This is the day the Armenian community marks as the one hundredth anniversary of the beginning of the first genocide of the twentieth century.
As the Ottoman Empire collapsed, and Turkey began to form as a nation, Turks killed off between a million and a million and a half Armenians.
The genocide was accomplished through the organized wholesale killing of able-bodied men and boys, followed by the deportation of women, children, the elderly and infirm on death marches to the Syrian desert. During the drive, deportees were deprived of food and water and subjected to robbery, rape, and massacre.
The term genocide was first coined, by Raphael Lemkin, not to describe the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis, but the extermination of the Armenians by the Turks.
Thanks for the music and history lesson.
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