Just Because You Deny Something

[Strike For The South]

Doesn't mean it didn't happen. Today is a day to remember all the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greek civilians who were slaughtered in cold blood simply because Turkey had couldn't fight a proper war.

[Crandar]

As a Greek, I must say that all the claims about a Greek-Pontic genocide are not founded on historical facts.

[Strike For The South]

As a Greek, I must say that all the claims about a Greek-Pontic genocide are not founded on historical facts.

As an American, I must say they are.

[Crandar]

Well, I doubt your objectivity on the issue. Pretty much every scholar confirms that the massacres were limited on scope, territorial extension and intent:
https://books.google.fr/books?id=xdB...page&q&f=false
p. 122-123.
https://books.google.fr/books?id=qi9...page&q&f=false
p. 342-343.

[Montmorency]

Well, I doubt your objectivity on the issue. Pretty much every scholar confirms that the massacres were limited on scope, territorial extension and intent:
https://books.google.fr/books?id=xdB...page&q&f=false
p. 122-123.
https://books.google.fr/books?id=qi9...page&q&f=false
p. 342-343.

More specifically, the text you point to claims:

A handful of foreign travelers in Anatolia directly witnessed the diff erential treatment of Greeks and Armenians during the war; they frequently recorded in their journals and reports that compared to the Armenians, the Greeks were not subjected to especially violent or brutal measures.

[...]

This happened so frequently that in some regions, such as Tokat, the authorities razed Greek village houses in order to flush out Armenians thought to be hiding there. Despite the increasingly severe wartime policies, in particular for the
period between late 1916 and the first months of 1917, the government’s treatment of the Greeks - although comparable in some ways to the measures against the Armenians - differed in scope, intent, and motivation.

Here, a strong disjunction between intention and action is found. According to the Austrian consul at Amisos, Kwiatkowski, in his November 30, 1916, report to the foreign minister Baron Burian:
‘‘on 26 November Rafet Bey told me: ‘we must finish off the Greeks as we did with the Armenians . . . ’ on 28November Rafet Bey told me: ‘today I sent squads to the interior to kill every Greek on sight.’ I fear for the elimination of the entire Greek population and a repeat of what occurred last year.’’ Or according to a January 31, 1917, report by Chancellor Hollweg of Austria:

The indications are that the Turks plan to eliminate the Greek element as enemies of the state, as they did earlier with the Armenians.
The strategy implemented by the Turks is of displacing people to the interior without taking measures for their survival by exposing them to
death, hunger, and illness. The abandoned homes are then looted and burnt or destroyed. Whatever was done to the Armenians is being repeated with the Greeks.

Massacres most likely did take place at Amisos and other villages in the Pontus. Yet given the large numbers of surviving Greeks, especially relative to the small number of Armenian survivors, the massacres apparently were restricted to the Pontus, Smyrna, and selected other ‘‘sensitive’’ regions.

So in other words they did massacre Greek civilians on multiple occasions, but not to the extent seen with the Armenians.

[Sarmatian]

Yes, but there is a difference between a genocide and a massacre.

[Montmorency]

Why was there, in this case?

[Fragony]

Turks don't deny it was a warcrime, just not a genocide. Austra-Hungary commited simi.ar atrocities in the Balkan-area, was that also genocide or just cruelty. I don't think you can ask from the Turks to admit it was genocide, that is a plan to really kill everythone. That just didn't happen no matter how horrible, the Turks have a point if they say it wasn't a genocide. What Austria-Hungary did we call a punitive-action, what Turkey did genocide, they even admit mass-masscres. Nobody accuses Austria-Hungary of genocide and they killed a staggering amount of people

[Crandar]

More specifically, the text you point to claims:

So in other words they did massacre Greek civilians on multiple occasions, but not to the extent seen with the Armenians.

What Sarmatian said. Of course the Muslims killed thousands of Greeks, but that still doesn't make it a genocide.

If every massacre was counted as a genocide, then the Muslims would also have been genocided by Armenians and by the mountainous Pontic Greeks. I am all for slandering them, because they collaborated massively with the Nazis in WW2, but let's keep it real.

Downgrading the definition of genocide is self-contradictory, will lead into making the term redundant and will force us into inventing a new word, only for the same circle to repeat itself. Terminology doesn't render the victim's fate less tragic and the perpetrator's decision less despicable.

[Montmorency]

Partly, I was getting at the war in the 1920s, in which far more Turkish Greeks were killed as part of the final expulsion. The terminology isn't the question here, though "democide" and "ethnic cleansing" are quite appropriate, and universal extermination isn't a defining factor in genocide.

Fragony, Hungary did indeed indulge in genocide against non-Magyars between the wars. No excuses there.

[Strike For The South]

Yes, but there is a difference between a genocide and a massacre.

Efficiency? The ability and or means to see it through?

Mai Lai was a massacre. The Mariannas turkey shoot was a massacre. Yet, they are two very different things.

[Sarmatian]

Efficiency? The ability and or means to see it through?

Mai Lai was a massacre. The Mariannas turkey shoot was a massacre. Yet, they are two very different things.

I believe it is in the intent. If the point is to wipe out a group, it is a genocide.
If the point is to preemptively dispose of anyone who could be a threat, or to sap said group's will to fight/resist, it's not a genocide.

I'm not arguing this particular case, but if we don't agree on a distinction, practically every war in the history of mankind was a genocide.
We might call fire bombing of Tokyo a genocide, then. What was the point of it - to kill a large number of Japanese as possible, with absolutely no distinction between soldiers and civilians (one might argue the point was to kill as many civilians as possible), but it wasn't done to wipe the Japanese out, it was done to force Japan to surrender.

[Gilrandir]

I believe it is in the intent. If the point is to wipe out a group, it is a genocide.
If the point is to preemptively dispose of anyone who could be a threat, or to sap said group's will to fight/resist, it's not a genocide.

I'm not arguing this particular case, but if we don't agree on a distinction, practically every war in the history of mankind was a genocide.
We might call fire bombing of Tokyo a genocide, then. What was the point of it - to kill a large number of Japanese as possible, with absolutely no distinction between soldiers and civilians (one might argue the point was to kill as many civilians as possible), but it wasn't done to wipe the Japanese out, it was done to force Japan to surrender.

Civilians will eventually become military men.

[Strike For The South]

Civilians will eventually become military men.

So it is better to kill them all? Old, women , and children alike?

[Fragony]

Partly, I was getting at the war in the 1920s, in which far more Turkish Greeks were killed as part of the final expulsion. The terminology isn't the question here, though "democide" and "ethnic cleansing" are quite appropriate, and universal extermination isn't a defining factor in genocide.

Fragony, Hungary did indeed indulge in genocide against non-Magyars between the wars. No excuses there.

Which wars, I really don't know. I was rtalking about the the pre-WW1 period where Austria-Hungary did some pretty horrible things. Point is gone I guess but I would like to know more about that it's new to me

[Montmorency]

I was referring to the Greco-Turkish war of the early 20s of course, and on Hungary (with neighbors) see Segal, Genocide in the Carpathians: War, Social Breakdown, and Mass Violence, 1914-1945 (2016).

(The 1920 Treaty of Triannon dismembered the Kingdom of Hungary and parceled out land to its neighbors Austria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Poland... The following text centers on the sub-Carpathian Rus' region of (Czecho)Slovakia and pieces of it that were annexed by Hungary during 1938, then wholly after the Czechoslovak collapse in 1939; this area also briefly formed a sovereign Carpathian state in 1939, Carpatho-Ukraine.)

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

My narrative, then, looks at links and connections rather than comparisons, which have given rise to conceptual and methodological problems associated with the hierarchies created by the terms Holocaust, genocide, and ethnic cleansing. Thinking about the Holocaust as unique,using whatever word or rhetorical device, has overshadowed other processes and events in human history. Such scales have also marginalized an integrated picture of World War II, which challenges the strict isolation and separation of these categories and, in the case of Hungary, points to new interpretative frameworks concerning the destruction of Jewish communities and the mass murder of more than half a million Jews.

This broader perspective also underlines how the general term antisemitism actually blurs the Hungarian state’s anti-Jewish policies and actions by concealing the drive to renounce the claims of belonging of non-Magyars in
Subcarpathian Rus'—non-Jews as well as Jews—an essential goal in the planned transformation of the region’s society and its integration into “Greater Hungary.”

Accordingly, in September 1940 Miklós Kozma, another leading conservative[...]became the appointed governor (kormányzói biztos) of the region. Kozma not only embraced discriminatory actions against Jews and other groups in the region, which had begun immediately after the Hungarian occupation; he sought to alter completely the social makeup of Subcarpathian Rus' through harsh discrimination, daily violence, arrests and torture, political persecution, and, whenever possible,
mass deportations—targeting Jews,Roma, and Carpatho-Ruthenians. These policies spelled great suffering and disaster for almost all the inhabitants of the region. As non-Magyars, they constituted “problems” to a Magyar-dominated “Greater Hungary.”

While the drive for total uprooting of the region’s Jews has been well established in recent scholarship, nowhere has the key question—why?—emerged. Was this simply a manifestation of an extreme position aimed exclusively against Jews? Or, rather, was it part of a far-reaching vision regarding the future of Subcarpathian Rus'? Here a simplified notion of antisemitism blurs a complex reality, where anti-Jewish positions intermingled with other interests of the state and evolved into actions in concrete contexts that afforded a chance to pursue multiple goals. Multilayered mass violence also occurred in the other borderlands that fell into Hungarian hands during World War II: Romanians in Transylvania and “Serbs, Bosnians, Montenegrins, gypsies, or Jews who did not (themselves or their parents) have citizenship within the territory of Greater Hungary before October 31, 1918” in the Délvidék faced the violence of the state. Arrests, torture, and mass deportations began immediately with the Hungarian occupation of the Délvidék in April 1941, culminating in January 1942 in the massacres of thousands of Serbs and hundreds of Jews in the Šajkaš region and in Novi Sad. Serbs—another group without real power at
the time but still feared as a “security threat” even before the rise of organized partisan activities among Serbs in the Balkans—suffered the most: the Hungarian authorities expelled thirty thousand to German-controlled Serbia, despite strong protests
by the German authorities.

What came of the plans regarding Carpatho-Ruthenians? Mainly because of the stand of the German authorities beyond the Carpathians, who would not accept more deportees from Hungary after 15 August, the Hungarian government
could not even begin to organize and carry out deportations of Carpatho-Ruthenians. But the summer of 1941 signaled a new level of commitment to the idea of “Greater Hungary” and of mass violence in its service.

If Hungarian leaders and officials could imagine the mass deportation of Romanians from Transylvania after the war, they could easily envision an identical fate for the stateless and largely defenseless Carpatho-Ruthenians. The Roma population in the region suffered worse, as they represented the ultimate outsiders[...]

Still, the mass deportations in the summer of 1941 and subsequent persecutions in Subcarpathian Rus' were very much part of a genocidal process, insofar as we understand genocide not as a synonym for mass murder but as a thorough effort to eradicate a society and culture, which is precisely how Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term genocide, explained it. Yet even those who seek to change the narrative about Hungary before March 1944 focus almost exclusively on anti-Jewish policies, thus missing the significant connections that typified the multilayered mass violence designed and carried out by the state. The goal of a Magyar-dominated “Greater Hungary” prompted policies that targeted Roma and Carpatho-Ruthenians in
Subcarpathian Rus' in addition to Jews. Legislators in Budapest, county subprefects, and local gendarmes made sure that harassment, discrimination, violence, and sometimes death pervaded daily lives. But some moments between 1938 and 1944, particularly during the summer of 1941, opened windows of opportunity for violence to escalate in order to realize the ultimate desire of the authorities: to remove as many of the region’s non-Magyar inhabitants as possible.

As we have seen, Hungary’s leaders saw the world differently. Rather than a global utopia, they imagined a “Greater Hungary.” Jews figured as the first enemies on their list, as on the Nazis’, but they wanted them out of the country,
not necessarily dead. Moreover, some Hungarian nationalists conceded the role of at least some of the Jews of Budapest, particularly the financial elite, in the future of “Greater Hungary,” while excluding completely from this vision all the Jews in the multiethnic and multireligious borderlands. Their policies spelled suffering, dislocation, and death on a massive scale, but they never thought to realize their vision through systematic mass murder. Many of them hated Jews, certainly the Jews who
lived in the territories occupied by Hungary since 1938, but without the apocalyptic anxiety that radiated from Berlin. By 1944 the German and Hungarian states had attacked Jews as a
group “with similar justification over a lengthy time period,” to borrow from political scientist Roger Petersen’s explanation of hatred. When Germany invaded Hungary in 1944, the Hungarian authorities in Budapest, Subcarpathian Rus', and elsewhere
in the country quickly grasped the potential of the encounter between these two different anti-Jewish hatreds.

[G]enocide and other forms of mass atrocities happened, are taking place right now, and will most probably mar the future not because most people usually remain indifferent; mass violence has occurred and will occur because most people adhere to positions and emotional states that, explicitly or implicitly, approve of it.

To summarize the text highlights, in the interest of removing non-Magyar races standing in the way of the Hungarian plan, the Hungarian government from March 1939 began the legal and political repression of Ruthenians, Jews, and Roma with arbitrary targeting for detention and murder, recission of citizenship, marriage, and property rights, mass deportation (especially of Jews in the direction of German death squads in Poland/Ukraine), and mass execution of Carpathian militias (and some villagers) during the March '39 annexation. Part of the rationale given for eventually eradicating the Ruthenian population was the specter of Bolshevism, Ukrainophilia, and pan-Slavism.


Importantly for the matter of how to specify genocide, I think we all agree that it isn't simply a synonym for "mass murder". But genocide in international law is treated as an individual criminal act for which individuals may be tried and convicted. We should distinguish (as international law does) between genocide the substantive crime and the modes of liability through which genocide is realized. One such mode is mass murder.

Here are what the Convention stipulates as preconditions:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to
bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

For (c), the Trial Chamber has previously stated that immediate death or destruction need not be the objective of policies, and that whether or not the perpetrator may be willing to entertain less destructive "solutions" in the hypothetical does not impinge on decisions actually made or actions undertaken with the specific intent of destruction.

[Strike For The South]

While I am positive you haven't read all the books you reference, I am impressed you can string together these bite sized little morsels of intellectualism

[Montmorency]

While I am positive you haven't read all the books you reference, I am impressed you can string together these bite sized little morsels of intellectualism

Fair point, but I actually did read the book I referenced just for this thread, as well as parts of Behrens and Henham, Elements of Genocide (2013), in particular the chapters on actus rea and mens rea. The latter is a more legalistic treatment and analysis of the Genocide Convention, the history of its codification, and interpretations given at trial court cases. Crandar and Sarmatian may appreciate it, as the authors tend to endorse a narrower interpretation of the Convention that hews toward biological destruction rather than a broad, "social" interpretation.

It's not very intellectual anyway, but you were fine when I did Arendt I guess.

[Gilrandir]

So it is better to kill them all? Old, women , and children alike?

I was referring to Sarmatian statement

What was the point of it - to kill a large number of Japanese as possible, with absolutely no distinction between soldiers and civilians (one might argue the point was to kill as many civilians as possible)

and I kind of offered possible reasons Americans might have had in mind to justify the bombing.

As for the distinction between massacre and genocide I think that genocide is the goal and massacre is one of the means. Genocide may be performed by other means as well - like deliberately starving people to death (as it was with Ukraine in 1932-33).

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

One should note that there was a substantive difference between Greeks and Armenians. Specifically, there was already a Greek Homelnad beyond Ottoman reach, but there was no equivalent for Armenians, apart from the lesser part of Armenia ruled by the Russians.

It's entirely reasonable to suppose that the Ottoman government calculated that exterminating Pontic Greeks was pointless given the large number of British and American-backed Greeks in Greece. Better to spend you efforts on the more achievable goal of wiping out the Armenians, and only kill Greeks when necessary or profitable, let the rest flee to the Balkans.

[Strike For The South]

Fair point, but I actually did read the book I referenced just for this thread, as well as parts of Behrens and Henham, Elements of Genocide (2013), in particular the chapters on actus rea and mens rea. The latter is a more legalistic treatment and analysis of the Genocide Convention, the history of its codification, and interpretations given at trial court cases. Crandar and Sarmatian may appreciate it, as the authors tend to endorse a narrower interpretation of the Convention that hews toward biological destruction rather than a broad, "social" interpretation.

It's not very intellectual anyway, but you were fine when I did Arendt I guess.

Its not a slight.

[Crandar]

One should note that there was a substantive difference between Greeks and Armenians. Specifically, there was already a Greek Homelnad beyond Ottoman reach, but there was no equivalent for Armenians, apart from the lesser part of Armenia ruled by the Russians.

Umm, yes there is. Except for the language, Armenians were part of of the Armenian Apostolic Church and Greeks of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople.

The Armenians suffered more, not because they lacked foreign sponsors (Russia), but because they lived in the front, like the part of the Pontic Greeks also massacred.
The distinction is even more obvious when we compare them to the much more numerous Greeks living in Smyrna, about whom not even the Golden Dawn claims that they were genocided.