Today is the 92nd anniversary of the start of the Armenian Genocide, marking the day when much of the Armenian intelligentsia in Constantinople was arrested and later killed. Over the next several years, the Ottomans used World War I as cover to kill more than million people to create an Armenischrein Anatolia — a precondition for the later establishment of a Turkish national state. This is why Turkey won’t follow Germany’s lead and admit that a previous, disgraced regime committed unspeakable crimes — without those crimes, there could be no Turkey. Thus, Turkey’s almost crazed opposition to any recognition of the Armenian Genocide, including the resolutions now before Congress .

The anxiety of today’s Turks about Kurds stems from the same concerns that led their grandparents to exterminate the Armenians. The Kurds were OK when they were just comical rubes, “pre-Turks” who would loose their local color once they moved to the city and got an education — just as Armenians were accepted so long as they abided by Islam’s Jim Crow regime for Christians, with the expectation that more and more of them would convert to Islam and thus become Turks. But once Armenians developed a modern national identity, they had to be eliminated. The Turkish elite hasn’t gotten to that point with regard to the Kurds, and couldn’t pull it off anyway in the glare of modern media scrutiny, but when 20 percent of the population intellectually secedes from the Turkish national myth, conflict is pretty much guaranteed.

One last point: Never give up your guns. “And several weeks before deportation orders were given, the Germans — allies of the Turks during the First World War — brought dogs that sniffed out any weapons that Armenians had hidden. Hence, when the deportation orders came, the Armenians of Sivas were incapable of resistance.” (The Armenian Genocide: History, Politics, Ethics, by Richard G. Hovannisian)