On April 24, 1915, exactly 100 years ago today, the Armenian Genocide began.
The mass liquidation of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire was brought to fruition by the Young Turk government. At least 80% of the Armenian Ottoman population was marched to the Syrian desert and perished.
Turkey has denied the genocide’s existence ever since. Today, it is still an unrecognized event. Obama has officially
stated he will not recognize it as a genocide to secure ties with
Turkey, and many other countries follow suit.On the eve of World War II, Hitler justified his own similar actions by stating, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” The denial of the Armenians inspired Hitler’s own genocidal Holocaust, and every genocide after.
For the sake of all genocide prevention, it is vitally important these injustices are recognized. The Armenians are not invisible.
Tag: world history
Dark Ages, Schmark Ages. The De-Textbook cuts through that and so much more fake-fact bullshit.
cloudy with a chance of witch burning
your periodic reminder that a good chunk of Europe basically shat the bed for a few centuries while everyone else kinda did their thing.
I am sorry I’m going to be that person.
This map is extremely inaccurate.
1) China was not going through business as usual China was going through the TANG DYNASTY i.e. the Golden Age of Chinese culture, which would lay down legal and social and poetic norms for the rest of Chinese history. The Tang is so influential that a lot of languages call Chinese people 唐人 (People from Tang.) (We call Chinese people “people from Qin” so.)
2) Japan is _first becoming literate_ during this time period (due to the influence of the Tang they adopt Chinese script), which is a BFD for poetry, religion, politics, society. Japanese court culture develops, which near the end of this period (11th century, around the time Europe enters “high middle ages”) will produce The Tale of Genji (by a totally awesome woman named Murasaki),widely regarded as the world’s first novel because of it’s deft use of irony and social commentary.
3) The southern part of Korea is experiencing the emergence of Unified Silla, a state that will last the entire period and will see the importation of Chinese and Indian buddhism, the construction of the first Confucian college in Korea, and so on.
4) In Mesoamerica, the Mayans are inventing astronomy, writing (the third and final independent invention of writing in human history), and a whole crapload of other stuff. This is the triumph of their culture.
5) The Umayyads in Spain are a massive center of technology, learning, and (comparative) religious toleration.
6) The Eastern Roman Empire, which spans both the green and yellow portions of your map, isn’t doing too badly either, bouncing back after losing territory to the Caliphate.
7) The Polynesians are colonizing the ENTIRE PACIFIC using amazing advanced navigation technology not rivaled until the INVENTION OF GPS.
8) I am not equipped to talk about Sub-Saharan Africa in detail (cue rant about how we never learn about subsaharan africa in the western educational system) but you can bet there are some major, amazing developments going on there too. I’d be shocked if there weren’t.
9) HOLY SHIT INDIA.
10) OMG SOUTH EAST ASIA. SOUTH. EAST. ASIA.
11) THEY WEREN’T BURNING WITCHES IN EUROPE DURING THE MIGRATION PERIOD (dark ages). Witch burning took off in the EARLY MODERN PERIOD, nearly 1000 years after this. Europe was going through some tough shit, which would leave them backwards compared to the rest of the world for 1000 years, but also there were some amazing things happening there, at least have the decency to be like “angry dudes with swords stabbing people” not WITCH BURNINGS FFS.
12) And ABSOLUTELY Islamic Caliphate was a totally amazing flowering of intellectual, artistic, and spiritual culture, a mixing pot between a thousand cultures and languages, and totally amazing. Don’t in any way want to diminish that in any way.
PLEASE ALWAYS BE THAT PERSON
I'd Much Rather Have a Dragon 