Bush, Stalin, Hitler, Talaat Pasha- the end justifies the means.
One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic, (or collateral damage.)
Josef Stalin and Bush apologists.
---
Robert Fisk: A reign of terror which history has chosen to neglect
Published: 12 October 2007
The story of the last century's first Holocaust - Winston Churchill used
this very word about the Armenian genocide years before the Nazi murder of
six million Jews - is well known, despite the refusal of modern-day Turkey
to acknowledge the facts. Nor are the parallels with Nazi Germany's
persecution of the Jews idle ones.
Turkey's reign of terror against the Armenian people was an attempt to
destroy the Armenian race. While the Turks spoke publicly of the need to
"resettle" their Armenian population - as the Germans were to speak later of
the Jews of Europe - the true intentions of Enver Pasha's Committee of Union
and Progress in Constantinople were quite clear.
On 15 September 1915, for example (and a carbon of this document exists),
Talaat Pasha, the Turkish Interior minister, cabled an instruction to his
prefect in Aleppo about what he should do with the tens of thousands of
Armenians in his city. "You have already been informed that the
government... has decided to destroy completely all the indicated persons
living in Turkey... Their existence must be terminated, however tragic the
measures taken may be, and no regard must be paid to either age or sex, or
to any scruples of conscience."
These words are almost identical to those used by Himmler to his SS killers
in 1941.
Taner Akcam, a prominent - and extremely brave - Turkish scholar who has
visited the Yerevan museum, has used original Ottoman Turkish documents to
authenticate the act of genocide. Now under fierce attack for doing so from
his own government, he discovered in Turkish archives that individual
Turkish officers often wrote "doubles" of their mass death-sentence orders,
telegrams sent at precisely the same time that asked their subordinates to
ensure there was sufficient protection and food for the Armenians during
their "resettlement". This weirdly parallels the bureaucracy of Nazi
Germany, where officials were dispatching hundreds of thousands of Jews to
the gas chambers while assuring International Red Cross officials in Geneva
that they were being well cared for and well fed.
Ottoman Turkey's attempt to exterminate an entire Christian race in the
Middle East - the Armenians, descended from the residents of ancient Urartu,
became the first Christian nation when their king Drtad converted from
paganism in AD301 - is a history of almost unrelieved horror at the hands of
Turkish policemen and soldiers, and Kurdish tribesmen.
In 1915, Turkey claimed that its Armenian population was supporting Turkey's
Christian enemies in Britain, France and Russia. Several historians -
including Churchill, who was responsible for the doomed venture at
Gallipoli - have asked whether the Turkish victory there did not give them
the excuse to turn against the Christian Armenians of Asia Minor, a people
of mixed Persian, Roman and Byzantine blood, with what Churchill called
"merciless fury".
Armenian scholars have compiled a map of their people's persecution and
deportation, a document that is as detailed as the maps of Europe that show
the railway lines to Auschwitz and Treblinka; the Armenians of Erzerum, for
example, were sent on their death march to Terjan and then to Erzinjan and
on to Sivas province.
The men would be executed by firing squad or hacked to death with axes
outside villages, the women and children then driven on into the desert to
die of thirst or disease or exhaustion or gang-rape. In one mass grave I
myself discovered on a hillside at Hurgada in present-day Syria, there were
thousands of skeletons, mostly of young people - their teeth were perfect. I
even found a 100-year-old Armenian woman who had escaped the slaughter there
and identified the hillside for me.
There is debate in Yerevan today as to why the diaspora Armenians appear to
care more about the genocide than the citizens of modern-day Armenia.
Indeed, the Foreign minister of Armenia, Vardan Oskanian, actually told me
that "days, weeks, even months go by" when he does not think of the
genocide. One powerful argument put to me by an Armenian friend is that 70
years of Stalinism and official Soviet silence on the genocide deleted the
historical memory in eastern Armenia - the present-day state of Armenia.
Another argument suggests that the survivors of western Armenia - in what is
now Turkey - lost their families and lands and still seek acknowledgement
and maybe even restitution, while eastern Armenians did not lose their
lands.
http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article3052373.ece
--
The sanity of (Adolf) Eichman is disturbing. We equate sanity with a sense
of justice, with humaneness, with prudence, with the capicity to love and
understand other people. We rely on the sane people of the world to preserve
it from barbarism, madness, destruction. And now it begins to dawn on us
that it is precisely the *sane* ones who are the most dangerous.
Raids on the Unspeakable
Thomas Merton
He was found guilty on all counts, sentenced to death and hanged at Ramleh
Prison, May 31, 1962.
A fellow Nazi reported Eichmann once said "he would leap laughing into the
grave because the feeling that he had five million people on his conscience
would be for him a source of extraordinary satisfaction."
http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/biographies/eichmann.htm
--
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