The Armenians of Anatolia

Why do US governments refer to what happened to Armenians during WWI as "Medz Yeghern" which means "the great calamity" in Armenian? It's a middle ground. This is a word that tries to balance political correctness with keeping a NATO ally happy with keeping Armenians (somewhat) satisfied, just so all parties can avoid that bad word genocide.

More on this issue... [Talking at the table next to me, in TR, at a restaurant, in Berlin] this guy was saying he was talking to a German who served in the air force and he said he did not know about the Holocaust at the time. How could he not? [Then he comes to the Armenian "issue"] You know we could not have done it.. I don't think the government at the time could have managed such a thing..

Judging from the accent guy is an Istanbulite, a regular dipshit who is long on opinions and short on everything else. In this case he is using a sort of reverse-Orientalism suggesting Ottomans could not have pulled off such an event because it takes planning to do so.

First of all, it doesn't take that much to kill that many people. Hell, even the Romans managed to kill half a million in Dacia (today's Romania) and another half a million in Carthege in ancient times. It's barbaric, but easy.

Second of all, what would the Air Force know what the ground forces are up to? How the f--k do these people think 20th century industrialism was organized like? The system of boxes and channels, top-down hieararchies; this is what these people do. Compartmentalization, controlling information flow is a natural outgrowth of this piece of shit system. As we say in software, it's not a bug, it's a feature. Remember Valkyrie - who decided the fate of the coup? The guy at the information center who decide to route messages from one side instead of another.

What happened to Armenians during the WWI in [today's] Eastern Turkey? Bad things. Noone knows officially, but knowing the barbaric system the Ottomans had at the time, one could guess. A lot of people know someone, who knows someone, who has a relative who witnessed something. I know that my own great grandfather, living in a city near Black Sea at the time, hid away some Armenian families in a mosque that were running away from the "security forces". Why were these people running away? Surely not for tax evasion.

Such events are not constrained to one specific time frame either. Before WWI, Sultan Hamid II, a paranoid, genocidal maniac (an average Ottoman sultan) actually started the whole trend, a "pre-Medz Yeghern" if you will... He created an army of Kurds in Eastern provinces who were let loose on the villages in the area causing a bunch of mayhem, the strategy was about keeping away the Russian influence, but the end result  was famine, death for those villages, and mostly for Armenians. During WWI things only "sped up" and bigger; the nature of the process did not change.

This is the kind of thing the system today has to own up to. Guy on the street will not have that first hand data, the final piece of information needed for an apology. It was Willy Brandt who dropped on the knee for that grand gesture, wasn't it?