The Young Turks Genocide

1710 Words4 Pages

Throughout the course of humanity's historical timeline, the notions of violence, social division, and hatred have been binding forces that relentlessly recur in nearly every human civilization that has graced the planet. Even the United States of America is plagued by a history of the chilling murders of the majority of North America’s indigenous populations on the grounds of festering greed and racist motives. This familiar occurence of mass fatality became prevalent in the Ottoman Empire near the time of World War I in the form of intense, widespread genocide, though the horrific events came and went with barely a whisper from the outside world. In this period, the Ottoman government, ruled by the Turks, conducted unspeakable crime and injustice …show more content…

They believed strongly in expanding the true Turkish and Muslim population into a unified, independent state. Therefore, the group refused to regard practically all of the previous Ottoman government’s policies, excluding their willful intent to keep following the policy permitting and ordering extreme violence against Armenians. After they overthrew the government, they segregated all Armenian men in the army, most of whom were fighting against Russia in wars, and disarmed them. They were transported to brutal labor battalions under harsh conditions where they died from the inhumane treatment or were killed outright, just because of their ethnicity. After the majority of the Armenian men were being killed, the remaining population mostly consisted of women, children, and the elderly. Since they intended to construct a pure Turkish state, those who were neither Turkish nor were willing to convert to Islam by marrying into a Muslim home or practicing Islam immediately could not be a part of the new state, and therefore were to be punished, relocated, or killed. They possessed a burning, relentless determination to create this Turkish state, resulting in the extermination of those would not confine to …show more content…

The ambition of the government was publicly known despite efforts to keep the deportations and executions as secret as possible, and it was to obliterate the Armenian population. The majority of the events took place in Turkey, and yet other powers in the nation did not prevent or try to save the people from ruthless slaughter. It is reasonable to say that 1915 was the most traumatic year of all the events leading up to and composing the genocide. During this year, the Armenians not only lost their lives- they lost what created and carried their cultural identities. Their homeland was converted into a forbidden, vacant graveyard as those who survived the brutality fled. The places the Armenians were removed from were later used by the government to construct the modern state of Turkey, speaking volumes to why the triumvirate wanted them to die. The intentional mass murder of 1,500,000 Armenian-Christians is not just terrorism; killings at that enormous of an amount inevitably will decrease the population of that group in irreparable, traumatic, impactful ways. The Armenian Genocide was even an inspiration to Adolf Hitler, who led the genocide on Jewish people during World War II. When adult Armenians did not survive, they often left their young or

Open Document