Turkey is a beautiful country, and its people are a great people. The holidays I spent there with my wife in 2006 are among the happiest I can recall. I like Turkish food and have Turkish friends in Germany.
Sadly, Turkey is also a country where genocide denial – namely denial that the Armenian Genocide was a genocide – is not just the attitude of a minority of ideologically motivated fanatics, but official state policy.
Thus, when German President Joachim Gauck (the first German politician to do this, as far as I know) publicly called a spade a spade last Thursday, on the eve of 100th anniversary of the first killings, he triggered an angry response from Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who had earlier rebuked Pope Francis for a similar statement.
Meanwhile, there are signs that "many Turks now understand that their country has a need to address its past".
Germans have set an example in doing this over the past decades, by confronting the crimes of the Nazi regime and society as what they were. Turks will hopefully do the same in the near future. I’m sure it will benefit their great nation, like the great German nation has benefited from coming to terms with its past.
Roberto, great attitude of the German President. Turkey must face its past, not run away from it.
ReplyDeleteThe Armenian genocide strangely is not recognized as Genocide in Brazil too. I say strangely because there's no political strife that forces the country to have this position, except for the almost total lack of contact with Turkey and Armenia.
The unfortunate fact I've seen with this issue was the wave of Racist comments from Brazilians (the Coxinhas = nick for Reactionary people) against Turks and Muslims. To put it in context, the Racist comments comes from the "Brazilian Tea Party". Before this "Tea Party" appeared to be only Reactionary, but apparently is quite racist too, totally loonie and asshole.
Today Jews and Armenian are lucky, even if this will not last long. No one in the academic world of the Western World denies the Armenian Genocide or that the Nazi propaganda of 1000 years ago of the CATHOLIC church about Jews "slitting the throats of Gentile Children" was true.
ReplyDeleteBut this doesn't value for the Greatest Holocaust of History which wiped away from Europe and Middle East Vaudoises, Cathari, Paulicians, Bogomils, Patareni, Donatists, etc. , who were simply Christians, to whom Catholicism and Orthodoxy denied of course the Christian denomination.
"Manicheans", "Gnostics", "performing the euthanasia", "killing babies", all this filthy scum coming from the CATHOLIC propaganda is actually in our days exhibited by every 'respectable' schoolar of the Middle age history. The Greatest Holocaust of History continues also today, and often it find a veil hiding himself under other Holcausts...
Today mainstream media doesn't love the IRANIAN denial of Jewish Holocaust, maybe because IRAN, after Dominican Republic, has the LARGEST diplomatic body in her embassy in VATICAN...
ReplyDeleteThe power of the papacy, the guys who burned alive Christians and Jews but today are dictating the lines of every scholar in the world, and are wiping under the carpet of history the 'dust' of the 17 century long Greatest Holocaust by them performed.