Nobody’s Business But the Turks
So I’ve been working on our taxes this afternoon. And I’ve been letting TurboTax take me through the process, which generally entails clicking “None of these apply.” And clicking it again. And again.
But just as I’m getting lulled into a sort of taxtime trance, the program threw a curveball at me.
In the California State Tax section, after asking if we had any number of adjustments to the numbers imported from our Federal return (we didn’t), TurboTax asked if we had any other sources of income. I was pretty sure we didn’t, but I skimmed the list of checkboxes to make sure.
And there it was:
Settlement payments from the Ottoman Empire. You know, the one that existed for like six centuries until it fell apart after World War I. In 1922.
I don’t even have a joke here. If I wasn’t so frickin’ tired, I’d try to work in something about our byzantine tax code. But I’m running on empty, so I’ll let that one go. (You’re welcome.)
I’m just baffled as to how one goes about winning reparations from an empire that’s been defunct for 80 years.
I assume that the first step is finding yourself one hell of a lawyer.
2 Ripples from “Nobody’s Business But the Turks”
bestman says:
April 3, 2006 at 11:04 am
If there was ever a pop-culture reference that seemed perfectly made for a particular moment in real life, or vice versa, this would appear to be it.
Tom says:
April 9, 2006 at 11:04 pm
This was a settlement by New York Life Ins. related to the 1st Genocide of the 20th Century, committed by the Ottoman Turks upon the Armenian people. Not alot of people have heard of this mass slaughter of about 1.5MM Armenian people because the Turkish government has built an extensive campaign both in its country and internationally (especially the U.S.) to conceal the occurrence of this event. There is abundant information on the topic if you do a Google search “Armenian Genocide”.
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