MWC (Media With Conscience)
APril 25 2010

Armenian Genocide Day

Monday, 26 April 2010 03:13

Armenian Genocide Day (24 April) and Australia Anzac Day (25 April)
are inextricably linked because the 1915-1923 Armenian Genocide (1.5
million dead) commenced the day before the Australian and New Zealand
Army Corps (ANZAC) invasion of Turkey on 25 April 1915 and after
months of Allied shelling ` but bothTurkey and Australia are still
trapped in genocide denial.

April 24 is Armenian Genocide Day that remembers the 1.5 million
Armenians murdered by the Turkish Government in 1915-1923. April 25
remembers Australian and New Zealand war dead in all wars (100,000 and
30,000 respectively) and derives from the Australian and New Zealand
Army Corps (ANZAC) and Allied invasion of Turkey at Gallipoli on April
25 1915.

Armenian Genocide Day (24 April) solemnly observed by Armenians in
Armenia and around the world. It remembers the start on April 24 1915
of the last appalling process of mass murder of Armenians in Anatolia
in the period 1895-1923. At the time the Ottoman Empire was being
taken over by the British (Mesopotamia was invaded in1914 and indeed
the racist, warmongering Brits are still there). The Russians were
invading Turkey from the east. The British and French Navies had been
shelling Turkey up and down the Dardanelles for weeks ` a huge
gathering of the British and French Armada off Gallipoli and a huge
bombardment presaged the Allied invasion of the Gallipoli Peninsular
on April 25 1915 involving British, French, British colonial, French
colonial and Australian and New Zealand forces (the latter being
called the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, or Anzacs).

The xenophobic Turkish authorities acted on April 24, the day before
the actual invasion, by arresting and murdering Armenian
intellectuals and leaders ` priests, engineers, councillors, teachers
and doctors. Subsequently – and with horrendous violence involving
beatings, rape and murder ` the Armenians were forcibly marched into
the Syrian desert to perish from thirst and starvation. 1.5 million
Armenians were murdered and the process only stopped in 1923 when
there were effectively no more Armenian men, women and children to be
killed.

For scholarly accounts of the Armenian Genocide see: F. Chalk. and K.
Jonassohn, (1990), The History and Sociology of Genocide. Analyses
and Case Studies (Yale University Press, New Haven); Gideon Polya,
"Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950" (G.M. Polya,
Melbourne, 2007: Colin Tatz "With Intent to Destroy. Reflecting on
Genocide" (Verso, London, 2003); and Tony Taylor `Denial . History
betrayed’ (Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2008).
.
April 25 is remembered as the sacred Anzac Day in both Australia and
New Zealand, a day of remembrance for Australian and New Zealand
soldiers who died in wars. The war dead of New Zealand (2005
population 4 million) total 30,000, proportionately much higher than
for Australia (2005 population 20 million; 2007 population 21 million,
war dead 102,000. The Churchill-inspired Gallipoli Invasion was a
tremendous disaster for the Allies who were forced to withdraw because
of the heroism of the Turkish defenders under Kemal Ataturk.

One wonders whether a kind of racist hubris persuaded the British to
launch an attack on the Ottoman Empire at its very core while knowing
that the well-armed and well-trained Turks would fight ferociously to
defend the Turkish Homeland. Pro-Zionist warmonger Churchill had a
contempt for the non-European and Muslim Subjects of the British
Empire and was the architect of the disastrous Gallipoli adventure
that killed 131,000 ( 87,000 Ottoman and 44,000 Allied soldiers,
including 8,700 Australians and 2,700 New Zealanders) and wounded
262,000 (including 165,000 Ottoman and 97,000 Allied soldiers,
including 19,400 Australians and 4,800 New Zealanders).

Explanations for the Allied war against Turkey in general lie in
Middle East oil resources (oil was discovered in Iran in 1909), and
the seizure of the Middle East in a final carve-up of the world by
Western European colonial powers. The Allied seizure of Palestine was
quickly followed by the 1917 Balfour Declaration of the racist Zionist
dream of a Jewish Homeland that nevertheless provided that there
should be no detriment to either Jews or Indigenous Palestinians. In
the event 5-6 million Jews perished in the racist Zionist-complicit
Jewish Holocaust and Indigenous Palestinian have been deprived of the
land that was their Homeland for thousands of years (see Shlomo Sand,
`The Invention of the Jewish People’, Verso, London, 2009). In 2010
there are 7 million Palestinian refugees, most forbidden to even set
foot in their Homeland; 4 million Occupied Palestinians are abusively
imprisoned in their own Land, completely deprived of Human Rights and
with 1.5 million incarcerated in the Gaza Concentration Camp; and 1.5
million `lucky’ Arab Israelis live as second class citizens subject to
numerous egregious violations of Human Rights by racist Zionist-run
Apartheid Israel.

However the core reason for the issuance of the Balfour Declaration
according to pro-Zionist British historian Professor Sir Martin
Gilbert (a pro-Zionist and pro-Iraq War member of the current Chilcot
Inquiry into the Iraq War) was to get Russian Zionists to try to keep
Russia in the First World War (see Martin Gilbert’s monumental `First
World War’, p373).

The horrendous Armenian Genocide is still denied in Turkey for reasons
of national reputation and respect for Mustafa Kamal Ataturk, the hero
who through back the Allies at Gallipoli and the founder of modern
Turkey from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire . Under "Article 301" of
Turkish Law people are prosecuted in Turkey for mentioning the
Armenian Genocide. Courageous Turkish writer Turkish Hrant Dink was
prosecuted 3 times under the notorious Article 301 of the Turkish
Penal Code for "denigrating Turkishness" and was assassinated in 2007
` 100,000 Turks honored him at his funeral. Similarly, courageous
Turkish Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk was prosecuted (retrospectively)
under Article 301 but courageous responded by stating: "I repeat, I
said loud and clear that one million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds were
killed in Turkey".

The Armenian Genocide has been ignored in Australia until recent years
and is never officially alluded to in the Anzac Day ceremonies ` and
indeed other genocides with which Australia has been associated are
also remorselessly and religiously ignored in politically correct
racist (PC racist ) White Australia.
However times change and in recent years, over 90 years after the
commencement of the final Armenian Genocide, there were some
significant programs discussing the Armenian Genocide broadcast on
taxpayer-funded Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) television.

Thus the respected ABC Foreign Correspondent program stated: "While
the landings under fire at Gallipoli Cove on the western coast of
Turkey in 1915 were seen to have helped forge Australia’s national
identity, at the same time in Anatolia in central Turkey ethnic
Armenians were being evicted, harassed and slaughtered. Respected
historians say as many as a million people were killed and many more
made refugees. While in some countries such as France [and Belgium
too], it is a criminal offence to deny the Armenian genocide,
successive Turkish governments refuse to acknowledge it."

Indeed it is likely that the success of Labor celebrity journalist
candidate Maxine McKew in ousting Bush-ite warmonger Australian Prime
Minister John Howard from his own seat of Bennelong in the 2007 Labor
election victory landslide was due in part to her recognition of the
Armenian Genocide (there are some 8,000 Armenians living in this
Sydney electorate)..

However PC Racist Australia remains extraordinarily coy in relation to
its past and continuing involvement in Genocide ` noting that the term
is being used here as defined under International law by Article 2 of
the UN Genocide Convention: "In the present Convention, genocide means
any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole
or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: a)
Killing members of the group; b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm
to members of the group; c) Deliberately inflicting on the group
conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction
in whole or in part; d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births
within the group; e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to
another group."

It is not only the Turkish Government who deny the Armenian Genocide
(supported in this evil genocide-denial by the genocidal Bush
Administration, genocide-denying American Republicans, Democrats and
Zionists, and by genocidal and genocide-denying Apartheid Israel).

However it is not only the Armenian Genocide that is denied (or more
precisely, ignored) by the Americans, the racist Zionists and their
allies (noting that `ignoring’ is vastly worse than `denial’ because
at least public expression of `denial’ admits the possibility of pubic
debate). Thus `Denial. History betrayed’ by Tony Taylor (Melbourne
University Press, Melbourne, 2008) is a very well written, well
annotated and well referenced book that deals with the phenomenon of
`holocaust denial’ and, in general, the denial of horrendous abuses of
humanity, including the Armenian Genocide.

This is an important book that should certainly be read by everyone
and should be in every library. However inevitably `Denial’ can be
criticized and the most fundamental criticism is that this otherwise
excellent Mainstream Anglo book published by a prestigious Mainstream
Anglo publisher itself ignores major 20th century and ongoing 21st
century holocausts and genocides due to Anglo-American imperialism
e.g. the British-imposed WW2 Bengali Holocaust (6-7 million dead) (see
Gideon Polya, `Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History’,
G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 1998, 2008), the Iraqi Genocide (1990-2010
violent and non-violent excess deaths 4.4 million) and the Afghan
Genocide (post-invasion violent and non-violent excess deaths 4.5
million).

Australia as a whole has a remarkable capacity for `looking the other
way’ and most notably in relation to the 22 genocidal atrocities in
which it has been involved over 222 years (indeed 8 of these genocidal
atrocities are ongoing).

A quick summary of Australia’s involvement in past Genocides is
provided below with excess deaths (avoidable deaths, deaths that
should not have happened) ` noting that Australia overwhelmingly
ignores or denies its association with these crimes (you can
understand why Bush-ite Australian PM Kevin Rudd aka Krudd would not
use the world "Genocide" in his otherwise excellent 2008 "Sorry"
speech about the Australian Aboriginal Stolen Generations, 0.1 million
Indigenous children forcible removed from their Mothers ). The default
reference for the following is "Body Count. Global avoidable mortality
since 1950" (G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 2007.

1. 18th-19th century Aboriginal Genocide (Indigenous population
dropped from about 1 million to 0.1 million in the first century after
invasion in 1788).

2. Tasmanian Aboriginal Genocide (Full-blood Indigenous population
dropped from 6,000 to 0 in 1803-1776)

3. British Indian Genocide (post-invasion excess deaths 0.6 billion,
1757-1837; 0.5 billion 1837-1901 under Queen Victoria; 0.4 billion,
1901-1947; 1.5 billion in all or 1.8 billion if one includes the
so-called Native States of the British Raj).

4. European Chinese genocide (10-100 million deaths in the European
imperialism-driven Tai Ping rebellion period; Australia was involved
in suppressing the Boxer rebellion).

5. Boer Genocide (1899-1902; 28,000 Afrikaaner women and children died
in British concentration camps; Australians participated in the Boer
War)

6. Maori Genocide (Maori population dropped from 0.1-0.2 million in
1800 to 42,000 in 1893; Australia involved in the Maori wars)

7. African Genocide (scores of million perished over 5 centuries of
slavery and colonialism; Australians participated in the Sudan war).

8. Pacific Genocide (catastrophic population decline due to introduced
disease and slavery; thus 40,000 Fijians died from measles out of a
population of 150,000 in 1876; "blackbirding" slavery was conducted by
Australians in the late 19th century).

9. Armenian Genocide (1.5 million killed; Australian invasion in 1915
helped precipitate this atrocity).

10. Bengali Genocide (6-7 million perished in the "forgotten" man-made
Bengal Famine atrocity in Bengal and adjoining provinces in British
India, 1943-1945; Australians were there and indeed the Governor of
Bengal in 1944 was an Australian, R.G. Casey).

11. British post-1950 Third World Genocide (1950-2005 excess deaths in
countries subject to British occupation as a major occupier in the
post-war era totalled 727 million).

12. US post-1950 Third World Genocide (1950-2005 excess deaths in
countries subject to US occupation as a major occupier in the post-war
era totalled 82 million).

13. Australian Colonial Genocide (1950-2005 excess deaths in countries
subject to Australian occupation as a major occupier in the post-war
era, namely Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands totalled 2.1
million).

14. 20th century Aboriginal Genocide (total excess deaths clearly in
the range 0.1-1.0 million; 0.1 million Stolen generations Aboriginal
children forcibly removed from their Mothers in the 19th and 20th
centuries)
However Australia’s Genocide record gets even worse because PC racist
white Australia is variously involved in the following 8 continuing
Genocides (for detailed documentation simply do a Google Search for
the terms `Palestinian Genocide’, `Iraqi Genocide’, `Afghan Genocide’,
`Aboriginal Genocide’, `Biofuel Genocide’, `Climate Genocide’, `Tamil
Genocide’ and `Muslim Genocide’, if necessary coupled with the word
`polya’).

15. Palestinian Genocide (post-invasion excess deaths 0.3 million, 7
million refugees; Australia provides diplomatic, financial and haven
support for Israeli state terrorism and up to life imprisonment for
anyone giving support to the party that overwhelmingly won the 2006
Occupied Palestinian elections:).

16. Iraqi Genocide (4.4 million excess deaths 1990-2010; 2.5 million
post-invasion excess deaths, 5-6 million refugees; Australia
militarily involved since 1990).

17. Afghan Genocide (4.5 million post-invasion excess deaths, 3-4
million refugees plus a further 2.5 million Pashtun refugees generated
in NW Pakistan by war criminal Obama; Australia involved militarily
since 2001 ).

18. Ongoing Australian Aboriginal Genocide (9,000 excess deaths
annually; 90,000 excess deaths in the last 12 years of Coalition rule;
see `Aboriginal Genocide’).

19. Biofuel Genocide (16 million die avoidably each year but this is
increasingly biofuel-impacted as the biofuel perversion forces up
global food prices; Australia is a major sugar can grower and sugar
exporter with 60% of sugar going to bioethanol production worldwide).

20. Climate Genocide (22 million people die avoidably each year
already from deprivation and deprivation-exacerbated disease;
Professors James Lovelock FRS and Kevin Anderson say that fewer than 1
billion will survive this century die to unaddressed climate change –
noting that the world population is expected to reach 9.5 billion by
2050, these estimates translate to a climate genocide involving deaths
of 10 billion people this century, this including 6 billion under-5
year old infants, 3 billion Muslims in a terminal Muslim Holocaust, 2
billion Indians, 1.3 billion non-Arab Africans, 0.5 billion Bengalis,
0.3 billion Pakistanis and 0.3 billion Bangladeshis. ; on a per
capita basis Australia is among the very worst greenhouse gas
polluters).

21. Tamil Genocide (scores of thousands killed, 0.3 million
incarcerated in concentration camps, horrendous human rights abuses;
Australia is directly involved in this atrocity by declaring Tamil
activists to be `terrorists’ under Australia’s draconian
anti-terrorism laws, preventing medical aid for Tamils, `suspending’
the human rights of Tamil refugees and providing military, diplomatic
and lying propaganda assistance to the genocidal Sri Lankan
authorities).

22. Muslim Genocide (9 million Muslims violently or non-violently
killed in the Iraq War, 1990-2010, and Afghan War, 2001-2010, alone;
1950-2005 avoidable deaths from deprivation in the Muslim World
totalled 0.6 billion; it is predicted that 3 billion Muslims will die
due to unaddressed man-made global warming this century; Australia is
a leading player in the ongoing and worsening Muslim Genocide and
Climate Genocide).

However Australia (or more correctly Apartheid Australia, because it
specifically violates Indigenous Australians and its Tamil refugees
and Afghan refugee Subjects in a race-specific fashion) ignores its
participation in these racist atrocities. Holocaust denial is wrong
and utterly repugnant for 3 major reasons: (1) it is falsehood; (2) it
is profoundly offensive to the memory of the victims, survivors of
such atrocities, their loved ones and indeed to all of decent
humanity; and (3) it increases the probability of repetition of such
awful crimes ` history ignored and history denied yields history
repeated.

Indeed one supposes that it is for these sorts of reasons that Germany
recently proposed a measure for the EU that would criminalize not only
those who deny or diminish the Jewish Holocaust but those deliberately
or inadvertently belittling any relatively recent genocide, mass
murder, war crimes and other crimes against humanity. I have argued
for `no-penalty criminalization’ of holocaust denial and genocide
denial ` in order to protect scholarly freedom and freedom of speech,
those found guilty of holocaust denial or genocide denial in a public
judicial process would merely face the ignominy of such public
exposure.

Conclusions.

One would sincerely hope that Turkey will bite the bullet, face up to
its past tragic history and then move on ` especially if it wants to
enter the EU.

However I have no such hopes for Australia, the land of Flies, Lies
and Slies (spin-based truths) ` a country that continues to ignore its
horrendous past and continuing association with appalling genocides.
Indeed the 2008 Australia 2020 Summit, ostensibly held to offer
ideas for a better Australia, totally ignored Australia’s genocidal
involvements (see "Australia 2020 Summit betrayed Australian
Children").

Australia ignores its complicity in the Armenian Genocide just as it
ignores the avoidable deaths of 24 million Asians in the post-1950 US
Asian Wars in which Australia participated as a lackey of US
imperialism. Invade other countries with high technology wars and you
must expect millions of women and children to die.

Of course we honor the soldiers who have done their duty and fought
and died for our country. However we also have a duty to tell the
truth and remember the millions of innocent civilians (mostly women
and children) who have died over the last century due to high
technology wars and the genocidal atrocities associated with them `
history ignored yields history repeated.

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