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[Order Anni Cyrus’ new book, The Architecture of Jihad: HERE. And register for Anni Cyrus’ May 27th Evening Reception and Talk in LA: HERE.]
April 24, 1915
Constantinople, capital of the Ottoman Empire.
The city is still dark when the knocking begins.
It is not loud. A firm hand on a wooden door carries through a quiet home. A wife wakes first, then a husband, then children who do not yet understand why their parents are moving faster than usual.
Outside, there are lists.
Police units move from house to house with names already chosen. Writers, teachers, priests, editors, and community leaders. Armenian men whose voices carry beyond their own homes. They are told to come with them.
No charges. No explanation. No time.
A coat is pulled on. Shoes are slipped into place. A final look at a room that still holds the warmth of sleep. Some families follow to the doorway. Some to the street. Some stand still, hoping that stillness might delay what is already happening.
It does not.
By the end of the day, hundreds of Armenian intellectuals had been taken. Within weeks, most will be gone.
This is the beginning of a coordinated campaign by the Ottoman government, controlled by the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP, the Young Turks), led by Talaat Pasha, Enver Pasha, and Djemal Pasha, against Armenian Christians across the empire.
Orders spread across the empire. Armenians are told they are being relocated. Villages are emptied. Families are pushed onto roads with no destination, meant for survival. Men are separated first. Women and children follow.
The journeys are long. Water runs out. Feet split open. Voices grow quieter with each mile. There are gendarmes and escorts enforcing the movement. There are officials who sign the orders. There are neighbors who watch from a distance and say nothing.
What unfolds does not end in days or weeks.
It continues for years.
From 1915 through the early 1920s, an estimated one to one and a half million Armenians were killed. Hundreds of thousands more were displaced, scattered across deserts, across borders, across continents, separated from everything they once called home.
Entire communities disappeared.
Those who survived speak of starvation, exposure, forced marches, and violence carried out under authority.
This was not an accident of war; it was policy.
And yet, not everyone accepted it.
Some saw what was happening and refused to become part of it. They did not have armies. They did not stop what was coming. But they left something behind that could not be erased.
They left a record.
Henry Morgenthau Sr., the U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, was in Constantinople when the reports began to arrive. Deportations, disappearances, and entire regions being cleared of Armenian Christian populations.
He was told it was an internal matter. He was told not to interfere.
He did not accept that.
In his communications to Washington, he described what he was witnessing without softening it. He called it a campaign of extermination. He met with Ottoman officials and challenged their explanations. He warned that what was being done would not be forgotten.
He could not stop it, but when he later returned to the United States, he published what he had witnessed, ensuring that what was done could not be denied or erased.
Johannes Lepsius, a German pastor and humanitarian, lived in Germany, an ally of the Ottoman Empire. Silence would have been the easier path.
He chose to document.
Lepsius gathered testimonies, collected evidence, and published accounts of what was happening to Armenian Christians. His work exposed the gap between official narratives and lived reality. It placed the truth in front of a world that preferred not to see it.
There were consequences. German authorities blocked his publications, confiscated copies, and warned him to stop. He was pushed out of official circles and left to continue his work largely on his own.
But he continued, knowing that without documentation, denial becomes easy.
Armin T. Wegner, a German soldier and medic in World War I, a prolific author, and a human rights activist, was stationed in the Ottoman Empire during the deportations and saw the lines of Armenian Christians moving through dust and heat. There was no order to it. No destination meant for survival. Just movement without choice.
He had been instructed by military authorities not to document anything.
He ignored the order.
Wegner hid a camera and took photographs whenever he could. Starving families. Children too weak to walk. Faces that would have disappeared without record.
German authorities discovered what he had done. His images were confiscated. He was detained and ordered to stop.
He did not.
He carried surviving photographs out of the region and later published them, preserving evidence that could not be denied.
Years later, when people asked how something like this could happen, those images answered without argument.
As deportations began, he initially believed they were temporary wartime measures.
He later recognized that the objective was the destruction of the Armenian population.
As governor of Aleppo, he deliberately delayed deportation orders and allowed Armenian civilians to remain in place longer than directed. Through these delays and refusals, he was able to save thousands of lives. For this, he is often referred to as the “Turkish Oskar Schindler.”
When he was transferred to Konya, he continued to resist implementation, repeatedly sending telegrams to central authorities requesting shelter, protection, and reconsideration of the policy.
His objections were rejected.
He traveled to Constantinople to present a formal protest directly to the leadership of the Committee of Union and Progress. He was given assurances that deportations in his province would be halted.
They were not.
By the time he returned to Konya, large portions of the Armenian population had already been deported.
He continued to refuse full compliance.
On October 3, 1915, he was removed from his post for defying deportation orders.
Within three days of his removal, approximately 10,000 remaining Armenians in the region were deported, demonstrating how his presence had slowed and partially restrained the process.
In later statements, he described the deportations as a deliberate process of annihilation and publicly opposed the actions of the government.
He died in Istanbul in 1926. Thousands attended his funeral, including both Turks and Armenians.
There were many others who stood up, even though they knew they were in the minority. They could not stop what was coming, but they still chose to stand by their conscience and do what was right.
History knows the Armenian Genocide because of people like them. Knowledge alone does not leave a record; action does.
Documents, testimonies, and the truth exist only because someone refused to stay silent.
We remember the lives taken during this genocide, and we honor those who stood up regardless of the consequences.
And we pray that one day human society will stop allowing history to repeat itself, because the real heroes are not forgotten by history; they are forgotten by people.
My father was a survivor of the Genocide. His father died in the Genocide. His grandfather was beheaded earlier. His father corresponded with Jesse Jackson in the American consulate in Aleppo almost daily and gave reports of the situation of the Armenians. Which Jackson sent off to Morgenthau. As a pastor in Aleppo he saved thousands of Armenians from death either by the underground operations of himself and associates or through his reports to the consul. I read some of Morgenthau’s account–The Genocide was the worst crime in history. The Turks were absolutely barbaric and cruel. Thank God there is a final judgment. The millions of stories are a river of tears.
There were multiple Armenian genocides.
The muslim tribes are and have always been savages. They are only ruled by monarchy and fear. If they are not in fear they look for someone to oppress and kill. “me against my brother, my brother and I against the family, my family against the tribe, my tribe against the world” Expecting westernized behavior is ridiculous.
In the 1960s, our family became friends with an Armenian, who lived with a Greek family, in our church. He told me why he came to America — because of the genocide. Out of his family, only he and his uncle survived.
Think this couldn’t happen in Our Nation? Give the DEMOcrats full control and watch! Now they might not gather you up and march you somewhere but they’ll surely make LIVING such a nightmare and you’ll be a prisoner to their political power!
Several years ago I was reading reports and watching YouTube videos of FEMA camps and a store of 30,000 guillotines. I believed those reports then and I believe them now.
It is mainly due to President Trump that the FEMA camps are not full and the guillotines are not in constant use. The Demonrats must not be allowed to return to office of their killing sprees will commence.
As divided as this country is he who believes it couldn’t happen here is delusional. There are representatives already saying they will hunt down government agents once the hard left takes power. After Biden and Chris Wray’s Catholic hate and Chris Wray comments about white domestic terrorism the greatest threat one should take note.
Only Turks could make Nazi’s look “kind” by comparison: a quick death versus by being marched into the desert, beaten, raped, their children marched to death beside them.
“It is as important to one’s psychological health and well-being to do harm to those who do harm to you as it is to do well to those who do well by you.”—Nietzsche
After the war, Armenian squads hunted down every Turk they could who was part of the horror and executed them.
Nietzsche illuminates that “Turning the other cheek” destroys the soul.
I love Israeli determination to avenge the atrocities that the latest generations of Muslims inflict upon them. Anything less assures that this magnificent people will eventually perish from the Earth.
Did they have any luck? Seriously? Are you talking about hunting them down in Armenian territory or Turkey and how many did they get? Small comfort when they killed 1.5 million.
I do not know the full story, but know they tracked them down in hiding all over Europe and executed them.
Infinitesimal consolation, but some tiny modicum of “justice” (whatever the hell that is).
In a cosmic sense, we are each that life-generated energy from G-d Almighty becoming mankind. Like the incomprehensible variety and beauty written into our universe and demonstrated in G-d’s exceptional creativity, we can only actualize our human desires for being considered beautiful or most beautiful by comparing ourselves to others. The spiritual spark of our humanity is divine and G-d values it in each one of us as unique.
It is only through our self-obsessed narcissism that we have continued the arbitrary marginalization and murder of entire peoples. Starting with Cain, we seek our favored status by succumbing to our jealous desires through first denigrating and then mercilessly massacring the lives of others. As the ground of our once-holy planet has continued being saturated with innocent blood, we, like Cain, continue to replicate false arguments in violation of G-d’s laws. The Ten Commandments teach us the deceptions implicit in jealousy, envy, coveting what does not belong to us, destroying the reputation of another others through gossip and bearing false witness as well as our direct disregard for life in deliberately murdering others. These rebellions in worshipping ourselves through the genocidal destruction of other groups of people will never accomplish the ultimate goal of preferential placement before G-d. As originally demonstrated, Cain’s jealous murder of his brother only hid Cain from himself, not from G-d.
Our repeated onslaughts in slaughtering others, will always result in unintended consequences governed by the laws of G-d. The underlying premise of exceptionality through savagery is destroyed by the witness of those for whom life is precious and their conscience demands action. These are our heroes and heroines in each generation facing down these malignancies and drawing our attention to how our choices cause this repeated shedding of innocent blood. While we attempt to discredit and expunge these truths from the reality of our human record, G-d NEVER forgets. Knowing the beginning from the end, He continues witnessing those in every generation who will stand, like watchman on the wall, for truth and the preservation of life by following G-d and not man.
If only we would face this eternal truth and start living in obedience to it, our world would start healing and being repaired.
I like the explanation Taylor Sheridan uses ( the character probably mis-uses) for its practicality and defining the problem in terms that allow a more precise dissection. The head of the Dutton family talks about when populations reach a certain size, problems in governance happens, It’s relatively small, around 500, but after that point, that is when humanities’ horrific excesses start. OK, fiction even if there is a study, just from an inability to model something scientific, but it asks the right question, Is it leaders with a bunch of sheep following them that is the problem or is it all people in general? Something about human nature or a product of individuals?
Whenever there are power pigs, people who are OCD about ruling others and can’t live without power, there are always horrific excesses.
When belonging becomes more important than the truth, only a few will rise up carrying that banner. The rest will seek solace at the expense of those becoming the target.
Bernard Lewis on the Armenian “Genocide”..https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qG70UWESfu4
There were others who witnessed the Armenian Genocide – see genocide1915.org/ogonvittnen_missionar.html though I realise that there is a limit to how many can be documented in a single article. And it would have been worse – Demos Shakarian’s book “The Happiest People On Earth”, describes how a prophet warned many Armenians, with the result that they emigrated to the US between 1900-1915.
The Anatolian Genocide is even less well-known than its Armenian counterpart hellenicresearchcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Final-PP-2.pdf
The Armenian historian Vahakn Dadrian found Turkish archival sources showing that when Turkey was allied with Imperial Germany in World War I, the Germans also played a role in the genocide. If I remember correctly, some of his research was published in the academic journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
I left a reply and it was cancelled by Front Page. 2nd or 3rd time. Don’t know why? Nothing
in it was offensive-in fact I was very complimentary to the author
After witnessing the Armenian genocide, Sarah Aaronsohn created the NILI spy ring to assist the British in defeating Turkey. She was eventually caught by the Turks, tortured for three days and killed herself rather than reveal any information.