The Armenian genocide. As the beginning of World War I and 1914, over two million Armenians lived

in the fading Ottoman Empire. By 1922, there were fewer than 400,000. The others, over 1.5 million,

killed by a systematic plan developed by the Ottoman's young Turks party, given the acronym,

the CUP. They wanted to stay composed of nothing but Turkish Muslims and the Christian Armenians were

one of the largest minority groups standing in the way of that. Involved and yet another war with

Russia when World War I kicked off, the Turks killed Armenians under the pretense that if they

didn't, the Armenians would rise up and join the Russian attackers. Hundreds of thousands of

Armenians were made to march to the desert with many dying along the way, not just from starvation

and illness, but from brutal massacres carried out by Ottoman agents who would then rob them of

their few possessions. Hundreds of thousands of others were not killed under the pretense of

deportation. They were just butchered in their villages, homes and the streets. Over 100 years later,

the modern day Turkish government continues to deny that the collected acts of violence against the

Armenians was truly a genocide. They protested it was nothing more than spontaneous violence,

an unfortunate result of wartime confusion and definitely not government sanctioned.

And they're lying. They've been lying about it for so long. The Armenian genocide of the early

20th century wasn't even the first time the Turks had attempted to wipe out the Armenians.

They killed a few hundred thousand other unarmed Armenians just two decades before. There's no debate,

no controversy, no confusion. The Ottoman Empire was ruthless. Their government was led by pan

Turkish butchers for decades. Their mistreatment of the Armenians goes back centuries.

What they did during World War I went beyond the scope of any of the many human rights violations

they've committed and continued to commit. In the final years of the Ottoman Empire,

rulers desperate to cling to some semblance of former glory and power, tried to answer once and

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