Talk:Menemen massacre

Comments

Title is POV

What are the references calling this a massacre? The only reference produced so far is (1) from a Turkish propagandist website (2) not scholarly even if it were admissible which it isn't. Searching google books and google scholar you get only 1 return, in google scholar, for the same propagandist website. All the links on the net when searching for "Menemen massacre" are from wikipedia itself (800/900) or from other wikis mirroring wikipedia indirectly (100/900). This is not appropriate for WP and the article will be nominated for deletionXenovatis (talk) 22:56, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

This is not entirely correct. First, one of the references is a publication (by a professional academic historian) of the Center for Strategic Research of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Turkey. I find it a bit too easy to dismiss this in such an offhand way as "a Turkish propagandist website". The publication in question largely consists of literal quotations from the 1919 Report of the Inter-Allied Commission of Inquiry (formed by the U.S., the U.K., France, and Italy to investigate the situation). The term "massacre" referring to this large-scale murder of a thousand or more innocent civilians is also found, for example at www.lonympics.co.uk/massacres1.htm and at www.hungarianhistory.com/lib/vardy/vardy.doc, sources that are entirely independent of this article.

It is not at all uncommon to use the term "massacre" for the indiscriminate killing of much smaller numbers of people: Avivim school bus massacre: 12 victims killed; Boston Massacre: 5 victims killed; Columbine High School massacre: 12 victims killed; etcetera. This is a normal use in English of the word massacre: "The act or an instance of killing a large number of humans indiscriminately and cruelly" (American Heritage Dictionary). We can hardly call it "the Menemen Series of Unfortunate Events".  --Lambiam 19:09, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

• So you feel that a sum total of two academic references, one of which from a sometime employee and current beneficiary of the Turkish government (McCarthy) are sufficient to (1) include the events in WP in the first place (2) label them with a what is a term with several contradictory definitions when we are not sure which one they are using and even though WP:NPOV would suggest a neutral term like "killings, incident, debate, case etc". I am not being obtuse I genuinely expect an answer here, either yes or no.Xenovatis (talk) 19:29, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

  Well, you are not going to get a "yes or no" answer. What I wrote was mainly intended as a correction to what you wrote, which was clearly indicative of a certain bias. A possible lack of sufficient references in an article stub is in general not a direct criterion for whether the subject matter warrants inclusion, and this was anyway not an issue I was addressing in my comment. That discussion should be held at AfD. If you think that the use of "massacre" in the title of an article about the large-scale indiscriminate killing of civilians is POV, then surely you will also agree that the roughly 600 Wikipedia articles with a title of the form "X massacre" have a POV title. If it would not contravene WP:POINT, I'd suggest you to try to move the POVly named Massacres during the Greek Revolution to the neutral title Incidents during the Greek Revolution, and see how that is received.  --Lambiam 08:30, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

I didn't expect a straight answer so am not surprised. And it would violate WP:POINT. It's typicall though, when it concerns the Greeks 30 academic references are not enough. For the others 1 will do. Typical.Xenovatis (talk) 10:57, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

My two cents. All killings are terrible but not all deserve a page in here obviously. Menemen killings are significant for historic reasons and that is why anyone even cares to remember them today. It is of course amusing to see those who trhow around words like "genocide" and "massacre" so generously now complain about it when the victims are Muslims or Turks. --Murat (talk) 06:07, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

Of course the incident happened - it was the worst of a number of incidents committed by the ill-trained and badly-led Greek forces. However, McCarthy is nothing more than a propagandist, his stupid assertion that just because the local Greek population did the (obviously sensible) thing in identifying themselves as being Greek to the advancing Greek army means that the massacre was preplanned (for what reason?) just shows the guy has no credibility. BTW, what we don't get in the article is info on what propaganda use was made of the event by the Nationalist Turkish forces - given that the Erzurum conference took place the following month, I'd be surprised if they had missed the opportunity to use it at such a critical time. If it were used, then it would be from that fact that the historical significance of the event derives. Meowy 01:50, 28 May 2008 (UTC)