Except itâs not âhundreds of years agoâ. Slavery in the Ottoman empire was made illegal in phases between 1830 and 1871. Thatâs actually a bit later than in the US and Western-Europe and all but a handful of its colonies & protectorates. (X) And in reality the trade in slaves in the Ottoman Empire lasted till the early 19-hundreds.
The Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian genocides all happened between 1914 and 1925, less then one century ago.Â
And @naliya didnât single out the Turks. Hereâs a list of examples she named during the discussion: Â
the Polish being denied the right to exist many times,
the Greekâs genocide at the hands of the Turks,
the oppression of the Irish by the British,
the prejudices against Slavic people,
the many invasion of Finland by Russia,
the possibility of non white people being racist against white people - looking at Turkey again
the North of Europe having disdain for the south,
the Slavs, Balkan countries and more widely the East being regarded as inferior,
ethnic European Muslim groups such as the Albanian, Kosovar or Chechen facing discrimination
the Nazis sending Slavs to death camps
the struggles of non Han Chinese people in China
the conflict between the Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda
the crimes of Imperial Japan
the Ottoman empire, its subjugation and genocide of a large portion of the Balkans.
I understand why, if youâre from Istanbul yourself, the examples of the Turks would catch your eye first, but given the length and scope of this list itâs hard to maintain @naliya has some special fascination for them.Â
PLEASE show me receipts where the Ottomans committed a coordinated campaign to erase the existence of Greeks, Bulgarians, or Balkan people. âSubjugate/genocideâ you wrote, as if those two things are super close in meaning.
Thatâs not what it means. The / means and, or or combined with. It doesnât signify a resemblance in the denotation of the words between which itâs placed. The named peoples experienced subjugation, genocide, or both.
You must realize calling for receipts of planning the Greek genocide is ridiculous. I know of a telegram from the Minister of the Interior ordering an official in Smyrna to force Greeks out of their homes âthrough excesses of all sortsâ if need be, and make it appear as if they leave by their own choice to avoid political complications, but thatâs about it. No wonder, the Turkish governments still rejects claims that Turkey committed any genocide at all, and wonât facilitate research on it. (E.g., remember  Hrant Dink)  Besides, even if they have decided to keep such records laying around, I donât have access to their archives and donât read Turkish.
However, even without documents, itâs possible to show  intend. For example, there are eyewitness accounts, here is a small collection, and here a partly overlapping one (tw: dead bodies for the latter one).  The quotes by Turkish, German and Austro-Hungarian  officials are especially relevant. Besides that, you can show a systematic pattern of coordinated acts, and it seems to me there is. Assyrians, Greeks and Armenians were massacred, deported, marched into the desert, deprived of food and water, subjected to forced labour, robbed and raped by the thousands all over Turkey, and their villages burned. A 150.000 to 300.000 Assyrians, 450.000 to 900.000 Greeks and 1,5 million Armenians were killed, most of the rest expelled.
How likely do you think it is that this happened by coincidence? Especially since, in many cases, the Turkish military was involved?
I literally said they subjugated the shit out of those people, but thatâs not enough I guess?Â
No, you did not. You said: âThe Ottomans mightâve subjugated a lot of people,âŚâ  That sounds as if itâs still under debate, like itâs something that might or might not have happened. It certainly doesnât express how harsh the subjugation was, like âsubjugate the shit outâ does.
 If hearing me criticize PoC some more will make you happy, Iâll do it: The Ottomans were SUPER TERRIBLY BRUTAL to the peoples they conquered. But they did not attempt - and could never have managed - to eliminate those peopleâs existence, which is, hey, the definition of âgenocide.â
No, it is not. This is the international definition of genocide. Youâll see that attempting to eliminate a people completely isnât a requirement to fulfill it, let alone the capability to carry it out.  Intention to destroy a part of  a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, in combination with certain acts, is enough. To quote said source:
â The phrase âin whole or in partâ is important. Perpetrators need not intend to destroy the entire group. Destruction of only part of a group (such as its educated members, or members living in one region) is also genocide. Most authorities require intent to destroy a substantial number of group members â mass murder. But an individual criminal may be guilty of genocide even if he kills only one person, so long as he knew he was participating in a larger plan to destroy the group. â
The International Organisation of Genocide Scholars, who make it their job to study this sort of thing, Â has issued a resolution stating that the Ottoman campaign against Christian minorities of the Empire between 1914 and 1923 constituted a genocide against Armenians, Assyrians, and Pontian and Anatolian Greeks.
In fact they liked having minorities in their empire because they provided great sources of taxes, military conscripts and young boys to turn into janissaries.
That is⌠I donât even know how to put it⌠sadly ironic? Forcibly transferring children of the targeted group to another group is one of the acts explicitly stated as potentially genocidal.
Besides that, the Ottoman Empire lasted from 1299 till 1922. Even if at some point in time, the Ottomans were super happy to have all of those different ethnicities and cultures in their empire, in the beginning of the 20th century that feeling was definitely over. By that time nationalist had come into power who wanted to build a purely Turkish nation state. Â
And it again proves you didnât get the point of the discussion before you posted your first reply. The idea was to argue that whites have not always been in a position of power, and can have racism targeted against them. Bringing up practices of extortion and enslavement as a sort of⌠soothing counterargument?..  is truely baffling.
You seem to have latched onto the Ottomans as a perfect example of PoCsâ racism against white people, but it doesnât quiiiite work because the Ottomans for the most part didnât care what ethnicity or religion someone was, as long as that person could work for them.
I very much doubt that is entirely true. It is true the Ottomans enslaved Europeans, Africans as well as Central-Asians, but that doesnât rule out that they thought themselves superior to other ethnicities. E.g. Ali Suavi (1838â1878), intellectual and member of the Young Ottomans, stated that âTurks are superior to other races in political, military and cultural aspects, and the Turkish language surpasses the European languages in its richness and excellence. And where thereâs one scholar spewing such crap, there usually are more.Â
Religion, perhaps, was more important. Enslaving a freeborn Muslim was illegal (though conversion to Islam didnât automatically make you free). The dhimmy system was in place in the Empire, making Christians and Jews second-class citizens at best. Â DevĹirme (Yearly abduction of pre-adolescent boys as some form of tax) was practiced among the Christian populace the Balkans and Anatolia, not among the Turks themselves.Â
Besides that, the distinction between religion and ethnicity wasnât always clearly made. In the Turkish-Greek population exchange, âGreekâ was taken to mean âof Greek orthodox religionâ, while âTurkishâ was equated with âMuslimâ. What language people spoke or how else they identified themselves didnât matter.Â
Their treatment of the peoples they conquered is still a dark blot on the pages of history, but equating it with genocide is disingenuous at best. Even more gross is accusing the Turks of committing genocide against the Greeks, when in actuality the ethnic cleansing of the beautiful, centuries-old Greek communities of Anatolia was carried out in agreement with the Greek government in exchange for the reciprocal ethnic cleansing of Muslims from Greek lands. And this only after the mainland Greeks attempted an invasion of Ottoman territory so outrageously violent against civilians that it basically shocked Turkish nationalism into existence.Â
The Greek genocide started in 1914 and lasted till 1923.
The Greek invasion of Ottoman territory started on 15 May 1919.Â
The Turkish-Greek population exchange agreement is from January 1923, and it was to take effect on the 1st of May 1923, but  by that time most of the Greeks living in the Ottoman Empire had already fled.Â
The Greek genocide being a reaction to the invasion and done according to the agreement makes no chronological sense. The most I can make of it is that the Greco-Turkish war likely made an already horrendous situation even worse. Â
But besides that- The Greek government expelling a 500,000 poor Turkish sods from their homes doesnât make the Ottoman government killing and expelling Greeks any less reprehensible. It just makes the Greek government assholes too. Anyone can point out how theyâre only reacting to something the other guys did to them first until they end up with Agamenmon as the party responsible for every war ever fought in the region, but retaliating against individuals who arenât the ones who harmed you still is not okay.Â
And even then, the Turks allowed the Greek community of Istanbul to remain, where it survives (although decreased by periodic pogroms) to this day. Some genocide.
The numbers of Greek-Orthodox in the whole of Turkey went from 1.792.206 in 1914, to 119.822 persons in 1927, to about 7,000 in 1978 (X). But donât lose your shit, folks, thereâs one city in the land where theyâre still allowed to exist. Just the occasional pogrom, no big deal. And look how well theyâre doing:
Finally, letâs not forget the human cost paid by Muslims left behind when the Ottomans lost territory. The Bulgarians, Greeks, Macedonians and Serbs killed or expelled hundreds of thousands of Muslims - Turkish or not - in their attempts to destroy all trace of Ottoman culture and build ethnically âpureâ states. Turks are far from the only ones who refuse to admit the atrocities of their ancestors (and Iâm side-eyeing the only two examples you gave being Turkey and Japan). I have never heard of a European country apologizing to the descendants of those Muslim refugees, and honestly I suspect theyâd rather die than do so, because âthey had to do it to save the motherlandâ and ânational unityâ and other nationalist wargl blargl. Do those crimes not count because the Ottomans conquered those people first?Â
As I said, retaliating against innocent people is in no way okay, ever. Obviously, that goes for Balkan Muslims too. If anyone tries to trivialize or excuse what was done to them, you would be right to call them out.
However, that was not the case here. Though not specifically referring to this specific period, @naliya  named the Albanians, Kosovars and Chechens as victims of racism several times, so she seems quite aware of the (long-term) negative impact of the withdrawal of the Ottoman Empire on Muslims in the Balkan.
More to the point, the discussion wasnât about taking a complete inventory of all past atrocities in Europe. It was about how racism in Europe isnât a simple one-way street running from âwhite peopleâ towards âpeople of colorâ, and how not all white people at all times and places have been in a position of power. Â Bringing up instances that do not help building that argument is kind of pointless in this context.
As for the Armenians⌠the Turks are actually super guilty of attempting to erase the Armenians and their history from Anatolia, something that theyâre still more or less doing to the Kurds nowadays. Itâs a fucking tragedy. These are absolutely racist crimes, and the Turkish people should absolutely take responsibility for them, but with the currently jingoistic political climate here⌠well, Iâm not optimistic.
Anyway. I agree with you that pretty much every group has atrocities to answer for in their history, and we should call them all out - white and PoC - equally. But you also have to admit that these days the power balance between white European countries and Turkey has done a 180 since the days of the Ottomans, and nowadays itâs the Turks who have to deal with a lot of racism from Europeans. So yeah, I took issue with your singling out of Ottoman crimes hundreds of years ago as an example to back up your argument, when the current situation affecting actual living people is the opposite.
Agreeing with you that atrocities should be called out, no matter what groep commited them. But you canât possibly cover all atrocities in every post, so youâll have to pick your examples to match your subject. The subject here wasât the Ottomans or the Balkans, but the idea of racism/ethnicity in Europe.
As I see it, there were 2 reasons the Ottomans/Turks were brought up :
First, to provide an example for the point that âinsisting that white people always held power and were never oppressed erases a huge part of European history, erases the sufferings of many people/countriesâ. So yes, @naliya is speaking about history, and explicitly acknowledges that.
Second, as an example to illustrate that non white people can be racist against white ones. No-one in this discussion is denying Turks can be and are discriminated against in Europe, but the point was that the other way around exists too. Which point still stands. Thereâs an entire Wikipedia article on racism in Turkey, full of examples. The most extreme example I can think of is the Grey Wolves, but I have witnessed other, more mundane examples, like the often met âAll western/Dutch/white/etc women are whoresâ; or the parents of the broom in a mixed marriage expressing extreme disappointment at his choice of wife because they felt he was marrying beneath him.
(As a side note, I didnât think âWe should have thought all you guys to speak Turkish when you were still our slaves. If we did, I probably wouldnât have to learn English now. â from my Turkish to My Pakistani co-worker was very funny either.)
By the way, to say there has been a 180 degree turn in power balance since the Ottoman empire is a gross exaggeration. The Ottoman Empire was severely weakened in the 19th century, but Turkey today is not a powerless, let alone a conquered nation. Every source I check for it places Turkey in the top 20 of the world in economic power (X, X), and in the top ten in military power  (X, X). Itâs GPB per capita (X) may be lagging behind at a 61th place, but thatâs still better than some eastern European and Balkan counties. Plus, the unemployment rate, especially youth unemployment, is a good bit lower than in the EU (X, X).
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