Sangamon County Rifle Association
Right Reason on Second Amendment Rights
Springfield, Illinois


Phil Davis

Armenian Genocide
The cost of gun-control

Phil Davis

SCRA Meeting August 6, 2007
September 2007 GunNews





 The cost of gun-control in a place called Turkey or as it was called then, the Ottoman Empire.

Less than a hundred years ago the globe  looked very different.  In 1914 the world was squared up and ready to fight.  Two monolithic powers, groups of alliances, were faced off nose to nose.  In August of 1914 the powder keg was struck in a place that was once known as Yugoslavia.  World War I began.  A man named Princip shot Arch Duke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie with a .32 automatic, the shots literally heard around the world this century.

Everybody knows that Germany, England and France got into it but what of the other countries that most people don't even think about.  Russia, little countries in the Balkans like Montenegro, Serbia, Romania, and the Ottoman Empire.  The Ottoman Empire is Turkey.  In past centuries the Ottoman Empire had stretched all the way up into Hungary.  They had stood at the gates of Vienna, Austria in the 1600's.  This was a Muslim empire run by a sultan that stretched from central Europe to what is now Iran rivaling the size of the empire of Alexander the Great.

It had fallen apart in recent centuries through corruption, through defection, through nationalistic uprising tendencies.  It lost most of its European holdings.  Most of the Balkan Peninsula was back under independent control.  As the twentieth century dawned the Ottoman Empire was struggling for its life.

In 1909 a group of young politicians who were real firebrand nationalists wanted to reTurkify the Ottoman Empire, make the Ottoman Empire more Turkish, give it a sense of nationalism.  They were called the Council for Unity and Progress, the Cup, better known as the young Turks.  A young Turk is thought to be someone who is headstrong, rash and somewhat violent.  It was a very apt term for these people.  They wanted to make the Ottoman Empire truly Turkish.  They stopped teaching in the schools in Arabic and started noting that you had to speak in Turkish.

They really resented what was known as the mandates, concessions made to other foreign governments in the 1800's.

Certain groups within the Ottoman Empire had foreign sponsors.  For example, the French found themselves to be the sponsors of the Catholic minority of the Ottoman Empire.  The Russians found themselves to be the sponsors of the Eastern Orthodox minority within the Empire.  England  found itself to be the sponsor of the Jewish minority within the Empire.

Also the Russians found themselves to be the sponsors of the Armenian minority within the Empire and very much distrust was bred between the Armenians and the Young Turks.  They lived in the border lands between the Ottoman Empire and the Russian Empire.  Keep in mind when Davis says Russia he is not talking about czarists, he is not talking about Stalinists, he is not talking about communists, he is talking about the czar.  Admittedly the dying years of the Romanoff reign but still imperial Russia to boot.  Every time something tried to be done inside of Turkey you had all these outside influences that you had to deal with.

When the war broke out, Turkey, the Ottoman Empire, sided up on the side of the central powers which was Germany and the Austrian, Hungarian empire.  Immediately because of alliances they found themselves at war with their next  door neighbor to the east, Russia.  Russia was invaded by the Turks in late 1914.  The Turks tried to take some of the major port cities around the Black Sea.  They sent hundreds of thousands of troops and and confronted the imperial Russian army and they got stomped.  They got stomped into the ground and driven back.

The young Turks were rather unpopular anyway because many people thought they should have stayed out of the war so they had to have a scapegoat.  They had to find  find somebody to blame for this defeat.  Since they didn't trust the Armenians anyway seeing as the main government of the Ottoman Empire was in essence a Muslim sultanate, what better group than a group of Christians who had links to their enemies the Russians, to blame.  In 1914 when the Turkish army was destroyed, immediately word was sent out from Istanbul that it was the Armenians to blame because they had failed to support the Ottoman troops.  They had sabotaged supply lines and an uprising was eminent.

All throughout history, nothing scares a government or a people more than a threat of an uprising.  The Romans were terrified of it.  In the south before the Civil War what was the one thing that caused them to raise militias and be terrified constantly?  A servile uprising. 

The newspapers were run by the Young Turks and they put on there pictures of atrocities carried out by Armenians.  They showed piles of rifles  and pistols that were captured from Armenian guerillas.  If you look at these pictures you will notice that they are all model 98 Mauser rifles, the  Mauser 1896 semi-automatic pistols, broom handle Mausers, miraculously just like the ones  sent to them by their friend the Kaiser, not a Russian made gun in the pile, all of them brand new.  But again, pictures are pictures, just like William Randolph Hurst said, "You give me the pictures, I'll give you a war."

They put pictures of atrocities of a poor Turkish soldier who was executed by Armenians.  Evidently it was a staged picture,  all these woman clamoring around the stripped and bloodied body of a Young Turkish soldier, except there is a thing of cloth across his waist.  Can anybody guess why there is a strip of cloth covering his groin?  Because he was an Armenian who was shot by Turkish soldiers.  Turks are not circumcised.  They only figured that out after they took the first picture.  They had to re-stage it again with the cloth.

One of the first things they did because they did not trust the Armenian population was to require every Armenian family to turn in its weapons, all handguns and long guns.  If you didn't have a firearm it didn't matter, you were expected to turn one in.  In many cases these Turkish families would go and pay exorbitant prices to Turkish police officers to purchase nonfunctional weapons so they could turn them back in.  If you refused to turn them in you were imprisoned or beaten.  That was supposed to have been the end of it.

Is anyone familiar with someone saying, "if you'll only give me this one concession, that will be all we will require, we won't ask for anything more," kind of like the Illinois FOID act of 1968 or something like that, not that Davis is biased or anything against that piece of legislation. All Hitler wanted was a little piece, a little piece of Poland, a little piece of France and a little bit of Portugal and Austria by chance.

After they had the Armenians disarmed, they wanted to move them out of the area where they could be subversive and help the Russians because they knew that firearms could be transported easily.  The Russians could be sitting on guns  even after they had confiscated them all.  They wanted to get get them out.  So they invoked the temporary removal act of 1914.  The temporary removal and confiscation act of 1914 said that the government had the power to confiscate the property and possessions of any and all Armenian citizens.  Of course they did, what were the Armenians going to do to stop them.  They didn't have guns anymore.

But then they had the removal act.  The removal act was a relocation for their own good away from the war zone.  Anybody who is a study of Hitler's final solution knows that relocation is a code word.  Relocation means they're going to relocate them to a different existence.  However they didn't do it in the mass produced way that Adolph Hitler did in the 1940's.  They realized that they were living in a desert environment and they had already confiscated all their goods.  So they sent special squads of gendarmes. or military police to round up all the Armenians from the provinces that bordered Russia.

The most infamous one was Harput Province which there is a book written by an American envoy to that province called "The Slaughterhouse Province" with good reason.   They marched the men into the desert.  Their goal was supposed to be to take them down to into Jordan and Syria away from the war.  If you can imagine columns of five or ten thousand civilians at a time,  not given any food, not given any water and quite frequently stripped of all their clothing, being marched through the desert.  This is the same desert, just further north and a little further west where our troops are fighting in Iraq right now.  If you've served in Iraq, you know how hot it gets in that area in the summertime.  They were marched through there and anyone who fell out of formation was killed.  Usually the killings were not merciful.  Seeing as there was a war going on and ammunition was expensive and rare, the number one killing agents were clubs, hatchets and bayonets.  Not only was this a genocide by attrition but a genocide by collusion.  They marched them through Kurdish territory, another minority group who had no love lost for the Armenians or the Turks.

What these young officers did was camp these people in a valley near a Kurdish village.  Then at night they would go into the Kurdish village and find the head man or chief and say, "Look, we have a great opportunity for you.  There are a group of Armenians over the hill.  You can kill them and take anything they have.  We won't stop you.  By the way, if you refuse to do this, following us is a column of Ottoman troops.  You will be seen as disloyal.  What do you think will happen to you?"

It was their choice, kill the Armenians or die yourself.  Of course they chose to kill the Armenians.

In the accounts Davis read in the Slaughterhouse Province, (Davis did this for a class at UIS last semester) some of the atrocities were brutal  and horrendous.  Almost all the victims were stripped before they were killed because under Muslim law it is unclean or improper to wear the clothes of a dead person.  So as long as they were alive when they took their clothes off it was okay to resell them.

They would march them into areas in which there were no other witnesses.  There is a lakeside near the town of Harput where this person followed a group of Armenians out of town one day just to verify because he couldn't believe the horrible stories he heard.  On one short horse ride in one evening, he counted over ten thousand bodies, women had been violated in both the conventional way and also with both clubs and bayonets, people who had been tortured and who had been left to die in the sun.

When all was said and done, in 1914 and 1915, by the  most conservative estimates put out by Turkish government, over 180,000 people died in this manner.  By the figures put out by the Russians and the Armenians and the Red Crescent, which is their version of the Red Cross, between 350,000 and 500,000 people died that one year.

Again this was not the mass production wholesale genocide of Dauchau and Auschwitz.  There was no Treblinka, there were no gas chambers, and there were no crematories.  This was barbarism done one on one, up close and personal with clubs, hatchets and bayonets and all because they were defenseless.  That was the first genocide of the twentieth century.

Keep in mind ladies and gentlemen, what was the first thing they did to the target group, disarmed them!

An armed man is a citizen.

An unarmed man is a subject and you do not want to be subject to the whims of a government that is immoral or does not have your best interests in mind.

Davis said when he was growing up, every time he wouldn't eat his vegetables, his grandmother would invoke the starving Armenians and he had no idea what she was talking about.  He said, "Fine, send them the asparagus, I don't want it!"

But then he found out what she was talking about. 

To this day, the Armenians credit the United States with saving their culture because after it became known, after the war was over and even before the United States entered the war, our missionaries were sending millions of dollars worth of food and clothing into the Syrian desert to help the survivors.

If you have any questions about that go as close as St. Louis.  In 1919, large groups of Armenian survivors moved to St. Louis, Missouri.  They are in the process right now of building a memorial to survivors of the Armenian genocide.

The Turkish government refuses to acknowledge that there was an Armenian genocide.  It was called the Anatolian Refugee Crises.  Usually a refugee is someone who is leaving of their own volition trying to find help.  Someone who is stripped of their clothes and belongings and herded into the desert at gun or bayonet point is not usually considered a refugee.  Other words apply.

Everyone says, "So people are brutal to each other, what's new?"  What if because we failed to learn from this first genocide of the twentieth century, a greater one happened?

In 1939, as Hitler sent the SS divisions into Poland,  he admonished his commanders to, "Kill without mercy, destroy without conscience, after all who today remembers the annihilation of the Armenians?"

If we don't remember history ladies and gentlemen, we are doomed to repeat it.


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