Cenk Uygur Files to Run For Congress in Katie Hill's District

[George II]

76. I doubt it's coincidental that someone who denied the genocide happened to name his group...

...after the movement that perpetrated that genocide.

https://www.armenian-genocide.org/young_turks.html

The Young Turks were the perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide. The Young Turk Movement emerged in reaction to the absolutist rule of Sultan Abdul-Hamid (Abdulhamit) II (1876-1909). With the 1878 suspension of the Ottoman Constitution, reform-minded Ottomans resorted to organizing overseas or underground. The backbone of the movement was formed by young military officers who were especially disturbed by the continuing decline of Ottoman power and attributed the crisis to the absence of an environment for change and progress. Working secretly in unconnected clusters under the watchful eye of the Hamidian secret police, the Young Turks succeeded in overturning the rule of the autocratic sultan when the Ottoman armies in European Turkey openly supported the movement. Abdul-Hamid's reinstatement of constitutional and parliamentary rule in July 1908 ushered in a brief period of legalized political activity by a panoply of reformist Turkish parties as well as Armenian political and revolutionary organizations. The Young Turks earned further public support when their intervention was required to suppress the April 1909 counter-revolution staged by the palace.

At the center of the Young Turk Revolution stood the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) (Ittihad ve Terakki Jemiyeti) formed in 1895. Its members came to be known as Ittihadists or Unionists. The most ideologically committed party in the entire movement, the CUP espoused a form of Turkish nationalism which was xenophobic and exclusionary in its thinking. Its policies threatened to undo the tattered fabric of a multi-ethnic and multi-religious society. Taking advantage of the political confusion reigning in the aftermath of the First Balkan War which the Ottoman Empire lost in 1912 to its former subject states, the CUP seized power in a coup d'etat in January 1913. As it led the empire to a partial recovery in the Second Balkan War, the CUP monopolized political power domestically by bringing the Parliament completely under its influence. It also began to steer away from the long-held Ottoman foreign policy of alliances with Great Britain and France, and forged a stronger military cooperation with Germany. Moreover, the CUP compensated for the Ottoman retreat in the Balkans by promoting Pan-Turkism, an expansionist program designed to challenge Russia in its southern tier. By the time World War I broke out in August 1914, the CUP constituted a chauvinistic band which had subordinated the Ottoman state to its Turkist ideology. It also propelled the country into war against its better interests by entering into a secret accord with Germany.

To consolidate Turkish rule in the remaining territories of the Ottoman Empire and to expand the state into the so-called Turanian lands in the east, most held by Iran and Russia, the CUP devised in secret a program for the extermination of the Armenian population. From the viewpoint of Ittihadist ideology and its new and ambitious foreign policy, the Armenians represented a completely vulnerable population straddling an area of major strategic value for its Pan-Turanian goals. Ottoman misrule had made the Armenians, a prosperous minority despite its political disadvantages, sympathetic to Russia. To the Ittihadists, the global crisis of 1914 represented a rare opportunity to change the fortunes of the Ottoman state and to use the cover of war to embark upon a policy of both internal and external social engineering the likes of which had not been attempted or imagined. Once again they gambled on the element of surprise, subterfuge, and radical daring, this time against a civilian minority population.

Even though the initial advance of Ottoman forces in 1914 into Russia and Iran did not result in a permanent expansion, on the whole the Ottoman armies held Allied forces in check until 1916 and did not capitulate until 1918. The main thrust of the Armenian Genocide, however, was implemented within the first year of the war, years ahead of any imminent collapse. While the mass deportations of the civilian Armenian population was carried out in the spring and summer of 1915 and were completed by the fall, the systematic slaughter of the Armenians had started earlier with the murder of the able-bodied males already drafted into the Ottoman armed forces. By expropriating the movable and immovable wealth of the Armenians, the CUP also looked upon its policy of genocide as a means for enriching its coffers and rewarding its cohorts. The elimination of a commercially viable minority fulfilled part of the nationalist program to concentrate financial power in the hands of the state and promote greater Turkish control over the domestic economy.