터키의 150만 알메니안 대학살 100 주년 - 십자가 형

[하토브]

터키의 알메니아 대학살

20세기에 있었던 대학살 4건을 언급하라면, 바로 이 알메니안 대학살과 유대인 대학살과 한국전쟁 학살과 캄보디아 학살을 들겠습니다.

저는 한국인들이 터키는 형제국가라고 말하는 것을 종종 듣습니다. 그때마다 저는 그말이 한국과 한국민에 대한 모독이라고 느낍니다. 그 이유는 바로 알메니안 대학살의 원흉이 바로 터키인들이라는 것을 제가 알고 있기 때문입니다.

1915년부터 1918년에 걸친 알메니안 대학살은 무슬림 정권이 가장 오래된 기독교 국가였던 알메니아인들의 과반수에 해당되는 150만명을 학살한 사건이었습니다.

무슬림 정권은 기독교인들이 거의 모두라 할 수 있는 알메니안인들을 학살하고 쫓아내고 굶어죽거나 얼어죽게 하였습니다. 그중 16명의 소녀들을 벌거벗긴채 십자가에 못박아 죽인 사건도 있었습니다.

이런 진실에도 불구하고 터키 정부는 그들이 자연사 한것이며, 살해된 것이 아니라고 부인합니다.  더구나 터키는 2004년 알메니안 대학살을 언급하는 것을 범죄로 법제화하였습니다.

교묘한 것은 과거 냉전시대에는 터키가 자유진영의 맹방이었던 까닭에 그들의 대학살이 비난받지 못하였습니다. 소련과 싸우는 전선에 터키가 있었기 때문입니다. 오늘날도 터키는 나토에서 두번째로 강력한 군대를 갖고 있습니다. 또한 이라크 전쟁이나 ISIS 와의 전쟁에서도, 쿠르드 족 지원을 위해서도 터키는 미국에 매우 중요합니다. 그들의 공군기지에 미군 물자들이 경유하여 수송되기도 하고 있습니다.

이런 관계를 이용하여 미국에서 알메니아 대학살에 관하여 논의되거나 비난받는 결의를 피해왔습니다.

그러나 터키는 매우 교활하고 악랄한 역사를 계속해왔으며 알메니안인들은 참혹한 학살을 겪고 그것에 관한 기억과 기념마저도 박탈당하였습니다.

주후 300년경 최초로 기독교를 국교로 정하고 전국민이 기독교를 믿도록 하였던 알메니아는 세계 최초의 기독교 국가라고 알려져 있습니다. 이 나라는 노아의 후손들이 방주에서 가장 먼저 내려와 정착한 나라로도 알려져 있습니다.

나라가 없으면 이렇게 학살될수도 있다는 교훈을 주기도 합니다.

터키는 오늘날에도 기독교인 선교사들을 혀를 잘라 죽이기도 하는 잔인한 종족입니다.

반드시 주목하고 경계해야 할 족속인 것입니다.

1915년 4월 24일 시작된 알메니안 대학살의 100주년이 바로 오늘이었습니다.

그들의 영혼들에 대하여 하나님께 맡기고 생각해본 날이었습니다.

당신은 이 터키가 당신의 형제 나라 민족이라고 생각됩니까?

저는 그렇지 않습니다!

2015. 4. 24 하토브

Obama, Armenia, and What Hitler Learned About Genocide Denial

The president’s failure to call out Turkey for its role in the Armenian Genocide stains the soul of America.

Over the past decade the United States has often held up Turkey as the model of a moderate, democratic ally in the Muslim world, serving as a bridge between America and illiberal autocracies in the Middle East. President Obama has publicly showcased a warm working relationship with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan even he has heartily dismantled Turkish democracy and media freedoms.

Today, the idealism many once felt about Turkey’s President has been washed away by his increasingly authoritarian rule, persecution of his political opponents, support of terrorism, and anti-Semitism.

Of course, it’s not uncommon for our nation to hold its nose when dealing with thuggish autocrats in the face of pressing global crises. But the time has come to ask ourselves whether America is selling its moral soul to hold on to an “ally” that contravenes all decency by steadfastly denying the historical fact of the Armenian Genocide.

In recent history, Turkey has pulled every lever of influence at their disposal to prevent formal acknowledgement by the United States that Ottoman Turkey slaughtered 1.5 million Christian-minority Armenians under the cover of a world war and its aftermath. America’s concession to this morally bankrupt stipulation for good relations not only sets a gut-wrenching precedent but ignores the lessons history has taught us about turning a blind eye genocide.

Consider the words of Adolf Hitler to Nazi officers in August 1939, a week before the invasion of Poland: “Go, kill without mercy … who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”

Evil doesn’t happen in a vacuum but rather incubates amid the silence of bystanders. As Edmund Burke famously said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

The Armenian Genocide was Hitler’s proof-of-concept for his belief that the world has a short memory and would be largely indifferent to unspeakable horrors.

Once examined thoroughly the connections between the Nazis and the Young Turks are troubling. Hitler’s confidants learned from Turkey’s genocidal playbook. As Hitler strategized his rise to power in the early 1920s, his lead political advisor was Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, a young German Consular office in Erzurum during WWI, a region of Ottoman Turkey densely populated with Armenians.

Scheubner-Richter saw the galvanizing, nationalistic effect of blaming a well-educated, affluent religious minority for a nation’s woes. He witnessed the strategy of rounding up dissident intellectuals and political leaders first and the use of starvation as a means for mass slaughter. Although Scheubner-Richter died literally marching arm-in-arm with Hitler in the Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923, he was so influential to Hitler’s thinking that he dedicated the first part of Mein Kampf to him and later singled him out as the only “irreplaceable loss” of the Putsch.

“Go, kill without mercy … who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”

It wasn’t only Nazi elites that took notes from Turkey—Turkey’s ethnic cleansing in WWI was well known and admired by Nazi ideologues. In 1923, journalist Hans Trobst wrote in the Nazi newspaper Heimatland, “these bloodsuckers and parasites, Greeks and Armenians, had been eradicated by the Turks.” This chilling praise of genocide foretold atrocities to come.

Turkey’s approach to its own genocide has been the precise opposite of Germany’s efforts at atonement and reconciliation. In recent years, Turkey charged scholars and journalists with crimes for “insulting Turkishness” by advocating genocide. In a chilling and terrifying example of blaming the victim, High school textbooks in Turkey today refer to the “Armenian matter” (the word genocide is never used) and describe it as being the result of provocation by Armenians. Insinuations of genocide are said to be a lie used in an attempt to harm and break up Turkey.

The “Armenian matter” isn’t the only area where Erdogan has displayed detachment from reality. He aggressively contests that atrocities in Darfur were genocide yet libeled Israel as being guilty of an attempted “genocide” during its air campaign against Hamas in 2014 and called Zionism a “crime against humanity” in 2013. In July of last year he disgraced himself further with the stomach-turning charge that Israel’s “barbarism has surpassed even Hitler’s.”

This wretched anti-Semitic fervor has continued apace with Turkey most recently welcoming the relocation of Hamas’s so-called West Bank and Jerusalem Headquarters to Istanbul, even while the genocidal Hamas charter calls for the murder of Jews wherever they may be found. And rather than demonstrating even a hint of sympathy after the bloody Paris terror attacks took the lives of four Jews guilty only of buying bread for the Sabbath, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu equated Benjamin Netanyahu to the terrorists who carried out the attacks.

How can we as a nation trust a country that not only denies its own guilt in genocide but aids and abets organizations committed to the repetition of this most horrific of all human sins?

The White House has demonstrated its own faulty moral compass by both ignoring the intensifying anti-Semitism of our NATO “ally” and by refusing to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide. While President Obama supported formal recognition of the Armenian Genocide as a Senator and made promises to Armenian-Americans to recognize the genocide while seeking their votes in 2008, he has failed to live up to this promise over the past six years.

This revisionist history our nation indulges is disturbing and a stain on our conscience. Rather than speak truth, America seems to cower at the thought of an autocrat’s displeasure.

I cannot begin to imagine the pain of the Armenian community of having to suffer—even now on the centenary of the Armenian genocide—the final indignity: that after the murder of 1.5 million innocent victims the world barely acknowledges their deaths. That after being robbed of their lives the victims are now robbed of their memory.

When we dishonor the lives of the Armenians killed, we embolden those who would commit unspeakable evil, much in the way Hitler was emboldened by the world’s indifference to this dress rehearsal for the Holocaust. President Obama could have used the upcoming 100^th anniversary of the genocide this week as an opportunity to finally place the United States on the right side of history and morality and make it clear to Turkey that its choices have consequences. Sadly, he chose to do precisely the opposite. After intense lobbying by the Armenian-American community, to whom he made a campaign promise in 2008 that “As President I will recognize the Armenian Genocide,” the White House announced three days before the centenary that the President would break his promise for the sixth year running.

Mr. President, the world is watching. History is taking notice. The souls of 1.5 million Armenians cry out from the grave. Are you listening?

 The 1915 Armenian Genocide – Why Is It Still Denied By Turkey (And The U.S.)?

Apr. 25, 2013 9:28am Mike Opelka

What do you call the 1915 “mass deportation” of Armenians from the Ottoman Empire (Turkey) that resulted in the death of 1.5 million people?

Most historians and Armenians around the world call it genocide. The Turkish government and the United States are not among those who will officially accept the word “genocide” when speaking of the decimation of the Armenian people in the early part of the 20th Century. (And that list also includes U.S. Presidents.)

Image: 60 Minutes

The lack of respect given to the Armenian genocide is shocking when you consider the scope and brutality of the event that killed 75 percent of the Armenians — a predominantly Christian group.

The History:

Armenia was a trendsetter when it came to Christianity. The country adopted that faith in 301 A.D. This was even before the formation of the Holy Roman Empire. For centuries the Armenian people built a healthy and prosperous country. However, in the 15th century, the Ottoman Empire absorbed Armenia and the Armenians. The non-Muslim Armenians were classified as “infidels” and had to pay higher taxes and saddled with fewer rights than Muslims.

The Ottoman Empire stayed dominant in the region through the 19th century and into the early part of the 20th century. But in the late 1890s, Armenians were growing tired of their status as second class citizens and continued their push for more rights. In 1894, that push was met with a violent response from the Sultan who turned loose his private army on the Armenians. In the ensuing battles between 1894-96, it was reported that as many as 200,000 Armenians were killed by Sultan Abdul Hamid’s troops in what has been called the Hamidian Massacre. However, the killing of the 200,000 Armenian Christians was nothing compared to the 1915 genocide.

What led to the near extermination of the Armenians? It appears a combination of a few factors were working together to create a rabid form of Turkish nationalism that saw the Armenians as the enemies of the state. After all, the non-Muslims were officially considered “infidels” in the eyes of the Turks.

In 1908, a group of young Turks forced the Sultan out and took control of the government. At first they talked of bringing new freedoms to the Armenian people. Unfortunately, those freedoms never were granted by the ruling “Young Turks.” Instead the Armenians were seen as a threat to the shrinking Ottoman Empire.

1912-13 had the Turks losing huge chunks of their land to Christian regions that were breaking away. Greece, Bulgaria, and Serbia were all successful in their efforts to leave the Ottoman Empire. This was a devastating loss of power to the Turks and was the spark for even greater nationalism to foment.

Muslim refugees from the now-Christian breakaway countries poured into Istanbul with tales of Christian violence against their families. Some of the more extreme members of the Young Turks formed the Committee of Union & Progress (CUP). The CUP was focused on pushing Turkish nationalism, their chant was “Turkey for the Turks.”

The growing Turkish nationalism was also fuel for more hatred against the Armenian community, especially after Germany and Russia began warring in 1914. Turkey sided with Germany in this conflict. The Turks hoped a defeat of the Russians would help in the prospect of rebuilding their empire. In December of 1914, the Ottoman Turks tried to invade Russia, but suffered a horrible defeat. More than 100,000 Russian troops stormed across the border into Turkey and reports say that more than 5,000 Armenians helped the Russians, some even enlisting in the Russian Army.

This was likely a move that enraged the Turkish leaders who saw the Armenians as a liability. The Armenian members of the military were immediately disarmed and moved into labor camps and subsequently executed.

Not long after that, on April 24th, a group of 250 Armenian intellectual leaders of the community were rounded up and shipped off to a camp where they were killed.

Turkey had killed off the Armenian soldiers and the cultural elites. All that remained was to order the rest of the population to comply with a relocation order that was essentially a death sentence. Most of the Armenians were forced to march for sixty days and many did not survive the trip.

Image: YouTube

Like the Nazis, many Armenians were also transported via rail. And, also like the Nazis, the Turks forced their victims to purchase tickets for the ride to their own extermination.

Image: 1915 Aghet / YouTube

The accounts of the atrocities committed against the Armenians is as brutal and disgusting as any you have heard about from Hitler’s attempts to exterminate the Jews from Germany and the world. Small children and old people were marched over mountains and in circles, without food and water, literally until they died. Young Christian girls were defiled by the Turkish soldiers. There are reports that many killed themselves after being raped. The barbaric treatment of the Armenian women went even further.

Image: Auction of Souls

In his post on the genocide, (The Forgotten Genocide: Why It Matters Today) Raymond Ibrahim recounted the story of a woman who claimed to have witnessed the brutal crucifixion of 16 young girls.

In her memoir, Ravished Armenia, Aurora Mardiganian described being raped and thrown into a harem (which agrees with Islam’s rules of war).  Unlike thousands of other Armenian girls who were discarded after being defiled, she managed to escape. In the city of Malatia, she saw 16 Christian girls crucified: “Each girl had been nailed alive upon her cross, spikes through her feet and hands, only their hair blown by the wind, covered their bodies.”  Such scenes were portrayed in the 1919 documentary film Auction of Souls, some of which is based on Mardiganian’s memoirs.

Why Won’t America Call It Genocide?

It’s a good bet that Turkey and its leaders do not want to use the term genocide because it would likely cost them considerable sums of money in reparations, as well as the public embarrassment they would have to endure. But what about America?

No American president has officially called the mass killings that started in 1915 “genocide.” President Bush went as far as publicly urging Congress to reject a resolution on the subject.

In 2008, presidential candidate Barack Obama promised that, as president, he would acknowledge it, saying; “Armenian genocide is a widely documented fact.”

Despite that very clear language, President Obama was not been so quick to follow up on his campaign promise. After he was elected, on Armenian Remembrance Day, the president issued a statement. The word that was conspicuously absent from the release — genocide. That term was also absent from every single April 24th Armenian Remembrance Day since 2009.

• 2009 – Statement from President Obama
• 2010 – Statement from President Obama
• 2011 – President Obama’s statement on April 24th.
• 2012 – The President made another statement on April 24th.

Instead of using the word “genocide” the White House statements all use the term “Meds Yeghern.” What does that mean?  Meds Yeghern is an Armenian phrase that has the same meaning as genocide in their language. But Armenians want the world to recognize the atrocity they suffered at the hands of the Turks.

And while our presidents won’t say the word or put it in statements, the Turks are actually forbidden from using it. The word “genocide” is off limits — as in illegal. You can be locked up for saying the word or using it in a story. (TheBlaze staff would likely be placed under arrest and receive death threats for this article alone.)

So, why won’t a U.S. President call the very well-documented forced removal of 1.5 million people from their homes — many who were forced to march more than 50 miles into the desert where almost certain death awaited them — genocide?

CBS’s “60 Minutes” filed a story that speculated our lack of ability to call this genocide and what it really is: That it might have something to do with America’s military relationship with Turkey and that the country is vital to delivering supplies to our troops on the ground in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

The “60 Minutes” segment also includes a chilling video shot on the banks of the Euphrates River where it is believed 450,000 of the victims perished. In fact, the remains of the Armenians are so preval‎ent in the area that all you need to do is scratch the sand along the river banks and you will find pieces of human bones that have been there for 98 years.

Image: 60 Minutes

The Armenian people are persistent. Ninety-eight years after the genocide began in their country, they still hold out hope that Turkey will recognize what was done to the Armenians. They also hope that America will make good on the promises made by so many presidents.

In the meantime, Armenians are contributing in communities all over the U.S. As a matter of fact, one of the largest Armenian communities in the country is in Watertown, Massachusetts — a town that found itself in the center of the media spotlight this week. Watertown is also the home of the Armenian Library and Musuem of America.

You can watch the entire 60 Minutes piece here.

 (H/T and additional support provided by: Raymond Ibrahim and 1915 AGHET – The Armenian Genocide)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQ9NI9_0VoY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLyrpaTKCCE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE-XI6blXB0

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/04/25/the-1915-armenian-genocide-why-is-it-still-denied-by-turkey-and-the-u-s/

[하토브.]

어린 소녀들을 저렇게 십자가에 못박아 매달아 놓은 것이 아마도 산채로 못박은 다음에 세운 것이 아닌가 생각해봅니다. 얼마나 많은 고통을 주며 벌거벗긴 수치를 안겨야 했을까요?
가장 끔찍한 형벌을 자행한 저들은 얼마나 의로웠다고 스스로를 생각했을지.

17세기 일본에서 십자가형이 있었고, 그뒤로도 좀더 있었을 것입니다만, 20세기에 저러한 십자가형을 여자들에게 가했다는 족속을 생각하면 잔인함을 다시 한번 느낍니다.

[에이미]

터키의 문자가 고대로부터 가림토나 우리 한글에서 유래된 거라 비슷하다는 글을 읽은 적이 있습니다. 오래 전에 읽었던 기억이라 확실치않지만요. 저런 잔혹한 이슬람들이군요. 어떻게 소녀들을...

[하토브]

소녀들을 십자가에 못박아 죽인 놈들이 터키 놈들이지요.