Jack of Harts

The Ottoman Empire was failing in the early 1900s. It had been fading for centuries in fact. Prolonged wars with the Spanish Empire, the Russian Empire, the British Empire, and just about every other empire had left its coffers empty, its strength spent, and Constantinople itself, once the throne of empires, was a flee-bitten rat warren compared to the great cities of the other world powers. The Ottoman Empire was dying.

North Africa was lost. Greece and the other Balkanized nations north of it had rebelled. The Persians were a threat in the east, the Russians a threat in the north, and the Arabs were rumbling discontented murmurs. The Young Turks took power, relegated the Sultan to a figurehead status, and determined to deal with any other threats to the remaining power of the Ottoman Empire.

The Armenian Christians were exactly the kind of threat they saw all around them. The Armenians had been absorbed into the empire centuries before, but they still controlled much of the northeastern frontier between the Ottomans and the Russians. The Young Turks thought the Armenians could rebel like the Greeks, switch their allegiance to the Russians, and give the Russians an invasion corridor directly into the Ottoman heartlands. That could not be allowed, so the Young Turks decided to eliminate the problem the old fashioned way.

The best way to remove the Armenian problem was of course to remove the Armenians. The Ottomans had already gotten a head start on that problem by killing hundreds of thousands of Armenians in previous purges, but the Young Turks intended to go all the way. They sent their troops to confiscate the Armenian lands and force marched the Armenians out of their comfortable homelands into the deserts of the southern Ottoman Empire. Somewhere around one million Armenians died either in the marches or the concentration camps they ended up in, and hundreds of thousands more were forced to convert to Islam or die. A similar number of Greek Christians were killed, effectively ending two thousand years of Greek and Armenian culture in the area.

The Ottomans then moved their own people into the devastated region with a kind of mass migration, and that allowed them to form modern day Turkey as an ethnocentric Muslim State. Modern day Turkey calls it a simple deportation. One might even use the term involuntary mass migration if one was feeling less supportive.

A European Jew invented a new word to describe what happened to the Armenians, as well as his own people in later decades. Genocide.