Why did Stalin need to wipe out the Ukranian farmers? They were disrupting the social order. No, not at all. He wanted a new social order, and the farmers represented the old one; he was the disrupting power. So were the Nazis. And the French revolutionaries before them. That's why there was all the mass bloodshed. Not every move foreward is progress.
Why did the Young Turks try to wipe out the Armenians back during WWI? They feared the Armenians would disrupt the social order. No, the Armenians bet on the advancing Russian army and switch allegiance to them. This is much like California and Texas switching allegiance to Mexico.
I am very much troubled by what has been done to Armenians, but to portray them as victims of religious persecution is not quite accurate.
Most certainly, they were not some progressive movement suppressed by the Turks, as you seem to present it. Any nation who holds to such ideas can never be in agreement with the West and liberty or freedom. You should speak for our country only. Where in the West have you seen liberty and freedom in the way we understand it? In Germany, where every citizen pays a Church tax, regardless of his beliefs? Or in Spain, where after the expulsion in 1492 there are no Jews (in contrast, Munich, the capital of the Nazi movement in the 1920s-1930s, even after the Holocaust has about 7,000 Jewish citizens).
Your (and mine) understanding of liberty is a uniquely American phenomenon (yes, it has originated with Germanic tribes; yes, it was preserved in England that has been concurred by them; yes, it was further strengthened through the Magna Carta of 1215 and the First Parliament of 1265; yet its full development this idea has reached here, in the New World). So, it may well be that when we judge countries like Turkey, we should compare them to, say, France or Germany, but not the United States. And you know, when measured by that yardstick, Turkey does not look bad.
This would explain why Armenians serving in the armed forces, fighting Russians, where taken off and slaughtered? Why were Armenians living in perfect peace hundreds and hundreds of miles from the nearest battlelines were rounded up and sent to the deserts? Also, the Young Turks desired a state composed of Turks. The Kurds and such were to be assigned their own regions, as they were after all Muslim. The largely Christian minority populations- Greeks, Armenians, Assyrians- did not fit into the Young Turk's scheme of things. They were irregularities in the landscape. I suppose I should have qualified social order- it is more of a case of the ruling group's perception of the social order, so on that point you have me. And you are correct that it was not so much religious as it was ethnic, though one cannot seperate the religious component- why were Armenian children kidnapped and placed in devout Muslim homes?
Most certainly, they were not some progressive movement suppressed by the Turks, as you seem to present it.
It was not my intention to present it thusly (nor did I wish to debate the "troubles" as we shall call them, but did anyway I suppose). But the Young Turks saw a threat in the Armenian population- that of progress and revolution. The other Christian minorities of the Ottoman Empire had revolted and held their own states, so what was keeping the Armenians from doing so? Certainly there were revolutionary movements in the population, and Armenians had climbed upwards economically all through the nineteenth century, but the movements were hardly widespread. Certainly most of the people who died had nothing to do with any movement, and would have remained perfect citizens.