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There
was indeed a genocide of the Armenian people. As Sam Weems explains, from his "Armenia: Secrets of a
'Christian' Terrorist State"; using the history of Richard
Hovannissian as a basis: The real Armenian genocide was caused by the
Armenian peoples' "own dictator leaders."
Is this a fair assessment? Consider: The
Armenian Republic was established in 1918, and there were problems of
tremendous magnitude. Instead of attending to the much needed task of nation
building and care of the many who who were suffering beyond belief, the
fanatical leaders pursued their own direction of greed, immediately and
opportunistically seeking others' lands. They attacked Georgia. They attacked
Azerbaijan. They provoked Turkey and prepared for an attack (as Armenia's
first prime minister, Hovhannes Katchaznoni outlined in his 1923 manifesto), at a time when
warring should have been the last thing on their minds. Whatever resources
that were to go to the people, the corrupt leaders evidently did what they
could to line their own pockets. These are the factors that directly
contributed to Hovannisian's conclusion: "In
1919, for each 1000 persons in Armenia there were 8.7 births and 204.2 deaths,
a net loss of 195.5. It was verily a land of death."
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From Chapter Five (with material immediately preceding to be found here), Armenians Seek Free Handouts From the
Christian World; the book referred to is Richard G.
Hovannisian's The Republic of Armenia, Volume I, University of California.
The first winter was especially hard. The Armenian
people suffered greatly. Hovannissian notes: "The chaotic situation in Armenia was
intensified by the presence of approximately 500,000 refugees."(P126) This number is
confirmed by reports of American and British officials as well as by relief workers.
Hovannissian continues: "These figures do not
include the additional thousands who had found temporary sanctuary in Zangezura and
Karabagh, Georgia, the North Caucasus and the steppe lands of Russia.”(P127) In
addition, this number did not include the many thousands of Armenian refugees in the Arab
world.
Again, the Armenian numbers do not add up. If 1
million Armenians were removed from the Ottoman combat zones -- if 500,000 went to
Armenia, if there were additional many thousands of Armenian refugees in other places, if
thousands of Armenian women were taken into Muslim households — just how can Armenians
claim genocide of 1.5 million of their people? Based on Armenian history Professor Richard
G. Hovannissian’s numbers, the alleged 1.5 million Armenian genocide just could not have
happened.
The actual facts do prove the Armenian people
suffered unimaginable horror; thanks to the selfish decisions made by their leaders in
starting: a civil war in the Ottoman Empire; an attempt to start a civil war in Georgia;
and an attempt to begin a civil war in Azerbaijan.
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This was the true genocide of the Armenian people, that
caused by their own dictator leaders.
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Hovannissian reports the terror experienced by the
Armenian people:
The winter of 1918-19 was one of the longest
and most severe in the annals of Erevan. The homeless masses, lacking food,
clothing, and medicine, passed hellish months in blizzard conditions. The starving
people sometimes demonstrated or rioted for food, but these sporadic outbursts were
to no avail. The state granaries were empty. Allied officials who came to Erevan
brought hope that before too long provisions would begin to arrive from abroad.
Until that time the nation must persevere. But soon even this hope faded. An
American eyewitness, overwhelmed by the misery, wrote: ‘A terrible population.
Unspeakably filthy and tatterdemalion throngs; shelterless, death-stricken throngs
milling from place to place; children crying aloud; women sobbing in broken
inarticulate lamentation; men utterly hopeless and reduced to staggering weakness,
heedless of the tears rolling down their dirt-streaked faces. As a picture of the
Armenians most in evidence in Armenia I can think of nothing better than this,
unless I turn to other kinds of mobs: Large numbers here and there, wide-eyed, eager
hands outstretched in wolfish supplication; teeth bared in a ghastly grin that had
long since ceased to be a smile — an emaciated, skin-stretched grin, fixed and
uncontrollable.
The pitiful multitude lay in the snow, in
partially destrayed buildings, on doorsteps of churches, eventually too weak to
protest or even to beg any longer They lived in the land of stalking death; waiting
with sunken face and swollen belly for the touch of that angel. And death came,
delivering from anguish thousands upon thousands of refugees and native inhabitants
alike.
Many who withstood the exposure and famine
succumbed to the ravaging diseases that infested the derelict masses. Typhus was the
major killer striking in every district and at every age group, taking its largest
toll among the children. The phenomenon of death came to be both expected and
accepted. The insensible bodies were gathered from the streets by the hundreds each
week and covered in mass graves, often without mourner or final rites... that year
in the capital alone some 19,000 people contracted the disease and nearly 10,000
died from the three-headed monster-exposure, famine, pestilence. (P127-128)
This was the true genocide of the Armenian
people, that caused by their own dictator leaders. It was the self-appointed
Armenian leaders who began the rebellion from within the Ottoman Empire that led to
these terrible and horrible conditions.
"The burden of several hundred thousand
unsheltered and unemployed refugees was enough in itself to cause an economic
maelstrom. Even during normal times the land under the actual jurisdiction of the
Armenian government could not have supported so needy a population. The fertile soil
of the Araxes valley and the once-cultivated fields of Turkish Armenia now under
Muslim domination."(P 130)
Hovannissian would have the world believe the
Muslims took this land away from the Armenians causing them to starve. The Muslim
Turks had acquired these lands more than five hundred years before the Armenians
attempted a rebellion. The Armenian Christians had lived in peace with their Muslim
neighbors during this entire period of time. Now, a few Armenian warlords led a
revolt in an attempt to overthrow the Ottoman government. The bottom line is these
Armenian warlords failed and their people paid a terrible price, as did the Turks.
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| 8.7
births and 204.2 deaths, a net
loss of 195.5 |
Hovannissian published the following figures to show
the terrible plight of Armenians: "In 1919, for each 1000 persons in Armenia there
were 8.7 births and 204.2 deaths, a net loss of 195.5. It was verily a land of
death."(P133) The Turks experienced an equally terrible time but Professor
Hovannissian does not mention those losses at all. Rather, he uses the Christian Bible
word "verily" (translated by Christians to mean "truly") to deceive
Christians. This is yet another example of Hovannissian attempting to use Christian
"code" words to gain support in the Christian world for the Armenian cause even
if he only tells half the story as he does in this example. If he were a fair historian,
he would have given the birth and death ratio for Muslims, as well as for his
"Christian" Armenians. After all, Muslims are human beings also. Grieving for
Christian suffering and ignoring Muslim suffering is not the Christian thing to do.
The new Armenia, which was established out of Russia,
was based on a farm economy. There was very little industry of any kind. There was a wine
works and home manufacture of furniture, textiles, implements, and handicrafts and that
was all.
The drastic decrease in agricultural production,
beginning during the war years, contributed heavily to the Armenian tragedy. A poor
harvest in 1914 was followed by the conscription of farmhands by the thousands, the
revolutionary upheavals and civil strife throughout the Russian empire, the Turkish
invasion of Transcaucasia, and the influx of nearly a half million refugees created a
situation that insured the Armenian failure to establish a nation.
The question Hovannissian does not ask is what would
have happened to the Armenian people had their leaders not attempted a rebellion behind
the Ottoman battle lines, thus causing young farmers to be drafted into Armenian military?
There were other problems as well: "A soaring inflation resulted from these heavy
losses. The assorted paper specie became nearly worthless as the price of food and
essential items doubled and multiplied time and time again. Shrewd Armenian manipulators
and speculators hoarded the remaining meager stocks, relinquishing small amounts of food
to desperate people who paid with their last possessions and deeds of title. The
government was faced with a catastrophe that it had not created but for which it was held
accountable. It had little means to cope with problems, as neither legislation nor decree
could deliver the starving masses."(Pl 33)
This is yet another example of a half-truth. The
"paper specie" became nearly worthless: The Armenian government printed their
paper money (specie) even though they had no gold, silver; nor anything else to guarantee
their paper money was good. Is it any wonder; therefore, that it was worthless?
History has shown that when any government prints too
much money with nothing to guarantee it, inflation is certain to follow, just as it did in
Armenia. This is why "the price of food and essential items doubled and multiplied
time and time again." This is another example of how Armenia’s, self-appointed
dictator leaders failed their own people. Pipe dreams of establishing a "greater
Armenia" at the expense of neighbors’ lives, lands, and resources, and with little
more than lip service paid by the Christian world, duped by Armenian lies and
misrepresentations, were bound to backfire and come back to haunt the back-stabbers.
The Armenian leaders knew "shrewd manipulators
and speculators hoarded the remaining meager stocks, relinquishing small amounts of food
to desperate people, who paid with their last possessions and deeds of title." Why
didn’t the Armenian government treat this activity as a crime? Why didn’t they arrest
the individuals who did such terrible things to their own people? This was a small
country. It could not have been a secret who these individuals were. Were Armenian
government officials a part of such profit-making operations?
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Professor Richard Hovannisian arranged for
genocide-friendly Amb. John Evans
to speak at UCLA in early 2005.
Evans later had to explain his
genocide opinion, and that of the
status of Karabakh.
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Hovannissian states: "The government was
faced with a catastrophe that it had not created but for which it was held
accountable." This is hogwash! Clearly the Armenian dictator leaders had
started the revolution that failed that led to the terrible conditions of their
people. They printed money that was worthless and knew that when they printed it.
This government looked the other way and allowed hoarding and profiteering. This
so-called Armenia would have folded had it not been for one thing — the people of
America came to their rescue. Hovannissian expressed it this way: "At that
critical moment in the history of the Armenian people, the United States of America
came to the rescue, giving life, awakening fresh hopes, and opening new
horizons." (P133)
Americans came to rescue Armenia because
Armenian-paid agents went to the United States, played the Christian versus Muslim
race-ethnic card, and told stories about an imagined massacre to gain sympathy.
Their scheme worked because these stories were not challenged by Muslims. There were
no debating mechanism in place for Muslims to refute Armenian allegations. After
all, Christian Armenians could not have lied, could they? The Armenian tall tales
were bought by the Christian world hook, line, and sinker. Christian good will and
good intentions were misused and abused by the Armenian paid agents.
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Note how Prof. Hovannisian observes the rule of
"exclusive victimhood" to a tee, and focuses strictly on Armenian
suffering. While he does provide lip service to other deaths elsewhere in his book,
his statement of "verily a land of death" overwhelmingly applied to
the other peoples Armenia had ruled during 1918-1920. Check out these statistics from the pen of a
Soviet-Armenian historian.
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300,000
Ottoman-Armenians in Erivan;
some 150,000 already dead |
The following has been excerpted from Arnold Toynbee, The Western Question in Greece
and Turkey, 1922:
"There were also something like 300,000 Armenian refugees from
the same atrocities in the territory of the Erivan Republic, who had been living there for
five years in extreme destitution and with an appalling death-rate, but who were not
enabled to return to their homes in Ottoman territory, even after the formal conclusion of
peace between Angora and Erivan at the close of 1920."
That would make a total of some 450,000 Ottoman-Armenians who had hot-footed it away on
their own accord (i.e., not having been among the resettled), given Hovannisian's own
telling (Armenia On the Road to Independence, 1967) of some 150,000 having died of
starvation while accompanying the Russian retreats, in earlier years. As far as the
Armenians' not being "enabled" to return to their homes, perhaps the Armenians
felt they could not return, given the awful crimes the Armenians had committed in
Eastern Anatolia, as occupiers. (Or as Toynbee would later put it regarding
Ottoman-Christians who had sided with the invading Greeks, in the event of a loss and
after committing their own crimes, they would be "unwilling to risk another
settlement of accounts with [the Turks].")Armenians were certainly permitted to return in
provisions set by the Gumru and Lausanne Treaties.
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