Integrated Genocide History

${protocol}://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/gsi.12.1.10 - Matthias Bjørnlund <matthiasb@webspeed.dk> - Friday, June 22, 2018 3:16:09 AM - IP Address:188.120.87.197 Integrated Genocide History George N. Shirinian, ed., Genocide in the Ottoman Empire: Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks, 1913–1923, New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2017. Pp 433, hardcover, $69.95 US. Reviewed by Matthias Bjørnlund, Danish Institute for Study Abroad The Context Genocide studies—in short, analyzing one or more cases of organized mass destruction—is by now a somewhat established academic discipline. While it is still young, it is, after ‘‘having remained marginal to academic discourse’’ for decades, no longer a mere toddler in the field of humanities and social sciences thanks to a host of factors, from individual achievements to geopolitical shifts.1 Genocide, of course, is not young, not even as a concept. For instance, long before Nazi atrocities were famously dubbed ‘‘a crime without a name’’ by Winston Churchill in 1941, neologisms exactly similar to Raphael Lemkin’s 1943/44 invention of the Greek-Latin hybrid word ‘‘genocide,’’ (génos + -cide, i.e., the murder of a people/nation/race/tribe) were used by Scandinavian and German politicians, diplomats, reporters, and intellectuals from 1915, alongside ‘‘crimes against humanity,’’ ‘‘extermination,’’ and ‘‘race murder’’ to define or encapsulate the ongoing destruction of the Ottoman Armenians and Greeks. These neologisms were, for instance, folkemord, folkmord, and Völkermord, all combining the words ‘‘people’’ and ‘‘murder.’’ Both before and after that, the Greek genoktonia, the Armenian tseghaspanutiun, and several similar words synonymous with genocide were used in various languages, while the term ‘‘holocaust’’ was regularly employed as a term for the destruction of Christians in the Ottoman Empire since at least the Abdülhamid-massacres of the 1890s.2 It was up to devoted Polish-Jewish legal scholar and activist Lemkin, though, to not only precisely name the crime, but also take the most vital initial steps towards developing a legal-historical concept and framework of genocide based on case studies such as the ongoing Holocaust, the Holodomor, as well as the destruction of Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks in the Ottoman Empire.3 As readers of this journal will know, it was a pioneering work that led directly to the 1948 UN definition criminalizing genocide, as well as to numerous scholarly definitions and debates that followed.4 After the slow start, genocide studies, comparative and otherwise, took off in earnest from the 1980s with a broad variety of historical, sociological, legal, anthropological, political, psychological, interdisciplinary, and so on, perspectives on mass violence, all basically exploring one or more of the questions of how and/or why do we do what we do when we are at our absolute worst? And how should we deal with this, individually, in groups, as a society after the fact, so that even the faintest of hopes of not only historical accuracy, but also of preventing similar crimes as well as preserving human dignity and justice, can be kept? This activist approach of going beyond the search for knowledge or explanations of human behavior has been pronounced in the field, as expressed by Canadian political scientist Maureen S. Hiebert: ‘‘Genocide studies has always been a 6 2018 Genocide Studies International 12, no. 1 doi:10.3138/gsi.12.1.10 ${protocol}://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/gsi.12.1.10 - Matthias Bjørnlund <matthiasb@webspeed.dk> - Friday, June 22, 2018 3:16:09 AM - IP Address:188.120.87.197 130 Bjørnlund goal-oriented area of scholarship that has sought to make the post-Holocaust injunction, ‘never again’ a reality.’’5 If preventing genocide is indeed the most important criteria of success for the academic field in question, it has been an utter failure. When pointing to, say, the situation in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Myanmar, and so on, at the time of writing, January 2018, it has indeed become almost a cliché in itself to point out that ‘‘never again’’ has become a cliché, as our collective scholarly, as well as political, diplomatic, and military, answers to mass atrocities are once more almost entirely lacking in effectiveness or sincerity.6 Even on a purely academic level (as if such a thing ever existed), we will most likely never get a clear, universally accepted answer to what the very core of the object of study, the term ‘‘genocide,’’ even means or encompasses. In some circles it is still debated if it is even possible to explain the Holocaust, and, if so, how. That said, the universal fact that most scholarly findings and concerns are more or less detached from real-world implications should not come as a surprise—it is, after all, a while ago that Herodotus complained that ‘‘Of all men’s miseries the bitterest is this: to know so much and to have control over nothing’’—or become a cause for permanent depression, as contested concepts, histories, and realities have always been part of the academic game. It obviously does not mean we should not keep approaching truth through precision or, if one balks at the ‘‘t-word,’’ a lesser substitute like ‘‘intersubjectivity’’ or ‘‘well-justified belief.’’7 That leads us to what, among other things, happens in genocide studies these days: solid and sometimes even innovative work mixed with disappointment, just like in any other academic discipline (admittedly, I am not totally up-to-date with all the many developments and publications in the field, an indication not only of my limited time and energy, but also of a growing field). So while there may be no dramatic developments, an interesting and fruitful tendency in the recent historiography of genocides and other mass atrocities seems to be the attempt to go beyond what has perhaps by now become traditional—which clearly does not mean inferior or less useful—i.e., mostly (a) monographs and edited volumes on (aspects of) singular case studies;8 (b) general histories and encyclopedias of genocide;9 (c) conceptual and thematic treatments of the subject, from gendered aspects to memorialization and denial;10 (d) broad, regional studies of genocide with perhaps some thematic, but little or no causal linking between case studies;11 (e) searching for ‘‘root causes,’’ often in colonial and imperial settings, in studies linking cases of mass violence perpetrated by the same ethnic/national group over a longer period of time;12 and (f) relatively distinct cases being compared in articles, monographs, and anthologies, perhaps merely with an introduction providing the proverbial red thread between chapters, cases, or segments.13 This is my tentative, hopefully somewhat meaningful and less than arbitrary, organizing principle, but others could surely be used. Though there are of course gray areas, hybrids, and overlaps within the categories above (such as in Stefan Ihrig’s Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination and Justifying Genocide: Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler), in this rather new trend in genocide studies there is an increased focus on relatively directly related case studies that are, more or less successfully and consistently, integrated into deeper causal, temporal, and spatial narratives.14 This ‘‘holistic’’ approach, which, for lack of a better term, I 6 2018 Genocide Studies International 12, no. 1 doi:10.3138/gsi.12.1.10 ${protocol}://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/gsi.12.1.10 - Matthias Bjørnlund <matthiasb@webspeed.dk> - Friday, June 22, 2018 3:16:09 AM - IP Address:188.120.87.197 Integrated Genocide History 131 shall dub ‘‘integrated genocide history,’’ is in many ways following general historiographical trends as well as developments in, for instance, the study of the destruction of the European Jews: If the Holocaust was in some sense a European process, it took place within the context of other European processes of murderous exclusion, geopolitical turmoil, and economic restructuring in the period. While Jews were the pre-eminent victims of mass murder, they were by no means the only ones, and Nazi Germany not the only perpetrator. State violence against domestic minorities; violence against indigenous peoples in European colonies outside Europe; violence against opponents of the economic order; violence against the socially marginal; violence in wartime that exceeded the limits established by international law: all of these were established characteristics of the world in which Nazism appeared.15 In other words, these are narratives of genocide that emphasize continuity by exploring how the total or partial destruction of several groups are directly and profoundly interconnected within or (most often) across borders of nations and empires during a limited period of time, where mass murder and mass displacement are prime tools in the crushing of old orders and the creation of new, usually more homogenous realities.16 Such ‘‘topographies of terror’’ are generally conducted with an empiricallybased theoretical framework in order to understand not only the particular—the victims, perpetrators, and bystanders as well as the legacies of violence of the area and the era in question—but also the general, for instance ‘‘the phenomenon of genocide as an aspect of modern world-historical development.’’ An explicit or implicit assumption or conclusion in integrated genocide history is often that explaining the modern world, who we are and how we got here, is impossible without taking into account the genocidal processes that both led to and were caused by significant features of the late modern period: colonialism and post-colonialism, racism, industrialization, social/demographic engineering, centralization, the end of empires, and the creation of the nation states.17 Groundbreaking monographs, articles, and edited volumes in English on such killing fields include several works by Mark Levene, from ‘‘Creating a Modern Zone of Genocide: The Impact of Nation- and State-Formation on Eastern Anatolia, 1878– 1923’’ to The Crisis of Genocide, vol. I, Devastation: The European Rimlands 1912–1938 and vol. II, Annihilation: The European Rimlands 1939–1953.18 As it is summed up in the blurb for the latter two volumes: From the years leading up to the First World War to the aftermath of the Second, Europe experienced an era of genocide. As well as the Holocaust, this period also witnessed the Armenian genocide in 1915, mass killings in Bolshevik and Stalinist Russia, and a host of further ethnic cleansings in Anatolia, the Balkans, and Eastern Europe. Crisis of Genocide seeks to integrate these genocidal events into a single, coherent history.19 Among other things, what is quite sensibly postulated in that quote and documented over many hundreds of pages by Mark Levene is that analyzing and comparing (which, once more for the record, does not have to mean equating) case studies with a proximity in causality, time, and space provides us with new insights into the local, regional, and universal. It is also one way of overcoming at least some of the problems inherent in the paradigm of comparison itself. As it has been put: 6 2018 Genocide Studies International 12, no. 1 doi:10.3138/gsi.12.1.10 ${protocol}://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/gsi.12.1.10 - Matthias Bjørnlund <matthiasb@webspeed.dk> - Friday, June 22, 2018 3:16:09 AM - IP Address:188.120.87.197 132 Bjørnlund it is not difficult to make sense of an individual case . . . or to draw a few rough parallels across a range of cases. . . . The challenge comes in trying to make sense of the diversity across cases in a way that unites similarities and differences in a single coherent framework.20 Aside from Levene, this is what Timothy Snyder famously aims at in Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, integrating the story of the Holocaust into a larger framework of extreme violence by showing how instances of mass murder enabled and interacted with other instances of mass murder, fueled by rivalling Nazi and Soviet Utopian ideologies in a particular geographical zone from 1933 to 1945.21 Other noteworthy examples that fit reasonably well into that mold include several volumes on Africa’s great lakes region, Ugur Ümit Üngör’s The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–1950, a book that ‘‘argues that from 1913 to 1950, the Young Turk regime subjected East Anatolia, an ethnically heterogeneous space, to various forms of nationalist population policies aimed at ethnically homogenizing the region,’’ Joost Jongerden and Jelle Verheij’s Social Relations in Ottoman Diyarbekir, 1870–1915, as well as the many relevant and interconnected case studies exploring killing fields in borderlands in Omer Bartov and Erik D. Weitz’s Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands.22 The Review Then there is George S. Shirinian’s Genocide in the Ottoman Empire: Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks, 1913–1923, a most recent publication following this trend of integrating directly related case studies into a larger narrative, not only to bring more attention to relatively obscure events, but also to increase understanding of more well-known events like the Armenian Genocide and the history of the late Ottoman Empire in general by providing a broader and deeper context. The Armenian Genocide has become an established field of study after more than a generation of activist struggles as well as academic achievements. By now, ‘‘No book on the history of genocide can omit the case of the Armenians’’; it is not uncommon to see sophisticated publications going beyond the ‘‘proving genocide/countering denial’’-genre; and, while euphemisms and marginalization of the subject are still bountiful, the history of the genocide itself and of the Ottoman Armenians in general is slowly starting to take its natural place in narratives of WWI, the Ottoman Empire/early modern Turkey, the Near East, and so on.23 It is only during the last decade or so, though, that other groups victimized by the Young Turk and Kemalist regimes have received any attention worth noting, at least on the international academic scene.24 Aside from the Ottoman Kurds—both victims and perpetrators of atrocities—there is, for instance, the case of the persecution of Jews and Arabs within the Ottoman realm.25 But the most widespread and systematic acts of violence committed during this particular time period—from the Balkan Wars (that saw, among other things, massive ethnic cleansing of Muslims) to the Greco-Turkish ‘‘population exchange’’ and the establishment of the Turkish Republic—in this particular region (roughly the area covering the Ottoman Empire) were targeting Christians, Assyrians and Greeks, and Armenians. This discrepancy has been addressed in recent conferences and parliamentary resolutions (e.g., in Sweden, Armenia, and the Netherlands), commemorative monuments in Germany, Sweden, and Australia to all Christian victims of genocide in 6 2018 Genocide Studies International 12, no. 1 doi:10.3138/gsi.12.1.10 ${protocol}://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/gsi.12.1.10 - Matthias Bjørnlund <matthiasb@webspeed.dk> - Friday, June 22, 2018 3:16:09 AM - IP Address:188.120.87.197 Integrated Genocide History 133 the Ottoman Empire (meeting predictable resistance from the Turkish state),26 and also as integrated genocide history to various degrees in, for instance, Michelle Tusan’s Smyrna’s Ashes: Humanitarianism, Genocide, and the Birth of the Middle East, a 2015 special issue of Genocide Studies International introduced by Roger W. Smith, as well as in Dominik J. Schaller and Jürgen Zimmerer’s Late Ottoman Genocides: The dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and Young Turk population and extermination policies: The Young Turks’ overall aim was a demographic reorganization of the Ottoman Empire. All deportations were planned and supervised by the ‘‘directorate for the Settlement of Tribes and Immigrants’’ that belonged to the Ottoman Ministry of the Interior. A relatively small number of government administrators were thus chiefly involved in the coordination of the murder and expulsion of Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians and other minority groups. Therefore, the isolated study and emphasis of a single group’s victimhood during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire fails to really understand Young Turks’ motives and aims in its grand design.27 There is nothing inherently wrong with focusing on one case—for one, without such case studies, local history, microhistory, and so on, there would be little solid documentation to build on for comparative and integrative purposes. Very few scholars know all the relevant languages or have accessed all the relevant archives, but it may seem surprising that only few genocide scholars were inspired by the fact that one group of main perpetrators, the Young Turks/Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), and what can in many ways be seen as their direct successors, the Kemalists, were responsible for the attempted extermination in whole or in part of not one but three Christian groups within a short period of time in areas in or adjacent to the Ottoman Empire/Turkey which the perpetrators controlled or attempted to control. A few caveats are in order here, as such an approach has its problems and pitfalls: We obviously cannot simply lump Ottoman and Turkish Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks into one category of ‘‘Christians’’—even the Young Turks and the Kemalists usually did not do that. Nor can we assume that the individual groups were or are even close to being homogenous—for instance, an Armenian Protestant in the Kharpert (Harput; Mamouret-ul-Aziz) province could have little in common besides ethnicity with an Armenian Apostolic from Constantinople. There are serious disputes between proponents of a ‘‘Pontian/Pontic genocide thesis’’ and a ‘‘Greek/Hellenic genocide thesis’’—some parliaments, activists, and scholars, including in the volume under review here, recognize one, some the other. There are equally serious disputes regarding what constitutes an Assyrian or Assyro/Chaldean. Is it a meaningful and precise category? Does it include Nestorians, Chaldeans, Jacobites, Arameans, Syrians (Eastern Orthodox), Syriacs, and other groups? And so on.28 But all differences and difficulties aside, there is significant overlap in motivation for the persecution of these three Christian groups (like Turkish/Muslim supremacy, nation building, alleged disloyalty, ‘‘military necessity,’’ making room for assimilating heterogenous Muslim communities, and economy); extremely chauvinistic and Christianophobic arch perpetrators, such as physician, CUP-official, and governor Mehmed Reshid, were responsible for displacing and/or massacring members of all groups from the Ottoman Aegean coastline in the west to Diyarbekir in the east; and so on. There is thus relative proximity as well as causality, among other things, in the sense that all 6 2018 Genocide Studies International 12, no. 1 doi:10.3138/gsi.12.1.10 ${protocol}://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/gsi.12.1.10 - Matthias Bjørnlund <matthiasb@webspeed.dk> - Friday, June 22, 2018 3:16:09 AM - IP Address:188.120.87.197 134 Bjørnlund three cases of genocide were largely caused by the same mindset held by many of the same people. Experiences from the early pre-WWI demographic, engineered through the persecution of one group, Ottoman Greeks (a.k.a. Rum), directly influenced and inspired the later persecution of Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians during and after the war; while radicalization, brutalization, and impunity from warfare and from one atrocity spilled over into other atrocities.29 Whether this constitutes one or three genocides is, in my opinion, not too important (I tend to think of them as three somewhat separate, in some important ways unique, but still deeply interconnected events or series of events). What is important, though, is that whatever conclusion one reaches it can only be reached through comparison, not a priori. There have indeed been reasons for comparing the fates of Ottoman Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrians ever since WWI. As quoted by George Shirinian in his clear, concise introduction to the volume reviewed here, US ambassador at Constantinople, Henry Morgenthau, noted that, ‘‘The Armenians are not the only subject people in Turkey which have suffered from this policy of making Turkey exclusively the country of the Turks. The story which I have told about the Armenians I could also tell with certain modifications for the Greeks and the Syrians’’ (3).30 Or, as an Ottoman opposition leader in exile, Ismail Hakki, wrote it in 1915, when the Armenians were the main target: ‘‘The most horrible crimes are being committed against the Greeks and particularly the Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire.’’31 There should be nothing controversial in recognizing this, just as there should be nothing controversial in recognizing that, say, the German Nazis singled out Jews for total annihilation, but, as part of the same mindset, they arguably also committed genocide against other groups as well according to the legal and various non-legal definitions, including the Roma/Sinti. It is, as Shirinian writes, not that complicated, at least not in principle: The logic of approaching the genocides of the Christian minorities in the late Ottoman Empire as a whole, rather than as separate case studies, is clear. To a large extent, the experiences of these three peoples took place in the same country, during the same time period, as part of the same historical, social, economic, and political forces, involving a continuity of perpetrators with the same motive.32 The volume is divided into three parts, ‘‘Contexts,’’ ‘‘Documentation and Eyewitness Accounts,’’ and ‘‘Legacies and Interpretations.’’ The first chapter, ‘‘The Background to the Late Ottoman Genocides,’’ is also written by the editor and provides, with the other two chapters in the first part, a solid background analyzing the social, economic, and political causes of the Medz Yeghern, Seyfo/Sayfo, and Megali Katastrophi 1913–1923, a red thread making up for the lack of coherence and clear relevance of many other anthologies. Here, the rest of the contributions are situated in a broader narrative, an integrated genocide history. Shirinian describes in some detail a dysfunctional society where ‘‘an atmosphere in which political and social disputes were addressed only with extremes of violence became the norm’’ (63). In the end, he argues, this led to genocide—according to the legal as well as non-legal definitions—of the empire’s Greeks, Assyrians, and Armenians, perhaps not inevitably, but not merely by chance or due to ‘‘civil insurrection and wartime exigencies’’ either. In a chapter on late Ottoman genocides, Shirinian ends up arguing that there was only one genocide. This is not necessarily as confusing as it may sound, since, for instance, it makes little sense 6 2018 Genocide Studies International 12, no. 1 doi:10.3138/gsi.12.1.10 ${protocol}://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/gsi.12.1.10 - Matthias Bjørnlund <matthiasb@webspeed.dk> - Friday, June 22, 2018 3:16:09 AM - IP Address:188.120.87.197 Integrated Genocide History 135 to distinguish between Armenian and Assyrian victims massacred by the same perpetrators at the same time at exactly the same spot for the same reasons across the Ottoman border in Urmia, Persia/Iran, while it does at times make sense to distinguish between overall CUP and Kemalist policies against Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrians.33 The next chapter in the ‘‘Context’’ part, Dikran M. Kaligian’s ‘‘Convulsions at the End of Empire: Thrace, Asia Minor, and the Aegean,’’ covers the period from the 1908 Constitutional Revolution to the aftermath of the Balkan Wars in the Ottoman Empire. Based on many primary sources, Kaligian focuses on relations between the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) and the Young Turks/CUP, showing how enmity between those two national movements was perhaps not a natural state of affairs. Some forms of cooperation were possible, and as long as the vastly more powerful CUP was in control and actively suppressed—or merely signaled the unacceptability of—say, Kurdish violence against Christians in the east, such violence immediately diminished dramatically. This is perhaps one of the great missed opportunities in twentieth century history, because the CUP soon chose to gradually abandon the necessary structural reforms and once more accept impunity for crimes against Armenians and other persecuted groups, as in the aftermath of the 1909 Cilician massacres. That was followed by active encouragement and planning of violence, Turkification, and ethnic cleansing, such as against Ottoman Greeks in 1913–1914, where ‘‘the very tactics used, including the deployment of the Teskilat-i Mahsusa [the Special Organization, MB] the conscription of men into labor battalions, and the seizure and redistribution to Muslims of lands and businesses, resembles nothing so much as a dry run for the Genocide,’’ (98) and ended in full scale genocide soon after. Other avenues of action and development were, if not likely, then certainly possible, as Kaligian shows. The final chapter in the section, Anahit Khosroeva’s ‘‘Assyrians in the Ottoman Empire and the Official Turkish Policy of Their Extermination, 1890s–1918,’’ is dense, full of useful quotes and references, not only regarding the destruction of the Assyrians, but also of Armenians and Greeks, and, like some other contributions, it contains a couple of interesting illustrations (something many other academic publications would benefit from, although the illustrations in question could use a bit more contextualization. Pictures do not necessarily say more than a thousand words, but they do say something). However, it is also somewhat problematic. It generally lacks proper analysis, organization, and contextualization of all the sources. More specifically, a sentence such as ‘‘The infamy of executing that century’s first full-scale ethnic cleansing belongs to the Young Turk government’’ (105) is (a), not precise, as it, for example, overlooks the genocide of the Herero-Nama, (b), somewhat bombastic—genocide is a moral issue, but outright moralistic declarations belong elsewhere, and (c), confusing, as it sows doubt whether the author actually thinks the genocide of the Assyrians began in the 1890s during the reign of sultan Abdülhamid II as stated in the title, or later when the CUP took power. Paul R. Bartrop opens the second part of the volume with ‘‘Considering Genocide Testimony: Three Case Studies from the Armenian, Pontic, and Assyrian Genocides.’’ It is a short, straightforward, thoughtful, and informative chapter that recognizes and expands on a simple fact that should have been more widely accepted in the field of genocide studies years ago: testimonies by survivors are as useful and valid as any other sources, including diplomatic reports, if one aims at actually fully describing 6 2018 Genocide Studies International 12, no. 1 doi:10.3138/gsi.12.1.10 ${protocol}://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/gsi.12.1.10 - Matthias Bjørnlund <matthiasb@webspeed.dk> - Friday, June 22, 2018 3:16:09 AM - IP Address:188.120.87.197 136 Bjørnlund and understanding the phenomenon of mass murder (for one, they often contain important, reliable information on perpetrators, bystanders, rescuers, names, and places), and they are obviously absolutely vital if one wants the perspective of the victims. Such testimonies should, of course, not be used uncritically, but the same goes for any other source. Bartrop utilizes, among other things, many relevant insights from Holocaust studies to develop a framework, ‘‘a composite picture focusing on certain themes’’ (146), to find commonalities between the three cases. In doing so he not only brings together the experiences of Greek, Armenian, and Assyrian victims, but also identifies universal themes of suffering and resilience during genocide. Ellene S. Phufas, in ‘‘Found in Translation: Eyewitness Accounts of the Massacres in Nicomedia as Reported by Greek Journalist Kostas Faltaits,’’ also considers survivor testimonies collected by a seasoned Greek nationalist reporter and proponent of Enosis and the Megali Idea (the irredentist idea of a Greater Greece) embedded with the Hellenic army in Nicomedia (Izmit) during the Greco-Turkish War in 1921. The author has translated Constantine (Kostas) Faltaits’ testimonies, that were published in Greek in 1921 and English in 2016, and in her contribution she elaborates on how to do justice as a translator to such a subject removed in time, place, and cultural milieu— the need for historical research, contextualization, considerations of style, and so on. The brief, but interesting chapter ends with a small sample of testimonies of the destruction of Greeks and Armenians in the area, a destruction that will (or should) always humble translators, historians, and eyewitnesses alike. As Faltaits laconically put it himself in 1921: ‘‘. . . I will attempt to provide here a somewhat watered-down representation of the catastrophe’’ (223). In ‘‘The Assyrian Issue 1914–35: Australian Documents and Press,’’ Stavros T. Stavridis uses Australian archival and newspaper sources to explore the Assyrian experience, from the treatment of Ottoman Assyrians (and Greeks, Armenians, Turks, and Germans) in Australia as enemy aliens, which could initially result in internment over attempts at creating an independent or autonomous national home for the Assyrians after WWI, to the turmoil around the time of the creation of an independent Iraq that led, among other things, to the 1933 Simele Massacre of Assyrians, another round of displacements, and aborted plans of large-scale resettlement in Brazil and Australia (they were either too numerous or too ‘‘Asian’’). Such resettlement schemes had been proposed earlier (e.g., for Armenian genocide survivors in Brazil, Greek Macedonia, and Soviet Armenia), though usually with little international backing or success.34 Then as now, upheaval in Iraq—including the genocidal reign of the Islamic State there and in neighboring Syria—has led to strained relations between ethno-religious groups, leading once more to calls for Assyrian autonomy.35 Robert Shenk’s chapter, ‘‘Ethnic Cleansing, American Women, and the Admiral: Deep in Anatolia During the Turkish Nationalist Revolution,’’ weaves eyewitness testimonies by American missionaries, Near East Relief workers, and others in Turkey in the aftermath of WWI into a detailed description of a latter phase of the destruction of the disintegrating empire’s remaining Armenians and Greeks, often survivors of earlier massacres and death marches who were now being hunted down, forcibly assimilated, or expelled. Besides being based on extensive research, the chapter is unusually well written, perhaps a testimony to the author’s background as, among other things, a professor of English. Whatever the reason, it is, on a literary level, a joy 6 2018 Genocide Studies International 12, no. 1 doi:10.3138/gsi.12.1.10 ${protocol}://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/gsi.12.1.10 - Matthias Bjørnlund <matthiasb@webspeed.dk> - Friday, June 22, 2018 3:16:09 AM - IP Address:188.120.87.197 Integrated Genocide History 137 to read this solid scholarly account about a group of Americans, women in particular, who risked their own lives to save lives in places such as Hadjin, Sivas, and Kharpert. The chapter by Tehmine Martoyan, ‘‘The Destruction of Smyrna in 1922: An Armenian and Greek Shared Tragedy,’’ is a contribution, however, that leaves something to be desired. Similarities between the Greek and Armenian experiences in Smyrna are rightfully emphasized, but large parts consist of strings of quotes with little analysis, and, aside from a number of sources in Armenian that are used too little (one of which is an interesting testimony by Ghevond Duryan, Armenian bishop at Smyrna), those quotes are from publications that are rather well-known among scholars. Not much is added to the existing literature on the subject in what ends up as an indictment rather than a scholarly text. But hopefully Martoyan will make more of those Armenian sources on Smyrna 1922 available to a larger audience in another publication—the potential is there. Steven Leonard Jacobs begins the third part of the volume, ‘‘Legacies and Interpretations,’’ with the chapter ‘‘Lemkin on Three Genocides: Comparing His Writings on the Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek Genocides.’’ Here, Lemkin’s background and significance are briefly sketched alongside an outline of his ambitious unfinished work on the history of genocide from antiquity over the Middle Ages to modern times, a history which to Lemkin naturally included the genocide of the Ottoman Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians (but also, at least according to a list of planned chapters, genocide by the Greeks against the Turks). Jacobs elaborates on Lemkin’s dynamic, empirically based concept of genocide36 that . . . does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. (257) Jacobs concludes with a number of points derived from Lemkin’s work, among them one that could easily also be a credo for integrated genocide history: ‘‘The foundation of good—nay, excellent—scholarly work in the humanities is the linking of two seemingly discrete phenomena—in this case three genocidally linked victim populations— and the drawing of conclusions as to their similarities and dissimilarities and/or theorizing that examination . . .’’ (268). George Vardanyan’s short chapter ‘‘The Greek Genocide in the Ottoman Empire: Parallels with the Armenian Genocide’’ basically does what it promises to do: finding parallels (but also differences) between the Armenian and the Greek case, which he does on the practical level with the execution of the genocide, as well as the conceptual level with the overall Turkification process. The introduction, ‘‘The Greek Population in the Ottoman Empire,’’ deals with subjects that are largely covered in Shirinian’s contributions, but some repetition is bound to happen in a volume of this nature. It is a useful overview based on solid scholarship, but once again a surprising angle; a bit more original or lesser-known source material would have improved the quality— Vardanyan knows Armenian, Russian, and Greek (among other languages), this could be used more. Thea Halo, ‘‘The Genocide of the Ottoman Greeks, 1913–23: Myths and Facts,’’ once more covers ground that by now, Chapter 11, is mostly rather well known if one is reading the volume from one end to the other or is familiar with the subject in 6 2018 Genocide Studies International 12, no. 1 doi:10.3138/gsi.12.1.10 ${protocol}://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/gsi.12.1.10 - Matthias Bjørnlund <matthiasb@webspeed.dk> - Friday, June 22, 2018 3:16:09 AM - IP Address:188.120.87.197 138 Bjørnlund general. Some myths are confronted, but overall the editor could have asked Halo to focus on, say, Greek archival sources, post-genocidal survival, or the struggle for genocide recognition, all of which the author would certainly be competent to deal with. George Kouta’s chapter, ‘‘‘Redeeming the Unredeemed’: The Anglo-Hellenic League’s Campaign for the Greeks in Asia Minor,’’ is a far more narrow and critical study that focuses on understudied aspects of Diasporic Greek reactions to the early phase of the persecution of Ottoman Greeks, 1912–1914. The context (e.g., competing, but hardly equally powerful or influential Greek and Turkish nationalisms) is laid out before the author turns to a detailed description of the interplay between reports of ethnic cleansing of Greeks and the reactions of the Anglo-Hellenic League lobby organization in London, where the ‘‘examination of the publications of the League concerning the events on the Anatolian coast reveals the direct link that exists between the development of Ottoman economic nationalism and the ideology of pan-Turkism with the systematic persecution of Greeks in the area’’ (342). It is a nerdy (always a compliment), well-written, and thoroughly well researched piece that deserves to be integrated fully into larger narratives of the region and time. In ‘‘Genocide by Deportation into Poverty: Western Diplomats on Ottoman Christian Killings and Expulsions, 1914–1924,’’ Hannibal Travis provides insight into the common genocidal process of ‘‘deportation’’ (often a euphemism for death marches) as a substitute for outright massacre, as it ought to inform the conceptualization and understanding of the term ‘‘genocide,’’ rather than its denial. He weighs in on a functionalist/intentionalist debate concerning the late Ottoman genocide(s) and finds, among other things, that ‘‘the definition of genocide has always extended to efforts, such as those by the Ottomans, to irreparably damage, displace, and destroy the national pattern in an area by selective killings’’ (359). The recent conviction at the ICTY of Ratko Mladić for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity would seem to confirm that view from a legal perspective.37 Travis reiterates, in my opinion rightly so, that a sophisticated, empirically-based, as well as both broad and precise understanding of genocide requires that we see it as a result of a process—of Utopian transformation, of violent social engineering, and so on. Such a process can take many forms and will rarely run like clockwork, even when there is a more or less coherent ideology, a more or less detailed, pre-meditated plan, and a more or less clear command structure behind it. Citing a number of legal and historical precedents, Travis concludes in his substantial contribution to the volume that the concept of ‘‘genocidal intent’’ should not be seen as narrow or rigid. It can be found, for example, in the strains of extremist ideology.38 The final chapter, Suren Manukyan’s ‘‘The Socio-Psychological Dimension of the Armenian Genocide,’’ is by no means marginal. It is an ambitious attempt at explaining the broad level of participation in the Armenian Genocide by ‘‘ordinary people,’’ who were ‘‘not natural-born killers, but were socialized to mass murder through a variety of mechanisms’’ (418). The contribution could have benefitted from, for example, incorporating more sources on those ‘‘ordinary Ottoman people’’ and more recent criticism of Hannah Arendt’s ‘‘banality of evil’’-thesis, but all in all it is an original, nicely structured conceptual chapter on the group endeavor that is genocide, and thus very useful for comparative purposes.39 In conclusion, Genocide in the Ottoman Empire: Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks 1913–1923 is an above-average anthology. It has the good, the bad, and the so-so, but 6 2018 Genocide Studies International 12, no. 1 doi:10.3138/gsi.12.1.10 139 overall this integrated genocide history is a valuable addition to the growing field of genocide studies, where cases start to mingle and enter the mainstream, stimulating us to ask larger questions in dense descriptions of regions as they erupt in violence, to paraphrase Charles Joyner.40 Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Michael Freeman, quoted in Alex Alvarez, Governments, Citizens, and Genocide: A Comparative and Interdisciplinary Approach (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2001), 1. See also, for example, Scott Strauss, ‘‘Political Science and Genocide,’’ in The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, ed. Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2010); Henry C. Theriault, ‘‘Against the Grain: Critical Reflections on the State and Future of Genocide Scholarship,’’ Genocide Studies & Prevention 7,2 (2012): 123–144; Alexander Laban Hilton, ‘‘Critical Genocide Studies,’’ Genocide Studies & Prevention 7,1 (2012): 4: ‘‘Over the last two decades, the interdisciplinary field of genocide studies has dramatically expanded and matured. No longer in the shadow of Holocaust studies, it is now the primary subject of journals, textbooks, encyclopedias, readers, handbooks, special journal issues, bibliographies, workshops, seminars, conference, Web sites, research centers, government agencies, non-governmental organizations, international organizations, and a unit at the United Nations. If not yet fully theorized, the discipline is characterized by a number of debates and approaches. As the outlines of the field emerge more clearly, the time is right to engage in critical reflections about the state of the field, or what might be called critical genocide studies.’’ General note: A big thanks to Roger W. Smith and Svante Lundgren for useful comments on the first draft of this essay. All websites cited below were accessed 23 January 2018. Matthias Bjørnlund, ‘‘’The Big Death’: Finding Precise Terminology for the Murder of the Armenian People,’’ The Armenian Mirror-Spectator 85,40, issue 4 (2015), 13; Marius Dahlsgaard, ‘‘Inga Nalbandian: Den Store Jammer,’’ Morsø Folkeblad, 29 March 1917, 1; Kristeligt Dagblad, 29 March 1922; Sergey Sayapin, ‘‘Raphael Lemkin: A Tribute,’’ European Journal of International Law 20,4 (2009): 1157–1162; Caroline Fournet, The Crime of Destruction and the Crime of Genocide: Their Impact on Collective Memory (New York and London: Routledge, 2016), 3; Tessa Hofmann, ‘‘Genoktonia en roi—Cumulative Genocide: The Massacres and Deportations of the Greek Population of the Ottoman Empire (1912–1923),’’ in The Genocide of the Ottoman Greeks. Studies on the State-Sponsored Campaign of Extermination of the Christians of Asia Minor (1912–1922) and Its Aftermath: History, Law, Memory, ed. Tessa Hofmann, Matthias Bjørnlund, Vasileios Meichanetsidis (New York & Athens: Aristide D. Caratzas 2011), 39– 111; Jeremy Sarkin, Colonial Genocide and Reparations Claims in the 21st Century: The Socio-Legal Context of Claims under International Law by the Herero against Germany for Genocide in Namibia, 1904–1908 (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2008), 109; Vahagn Avedian, ‘‘Knowledge and Acknowledgment: The Politics of Memory of the Armenian Genocide’’ (PhD diss., Lund University, 2017), 105ff. See below and Douglas Irvin-Erickson, Raphael Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide, (Pennsylvania: U of Pennsylvania P 2017), 27 and passim; Peter Balakian, ‘‘Raphael Lemkin, Cultural Destruction, and the Armenian Genocide,’’ Holocaust & Genocide Studies 27,1 (2013): 57–89; Dominik J. Schaller and Jürgen Zimmerer, eds., The Origins of Genocide: Raphael Lemkin as a Historian of Mass Violence (New York and London: Routledge, 2013). See, for example, Matthias Bjørnlund, Eric Markusen, Martin Mennecke, ‘‘ Qué es el genocidio? En la búsqueda de un denominador común entre definiciones jurı́dicas y no jurı́dicas,’’ in Genocidio. La administración de la muerte en la modernidad, ed. Daniel Feierstein (Buenos Aires: Eduntref 2005), 17–48. Maureen S. Hiebert, ‘‘Questioning Boundaries. What’s old and what’s new in comparative genocide theory,’’ in Genocide Matters: Ongoing issues and emerging perspectives, ed. Joyce Apsel and Ernesto Verdeja (New York and London: Routledge 2013), 16. Pre-1980s examples of scholars studying genocide, comparative and otherwise, include Leo Kuper, Vahakn N. Dadrian, Helen Fein, Barbara Harff, Roger W. Smith, Richard G. Hovannisian, Yves Ternon, and others mentioned in Samuel Totten and Steven Leonard Jacobs, eds., Pioneers of Genocide Studies (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers 2002). See, for example, Max Fisher, ‘‘Rohingya of Myanmar Learn That ‘Never Again’ Doesn’t Always Apply,’’ New York Times, 13 November 2017; Alan Dowd, ‘‘From ‘Never Again’ to ‘Never Mind’,’’ Providence Magazine, 7 March 2016; Alexandra Tompson, ‘‘After The Rwandan Genocide The UN Promised ? ${protocol}://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/gsi.12.1.10 - Matthias Bjørnlund <matthiasb@webspeed.dk> - Friday, June 22, 2018 3:16:09 AM - IP Address:188.120.87.197 Integrated Genocide History 6 2018 Genocide Studies International 12, no. 1 doi:10.3138/gsi.12.1.10 ‘Never Again’—Now It’s Time For Them To Take Action Against ISIS,’’ Forbes, 20 April 2017; Eitan Arom, ‘‘The forgotten genocide: While Yazidis struggle for existence, the world does little to help,’’ Jewish News, 9 February 2017; Tom Holland, ‘‘Don’t forget the Yazidis: To avoid the next genocide, remember the last,’’ The Spectator, 12 August 2017; Nina Shea, ‘‘For Christians and Yazidis Fleeing Genocide, the Obama Administration Has No Room at the Inn,’’ National Review, 22 September 2015; Ewelina U. Ochab, ‘‘What Was Meant To Be ‘Never Again’ Happens Again And Again,’’ Forbes, 6 December 2017; Hamza Siddiq, ‘‘The Iraq intervention ensued and we said ‘never again’—yet here we are, silent, when it comes to intervention in Myanmar and Yemen,’’ The Express Tribune, 21 November 2017; Fazil Moradi & Kjell Anderson, ‘‘The Islamic State’s Êzı̂dı̂ Genocide in Iraq: The Sinja#r Operations,’’ Genocide Studies International 10,2 (2016): 139–182; Salman Rushdie et al., ‘‘The Rohingya are facing genocide. We cannot be bystanders,’’ The Guardian, 10 November 2017; Simon Adams, ‘‘Ratko Mladić, International Justice and the Bones of the Rohingya,’’ Huffington Post, 24 November 2017; Dominic Waghorn, ‘‘Rohingya crisis is ‘very deliberate genocide’, former UN general Romeo Dallaire says,’’ Sky News, 13 December 2017. For a recent analysis of what it takes for, to paraphrase the article abstract, ‘U.S. presidents to change policy to respond with increased intensity to mass killings of civilians in other countries,’ see Amanda J. Rothschild, ‘‘Rousing a Response: When the United States Changes Policy toward Mass Killing,’’ International Security 42,2 (2017): 120–154. 7. Bjørnlund et al., ‘‘ Qué es el genocidio?’’; Martin Shaw, What is Genocide? (Indianapolis: John Wiley & Sons, 2015); Josef Joffe, ‘‘Can the Holocaust be Explained?’’ The Wall Street Journal, 14 April 2017; On truth and genocide/truth in general, see, for example, the various discussions in Alexander Laban Hilton and Kevin Lewis O’Neill, eds., Genocide: Truth, Memory, and Representation (Durham: Duke UP, 2009); Maria Baghramian, Relativism (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 92–93; Felipe FernándezArmesto, Truth: A History and a Guide for the Perplexed (New York: Thomas Donne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 221. In the final analysis there is truth—meaning that some explanations are more wellbased and probable than others—’including in the mass graves,’ to paraphrase Erazmo, a survivor of the Guatemalan genocide: Victoria Sanford, ‘‘What is an Anthropology of Genocide?’’ in Hinton and O’Neill, (Durham and London: Duke UP, 2009), 41. The Herodotus quote is found in Andrew Silke, ed., Research on Terrorism: Trends, Achievements and Failures (London and Portland: Frank Cass, 2004), 1. 8. See, for example, the large number of publications on the Holocaust such as Doris L. Bergen, The Holocaust: A Concise History (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009); Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2011); Paul R. Bartrop, ed., Bosnian Genocide: The Essential Reference Guide (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2016); A. Dirk Moses, ed., Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2004); Wolfgang Gust, The Armenian Genocide: Evidence from the German Foreign Office Archives (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2014). 9. See, for example, Israel W. Charny, ed., Encyclopedia of Genocide, vol. I–II (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 1999); Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses, The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2010); Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2008); Kurt Jonassohn and Karen Solveig Björnson, Genocide and Gross Human Rights Violations in Comparative Perspective (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 1998); Dinah L. Shelton, ed., Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity (Detroit and New York: Thomson Gale, 2005); Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan, eds., The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003); Rudolph J. Rummel, Statistics of Democide: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900 (Münster: LIT Verlag, 1998); Adam Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction (New York and London: Routledge, 2006); Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity (New York: PublicAffairs 2009). 10. See, for example, Amy E. Randall, ed., Genocide and Gender in the Twentieth Century: A Comparative Survey (London and New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015); Elisabeth Hope Murray, Disrupting Pathways to Genocide: The Process of Ideological Radicalization (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); JoAnn DiGeorgio-Lutz and Donna Gosbee, Women and Genocide: Gendered Experiences of Violence, Survival, and Resistance (Toronto: Women’s Press, 2016); Paul Behrens, Nicholas Terry, Olaf Jensen, eds., Holocaust and Genocide Denial: A Contextual Perspective (New York and London: Routledge, 2017); Kjell Anderson, A Criminology of Genocide: Killing Without Consequence (Oxford and New ? ${protocol}://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/gsi.12.1.10 - Matthias Bjørnlund <matthiasb@webspeed.dk> - Friday, June 22, 2018 3:16:09 AM - IP Address:188.120.87.197 Bjørnlund 140 6 2018 Genocide Studies International 12, no. 1 doi:10.3138/gsi.12.1.10 ${protocol}://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/gsi.12.1.10 - Matthias Bjørnlund <matthiasb@webspeed.dk> - Friday, June 22, 2018 3:16:09 AM - IP Address:188.120.87.197 Integrated Genocide History 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 141 York: Taylor & Francis, 2018); Jacques Sémelin, Claire Andrieu, and Sarah Gensburger, eds., Resisting Genocide: The Multiple Forms of Rescue (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2014); Simone Gigliotti, ed., The Memorialization of Genocide (New York and London: Routledge, 2015); Herbert Hirsch, Genocide and the Politics of Memory: Studying Death to Preserve Life (The U of North Carolina P, 1995); Samuel Totten, Henry Theriault, and Elisa von Joeden-Forgey, eds., Controversies in the Field of Genocide Studies (New York and London: Routledge, 2017); Levon Chorbajian and George Shirinian, eds., Studies in Comparative Genocide (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999); Omer Bartov and Phyllis Mack, eds., In God’s Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2001); Kara Critchell et al., ‘‘Editors’ Introduction,’’ Journal of Perpetrator Research 1,1 (2017), 1-27. See, for example, Hannibal Travis, Genocide in the Middle East: The Ottoman Empire, Iraq, and Sudan (North Carolina: Carolina Academic Press, 2010); Deborah Mayersen and Annie Pohlman, eds., Genocide and Mass Atrocities in Asia: Legacies and Prevention (New York and London: Routledge, 2013); Marcia Esparza, Henry R. Huttenbach, and Daniel Feierstein, eds., State Violence and Genocide in Latin America: The Cold War Years (New York and London: Routledge, 2009); Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge and London: Harvard UP, 2001). Examples include Benjamin Madley, ‘‘From Africa to Auschwitz: How German South West Africa Incubated Ideas and Methods Adopted and Developed by the Nazis in Eastern Europe,’’ European History Quarterly 35,3 (2005): 429–464; François Haas, ‘‘German science and black racism—roots of the Nazi Holocaust,’’ The FASEB Journal 22,2 (2008): 332–337; Vahakn N. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2004), 114ff, ‘‘The Inauguration of a Proto-Genocidal Policy’’); Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, New York: Cornell UP, 2005); Fatma Müge Göcek, Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present, and Collective Violence Against the Armenians, 1789–2009 (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2015); Elizabeth R. Baer, The Genocidal Gaze: From German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2017); Bryan Glyn Williams, The Crimean Tatars: From Soviet Genocide to Putin’s Conquest (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2015); Volker Langbehn & Mohammad Salama, eds., German Colonialism: Race, the Holocaust, and Postwar Germany (New York: Columbia UP, 2011); Mark Biondich, The Balkans: Revolution, War, and Political Violence since 1878 (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2011), and other volumes in the ‘‘Zones of Violence’’ series. See, for example, Susan E. Cook, ed., Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda: New Perspectives (New York and London: Routledge, 2017); Edward Kissi, Revolution and Genocide in Ethiopia and Cambodia (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2006); Robert Melson, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992); Deborah Mayersen, On the Path to Genocide: Armenia and Rwanda Reexamined (New York and London: Berghahn Books, 2014); Maud Mandel, In the Aftermath of Genocide: Armenians and Jews in Twentieth-Century France (Durham and London: Duke UP, 2003). For a passionate, part timely, part shallow critique of comparative genocide studies, see Anton Weiss-Wendt, ‘‘Problems in Comparative Genocide Studies,’’ in The Historiography of Genocide, ed. Dan Stone (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 42–70. Stefan Ihrig, Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination (Cambridge and London: Harvard UP, 2014); Stefan Ihrig, Justifying Genocide: Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler (Cambridge and London: Harvard UP, 2016). Donald Bloxham, The Final Solution: A Genocide (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2009), 2. Integrated genocide history, I would argue, is explicitly or implicitly influenced by/incorporate (elements of), for example, subaltern studies, ‘‘transnational history,’’ ‘‘connected histories,’’ or ‘‘shared histories,’’ the latter having ‘‘taken its cue from people studying the connections between the history of separate ethnic groups.’’ All terms are used by scholars sharing ‘‘a similar interest in what moves between and across polities and societies’’ (Akira Iriye and Pierre-Yves Saunier, eds., The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History: From the Mid-19th Century to the Present Day (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), xviii). Whether we need such new terms and approaches, though, including histoire croisée (entangled history), ‘‘transfer history,’’ and so on for the purposes of writing integrated genocide history, or if we can by and large rely on good old comparative history is an open question. Heinz-Gerhardt Haupt and Jürgen Kocka, ‘‘Comparative History: Methods, Aims, Problems,’’ in Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-National Perspective, ed. Deborah Cohen and Maureen O’Connor (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 32, make a good case for the latter position: ‘‘Exponents of transfer 6 2018 Genocide Studies International 12, no. 1 doi:10.3138/gsi.12.1.10 ${protocol}://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/gsi.12.1.10 - Matthias Bjørnlund <matthiasb@webspeed.dk> - Friday, June 22, 2018 3:16:09 AM - IP Address:188.120.87.197 142 16. 17. 18. 19. Bjørnlund history and histoire croisée accuse comparative history of privileging the nation-state, and thus of always confirming the nation’s significance. Comparativists, they further charge, tend to accept nations’ own self-representations without critical examination. Above all, comparative history’s focus upon national differences tends to minimize the overlap and similarity among countries. And yet, as we have discussed, comparative history need not restrict itself to the nation as the sole unit of examination, and by no means must it follow blindly the history of national self-description. Moreover, comparative history does not rule out relations of interdependence or cross-national influence simply because it considers two or more cases alongside each other. Indeed, the conventional method of source analysis in comparative historical work explicitly take such transfers into account.’’ See also, for example, Nicholas A. Robins and Adam Jones, eds., Genocides by the Oppressed: Subaltern Genocide in Theory and Practice (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2009); A. Dirk Moses, ed., Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008). This is not to reopen the German Historikerstreit, where historical and moral boundaries became blurred and it was postulated by some that Nazi Germany was more or less ‘‘forced’’ by an aggressive, threatening, violent Soviet Union to become equally or more violent, etc., but also by others that the Holocaust was beyond comparison. See, for example, Andrei S. Markovits and Beth Simone Noveck, ‘‘West Germany,’’ in The World Reacts to the Holocaust, ed. David S. Wyman and Charles S. Rosenzveig (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins UP, 1996), 435ff. But sophisticated academic explanations and the scholarly contextualization of mass murder are just that, they are comparative by nature, avoid relativizing as well as sacralization, and they are not and should not be used as excuses or rationalizations for past, present, or future transgressions of any kind. Mark Levene, The Crisis of Genocide, vol. I, Devastation: The European Rimlands 1912–1938 (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2013), xiii. ‘‘Topographies of terror’’ is of course inspired by ‘‘Topography of Terror’’/‘‘Topographie des Terrors,’’ a center documenting Nazi forced labor in a former SSheadquarters in Berlin. On the center as a site for ‘‘topographies of terror’’ in plural, as it incorporates the commemoration and documentation of Nazi atrocities as well as a part of the Berlin Wall, see Georgina Webb-Dickin, ‘‘Topographies of Terror: Reading Remnants and Traces on the Gestapo Gelände,’’ HARTS & Minds: The Journal of Humanities and Arts 1,2 (2013): 1–18, an article that explores ‘‘the histories of the so-called Gestapo Gelände (Gestapo terrain), their rediscovery in the 1970s and their relationship with the Berlin Wall remnant, considering how the relics of seemingly different eras are presented as constituents of the same landscape’’ (1). A pioneering work on genocide as a feature of the modern era is Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, New York: Cornell UP, 1989): ‘‘We suspect (even if we refuse to admit it) that the Holocaust could merely have uncovered another face of the same modern society whose other, more familiar face we so admire’’ (7). See also, for example, A. Dirk Moses, ‘‘Genocide and Modernity,’’ in The Historiography of Genocide, ed. Dan Stone (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 156–193. See also Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005); Philipp Ther, The Dark Side of Nation-States: Ethnic Cleansing in Modern Europe (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2014). For a critique of the predominantly bleak view on modernity vis-à-vis genocide, see Michael Freeman, ‘‘Genocide, civilization and modernity,’’ The British Journal of Sociology 46,2 (1995): 207– 223, offering ‘‘a clearer view of the interrelations between the constructive and destructive features of all civilizations’’ (207). See also, in general, Uğur Ümit Üngör, ‘‘Geographies of Nationalism and Violence: Rethinking Young Turk ‘Social Engineering’,’’ European Journal of Turkish Studies 7 (2008), http://journals.openedition.org/ejts/2583; Daniele Conversi, ‘‘Cultural Homogenization, Ethnic Cleansing, and Genocide,’’ in The International Studies Encyclopedia, ed. Robert A. Denemark (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 719–742; Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2005). Mark Levene ‘‘Creating a Modern Zone of Genocide: The Impact of Nation- and State-Formation on Eastern Anatolia, 1878–1923,’’ Holocaust & Genocide Studies 12,3 (1998): 393–433; Mark Levene, The Crisis of Genocide, vol. I, Devastation: The European Rimlands 1912–1938 and vol. II, Annihilation: The European Rimlands 1939–1953 (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2013 and 2014). See also Mark Levene, ‘‘’The Enemy Within’?: Armenians, Jews, the Military Crises of 1915 and the Genocidal Origins of the ‘Minorities Question’,’’ in Minorities and the First World War: From War to Peace, ed. Hannah Ewence and Tim Grady (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 143–174. https://www.amazon.com/Devastation-European-Rimlands-1912-1938-Genocide/dp/0199683034. 6 2018 Genocide Studies International 12, no. 1 doi:10.3138/gsi.12.1.10 ${protocol}://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/gsi.12.1.10 - Matthias Bjørnlund <matthiasb@webspeed.dk> - Friday, June 22, 2018 3:16:09 AM - IP Address:188.120.87.197 Integrated Genocide History 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 143 Charles Ragin cited in Martin Shaw, Genocide and International Relations: Changing Patterns in the Transitions of the Late Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013), 29. The original quote is found in Charles Ragin, The Comparative Method: Moving Beyond Qualitative and Quantitative Strategies (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1989), 19. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010). Various experts have reviewed Snyder’s book; praise for his approach include his treatment of ‘‘all of these episodes—the Ukrainian famine, the Holocaust, Stalin’s mass executions, the planned starvation of Soviet POWs, postwar ethnic cleansing—as different facets of the same phenomenon’’ (Anne Applebaum, ‘‘The Worst of the Madness,’’ New York Review of Books, 11 November 2010), while others have strongly criticized him for the same reasons: ‘‘. . . by drawing together all these various mass murders—by building a narrative that includes both the Ukrainian famine and the Treblinka extermination camp as part of the same larger historical event—Snyder is challenging a notion that many historians and thinkers have long held: that the Holocaust is unique in human history.’’ (Gal Beckerman, ‘‘Exploring the ‘Bloodlands’,’’ Boston.com, http://archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/03/13/exploring_ the_bloodlands/?page=full, 13 March 2011). Snyder received the 2013 Hannah Arendt Prize for ‘‘Bloodlands’’. For a thorough analysis of how (the representation of) the Holocaust has become paradigmatic for the representation of other genocides, see Rebecca Jinks, Representing Genocide: The Holocaust as Paradigm? (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). See also Raz Segal, ‘‘The Modern State, the Question of Genocide, and Holocaust Scholarship,’’ Journal of Genocide Research (2018): 1–26. Ladislas Bizimana, Conflict in the African Great Lakes Region: A critical analysis of regional and international involvement (Bilbao: Universidad de Deusto, 1999); Kenneth Omeje and Tricia Redeker Hepner, eds., Conflict and Peacebuilding in the African Great Lakes Region, (Indiana: Indiana UP, 2013); Howard Adelman and Astri Suhrke, eds., The Path of a Genocide: The Rwanda Crisis from Uganda to Zaire (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 1999); Gerard Prunier, Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2011); Ugur Ümit Üngör, The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913– 1950 (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2011), vii; Joost Jongerden and Jelle Verheij, eds., Social Relations in Ottoman Diyarbekir, 1870–1915 (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2012); Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz, eds., Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands (Indiana: Indiana UP, 2013); Nicholas Doumanis, Before the Nation: MuslimChristian Coexistence and its Destruction in Late-Ottoman Anatolia (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2013); Ryan Gingeras, Sorrowful Shores: Violence, Ethnicity, and the End of the Ottoman Empire, 1912– 1923 (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2009); W. D. R. Heijs, ‘‘The ‘‘Gardening States’’: Comparing State Repression of Ethnic Minority Groups in Turkey and the Soviet Union, 1908–1945’’ (MA thesis, Utrecht University, 2017). The quote is found in Dominik J. Schaller and Jürgen Zimmerer, ’’Introduction,’’ in Late Ottoman Genocides: The dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and Young Turkish population and extermination policies, ed. Dominik J. Schaller and Jürgen Zimmerer (New York and London: Routledge, 2009), 4. See also, for example, Erik J. Zürcher, The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building: From the Ottoman -empire to Atatürk’s Turkey (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2014); Hans-Lukas Kieser, Kerem Öktem, Maurus Reinkowski, eds., World War I and the End of the Ottomans: From the Balkan Wars to the Armenian Genocide (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2015); Lerna Ekmekcioglu, ‘‘Introducing the ‘Armenian Ottoman History’ Issue of JOTSA,’’ Journal of Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 4,2 (2017): 231–237; Alexander Korb and Dieter Pohl, Mass Violence and Genocide in Eastern Europe and the Balkans: The Second World War and its Aftermath (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017); Bedross Der Matossian, ‘‘Explaining the Unexplainable: Recent Trends in the Armenian Genocide Historiography,’’ Journal of Levantine Studies 5,2 (2015): 143–166; Jennifer M. Dixon, ‘‘Norms, Narratives, and Scholarship on the Armenian Genocide,’’ International Journal of Middle East Studies 47,4 (2015): 796–800. For example, in Sweden there has long been published important literature on the Assyrian genocide by, for instance, Nsibin Förlag, to a large degree thanks to the substantial Assyrian diaspora in that country, but it has only recently started entering the mainstream of scholarship. For a recent Swedish publication on the Ottoman Christian genocide and Sweden’s reaction, see Svante Lundgren, Hundra år av tveksamhet. Osmanska folkmordet på kristna och Sveriges reaktion (Södertälje: Tigris Press, 2015). On Germany, see Tessa Hofmann, ’’Der osmanische Genozid an Christen in der deutschen Geschichts- und Erinnerungspolitik,’’ Jahrbuch Verfolgung und Diskriminierung von Christen 29 (2017): 2–21. 6 2018 Genocide Studies International 12, no. 1 doi:10.3138/gsi.12.1.10 ${protocol}://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/gsi.12.1.10 - Matthias Bjørnlund <matthiasb@webspeed.dk> - Friday, June 22, 2018 3:16:09 AM - IP Address:188.120.87.197 144 25. 26. 27. Bjørnlund Üngör, The Making of Modern Turkey; Taner Akcam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (New Jersey: Princeton UP, 2012), 59 for example; Osik Moses, ‘‘Deportation of the Jewish population in Palestine during World War I,’’ International Graduate Students’ Conference on Holocaust and Genocide Studies Papers (Clark University, 2015), 1–19; Hasan Kayali, Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, 1908–1918 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1997), 198. See, for example, Stefan Schaal, ‘‘Völkermord: Türkei will Mahnmal in Pohlheim verhindern,’’ Giessener Allgemeine, 8 December 2017; ‘‘Hellenic, Armenian & Assyrian Genocides,’’ Monument Australia, http:// monumentaustralia.org.au/themes/conflict/genocide/display/97793-hellenic%2C-armenian-and-assyrian-genocides; Sabri Atman, ‘‘International Conference ‘Three Genocides, One Strategy’,’’ Atour, 19 September 2010, http://www.atour.com/~aahgn/news/20100922a.html; A. Makris, ‘‘Dutch Parliament Recognizes Greek, Assyrian and Armenian Genocide,’’ Greek Reporter, 11 April 2015; ‘‘Sweden Recognizes Assyrian, Greek and Armenian Genocide,’’ AINA News, http://www.aina.org/news/20100311192620.htm, 3 March 2010; ‘‘Armenia Recognizes Assyrian and Greek Genocides,’’ Armenian Weekly, 24 March 2015; Panayiotis Diamadis, ‘‘Governmental and Parliamentary Recognition of the Genocides of the Armenians, Assyrians and Hellenes,’’ AHIF Policy Journal (2016). Michelle Tusan, Smyrna’s Ashes: Humanitarianism, Genocide, and the Birth of the Middle East (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P/Berkeley Series in British Studies, 2012); Roger W. Smith, ‘‘Introduction: The Ottoman Genocides of Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks,’’ Genocide Studies International 9,1 (2015); Schaller and Zimmerer, Late Ottoman Genocides, 5. Recent publications dealing with aspects of at least one of the Greek and Assyrian genocides include Hofmann, Bjørnlund, and Meichanetsidis, The Genocide of the Ottoman Greeks; George S. Shirinian, ed., The Asia Minor Catastrophe and the Ottoman Greek Genocide: Essays on Asia Minor, Pontos, and Eastern Thrace, 1912–1923 (Bloomingdale, Illinois: The Asia Minor and Pontos Hellenic Research Center, Inc., 2012); Israel W. Charny, ‘‘Introduction to Special Section on Co-Victims of the Armenian Genocide, Assyrians, Yezidis, Greeks,’’ Genocide Prevention Now 5 (2011), http://www.ihgjlm.com/genocide-prevention-now-special-issue-5/; Hannibal Travis, ed., The Assyrian Genocide: Cultural and Political Legacies (New York and London: Routledge, 2017); David Gaunt, Naures Atto, and Soner O. Barthoma, eds., The Genocide Against the Assyrian, Syriac, and Chaldean Christians in the Ottoman Empire (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2017); Joseph Yacoub, Year of the Sword: The Assyrian Christian Genocide, A History (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2016); Racho Donef, The Hakkari Massacres: Ethnic Cleansing by Turkey 1924–25 (Sydney: Tatavia Publishing, 2014); Sargon Donabed, Reforging a Forgotten History: Iraq and the Assyrians in the Twentieth Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2016); Harry J. Psomiades, Fridtjof Nansen and the Greek Refugee Crisis 1922–1924: A Study on the Politics of International Humanitarian Intervention and the GreekTurkish Obligatory Population Exchange Agreement (Bloomingdale, Illinois: The Asia Minor and Pontos Hellenic Research Center, 2011); Thea Halo, Not Even My Name: A True Story (New York: Picador, 2001); David Gaunt, The Assyrian Genocide. Seyfo: When—Where—How (Assyrian Genocide Research Center, 2011); Svante Lundgren, The Assyrians—from Nineveh to Södertälje (Raleigh, North Carolina: Nineveh Press, 2016); Kostas Faltaits, The Genocide of the Greeks in Turkey: Survivor Testimonies From The Nicomedia (Izmit) Massacres of 1920–1921 (USA: Cosmos Publishing, 2016) (which also contains testimonies on the Armenian genocide); Lou Ureneck, Smyrna, September 1922: The American Mission to Rescue Victims of the 20th Century’s First Genocide (New York: Ecco, 2016); David Gaunt, Massacres, Resistance, Protectors: Muslim-Christian Relations in Eastern Anatolia during World War I (New Jersey: Gorgias Press, 2006); Erik Sjöberg, The Making of the Greek Genocide: Contested Memories of the Ottoman Greek Catastrophe (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2016); Marjorie Housepian Dobkin, Smyrna 1922: The Destruction of a City (New York: Newmark Press, 1998); Vartkes Yeghiayan, comp., British Reports on Ethnic Cleansing in Anatolia, 1919–1922: The Armenian-Greek Section (Glendale: Center for Armenian Remembrance, 2007); Sofia Mutlu-Numansen and Ringo Ossewarde, ‘‘Heroines of gendercide: The religious sensemaking of rape and abduction in Aramean, Assyrian and Chaldean migrant communities,’’ European Journal of Women’s Studies 22,4 (2015): 428–442; Akis Gavriilidis, ‘‘Lemkin’s Greek Friends: Abusing History, Constructing Genocide—and Vice Versa,’’ Holocaust & Genocide Studies 30,3 (2016): 488–505; Panayiotis Diamadis, ‘‘Australia’s first commissioner for refugees: The ‘call from Macedonia’ and Australian humanitarian relief in the league of nations,’’ Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 98,1 (2012): 7–27; Riccardo Armillei, Nikki Marczak, Panayiotis Diamadis, ‘‘Forgotten and Concealed: The Emblematic Cases of the Assyrian and Romani Genocides,’’ Genocide Studies & Prevention 10,2 (2016): 98–120; Antonis Klapsis, ‘‘Research Note: 6 2018 Genocide Studies International 12, no. 1 doi:10.3138/gsi.12.1.10 ${protocol}://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/gsi.12.1.10 - Matthias Bjørnlund <matthiasb@webspeed.dk> - Friday, June 22, 2018 3:16:09 AM - IP Address:188.120.87.197 Integrated Genocide History 145 American Initiatives for the Relief of Greek Refugees, 1922–1923,’’ Genocide Studies & Prevention 6,1 (2011): 98–106; Yoab Benjamin, ‘‘Assyrians in Middle America A Historical and Demographic Study of the Chicago Assyrian Community,’’ Journal of the Assyrian Academic Society 10,10 (1996): 18–46; Andrew R. Basso, ‘‘Towards a Theory of Displacement Atrocities: The Cherokee Trail of Tears, The Herero Genocide, and The Pontic Greek Genocide,’’ Genocide Studies & Prevention 10,1 (2016): 5–29; Ari Sekeryan, ‘‘Romioi–Armenian friendship in the Ottoman Empire during the Armistice period (1918–1923),’’ British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (2017): 1–19; Robert Shenk, America’s Black Sea Fleet: The U.S. Navy Amidst War and Revolution, 1919–1923 (Naval Institute Press, 2012); Speros Vryonis, Jr., The Mechanism of Catastrophe: The Turkish Pogrom Of September 6–7, 1955, and the Destruction of the Greek Community of Istanbul (New York: GreekWorks.Com, 2005); Constantine G. Hatzidimitriou, American Accounts Documenting the Destruction of Smyrna by the Kemalist Turkish Forces, September 1922 (Aristide D. Caratzas, 2005); Harry J. Psomiades, ‘‘The American Near East Relief (NER) and the Megali Catastrophe in 1922,’’ Journal of Modern Hellenism 19–20 (2002–2003): 135–150; Ron Levitsky, They Shall Not Perish: A Story of the Near East Relief. A Curriculum Guide for Teaching about America’s Response to the Armenian, Anatolian Greek & Assyrian Genocides (Near East Foundation & The Genocide Education Project, 2015); Sébastien de Courtois, The Forgotten Genocide. Eastern Christians, the Last Arameans (New Jersey: Gorgias Press, 2004); Theodora Ioannidou, The Holocaust of the Pontian Greeks: Still an Open Wound (Mediterra Books, 2016); Ioannis Hassiotis, ‘‘Shared Illusions: Greek-Armenian Co-Operation in Asia Minor and the Caucasus (1917–1922),’’ Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 36,2 (2012): 215–233; Alexandra Karambelas, ‘‘The ‘Un-mixing of Peoples’: The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne and Nation-Building in the Ottoman Empire and Beyond,’’ AHIF Policy Journal (2015): 1–21; Michel Bruneau, ‘‘L’expulsion et la diasporisation des Grecs d’Asie Mineure et de Thrace orientale (1914–1923),’’ Anatoli 3 (2012): 57–83, http://journals.openedition.org/ anatoli/426; John Williams, ‘‘The ethnic cleansing of Greeks from Gallipoli, April 1915,’’ Quadrant 57,4 (2013): 26–33; Sargon George Donabed and Daniel Joseph Tower, ‘‘Reframing Indigeneity: The Case of Assyrians in Northern Mesopotamia,’’ Perspectives on History (2018); Emre Erol, The Ottoman Crisis in Western Anatolia: Turkey’s Belle Epoque and the Transition to a Modern Nation State (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2016); Rebecca Gill, ‘‘‘Now I have seen evil, and I cannot be silent about it’: Arnold J. Toynbee and his Encounters with Atrocity, 1915–1923,’’ in Evil, Barbarism and Empire: Britain and Abroad, c. 1830–2000, ed. Tom Crook, Rebecca Gill, and Bertrand Taithe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 172–200; T. Elal, ‘‘’Her Name Was Not Seher, It Was Heranuş . . .’: Reading Narratives of Forced Turkification in Twenty-First Century Turkey,’’ Genocide Studies & Prevention 10,3 (2016): 25–38; Dimitris Kamouzis, ‘‘Out of Harm’s Way? Structural Violence and the Greek Orthodox Community of Istanbul during World War I,’’ Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 4,1 (2017): 189– 211; Dr. Abraham K. Yoosuf, Assyria and the Paris Peace Conference (Raleigh, North Carolina: Nineveh Press, 2017). Early publications on the subject(s) include Edward Hale Bierstadt, The Great Betrayal: A Survey of the Near East Problem (The Pontian Greek Society of Chicago, 2008 (1924)); Rev. Joseph Naayem, Shall This Nation Die? (New York: Chaldean Rescue, 1920); Yonan Hoormuz Shahbaz, The Rage of Islam: An Account of the Massacre of Christians by the Turks in Persia (Kessinger Publishing, 2009 (1918); Mark H. Ward, The Deportations in Asia Minor 1921–1922 (London: Anglo-Hellenic League, 1922). 28. See, for example, ‘‘Petition Launched to include all Greeks in Genocide Recognitions,’’ July 2017, http:// www.greek-genocide.net/index.php/overview/internal/322-petition-launched-to-include-all-greeks-ingenocide-recognitions; Lundgren, The Assyrians—from Nineveh to Södertälje, 11 and passim; Ninose Emmanuel and Hermiz Shaheen, ‘‘Challenges facing the Assyrian Universal Alliance,’’ SBS, 9 December 2017, https://www.sbs.com.au/yourlanguage/assyrian/en/audiotrack/challenges-facing-assyrian-universalalliance; Nikolaos Hlamides, ‘‘Pontic Greeks and the Greek Genocide,’’ Genocide Prevention Now, 2010, http://www.ihgjlm.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Pontic_Greeks_and_Greek_Genocide.pdf; Johnny Messo, Arameans and the Making of ‘‘Assyrians’’: The Last Aramaic-speaking Christians of the Middle East (Aramaic Press, 2017). 29. See, for example, Matthias Bjørnlund, ‘‘The Persecution of Greeks and Armenians in Smyrna, 1914– 1916: A Special Case in the Course of the Late Ottoman Genocides,’’ in The Asia Minor Catastrophe, 89–133; Ugur Ümit Üngör and Mehmet Polatel, Confiscation and Destruction: The Young Turk Seizure of Armenian Property (London: Continuum International, 2011), 147ff, for example; Taner Akcam and Umit Kurt, The Spirit of the Laws: The Plunder of Wealth in the Armenian Genocide (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2015); Vahakn N. Dadrian and Taner Akcam, Judgment at Istanbul: The 6 2018 Genocide Studies International 12, no. 1 doi:10.3138/gsi.12.1.10 ${protocol}://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/gsi.12.1.10 - Matthias Bjørnlund <matthiasb@webspeed.dk> - Friday, June 22, 2018 3:16:09 AM - IP Address:188.120.87.197 146 Bjørnlund Armenian Genocide Trials (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2011). For recent interesting analyses of the often overlooked aspects of religious motivations vis-à-vis the mass violence against Ottoman Armenians and other Christians, see Jonathan Dangoor, ‘‘‘No need to exaggerate’—the 1914 Ottoman Jihad declaration in genocide historiography’’ (MA thesis, Uppsala University, 2017); Vicken Cheterian, ‘‘The Religious Factor in the 1915 Genocide’’ (unpublished conference paper, Workshop for Armenian-Turkish Scholarship (WATS), Berlin, 2017). 30. See also, for example, Georg Horton, The Blight of Asia: An Account of the Systematic Extermination of Christian Populations by Mohammedans and the Culpability of Certain Great Powers; with the True Story of the Burning of Smyrna (London: Sterndale Classics, 2003 (1926)); Hannibal Travis, ‘‘Constructing the ‘Armenian Genocide’: How Scholars Unremembered the Assyrian and Greeks Genocides in the Ottoman Empire,’’ in Hidden Genocides: Power, Knowledge, Memory, ed. Alexander Laban Hinton, Thomas La Pointe, and Douglas Irvin-Erickson (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2013), 170–192. 31. Quoted in Artem Ohandjanian, 1915. Irrefutable Evidence: The Austrian Documents on the Armenian Genocide (Yerevan: National Academy of Sciences/Museum-Institute of the Armenian Genocide, 2004), 109. See also Bjørnlund, ‘‘The Persecution of Greeks and Armenians,’’, 126. 32. Shirinian, The Asia Minor Catastrophe, 8. 33. A largely similar point has also been made by Svante Lundgren, ‘‘Inkluderande folkmordsforskning,’’ Hujådå, 4 September 2017, http://hujada.com/article.php?ar=3054&page=1. 34. See, for example, Matthias Bjørnlund, På herrens mark. Nødhjælp, mission og kvindekamp under det armenske folkedrab (Kristeligt Dagblads Forlag, 2015), 213, 253–254, note 134. 35. Saad Salloum, ‘‘Iraqi minorities move forward with autonomy plan,’’ Al-Monitor, 16 March 2017; Griffin Paul Jackson, ‘‘Iraqi Christians at Odds with World on Kurdish Independence Referendum,’’ Christianity Today, 22 September 2017; Bradley Martin, ‘‘Assyrian Statehood Would Help Kurdish-American Relations,’’ Algemeiner, 10 February 2017; Romsin McQuade, ‘‘Iraq’s persecuted Assyrian Christians are in limbo. We must create an autonomous space for these ancient communities,’’ The Telegraph, 30 July 2014. 36. On Lemkin’s sometimes contradictory/evolving notion of genocide, see, for example, Yehuda Bauer, The Jews: A Contrary People (Vienna, Zürich, Berlin, Münster: LIT Verlag, 2014), 147: ‘‘On the one hand, Lemkin focused his attention on the annihilation of ethnic or national groups, but on the other hand, he also talked about the destruction of the substance of groups as such, their structures and cultures, not only about murder of people.’’ 37. ‘‘ICTY convicts Ratko Mladić for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity,’’ 22 November 2017, http://www.icty.org/en/press/tribunal-convicts-ratko-mladi%C4%87-for-genocide-war-crimes-andcrimes-against-humanity. For a critique invoking Lemkin of how the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) set the bar ’’exceptionally high in determining genocide,’’ thus convicting Mladić of genocide in Srebrenica, but not elsewhere, see Hamza Karčić, ‘‘Genocide charges are just too hard to prove—even in former Yugoslavia,’’ The Guardian, 29 November 2017. 38. See also Hannibal Travis, ’’Counterinsurgency as Genocidal Intent: From the Ottoman Christians to the Bosnian Muslims,’’ in The Armenian Genocide Legacy, ed. Alexis Demirdjian (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 149–164. 39. See, for example, Richard Wolin, ‘‘The Banality of Evil: The Demise of a Legend,’’ Jewish Review of Books (2014), https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/1106/the-banality-of-evil-the-demise-of-alegend/. 40. Charles Joyner, Shared Traditions: Southern History and Folk Culture (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1999), 1: ‘‘I have since come to refer to what I learned from ‘Miss Petey’ as ‘asking large questions in small places.’’’ 6 2018 Genocide Studies International 12, no. 1 doi:10.3138/gsi.12.1.10