Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821-1922 [Hardcover]

The Muslim loss is an important part of the history of the Turks. It was they who most felt the consequences of nationalism and imperialism. At a time when the Ottoman Empire was struggling to reform itself and survive as a modern state, it was first forced to drain its limited resources to defend its people from slaughter by its enemies, then to try to care for the refugees who streamed into the empire when those enemies triumphed. After the Ottoman Empire was destroyed in World War I, the Turks of what today is Turkey faced the same problems - invasion, refugees. and mortality. The Turks survived, but their nation was greatly affected by the events of the past century. The new Turkish Republic was a nation of immigrants whose citizens came from Bulgaria, Greece, Yugoslavia. Armenia, Georgia, Russia, Ukraine, and elsewhere. Like the Ottoman Empire before it, Turkey faced all the difficulties of integrating an immigrant population and coping with massive wartime destruction while it was trying to modernize and survive. The challenges of that struggle shaped the character of the Turkish Republic.

Despite the historical importance of Muslim losses, it is not to be found in textbooks. Textbooks and histories that describe massacres of Bulgarians. Armenians, and Greeks have not mentioned corresponding massacres of Turks.

The exile and mortality of the Muslims is not known. This goes against modern practice in other areas of history. It has rightly become unthinkable today to write of American expansion without consideration of the brutality shown to Native Americans. The carnage of the Thirty Years' War must be a part of any history of
religious change in Europe. Historians cannot write of imperialism without mention of slaughter of Africans in the Congo or of Chinese in the Opium Wars. Yet, in the West, the history of the suffering of the Balkan, Caucasian. and Anatolian Muslims has never been written or understood. The history of the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Anatolia has been written without mention of one of its main protagonists, the Muslim population. The "traditional" view of the history of the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Anatolia is less than complete, if not misleading, because the histories of the Ottoman minority groups are taken out of context. A major part of that context is the suffering of Muslims, which took place in the same regions and at the same time as the sufferings of Christians, and often transcended them. The few who have attempted to alter the traditional view have been derided as "revisionists "as if revision were an academic sin and contextual historical accuracy irrelevant. In fact, revising one-sided history and changing deficient traditional wisdom is the business of the historian, and in few areas of history is revision so needed as in the history of the Ottoman peoples. The history that results from the process of revision is an unsettling one, for it tells the story of Turks as victims, and this is not the role in which they are usually cast. It does not present the traditional image of the Turk as victimizer, never victim, that has continued in the histories of America and Europe long after it should have been discarded with other artifacts of nineteenth-century racism.

If you want to make an informal statistical research about the events of 1915 and who made Genocide, ask a Turk and an Armenian about how did their ancestors die. One clever Armenian made it in the Turkish forum. Almost all the Armenians had victims from their family, and only one Turk declared the same. If you are a denialist read this book. If you want to learn more about the events of 1915 read some other Turks (or Turkish origin) Historians. I recommend you Taner Acsam, Halil Berktay and Fekrit Adanir for starting. They are Turks but they dont agree with Turkish national myths.