Dark Pasts: Changing the State's Story in Turkey and Japan (2018) is a book by historian Jennifer Dixon that discusses controversies around Japanese war crimes in World War II and the Armenian genocide denial in Turkey. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] According to Dixon, states tend to deny rather than glorify their past crimes due to international constraints. [9]
Genocide denial is the attempt to deny or minimize the scale and severity of an incidence of genocide. Denial is an integral part of genocide and includes secret planning of genocide, propaganda while the genocide is ongoing, and destruction of evidence of mass killings. According to genocide researcher Gregory Stanton, denial "is among the surest indicators of further genocidal massacres".
The Armenian genocide was the systematic destruction of the Armenian people and identity in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Spearheaded by the ruling Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), it was implemented primarily through the mass murder of around one million Armenians during death marches to the Syrian Desert and the forced Islamization of Armenian women and children.
Bias in curricula refers to real or perceived bias in the educational textbooks.
Armenian genocide denial is the claim that the Ottoman Empire and its ruling party, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), did not commit genocide against its Armenian citizens during World War I—a crime documented in a large body of evidence and affirmed by the vast majority of scholars. The perpetrators denied the genocide as they carried it out, claiming Armenians were resettled for military reasons, not exterminated. In the genocide's aftermath, incriminating documents were systematically destroyed, and denial has been the policy of every government of the Republic of Turkey, as of 2022.
Armenian resistance included military, political, and humanitarian efforts to counter Ottoman forces and mitigate the Armenian genocide during the first World War. Early in World War I, the Ottoman Empire commenced efforts to eradicate Armenian culture and eliminate Armenian life, through acts of killing and deportation into uninhabitable deserts and mountain regions. The result was the homogenisation of the Ottoman empire and elimination of 90% of the Armenian Ottoman population, and it became known as Armenian genocide|the Armenian genocide.
The Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars is a document published in Washington D.C. in 1914 by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Hans-Lukas Kieser is a Swiss historian of the late Ottoman Empire and Turkey, Professor of modern history at the University of Zurich and president of the Research Foundation Switzerland-Turkey in Basel. He is an author of books and articles in several languages.
The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey's Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924 is a 2019 history book written by Benny Morris and Dror Ze'evi. They argue that the Armenian genocide and other contemporaneous persecution of Christians in the Ottoman Empire constitute an extermination campaign, or genocide, carried out by the Ottoman Empire against its Christian subjects.
Türkkaya Ataöv (born 1932 is a Turkish academic and columnist. He is a researcher of Armenian genocide.
Genocide justification is the claim that a genocide is morally excusable or necessary, in contrast to genocide denial, which rejects that genocide occurred. Perpetrators often claim that the genocide victims presented a serious threat, meaning that their killing was legitimate self-defense of a nation or state. According to modern international criminal law, there can be no excuse for genocide.
Eric D. Weitz was a professor of history at City University of New York, and author of several books.
The relationship between the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust has been discussed by scholars. While a direct causal relationship between the Armenian genocide is not proven, it has been suggested that Holocaust perpetrators were inspired by the Ottoman example and the legacy of impunity. Both the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide are considered paradigmatic cases of genocide in the twentieth century.
The terminology of the Armenian genocide is different in English, Turkish, and Armenian languages and has led to political controversies around the issue of Armenian genocide denial and Armenian genocide recognition. Although the majority of historians writing in English use the word "genocide", other terms exist.
Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present and Collective Violence Against the Armenians, 1789–2009 is a 2015 book by Turkish sociologist Fatma Müge Göçek which deals with the denial, justification, and rationalization of state-sponsored violence against Armenians in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, focusing especially on the Armenian genocide and its persistent denial in Turkey. Among the arguments made in the book is that the Armenian genocide was an act of foundational violence that enabled the creation of the Republic of Turkey and its continuing denial is an ideological foundation of the Turkish nation-state. The book was praised by reviewers for its extensive research and methodological innovation, although some noted that it was dense and not easy to read for those not familiar with the topic.
The International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide was the first major conference in the field of genocide studies, held in Tel Aviv on 20–24 June 1982. It was organized by Israel Charny, Elie Wiesel, Shamai Davidson and their Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide, founded in 1979. The conference's objective was to further the understanding and prevention of all genocides; it marked the shift from viewing genocide as an irrational phenomenon to one that could be studied and understood.
Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town called Buczacz is a 2018 book by historian Omer Bartov exploring ethnic relations between Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews in the town of Buczacz with a focus on the Holocaust.
The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–1950 is a book by Uğur Ümit Üngör, published by Oxford University Press in 2011. The book focuses on population politics in the transition between the late Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey, especially in the Diyarbekir region.
ASİMKK was a Turkish government agency under the National Security Council devoted to coordinating efforts against Armenian genocide recognition that operated in the 2000s and 2010s. Set up due to international pressures for genocide recognition in May 2001, the agency was jointly chaired by the Foreign Minister of Turkey and the secretary general of the National Security Council. The agency's goal was to centralize Turkish efforts to promote Armenian genocide denial in public opinion both in Turkey and internationally. Beginning in 2002 with Abdullah Gül, the prime minister of Turkey was the ex officio head of the organization. The body included high-level representation from the Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Justice, Ministry of the Interior, Foreign Ministry, Ministry of National Education, the Turkish Historical Society, and the Directorate General of the State Archives.
The state funeral of Talaat Pasha, former Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire and one of the chief architects of the Armenian genocide, took place at the Monument of Liberty in Istanbul, Turkey, on 25 February 1943. At the request of the office of the prime minister of Turkey, Şükrü Saracoğlu, Talaat's remains were disinterred and transported to Turkey. The funeral was attended by Prime Minister Saracoğlu, German ambassador to Turkey Franz von Papen, and Turkish journalist Ahmet Emin Yalman. With this gesture, Adolf Hitler hoped to secure Turkish support for the Axis in World War II. Hüseyin Cahit Yalçın gave the funeral oration as Talaat was buried at the monument, originally dedicated to those who lost their lives preventing the 1909 Ottoman countercoup.
Throughout the 2000s (and to this day), the official Turkish narrative has denied outright, and systematically, that the experience of the Armenians was a crime at all, let alone a genocide. Whatever linguistic acrobatics the state narrative has performed does not change this reality.
However, if ardent nationalists and militarists were willing to commit the Armenian Genocide and Nanjing Massacre, why haven’t they been willing to admit these atrocities? ... Although focused on the material and ideational reasons why states resist showing contrition, Dark Pasts helps answer why unrepentant nationalists avoid unambiguously justifying dark politics... These patterns of evasion reveal that even far-right Turkish and Japanese nationalists understood that embracing mass atrocity crimes could be politically damaging, a source of shame, and a stain on the nation.