Turks rage over the Pope's Armenian genocide claim

[crazy canuck]

I am glad that this sort of thing comes easily to you.

I am sorry for your clients' sake that reading for comprehension comes so hard for you.

Normally the things I read have proper sentences. So yes, both my clients and I are fortunate to be able to communicate on that level.

[Berkut]

I think you misunderstand CC. Berkut was calling the Turks pretty infantile.

Ah, with his poor grammar it is often hard to tell but it seems you are probably correct.

Even when he is 100% obviously wrong, he is just incapable of actually admitting it - even over something completely trivial.

[The Brain]

Something completely trivial like genocide?

[grumbler]

Normally the things I read have proper sentences. So yes, both my clients and I are fortunate to be able to communicate on that level.

Well, it is a good thing that Dick, Jane, and Spot are your only clients.

[Martinus]

I gotta say - I thought that having the asshole trio of grumbler, Berkut and CC at each other's throats would be amusing - but it is still tacky. 

[grumbler]

I gotta say - I thought that having the asshole trio of grumbler, Berkut and CC at each other's throats would be amusing - but it is still tacky. 

Now that you are on the scene, our assholiness is completely redundant, so I can retire from this topic.   Maybe I'll just go back to the one where you rage against anybody who thinks murderers have similarities. 

[alfred russel]

The Armenian genocide issue seems so odd. It was a century ago--a historical event basically out of living memory. It is an odd topic for western legislatures and governments to be debating and holding votes regarding.

What is odder is that Turkey cares. The world could rise up as one and say, "that was genocide" and I'm not convinced there would be any negative implications whatsoever to the Turkish state or people.

[PDH]

The Armenian genocide issue seems so odd. It was a century ago--a historical event basically out of living memory. It is an odd topic for western legislatures and governments to be debating and holding votes regarding.

What is odder is that Turkey cares. The world could rise up as one and say, "that was genocide" and I'm not convinced there would be any negative implications whatsoever to the Turkish state or people.

I think you are missing the emotive point in this...that is, the Armenian genocide (or whatever) happened at the moment of flux in the Ottoman Empire when the Young Turks were failing and luminaries such as Ataturk were rising.  In short, it is part of the events of the birth of the modern nation of Turkey.  Whether or not a hundred years is nothing to you, remember that there are people in the US who get frothy and foamy about what the peccadilloes of a Founding Father were, and that was more than twice as much in the past.

Don't mess with rituals, beliefs, or emotional attachments - unless you want a backlash.

[Eddie Teach]

I gotta say - I thought that having the asshole trio of grumbler, Berkut and CC at each other's throats would be amusing - but it is still tacky. 

Typically, grumbler strings CC out over several boring pages. If you want amusement, see grumbler vs. Raz.

[Syt]

http://www.thelocal.de/20150424/gauck-germany-has-blame-for-armenian-genocide

Steinmeier: Armenia wasn't genocide

Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier insisted on Friday that calling Armenian massacres genocide risks belittling the Holocaust, after President Joachim Gauck broke a taboo by using the word on Thursday.

Steinmeier stuck to his guns on Friday, arguing in an interview with Spiegel that "We in Germany need to be careful not to give justification to those who follow their own political agenda and say the Holocaust started before 1933.'"

"I'm tired of debates in which I'm expected to jump over a stick which is being held out for me, although everyone knows that complex memories can rarely be brought together under one word," the foreign minister said.

"The simple reduction of this debate to the question of whether we describe it as genocide or not" doesn't help "end the silence that persists between Turks and Armenians."

Steinmeier has come in for fierce criticism this week, with one high profile politician comparing him to Germany's First World War leadership.

Both Gauck and Bundestag (German parliament) president Norbert Lammert condemned the massacre of 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman forces a century ago as a "genocide", the first time Germany has officially used the term.

Gauck's speech at an event commemorating the centenary marked the first time that Berlin has officially used the word "genocide" to describe the killings in Armenia, and an unusually strong acknowledgement of the then German Empire's role.

"In this case we Germans must come to terms with the past regarding our shared responsibility, possibly shared guilt, for the genocide against the Armenians," he said at the ecumenical service in Berlin.

He was joined in using the word genocide by Bundestag (German parliament) president Norbert Lammert.

Lammert opened a debate on Armenia in the chamber by saying that "what happened in the Ottoman Empire before the eyes of the world was a genocide. It did not remain the last one of the 20th Century.

"That makes our obligation not to repress or gloss over the crimes committed then that much bigger, out of respect for the victims and with responsibility for cause and effect."

Armenians say up to 1.5 million of their kin were killed between 1915 and 1917 as the Ottoman Empire was falling apart and have long sought to win international recognition of the massacres as genocide.

Modern Turkey, the successor state to the Ottoman Empire, rejects the claim, arguing that 300,000 to 500,000 Armenians and as many Turks died in civil strife when Armenians rose up against their Ottoman rulers and sided with invading Russian troops.

Gauck's statement was expected to draw an angry reaction from Ankara, which has close defence and trade ties with Berlin.

Germany also has a three-million-strong ethnic Turkish population deriving from a massive "guest worker" programme in the 1960s and 1970s.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said earlier Thursday that a decision by Austrian lawmakers this week to condemn the massacre as "genocide" would have "unfavourable repercussions" for bilateral ties.

Gauck, a Protestant pastor and former East German dissident, is the head of state and serves as a kind of moral arbiter for the nation.

Nazis banned book

In his speech at the Berlin Cathedral, Gauck said that particularly given Nazi Germany's slaughter of six million Jews during World War II, for which Berlin has publicly atoned for decades, it must also own up to its historical guilt in the Armenian mass murders.

"Woman and men, children and the elderly were indiscriminately sent on death marches, banished without any protection or food to the steppe and the desert, burned alive, chased, beaten and shot to death," he said.

"This planned and calculated criminal act targeted the Armenians for a sole reason: because they were Armenians."

Gauck said that the German empire, then allied with the Ottomans, deployed soldiers who took part in "planning and, in part, carrying out the deportations".

German diplomats and observers who reported back to Berlin the atrocities they witnessed were "ignored" for fear of jeopardising relations with the Ottomans, he said.

Gauck said that the Nazis even banned an Austrian novel about the mass murders but that the book was read in Jewish ghettos in the 1930s "as a harbinger of what was to come for the Jews".

He said it was impossible to walk away from guilt through "denial, repression or trivialisation" of history.

"We in Germany learned the hard way, in part by shameful procrastination, to remember the crimes of the Nazi era, above all the persecution and extermination of European Jews," he said.

The presidents of Russia and France - two of nearly two dozen countries to formally recognise the genocide - are to join a handful of world leaders attending a commemoration of the massacre in the Armenian capital Yerevan on Friday.

Germany plans to send a junior foreign minister to the event.

While Gauck clearly labelled the mass murders a genocide, the German government has backed a compromise resolution to be debated on Friday in parliament.

"Their fate exemplifies the history of the mass murders, ethnic cleansing campaigns, expulsions, indeed the genocides that marked the 20th century in such a horrible way," reads the draft text obtained by AFP on Monday.

The Turkish foreign ministry issued a statement condemning Gauck, and that he has no right to accuse Turkey of crimes that have no basis in facts. The ministry said that the Turkish people will never forget and never forgive his words, and that the Turkish diaspora in Germany would certainly make their opinion heard over having their heritage smudged like this.

[Duque de Bragança]

Steinmeier 

Business as usual in Ankara...

[alfred russel]

I think you are missing the emotive point in this...that is, the Armenian genocide (or whatever) happened at the moment of flux in the Ottoman Empire when the Young Turks were failing and luminaries such as Ataturk were rising.  In short, it is part of the events of the birth of the modern nation of Turkey.  Whether or not a hundred years is nothing to you, remember that there are people in the US who get frothy and foamy about what the peccadilloes of a Founding Father were, and that was more than twice as much in the past.

Don't mess with rituals, beliefs, or emotional attachments - unless you want a backlash.

The Armenian genocide was perpetrated by the Ottoman regime, and to a certain extent, the main ringleaders were run out of Turkey after the war by the founders of the new Turkish state such as Ataturk. I realize the events are more nuanced, but it seems quite possible to lump in the genocide with the other Ottoman nonsense that was replaced with the new Turkish state.

My main point was this, and I'll pick up on the analogy with the modern founding fathers. I'd find it odd if some legislature in an Australian state was debating and voting on a resolution regarding whether Thomas Jefferson should be denounced for raping his slaves. I'd find it far more odd and stupid of the US responded by curtailing diplomatic relations over such resolutions.

[Syt]

2500 Armenians marched in memory of the centenary through Vienna. The Turkish counter protest was 4500 strong, drummed up on short notice from Vienna and surrounding states. They say that Austria stabbed Turkey in the back because of Armenian lies, chanted Allahu Akbar and called for Turkish sanctions against Austria.

[Martinus]

Hey Turkish diaspore, if you don't like what the German President is saying, why don't you GTFO.

[Syt]

Hey Turkish diaspore, if you don't like what the German President is saying, why don't you GTFO.

That was Austria, where the parliament was unanimous about calling it a genocide. Never thought I'd live to see the day where Austrian politics are more willing to take a clear stance than German ones.