The Denial Of Slaughter: The Armenian Genocide

Armenia, located in the South Caucasus region, is a landlocked country with a rich history dating back to ancient times. The country boasts a distinctive cultural heritage, Armenian history spans thousands of years, marked by a unique cultural and historical trajectory. One of the world's oldest civilizations, Armenians have faced various empires, invasions, and periods of independence. Notably, they adopted Christianity as a state religion in 301 ce, making Armenia the first nation to do so.

    Throughout history, Armenians have endured foreign rule, including the Persian, Byzantine, and Ottoman Empires.

                 The Republic of Armenia emerged in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union, bringing a new chapter to Armenian history. The ongoing Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and geopolitical dynamics continue to shape the nation's contemporary narrative. Despite historical challenges, Armenia has a resilient spirit and is known for its monasteries, stunning landscapes, and contributions to world literature and art. Through out the highs and lows of Armenian history one event has inflicted a nasty wound that has festered for almost a century and that its the Armenian genocide. 

Hi everyone and welcome back to the dark history podcast where we explore the darkest parts of human history. hope everyone is well I’m Rob your host as always. Welcome to the new episode, The Denial Of Slaughter: The Armenian Genocide. The Armenian Genocide refers to the systematic extermination of the Armenian population by the Ottoman Empire during World War I, it started in 1915 and was around until 1923. The Ottoman government, under the rule of the Young Turks subjected Armenians to mass killings, forced labor, and deprivation. The term “genocide” was later coined to describe these acts, as it involved the intentional destruction of a specific ethnic group.

While recognized as genocide by many countries and scholars, Turkey disputes this label, acknowledging the deaths but attributing them to wartime conditions and denying a systematic intent to eliminate the Armenian population. The recognition of the Armenian Genocide remains a contentious and sensitive international issue.

            So without further ado please turn off those lights sit back and relax next to the fire for more dark history. 

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The Denial Of Slaughter: The Armenian Genocide

Armenia, located in the South Caucasus region, is a landlocked country with a rich history dating back to ancient times. The country boasts a distinctive cultural heritage, Armenian history spans thousands of years, marked by a unique cultural and historical trajectory. One of the world's oldest civilizations, Armenians have faced various empires, invasions, and periods of independence. Notably, they adopted Christianity as a state religion in 301 ce, making Armenia the first nation to do so.

    Throughout history, Armenians have endured foreign rule, including the Persian, Byzantine, and Ottoman Empires.

                 The Republic of Armenia emerged in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union, bringing a new chapter to Armenian history. The ongoing Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and geopolitical dynamics continue to shape the nation's contemporary narrative. Despite historical challenges, Armenia has a resilient spirit and is known for its monasteries, stunning landscapes, and contributions to world literature and art. Through out the highs and lows of Armenian history one event has inflicted a nasty wound that has festaed for almost a centry and that its the Armenian genocide. 

Hi everyone and welcome back to the dark history podcast where we explore the darkest parts of human history. hope everyone is well I’m Rob your host as always. Welcome to the new episode, The Denial Of Slaughter: The Armenian Genocide. The Armenian Genocide refers to the systematic extermination of the Armenian population by the Ottoman Empire during World War I, it started in 1915 and was around until 1923. The Ottoman government, under the rule of the Young Turks subjected Armenians to mass killings, forced labor, and deprivation. The term “genocide” was later coined to describe these acts, as it involved the intentional destruction of a specific ethnic group.

While recognized as genocide by many countries and scholars, Turkey disputes this label, acknowledging the deaths but attributing them to wartime conditions and denying a systematic intent to eliminate the Armenian population. The recognition of the Armenian Genocide remains a contentious and sensitive international issue.

            So without further ado please turn off those lights sit back and relax next to the fire for more dark history.

The world between 1915 and 1923 was carnage to say the least and its between those years that this repugnant yet complex even occurred, so before we start I think it's important to understand what was actually going on in the world at the time.

              The war years saw a global conflict involved major powers, reshaping political landscapes and causing widespread devastation. Trench warfare, technological advancements, and significant loss of life characterized the war.

     The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, in 1917, led to the establishment of the Soviet Union, altering the geopolitical balance and inspiring other revolutionary movements worldwide.

      To compound the craziness of the decade a pandemic gripped the world. The Spanish flu hit in 1918 lasting until 1919. The influenza pandemic caused a global health crisis, infecting a significant portion of the world’s population and resulting in millions of deaths.

        With in that pandemic the treaty of Versailles was signed. The peace treaty that officially ended World War I, imposing heavy penalties on Germany and establishing the League of Nations in an attempt to prevent future conflicts, of course we all know what happened 20 years later. 

The aftermath of World War I saw efforts to rebuild and redefine nations. New political boundaries emerged, empires crumbled. One empire to crumble was the Ottoman empire, who during the war had been dubbed the sick man of Europe. Turkey underwent a struggle for independence led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, resulting in the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923.

       This period in time was characterized by a complex interplay of geopolitical shifts, societal transformations, and the aftermath of a devastating global conflict, setting the stage for the 20th century.

 The Armenians were a primarily Christian ethnic group who had lived in Eastern Anatolia for centuries. At the turn of the twentieth century, approximately two million Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire, primarily in rural areas although there were also small communities in large urban areas such as Constantinople.

             The Armenians of the Ottoman Empire faced many obstacles. As a Christian minority in a Muslim-majority Empire, they were subject to legal discrimination, higher taxes and unpunished crimes against them including robberies, murders, and sexual assaults. Over time, racial ideologies that privileged ethnic Turks opened new opportunities for anti-Armenian discrimination.

Another significant obstacle was their role as a middleman minority. In a nutshell A De middleman minority is an ethnic group that is overrepresented in occupations like bankers or merchants relative to their small overall population. The most famous middleman minorities are the Jews in Europe and the United States.

Although only a small percentage of Armenians worked in these lucrative jobs, all Armenians were subject to discrimination that described them as parasites, thieves, and leeches who were stealing

     This caused outbreaks of violence and persecution throughout the late 19th century. The Ottoman government regularly seized Armenian land to redistribute to Muslim and Kurdish settlers and the Kurdish Hamidian regiments were given free reign to raid Armenian villages as part of their resettlement. Despite attempts to muster international support, the Armenians were left to defend themselves and formed a number of impromptu militia groups to defend their towns, but the Ottoman authorities interpreted this as a sign of rebellion and cracked down hard in the 1890s.

         In 1894 in the town of Sasun, thousands of Armenians were slaughtered. These actions were widely condemned by the world but the demnation didn't deter the Ottomans it made them more angry. In 1895 Massacres of Armenians broke out in Constantinople and then engulfed the rest of the Armenian-populated regions stories of Armenian women and children being assaulted and killed were wide spread. One of the worst atrocity took place in Urfa, where Ottoman troops burned the Armenian cathedral, in which 3,000 Armenians had taken refuge, and shot at anyone who tried to escape. Known as the hamidian massacres 300,000 were killed at the hands of their Muslim neighbours and government soldiers. Many Armenian villages were forcibly converted to Islam. The Ottoman state bore ultimate responsibility for the killings, whose purpose was violently restoring the previous social order in which Christians would unquestioningly accept Muslim supremacy, and forcing Armenians to emigrate, thereby decreasing their numbers.

Violence would continue right up to the 1900’s. In early 1909 the worst of these massacres happens.  in Adana armed Muslims attacked the Armenian quarter and Armenians returned fire. Ottoman soldiers did not protect Armenians and instead armed the rioters. Between 20,000 and 25,000 people, mostly Armenians, were killed in Adana and nearby towns. Non of these massacres are considered part of the main genocide but they show that the genocide as a whole was not an  isolated incident. The Armenians were being slaughtered long before the actual genocide began, the genocide was an envolution of what was already occurring at the time.

Two changes and events exacerbated the situation and turned it from massacre occurring in pockets around the country to a full-blown extermination.

        The first was the rise of the CUP or the committee of the union and progress. The CUP or young Turks were radicals who wanted to bring about the end of the absolute monarchy in the empire and had a strong ethno-nationalist agenda calling for the Turkification of the empire. In 1913 they managed to take power under the leadership of Mehmed talat or talat pascha who effectively became a dictator. Talat Pascha along with the Sultan began to steer the empire to be more pro Muslim, turning a blind eye to the brutalisation of Christians including the Armenians, Greeks and Assyrian minorities in the country.

 Secondly During the First World War, the Ottoman Empire joined forces with Germany and Austria-Hungary against the British French and Russians. Russias border with the Ottoman empire would be very problematic, add to the fact the the Orthodox Russians had a strong kinship with the Armenians. The Ottoman leaders openly blamed their defeats on Armenians in the region and stated that they had betrayed their empire by fighting for and helping the enemy forces. Losses amplified the nationalist desire of the Ottoman leaders to create an ethnically homogenous community. It was hoped that this community would then strengthen the empire through shared beliefs and, as a result, ensure its survival. As the majority of the inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire were Muslim, the Christian Armenians were increasingly seen as outsiders and a threat to the harmony of the empire.

                          Indeed, as the war intensified, Armenians saw the Russian army as liberators and welcomed them as they poured into Turkish Armenia.  The notion that Armenians where fighting against the Turks was a deliberate falsehood but these governmental lies acted as a catalyst and justification for the genocide of the Armenian people and the CUP government could  used the emergency wartime conditions to create a more ethnically homogenous country.

      In January 1915 Enver Paşa attempted to push back the Russians at the battle of Sarıkamış, only to suffer the worst Ottoman defeat of the war. Although poor generalship and harsh conditions were the main reasons for the loss, the Young Turk government sought to shift the blame to Armenian treachery. Armenian soldiers and other non-Muslims in the army were demobilized and transferred into labour battalions. The disarmed Armenian soldiers were then systematically murdered by Ottoman troops, the first victims of what would become genocide. About the same time, irregular forces began to carry out mass killings in Armenian villages near the Russian border.

        Armenian resistance, when it occurred, provided the authorities with a pretext for employing harsher measures. In April 1915 Armenians in Van barricaded themselves in the city’s Armenian neighborhood and fought back against Ottoman troops as many as 55,000 people were killed. The leader of the province drew up plans to exterminate every single fighting age Armenian male in Van. The Armenians in Van held the Ottoman Army off until the a Russian army forced the Ottomans into retreat. As the Turks retreated they attacked Armenian and Assyrian/Syriac villages; the men were killed immediately, many women and children were kidnapped by local Kurds, and others marched away to be killed later. The events at Van would terrify Talat Pascha who was convinced an Armenian uprising was immanent.

                On April 24, 1915, citing Van and several other episodes of Armenian resistance, Talat Paşaordered the arrest of approximately 250 Armenian intellectuals and politicians in Istanbul, including several deputies to the Ottoman Parliament. Most of the men who were arrested were killed in the months that followed. Orders were sent out over all the country to do the very same this was in hope to decapitate the leadership for any Armenian uprising. The 24th of April 1915 is the date widely regarded to be the start of the Armenian genocide.

In May 1915, the deportation of the Armenians from the Empire’s eastern provinces began. A series of consecutive laws passed by the Turkish government gave it the right to confiscate or otherwise impound Armenian properties and businesses left behind by the departing deportees as a wartime necessity. Other restrictions of similar or harsher nature soon followed, leaving the Armenian population defenseless, property-less, and generally destitute. Forced marches, massacres became more commonplace and widespread, especially on deportation routes. The Turkish military instituted a number of gruesome methods to exterminate the Armenian population, some of which would be adopted and refined by the Nazis a mere 25 years later. Those who were not killed outright by the military often faced starvation along the way. Rapes of women and girls were also commonplace.

   At least 150,000 Armenians passed through Erzindjan from June 1915, where a series of transit camps were set up to control the flow of victims to the killing site at the nearby Kemah gorge. Thousands of Armenians were killed near Lake Hazar, pushed by paramilitaries off the cliffs. More than 500,000 Armenians passed through the plain south of Malatya, one of the deadliest areas during the genocide. Arriving convoys, having passed through the plain to approach the Kahta highlands, would have found gorges already filled with corpses from previous convoys. Many others were held in tributary valleys of the Tigris, Euphrates, or Murat and systematically executed by the Special Organization. Armenian men were often drowned by being tied together back-to-back before being thrown in the water, a method that was not used on women. Authorities viewed disposal of bodies through rivers as a cheap and efficient method, but it caused widespread pollution downstream. So many bodies floated down the Tigris and Euphrates that they sometimes blocked the rivers and needed to be cleared with explosives. Tens of thousands of Armenians died along the roads and their bodies were buried hastily or, more often, simply left beside the roads. The Ottoman government ordered the corpses to be cleared as soon as possible to prevent both photographic documentation and disease epidemics, but these orders were not uniformly followed.

                            The Armenians who managed to survive the marches were sent on foot to concentration camps created by the Ottoman military. These camps were located near modern Turkey’s southern border, in the Syrian desert of Deir ez-Zor. The Turkish government routinely withheld food and water from the Armenians in the camp. The lack of nourishment, coupled with unsanitary conditions and widespread disease, meant life expectancy at the camps was extraordinarily short. Armenian women and girls were often sold while in the camps by Turkish gendarmes to local Arab bedouins and chieftains. Many of the Armenian women were also routinely abducted and taken as forced brides by Turkish and Kurdish militiamen.

Intentional, state-sponsored killing of Armenians mostly ceased by the end of January 1917, although sporadic massacres and starvation continued. Both contemporaries and later historians have estimated that around 1 million Armenians died during the genocide, with figures ranging from 600,000 to 1.5 million deaths. Between 800,000 and 1.2 million Armenians were deported, and contemporaries estimated that by late 1916 only 200,000 were still alive. Massacres would flair up again during the Turkish war of independence seeing Nearly 100,000 Armenians massacred in Transcaucasia by the Turkish army and another 100,000 fled from Cilicia during the French withdrawal. Armenian survivors were left mainly in three locations. About 295,000 Armenians had fled to Russian-controlled territory during the genocide and ended up mostly in Soviet Armenia. An estimated 200,000 Armenian refugees settled in the Middle East and In the Republic of Turkey, about 100,000 Armenians lived in Constantinople and another 200,000 lived in the provinces, largely women and children who had been forcibly converted. Though Armenians in Constantinople faced discrimination, they were allowed to maintain their cultural identity, unlike those elsewhere in Turkey who continued to face forced Islamization and kidnapping of girls after 1923.

     To this day the Turkish government denies the Armenian genocide. The Turkish government maintains that the mass deportation of Armenians was a legitimate action to combat an existential threat to the empire, but that there was no intention to exterminate the Armenian people. The government's position is supported by the majority of Turkish citizens. Many Kurds, who themselves have suffered political repression in Turkey, have recognized and condemned the genocide. The Turkish state perceives open discussion of the genocide as a threat to national security because of its connection with the foundation of the republic, and for decades strictly censored it.

Thank you for taking the time out of your day and listening to this dark episode, I wrote and then rewrote this script as its incredibly difficult not to get bogged down in the intricacies of the story. Believe me this episode could easily been an hour or two hours long. I implore you to do your own research on this topic because it is mind bending, you have the whole struggles of the Armenians during the Ottoman empire when it was in its hay day, the ultimate death of the empire and how all the moving parts of it political fall out were blamed on the minorities. 

       Today the world almost feels like its on a knife edge and when you look at the world during the early decades of the 20th century you can draw similarities. We've had a pandemic just like they did back then, the geopolitical landscape is shifting just like back then, wars are beginning to break out all over the world just like then.  At the risk of putting my tinfoil hat on, the media pushes your views on wars, as Ukraine was invaded by Russia we hear a lot about the plight of the Ukrainian people. Now we have the Israel and Palestine conflict that has become an incendiary topic across the globe with the media pushing the Israeli narrative and others pushing the free Palestine narrative, but behind all of this media coverage of these wars another war is and has taken place and that is between Azerbaijan and you've guessed it Armenia over the disbuted terrorty of nergono kharabak. The majority in this region are ethnic Armenians but as of the 19th September 2023 they have all been forced out and tensions between the two countries are high. With a hatred that runs quite deep could we again see massacres and forced displacement of Armenians if this conflict escalates. 

     before I go onto the comment shpeal I wanted to thank everyone who has listen, commented and rates the show over the last 18 months because as of last episode we hit a 100k downloads. I know there are people out there who are at millions and tens of millions but I've taken this as quite an achievement for a show that is literally just me so I really want to that j each and every one of you for making this happen. Thank you.  Anyway if you could please drop a review on the show it really dose help the podcast out the more reviews the more the algarithm pushes the show out there. I want to thank everyone who has reviewed the show also. If you think friends and family may be interested in the podcast then share it with them. Links to all socials are below. the link to the show's patron is below. this is for people who want to support the channel but you don't have to. As always If you’ve been listening for a while and not subscribed please do it that way you never miss an episode. So with all that out the way Thank you again for listening. Join us next time, for our next episode, as we delve into another event  and more dark history

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