Armenian History and the Question of Genocide

This book presents the Turkish position regarding the Armenian claims of genocide during World War I and the continuing debate over this issue. The author illustrates that although genocide is a useful concept to describe such evil events as the Jewish Holocaust in World War II and Rwanda in the 1990s, the term has also been overused, misused, and therefore trivialized by many different groups seeking to demonize their antagonists and win sympathetic approbation for them. This book includes the Armenians in this category because, although as many as 600,000 of them died during World War I, it was neither a premeditated policy perpetrated by the Ottoman Turkish government nor an event unilaterally implemented without cause. Of course, in no way does this excuse the horrible excesses that were committed. To illustrate this point, this book uses the recent work of the noted French scholar Jacques Semelin, and such long-suppressed Armenian personalities as Hovhannes Katchaznouni (the first prime minister of Armenia after WWI) and K.S. Papazian (an historian), among others. This book also illustrates how today Armenians have sought to politicize and legislate their version of history in parliamentary and other governmental bodies around the world, damning their opponents as genocide deniers and perpetrators of hate speech. The case of the renowned scholar Bernard Lewis is a prime example of this Armenian misuse and distortion of their politicized version of history. This book also analyzes the hypermobilized Armenian lobbying tactics that have achieved considerable success in politicizing their version of history. Among many other issues, this book also analyzes the recent "soccer diplomacy" between Turkey and Armenia, which has led to their signing treaties that will establish diplomatic relations between them and an historical commission to analyze their different versions of history

Michael M. Gunter is a Professor of Political Science at Tennessee Technological University. He is the author of seven critically praised scholarly books on the Kurdish question, the most recent being The Kurds Ascending: The Evolving Solution to the Kurdish Problem in Iraq and Turkey (2008, 2011).