Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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47 of 54 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Overlooked Reality, January 22, 2001
This is a necessary, long overdue work reminding us that the ethnic sufferings in Caucasia, the Eastern Mediterranean, and Balkans during the last 200 years were not all one sided. Many thousands of Moslem families suffered the same tragedies and walked the same dreary road into exile as their Christian neighbors. The massacres and wholesale population transfers were mutual and massive. Conventional wisdom in the West about the tragic events listed in this book is sadly one-sided. McCarthy has made a valuable contribution to remind people of the complex reality of these issues.
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32 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Misunderstandings and fanatic lies, December 7, 2003
By A Customer
McCarthy's book is the result of an excellent research of the historical documents and archives.
ONE-FOURTH O THE MUSLIM POPULATION IN ANATOLIA AND BALKAN DURING 1821-1922 HAD BEEN LOST.
The civilian people of the Eastern Anatlolian villages massacred by the Armenian people without discriminating if they were women, children, or the old. Numerous Mass-Graves are the proves this historical fact.
Despite this fact, there are still fanatic people claiming the opposite in order to make their guilt forgotten. Why does Armenia still not open it's archives? Why can the Armenians still not show any historical proof of theis claims?
Thousands of Armenians had to go on exile at the end of the 1st World War. Why? Because they had massacred so many villages and so many innocent people, it was impossible for them to live there anymore. They were taken under arms joining onto the Russian and French Army. And this Armies have taken the Armenians with them to Russia and France at the end of the war.
Besides all, how can you explain, that the Turks, who lived with Armenians over 900 years, gave them the position of a Vezir (minister), called them 'loyal people', allowed the refoundation of the Armenian Patriarchate in istanbul(1461), charged almost no taxes from Armenians, sudenly decide to kill all Armeinans?
There is no logical explanation, except the fanatic lies.
Despite tall these facts, why have the Turks not asked for an apology and explanation from the Armenians? Why have the Turks kept silent for almost 100 years?
Because after the foundation of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk wanted to open a white page and end all the hostility with the oppents in the war. Not to forget that there were Armenians still living in Turkey.
Unfortunately this have been misunderstood.
McCarthy also found out in the British archives, that the Blue Book was told to be written by the British secret service in order to gain the popularity of Armenia in the cold war against Russia.
This book is of great value, because it shows the historical facts. Whether you like them or not. As long as you cannot show another facts you must accept them.
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68 of 83 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, July 26, 2001
McCarthy has unearthed a horrifying and extremely important fact: that in the course of the century between the Greek war of independence and World War I, the Ottoman Empire suffered five and a half million dead and five million refugees. He deems this Europe's largest lost of life and emigration since the Thirty Years' War. Christian suffering in this time and place is well-known; McCarthy shows the other side, that "Muslim communities in an area as large as all of western Europe had been diminished or destroyed." His study minutely reviews the regions and wars, pulling information from foreign and Ottoman sources to produce a compelling account. Beyond the tragedy involved, this pattern of death and exile has a profound historical importance. To take just three matters that the author raises: It puts into perspective the deportation of Armenians in 1915 and turns this from an act of hatred into one motivated by fear (had the Armenians, with Russian support, rebelled, Ottoman Muslims could have expected to be slaughtered). Also, this legacy explains the modest and circumspect foreign policy pursued by Atatürk; "as a land of recent refugee in-migration and massive mortality," his country was ready not to assert itself but to reform itself. Lastly, the massive immigrations to Anatolia mean that modern Turkey is (like France) a land of migrants; McCarthy estimates that one-fifth of the population descends from nineteenth-century refugees. This helps understand the country's acute sensitivity to current problems in Bosnia and Azerbaijan. Middle East Quarterly, June 1996
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