Pasha at Galipoli
Mustafa Kemal Pasha (later Atatürk) looked toward the United States military and saw an Ottoman-like organization where promotion was based on competence not a ranked nobility. As had the U.S. Continental Congress, he chose to bring Turkey out from religious dominance in founding the modern Turkish Republic. What else had he seen?
When the Ottoman Empire was being pushed out of the Balkans, leading up to and including the wars of that name, captured Ottoman soldiers and occupied civilian counterparts met such horrific deaths and in such numbers as to warrant their consideration as victims of the first holocaust of the 20th century. Some officers of the Empire had to have known of those gruesome details, clearing their minds to that simplistic immediacy upon which revenge thrives.
The Bulgarian perpetrators of this holocaust were out-of-reach Christians; the Armenians were accessible. In one incident, thousands of captive Armenians burned to death, when their enclosure caught fire; as died years earlier captive, Balkan Muslim soldiers after being volleyed upon with artillery while in a barbed wire corral at Stara Zagora. Other parallels point toward a misguided revenge at the root of the 20th century’s second holocaust: that of Armenians. Even had the revenge fought its way back to and upon Bulgarians, it would have fallen mostly upon innocent Bulgarians; such is the nature of the beast, revenge.
Armenians (not civilians) in Ottoman Empire
There was another thread running through all of this: the dread of having territory overrun and then finding oneself turned upon by those prisoners and civilians who have a religious connection to the invaders. The corral at Stara Zagora had been filled with soldiers captured near the then recent Ottoman border. Had a military component to the slaughter of Balkan civilians been noticed, then the issue of how reliable Anatolian Armenians, as Christians, might have been if Russia invaded, would certainly have given the Young Turks pause.1
That a Roman Catholic priest might sin through pedophilia does not implicate other priests; nor did the intimidating use by a Bulgarian Orthodox priest of the one tool of terror which Christ had driven almost into oblivion: crucifixion. That use does however raise a possibility: priests who only imagine themselves to be Christians. Crosses were applied to some Muslim women, who had selectively survived their holocaust, as pressure towards conversion and into a “Christian” marriage. Did the Ottoman forces heading for Stara Zagora find witnesses with the courage to speak, realizing that revelation of the crucifixions would be inseparable from the revelation of their forced conversions toward marriage (hence toward rape), inseparable from death by a misguided sense of honor. 2
What had Atatürk seen or heard as he and his forces approached Stara Zagora? Perhaps he had rather seen through the farce that talked Christians and Muslims into being a curse each to the other, had seen this nothing set them one upon the other, and, by all of that, had recognized the danger of these militaries being (or imagining themselves) subservient to their particular religious views. In Turkey those would have been Islamic views; in the newly forming United States, Protestant Christian views. Might it not have been the blood of brutalized Muslims and Armenians, flowing before Atatürk, that congealed in the secularity of the modern, Turkish Republic.
Now consider the descendants of those Muslims and Armenians who were marked for death, as well as of those Bulgarians and Turks who sought out the mark and participated in the atrocities. In a Jeffersonian sense, any natural propensity in them towards victimizing others or being a victim would be shared by all of us; and, considering our diverse character, mild compared to those cultural forces which had a century ago thrust themselves catastrophically into the region’s psyche. Of course, it is important to be aware of such pressures, whether they would cast us as victim or as victimizer.
1 Yes, according to Wikipedia’s Ottoman Empire: First World War (1914–1918), against the wishes of Atatürk, the Empire entered the “not so great war” on the side against Russia and quickly found itself being invaded by the same with support from trans-border Armenians. Grasping the danger, they began deporting Anatolian Armenians from the war zone to a place of certainly Ottoman security; but instead, brutality and ill preparation combined to end many of those journeys in the Armenian Holocaust.
2 Same tale, but now are they even Muslims:
With the imposition of Sharia upon the Swat Valley (Pakistan), the parents of young girls were told that it was time for those girls to be married. Shortly parents, who had months ago sent a daughter off to school, would under this duress hold that same child down while an invading Taliban, a hero of the Jihad current to 2009, raped and indentured her with his marriage contract.
Ironically, there are available Taliban widows who, for the sake of “modesty,” are forced to stay at home and starve out of the land of usurped Qur’ans and into the arms of Muhammad ibn ‘Abdullāh who had often married such widows. A superstition, presuming to speak for Allah, alleges of those deaths: “Had they prayed harder their husbands would have survived!”
Related articles
- In Memory Of The Millions of Victims Of The Orthodox Christian Holocaust (vatopaidi.wordpress.com)
- Review of “Armenian Genocide FAQ” (lantonov.wordpress.com)
