A Public Relations Tragedy

Those tactful Starbucks people have run into a bit of trouble thanks to an advertising poster showing Armenian women in traditional dress enjoying an economy-size styrofoam under balloons bearing the Turkish flag. Evidently Starbucks' Los Angeles advertising department is utilising researchers with qualifications in Gove History™, where waving flags and jolly chaps doing jolly things are much more important than mere bloody and sordid facts.

The present state of Turkey is the successor to the Ottoman Empire, which wiped out between a million and a million and a half Armenians, along with other ethnic minorities, between 1915 and 1918, possibly in an effort to preserve Turkish jobs for Turkish workers. Twenty-two countries have recognised the event as a genocide, and the Official Greatest Ever Number One Greatest Briton Ever, Winston Churchill, even used the term Holocaust at the time, since (thanks partly to his own high-handed bungling) the Ottoman Empire was then on the wrong, and winning, side of the Dardanelles Campaign. The present state of Turkey refuses to call the event a genocide; a position it shares with the present British government. The Ministry of Wogs, Frogs and Huns prefers the term "tragedy", doubtless on the supremely moral grounds that Britain has fewer commercial ties with Armenia than with Turkey. The centenary of the massacre will be commemorated in April, when presumably the representatives of the British Empire's successor state will be too busy celebrating Churchill's great victory at Gallipoli.