Whew

[anghraine]

I got into a debate with a friend that touched on the Ottoman genocides, I went to do some research to make sure I was remembering details correctly, fell down a rabbit hole of research, and wow I'm not sleeping tonight.

The conversational aside was specifically about the assassination of Talaat Pasha, which also happened on March 15th. My birthday! I mean, not my birthday at the time, obviously—I would not be born until many decades later—but it is certainly a day for the annals of history. I cherish and respect Tumblr's hatred of Julius Caesar, but he's got nothing on Talaat Pasha. I wish I believed in hell specifically so I could believe he's burning in it.

(Fun fact: my grandmother, who is Greek, used to hint darkly about some misdeed of "the Turks" that she's still got a grudge about, and for years, I thought she was just being vaguely Islamophobic. I did eventually get the impression of something happening not long before she was born, maybe. But I was still really unsure about any details until I was digging through some articles on a trip during my master's program and discovered that "vague misdeeds" were entire fucking genocides that my own country, the USA, did not find it politically convenient to acknowledge until years later.)

Comments

[elperian]

I honestly think my first introduction to this knowledge was through My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which 1) speaks to the importance of people making art about their own cultures and 2) speaks to the absolute non-coverage of the genocide in U.S. news growing up.

[anghraine]

Yuppp. I remember reading about anti-Greek pogroms in Istanbul in the 50s (i.e. the decade when my father was born) and realizing that ... like, this stuff could have happened to my own grandmother (someone I know personally, who is still alive) and her parents if they'd just happened to live somewhere else. The USA has obviously been much kinder to us, but also would not acknowledge these things for what they were because of the value of Turkish airspace to US military tactics (iirc Biden is the first president to acknowledge any of the Ottoman genocides). It was extremely upsetting and disorienting, really!