Today is April 24. It is an important day for the Armenians.
The Armenians? Yes. Let me tell you something about them.
I had long thought that the first incidence of genocide in the 20th century was the
The next great genocide was known as the de-Kulakization program of the 1930s. Stalin modeled this campaign on Lenin's De-Cossackization program. Here Stalin introduced the innovation of the concentration camp, where prisoners were worked or starved to death. In the three year period of 1930 to 1932, Stalin (with the assistance of his Ukranian governor, Nikita Sergeievich Kruschev) oversaw the liquidation of 6 million people in Russia and Ukraine, through a combination of mass starvation, forced migration, and concentration camps where the goal was to, literally, work the prisoners to death.
Members of the Nazi party, touring these camps, later proposed them to Hitler as a model for getting rid of the Jews and other undesirables. The concentration camps were not a Nazi invention, as it turns out. The Nazis did, on the other hand, develop the twin innovations of poison gas and ovens, which massively increased efficiency of disposal.
The Soviets, always more technologically primitive, made less effort to clean up the mess wrought by their genocides. They were not completely unfastidious, however. In the 1930s, the Soviet government printed up signs in the affected parts of the Soviet Union, letting citizens know that eating their own children was an act of barbarism. They also did their best to crack down on the practice of cannibalizing corpses stolen from mass graves and hospitals by people who otherwise had nothing at all to eat. (The New York Times was on hand to report but, unfortunately, their correspondent was friendly to Stalin's regime.)
After Hitler, the genocides of the 20th century continued in a stunning number of places. Ho Chi Minh, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, and others killed hundreds of thousands or millions. The greatest mass murderer in human history, Mao of China, killed fully 65 million souls in his many pograms.
Stop and think about that some time. One man killed 65 million people. Go watch Schindler's List. It's a truly amazing movie, an important movie that everyone should see. Then think: Mao killed more than ten times as many Chinese as Hitler killed Jews.
Try to wrap your mind around that. You can't, can you? It becomes simply a number. A numbing, appalling number of wives, grandmothers, daughters, fathers, grandfathers, sons--all ages, all groups, it didn't matter. You were a problem for the regime, and then you were gone.
We think of the Nazis when we think of genocide. Well, why shouldn't we? They were as evil as evil can get, and they were efficient at documenting their crimes. Proud of them, even. They should always be remembered as a unique evil, and the specter of their philosophy should always be feared.
My only regret is that not enough people remember the others.
My friend Ara Rubyan recently posted about the 20th century's first genocide. I haven't mentioned it yet, but I'm getting there. Ara quoted the perfect phrasing of Milan Kundera: the struggle of memory against forgetting.
One group who struggles not to forget is the Armenians.
When it came to the practice of genocide, Lenin's Marxist revolutionaries were not the first. That honor belongs to a political party called the "Committee of Union and Progress," known more informally as "The Young Turks." They were the first, having conducted their genocide campaign in the twilight of the Ottoman Empire. Starting in 1915, they began slaughtering the Armenians in wave after wave of terror. By 1923, 1.5 million Armenians were dead. As always with genocide, no one was spared the knife: women, children, old men, young men, it didn't matter. Mounds of skulls were built by the victors, while the lucky survivors fled for their lives.
It was the Armenians who were the first people nearly extinguished during the most violent, blood-soaked century of human history.
Even here, as I write this, memory still struggles against forgetting. As we remember the 6 million Jews slaughtered by Hitler, we sometimes forget the millions of others who died: the Gypsies, the Slavs, the crippled and lame, the Christian resisters and the political opponents who died next to the Jews in the camps. In the Armenian Genocide, where 1.5 million Armenian innocents perished, hundreds of thousands of Assyrians and Greeks were killed alongside them, in the same waves of terror.
The struggle of memory against forgetting. It's hard. What does it matter? It was a long time ago. I wasn't there. I don't know any of these people. Can I really be said to remember this anyway?
Well, what can I say?
I'll do my best.
---
Images taken from Armenian National Committee of San Francisco and Gaydzer. Also, A slightly different version of this article was first published on Dean's World last year.--Dean
It's been said that Hitler defended his decisions (against the judgement of history) by pointing out that no one remembered the Armenians.
I'm pretty sure that the French and the U.S. killed more Vietnamese people than Ho Chi Minh did as I wasn't aware of his regime committing genocide in the manner mentioned in this thread. Remember, Minh wrote 7 letters to Truman asking for help liberating and ultimately forming an alliance with the Vietnamese nation. Our racist policy (treating brown skin people as less worthy than white skinned people) at the time caused us to turn a blind eye to what the French had been doing in Indochina, and of course we took the wrong side. Not only were millions of Vietnamese people killed by our bombs, 56,000+ Americans died in vain.
Typical of the left. We have a post here about the worst mass genocides in world history and "Tim" uses it as case for moral relativism -- The U.S. is just as bad.
I'd hate to live in your head Tim. Your worldview is really twisted.
tbob
Yes, Ho Chi Minh killed more Vietnamese than the U.S. did.
Ho Chi Minh was also a KGB operative long before he became a "revolutionary," and his "revolution" was funded and provided extensive intel by the Soviets.
He was a mass murderer and an oppressive tyrant far worse than the Diem brothers ever were.
Er, no fighting, kids. (I know, it's almost a lost cause, but I still try.)
I stand corrected. (In my twisted little mind.) I was always under the assumption that most of the killings took place after Ho died. I am certainly not the least bit sympathetic to communism or its tragic revolution. Maybe after reading "Ho Chi Minh: A Life" I got the impression that he wasn't really as bad as he was made out to be. Of course, I'm always open to the idea that I could be wrong.
I didn't intend to come off as "oh yeah, well look what America did!" Truly, the communist revolution was the greatest evil and caused the most tragic human devastation in human history.
The first major repressions in Vietnam occurred in the early 1950s,when Ho was alive,and before the war even started.Hanoi issued a "Population Classification Decree" in 1954,and around 100,000 people were murdered over the next few months because they happened to be in the wrong class.Of course,in rural Vietnam at the time,being from a wealthy class meant you may have had an extra cow,but such nuances have never been important with communist regimes.It's disturbing how many people have no idea of the magnitude of the crimes this ideology has wrought.Auschwitz is virtually shorthand for institutionalized evil in the modern lexicon;how many people have heard of Kolyma?
Here we go again with the Ara Rubyan Annual Armenian Massacre Show.
See the three Armenian doctors hung by their ankles like captured swordfish hung out over the end of a south Florida fishing boat!
See the Armenian heads displayed on the Turkish table!
See the starved Armenian child!
Oh woe... Go beat down the doors of the nearest Turkish consulate and demand that they immediately assume responsibility for the crime of the millenium!
---
Ara,
If Armenia and the Armenians are that important to you, your family, the Armenian Youth Federation, and to the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (part of the Socialist International, I understant),
...then why don't you all concentrate your efforts on building modern, independent, Armenia into something more significant for the world of the 20th century than what it has been since the implosion of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics almost 13 years ago?
Because all that Armenia appears to be today is a little, landlocked, insignificant, two-piece south Caucasian republic that periodically but regularly breaks out into bad government (which in 1994 banned the Armenian Revolutionary Federation) and even worse earthquakes (leaving behind hordes of weeping women all shrouded-up like the same black crows we see from all over the middle east), no viable economy, and no serious role to play on the world stage except as a sponge for soaking up spare money from the Armenian diasporas in the US, Canada, Argentina, Syria, Iran and Lebanon, and endless scuffles with the Azeris that are sort of a south Caucasian counterpart to the Turks and Greeks squabbling over this or that fragmentary patch of Cyprus.
I say that you should concentrate on building the Armenia that you've got and forget about trying to retrieve what your leaders still call western Armenia, which nothing short of another world war will ever take away from Turkey.
The world is awash in greater or lesser massacres, and that one that your people say the Turks caused and the Turks say say your people caused is now seen in its proper context as only one of the lesser indignities of human history.
(I understand you can't even call it a "holocaust" now because that gets the Jews indignant, and in any case, the Israelis value their strategic relationship with Turkey one hell of a lot more important than any relationship they will ever have with the Armenian International.)
In any case, we've had the Turks expelling and/or starving and sometimes murdering the Armenians. We've had the Soviets liquidating the cossacks. We've had the Soviets liquidating the kulaks. We've had the Soviets mass-starving the Ukrainians. We've had the Germans mass-gassing the Jews and burning their corpses. We've had the Indians and Pakistanis mass-murdering each other when the Indian Empire was split. We've had Mao Zedong liquidating un-communizable Chinese. We've had Pol Pot liquidating almost everyone who could read or write in Cambodia (the school teacher's ultimate revenge, I presume). We've had communists mass killing Croats (Bleiburg). We've had Serbs mass killing Bosna muslims and Albanians. We've had Hutus killing Tutsis and vice-versa. Lest we forget, we've had europeans in north America starving and infecting, killing and dispossessing Indians.
Don't you know by now that this never ends? That it never will end? That it gets worse as the world population increases and exacerbates tensions among competing and mutually antagonistic cultures?
Above all, haven't you all realized by now that there is no international justice except that which you can organize with the force available to you? All you accomplish with these rememberances is to poison yourselves. As the Serbs have done with their eternal fixation on the battle of Kosovo polje. As the French did over Alsace-Lorraine after 1870. As the Arabs have been doing in regard to their dead-as-Babylon Palestine since 1948. And on and on and on. As the Jews have been doing since 1945 with the murder of their six million in Europe, which has become a sort of holocaust industry.
I think they are all wrong when they say that if forget history you are doomed to repeat it. I say that if don't forget it, and fail to get on with your lives, you are doomed to perpetuate it, and and to poison yourselves until the end of time with horrors that ought to be buried as soon as practicable.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Arnold,
Excuse me, but I didn't write this post; Dean did, and with no prompting from me, I assure you. Ask him yourself if you don't believe me.
So go stick your head up your ass and fart. It would make a more enlightening sound than whatever bullshit it was that you just said.
But I mean that in a nice way, of course.
I am afraid that history will repeat itself as long as people still harbour the hate and ignorance that perpetuated these horrible acts in the first place. One may say "look at us poor [fill-in the blank], our plight was such a terrible one". Yet another may say "Those damn [fill-in the blank] I won't rest until I get them back."
We need to move to a place where the ideology that fueled the genocide in the first place is eradicated from civilization. Ignorant people fear what they do not understand, and this fear drives them to hate if it is not addressed properly. It is a big undertaking to teach most of the world and cultural awareness and understanding, but that is what needs to happen if we are ever to overcome the mass prejudice and hate that drives crimes against humanity.
In my own blog, I have been blogging recently about the rise of Nazism in Russia (where my wife is from). There you can see what happens when people forget their own history, coupled with the ignorance that blames a person of a different ethnic background for personal/national problems.
Ara, I know you meant it in a nice way, of course. Even so, you ought to think a little on what I wrote. Dredging up all these ancient wrongs accomplishes nothing but misdirecting and sapping the energies of the very peoples who have to bear the burden of carrying the hatreds resulting from it.
And after a while, these photographs become less dreadful and more picaresque, if you know what I mean. So the whole thing kind of backfires every time the Armenian organizations haul out their tired and crumbling photos from the April 1915 troubles and start trying to lash the Turks with them, just one more time.
In any case, you know as well as anyone else that Turkey is outstandingly important to the United States, while Armenia in contrast means nothing to most of us and to the government of this country. And it never will. So nobody is going to right any Armenian wrongs -- real or fanciful -- at Turkey's expense. The same applies to the Kurds of southeastern Turkey. Nobody here will help them break loose.
I took the trouble to go to the Gaydzer website and read on of their issues. It turns out that:
-- Armenia is losing young people to emigration faster than they can be popped out of the wombs of the assorted Armenian mammas;
-- Armenians overseas, when they get to the third generation or so in any given diaspora, may sport Armenian names but can no longer read, write, speak or understand the Armenian language;
-- Armenians are starting to intermarry with non-Armenians out in the diaspora, folks whose interests in Armenia are probably less than that of real Armenians.
And so on and so on. So, Armenia, welcome to the world of the little nations with the big, scattered, shrinking diasporas. Ask the Croats, Lebanese christians, Jews, Serbs, or just about any other national group all about this.
Armenia's best hope for some sort of useful future is in some kind of Caucasus federation with the other small christian nations up in those mountains. Georgians, Ossetins and a few others come to mind. That way, they'll always have protection from big Russia nearby. Sometimes, they have unwanted Russian interference as well. But that's what comes with the territory, as you well know.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
I sympathise with the underdog , but Arnold Harris has some valid points
Arnold,
I. Did. Not. Write. That. Post.
How do you know what I think?
Ara, I looked back on both my comments on this thread. I couldn't find any reference alluding to anything you do or do not think.
But it was you who originally posted this stuff about the Armenian community in Turkey in April 1915. So I presumed your views coincided with those of represented the AYF, the ARF, Gaydzer, whatever. And before I comment on anything these days, I take the trouble to google up some background stuff on the subject. Just as I would have done when I was a working reporter 43 years ago. I didn't mean to piss you off over the grandfather's or greatgrandfather's national shtick.
Anyway, while I was googling around, I started looking up some of the other small and mostly obscure peoples of the Caucasus: Ossetins, Georgians, Chechens, Lazi, Abkhazi, Khevsurs, Pshavs, Svanets, and on and on... A regular little zoo of obscure human groups each hidden away in their own little mountain hideaway.
I wish the Armenians luck. I know they have some significance in early christian history, but I'm not certain what it was and probably will never know because I'm not particularly interested in them.
But one thing for sure. When the osmanli seljuk Turks under Alp Arslan in 1071 smashed the Byzantine army of Romanus IV Diogenes at Manzikert near the Iranian border, capturing Romanus himself and consequently occupying and repopulating all Anatolia with Turks, that sealed Armenia's fate right up to the present day. No further overland contact with the christians of the west, until the Russians came south into the Caucasus in the 18th century.
I think I know a little more now about what happened in 1915. In the autumn following the beginning of World War I, a pair of German warships that had taken refuge from the British in the safe harbor at Istanbul, sailed out with German officers and crewmen but flying the Ottoman colors, and bombarded some Russian Black sea ports in late 1914.
The Russians naturally responded by declaring war on the Ottoman empire. Then they sent agents into eastern Turkey to stir up trouble among the large Armenian population around Lake Van. This Armenian population in Turkey had been having detiorating relations with the Turks for the better part of the past half-century, maybe because they though the Turkish empire was on its last legs and they therefore had nothing to lose.
A significant number of the leadership class of the Turkish Armenians became convinced that a large Russian army would shortly be sent to the southern Caucasus to invade eastern Turkey.
They could not have made a greater mistake. The Russians by early spring 1915 was in retreat from the German and Austro-Hungarian armies in Europe, and had neither troops nor munitions to spare for purposes of liberating Armenians in what for them was a secondary theater of war.
But the Ottoman government, especially regenerated under the 'Young Turks', read the Armenian activities as dangerous treason, and they determined to expel the Armenians to far away from the front lines. Undoubtedly a lot of Armenians were outright murdered by the hostile Turks forces.
But the bulk of them, I think, died in the privations of a long trek through the mountains toward the southwest. Especially during their trek through mountain lands inhabited by Kurdish tribesmen who presumably hated them as non-moslems and who also practiced routine robbery and murder among anybody transversing their lands without major military protection. (Mountain peoples have always practiced this kind of piracy as a form of making a living.)
Anyway, that was the end of western Armenia. With the collapse of the Ottoman empire at the end of World War I, the new leadership of Turkey determined they would have an end to any non-Turkish communities in their lands (except for the Kurds, whom they have always considered "mountain Turks", whatever that is supposed to mean.) That meant that no Armenians refugees would be re-admitted to the new Turkish republic, and also put the handwriting on the wall for the future of the remaining Greek communities in western Anatolia.
What I have related above are a hard set of historical events of the type that never, ever get undone. Sort of like all the Germans central and eastern Europe east of the Oder-Neisse river system being expelled westward after 1945, with large numbers of them put in slave labor or outright murdered. Those Germans will never return to Poland, Czeska, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, the Baltic states or former Jugoslavia. And for much the same reason, no Armenians will ever be permitted to resettle in eastern Turkey.
I think also that the age of population expulsions is still with us, UNO or no UNO.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Ara, I looked back on both my comments on this thread. I couldn't find any reference alluding to anything you do or do not think.
Arnold, for Christ's sake, you addressed your comments to me, by name. You even asked me the (presumably) rhetorical question, "Don't you know by now that this never ends? That it never will end?"
Honest to goodness, Arnold, I'm a bystander here.
...it was you who originally posted this stuff about the Armenian community in Turkey in April 1915.
I have no idea what you're talking about, my friend, but suit yourself.
Ara, you're disclaimer is disingenuous. Dean picked up much of your stuff direct from your own website, U Pluribus Unum, including the following:
"The Ottoman Turkish destruction of the Armenian people, beginning in the late 19th and intensifying in the early 20th century, was a genocide, and jihad ideology contributed significantly to this decades long human liquidation process.
These facts are now beyond dispute."
Well, Ara, now that I have had an opportunity to read about what actually occured in 1915, but from the point of view of the Turks as well as that of the Armenians, I sure as hell would argue about the "facts" being beyond dispute.
I happen to be a lover of accuracy, above all things. And when I get the idea that I and a lot of other people have been systematically propagandized, I typically turn against the side that I think began to erect a tissue of lies for political purposes.
So you succeeded in getting me interested enough to research some of this Armenian stuff yet further. And what do I find? That back in the 1980s, an Armenian "patriot" group operating under the name ASALA systematically murdered 27 Turkish diplomats in other countries, including the United States. That, of course, is outright terrorism. Not a hell of a lot different than what al-Qaide has been doing for some time. And I doubt that many non-Armenians will have much sympathy for them or their cause if they begin researching this as I have done.
Maybe the Armenians who support that kind of stuff can fool a lot of people about some of their tactics. Maybe even a lot of people who comment on these websites. Maybe even Dean Esmay. But me? Never.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Dean, Ara is right about one thing. It was you who assembled all this, with the emphasis not on the better known and truly humongous scale mass murders of the later 20th century, but on the deaths of the Armenians. And a lot of evidence I have been studying shows that some of the blame should be put on the memory of the leadership of the Armenian community in Turkey before and during World War I.
The worst part of swallowing the Armenian story hook, line and sinker is that is has been used as justification for the same kind of international terrorism that we are warring against today. Unless we cleanse the world of this kind of activity, you, I and our children have no safe future at all.
So why don't you check out some of the information from the Turkish side, or from some impartial scholars whose writings you can check out as well as I can, before coming to this same conclusion every April 24th?
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Arnold,
I have to come back to your statement 'So why don't you check out some of the information from the Turkish side, or from some impartial scholars whose writings you can check out as well as I can, before coming to this same conclusion every April 24th?'. I can propose you the following articles. one is from Turkish source, another is German:
Taner Akcam: Armenien und der Völkermord.
Die Istanbuler Prozesse und die türkische Nationalbewegung.
Hamburger Edition 1996
ISBN 3-930908-26-3
Heinrich Vierbücher: Armenien 1915.
Was die kaiserliche Regierung den deutschen Untertanen verschwiegen hat: Die Abschlachtung eines Kulturvolkes durch die Türken.
Donat Verlag 2004
ISBN 3-934836-73-9
Franz Werfel: Die vierzig Tage des Musa Dagh.
Fischer Taschenbücher Bd. 9458
ISBN 3-596-29458-4
If you are really interested have a look (you can get the English translations -no problems) and then only post your messages.
James, the information I have read from the Turkish point of view makes no effort to hide the fact that large numbers of Armenians lost their lives in the forceful deportations that began in April 1915 from near the battle zone in eastern Turkey.
What they do claim is that a goodly share of the responsibility for this mass loss of life was with the leadership of significant parts of the Turkish Armenian community, who collaborated with the Russian invaders, committed acts of sabotage, organized gangs of armed Armenian guerillas who ambushed and killed Turkish troops, and all the rest we have come to know from dealing with hostile populations in the middle east today. This is a claim that I think bears weight.
For a hell of a lot less justification, the United States government relocated every Japanese American from the far west in early 1942 and locked them away in concentration camps, with armed guards, barbed wire, vicious dogs, et al.
Does this excuse the outright murder of a large number of these Armenians whom the Turks say were being relocated to live in and around Christian Arab communities in Syria and Lebanon? No.
But neither can anyone even begin to figure out the exact numbers involved, because all these horrors occured in obscure places in the middle of a vast world war that itself was grinding to death perhaps a score of a million lives in combat on numerous fronts, of civilians starving to death behind the lines, of entire populations caught up in the chaos of civil wars and more repressions following the armistice.
In any case, I am not interested in staring at smudgy photographs of Armenian men, women and children hung by their heels from bridges, or with their heads reposing on coffee tables, or starving in the Syrian desert or any other graphic representations of old catastrophes. Any more than I am interested in looking at photos of bleeding, chopped-up fetuses that the anti-abortion folks so fervently want all the rest of us to swoon over.
And why are the Turks being continually tormented over something that happened 89 years ago, in comparison to the 150 million lives squandered since then by the German nazis, the Russian, Chinese and Cambodian communists, the Japanese imperialists and the terrible wars that were found in the middle of the last century?
Moreover, I now know that all this Armenian-generated hatred of Turkey was used as an excuse by one or more associated Armenian terror gangs to assassinate 27 Turkish diplomats during the 1980s. Knowing what I now know, if I were Turkish, I too would not any Armenians inside my borders, and I would just want them to keep their distance.
As you would guess from my writings, I do not celebrate mass deaths, either through remembrance, mourning or any other acknowledgement. Present and future life is all I am interested in. And my only interest in modern Armenia and the modern Armenians is what they accomplish with their independence.
I more or less have the same thoughts about the Ukrainians, Croats, Serbs, Jews, American Indians, Chinese, Cambodians, Greeks, Russians, Japanese, whatever. All of them have suffered in mass murders, deprivations, injustices of one type or another. But life goes on, and that's all I'm here for.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Ara, you're disclaimer is disingenuous. Dean picked up much of your stuff direct from your own website, E Pluribus Unum...
Arnold, I was quoting Andrew Bostom writing in Front Page magazine. Sheesh.
As for me, I've heard enough first-hand accounts to make up my own mind, thanks. I don't need to debate this with you as I personally don't care what you do or don't believe.
I don't believe anything at all, Ara. But now that I know about the 27 Turkish diplomats murdered by Armenian terrorists, I will have something to talk about that is more meaningful to most Americans these days than tales of woe from the 89-year-old stuff about the Armenian massacres in eastern Turkey, the next time this Armenia vs Turkey topic comes up.
Let's just say that I get bored looking at old propaganda photos.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Arnold,
Did I ever tell you about the time I was a suspect in the murder of the Turkish military attache in Ottawa, circa August 1982?
Ask me sometime.
No Ara, you never told me about being a suspect in the murder of the Turkish military attach in Ottawa, circa August 1982.
Maybe because the information sources of the Turkish government itself shows that the attacks by the Armenian terrorist organization ASALA (Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia) attacked Turkish officians in Ottawa on 8 Apr 1982 and on 12 Mar 1985. (Not "circa August 1982").
In the 1982 attack, the Turkish commercial attache was shot, wounded and left paralyzed by the attack. The five Canadian Armenian ASALA members arrested were Nicholas Moumdjian, Haroutium Kevork, Haig Balian, Haig Harkhanian, and Melkon Karakhanian.
In the 1985 attack, Turkish embassy Pinterton security guard was shot and killed by three Canadian Armenians (two Syrian born, one Lebanese born), who then took 12 people hostage -- including women and children -- after failing to kill the Turkish ambassador, who escaped by leaping from a second-story window, breaking his right arm, right leg, and pelvis. The killers, affiliated with what they called the "Armenian Revolutionary Army" of the JCAG, were Kevork Marachelian, Ohannes Noubarian, and Rafi Panos Titizian.
Of all these Armenian names described above, none of them are "Rubyan". So Ara, how do you claim involvement in these sad, pitiful, incidents of terrorist murder and attempted murder, and why do you choose to tell me and the rest of the world about them now, some 20 years later? I can't believe that you consider the murder of any country's overseas representative as some sort of brave act.
Nor can I believe you are tainted by some form of self-hatred over your Armenian familial connections, and you want to show these people in their most unflattering light. Having lived in Israel for almost a couple of years, I learned a lot about Jewish self-hatred. But the Armenian variant of self-hatred, if there is such a thing, is news to me.
So, guy, your serve.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
First of all the guy's name was Atila Altikat, and he was the Turkish Military Attache to Ottowa. He was killed on Aug. 27, 1982. I was there and I saw his body. Talk about "wrong guy at the wrong place at the wrong time." That would be me (for a couple of hours anyway) AND Altikat. Heh.
Also, cool your jets -- I didn't say I killed him, nor did I "claim involvement," nor did I say I was "tainted by some form of self-hatred."
Geez. Do you actually read what I'm writing?
Okay, Ara, you win. A second Turkish website I went into confirmed that Armenian terrorists did murder Atila Altikat, the Turkish military attache in Ottawa, Canada on 27 Aug 1982. And you have confirmed that you were there. But that you did not kill him.
So what were you, presumably an American of Armenian ancestry doing at the Turkish embassy in Canada on the day that one or more Armenian terrorists murdered an innocent diplomat? Getting a visa to visit Turkey? Or if you were not part of the gang that did the killing, just why were you on the scene when the murder was committed?
Without knowing any more than about you than what you have written for Dean's World for the past 18 months or so, and past hints about your Armenian connections, and from these most unusual comments you have made about this Ottawa political murder, I have to assume that you are at least in sympathy with the murderers.
If the Canadian authorities investigated you and released you, then they would have assumed you played no active role in the assassination.
But you've given me reason to believe that there is something wrong about you, Ara. Otherwise, you would not have been part of an Armenian group that was present at a Turkish embassy when one or more Armenians murdered a member of the embassy staff. Presumably just to prove that Armenian culture and history is more significant than Turkish culture and history.
Maybe you are indignant that I feel that way about you. But how else do you seriously expect someone like me to respond to what I hope is just your latest online practical joke, or some other line of shit?
I said this a week ago to David Mercer, who has never had any involvement in anything as serious as you have hinted at here, and I will say it again to you.
Go get yourself some sort of normal life Ara, and stick with it. Because the small picture you have illustrated with your words, at least in this exchange of comments on Dean's World, make you seem vaguely less than wholesome. Or maybe you just misjudged me and whatever you imagine I stand for. Because I sure don't find anything funny about terrorism.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Heeheeheeheehaahahahahaha! I love you Arnold.
But you really jump to conclusions entirely too much.
First off, you're assuming that Atila Altikat was killed in the Turkish Embassy; he was not. He was gunned down in his car while it was stopped at a traffic light.
I happened upon the scene entirely by chance, moments after it happened, hand to God. It was like a Hitchcock movie, "North by Northwest," I believe.
Skeptical? Too bad, cause that's exactly what happened. I have 3 witnesses.
There's more...
I was driving a late model Toyota; initial radio bulletins had the perp leaving the scene in (you guessed it) a late model Toyota.
You know my name; so you know that when I passed through several RCMP road blocks I sweatin the oldies, to coin a phrase. Inexplicably, they waved me on after examining my credentials. Go figure.
That's it; I have (of course) embellished the story somewhat down through the decades, adding the bit about "being a suspect." Although I will say this: I have NEVER EVER felt that surge of electricity again like I did that morning when I realized that I was (possibly) about to get fucked over by circumstantial evidence to the nth degree.
So next time someone gives you a few details, don't be so eager to fill in the blanks.
P.S. I hate terrorists too; and I've given a lot of thought to your comments about Armenian terrorists.
More on this another time.
Go get yourself some sort of normal life Ara...you seem vaguely less than wholesome.
There is nothing vague about it, Arnold.
Bwahahahahahaaa!