User talk:Cannotpick

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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Again, welcome! Pbritti (talk) 19:21, 16 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

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Discussion on talk page

I have reverted this edit [1] based on this source [2]. I have posted here per WP:BRD. // Timothy :: talk 15:12, 22 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Utilisation of muslim subjects to suppress Christian subjects by the ottoman empire.

"rv, stating 'all of which *they themselves* had been inflicting on Christians' in reference to the persecution of Muslim *civilians* in ex Ott. lands is ridicilous. These Muslims were not some uniform blob who all engaged in atrocities, many of the persecuted were men, women and children who had personally never committed atrocities against Christians; a generalization such as '*they themselves* were doing these before' implicates tens of thousands of innocent people in crimes they didnt commit"

I recommend you read "ECONOMIES OF VIOLENCE, BANDITRY AND GOVERNANCE IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AROUND 1800" (2014) and "War, State and the Privatisation of Violence in the Ottoman Empire" (2020) By Tolga U. Esmer. Your comment is not wrong inasmuch as of course not all muslim civilians were harrying their Christian neighbours but it is not entirely correct either. The Ottomans delegated suppression of local Christians to their muslim subjects in many cases, most famously to the Kurds during the Armenian genocide, of whom the Albanians were a part in the Balkans and Albanians were settled in formerly Armenian regions (Although at various points they were also suppressed by the State.). An example is Armatoles fighting klephts: "Albanian armatoles were employed by Ottoman authorities, and in particular in the latter half of the 18th century, during the administration of the Ottoman Albanian ruler Ali Pasha of the increasingly independent Pashalik of Yanina he replaced Greek armatoles, making the regions armatoles almost exclusively Albanian. The thus deposed Greek armatoles became klephts and their subsequent anti-armatoloi activity was not only brigandage, but also a form of resistance against Ottoman rule." Furthermore in the Armenian genocide case there seems to be some evidence that muslim civilians also partook in massacres. This again is not a justification for massacring civilians especially as not all, the majority most likely, of them partook. John Not Real Name (talk) 13:40, 9 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Greetings! Before I discuss your comments, let me specify what article the edit summary of mine you quoted came from, as you didn't include from where it originates. I heavily recommend in your future comments on account talk pages that you specify which edits on which articles directed you to someone's talk page, as outsiders will be left without context for the discussion if you do not do that. Anyway, on the 9th of October I reverted an edit by 86.33.82.194 on 'the Persecution of Muslims during the Ottoman contraction' page, with the aforementioned edit summary. The concluding sentence of the lead paragraph was edited from 'These populations [various groups of Muslims] were subject to genocide, expropriation, massacres, religious persecution, mass rape, and ethnic cleansing.' to '... mass rape, and ethnic cleansing, all of which they themselves have previously been inflicting on the local Christian population during centuries of Ottoman occupation'. The two main reasons for the reversal of this edit were a) faulty generalization and b) placement. The generalization one should be obvious: who exactly is the 'they themselves' in this sentence? It refers to hundreds of thousands of innocent Muslim civilians who were massacred, raped, exiled, etc. and groups them together with war criminals who committed war crimes against Christian populations in the past, on the basis of the two sharing a religion. This is obviously ridicilous; as you yourself stated the vast majority of the Muslims persecuted during the Ottoman contraction were, as it has been so often the case in the history of warfare, civilians, people who personally hadn't been involved in war crimes against their Christian co-locals. Simply equating the two and stating that the oppressed Muslim civilians had previously done the same against Christians is a gross generalization and misrepresentation of reality that's unacceptable on Wikipedia. This was no different than someone going to the Rwandan Genocide page and editing the lead section to say 'They (the Tutsi population) were subject to massacres, rapes and genocide, all of which they themselves had inflicted on the Hutu population previously.' in reference to earlier crimes committed by some Tutsi radicals. That would be rightfully edited out, and so was the anonymous edit reverted by me. Another issue other than the generalizing phrasing of the sentence was its placement. The Wiki is not a 'oh who suffered more?' competition; there are pages dedicated to crimes suffered by both Christian and Muslim populations. Editing the concluding sentence of the lead paragraph in a page about the suffering experienced by Muslims and turning it around to make it be about Christian suffering instead is misplaced. Hope this clarifies the context for my revert that caused this talk to be opened.

Now to move to your comments. I am familiar with the historical events you mentioned, and there is a level of truth to your argument. However, as with anything, history is not so white and black. I can also provide examples of the contrary as well, where the Ottoman government used Muslim troops to ensure their Christian citizens' safety or protect their rights. As an example, Konstantin Mihailović's memoirs paint an interesting grey picture of Ottoman relations with Christians, where he claims the Ottomans were quite brutal in their military conduct against Christian states, however generally treated the Jizya-paying Christian population under their rule fairly. He states that you were more likely to be oppressed by a provincial lord far away from the central Ottoman government's supervision compared to if you lived directly under the authority of the Sultans. Mihalovic's describes incidents such as a Christian peasant woman complaining to Murad II about a Muslim soldier stealing her milk and the Sultan executing the soldier as punishment to back up his claims about Dhimmi tolerance. You could say well that was in the 1400s, but I can count numerous later examples as well. For example, starting from the 1500s and continuing well into the late Empire, there was the legal concept of 'Protégé', a practice tied to Ottoman capitulations where foreign diplomats and Christian clergy could receive certain special priviliages and protections that would be enforced by the Ottoman state. The system initially just covered certain foreigners; however, it was later expanded to be participable in by some local Ottoman Christians and Muslims as well. Similarly, the system required the payment of a sum of money initially; however, it was later made participable free of cost in many cases. (ı recommend reading Belkıs Konan's paper on this) Even during the siege of Van (1915), there are reports of Kurdish soldiers responsible for particularly harsh atrocities against Armenians being punished for their actions by Ottoman troops (Kloian, Richard Diran, (1980), The Armenian Genocide, p. 11). What all of this demonstrates is the level of sophistication within history. The same state that significantly oppresses its minority populations can also paradoxically protect its minorities in a different context or year of the state's existence. Likewise, members of the same larger group identity (Muslim in this case) can vary significantly in their interfaith interactions, which cannot be generalized into being uniformly negative or positive, which I remind is the reason why this discussion happened in the first place.

To finish up, I have a couple of things to add. Your comment reads as if the Armatoles are an example to your point about the Ottomans using Muslim civilians to suppress Christians. If that was actually the implication then that would a categorical error, the Armatoles would not classify as civilians per the definition of the word, as they were irregular soldiers/combatants. I am also reviewing your edits on the Persecution of Muslims page, to see if any errors or other problems are present that need to be improved upon. Although I am not done yet with my review, I will say that your critique of Justin McCarthy's Death and Exile as an inappropriate source that needs to be replaced with higher quality sources, particularly on the basis of number inflation, is misplaced. Firstly, even scholars who criticized MccCarthy's controversial stance on the Armenian Genocide such as Donald W. Bleacher praised Death and Exile as a 'necessary corrective' on Western historical narratives on late Ottoman history, stating his work successfully demonstrated the existence of large-scale suffering by Muslims in the period. In general, Death and Exile is a very well-sourced publication that uses extensive Muslim and Christian documentation together to minimize bias. I recommend reading the book if you haven't already in case you are skeptical of this claim. When it comes to accusations of number exaggeration in the book as you insinuated, even that is a claim disputed amongst scholars. Some historians, such as Hakem Al-Rustom, state that he could have exaggerated the Muslim death toll on the grounds of his claimed bias; however even the highly critical Al-Rustom refuses to argue that MacCarthy definitively did as such, rather using the words 'He thus might have exaggerated', accepting the possibility of the accuracy of his estimates. Dennis P. Hupchick on the other hand supports the accuracy of MacCarthy's numbers, stating 'the statistical data appear generally valid'. Robert Olson holds a similar position, calling MacCarthy's demographic work 'solid'. That's not all however, there are scholars particularly from the Turkish side who claim McCarthy's number estimates are actually too conservative. Their argument is based on the methodology adopted by McCarthy in his work, where he states in Death and Exile that in cases of more than one estimate being present in the primary sources for the Muslim death toll in a massacre, he generally accepted the lower estimate to avoid accusations of bias or exaggeration. When all of these are taken into account, McCarthy estimates are actually not on the most liberal end of the range given for late Ottoman Muslim casualties, with both higher and lower estimates existing. Thus I see no reason to replace it as a cited source as long as other estimates are also presented alongside it with due weight given to each. Cannotpick (talk) 18:46, 10 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I am replying to you not anyone else. You somehow managed to completely misunderstand my comment. I am aware that there were attempts to protect dhimmi populations (Ottoman soldiers in the Armenian Genocide participated. They are not guiltless. Some did help.) but my point focused on the practice of using muslim populations to police minorities after the 1690s when the Serbian population rose up. It is not a one-way process and these muslim bands were also themselves under a ban when they got rowdy (Both of these pieces of information are in the cited articles.). The Armatole example was about an armed band policing their neighbours but I never wrote they were civilians, I prefaced the conversation with this.

On overall casualties, the book in question has been criticised by everyone even those who use it like Hakem Al-Rustom. He uses it but with a proviso. Also writing that there are those with higher casualty lists is not a good argument. People who have looked into it criticise it and his backing by the Turkish state is emblematic of his position. Now I did not alter most figures because I did not have competing sources (Except in cases where the reading of the source by the person who used the source is evidently wrong.). Furthermore we do have other sources which I did not remove and the figures they give are rather low compared to McCarthy's. John Not Real Name (talk) 13:33, 17 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I am starting to get a sense of your biases regarding this topic and why exactly you might have edited this page, but I will leave any further commentary regarding that to the future, to observe the exact picture your behaviour and comments paint in future responses and edits.

''the book in question has been criticised by everyone''. Are you casually spreading misinformation about an academic text because the contents of it aren't aligned with your narrative of history? I will for now assume no and pretend this comes from a place of ignorance or misunderstanding instead of bad faith as per WP:AGF. Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821-1922 is a book that has gone through extensive evaluation by scholarship and by all means successfully passed the peer review process. Allow me to relieve you of needing to research this claim by just listing the facts for you, some of which you should have already seen if you actually read my comment:

Historian Dennis P. Hupchick generally left a positive review of the book, stating: 'the statistical data appear generally valid. McCarthy succeeds in providing factual material for bringing the European historiography of the later Ottoman Empire into more objective balance.'

Historian Michael Robert Hickock too had an overall positive view of Death and Exile despite him criticizing specific aspects of the book, particularly regarding the proving of governmental intent for the massacres that occurred. However, he agrees McCarthy undeniably proved the existence of extensive Muslim suffering in this period: 'Professor McCarthy does an excellent service to both the general reader and the scholars of the region with this survey of human suffering... Although he succeeds in recounting the plight of Muslim communities, he is less successful at demonstrating state policy or proving intent... The question of intent underlies the book's biggest flaw.

Bulgarian Historian Georgi Zelengora accepts the book as academically reliable and cites it in his own works; he had this to say about various Bulgarian groups who criticized Death and Exile: Translated: 'Justin McCarthy's “Death and Exile”, in which [many] Bulgarian readers learned about the crimes committed against Muslims by their homeland for the first time, has been translated into Bulgarian in 2010. Patriotic organizations have declared the book anti-Bulgarian. Semi-educated journalists and third grade politicians started disputing the author's professionalism, showing they have zero knowledge on the topic of demographics.'

Historian Kemal Karpat, in his review of the book, wrote: 'This is the first well-documented and comprehensive Western account of the treatment of Ottoman Muslims from the 1820s to 1919-1922. The scope of the book, its vast documentation, and the author's efforts to remain objective and impartial in analyzing little known events that most other Western scholars have ignored are praiseworthy.'

Historian Robert Olson praised the work as well, saying: 'Justin McCarthy's solid demographic work contributes to achieving a better balance and understanding that he so ardently desires for the history of these regions and peoples.'

Historian Donald W. Bleacher, who is a critic of McCarthy's stance on the Armenian Genocide, still praised Death and Exile as a high-quality work of historiography: 'Justin McCarthy has, along with other historians, provided a necessary corrective to much of the history produced by scholars of the Armenian genocide in the United States. McCarthy demonstrates that not all of the ethnic cleansing and ethnic killing in the Ottoman Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries followed the model often posited in the West, whereby all the victims were Christian and all the perpetrators were Muslim. McCarthy has shown that there were mass killings of Muslims and deportations of millions of Muslims from the Balkans and the Caucasus over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.'

Historian Veselin Angelov not only praised Death and Exile but defended Justin McCarthy against critics in general. I left this one for last because some of it seems pretty fitting for this situation ;) Translated (sentences might be out of order as I copied them from his interview one by one): 'I find Justin McCarthy's book valuable because it gives a different look at historical events in which there is a lot of mythology and political partisanship. It overturns long-held myths about the last 100 years of the history of the Ottoman Empire... The book is supported by quite solid and irrefutable scientific evidence... Even his critics admit that McCarthy refers to solid sources previously neglected mostly in the Christian West... In all probability, reading Justin McCarthy's book, the majority of Bulgarians will be amazed, horrified and want to throw it away. They will think that it is the product of a huge falsification and a tool of manipulation of Turkish historiography and propaganda. They will not believe anything written in it, with the idea that it is one-sided... I would advise against jumping to conclusions. There are quite a few readers of the English edition, for example, who think that McCarthy is not a "Turkish cannon", but presents a fair story. It helps to correct the injustice committed in the interpretation of history... The [negative] reaction in some Internet forums [to the book] does not surprise me. And from people who haven't read the book. I predict that with the appearance of the book, denials and incantations will multiply. These people, among them politicians, are laymen in historical knowledge, they do not understand that this is a scientific work... many historians consider him an extremely pro-Turkish American researcher, because many of his theses coincide with the views of the Turkish historiography. For me, his behavior is purely professional. It only states the specific facts. I did not get the impression that he underestimated the Christians within the empire or that he tolerated the [crimes of] Muslims. I have already mentioned that he does not omit data about murders, looting and pogroms of Turks, Kurds, Tatars and Circassians against the Christian population. As he himself says, historical correctness demands recognition. And he admits that the Christians have also suffered a great deal. A significant part of his book is devoted to the sufferings of Christians... They label him a "genocide denier", an "agent of the Turkish government" and a "revisionist". In most cases, the attacks against him are not supported by serious scientific arguments. However, there are historians who are positive about the results of McCarthy's scientific pursuits.'

So tell me, how is this exactly a book 'criticized by everyone'? Now to respond to your other points, the one critic of the book you cited, Hakem Al-Rustom, didn't even state definitively McCarthy inflated Muslim casualties, he just states McCarthy might have inflated them based on his claimed bias. See the relevant quote for this from my previous comment here. This is in contrast with other scholars who are in agreement McCarthy's numbers (again, see the relevant quotes.) and the fact McCarthy generally went with conservative massacre casualty estimates. Thus the argument that Death and Exile needs to be removed from the wiki on the basis of 'inflated numbers' is untenable, as the claim isn't anywhere near strongly backed enough to warrant a removal. Alternative estimates can be presented alongside it, however, a removal of it as you stated would just result in a rightful revert.

Your other argument, ''his backing by the Turkish state is emblematic of his position'', is not a cause for removal of content from the Wiki by itself. The Wikipedia guidelines do not necessarily or primarily remove academic sources on the basis of the possible biases of the source or where the source gets its funding from; rather, the central criteria for being included or excluded in the Wiki is whether an academic source's claims have been substantiated/verified by academic peer review. If the claims had been discredited as inaccurate propaganda, then we could have talked about removal, however Death and Exile has largely been accepted by scholarship as a quality source on Late Ottoman Muslim suffering. Yes aspects of it have been criticized by some scholars. but almost every academic publication receives some level of criticism; that's just an inevitable part of the process, and in the case of Death and Exile the critiques are nowhere nearly strong or commonly accepted enough to warrant a removal. If you want to argue more about this we can, but I will end this tangent for now.

''The Armatole example was about an armed band policing their neighbours but I never wrote they were civilians'' I never claimed you did. I specifically took care to make it clear that what I was saying was not you stated that, rather just your comment could be read that way, as the original article that spawned this discussion was about the crimes committed against the Muslim civilian population. Cannotpick (talk) 16:33, 23 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I am not an expert so I am not claiming to be good at all this, my edits have been careful not to delete things if I cannot provide a different source. I object but that is all. Hakem Al-Rustom is writing that he may have exaggerated because he is using the source and is not evaluating it. It is acknowledging a bias. As for the book, I have read it for example regarding the deaths of muslims in the Balkan Wars (1912-1913) and he has two different death figures. One early on at above 600,000 (I think 642,000 or so.) and at the end with 1,450,000 and 410,000 extra refugees. I would think I am crazy but his final figure of 5,000,000 includes the 1,450,000 death toll so he for some reason exaggerated and many people cite that including Wikipedia. Another issue is "After the war, peace talks between Greece and Turkey started with the Lausanne Conference of 1922–1923. At the Conference, the chief negotiator of the Turkish delegation, Ismet Pasha, gave an estimate of 1.5 million Anatolian Turks that had been exiled or died in the area of Greek occupation. Of these, McCarthy estimates that 860,000 fled and 640,000 died; with many, if not most of those who died, being refugees as well." Other than the oddity of taking Turkish figures at face value. A similar claim was indeed made here "Roger Owen and Şevket Pamuk estimate that during the last decade of the Ottoman Empire (1912–1922), when the Balkan Wars, the First World War and the War of Independence took place in areas that were later to become part of Turkey, the "total casualties, military and civilian, of Muslims during this decade are estimated as close to two million." Assuming civilian casualties are 1,500,000 anyway this leaves us with a problem. The figures include the ten year period between 1912 and 1923 not just the latter couple years. One would probably have to include at least some of the many civilians who died (By whatever means but assuming murder.) in that ten year range and that could result in wide divergences from 640,000 dead because he also puts rather high figures for the number dead in the Caucuses Campaign (Which spilled into Anatolia I believe.). So yeah he exaggerates a lot. Furthermore on page 339 he has this: E. Anatolia, 1914-21 1,190,000 (Dead) 900,000 (internal refugees) Caucasus, 1914-21 410,000 (Dead) 270,000 (number setting out) W. Anatolia, 1914-22 1,250,000 (Dead) 480,000 (Greek-Turkish Population Exchange.) (I did not put this in quotes as I had to add some things in brackets for this to make sense. You can check if the figures are proper yourself.). These figures are insane (They are the ones cited as overall deaths in Wikipedia and other sources use this page for reference.) and above others. He writes that "Deaths of Muslim soldiers and deaths of civilians who were not in war zones (from war-caused famine, disease, etc.) have not been included, even though they can justifiably be called the results of the same factors that killed those recorded in the table. (For example, Muslim population losses in Anatolia from 1914 to 1922 were actually almost three million; only 2.4 million are listed in the table because central and northern areas of Anatolia that were not in the war zone have been excluded.) With the exception of the figures for the period from 1914 to 1922, most of the Turkish soldiers who died in the wars are also not included. Soldiers from Anatolia, in particular, fought in all the Ottoman-Russian wars and died in great numbers." Earlier he indicates the figures I just noted were actually " low estimates of Muslim mortality." This is widely disparate from other sources and is hardly low-balling it (He includes refugees separately. He means deaths.). John Not Real Name (talk) 22:04, 23 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]