Tall Armenian Tale

 

The Other Side of the Falsified Genocide

 

  Missionary Testimony in a Biased New York Times Article   
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The following is a typical story, circulated in prestigious newspapers such as The New York Times. No wonder Turks have a bad reputation to this day in the West... such incredible tales of horror no doubt have had a potent, cumulative effect. 

 
A TYPICAL NEWSPAPER ACCOUNT OF THE ARMENIAN “GENOCIDE”



From an Armenian web site; excerpts from perhaps the most reputable newspaper in the United States, The New York Times:

JUNE 7, 1919 (subtitled:) 70% OF ARMENIANS KILLED 


The Rev. Paul F. B. Chappell of Nashville, Tenn., told the correspondent of what he had seen in traveling from Port Said to Aleppo. 

"Poverty is most profound, although the prospects for the next harvest are good," he said. "Even at the present time the people fall dead in the streets from the effects of Turkish treatment. The Turks could not invade Syria as they invaded Armenia, but they were successful in preventing food from going to Syria. Starvation is wide-spread throughout the region

------------

A large number of photographs taken in Armenia, showing piles of skulls and skeletons and pictures of deformed children and tortured women were shown the correspondent by the Rev. Samuel T. Bartlett of Toronto, a member of the committee who penetrated into Eastern Turkey. 

"At Ourfa," Mr. Bartlett said, "I saw a deep well filled with skulls of dead Armenians. There must have been several thousand of them. At Malatee there is a pit containing thousands of skeletons. A little girl at Sivas told us the Turks had taken her father and other men, tied and tortured them and then killed them. 

"The Turks also took all the babies in the town and threw them into the river until it overflowed its banks. They let out the priests, put red-hot iron shoes on their feet, tied them to wagons and forced them to walk long distances. The finger and toe nails of the priests were pulled out, and the priests finally were compelled to say the rites over the dead, while the Turks looked on and laughed and mocked. At other places they pulled out the beards of the priest and tortured them until they fell dead from exhaustion. It was a tale of bloody butchery that we heard." 

Mr. Bartlett said that the committee traveled across Central Asia Minor from Aleppo to Samsun to Constantinople they were the guests of Rear Admiral Mark L. Bristol, the American commander in Turkish waters, on the Destroyer 149. 

Such lively imaginations must have come in handy for the priests of The Spanish Inquisition, to cook up their exquisite tortures 


Holdwater would like to make three comments.

1) Regarding Rev. Paul F. B. Chappell’s opinion (
"The Turks could not invade Syria as they invaded Armenia"): This account is from 1919, after Syria was no longer an Ottoman territory... under British rule, if I’m not mistaken. So, if he means the Turks were in no position to challenge the British by invading Syria, he would be correct... certainly, the Turks had other things on their minds, with Istanbul under Allied occupation, pulling the strings of the official Ottoman puppet government... while the Allies were conspiring to divvy up the devastated empire to leave only what would amount to an Indian reservation for the Turks. As Turkey demonstrated after Ataturk eventually kicked out all invading forces, the nation had no interest in territorial expansion. So this man of God is already demonstrating his bias.

As far as invading “Armenia,” if he’s referring to re-conquered Turkish lands where the Turks had been living for the last thousand years or so, he was entitled to his opinion.... but again shows his bias. If Turkey was the cruel and barbarous invading aggressor as he’s attempting to portray, no doubt what is now Armenia could have been conquered, as well. (When Armenia was briefly a nation, before hooking up with The Soviet Union... since the well-armed [by the Brits] Armenian soldiers were too cowardly to put up any fight, Turkey could have rolled over Armenia during this period, if she were truly expansion-oriented.)

Starvation was widespread everywhere. I don’t know what food he’s referring to that was prevented from going into Syria... is it food that was grown in Turkey that Turkey didn’t allow to be exported? Whatever little food existed was needed to feed the Turks themselves, in their desperate life and death struggle. Is it food that Christian charitable organizations brought in strictly to take care of the Armenians, with the Near East Relief Fund? So far, I’ve come across no report suggesting the Turks impeded in any way the efforts of these Christian charities. In fact, it's amazing the government allowed these charities to operate during wartime, when their participants were extremely unfriendly to the Turks.

2) Regarding the good Reverend Samuel T. Bartlett’s account... of course, Greeks, Armenians and others who have made Turk-hating a reason for their existence would jump up and down in ecstasy over such a description... coming from a “moral” man of God, who MUST have been telling the truth. However, if you are a reader whose mind has not been hopelessly poisoned with vicious anti-Turkish propaganda, think about the scene described.

The described scene is of such unimaginable, ghastly horror, it makes the Marquis de Sade come across like Joan of Arc.

The Turks also took all the babies in the town and threw them into the river until it overflowed its banks.” For the love of the Gods! How many babies would it take to overflow the banks of a river? Was this a town, or a small nation?

I’m now reminded of the story that was widely circulated in America, before the first Gulf War got underway. Iraqi soldiers went into a Kuwaiti hospital and threw babies away, after removing them from their incubators. After the war, the story was revealed to have been cooked up by Kuwaitis living in America. However, the story did its job... if we weren’t already justly convinced the Iraqis did a wrongful thing with their invasion, now we knew they were utter monsters, and it was our duty to give them their due. 

I wonder where the Turks got these convenient
red-hot iron shoes”? Here they were, going off to slaughter a town of innocent Armenians with their government-issued genocidal orders... I guess they just decided to have a little sadistic fun by ordering a few of these iron shoes from the iron shoemaker. (Of course, then they would need to take the trouble of building a fire in order to heat these iron shoes. I guess a lot of these stupid Turks’ hands got pretty burnt while slipping the red hot iron shoes onto the feet of the priests... who probably already died just from the shocking thought of what was to occur.)

As far as running into thousands of skeletons and skulls no matter which way they turned... well. Let’s concentrate on the thousands of skulls that were thrown into the well, That’s a lot of work. As if it wasn’t already a big enough job to murder thousands of people... why would these soldiers (I’d imagine this is what the reverend would prefer for us to believe) take the time to behead their thousands of victims, and throw the heads into the well? I’ve never beheaded anyone, mind you, but I’ve seen enough Mafia movies to know the amputation of bodily parts is time-consuming and pretty disgusting work. Maybe these soldiers took big heavy axes with them (along with the iron boots) to do the job as quickly as possible, but remember.... we’re talking thousands of beheadings. Even if the Turks had this psychotic blind hatred of Christians to add the final insult to the fatal injuries of their victims, I’d think the hatred would start cooling off after the twentieth or twenty-first beheading. 


C. F. Dixon-Johnson wasn’t kidding, when he reported in his 1916 book, “The Armenians”:

"All the stories of Turkish misdeeds have proved on investigation to be gross exaggerations beyond the belief of any thoughtful person."

(Mr. Dixon-Johnson illustrates his point with similar ridiculous stories reported in his nation's equally prestigious The London Times.)

It’s heartbreaking to have confirmed time and time again that the ones who spread these horrifically fabricated stories to Western minds were
men and women of religion. I’d prefer to believe people who devote themselves to religion are the last salvation of “goodness” when humanity goes bonkers. Alas, from the evil men who ordered the Crusades to the evil Taliban who particularly subjugated women... there is no historical shortage of extreme religiousness that has caused so much hatred and misery and destruction. 

3) Think about the effects of these reports, especially printed in such trustworthy and reputable newspapers as The New York Times. Multiply such stories many, many times over the years from newspapers, books, television, movies... where the Armenians, Greeks and other Turk-haters have had a total free reign over what was being said, entirely unopposed. (“Who wants to defend Turks?” — Pauline Kael, in her analysis of “Midnight Express”).

I recently visited the archives of an Internet forum where Turks confront Turk-haters ... I always lend an ear to the more civilized among the latter to see what kind of objective evidence they can offer to back up their charges. I ran into a message from one of them ... I think it was from a gentleman called “Mehik” (“I hate Turks so fucking much!!!! DEATH TO THE TURKISH PEOPLE!!! DEATH TO THE TURKISH RACE!”), who asked why it was that so many people dislike the Turks.... offering justification for his feelings, since his is the majority opinion. (Although, fortunately, not usually to the same level of intensity.) If you have ever wondered as well, now you know the answer: almost totally one-sided media manipulation that has lasted generations. This is why, when Westerners travel to Turkey, they are usually in disbelief when they discover the real identity of the Turks has no bearing with what they have been misled to believe. Such contact form the seeds of the rare "Pro-Turk" Westerner, assuming the minds of Westerners have not been poisoned beyond the point of return.


PLAGIARIZED LITERATURE TO HELP WITH CONCOCTION OF HORROR STORIES

"As to the story that Armenian women, who, rather than 'suffer dishonor at the hands of (their) Turkish persecutors,' threw themselves into an abyss until the ravine was filled with corpses, the American correspondent says that 'the horrible narrative is a reproduction, with additions and embellishments to suit the occasion, of an old tale in poetry by Mrs. Hemans years ago, under the title of 'The Suliote Mother'."

Well! Not the typical kind of "lemming"-like behavior when one thinks of Armeni-Lemmings, but fret not... the cliff note never happened. However, notice how similar in tone this story is, to the nonsense of the Times article above.

Prof. Turkkaya Ataov, in An Armenian Source (1895) reporting on the work of an American New York newspaper correspondent, who published in booklet form five letters he had written in and sent from Istanbul... entitled, "The Armenian Troubles and Where The Responsibility Lies." The Associated Press correspondent believed the exaggerated massacre reports during the time of "The Bloody Sultan," and particularly the Sassoon events of 1894, had been 'polluted with falsehood and exaggerations.' The newspaper man further reported  that the disturbances were ' brought about by the Armenian revolutionary committees'... and revealed that Armenian conspirators murdered the Rev. Edward Riggs and two other American missionaries and fastened the blame on the Turks. No doubt The New York Times among other Western publications must have eaten up this lie (only one of countless others accepted at face value), adding fuel to the fire of Western anti-Turkish prejudice.


 

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Examples of Biased New York Times Coverage from the Period 

 

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