The Great Game of Genocide

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The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians is a 2005 non-fiction book by Donald Bloxham, published by Oxford University Press (OUP), about the Armenian genocide. Bloxham concludes that the Armenian genocide was planned by the Ottoman government. [1]

Contents

Fake illustration used in the book titled "A Turkish Official starving Armenians with bread" Fake image claiming to be Ottoman official teasing Armenian starved children by showing bread, 1915.jpg
Fake illustration used in the book titled "A Turkish Official starving Armenians with bread"

It focuses on the geopolitical relations between the powers of World War I and the genocide, and how some countries supported the Armenians for geopolitical reasons but ended support due to new geopolitical factors in regards to the empire and the successor, the Republic of Turkey. The book includes an overview of relations between Ottoman Armenians and Ottoman Turks while many other works on the genocide focus solely on that. [3]

The final chapter discusses how the government and people of the United States responded to the Armenian genocide. [1]

Controversy

The book heavily relied on secondary sources. The primarily sources it relied on were Western archival materials supplemented by the pertinent published sources. Bloxham has done no research work in the Ottoman archives nor utilized the contemporary Ottoman press. It presents a one-sided story of Armenian accusations without looking at the overall context of what took place and ignoring the Ottoman experience. The book underplays the massacre of Turks by Armenian armed bands during the French occupation of Cilicia. Bloxham's work also included categoric false information as well as spelling and typographical mistakes. For example, the Osmaniye-İslahiye-Radju military supply line was a railway, not a road; Greek troops disembarked at İzmir on May 15, 1919, not on May 16; the Turkish city of Adalia (Antalya) was never occupied by Greece. Typographical mistakes included Arnavutköj for Arnavutköy, Radjun for Radju, Gourard for Gouraud, Akullioglu for Akıllıoğlu, Dörtyöl for Dörtyol, and Aloannis for İoannis. The book also had in-between pages 146 and 147 fake illustrations. [4] However such inaccuracies are not mentioned by Jay Winter in his review where he said that as Bloxham affirms the genocide, the "bitter irony of the title" is not a denial of the genocide. [5]

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References

Notes

  1. 1 2 Brown, L. Carl (1 May 2006). "The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians". Foreign Affairs . Retrieved 22 June 2019.{{cite magazine}}: Cite magazine requires |magazine= (help)
  2. Bloxham, Donald (2005). The great game of genocide : imperialism, nationalism, and the destruction of the Ottoman Armenians. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN   0-19-927356-1. OCLC   57483924.
  3. Oktem, p. 712.
  4. Güçlü, Yücel (1 March 2006). "Review of The Great Game of Genocide". Middle East Quarterly.
  5. Winter, p. 126.