h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I do not have a Turkish or Armenian background and I do think that the entry brings one part of history to life: the killing of Armenians.

It does look a little anti-Turkish though, without a link to the many examples of Turkic and other islamic peoples being massacred and expelled from Christian countries in the Caucusus and the Balkans.

As in many of these situations, Armenian christians had long standing grievances against the State in which they lived. Part of the background to the massacres was the decision by Armenians to use the First World War to help Russia to invade the Ottoman Empire. Turks saw this as a strong betrayal by Armenians, who, though Christian, were Ottoman nationals. This marked the end of a very long standing tolerance for christianity in the Ottoman Empire, based on Islamic requirements that moslems, christians, jews and zoroastrians (the old Persian religion) should all be respected.

After the first world war in which the Ottomon Empire sided with Germany, the great powers all but elimited any place for Turkic peoples to live. Eastern Anatolia (the heartland of modern Turkey) was turned into an Armenian state, although number of Turks in Eastern Anatolia considerably outnumbered the minority Armenian population and Greece was permitted to invade Western Turkey as far as the present Turkish capital. In Europe: Bulgaria, Greece and other countries created the conditions which allowed civilians in the Balkans to massacre Turks. These atrocities were covered in the European and American press of the time.

There was an explicitly pro-Christian and anti-Islamic policy by the European Powers and Russia, and against the letter of American brokered principles about the way in which people should be governed. These historical policies are very relevant to the debate about whether Turkey may one day join the European Union because Europe's history is largely a christian one, and includes some shameful episodes of crusades, persecution of moslems, their expulsion from christian countries and of failures to protect European muslims, including Turkic peoples, from rampaging mobs.

If we are all to move on, then we need to make sure there are balanced discissions about such issues and the Armenians massacres, which ensure they are not denied, but which also show excesses committed against Turks by Armenians and many others.

A further issue that could be linked with the story is the relatively modern (1970s and 1980s) history of ASALA (if memory serves, the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia). This was the Marxist-Leninist Armenian terrorist group formed in 1975 with stated intention to compel the Turkish Government to acknowledge publicly its alleged responsibility for the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915, pay reparations, and cede territory for an Armenian homeland. Led by Hagop Hagopian until he was assassinated in Athens in April 1988.

It carried out bombing and assassination attacks against Turkish targets and attacked French and Swiss targets to force release of imprisoned Armenians. It bombed US airline offices in Western Europe in the early 1980s and bombed Orly Airport in Paris in 1983, killing eight killed wounding 55.

Without excusing any one act of barbarism, I am uncertain of the wisdom of linking Turks with the Nazi Party of Adolf Hitler (Turkey was neutral in World War 2) or of implying a one way stream of atrocity by the Ottoman Empire against christians, when the Turkic peoples who formerly lived in a wide area have themselves suffered much at the hands of christians and Turks only narrowly escaped from becoming a homeless diaspora themselves by the military action of Attaturk in the 1920s, which forced first French and then wider recognition of the right for Turks to have a homeland in the same way that had been permitted the German inhabitants of the other defeated empire in World War I, the Austro-Hungarian Empire.