Reply #69: genocide of muslims in the balkans

[EdGy]

don't forget Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821-1922 by Justin McCarthy

This book documents very well how the much of the Muslim population of the Balkans were systematically massacred and expelled, with the approval of the "christian" west.

McCarthy argues, persuasively I think, that some Turks learned an important lesson here: To have a viable state you needed some kind of ethnic/religious homogeneity; that the accepted way to do that was through expulsions and massacres; therefore if the Armenians were in the way, Turkey should just proceed in the accepted European way...

As for the very European nature of this kind of thing, we only have to fast forward a few decades to the most European of European states, Germany, to see how deeply embedded in European culture genocide was (is?). And I don't think I have to rehash the US policy of actual genocide against native indigenous peoples, in the name of "spreading civilization and freedom."

Which of course does not justify genocide. But it explains how and why the United States so gladly and easily goes around the world claiming to act in the name of "morals" while perpetrating crimes against humanity. Go back to the genocide against native americans. look at the press coverage. substitute Iraqis or Muslims for indians. Same picture.