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AKTAN: HE'S STARTING TO UNDERSTAND


khodja

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Gunduz Aktan editorial today in Turkish Daily News. While I do not agree with all his points, his referral to "father" and "child" is appropriate. Armenians trusted their father, the Ottoman leaders. When some of the children mis-behaved the father punished all the children in a most brutal way. I have know parents who do this all the time. They are not the best of parents and create many pschological problems in their children.
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quote:
Originally posted by hagarag:
Gunduz Aktan editorial today in Turkish Daily News. While I do not agree with all his points, his referral to "father" and "child" is appropriate. Armenians trusted their father, the Ottoman leaders. When some of the children mis-behaved the father punished all the children in a most brutal way. I have know parents who do this all the time. They are not the best of parents and create many pschological problems in their children.


Heh. What they called "misbehavior" was the simple request to be given a modicum of dignity. The response to those wishes by the Armenian subjects was more oppression and slaughter. This in turn did produce a few "revolutionaries" that indeed "misbehaved" in the sense that you are implying. But then, it would take a super-human level of patience from a community not to produce any violent reaction to such oppression. The "father" in question was a very, very abusive one to begin with. If one insists on making a father-child analogy, a more appropriate one would be: Most of the abusive father's kids punch him and leave the house. The enraged brute then turns his fury on the few children that still stayed in the house and starts beating them, again, even more brutally than before. Upon hearing their cries for help, he decides that those ungrateful bastards are just too much trouble and stabs them. I suspect Turkish Daily News did not have such an analogy in mind.
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While I agree with your assessment for the majority of Armenians, I only have to view the status of my family in Ottoman Turkey to know that despite discriminatory practices by the Ottomans, my family had more dignity in Ottoman Turkey (until the fall of the last Sultan) than we did in either France or the USA.
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Gamavor,

 

I state what I see. If the truth doesn't fit in with what you want to believe, there is not much that I can do about that. Ater the Young Turks decimated my family and confiscated what my great-aunt called "une schemed to deprive him of his portion of what was not confiscated sitting in Western European banks. So the Armenian relatives added insult to the injury inflicted by the Turks.

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Gamavor,

 

I state what I see. If the truth doesn't fit in with what you want to believe, there is not much that I can do about that. After the Young Turks decimated my family and confiscated what my great-aunt called "une fortune colossal," my father's Armenian cousins schemed to deprive him of his portion of what was not confiscated sitting in Western European banks. So the Armenian relatives added insult to the injury inflicted by the Turks.

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