Του Κωνσταντίνου
Χατζηδημητρίου
Εκδόσεις Καρατζάς 2005.
AMERICAN ACCOUNTS
DOCUMENTING the DESTRUCTION of SMYRNA
by the Kemalist Turkish Forces, September 1922
Constantine Hatzidimitriou
Caratzas 2005.
Available at Amazon
In September, 1922, the thriving, cosmopolitan city of Smyrna was captured and put to the torch by Turkish forces, led by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. This was the culmination of a war that resulted in the transformation of the Ottoman Empire into the modern Turkish state. The destruction of the middle class Greek and Armenian quarters of the city, and the slaughter or expulsion of its inhabitants, represented the final seal of Turkish dominion. The "Progressive" Kemalist secular state-building ideology in part was the child of Bolshevik, proto-fascist and radicalist influences. It assumed that the construction of modern Turkish identity required religious, ethnic and even "racial" uniformity. For this reason genocide and the expulsion of heterogeneous, especially middle class and Christian groups was an integral element and underlying principle of the Turkish modernization reform process.
The governments that succeeded that of Ataturk, including the present
secular "democracy," continued to subscribe to this principle
(witness the effort to crush Kurdish identity over the last two decades).
However, the exigencies of dealing with western liberal democracies required
that another reality be superimposed: Turkish regimes hence founded an entire
industry to deny the genocides of the Armenians, of the Pontians and other
Greeks, even that of smaller religious or ethnic groups such as the Arab
Nestorian Christians. The destruction and burning of Smyrna became one of the
first projects of systematic denial by Turkish governments. The evidence in
this book includes official U.S. State Department documents, press and other
eye witness accounts that testify regarding the details of ethnic persecution.
The reality they project must be contraposed to that promoted by the present
Turkish regime and its mercenary propagandists in Washington and elsewhere.
ΠΗΓΗ: ΑΡΧΕΙΟΝ ΠΟΛΙΤΙΣΜΟΥ, 1.9.2022.
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