Signs are already emerging that Turkey's entrance into the EU will not change Turkey as much as it will change Europe. And look: it was half a sentence. Someone in Turkey is paying very, very close attention to these matters. From Deutsche Presse Agentur (DPA), with thanks to Kemaste:
(dpa) - Pressure from Turkey has resulted in the removal of a reference to the Armenian genocide from a German school curriculum, reports said Wednesday.The eastern German state of Brandenburg has eliminated half a sentence on the Armenians included in ninth and tenth grade history classes after a Turkish diplomat complained to state Prime Minister Matthias Platzeck, the newspaper Die Welt reported.
In a chapter entitled "War, Technology and Civilian Populations" the school book text said "for example, the genocide of the Armenians population of Anatolia." That passage has now been removed from school textbooks, the newspaper said.
Platzeck met regularly with Turkish diplomats and was "steeled" against their influence, the newspaper quoted him as saying. The prime minister added that genocide was too important an issue to be dealt with in just half a sentence. "Brandenburg's curriculum was the only one in Germany which up until now included a reference to the murder of the Armenians," said Die Welt.
Most historians say that between 600,000 and 1.5 million Armenians were killed in 1915 and 1916 under the Ottoman Turks during World War I. The Turkish government, which denies that a genocide took place, speaks of 200,000 dead.
A Turkish embassy spokesman in Berlin declined to comment directly on the report, but noted the initiative had come from the Turkish consulate responsible for Berlin and Brandenburg - not from the embassy itself.
Here, from September 2000, is "'Genocide? What genocide?'," David Kupelian's account of how the Armenian genocide affected his family. (Thanks again to Kemaste.) It begins:
When my father was three years old, he was sentenced to a brutal death, along with his mother and infant sister, by the Turkish government. Along with hundreds of thousands of other Armenians, they were earmarked to be herded into the Syrian desert where they would die of starvation, disease, or worse -- torture and death at the hands of brutal soldiers or hordes of roving bandits.
Read it all. When I hear Islamic apologists speak of the "illustrious Ottoman Empire," it is hard for me to take them seriously, knowing so many stories like Kupelian's of exile and murder.
The German state of Brandenburg has great timing to eliminate this reference to the Armenian genocide just days after the commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz.
Bat Ye'or's just-published "Eurabia" discusses the re-writing of European history in order to satisfy Arab Muslim demands. The re-writing includes preposterously exaggerated claims made for the "Islamic" contribution to Western civilization -- along the wellknown lines of Tariq Ramadan. Formally, the Arabs have not had to request that the Nazi murders (or other European manifestations of antisemitism) be downplayed, for that was being done quite nicely, thank you, without any requests.
However, as "the Holocaust" (a term which one uses reluctantly, as it evokes only an abstract and phylogenetic pity, which will not do) is required to be discussed, as part of the history curriculum in, for example, French schools, Muslim "enforcers" -- i.e., completely disobedient and even sinisterly violent students -- have managed in many places to simply silence the teachers. The physical intimidation of both non-Muslim students, and of teachers, has been written about repeatedly in France. It is the most serious problem in the French school system: the primitive laying down the law for the(relatively) civilized, and in the very schools where those primitives are to be dragged into civilization. Jules Ferry would be amazed.
These are of a piece with the excising of a half-sentence -- what's that? A hundred thousand victims per word? Are the Germans, in dancing to the Turkish enforcer's tune, trying to again make Hitler's observation -- "Who cares about the massacres of the Armenians?" -- true again?
This incident should prompt, all over Germany and Europe, more -- not less -- attention to the Armenian genocide, and to the murders of Greeks, to the Bulgarian massacres (google "Gladstone" and "Bulgarian massacres" for more on this), to how Turkish officials treated the Jews in 19th-century “Palestine,” and the entire whitewashed history of the Ottoman Empire.. See Angelov, Bryonis, Constantelos, Dadrian, Papoulia, and many other Greek, Bulgarian, Armenian, Rumanian and other scholars, all of whom can be retrieved, and many of whose most important works will be included in a forthcoming book by Andrew Bostom.
The retrieval, and republication, of such scholarship is important; Bernard Lewis has had things to himself (with some help from Stanford Shaw and Turkish Ottomanists, but one can find in the later paragraphs of breathtaking truth-telling, as in Hilal Inalcik), largely unchallenged (except by those who, like Esposito, are apologists who dislike Lewis for being too "hard" on Islam, which in turn makes many wish to automatically support Lewis and overlook how superficially he has treated the problem of the dhimmi, both in his work on Jews under Islam, where it would appear that "modern (i.e. European) antisemitism" is the main source for the Muslim variety, and not Islam itself, and in his virtual non-treatment of the dhimmitude of Christians, so thoroughly discussed by Bat Ye'or in "The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam."
But Lewis has ignored Bryonis, Constantelos, Papoulia, Dadrian, and many others who managed to reconstruct the history of various non-Muslim commmunities with their command of the relevant languages -- Bulgarian, Greek, Rumanian, etc. Their works, not given sufficient due by most Western Ottomanists, constitute an important contribution to Ottoman studies.
"For six centuries, there has been a Jewish Cracow. By this weekend, those six centuries, they're a rumor. They never happened. Today is history."
-- SS officer Amon Goeth, Commandant of the Plaszow labor camp (from Schindler's List)
So, both historical and contemporary reporting will be filtered, censored, and rewritten to bury the reality of 1,300 years of Islamic invasion, conquest, subjugation and genocide. By accommodating Muslim revisionism, the dhimmi Europeans are sealing their fate as no one, including scholars, will be free to educate and alert the West on the impending onslaught. Europe is finis.
A comma here, a comma there, a change of phrase, an elimination of a paragraph, the dumbing down or perversion of textbooks and certain groups and individuals get what they want: an ignorant, compliant population that is easy to govern and manipulate. In this case, in Europe, the ruling oligarchy will be, it appears, Islam.
Who can account for the same phenomenon in the United States? If Islam is again guilty, then they have been purposely undermining the United States for many decades. Are Leftists and Islamists working behind the scenes? Remember that war is deception and bombs and bullets don't have to fly to prove that we are at war.
And we are deceived. How can we know better if what we are taught in school is false, based on information found in incorrect or misleading textbooks dispensed by teachers that are barely less ignorant than their students?
Much will be lost down the memory hole. I hope someone has the foresight to create a cache of books and manuscripts as was down in earlier centuries.
Politically incorrect to point out a genocide. You are having laugh. What spinless cowards are in authority over there???
In George Orwell's 1984 there was an essay in the middle of the book. There were some principles that all totalitarian societies must embrace to propagate itself. One was 'WAR IS PEACE'. This idea meant to keep the masses frightened and intimidated, one must concoct an eternal and external enemy. The other side of this was to whitewash any real grievances that the other side had while covering up both the overt and covert aims of your own gov't. The second principle was 'IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH'. Don't let the masses know that they have been hoodwinked, suppress the unpleasant truth and glorify the beautiful, wonderful, happy lie. Do this, and gov't gets the 'dream' come true of total absolute control. The third 'virtue' was 'TODAY IS TOMORROW'. History is to be attacked, rewritten or otherwise abolished. Cut the people off from their past successes and failures and comliance is the natural result. Islam is waging war, Europe is in denial (ignorant) and very few it seems can teach history without someone being offended and offering a different, less offensive version. Even so, come Lord Jesus!
The armenian genocide is a historical fact and we need to remember, greetings
When a society starts to forget one genocide it makes it easier for it to happen again. beware the Turks, once they take Europe they will be soon on the shores of the US.