4 ms·

Strange how such a long article about imperialism in the middle east does not mention the Ottoman empire even once. An empire that genocided 300,000-900,000 Gre

by MikeUt 5y ago

Strange how such a long article about imperialism in the middle east does not mention the Ottoman empire even once. An empire that genocided 300,000-900,000 Greeks a mere 56 years before Said's book was published [1]. Surely it played a large role in the West's perception of the Orient, which is what the field of Orientalism purports to study. It's telling that the cover of his book [2] is The Snake Charmer painting, instead of, for example, The Slave Market [3], by the same artist, showing a very different relationship of the West with the Orient, than the one portrayed by Said. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_genocide [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism_(book) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Slave_Market_(G%C3%A9r%C3%B4me_painting) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Slave_Market_(G%C3%A9r%C3%...

dang 5y ago
Please don't use HN to perpetuate flamewar talking points. It really doesn't matter what your position is—that stuff is predictable, nasty, and boring. As if we need to perpetuate war against the Ottoman Empire here. Good grief! Edit: this is obviously some sort of agenda since you've posted like this before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27228927 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27228927. This is not what HN is for. If you do it again we will ban you, so please conduct these battles elsewhere.
- MikeUt 5y ago
  I must admit I'm not sure how one would distinguish an agenda, from simply a viewpoint that has remained unchanged. My education in history differs from most of HNs, so I find it difficult to let slide a field of study that omits half of the history it claims to represent. Nevertheless, if you insist, I'll refrain from commenting on this topic entirely in the future (I would offer to comment in a non-flamewar style, but if my above post counts as flamewar, I don't think there's a way to express my perspective without it).
  - juanani 5y ago
    Anything that challenges popular (Western narratives) is flagged. I am looking for a non-Western HN, pls if anyone knows a place that isn't overrun by brainwashed mods.
  - dang 5y ago
    By agenda I suppose I mean that these comments are repeatedly prosecuting some sort of battle, and battles on divisive topics produce flamewar, which is not what we want here. When the topic is longstanding racial and religious grievance, the flames of hell burn particularly hot. Look at what your comment led to downthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27853738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27853738. What a nightmare. So yes, please don't post any more comments like this.
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      Feels a bit wrong to blame MikeUT for the post of some Atatürkian asshole.
      - dang 5y ago
        You seem to be making the deeply flawed assumption that only one side can be breaking the site guidelines at a time.
        CRConrad 5y ago
        No, why do you think so? I'm talking about the apparent apportioning of opprobrium in your comments.
        dang 5y ago
        I'm a bit out of date with this thread so I no longer know which other user you're talking about. My point is simply that I responded to MikeUT about MikeUT's comment. I wasn't blaming MikeUT for anything anyone else did—nor would I use the word "blame" in the first place. Everyone here needs to follow the site guidelines regardless of what other users do. Edit: if you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27853738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27853738, we banned that account for trolling.
cheif-lama 5y ago
I am done with my k8s deployment so let us deal with your childish comments, bottom-up. As Brandolini's law states that it takes a lot more effort to refute nonsense, perhaps this is why nobody entertained you. I would have expected a bit of googling before parroting this non-sense. If you had read the book, you would have known why these images of slave markets come from the imagination of a French man who painted these while strolling on Champs Elysees. In this video [1] Jonathan Lyons goes into detail about how these images sprung out of the imagination of an orientalist whose head Islam was living rent-free, at the time Europe was coming out of dark ages and Muslim civilization of decedent. Good watch, if you are not a reading type. Now ask yourself (I know that is a big ask), If Ottomans wanted to kill Greek, they could have done that during all that time when they were ascendant and Greeks were kissing curly tips of their shoes? Why wait till they became "Sick man of Europe to kill Greeks". These claims of genocide are similar to the claim of the Armenian genocide. They are politically motivated, rooted in the racist past and nostalgia - that will only become more pungent with time. It is in the same vein as many Americans, for whom history started on 9/11. Anywho, watch the video [8] of real historian, Bernard Lewis, talking about the Armenian genocide: “The Armenians want to benefit from both worlds. On the one hand, they speak with pride of their struggle against the Ottoman despotism, while on the other hand, they compare their tragedy to the Jewish Holocaust. I do not accept this. I do not say that the Armenians did not suffer terribly. But I find enough cause for me to contain their attempts to use the Armenian massacres to diminish the worth of the Jewish Holocaust and to relate to it instead as an ethnic dispute.” Wikipedia is heavily edited by every tom, dick and harry with agenda. Take Israeli Hasbara that pays soldiers to edit Wikipedia pages, and you don't need much to twist things. Here Wikipedia characterizes the death of 2,000,000 Muslims as persecution [2, 2a]. Same Wikipedia calls killing of 10 million African "atrocities", where Dutch King [3] used theirs and their children's body parts as currency and hauled them off to Europe like animals to be put in zoos. Is this a coincidence? I think not, this pattern of dumbing down is very common when dealing with brown or black people [10]. This is what Voltaire, a rabid, anti-Islam, has to say about the Ottomans: "Let us get out of our grooves and study the rest of the globe. The Sultan governs in peace twenty million people of different religions; two hundred thousand Greeks live in security in Constantinople...The empire is full of Jacobites, Nestorians, and Monothelites; it contains Copts, Christians of St. John, Jews and Hindoos. The annals of Turkey do not record any revolt instigated by any of these religions." [Reference: Voltaire, Toleration and Other Essays, translated with an introduction by Joseph McCabe (New York and London: Knickerbocker Press, 1912), 23] So what changed? What ticked off Ottomans? Well, the bit that says all this happened "during World War I and its aftermath (1914–1922)", when Greek partisans before and after the occupation of Izmir killed their neighbours, raping them and taking their property. Just like what Serbians did to Bosnians recently. It seems like it is in the DNA of Europeans [9]. > "In the chaos, looting of Turkish houses began, and by the end of the day three to four hundred Turks had been killed." Not to mention what Greeks did to ethnic Greek Muslims and Slavs living in Greek territories. There are still pockets of these Muslims left, and they are regularly denied basic rights even till today. Keep in mind the treatment of Greek and Armenian came at the heal of Ottoman contraction, with some of these refugees still vividly recalling their treatment in former Ottoman territories [4]. Surrounded by allies, Ottomans were not going to give way to revolt from the heart of their homeland, it would have been suicide. The Greek and Armenian partisans didn't just kill Ottomans Muslim citizens randomly, but also their compatriots who stood up against them, most famous was the Orthodox priest who warned the Armenian partisans against siding with Russian during world war. He was no friend of Ottomans, but he knew this can't end up good, he was right. Your incredulity and hypocrisy stem from the same cesspool which inspired the generation of your forefather before you with poems like White man's Burden [5], or still doing till today. You rather believe that Muslims under Sharia would allow slave markets of beautiful women paraded naked, the same Shaira that punishes public nudity. But these are just projections of basal desires rather than reality. You can't have your cake and eat it too. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoN0sTesaDY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoN0sTesaDY [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Muslims_during_the_Ottoman_contraction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Muslims_during_... [2a] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMqqfP3dBX0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMqqfP3dBX0 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocities_in_the_Congo_Free_State https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocities_in_the_Congo_Free_S... [4]: https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryPorn/comments/i5agxj/a_turkish_peasant_performs_his_last_prayer_before/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryPorn/comments/i5agxj/a_turki... [5]: https://www.amazon.ca/Slavery-Islam-Jonathan-C-Brown/dp/1786076357 https://www.amazon.ca/Slavery-Islam-Jonathan-C-Brown/dp/1786... [6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Man%27s_Burden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Man%27s_Burden [7] The Sultan's Renegades: Christian-European Converts to Islam and the Making of the Ottoman Elite, 1575-1610 [8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qG70UWESfu4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qG70UWESfu4 [9] https://www.juancole.com/2013/04/terrorism-other-religions.html https://www.juancole.com/2013/04/terrorism-other-religions.h... [10] Bias in Media coverage of various racial groups * Kearns, Erin M., Allison E. Betus, and Anthony F. Lemieux. "Why do some terrorist attacks receive more media attention than others?." Justice Quarterly 36.6 (2019): 985-1022. * Stone, Meighan. "Snake and stranger: Media coverage of muslims and refugee policy." Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy (2017). * Silva, J. R., Duran, C., Freilich, J. D., & Chermak, S. M. (2020). Addressing the myths of terrorism in America. International Criminal Justice Review, 30(3), 302-324. * Rao, Kumar, Carey Shenkman, and K. Ahmed. "Equal treatment? Measuring the legal and media responses to ideologically motivated violence in the United States." Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (2018). * Naureckas, Jim. 2017. A Lesson Media Missed about the Dangers of Scapegoating. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. Shier, Allie, and Eran Shor. 2016. Shades of Foreign Evil: ‘Honour Killings’ and ‘Family Murders’ in the Canadian Press. Violence Against Women 22: 1163. * Jiwani, Yasmin. 2014. A Clash of Discourses: Femicides or Honour Killings? In Re-Imagining the Other: Culture, Media, and Wester-Muslim Intersections. Berlin: Springer, p. 122. * Powell, Kimberly A. 2011. Framing Islam: An Analysis of US Media Coverage of Terrorism Since 9/11. Communication Studies 62: 90 * Mishra, Smeeta. 2007. ‘Saving’ Muslim Women and Fighting Muslim Men: Analysis of Representations in the New York Times. Global Media Journal 6: 1–20 * Naurath, N. "Most Muslim Americans See No Justification for Violence. Retrieved May 6, 2018." (2011). * Views of Violence: What drives public acceptance and rejection of attacks on civilians 10 years after 9/11 (Gallup Poll) * American Muslim Poll: Politics, Priorities and Prejudice in 2016 - Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU).

by MikeUt 5y ago

dang 5y ago

Please don't use HN to perpetuate flamewar talking points. It really doesn't matter what your position is—that stuff is predictable, nasty, and boring. As if we need to perpetuate war against the Ottoman Empire here. Good grief! Edit: this is obviously some sort of agenda since you've posted like this before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27228927 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27228927. This is not what HN is for. If you do it again we will ban you, so please conduct these battles elsewhere.

MikeUt 5y ago
I must admit I'm not sure how one would distinguish an agenda, from simply a viewpoint that has remained unchanged. My education in history differs from most of HNs, so I find it difficult to let slide a field of study that omits half of the history it claims to represent. Nevertheless, if you insist, I'll refrain from commenting on this topic entirely in the future (I would offer to comment in a non-flamewar style, but if my above post counts as flamewar, I don't think there's a way to express my perspective without it).
- juanani 5y ago
  Anything that challenges popular (Western narratives) is flagged. I am looking for a non-Western HN, pls if anyone knows a place that isn't overrun by brainwashed mods.
- dang 5y ago
  By agenda I suppose I mean that these comments are repeatedly prosecuting some sort of battle, and battles on divisive topics produce flamewar, which is not what we want here. When the topic is longstanding racial and religious grievance, the flames of hell burn particularly hot. Look at what your comment led to downthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27853738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27853738. What a nightmare. So yes, please don't post any more comments like this.
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    Feels a bit wrong to blame MikeUT for the post of some Atatürkian asshole.
    - dang 5y ago
      You seem to be making the deeply flawed assumption that only one side can be breaking the site guidelines at a time.
      - CRConrad 5y ago
        No, why do you think so? I'm talking about the apparent apportioning of opprobrium in your comments.
        dang 5y ago
        I'm a bit out of date with this thread so I no longer know which other user you're talking about. My point is simply that I responded to MikeUT about MikeUT's comment. I wasn't blaming MikeUT for anything anyone else did—nor would I use the word "blame" in the first place. Everyone here needs to follow the site guidelines regardless of what other users do. Edit: if you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27853738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27853738, we banned that account for trolling.

cheif-lama 5y ago

I am done with my k8s deployment so let us deal with your childish comments, bottom-up. As Brandolini's law states that it takes a lot more effort to refute nonsense, perhaps this is why nobody entertained you. I would have expected a bit of googling before parroting this non-sense. If you had read the book, you would have known why these images of slave markets come from the imagination of a French man who painted these while strolling on Champs Elysees. In this video [1] Jonathan Lyons goes into detail about how these images sprung out of the imagination of an orientalist whose head Islam was living rent-free, at the time Europe was coming out of dark ages and Muslim civilization of decedent. Good watch, if you are not a reading type. Now ask yourself (I know that is a big ask), If Ottomans wanted to kill Greek, they could have done that during all that time when they were ascendant and Greeks were kissing curly tips of their shoes? Why wait till they became "Sick man of Europe to kill Greeks". These claims of genocide are similar to the claim of the Armenian genocide. They are politically motivated, rooted in the racist past and nostalgia - that will only become more pungent with time. It is in the same vein as many Americans, for whom history started on 9/11. Anywho, watch the video [8] of real historian, Bernard Lewis, talking about the Armenian genocide: “The Armenians want to benefit from both worlds. On the one hand, they speak with pride of their struggle against the Ottoman despotism, while on the other hand, they compare their tragedy to the Jewish Holocaust. I do not accept this. I do not say that the Armenians did not suffer terribly. But I find enough cause for me to contain their attempts to use the Armenian massacres to diminish the worth of the Jewish Holocaust and to relate to it instead as an ethnic dispute.” Wikipedia is heavily edited by every tom, dick and harry with agenda. Take Israeli Hasbara that pays soldiers to edit Wikipedia pages, and you don't need much to twist things. Here Wikipedia characterizes the death of 2,000,000 Muslims as persecution [2, 2a]. Same Wikipedia calls killing of 10 million African "atrocities", where Dutch King [3] used theirs and their children's body parts as currency and hauled them off to Europe like animals to be put in zoos. Is this a coincidence? I think not, this pattern of dumbing down is very common when dealing with brown or black people [10]. This is what Voltaire, a rabid, anti-Islam, has to say about the Ottomans: "Let us get out of our grooves and study the rest of the globe. The Sultan governs in peace twenty million people of different religions; two hundred thousand Greeks live in security in Constantinople...The empire is full of Jacobites, Nestorians, and Monothelites; it contains Copts, Christians of St. John, Jews and Hindoos. The annals of Turkey do not record any revolt instigated by any of these religions." [Reference: Voltaire, Toleration and Other Essays, translated with an introduction by Joseph McCabe (New York and London: Knickerbocker Press, 1912), 23] So what changed? What ticked off Ottomans? Well, the bit that says all this happened "during World War I and its aftermath (1914–1922)", when Greek partisans before and after the occupation of Izmir killed their neighbours, raping them and taking their property. Just like what Serbians did to Bosnians recently. It seems like it is in the DNA of Europeans [9]. > "In the chaos, looting of Turkish houses began, and by the end of the day three to four hundred Turks had been killed." Not to mention what Greeks did to ethnic Greek Muslims and Slavs living in Greek territories. There are still pockets of these Muslims left, and they are regularly denied basic rights even till today. Keep in mind the treatment of Greek and Armenian came at the heal of Ottoman contraction, with some of these refugees still vividly recalling their treatment in former Ottoman territories [4]. Surrounded by allies, Ottomans were not going to give way to revolt from the heart of their homeland, it would have been suicide. The Greek and Armenian partisans didn't just kill Ottomans Muslim citizens randomly, but also their compatriots who stood up against them, most famous was the Orthodox priest who warned the Armenian partisans against siding with Russian during world war. He was no friend of Ottomans, but he knew this can't end up good, he was right. Your incredulity and hypocrisy stem from the same cesspool which inspired the generation of your forefather before you with poems like White man's Burden [5], or still doing till today. You rather believe that Muslims under Sharia would allow slave markets of beautiful women paraded naked, the same Shaira that punishes public nudity. But these are just projections of basal desires rather than reality. You can't have your cake and eat it too. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoN0sTesaDY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoN0sTesaDY [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Muslims_during_the_Ottoman_contraction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Muslims_during_... [2a] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMqqfP3dBX0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMqqfP3dBX0 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocities_in_the_Congo_Free_State https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocities_in_the_Congo_Free_S... [4]: https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryPorn/comments/i5agxj/a_turkish_peasant_performs_his_last_prayer_before/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryPorn/comments/i5agxj/a_turki... [5]: https://www.amazon.ca/Slavery-Islam-Jonathan-C-Brown/dp/1786076357 https://www.amazon.ca/Slavery-Islam-Jonathan-C-Brown/dp/1786... [6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Man%27s_Burden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Man%27s_Burden [7] The Sultan's Renegades: Christian-European Converts to Islam and the Making of the Ottoman Elite, 1575-1610 [8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qG70UWESfu4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qG70UWESfu4 [9] https://www.juancole.com/2013/04/terrorism-other-religions.html https://www.juancole.com/2013/04/terrorism-other-religions.h... [10] Bias in Media coverage of various racial groups * Kearns, Erin M., Allison E. Betus, and Anthony F. Lemieux. "Why do some terrorist attacks receive more media attention than others?." Justice Quarterly 36.6 (2019): 985-1022. * Stone, Meighan. "Snake and stranger: Media coverage of muslims and refugee policy." Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy (2017). * Silva, J. R., Duran, C., Freilich, J. D., & Chermak, S. M. (2020). Addressing the myths of terrorism in America. International Criminal Justice Review, 30(3), 302-324. * Rao, Kumar, Carey Shenkman, and K. Ahmed. "Equal treatment? Measuring the legal and media responses to ideologically motivated violence in the United States." Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (2018). * Naureckas, Jim. 2017. A Lesson Media Missed about the Dangers of Scapegoating. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. Shier, Allie, and Eran Shor. 2016. Shades of Foreign Evil: ‘Honour Killings’ and ‘Family Murders’ in the Canadian Press. Violence Against Women 22: 1163. * Jiwani, Yasmin. 2014. A Clash of Discourses: Femicides or Honour Killings? In Re-Imagining the Other: Culture, Media, and Wester-Muslim Intersections. Berlin: Springer, p. 122. * Powell, Kimberly A. 2011. Framing Islam: An Analysis of US Media Coverage of Terrorism Since 9/11. Communication Studies 62: 90 * Mishra, Smeeta. 2007. ‘Saving’ Muslim Women and Fighting Muslim Men: Analysis of Representations in the New York Times. Global Media Journal 6: 1–20 * Naurath, N. "Most Muslim Americans See No Justification for Violence. Retrieved May 6, 2018." (2011). * Views of Violence: What drives public acceptance and rejection of attacks on civilians 10 years after 9/11 (Gallup Poll) * American Muslim Poll: Politics, Priorities and Prejudice in 2016 - Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU).