Armenian Genocide (1915-1923)

By David J. Stewart | July 2012

       Nearly a century later, the atrocities which occurred during the Ottoman Empire (1915-1923) are not forgotten. In 1948, a United Nations convention defined genocide as acts “committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.” By very definition, there is an ongoing genocide in America against Christianity today. Systematically the Bible has been removed from our nation's schools. Christ has been removed from Christmas, now displayed by all the corporations and government as Xmas. Recently An Arizona man was sentenced to 60-days in prison for having a Bible study in his home.[1] Another couple in California was fined $300 for having a Bible study in their living room.[2] What is going on in America?

I'll tell you. The same demonic hatred that the Turks harbor against the Christian Armenians throughout the 19th century eventually came to a boil during World War I, and over one million Armenian families were butchered (many brutally tortured for the pleasure of the Turkish solders). Women and young girls were raped and some of the prettiest kept as sex-slaves in lifetime servitude. Others were stripped naked and nailed to crosses for their Christian faith. The world is a wicked place 1st John 5:19 declares, “And we know that we are of God, and the whole world lieth in wickedness.”

The target of the Armenian genocide were the Armenian Christians.

About 94 percent of Armenians consider themselves to be Armenian Christians, having derived their faith directly from Christ's apostles. The Christian faith has shaped Armenian culture so intimately that it permeates the very landscape at virtually every corner of the country. Armenia became the first nation to declare Christianity as its state religion in 301 AD.

SOURCE: Religion - ARMENIA Information

Somewhere in the range of 600,000 to 1,800,000 Armenians were savagely beaten, deported, raped, tortured and murdered by mass-murdering Turkish soldiers. They were Christians. The perpetrators were the new Young Turk Muslim government. The Turks had maintained a longtime discrimination and hatred against the Armenians. 

In 2005, the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) affirmed in a letter to Prime Minister Erdogan that scholarly evidence revealed the “Young Turk” government of the Ottoman Empire began a systematic genocide of its Armenian citizens – an unarmed Christian minority population. Notice the word “UNARMED!” Never surrender your weapons! Keep your guns! Buy more and store them in a safe place where kids can't get them. Personal gun safety is equally as important as owning a gun to defend oneself. Statistics have shown that guns are far more likely to kill loved one's than be used in self defense. In fact, I heard that it's like a 40-to-1 ratio. So be responsible and lock guns in a safe hidden place built into the wall behind a picture frame.

As a caring Christian myself who fears God in 2012, I am very interested in the atrocities which have happened to others throughout history (especially to horrible crimes against my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ). One of the most horrific crimes in history was the Armenian genocide which which escalated during 1915-1923). The Armenians were Notable Christians and the Muslims hated them from the beginning.

According to the Toronto Globe, August 25, 1915, the Italian consul of Trabzon in 1915 Giacomo Gorrini wrote: “I saw thousands of innocent women and children placed on boats which were capsized in the Black Sea.”

It's a shame that so many people are selfish in these modern times. We enjoy and l amidst the greatest blessings which the world has ever known; and yet more people are unthankful, disobedience and resentful against God than ever before. Whereas sheep herders like David, with no more than the Book of Moses (the first 5 books of the Old Testament) served God faithfully; ungrateful people today won't even open the covers of God's Word to search His hearts. Psalms 33:11, “The counsel of the LORD standeth for ever, the thoughts of his heart to all generations.” we have the completed Words of God today and tons of Bible study resources available at our fingers tips, yet people won't even read the Bible because it doesn't fit their agendas.

Armenian Genocide 1915-1923

Of this photo, the United States ambassador wrote, "Scenes like this were common all over the Armenian provinces, in the spring and summer months of 1915. Death in its several forms—massacre, starvation, exhaustion—destroyed the larger part of the refugees. The Turkish policy was that of extermination under the guise of deportation."

In 1939, Adolf Hitler gave a talk to then-commander of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Goering, explaining the necessity of quickly and brutally invading Poland. Hitler dismisses his use of violence by saying, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”[3] Given that genocides still occur today, this question illuminates the importance of continuing to speak of these atrocities.

My friend, genocide has been happening throughout history, primarily targeting Christians, whether feeding them to hungry lions during the time of the Roman Empire or the butchering of the Armenian Christians. Do you think it can't happen in America? It already is! As of 2012 the silent American abortion holocaust has genocide 53,000,000 human lives!!!

This Time, the World Is Not Buying It
by Paul Craig Roberts

The success of the Bush Regime's propaganda, lies, and deception with gullible and inattentive Americans since 9/11 has made it difficult for intelligent, aware people to be optimistic about the future of the United States. For almost 8 years the US media has served as Ministry of Propaganda for a war criminal regime. Americans incapable of thinking for themselves, reading between the lines, or accessing foreign media on the Internet have been brainwashed.

As the Nazi propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, said, it is easy to deceive a people. You just tell them they have been attacked and wave the flag.

It certainly worked with Americans.

The gullibility and unconcern of the American people has had many victims. There are 1.25 million dead Iraqis. There are 4 million displaced Iraqis. No one knows how many are maimed and orphaned.

Iraq is in ruins, its infrastructure destroyed by American bombs, missiles, and helicopter gunships.

We do not know the death toll in Afghanistan, but even the American puppet regime protests the repeated killings of women and children by US and NATO troops.

We don't know what the death toll would be in Iran if Darth Cheney and the neocons succeed in their plot with Israel to bomb Iran, perhaps with nuclear weapons.

What we do know is that all this murder and destruction has no justification and is evil. It is the work of evil men who have no qualms about lying and deceiving in order to kill innocent people to achieve their undeclared agenda.

That such evil people have control over the United States government and media damns the American public for eternity.

America will never recover from the shame and dishonor heaped upon her by the neoconned Bush Regime.

The success of the neocon propaganda has been so great that the opposition party has not lifted a finger to rein in the Bush Regime's criminal actions. Even Obama, who promises "change" is too intimidated by the neocon's success in brainwashing the American population to do what his supporters hoped he would do and lead us out of the shame in which the neoconned Bush Regime has imprisoned us.

This about sums up the pessimistic state in which I existed prior to the go-ahead given by the Bush Regime to its puppet in Georgia to ethnically cleanse South Ossetia of Russians in order to defuse the separatist movement. The American media, aka, the Ministry of Lies and Deceit, again accommodated the criminal Bush Regime and proclaimed "Russian invasion" to cover up the ethnic cleansing of Russians in South Ossetia by the Georgian military assault.

SOURCE: This Time, the World Is Not Buying It - by Paul Craig Roberts

If the Lord tarries, by 2050 the United States will be like the Soviet union during Lenin and Stalin. Synthetic biology will dominate the future. There will be genetic classes of humans. A lack of transplant organs will be a thing of the past. Solar power will be our primary source of electricity in all homes. The world will become a prison planet. There will be World War III (starting in the Middle East) and tens-of-millions of people will die.

As always, more innocent people than soldiers will die. Genetics will play a big role in sterilization. At present, massive programs are being developed to use mosquitoes and vaccinations to sterilize women. GM foods will also be used to carry out the agendas of the global elite. Obesity will become a crime. Drones will be feared, carrying massive explosive warheads and surveillance equipment. Cameras will monitor every place. There will be no privacy. People will live in continual fear of the New World Order. All of the science-fiction movies will become a reality.

One thing that history has shown is that man never learns from his mistakes. Neither God or the Devil have changed in 6,000 years. The evil nature of humanity hasn't changed either. There's nothing new under the sun. The only hope of civilizations is Jesus Christ, Who offers us eternal life through His precious blood. Jesus died, was buried and rose from the dead three days later. This is the Gospel message of hope, salvation by faith in Christ Jesus. Do you believe the Gospel? This life will soon be over and all that will matter is whether you dies IN YOUR SINS (John 8:24) or IN THE LORD (Revelation 14:13). Ye must be born again (John 3:3).


The Genocide Begins

Photo to left: a Starving Armenian boy

At this time, about forty thousand Armenian men were serving in the Turkish Army. In the fall and winter of 1914, all of their weapons were confiscated and they were put into slave labor battalions building roads or were used as human pack animals. Under the brutal work conditions they suffered a very high death rate. Those who survived would soon be shot outright. For the time had come to move against the Armenians.

The decision to annihilate the entire population came directly from the ruling triumvirate of ultra-nationalist Young Turks. The actual extermination orders were transmitted in coded telegrams to all provincial governors throughout Turkey. Armed roundups began on the evening of April 24, 1915, as 300 Armenian political leaders, educators, writers, clergy and dignitaries in Constantinople (present day Istanbul) were taken from their homes, briefly jailed and tortured, then hanged or shot.

Next, there were mass arrests of Armenian men throughout the country by Turkish soldiers, police agents and bands of Turkish volunteers. The men were tied together with ropes in small groups then taken to the outskirts of their town and shot dead or bayoneted by death squads. Local Turks and Kurds armed with knives and sticks often joined in on the killing.

Then it was the turn of Armenian women, children, and the elderly. On very short notice, they were ordered to pack a few belongings and be ready to leave home, under the pretext that they were being relocated to a non-military zone for their own safety. They were actually being taken on death marches heading south toward the Syrian Desert.

Muslim Turks who assumed instant ownership of everything quickly occupied most of the homes and villages left behind by the rousted Armenians. In many cases, local Turks who took them from their families spared young Armenian children from deportation. The children were coerced into denouncing Christianity and becoming Muslims, and were then given new Turkish names. For Armenian boys the forced conversion meant they each had to endure painful circumcision as required by Islamic custom.

Turkish gendarmes escorted individual caravans consisting of thousands of deported Armenians. These guards allowed roving government units of hardened criminals known as the ‘Special Organization’ to attack the defenseless people, killing anyone they pleased. They also encouraged Kurdish bandits to raid the caravans and steal anything they wanted. In addition, an extraordinary amount of sexual abuse and rape of girls and young women occurred at the hands of the Special Organization and Kurdish bandits. Most of the attractive young females were kidnapped for a life of involuntary servitude.

The death marches during the Armenian Genocide, involving over a million Armenians, covered hundreds of miles and lasted months. Indirect routes through mountains and wilderness areas were deliberately chosen in order to prolong the ordeal and to keep the caravans away from Turkish villages.

Food supplies being carried by the people quickly ran out and they were usually denied further food or water. Anyone stopping to rest or lagging behind the caravan was mercilessly beaten until they rejoined the march. If they couldn’t continue they were shot. A common practice was to force all of the people in the caravan to remove every stitch of clothing and have them resume the march in the nude under the scorching sun until they dropped dead by the roadside from exhaustion and dehydration.

An estimated 75 percent of the Armenians on these marches perished, especially children and the elderly. Those who survived the ordeal were herded into the desert without a drop of water. Being thrown off cliffs, burned alive, or drowned in rivers.

During the Armenian Genocide, the Turkish countryside became littered with decomposing corpses. At one point, Mehmed Talaat responded to the problem by sending a coded message to all provincial leaders: ‘I have been advised that in certain areas unburied corpses are still to be seen. I ask you to issue the strictest instructions so that the corpses and their debris in your vilayet are buried.’

But his instructions were generally ignored. Those involved in the mass murder showed little interest in stopping to dig graves. The roadside corpses and emaciated deportees were a shocking sight to foreigners working in Turkey. Eyewitnesses included German government liaisons, American missionaries, and U.S. diplomats stationed in the country.
 

Western Response

During the Armenian Genocide, the Christian missionaries serving in the Empire were often threatened with death and were unable to help the people. Diplomats from the still neutral United States communicated their blunt assessments of the ongoing government actions. U.S. ambassador to Turkey, Henry Morgenthau, reported to Washington: ‘When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race”

The Allied Powers (Great Britain, France, Russia) responded to news of the massacres by issuing a warning to Turkey: ”the Allied governments announce publicly ’that they will hold all the members of the Ottoman Government, as well as such of their agents as are implicated, personally responsible for such matters.’

The warning had no effect. Newspapers in the West including the New York Times published reports of the continuing deportations with the headlines: Armenians Are Sent to Perish in the Desert ‘ Turks Accused of Plan to Exterminate Whole Population (August 18, 1915) ‘ Million Armenians Killed or in Exile ‘ American Committee on Relief Says Victims of Turks Are Steadily Increasing ‘ Policy of Extermination (December 15, 1915).
 

Armenian Self-Defense

Temporary relief for some Armenians came as Russian troops attacked along the Eastern Front and made their way into central Turkey. But the troops withdrew in 1917 upon the Russian Revolution. Armenian survivors withdrew along with them and settled in among fellow Armenians already living in provinces of the former Russian Empire. There were in total about 500,000 Armenians gathered in this region.

In May 1918, Turkish armies attacked the area to achieve the goal of expanding Turkey eastward into the Caucasus and also to resume the annihilation of the Armenians. As many as 100,000 Armenians may have fallen victim to the advancing Turkish troops.

However, the Armenians managed to acquire weapons and they fought back, finally repelling the Turkish invasion at the battle of Sardarabad, thus saving the remaining population from total extermination with no help from the outside world. Following that victory, Armenian leaders declared the establishment of the independent Republic of Armenia in a small portion of their historic homeland in the Caucasus.
 

War Trials

World War I ended in November 1918 with a defeat for Germany and the Central Powers including Turkey. Shortly before the war had ended, the Young Turk triumvirate; Talaat, Enver and Djemal, abruptly resigned their government posts and fled to Germany where they had been offered asylum.

In the months that followed, repeated requests by Turkey’s new moderate government and the Allies were made asking Germany to send the Young Turks back home to stand trial. However all such requests were turned down. As a result, Armenian activists took matters into their own hands, located the Young Turks and assassinated them along with two other instigators of the mass murder.

Meanwhile, representatives from the fledgling Republic of Armenia attended the Paris Peace Conference in the hope that the victorious Allies would give them back their historic lands seized by Turkey. The European Allies responded to their request by asked the United States to assume guardianship of the new Republic. However, President Woodrow Wilson’s attempt to make Armenia an official U.S. protectorate was rejected by the U.S. Congress in May 1920.

But Wilson did not give up on Armenia. As a result of his efforts, the Treaty of Sevres was signed on August 10, 1920 by the Allied Powers, the Republic of Armenia, and the new moderate leaders of Turkey. The treaty recognized an independent Armenian state in an area comprising much of the former historic homeland.
 

Justice Denied

However, Turkish nationalism once again reared its head. The moderate Turkish leaders who signed the treaty were ousted in favor of a new nationalist leader, Mustafa Kemal, who simply refused to accept the treaty and even re-occupied the very lands in question then expelled any surviving Armenians, including thousands of orphans.

No Allied power came to the aid of the Armenian Republic and it collapsed. Only a tiny portion of the easternmost area of historic Armenia survived by being becoming part of the Soviet Union.

After the successful obliteration of the people of historic Armenia during the Armenian Genocide, the Turks demolished any remnants of Armenian cultural heritage including priceless masterpieces of ancient architecture, old libraries and archives. The Turks even leveled entire cities such as the once thriving Kharpert, Van and the ancient capital at Ani, to remove all traces of the three thousand year old civilization.

Referring to the Armenian Genocide, the young German politician Adolf Hitler duly noted the half-hearted reaction of the world’s great powers to the plight of the Armenians. After achieving total power in Germany, Hitler decided to conquer Poland in 1939 and told his generals: ‘Thus for the time being I have sent to the East only my ‘Death’s Head Units’ with the orders to kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of Polish race or language. Only in such a way will we win the vital space that we need. Who still talks nowadays about the Armenians?’

SOURCE: Armenian Genocide | United Human Rights Council


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