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THE WEIRD PHENOMENON OF OTTOMAN EMPIRE NOSTALGIA
http://hetq.am/eng/articles/22194/the-weird-phenomenon-of-ottoman-empire-nostalgia.html
14:20, January 11, 2013
By John Hinderaker
If you hate America and the West generally, but aren't crazy enough to
long for Nazism or Communism, what's left? Remarkably, many leftists
have recently been expressing affection for the Ottoman Empire.
Seriously. If you think about it, the Ottomans fulfilled a liberal
fantasy: authoritarian so you get to boss everyone around and always
get your way, but usually without actually having to murder your
enemies. Plus, with no shortage of sex. I ridiculed Tom Friedman's
yearning for the days of the Ottomans here, and included this
throwaway line:
It turns out that "Iron Empires" means the Ottomans, who, as Friedman
writes, "had a live-and-let-live mentality toward their subjects."
Unless, of course, they were Armenians.
At the Middle East Quarterly, Efraim Karsh undertakes a more
systematic demolition of Ottoman nostalgia:
It is commonplace among Middle East scholars across the political
spectrum to idealize the Ottoman colonial legacy as a shining example
of tolerance. "The multi-ethnic Ottoman Turkish Empire," wrote
American journalist Robert Kaplan, "was more hospitable to minorities
than the uni-ethnic democratic states that immediately succeeded it. ...
Violent discussions over what group got to control which territory
emerged only when the empire came to an end, after World War I."
Karsh also cites the Armenian genocide in response to the idealization
of the Ottomans:
While there is no denying the argument's widespread appeal, there is
also no way around the fact that, in almost every particular, it is
demonstratively wrong. The imperial notion, by its very definition,
posits the domination of one ethnic, religious, or national group over
another, and the Ottoman Empire was no exception. It tolerated the
existence of vast non-Muslim subject populations in its midst, as did
earlier Muslim (and non-Muslim) empires-provided they acknowledged
their legal and institutional inferiority in the Islamic order of
things. When these groups dared to question their subordinate
status-let alone attempt to break the Ottoman yoke-they were brutally
suppressed, and none more so than the Armenians during World War I. ...
A far cry from the tolerant and tranquil domain it is often taken for,
Turkey-in-Europe was the most violent part of the continent during the
century or so between the Napoleonic upheavals and World War I as the
Ottomans embarked on an orgy of bloodletting in response to the
nationalist aspirations of their European subjects. The Greek war of
independence of the 1820s, the Danubian nationalist uprisings of 1848,
the Balkan explosion of the 1870s, and the Greco-Ottoman war of
1897-all were painful reminders of the cost of breaking free from an
imperial master. And all pale in comparison with the treatment meted
out to the foremost nationalist awakening in Turkey-in-Asia: the
Armenian.
He recites the brute facts of the Turks' suppression of the Armenians;
read it all if you aren't already familiar with the depressing story.
In the meantime, here are some excerpts. See whether some aspects of
the story seem especially topical:
The first step in this direction was taken in early 1915 when Armenian
soldiers in the Ottoman army were relegated to "labor battalions" and
stripped of their weapons. Most of these fighters-turned-laborers
would be marched out in droves to secluded places and shot in cold
blood, often after being forced to dig their own graves. Those
fortunate enough to escape summary execution were employed as laborers
in the most inhumane conditions.
At the same time, the authorities initiated a ruthless campaign to
disarm the entire Armenian population of personal weapons before
embarking on a genocidal spree of mass deportations and massacres. By
the autumn of 1915, Cilicia had been ethnically cleansed and the
authorities turned their sights on the foremost Armenian settlement
area in eastern Anatolia. First to be cleansed was the zone bordering
Van, extending from the Black Sea to the Iranian frontier and
immediately threatened by Russian advance; only there did outright
massacres often substitute for otherwise slow deaths along the
deportation routes or in the concentration camps of the Syrian desert.
In other districts of Ottoman Armenia, depopulated between July and
September, the Turks attempted to preserve a semblance of a
deportation policy though most deportees were summarily executed after
hitting the road. In the coastal towns of Trebizond, for example,
Armenians were sent out to sea, ostensibly for deportation, only to be
thrown overboard shortly afterward. Of the deportees from Erzerum,
Erzindjan, and Baibourt, only a handful survived the initial stages of
the journey. ...
Whenever the deportees arrived at a village or town, they were
exhibited like slaves in a public place, often before the government
building itself. Female slave markets were established in the Muslim
areas through which the Armenians were driven, and thousands of young
Armenian women and girls were sold in this way. Even the clerics were
quick to avail themselves of the bargains of the white slave market. ...
Nor for that matter is there any symmetry between the military (and
other) resources at the empire's disposal and those available to its
subjects, not least since states by definition control the means of
collective violence. In the Armenian case, this inherent inequality
was aggravated by the comprehensive disarming of the community; and
while some "gangs" may have retained their weapons, the vast majority
of Armenians surrendered them to the authorities despite their stark
realization that the 1895-96 massacres had been preceded by very
similar measures.
We can only speculate as to why so many liberals have grown fond of
the Ottomans.
Powerline; January 10, 2013
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
http://hetq.am/eng/articles/22194/the-weird-phenomenon-of-ottoman-empire-nostalgia.html
14:20, January 11, 2013
By John Hinderaker
If you hate America and the West generally, but aren't crazy enough to
long for Nazism or Communism, what's left? Remarkably, many leftists
have recently been expressing affection for the Ottoman Empire.
Seriously. If you think about it, the Ottomans fulfilled a liberal
fantasy: authoritarian so you get to boss everyone around and always
get your way, but usually without actually having to murder your
enemies. Plus, with no shortage of sex. I ridiculed Tom Friedman's
yearning for the days of the Ottomans here, and included this
throwaway line:
It turns out that "Iron Empires" means the Ottomans, who, as Friedman
writes, "had a live-and-let-live mentality toward their subjects."
Unless, of course, they were Armenians.
At the Middle East Quarterly, Efraim Karsh undertakes a more
systematic demolition of Ottoman nostalgia:
It is commonplace among Middle East scholars across the political
spectrum to idealize the Ottoman colonial legacy as a shining example
of tolerance. "The multi-ethnic Ottoman Turkish Empire," wrote
American journalist Robert Kaplan, "was more hospitable to minorities
than the uni-ethnic democratic states that immediately succeeded it. ...
Violent discussions over what group got to control which territory
emerged only when the empire came to an end, after World War I."
Karsh also cites the Armenian genocide in response to the idealization
of the Ottomans:
While there is no denying the argument's widespread appeal, there is
also no way around the fact that, in almost every particular, it is
demonstratively wrong. The imperial notion, by its very definition,
posits the domination of one ethnic, religious, or national group over
another, and the Ottoman Empire was no exception. It tolerated the
existence of vast non-Muslim subject populations in its midst, as did
earlier Muslim (and non-Muslim) empires-provided they acknowledged
their legal and institutional inferiority in the Islamic order of
things. When these groups dared to question their subordinate
status-let alone attempt to break the Ottoman yoke-they were brutally
suppressed, and none more so than the Armenians during World War I. ...
A far cry from the tolerant and tranquil domain it is often taken for,
Turkey-in-Europe was the most violent part of the continent during the
century or so between the Napoleonic upheavals and World War I as the
Ottomans embarked on an orgy of bloodletting in response to the
nationalist aspirations of their European subjects. The Greek war of
independence of the 1820s, the Danubian nationalist uprisings of 1848,
the Balkan explosion of the 1870s, and the Greco-Ottoman war of
1897-all were painful reminders of the cost of breaking free from an
imperial master. And all pale in comparison with the treatment meted
out to the foremost nationalist awakening in Turkey-in-Asia: the
Armenian.
He recites the brute facts of the Turks' suppression of the Armenians;
read it all if you aren't already familiar with the depressing story.
In the meantime, here are some excerpts. See whether some aspects of
the story seem especially topical:
The first step in this direction was taken in early 1915 when Armenian
soldiers in the Ottoman army were relegated to "labor battalions" and
stripped of their weapons. Most of these fighters-turned-laborers
would be marched out in droves to secluded places and shot in cold
blood, often after being forced to dig their own graves. Those
fortunate enough to escape summary execution were employed as laborers
in the most inhumane conditions.
At the same time, the authorities initiated a ruthless campaign to
disarm the entire Armenian population of personal weapons before
embarking on a genocidal spree of mass deportations and massacres. By
the autumn of 1915, Cilicia had been ethnically cleansed and the
authorities turned their sights on the foremost Armenian settlement
area in eastern Anatolia. First to be cleansed was the zone bordering
Van, extending from the Black Sea to the Iranian frontier and
immediately threatened by Russian advance; only there did outright
massacres often substitute for otherwise slow deaths along the
deportation routes or in the concentration camps of the Syrian desert.
In other districts of Ottoman Armenia, depopulated between July and
September, the Turks attempted to preserve a semblance of a
deportation policy though most deportees were summarily executed after
hitting the road. In the coastal towns of Trebizond, for example,
Armenians were sent out to sea, ostensibly for deportation, only to be
thrown overboard shortly afterward. Of the deportees from Erzerum,
Erzindjan, and Baibourt, only a handful survived the initial stages of
the journey. ...
Whenever the deportees arrived at a village or town, they were
exhibited like slaves in a public place, often before the government
building itself. Female slave markets were established in the Muslim
areas through which the Armenians were driven, and thousands of young
Armenian women and girls were sold in this way. Even the clerics were
quick to avail themselves of the bargains of the white slave market. ...
Nor for that matter is there any symmetry between the military (and
other) resources at the empire's disposal and those available to its
subjects, not least since states by definition control the means of
collective violence. In the Armenian case, this inherent inequality
was aggravated by the comprehensive disarming of the community; and
while some "gangs" may have retained their weapons, the vast majority
of Armenians surrendered them to the authorities despite their stark
realization that the 1895-96 massacres had been preceded by very
similar measures.
We can only speculate as to why so many liberals have grown fond of
the Ottomans.
Powerline; January 10, 2013
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress