Article: reasons behind Armenian Genocide surreal mix of jealousy

PanARMENIAN.Net - In the ensuing decade, the entire Armenian Plateau and the rest of the Ottoman Empire was ethnically cleansed of 1.5 million Armenians as well as 1.5 million Assyrian and Pontic Greeks -- nearly the entire empire's Christian population. Christians were rounded up and locked inside churches that were set on fire and burned alive or thrown into caves with sulfur thrown on top of them and cremated in primitive gas chambers, The Huffington Post says.

The Turks, aided and abetted by their ally the German Kaiser seized Christian properties and bank accounts, raped and enslaved women and children and forced thousands to convert to Islam under pain of death. The vast majority of the Armenian population was deported to concentration camps in Syria -- a thousand-mile trek through the desert that few survived. Those that did often ended up dying of disease and malnutrition. The local Arab population recalls seeing the Armenian survivors straggle in emaciated and famished like wild animals, emerging from the desert sands like some frightening army of living dead. Many fell to their knees and broke down, invoking the name of all-powerful Allah to ask what could possibly have befallen these poor refugees, the article says.

It notes that the hundred years of official Turkish state denial have left Armenians alone and bitter, but all over the world, this Christian people known as the "Jews of the Caucasus" have rebuilt communities and prospered as they have in Soviet and now independent Armenia.

“The reasons behind the Armenian Genocide include a surreal mix of ethnic and financial jealousy -- the Armenian Amira class for example ran everything from the state mint to the bread factories and most of the empire's industry, while the Greeks and Levantines were the most successful diplomats and merchants as well,” the publication emphasizes.

Taking advantage of Christian missionary zeal in the Empire, Armenians were also its most educated element. The Turks, who had lost the entire Western part of their empire during the Serbian and Greek Wars of Independence reacted to the cloak of opportunity presented by WWI when the West had other concerns, to launch a veritable full-scale jihad against the infidel dhimmi or non-Muslim minorities, the article says.

A century later we know that unfortunately genocide is not a Turkish specialty, though they carried theirs out with a sometime grotesque zeal, releasing prisoners and the insane from jails so that the Armenians and other Christians would be massacred with particular viciousness. The Holocaust of the Jews in World War Two, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Bosnian cleansing by Serbs only twenty five years ago and most recently the Rwandan Genocide when brother tribes of Hutu set upon their Tutsi brothers, hacking people to death by the thousands with primitive machetes, lead us to the unfortunate conclusion that the genocidal instinct is deeply ingrained in human DNA, the publication concludes.