The Young Turks Fight Against the Decline of the Ottoman Empire

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Between 1301 to 1922, in the region north of present day Syria, was known as the Ottoman empire. It was rooted in the belief that Islam as an ideology should be in power. One territory held by the Ottoman empire was their homeland of Turkey. In 1907, the Sultan Abdul Hamid II, wanted for the most part to have people who were educated outside of the country limited in what they could do, and if not then they were expunged, as he thought that they were the cause of his land’s plight and decline. This resulted in him becoming very unpopular with his people, thus having many secret societies created practically under his nose. The most important being The Young Turks.

The Young Turks, a group of young military officers who wanted to keep their country’s decline from continuing, wanted to improve general conditions for certain peoples in the Ottoman empire. Not only was anyone who was not Muslim treated as second class citizens, they were also required by law to pay more for their taxes than a muslim civilian. Realizing this, in the 1890s and early 1900s, an organization called The Young Turks arose, pressing for political reform calling for the right to vote, a constitutional government and and an end to discriminatory practices such as the aforementioned raised taxes. Eventually, The Young Turks staged a coup successfully in an attempt to change the rule to a constitutional monarchy . This, however, had some unforeseen consequences.

The men at the forefront of the Young Turk’s rebellion were Mehmed Talaat, Ismail Enver and Ahmed Djemal. Eventually, they came to have more of a dictatorial sort of rule on their people, with their own visions of what they wanted for the Turkic people. They all wanted to unite their people and expand ...

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...Talaat responded to the problem by sending out coded messages to all the governers of the Turkish provinces to bury the bodies. Of course, they listened not, and allowed the bodies to continue rotting, as those involved in the mass murders were not so interested in stopping along their marches and mass killings to dig their victims graves.

In short, the majority of Turkey’s allies did nothing about the ordeal in the end. Basically brushing the entire event off. Eventually, the already small and fragile Armenian republic was given no support from the allies as a whole, and collapsed upon itself. As for the Turkish, in the successful obliteration of the vast majority of the Armenian people, they destroyed many priceless masterpieces, libraries and churches that had belonged to the Armenians. In Turkey, it’s illegal to even mention the topic of the Armenian Genocide.

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