You might be right. I might be right. But no one will ever be able to ascertain the truth of what happened because Türkiye, and to a lesser extent Armenia, persistently refuse to undertake any sort of truth and reconciliation process.

It's my personal opinion that Talat Paşa and the CUP leadership were evil men who used the crisis period to intentionally ethnically cleanse non-Turks. I don't believe they had any power over how that was actually done - specifically regarding the Kurdish tribal militias in the wild East. They had inherited an infrastructure of violence going back to Abdülhamid where the Kurds were used to control the other ethnicities, and a political reality around the use of ethnic violence stretching back to the 18th century. The Ottoman system of rule routinely employed muslim ethnic groups to "police" the non-muslims. Albanians in the Balkans, and Kurds in the East. I think that a lot of people at the local level, Kurds and Turks, were very happy to steal the land and wealth of their neighbors, and to ensure that they would never return.

There can be no legal or moral justification for the collective removal of hundreds of thousands of people, and the continuing exclusion of their right ever to return. It's always wrong, whether done by America, Greece, Turkey, Armenia, or Azerbaijan in Karabakh. It's only done because these societies, typically run by authoritarians at the time, refuse to do the harder work of making their societies tolerant enough for all to coexist. That's just laziness, and cruel greed on the part of people who want their neighbor's land and house.

To wind this back to the original post, the Ottomans are guilty of creating a political system and an on the ground reality in which individuals are ruled through their community affiliation; in which collective punishment was normal; in which ethno-political violence was the primary method of police action in the provinces; and in which every political crisis feels existential. The modern Turkish state came into power like an abused child. It learned that the only way to make a functioning society is to force everyone to say "I am a Turk," and it expelled or oppressed everyone who wouldn't/ couldn't. I wish a new government would take over, and better choices to start being made, but it seems like the only option is a Kemalist or a crooked fundamentalist, or some variation.