06-09-2010, 02:28 AM
Dennis Ruhl Wrote:ham Wrote:As you may have heard, Turks are convinced they are Europeans and Jews are convinced they can trace their family lines back to 1000BC in Palestine
Turks are descendants of Greeks and Armenians with a small central Asian mix. That is why Turks in Turkey don't look like their central Asian cousins. The benefits of speaking Turkish and adopting Islam were made overwhelming for 1,000 years. Ask the Kurds. You can't ask the Greeks or Armenians.
Look at any painting or similar from the middle ages, when freshly arrived Turkish invaders depict themselves...you'll see very slanted eyes and turbans. That is how they saw themselves. Of course many othr nationalities existed and mixed within the empire. The folk tale about being Europeans is an early 1900s one, starting from the Young Turks' revolution and coming to an end with Kemal's 'modernization'...come think of it, Kemal's prime intent was to discredit the sultan's (legitimate) government in Istanbul, whom he accused of being corrupt and of selling Turkey to westerners.
In fact, not only the empire had been dismantled after WWI (allied with Germany and Austria), but Turkey itself had been divided among western allies: Italy, Greece and others getting a chunk.
That is where the beef between Greece&Turkey begun.
So Kemal retreated to the unknown city of Ankara, founded a secessionist government and waged a war against the unjust provisions of the Versailles treaties in order to reverse them, which would occur later for the most part.
Kemal did something similar to what Hitler did much later: roll back the Versailles treaties, but they get very different press.
In an attempt to lend a veneer of social credibility to his secessionist regime, Kemal played the modernization card.
Again, pipe dreams similar to Nazi claims to ancestry from people living in the terra cava or Shamballah...but you'll see very few -if any at all- ridiculing the Turkish version.
A.A Mole University
B.A London Institute of Applied Research
B.Sc Millard Fillmore
M.A International Institute for Advanced Studies
Ph.D London Institute of Applied Research
Ph.D Millard Fillmore
B.A London Institute of Applied Research
B.Sc Millard Fillmore
M.A International Institute for Advanced Studies
Ph.D London Institute of Applied Research
Ph.D Millard Fillmore

