Reddit Reddit reviews The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East

We found 2 Reddit comments about The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East
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2 Reddit comments about The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East:

u/PIK_Toggle · 13 pointsr/IAmA

Not OP, but I asked the same question years ago and I compiled this list:

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  1. This is the best book on the subject that I've read. It is as fair to both sides as one can be. In fact, I came away with a better understanding of how and why the Palestinians feel the way that they do after reading the book.

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  2. The Arab Spring. This is a great journey through all of the countries affected by The Arab Spring. It helps understand where we are now.

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  3. The Prize. Technically, it is the history of the oil industry. As you should expect, it covers a lot of ME history, too.

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  4. Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS This book helps you understand how radical ISIS really is compared to AQ.

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  5. Michael Oren has two good books: Six Days of War and Power, Faith, and Fantasy. Despite Oren's affiliation with Israel, his books are fair and interesting reads.

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    A book on the fall of the Ottoman Empire is another good place to start. I have not read this one yet. I've heard that it is a good read.

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u/weopity77 · 0 pointsr/CringeAnarchy

certainly many things justify the systematic extermination of groups, an important one being the survival of the nation-state, but that didn't happen here - what happened here was systematic deportation which is exactly the same fate that would have befallen the turks had they been been utterly defeated in ww1. the armenian men were mostly put in labor camps, the old and women and children were deported. the turkish people had to the right to defend themselves from enslavement just like anyone else. the british, french, and russian empires have treated their colonial subjects the same exact way all through out their history. the fucking british had concentration camps in kenya in the 1950s and 1960s for fucksake. the british taught the world how to create concentration camps when they deported the men across the fucking ocean and then marched the boer women and children across the veld and put them in concentraion camps where fully half of them died by 1902.

the entente in ww1 intended to completely destroy turkey. to carve it up and crush it ethnically. russia was to get the caucuses, instanbul, and the turkish straight, the french were going to take anatolia and enslave the turks there, the kurds were going to get a nation, and the turks were going to be enslaved or deported from all that territory and presumably left with a tiny rump territory they didn't actually control. do you have any idea what russians, british, and french have done to ethnic minorities under their colonial control over the centuries? mass murder, rape, and utter enslavement. what would have happened to the turks that lived in areas that were majority armenian or kurdish?

the armenians threw in their lot with the entente in this conflict that we would define (if we applied your definitions evenly) as a war of mutual extermination. the armenians had an army of 50,000 fighting against the turks in 1918. many hundreds of thousands if not millions fought against turkey or gave aid to the entente during the entire course of the war.

your problem is you've never read an objective account of ww1 in the middle east, you don't know what the intentions of the entente were because they were never allowed to carry them out simply because russia collapsed and the french and british were exhausted by the end and you aren't well read enough to know their secret intentions, and similarly you aren't aware of colonial policy of the entente because you are crucifying the turks for doing exactly what the entente and armenians and kurds would have done to them had they won a complete victory.

if you'd like to learn about history and not just parrot back propaganda, here are two decent books for a neophyte.

https://www.amazon.com/Ottoman-Endgame-Revolution-Making-1908-1923/dp/0143109804

https://www.amazon.com/Fall-Ottomans-Great-Middle-East/dp/0465097421