Many people, including myself, will never hold the Turkish people in high regard until they finally acknowledge the Armenian Genocide.
I have yet to converse with a Turk who acknowledges the Genocide. On the contrary, the Turks attempt to shift the blame to the Armenians and Russians.
Shameful.
You’re referring to heinous mass murders from more than a hundred years ago (1915-1917) under the Ottoman Empire.
Young people in Turkey today don’t have any connection with that history. Turkey today is not the Ottoman empire. It is much smaller and culturally distant. The culture and norms of the Ottoman Empire were driven out by Atatürk.
It is hard for example for today’s Americans to be connected with say the enslavement of millions of black Africans. We were not there, we are a different country, we are culturally distant.
Young people in Turkey today wear jeans, text on their smartphones, listen to rock music, and some obtain quality university educations. Yet Erdogan is trying to bring that society into a Fifth Islamic Caliphate. He’s the problem, not the Turkish people.
The same situation occurs in Iran.
If I had my preference, I’d like to see Istanbul once again called Constantinople and for Christian Bible teaching to persuade the people there to accept the truth of Christ. But I don’t think that’s realistic for now.
But if the world is given a choice between Turkish westernization in a secular society and the Islamic Caliphate plan of Erdogan, then certainly the world will pick the modern secular version of the society there.
We can expect that if westernized modern Turks who have integrity were to take power, they would review the region’s history and acknowledge the horror of the Armenian genocide taking it into the history books, teaching all young adult students of that horror and how it must never be allowed to happen again. But this will never happen while Erdogan is there.
So first things first, embrace the friendliness of modern Turks and support them however possible to get rid of Erdogan.