as i see it - Pt. IV

[ara baliozian]

Sunday, April 17, 2005

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Edouard Balladour (identified as an Armenian by some) in a recent interview in LE POINT (Paris: March 24, 2005) on French responsibility of the massacres in Rwanda: “It wasn’t at all easy to tell Hutus from Tutsis.”

In her memoirs of the Russo-Turkish war in Van, Tatyana Tolstoy says something very similar about Armenians and Turks.

One is justified therefore in wondering if Hutus looked like Tutsis, and Armenians like Turks, how many of them were victims of friendly fire?

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I am reminded of George Orwell’s final words in ANIMAL FARM. The men looked so much like pigs, Orwell writes here, and the pigs so much like men that it was impossible to tell them apart.

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If we call them “Asiatic barbarians,” and they retaliate by calling as “Armenian bastards” (the word “pij” in Turkish is a much more wounding insult), what can we hope to achieve? Except perhaps exposing the fact that as nations we have not yet emerged from an infantile and primitive stage of underdevelopment.

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Racism and diplomacy are mutually exclusive concepts.

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During a visit to Detroit, when he was invited to make a brief appearance at an Armenian community center, Saroyan is said to have replied with a blunt, no thanks! I did not understand this refusal then, but I do now.

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Learning from history is an art form that requires a certain talent, which consists in admitting that, (one) we did not know everything; (two) we don’t understand everything; (three) we are not infallible; (four) we are not as good as we think we are, (five) our adversaries may not be as bad as we say they are, and (six) most of them may well be brainwashed dupes of nationalist propaganda.

#

[ara baliozian]

Monday, April 18, 2005

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Never, never say to an Armenian writer, “It’s easy for you to say.” Only readers who know nothing about the history of our literature are capable of uttering such nonsense. Being a writer, being an Armenian writer, being an honest Armenian writer has never been easy. As a boy, my elders repeatedly warned me of this, but I ignored them. Which goes to show that idealism can lead one to hell as surely as a life of crime.

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The Arabs and the Azeris have oil, the Israelis and Turks have American support, and the Georgians were successful in overthrowing their rascals. What do we have on our side? – except a corrupt bureaucracy, unemployment, poverty, hostile neighbors, the possibility of another devastating earthquake, and in the words of Avedik Issahakian, “imbeciles for leaders.” At this rate and if nothing changes, a hundred years from now only ants and scorpions will survive in our homeland.

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G.K. Chesterton: “It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem.”

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I have read and reviewed enough travel books on Turkey to know that not all Turks think alike on Armenians, probably because many of them remember an Armenian grandparent or relative who was not a threat to the territorial integrity of the nation. The average Turk may even be more tolerant of Armenians than some Armenians are of their fellow Armenians.

*

We grew up as racists and deep inside somewhere we continue to be racists. That does not mean we should legitimize, preach and promote racism. On the contrary, we should make an effort to move in the opposite direction if we hope the generation that follows us to be an improvement on ours. To say otherwise is to subscribe only to technological progress and to dismiss moral progress as an unattainable, unrealistic, and undesirable goal.

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Stanislaw Lec: “Is it progress if a cannibal uses knife and fork?”

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A wise man once defined progress as “the triumph of laughter over dogma.”

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[ara baliozian]

Tuesday, April 19, 2005

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Who could have guessed that some day the Pope and the Vatican would attract as much U.S. media attention as Monica Lewinsky?

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In life, the choice is not always between right and wrong, or good and evil, but between evil and a lesser evil.

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Some readers don’t approve of my ideas because they have not bothered to read the ideas of my predecessors.

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When shortly before the Genocide, Krikor Zohrab warned his fellow Armenians to get out because “this time around they will exterminate us,” he was dismissed as an alarmist. “Zohrab effendi is exaggerating,” they said.

Hagop Oshagan, Gostan Zarian, and Zabel Yessayan got out in time and survived. A good number of ARF leaders also survived to write their copious memoirs, some of which are longer than Tolstoy’s WAR AND PEACE and Dostoevsky’s BROTHERS KARAMAZOV combined.

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There is an old Greek saying: “He who wants too much, will lose even the little that he has.”

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Perhaps we lost everything because our greed knew no bounds. We wanted the keep our ancestral homes; we demanded freedom from tyranny, we wanted independence, our historic lands, and the total disintegration of the Empire. And why not? After all, Russia and the Great Powers were on our side, also the Kurds and Greeks, not to say the Good Lord Himself, who, as every Christian knows, is on the side of Christians and against infidels. And yet…

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“And yet!” – the two saddest words in the English language, it has been said.

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When life becomes unbearable, our need for illusions becomes overwhelming.

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The trouble with our partisans is that they haven’t had a new idea for a hundred years.

#

[ara baliozian]

#

Wednesday, April 20, 2005

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Solidarity means admitting the obvious: namely, that we depend on one another. An Armenian who says, "I depend on no one," speaks as a dupe of divide-and-rule tactics devised by our gravediggers.

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It is always safe to assume that things are not always as bad as we think they are. Sometimes they are worse than we can imagine.

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Emily Lotney: "A converted cannibal is one who, on Friday, eats only fishermen."

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I have never been successful in winning an argument with a fellow Armenian without making him an enemy for life.

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The question I ask myself repeatedly is: We survived the Turks. Will we survive ourselves?

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For six centuries they were our lords and masters. No one will ever convince them they are not better than we are. In the same way that no one will ever convince even the dumbest Armenian that he is not better than they are. That's because, in the words of Gordon W. Allport: "The easiest idea to sell anyone is that he is better than someone else."

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Racism has been defined as "the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason."

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The purest races now in existence, according to Bertrand Russell, are "the Pygmies, the Hottentots, and the Australian aborigines."

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[ara baliozian]

Thursday, April 21, 2005

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The West sees the Middle East today as a jungle of tribal feuds with no end in sight. If we want to be perceived as a positive, civilizing force, we must rise above this malaise and work for reconciliation and peaceful coexistence. No one is interested in explanations whose aim is to legitimize prejudice, hatred, and violence. If, on the other hand, we behave like another tribe with unsettled scores, we should not be surprised if the West turns its back on us.

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I once read a memoir by an Armenian survivor dedicated to the Turk who had saved his life. I should like to see more dedications like this one.

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The Ottoman Empire collapsed because it adopted hatred as a policy towards its minorities and dissenters. Fascists in Italy, Nazis in Germany, and Bolsheviks in the USSR repeated the same blunder. An ideology of hatred destroys itself.

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Marie Curie: “Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.”

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Niels Bohr: “Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation but as a question.”

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It is not my intention to silence anyone. We live in a free country where free speech is a fundamental human right. I believe in free speech. I believe everyone has an inalienable right to make an ass of himself in public.

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If my readers have learned from me as much as I have learned from them, it has all been a waste of time.

*

In an Armenian discussion forum I read the following exchange recently between a Turk and an Armenian.

TURK: “The Armenian Genocide is a controversial issue that should be discussed in a civilized manner by open-minded Armenians and Turks.”

ARMENIAN: “Kiss my ass!”

*

Because truth is on his side, he thinks he can behave like a barbarian. I see something Ottoman in this.

#

[ara baliozian]

Friday, April 22, 2005

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Edward Thorndike: “Colors fade, temples crumble, empires fall, but wise words endure.”

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Life is not fair. We know that but sometimes we forget it, and by forgetting we hope against all hope that next time it will be a little less unfair.

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All the money in the world will not resurrect a single victim; and so far, millions, not to say, billions of words have failed to annex a single inch of territory to our homeland. I am not advocating resignation. Neither am I implying we should say let bygones be bygones. Hell no! What I am suggesting is that sometimes by concentrating all our energies in a single direction, we may ignore many other more promising directions.

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Turkish acknowledgment of our genocide, monetary and territorial restitution: these are worthy, even noble, goals. But so are a homeland and a diaspora whose leaders are men of integrity.

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I for one would have no use for a homeland twice or even ten times its present size that is oppressed by a corrupt regime and plagued by chronic unemployment, poverty, and forever dependent on foreign help.

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History is very clear on this point: a corrupt power structure is a millstone around the neck of the people, and it makes no difference if the millstone is Turkish, Soviet, or Armenian. An Armenian mini-sultan or crypto-commissar can be as dangerous to the survival of the nation as an Ottoman sultan or a Stalinist commissar.

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Of what possible use will be monetary restitution to us if the money will disappear in the deep pockets of a kleptocracy? Of what possible use would be ten more towns and fifty more villages if their inhabitants will emigrate to Los Angeles, Moscow, Sofia, and Istanbul?

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Thomas Mann: “War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.”

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[ara baliozian]

Saturday, April 23, 2005

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Howard W. Newton: "The thoughtless are seldom wordless."

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Because I wrote in praise of peace and coexistence, a reader once accused me of treason.

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I understand fanatics because I was one.

I understand fools too for the same reason.

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Some of our self-appointed genocide pundits take themselves so seriously that they think humor is pro-Turkish.

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Tone deafness and color blindness have their moral and political equivalents: individuals who cannot tell the difference between honesty and charlatanism, or democracy and fascism.

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Arguing with an Armenian is like arguing with a bishop or a commissar: afterwards you feel slightly excommunicated or executed.

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Dario Fo (winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize for Literature) writes: "People who are up to their necks in shit walk with their heads held high."

When, O when will we produce writers capable of writing such lines?

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[armjan]

I can't wait to read what you have in store tomorrow.

 

cheers Mr. baliozian,

[ara baliozian]

Sunday, April 24, 2005

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If you want to understand the past and human conduct in general, you will be closer to reality if you assume, in time of crisis, man is motivated more by irrational drives and less by reason.

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While on every April 24 we mourn Talaat’s victims, let us not ignore Stalin’s victims, whose number remains unknown to most of us. But perhaps we prefer to ignore them because the executioners were not Turks but Armenians.

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In the Middle Ages Jews who copied the Holy Scriptures believed that even a single letter in the wrong place might mean the destruction of the world. How much more so the death of a single innocent human being?

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What if the world is being destroyed even as I am writing and you are reading these lines, but because the destruction is in slow motion we have the illusion of survival.

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The Genocide is a tragic episode in our history, but it is only a chapter, not the whole book. It is a factor, even if a defining factor, in shaping of our identity, but it is not the only factor.

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The Genocide is history, it is not theology, and it should not be allowed to become pathology. If we allow it to become pathology, it may paralyze our will to confront and solve our present problems of which we have more than our share.

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We speak of our writers and intellectuals who were Talaat’s and Stalin’s victims but even as we speak, we ignore their works. I am reminded of Antranik Zaroukian’s words to the effect that even as we mourn our crucified writers, we crucify their memories by ignoring that which is best in their works, and by extension, in the Armenian psyche.

#

[ara baliozian]

did i disappoint you? / ara

 

 

 

I can't wait to read what you have in store tomorrow.

 

cheers Mr. baliozian,

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[ara baliozian]

Monday, April 25, 2005

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G.K. Chesterton: “The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.”

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Violate free speech and you violate freedom. Violate freedom and you legitimize slavery.

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Armenians who hate are convinced that their hatred bears God’s seal of approval.

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We are better at excommunicating friends than converting enemies.

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We have more enemies than friends, and our friends are friends in name only. We cannot even rely on our fellow Armenians for friendship.

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An Ottomanized Armenian may be defined as one who believes in the power of hatred to change the world.

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Good and evil, friend and foe, love and hate: they are not permanent conditions. A friend may turn into an enemy and vice versa. Unless we make an effort to excommunicate less and convert more, we condemn ourselves to remain perennial sheep in a jungle of predators.

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When it comes to literature, we prefer writers who plagiarize patriotic clichés and recycle pro-establishment platitudes to one who speaks his mind and says what must be said. We stifle originality when it fails to flatter our collective ego or when it challenges our prejudices. How many of our contemporary writers (do we have them?) would have the integrity and courage of Raffi and say “Treason and betrayal are in our blood”? And it is worth remembering that Zarian confided his true feelings about his fellow Armenians (such as “Armenians survive by cannibalizing one another”) only in his notebooks, which were not meant for publication in his lifetime.

#

[armjan]

did i disappoint you? / ara

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no, not at all, as usual, I enjoy reading your comments.

Edited April 26, 2005 by armjan

[ara baliozian]

Tuesday, April 26, 2005

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Some of my readers, it seems, have an ego so precariously balanced on the edge of the abyss that even the shadow of an alien idea may topple them.

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I never said “our political parties have been of no political use to us: their greatest enemy is free speech.” It was Gostan Zarian, universally acknowledged as one of our greatest writers.

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I see nothing wrong in disagreement. But I see something pathological in a disagreement based on the misunderstanding or the distortion of a simple sentence like the one quoted above.

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Leo Rosten: “Extremists think ‘communication’ means agreeing with them.”

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I never said, “Our revolutionaries should be crucified!” It was General Antranik.

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And I never said, “Every Armenian has another Armenian whom he considers his mortal enemy.” It was Derenik Demirjian, another prominent author of the 20th Century.

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When a reader who disagrees with me pretends I am the only Armenian he disagrees with, I have no choice but to conclude that I must be the only Armenian he reads.

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It is an insult to all Armenians to think that they are so vulnerable and fragile that they can be ruined by an idea that does not bear a boss’s, bishop’s, or benefactor’s seal of approval.

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God loves all men, except theologians and propagandists who parade as pundits whose convictions are dogmas.

#

[ara baliozian]

#

Wednesday, April 27, 2005

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Elbert Hubbard: "If you can't answer a man's argument, all is not lost, you can still call him vile names."

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Only if we make an honest effort to view reality through Turkish eyes may we be able to enhance our credibility in the eyes of skeptics like the Americans and the Israelis.

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Reality (or god) does not see friend and foe; it sees only misguided men committing blunders.

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The Turks did not single us out for extermination. They would have exterminated all their enemies. They didn't because they (enemies) were beyond their reach. By contrast, we made an ideal target.

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It makes little sense to suggest that after 600 years of coexistence the Turks suddenly woke up on April 24, 1915 and decided to exterminate us because we aroused their cannibal instincts. No one with any degree of objectivity and common sense will ever agree with us if we say or imply in any way that we are better than Turks. All such talk is bound to smack of racism and lower our moral standing.

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The Genocide is a central issue with us. It was only a peripheral one for them. We were only a small fraction of their problems of which they had many more than they could handle in a rational way. They massacred us because they had the power and we didn't.

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We only damage our credibility if we as victims assert moral superiority or adopt a holier-than-thou stance. Because by saying Turks are evil we also imply that they are good only for extermination. But to think in terms of extermination is quintessentially Ottoman.

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Let us therefore put an end to all talk of Turks as bloodthirsty savages and Asiatic barbarians.

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[ara baliozian]

Friday, April 29, 2005

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FOR OUR SPEECHIFIERS

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G.B. Shaw: “The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.”

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Voltaire: “Doubt is not a pleasant mental state but certainty is a ridiculous one.”

*

ON A RARE COMMODITY

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If you listen to Taner Akcam’s interviews and read his writings carefully, you may notice that he at no time ignores the Turkish side of the story. The reason why his fellow Turks see him as a hostile witness is that he refuses to ignore the Armenian experience. You may also have noticed that we suffer from the same aberration. We see the objectivity of an honest observer as anti-Armenian, which is an insult to all Armenians.

*

A CURSE

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I can’t imagine a worse curse than “May your son grow up to be an Armenian writer who sees no merit in recycling partisan propaganda and chauvinist mumbo jumbo.”

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A FAMILIAR PHENOMENON

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A routine occurrence in our environment: the Armenian who states, “I hate no one!” and uses this assertion as a license to hate not only Turks but anyone else who does not share his hatred, that is to say, most of mankind including a fraction of his fellow Armenians.

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IN PRAISE OF MEDIOCRITY

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Socrates was condemned to death; Christ was crucified; and Gandhi assassinated. I owe my life to my mediocrity.

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Did you know that Russians excommunicated Tolstoy and Cretans shat on Kazantzakis’s grave?

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About the etymology of the word cretin: there are two schools of thought: the first says it derives from Cretan, and the second from Chrétien (Christian in French) – both date from pagan times.

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ON MORALITY

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Samuel Butler: “Cannibalism is moral in a cannibal country.”

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[ara baliozian]

Saturday, April 30, 2005

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Bertrand Russell: "Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feelings?"

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It is an illusion to think that if you violate my fundamental human right of free speech today, no one will violate yours tomorrow because your views are invulnerable, you are infallible, and you enjoy the approval of the Good Lord and all His representatives on earth.

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I read because I neither know nor understand everything; and I write because I want to share my understanding. If you know everything you need to know, and understand everything you need to understand, why do you even bother reading a minor scribbler like myself? - unless of course you are looking for an excuse to discharge your venom.

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The challenge we confront today is to look back without turning into pillars of salt.

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Our leadership keeps reminding us to remember the Genocide as they themselves ignore and expect us to forget the two ongoing white genocides (exodus from the Homeland and assimilation in the Diaspora).

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G.B. Shaw: "He knows nothing; he thinks he knows everything - that clearly points to a political career."

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H.L. Mencken: "There are some politicians who, if their constituents were cannibals, would promise them missionaries for lunch."

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[ara baliozian]

Sunday, May 01, 2005

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Alphonse Karr (1808-1890), French writer: “Every man has three characters – that which he exhibits, that which he has, and that which he thinks he has.”

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There are two kinds of Armenians, or so I am informed by some of my patriotic readers: the good and the bad. You may now guess to which category I belong.

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We are all God’s children with a purpose in life. My guess is the purpose in my life as a bad Armenian is to allow good Armenians to compare themselves to me and to bask in their moral superiority.

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After World War II it was fashionable to divide Germans into good and bad Germans. But according to Thomas Mann, this division, though convenient, was not accurate. Good as well as bad Germans, he explained, were one and the same, the only difference being that the good followed their brain and the bad their gut.

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Has anyone ever defined Armenianism or a good Armenian? I once heard one of our self-appointed pundits and experts on any given subject say that a good Armenian is one who hates no one, because, you see, hatred happens to be an alien feeling to all pure-blooded and authentic Armenians. Speaking for myself, I have never met such an Armenian. And it is to be noted that this self-assessed and so-called pure-blooded authentic Armenian who put out that definition was one of the most unpleasant and obnoxious specimens of humanity I have ever met.

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Groucho Marx: “There’s one way to find out if a man is honest – ask him. If he says ‘Yes,’ you know he is a crook.”

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To be satisfied with one’s knowledge means to be satisfied with one’s ignorance.

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Propaganda is to war and massacre what the acorn is to the oak.

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Good Armenians define themselves as good only in relation to bad Armenians. So that, if it weren’t for bad Armenians like myself, there wouldn’t even be such a category as the good.

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Thomas Mann once wrote an essay about Hitler titled “A Brother.”

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[ara baliozian]

Monday, May 02, 2005

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US AND OURSELVES

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Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592, French thinker: “There is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others.”

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The reason I have become enemy number one to our bosses, bishops, benefactors and their dupes is that I have been calling them dividers. Themselves victims of divide-and-rule tactics by hostile empires (like the Ottoman and the Soviet), our bosses, bishops, and benefactors employ divide-and-rule tactics against us in order to safeguard their own petty little powers and privileges. Our bosses speechify in the name of a defunct 19th-century ideology (nationalism), our bishops sermonize in the name of long-forgotten medieval orthodoxies, and our benefactors, by supporting one side against the other, let capital do the speechifying and sermonizing for them.

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To those who call me a divider even as I stress the importance of solidarity on the grounds that “a house divided against itself cannot stand,” I can only say, you are barking up the wrong tree, my friends, because I am on your side and against our enemies, the most dangerous of which are our dividers. If you don’t believe me, read Khorenatsi, Yeghishe, Raffi, Voskanian, Zohrab, Zarian, Shahnour, Massikian…Even better, use your eyes (if you are not blind) and ears (if you are not deaf) provided of course first you de-brainwash yourselves. Because, to the brainwashed, black is white, the negative is positive, evil is good, and foe is friend.

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Romain Rolland (1866-1944), French author: “France fell because there was corruption without indignation.”

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[ara baliozian]

Tuesday, May 03, 2005

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ARMENIANISM AND OTTOMANISM

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If I knew how to pray, I would go down on my knees every day and say, “Grant me, O Lord, the tolerance never to want to silence someone simply because he disagrees with me.”

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To silence a writer because he exercises his fundamental human right of free speech is fascist. To insult him for the same reason is Ottoman.

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Most of our folk songs, liturgical music, art and architecture, belong to our pre-Ottoman stage and they speak of faith, unassuming beauty, simplicity, candor, and honesty – all of which are incompatible with intolerance, which belongs to our Ottoman phase. If our historians have so far ignored this aspect of our evolution it may be because all nations, tribes, and political parties have their own version of the past. Which may suggest that more often than not men study history in order to misunderstand, misinterpret and adjust it to a specific propaganda line.

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I am not saying there was no intolerance in medieval Armenia. What I am saying is that intolerance was not a central and defining feature of our identity, as it is today in our post-Ottoman phase.

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It is a fallacy to think that if you are on the side of the king and all his men you must have right on your side. We don’t have kings any more, true; but we have bosses, bishops, and benefactors who speak in the name of God, Capital, and Dogma.

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To those who disagree with me and wish me silenced, I say no doubt you think as you do because you have a good reason, perhaps even ten good reasons. But what if someone else thinks as he does because he has twice as many better reasons?

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On the subject of Armenianism, we all do some projecting and generalizing of course. I too plead guilty to that charge; and I am willing to concede that most of my readers subscribe to a superior brand of Armenianism, which has been thoroughly cleansed of all traces of Ottomanism. To them I say, please ignore what I have written above because it does not apply to you.

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[ara baliozian]

Wednesday, May 04, 2005

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If you have the majority on your side, intolerance will be a constant temptation. The true meaning of democracy consists in the protection of the rights of minorities from the intolerance and persecution of majorities.

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We survived 600 years of brutal Ottoman oppression, granted. The question we should all ask is, "Did we survive as Armenians?"

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Albert Schweitzer: "The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives."

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I have been wrong most of my life. Which is why I can assert with some degree of certainty that he who subscribes to a belief system that was mine twenty years ago cannot be right, let alone infallible.

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True patriotism does not mean love of country alone, but also love of fellow countrymen, especially that fraction of one's countrymen that may disagree with us. To love only those who agree and hate those who disagree is not patriotism but fascism.

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Confucius: "The superior man understands what is right, the inferior man understands what will sell."

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If you think I am wrong, you may be right. But if you think I am wrong because you are infallible, the chances are you are dead wrong.

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Nothing can be as ephemeral as the support or opposition of politicians as well as fellowmen, including fellow Armenians. On the day Turks outnumber Armenians in America, I for one will not be surprised if a politician makes appearances in Turkish community centers and declares Turks to be honest witnesses and Armenians pathological liars on the subject of the Genocide. Neither would I be surprised if wealthy and middle-class Armenians vote for this type of politician if he promises not to raise their taxes.

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I welcome the disagreement of dupes as much as I dread the agreement of fanatics.

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[sen_Vahan]

I think Turks already outnumbered Armenians in the US, didn't they? How many Armenians are currently residing here? 2 million?

 

Vahan

[ara baliozian]

Thursday, May 05, 2005

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We flatter ourselves when we say the world, or a fraction of it, is against us. The truth is much worse, as always. The world is for itself and we may not even register on its consciousness. It would be even more accurate to say that the world cares about us as much as we care about the world.

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Neither the Americans nor the Israelis are against us; they are for themselves. To say otherwise is to commit the same blunder as our revolutionaries who thought they couldn’t go wrong because the Great Powers were on our side. Which is why, Armenians whose sympathy never goes beyond Armenian victims may end up doing more harm than good to our cause. We may have a better chance of gaining world support if we emerge from our self-absorbed tribalism and concern ourselves not only with our victims but will all victims regardless of race, color, and creed, including Turkish victims.

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We see the Genocide as a tragedy; but it is also a defeat and a victory – a Turkish victory not only over Greeks, Kurds, and Armenians, but also Russia, the Great Powers of the West, and their Allies.

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Unlike Turks we are good at picking fights we can’t win. Several of our poets have even addressed some nasty words against the Good Lord Himself. At this point I don’t mind admitting that, by picking a fight against our bosses, bishops, benefactors and their hirelings, flunkies, dupes and brown-nosers, I too have picked a fight I can’t win, and I have thus joined the ranks of my ancestors as a perennial loser.

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H.G. Wells: “The Athenian democracy suffered much from that narrowness of patriotism which is the ruin of all nations.”

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Gordon W. Allport: “Many studies have discovered a close link between prejudice and patriotism. Extreme bigots are almost always super-patriots.”

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Buddha: “When a man has pity on all living creatures then only is he noble.”

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[ara baliozian]

I think Turks already outnumbered Armenians in the US, didn't they? How many Armenians are currently residing here? 2 million?

 

Vahan

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it's more like one million.

as for turks...i am not sure. / ara

[Nakharar]

There are more Turks living in any European city like Berlin, Frankfurt or Brussels than there are Turks in the US and Canada put together. In Germany, Turks outnumber Armenians 100 to one. Despite their large numbers in Europe politically they are minnows. The much smaller Armenian minorities are much more politically active and higly effective in comparison to the Turks.

[sen_Vahan]

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We see the Genocide as a tragedy; but it is also a defeat and a victory – a Turkish victory not only over Greeks, Kurds, and Armenians, but also Russia, the Great Powers of the West, and their Allies.

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I don't think it was the Turkish victory. It more looks like it was a back-up plan in case of the lost war. I do not really understand why they picked a genocide of the christian minorities but it can hardly be called a victory over the WEST. Even well before Tallar/Enver and Co. in 19th century the Russian Tsar was warned by the Western Embassies in Istanbul that in case Russians take Polis by force the Turks will commit a genocide of all the Christian minorities, most of whom were "under Russian protectorate". At that time the Sultan was if not an Anglo-Russian puppet but strongly dependent on their "mood". Turks were very well aware that their Empire is on the abyss, and dependent on the British and Russian. What did not happen in the 19th century because of more careful political players, did take place in the 20th - the Empire collapsed and the Christian minorities were massacred.

 

This does not look like a victory of Turks over anybody, and I would like to know your opinion.