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Whether motivated by religion or pure nationalism allowing genocide to be denied is a bad precedent. Joel Send a noteboard - 03/04/2010 11:04:53 AM

Were I the victim of a neighbors never punished genocide I'd probably choose my words carefully when we spoke, too. I think the willingness to condone military coups in Turkey has less to do with the alternative of a Muslim state (I assume the generals are all Coptic, right? ) than with the Siege of Vienna and centuries of religious conflict in Europe that was born of the Muslim conquest of Turkey, and which has two world wars and Milosevic as its legacy. Given how impotent, how dismissive, Europe was of genocide in Bosnia during the Twentieth Century Turkeys admission to the EU seems to me a very bad idea until/unless they show a lot more reform and put the idea of theocracy to rest for good. It's less about anti-Muslim or anti-democratic bias than it is about not giving religious extremists power to threaten millions (the same reason the US supported Musharraf in Pakistan: If we hadn't the Taliban would have nuclear weapons now. )


You need to brush up on your history of Turkey - everything that happened in the past century. The ruling class even in the Osman Empire was never all that religious - most ruling classes aren't, I find, as being truly devout would limit their ability to be self-serving as well as possibly harming their diplomatic interests - but the Osman Empire came to an end, and the Republic of Turkey is a rather different entity. Mustafa Kemal was a thoroughly Westernized army officer, and built a state that is probably even more aggressively secular than France. Him being born a Muslim and remaining a Muslim in name doesn't change any of that. There is a relatively small but immensely powerful class of secularists in Turkey, who look down on devout Muslims and want to keep them down. Mustafa Kemal was one of those, and many of the governments since. Obviously the government now is formed by a party representing in the first place the devout Muslims (though it also has most of the even smaller group of Turkish liberals, fyi), but the secularists still control the judiciary and the army. So no, the generals aren't Copts - there aren't any Copts in the Asian part of the Middle East to my knowledge anyhow, the Christians in Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq are Assyrians and Maronites, while the ones in Turkey are mostly Greek Orthodox - but they don't make it to the powerful army positions unless they are aggressively secular and nationalistic. The last coup they did actually execute was against a party that was too Muslim for its taste; the AKP has originated in that same party but is a fair bit more moderate now - the threat of the AKP lies more in its remarkable success and popularity.

While we're on the topic, I think a lot of Americans who blindly choose the side of the secularists over that of the "Muslim-Democrats" of the AKP might reconsider if they had a clue about what said secularists really thought. Maybe those Americans just think that anyone opposed to Muslims must obviously be in favour of America and the West. Well, think again. The CHP, the secularist party, is consistently more hostile towards the US - and certainly towards the EU - than the AKP is. A part of that may just be because they're in the opposition and the AKP is in government, but when you see some of party leader Baykal's statements, you'll see that there's much more to it than that. Between those two parties - the other two major parties in Turkey are an even more nationalistic party, MHP, and the successor party of the pro-Kurdish DTP, which is mostly moderate except for the inevitable ties to the PKK, but is unlikely to make it into the government any time soon - the AKP is most definitely the saner and more pro-Western one, and the one I would vote for myself, as I think would most Westerners if they had time to study the party positions (okay, some of them might vote DTP as well). And still between the two of them (the DTP has acknowledged the genocide and apologized for the Kurds' significant role in it), the AKP is the more likely to admit to the genocide, because the AKP isn't as nationalistic. Whether or not religion was a more important factor than politics and nationalism at the time the genocide actually happened, it's clear that religion is not a major factor in the refusal now to acknowledge it.

And then as for your blaming the two world wars on religion, that makes little sense to me... certainly, the Balkan Wars had a link to religion, though I wouldn't call it the dominant factor, but the Balkan Wars are only a small part of the factors leading to WW1 (I'm assuming your reasoning to claim WW2 as well is merely that WW1 led to WW2). One would think that you'd not blame religion for even more of the world's ills than its detractors already do, considering how religious you are yourself.

And yes, I'm arguing that the Great War laid the foundation for WWII, not only in terms of the nationalistic tensions it seeded, but in terms of the alarming willingness in much of Europe to tolerate any level of bloodshed and atrocity so long as we don't call it "war. " Europe is still wrestling with the cultural and religious legacy of the Muslim push past Constantinople into Europe, and with Milosevic a recent memory I don't think it's a great idea to admit Turkey to the EU while its government denies the previous governments genocide during the Great War. That previous government was the same group that two centuries earlier led an army to the gates of Vienna before being repelled. In an age of Mid-Eastern religious terror aimed at the West, the fact that Turkeys rulers TODAY are a small clique of well armed secularists less willing than the religious element to accept responsibility makes rolling out the red carpet while they deny their past very ill advised, IMHO. I'm not choosing Ataturks side or anyone elses here because, as with Israel and Palestine, I don't see a side worth endorsing. It often seems the only European who learned anything from the Armenian genocide was Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter (yet another WWII legacy of the Balkan role in the Great War. )

Put more simply, the EU retains a simmering problem in religious and nationalistic clashes in the southeast, and whether a religiously nationalistic or a militarily nationalistic Turkish government is denying that nations contributions in the form of the Armenian Genocide, admitting them to the EU while they do so isn't helping a centuries old problem in desperate need of resolution rather than exacerbation. Maybe if Turkey could acknowledge the past and find a way forward the way Germany did with the Nazis they could be a fine model for the Balkans. As it stands, the Germans have managed to evolve, suffer the horrors of and finally repudiate the Holocaust while Turkey still denies its inspiration ever occurred. It's baffling to me why a place that's made Holocaust denial ILLEGAL in many areas will condone a prospective member denying its prototype ever happened. How they'll handle Scheubner-Richter in history books I have no idea, since it's illegal both to deny his role in the Nazi Holocaust and (in future EU member Turkey) admit to the Armenian Genocide he documented.
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Heh, Erdogan is pissed - 04/03/2010 10:47:20 PM 299 Views
Sigh. I wish they would stop trying to pass that. - 04/03/2010 10:55:58 PM 190 Views
If Erdogan has no problem making scenes like the one in Davos why should he expect any less ? - 05/03/2010 12:11:33 AM 180 Views
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With all due respect, fuck Turkey. - 05/03/2010 12:35:03 AM 185 Views
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Turkey is an abomination. - 05/03/2010 01:20:31 AM 186 Views
I don't like the new military uniform colors. Off to prison!!! *NM* - 05/03/2010 01:38:58 AM 83 Views
I agree with Tom *NM* - 05/03/2010 12:50:13 AM 82 Views
How is denying the eponym's genocide improving relations with Armenia? - 05/03/2010 01:44:17 AM 188 Views
Please don't throw the Hagia Sophia. - 05/03/2010 02:01:31 AM 194 Views
Perish the thought. - 05/03/2010 02:13:15 AM 162 Views
Modern Armenia looks at it rather differently than the diaspora does. - 05/03/2010 09:58:21 AM 182 Views
Yes, but the Turks are pretending not to understand democracy - 05/03/2010 11:04:25 AM 172 Views
I imagine modern Armenia is more placating, yes. - 15/03/2010 05:58:24 AM 171 Views
I'm sorry, but really, you do not have a clue. - 15/03/2010 01:02:50 PM 210 Views
Whether motivated by religion or pure nationalism allowing genocide to be denied is a bad precedent. - 03/04/2010 11:04:53 AM 191 Views
It's been denied for eighty-five years. It can wait five more. - 03/04/2010 07:47:57 PM 182 Views
Re: It's been denied for eighty-five years. It can wait five more. - 08/04/2010 09:47:31 AM 187 Views
I wish the Turks would just admit it on their own. - 05/03/2010 12:33:27 AM 170 Views
I agree. They just need to man up and admit it, apologize, and move on. *NM* - 05/03/2010 01:38:12 AM 78 Views
So what? - 05/03/2010 01:40:22 AM 205 Views
I think it is a trickey one. - 05/03/2010 10:18:02 AM 178 Views

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