Chuck wrote:How about the bit I commented on.
The Turks (or actually ottomans) did NOT "exterminate" all those people, a very large percentage died through migration in winter and those that were killed were not all killed by Turks.
That daft headline / statement implies the Turks did what the Nazis and Stalin did and massacred people in death camps, which is just silly. I know it is favoured by the anti gun control people but at least get it right. Quite a few in the region seemingly had it in for the Armenians who were at the end of the day, an enemy!
Today Turks and Armenians live side by side in each country, the "question" is STILL in debate and not - as some would have it believed - any other way.
Chuck, in all my studies of the Great War, no academic I have ever encountered has ever contested the Armenian genocide, the only group who deny it is the Turkish Government.
No death camps were not common and most did likely die on the death marches, much the same way the Japanese killed PoWs on death marches. It was still a FORCED deportation, and large scale massacres of a specific racial group did occur, there is the photographic evidence to prove it. In my opinion, and in the view of others, the only reason larger deaths camps were not set up was simply because the Ottoman Empire had a god awful transport infrastructure, it was the only Nation in the Great War not to suffer from a food shortage for the duration, yet many troops still died of starvation on the front as the infrastructure to transport food was not there.
They were not an enemy in the traditional sense, yes many eventually high tailed and joined the advancing Imperial Russian army in 1915/16 but this also happened to the Austro-Hungarian Empire with the Czechs, yet they did not feel it necessary to murder (at least) hundreds of thousands of civilians of that racial group.