Post by Logan on Jan 25, 2016 13:47:36 GMT -6
SARASOTA - America's largest collective philanthropic effort, at least up to that point in history, was triggered by a dying empire's determination to purge its population of an ethnic minority. The effort failed to stop the wholesale slaughter and deportation of 1.5 million people, but it did manage to save the lives of several hundred thousand, including 130,000 orphans.
The massacre of Armenian Christians by the Ottoman Turks that began in 1915 is often cited as the green light that emboldened other governments to launch extermination campaigns against civilian populations during the 20th century and beyond. On Tuesday evening, an expert on the phenomenon, Susan Billington Harper, will review the record for a Sarasota World Affairs Council audience.
Harper, non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, brings her "Genocide and American Humanitarianism: Lessons from World War I and Its Aftermath" presentation to New College. More than 100 years after the bloody Armenian purges occurred, the issue remains so incendiary in Turkey that the correlation of the word genocide to Armenia is forbidden.
The Turks targeted the Armenians as traitors sympathetic to the non-Muslim Allies when war broke out in 1914. The consequences of what followed created a political hot potato today, based largely on semantics.
Continued at www.heraldtribune.com/article/20160125/ARTICLE/160129751/2416/NEWS?Title=Speaker-addresses-20th-century-genocides .
The massacre of Armenian Christians by the Ottoman Turks that began in 1915 is often cited as the green light that emboldened other governments to launch extermination campaigns against civilian populations during the 20th century and beyond. On Tuesday evening, an expert on the phenomenon, Susan Billington Harper, will review the record for a Sarasota World Affairs Council audience.
Harper, non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, brings her "Genocide and American Humanitarianism: Lessons from World War I and Its Aftermath" presentation to New College. More than 100 years after the bloody Armenian purges occurred, the issue remains so incendiary in Turkey that the correlation of the word genocide to Armenia is forbidden.
The Turks targeted the Armenians as traitors sympathetic to the non-Muslim Allies when war broke out in 1914. The consequences of what followed created a political hot potato today, based largely on semantics.
Continued at www.heraldtribune.com/article/20160125/ARTICLE/160129751/2416/NEWS?Title=Speaker-addresses-20th-century-genocides .