From 1894 to 1924, three waves of violence swept through Anatolia targeting areas inhabited by Christian minorities, which constituted 20 percent of the population at the time. By 1924, Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks had dwindled to 2 percent of the population. Most historians have treated these three waves of violence as separate and individual events, while successive Turkish governments present them as a series of unfortunate occurrences.
The Thirty-Year Genocide is the first work to show that, in fact, these three waves were a single, continuous, and deliberate effort to exterminate the Christian population of Anatolia. This period, the most violent in the recent history of the region, began during the reign of Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II, continued under the Young Turks, and ended in the early years of Kemal Atatürk's government.
Despite the dramatic shift from the Islamic autocracy of the sultan to secular republicanism, the extermination policies implemented in the country were remarkably consistent and systematic, involving premeditated mass killings, displacements, forced conversion to Islam, mass rapes, and cruel abductions of women and children. And the most constant element was the call to holy war. Although the teaching of Islam does not justify it, the extermination of two million Christians was carried out within the context of a ruthless appeal to the Turks to create a purely Muslim nation.
Revealing and based on extensive research, this book redefines the way we perceive one of the most heinous events in modern history.
PATHS OF HISTORY
Series Editor: Kostas Kostis
History is the word we have chosen from the ancient Greek intellectual arsenal to bring together the past, present, and future. It is no coincidence, then, that the way we understand the past necessarily determines our capacity to grasp the present, as well as our efforts to predict the future. In this logic, the series "Paths of History" seeks to include books that share a common denominator of history, yet are not necessarily history books.
Economics, social theory, political science, and anthropology fall within the perspective of the series to the extent that they utilize a historical understanding of time. Moreover, the authors of the books in the series discuss their topics in a way that seeks to surpass the traditional certainties of their fields, thus satisfying two of the fundamental requirements of their craft, which are questioning and innovation.
"Exciting, analytical, unique, an outstanding contribution to historiography and contemporary thought." Ronald Grigor Sun, author of “They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else”: A History of the Armenian Genocide
"Exceptionally well-written and thorough, this book places the violence of the late Ottoman Empire and the years following World War I in an entirely new context. Most researchers have hesitated to examine the three waves of violence in their entirety until now. The authors of this book do so with remarkable success and will provoke intense reactions." Stefan Ihri, author of Justifying Genocide: Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler
"An excellent diagnosis of why, during specific periods over a span of thirty years, the Ottomans and their successors committed vast atrocities." Bruce Clar, New York Times Book Review
"A landmark book, exceptionally detailed and insightful." Mardean Isaa, Times Literary Supplement
"Many times I stopped reading, with the same question: Is it possible for a people to become so addicted to violence that they lose their humanity?" Robert Fk, The Independent
"Extremely well-researched and well-written, it presents the three waves of violence against the Christians of Anatolia not as sporadic and isolated events, but as parts of a broader and unified plan of systematic extermination. Hitler and the Nazis learned lessons from this genocide…" Jacob Heilbrun, The Spectator
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