Aghet 2.0

These days it's the 100 anniversary of the beginning of the Armenian Genocide (Aghet), one of the most horrendous crimes ever committed, and considered the first genocide, the first attempt to completely annihilate a human group. The monstrosity of these acts committed by the Turkish government and many Turks (others opposed it and even died because of it) has been aggravated by the continuous denial by all the different Turkish governments (and by a large part of the Turkish population) to these days. Adding injury to insult, Turkey has had the impudence to try to reverse the facts, justifying "the dead of some Armenians" as a response of the Turkish population against the crimes committed by the Armenians against the Turkish nation. There's at least one documentary portraying this distortion of true, it's so revolting to me that I won't even provide a link.

Aghet is a really good documentary, and I think it's pretty appropriate to give it a watch these days. It's interesting to see how before the genocide the Turkish government had treated Armenians as second class citizens, submitting them to higher taxes and stripping them of rights, just for being Christians and ethnically different. When the ultra nationalist and Islamist Young Turks gained power, things went much worse, and their idea of "Turkey for the Turks" (puff, pretty far-right scum) resulted in the Genocide. Apart from xenophobia, the idea of looting the belongings of 1.5 million people seemed quite appealing to the Turkish government. It was not only an attack on Armenians, other "foreigners" (like Greeks) were also attacked, and it should be noticed how the Turks pillaged European villages as they were expelled from their "colonies" (Serbia, Montenegro...)

100 years later the current Turkish government not only continues to deny the Genocide, but seems quite inspired by the leaders of that time, the blood thirsty Three Pashas. The government of Erdogan is following the 2 same basic directives, Ultra-Nationalism and Islamism. This has taken Turkey to support Islamo-Fascists in Syria and Irak (Al-Nusra, ISIS), prevent any sort of help to the Kurds in Kobane (since stopping the Kurds to cross the border to join the resistance to preventing humanitarian aid to cross that same border). Indeed, I think the Turkish goverment would be pretty happy to perpetrate a Kurdish Genocide (just think of the millions of Kurds that were displaced during the war with the PKK liberation army), but hopefully 100 years later they can't do it so clearly, and have to be a bit more subtle (support terrorist groups, send the secret services to kill Kurds in Europe, compare the YPG/JPG with ISIS...)

When I first watched Screamers, that excellent documentary about the Genocide where System of a Down (all of them of Armenian descent) guide us through this madness, it shocked me when they explain how the lack of response by international powers to the slaughter prompted Hitler to go ahead with the Holocaust (he declared in 1939, "Who remembers the Armenians?"). Indeed, Germany played a particularly disgusting role during the Genocide. They had Turkey as their allies, but Germany was the strong side of this alliance, so they could have forced Turkey to stop the murders, but they preferred not to bother "their friends", as the lives of the Armenians had no major interests to the "Reich".

If we wanted to find something "positive" in the tragedy, we could say that the survivors were forced to flee to different places all over the world, and over the years the Armenian diaspora has contributed a great deal to the different countries where they found shelter (they integrated and thrived, I think I've never heard about "Armenian ghettos" or something of the sort). In France this community prospered particularly, and has always had the support of the Government and the rest of the population. This week many acts have taken place over the country in commemoration of this madness, and of course Toulouse has not been an exception