Denial of The Armenian Genocide 100 Years Later - Richard G. Hovannisian

Denial of the Armenian Genocide 100 Years Later:
The New Practitioners and Their Trade

Richard G. Hovannisian
University of California, Los Angeles
Shoah Foundation, University of Southern California
http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/gsi.9.2.04 - Friday, June 03, 2016 8:14:26 PM - IP Address:188.72.126.36
This essay assesses the several phases of denial from the time of the 1915 Armenian Genocide to the
present, with emphasis on the most recent stage and contemporary deniers in the United States. The
study analyzes their arguments and approaches, with particular attention on negationist assertions
relating to intent and the claimed necessity of counterinsurgency measures against the Armenian
population of the Ottoman Empire. It gives numerous examples of the factual errors and fallacies in
the rationalizations that are employed. Modern denial is characterized by increased sophistication,
which can include the use of seemingly sound research methods and critical-thinking techniques.
Because it can look to be legitimate scholarship, denial in this form can be particularly deceptive for
students and others who might not be well informed about the historical facts and extensive evi-
dence of the Armenian Genocide. The essay concludes with a reflection on the need for strong peer-
evaluation standards for journals and presses to avoid publication of denialist material.
Key words: Armenian Genocide, genocide denial, phases of denial, genocide deniers, UN genocide
convention, Raphael Lemkin, University of Utah Turkish Studies Project
On the centenary of the Armenian Genocide, it has been frequently said that the strug-
gle for recognition of the genocide has reached fruition and that it is now time to focus
on the logical succeeding stages—reparations and restitution. Such declarations, how-
ever upbeat, have not sounded fully realistic, for the Armenian Genocide is far from
universally recognized. Thus, while one may rightly raise the issues of reparations and
restitution, it appears obvious that, at the same time, the quest for worldwide acknowl-
edgment of the Great Crime (Mets Eghern) requires continued, resolute efforts in the
face of powerful international political, economic, and military deterrents. Moreover,
although significant progress has been made in the study of the genocide and while
there has been a noted increase in the number of governments, international organiza-
tions, and religious bodies and leaders formally acknowledging the Armenian calamity,
these acts have been paralleled by the heightened resourcefulness and sophistication of
denial by the successor state on the perpetrator side and its defenders that Armenians
experienced genocide in the Ottoman Empire.1
The most troubling aspect of this latter development is the realization that it is
extremely difficult, if not impossible, to deal in an effective and convincing manner,
with those rejecting the clear veracity of the Armenian Genocide; for, more often than
not, they seem to be motivated by considerations that defy logic, and they dismiss or
discredit the enormous corpus of existing evidence. Modern denial is based increasingly
on the semblance of maintaining high scholarly standards, including generally accept-
able organization and prose, legitimate-looking quotations, and ample citations of
Richard G Hovannisian, “Denial of the Armenian Genocide 100 Years Later: The New Practitioners and
Their Trade,” Genocide Studies International 9, 2 (Fall 2015): 228–247. © 2015 Genocide Studies International.
doi: 10.3138/gsi.9.2.04
Denial of the Armenian Genocide 100 Years Later 229
archival holdings and other documents. The broadening of this phenomenon to include
established and aspiring academics in Europe and America gives cause for deep con-
cern, especially as the immediate witnesses and survivors are now gone and, until re-
cently, there were relatively few upcoming scholars making use of untapped archival
and other primary sources to gain greater in-depth knowledge and understanding of
the planning, organization, perpetration, and aftermath of the crime.
It may be inaccurate to say that denial is the last phase of genocide, as has been
posited by Israel Charny and others, including this writer himself, for denial has
been present from the very outset, even as the process was initiated and carried for-
ward toward the desired end. As early as 1916, the Young Turk government published
volumes on the conspiratorial aspirations and seditious actions of Armenian revolu-
tionary committees as a way of justifying its measures to deal with the alleged threat.2
While, at the time, little validity was accorded to these collections, now, one hundred
years later, the same theme is being advanced by modern-day deniers who piece
together reports, correspondence, and decrees to maintain that there were, beyond a
doubt, widespread Armenian uprisings that undermined the Turkish war effort and,
ultimately, obliged the government to initiate counterinsurgency measures for self-
preservation. Most of those rejecting the truth of the genocide no longer dispute the
fact that thousands of innocent people died during these operations, but they reject the
claim of intent—and without intent, there is no genocide according to the United
Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
Their partial concession regarding the regrettable death of part of the Armenian civil-
ian population helps to lend credibility to their professions of impartiality, especially if
those making such professions do not bear Turkish surnames.
A Historical Overview
Denial has passed through several phases, not clearly distinct and often overlapping,
but which, in the Armenian case, can be identified as (1) absolute denial, (2) suppres-
sion, (3) rationalization, and (4) relativization.3 In the early years, there was absolute
denial of the death marches and the intent of the government to dispossess the Arme-
nian population. This strategy was entirely unconvincing, as the world had seen and
heard too much and the wretched Armenian survivors were still in immediate view and
memory. There then followed the phase of attempted suppression. The intent of this
approach in early Republican Turkey, under Mustafa Kemal, was to erase the genocide
from living memory by preventing discussion of the topic, in the belief, not misplaced,
that the survivors would not live for long and that the world would be engrossed in
many other immediate, pressing matters. The well-known episode of the successful pre-
vention of the filming in Hollywood of Franz Werfel’s epic, The Forty Days of Musa
Dagh, is the most illustrative example of this strategy.4
By the start of World War II, there was little discussion of the Armenian deporta-
tions and massacres among scholars and governments, even though the persecutions of
the Hitler era did tug a little at memory. In the post-war era, as Turkey joined the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization and as the Cold War deepened, the Ankara govern-
ment shifted to rationalization to counter the few critics who still spoke of the Arme-
nian Genocide. This was reflected in the 1950s, for example, by declarations of the press
attaché of the Turkish embassy in Washington, DC, who explained that the Armenians
had acted as willing agents of a foreign government (Russia) and that, therefore, it had
© 2015 Genocide Studies International 9, no. 2 doi:10.3138/gsi.9.2.04

230 Hovannisian
become necessary to relocate a limited number. Appealing to American sensitivities, he

wrote, “[The] Turkish response to Armenian excesses was comparable, I believe, to
what might have been the American response, had the German-Americans of Minne-
sota and Wisconsin revolted on behalf of Hitler during World War II.” After all, the
first obligation of any government is to defend the country and its citizenry from exter-
nal and internal threats. Fortunately, he noted, almost all ill-feeling toward Turkey had
vanished and even the “poor starving Armenians” were fading from memory.5
The Cold War contributed significantly to the development of academic rational-
ization, as seen in the 1951 publication of Lewis V. Thomas of Princeton University,

who admits that the Turks may have overreacted to any real Armenian menace and
that much of the Armenian population had been “slain on the spot or converted to the
Moslem faith and assimilated . . . or expelled beyond the frontiers,” adding, however,
that the Turks did view the Armenians as an “active fifth column.” He then draws the
following problematic conclusion:
By 1918, with the definitive excision of the total Armenian Christian population
from Anatolia and the Straits area, except for a small and wholly insignificant
enclave in Istanbul city, the hitherto largely peaceful processes of Turkification and
Moslemization had been advanced in one great surge by the use of force. . . . Had
Turkification and Moslemization not been accelerated there by the use of force,
there certainly would not today exist a Turkish Republic, a Republic owing its
strength and stability in no small measure to the homogeneity of its population, a
state which is now a valued associate of the United States.6
Thomas initiated a course that was refined by a generation of his students, includ-
ing Stanford Shaw and, in turn, the latter’s students, Heath Lowry and Justin McCarthy.
In the 1980s, Lowry became director of the Institute of Turkish Studies in Washington,
DC, and during his time in that position actively engaged in acts of repudiation to the
degree of drafting a letter rejecting the veracity of the Armenian Genocide for the Turk-
ish ambassador to send to a scholar who acknowledged the factuality of the genocide.
He also published tracts to discredit the accounts of Henry Morgenthau Sr., US ambas-
sador to Turkey from 1913 to 1916, and other contemporaries.7
The intensification of Armenian activism worldwide occasioned by the 50th anni-
versary of the genocide, in 1965, and the subsequent spate of political violence against
Turkish diplomats, largely by the grandchild generation of the victims, brought the
issue back into a certain focus. This prompted the Turkish state, first, to reissue the
poorly written and transparent propaganda brochures distributed during World War I
and then, eventually, to imitate Western-style scholarly techniques of citing archival
and other supportive sources, compiling bibliographies, and seeking reputable publish-
ing houses. During this period, texts denying the truth of the genocide combined ratio-
nalization with relativism, not only explaining why it had been necessary to take
measures against the seditious Armenians but, at the same time, also reminding the
world that the deaths that occurred in a “civil war” were not limited to Armenians, as
the turmoil had engulfed the entire Ottoman Empire, and, actually, the number of
Turks and other Muslims who perished from wartime conditions was far greater than
that of Armenians. In so doing, these texts attempted to obscure the causes, means, and
ultimate goal of death, just as deniers of the Holocaust and other genocides use

comparative relativism to diminish the scope and significance of the lethal measures
taken against the victim groups of the Nazis and other regimes.
The Modern Phase: Kamuran Gürün and Guenter Lewy

The modern phase of denial has followed the approach outlined above. More precisely
expounded by Turkish diplomat Kamuran Gürün in the 1980s, the dominant thesis of
this stage does not dismiss a great loss of life but puts it into the context of civil war,
mutual victimization, unpreparedness and inability to judge the scope and conse-
quences of the “relocation,” disease, some local officials, and many uncontrollable tribes-
men. In The Armenian File: The Myth of Innocence Exposed (translated from Turkish,
1985), Gürün writes:
Various deaths occurred for various reasons during the relocation. Some of the
deaths were due to epidemics, some were due to climatic factors, some were due to
the hardships suffered during the journey, some were due to attacks, because offi-
cials did not protect them or because some officials engaged in illegal acts. . . .
Who are the ones who can be pointed to as “murdered” in these deaths? Cer-
tainly not the ones who were killed while fighting, nor those who died of epidemics
of typhus, typhoid fever, cholera, and variola, which were then widespread in Tur-
key, or of famine. It cannot be claimed that they would not have died if they had
stayed in their homes, because the epidemics spread to the areas of their residence
and took hundreds of thousands of lives. . . .
Should we include in this group those who died because of climatic factors and
the hardships of the journey during the emigration? We do not think so.8
It is noteworthy to compare this statement with what Guenter Lewy wrote twenty years
later in The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide:
We do not know how many Armenians perished as a result of starvation and dis-
ease and how many were killed by Kurds, seeking booty and women, or by fanatic
Muslims, who regarded the Armenians as infidels and traitors. For all of these oc-
currences the incompetent Ottoman regime bears some indirect responsibility. But
there is a difference between ineptness, even ineptness that has tragic and far-
reaching consequences, and the premeditated murder of a people.9
Elsewhere in the book, in order to dismiss the critical element of intent, Lewy re-
iterates, “Unfortunately and not surprisingly, the ability of the central government to
influence events in the provinces remained limited.”10 There is, he maintains, no evi-
dence of premeditation or intent to destroy the Armenian people. Rather, as one
reviewer says, it was simply a matter of “bad judgment, bad luck, bad planning, bad
weather, bad local officials, and bad Kurds.”11 As others who claim that no genocide oc-
curred, Lewy makes the Ottoman Armenians less than equal citizens, explaining, “A
government as callous about the suffering of its own population as was the Young Turk
regime could hardly be expected to be very concerned about the terrible human misery
that would result from deporting its Armenian population, rightly or wrongly suspected
of treason.”12 Thus, Lewy has reiterated the position of the ruling Committee of Union
and Progress (Young Turk) party that to be “Ottoman” required that one be Turkish
and Muslim and that, therefore, the Armenians were, by definition, alien—the other—
not a part of the empire’s “own population.” It may be significant that prior to

232 Hovannisian
publication of the book by the University of Utah Press, Lewy advanced treatises dis-
counting the brutal treatment of the Native American population from the seventeenth
century onward and the widespread persecution of the Gypsies during the Holocaust as
being genocidal. He had, it seems, no previous scholarly association with Armenian or
Turkish history, yet, for reasons about which one may speculate, he has authored a
volume that advances rationalization and relativism and exclusion of use of the term
genocide.
Like others in the modern period actively contesting the use of the term genocide
for the Armenian case, Lewy picks and chooses bits of information and quotations to
build his case. For example, in describing an American military mission to Anatolia and
Armenia in 1919, he writes that its leader, General James G. Harbord, reported that
Armenian “retaliatory cruelties unquestionably rivaled the Turks in their inhuman-
ity.”13 Yet the author chooses to omit the first half of that sentence, which speaks of the
plunder and destruction of Armenian homes and villages even where there had been no
military conflict: “In the territory untouched by war from which the Armenians were
deported the ruined villages are undoubtedly due to Turkish deviltry.”14 Nor does Lewy
convey Harbord’s primary finding:
Massacres and deportations were organized in the spring of 1915 under definite
system. The soldiers going from town to town. . . . Young men were first sum-
moned to the government building in each village and then marched out and killed.
The women, the old men, and children were, after a few days, deported to what Ta-
laat Pasha [minister of interior and chief architect of the deportations] called “agri-
cultural colonies,” from the high, cool, breeze-swept plateau of Armenia to the
malarial flats of the Euphrates and the burning sands of Syria and Arabia.15
Harbord concluded, “Mutilation, violation, torture, and death have left their haunting
memories in a hundred beautiful Armenian valleys, and the traveler in that region is sel-
dom free from the evidence of this most colossal crime of all the ages.”16 Yet, this “most
colossal crime of all the ages” does not fit easily into Lewy’s design to paint a scene of
general tragedy affecting all elements of the Ottoman population, thereby rejecting
genocidal intent or operations.
With such an approach, it may not be a surprise that, on the dust-jacket of Lewy’s
work, fellow negationists Norman Stone of Bilkent University in Ankara would write,
“His book, which has Olympian fair-mindedness as well as thorough knowledge of the
various sources, now replaces everything else,” and Michael Gunter of Tennessee Tech-
nical University would add, “There is no other comparable work that so objectively,
thoroughly, and meticulously reviews and analyzes so many different sources on both
sides of this bitterly divisive issue.”17 It makes little difference that Lewy’s manuscript
had been rejected by eleven publishers, including four university presses, before the Uni-
versity of Utah Press accepted the volume as the first title in its Turkish and Islamic Stu-
dies series, under the editorship of another denier, Hakan Yavuz.18
Thus, the theme of admitting unfortunate Armenian deaths from various causes
but withholding the label of genocide is here again advanced by a non-Turkish author.
Interestingly, even though Lewy does chide the Turkish state and interest groups for
not acknowledging openly and sufficiently the deplorable deaths of noninvolved Arme-
nians, both that government and those interest groups seem quite prepared to accept
this minor jab in exchange for the much more important contribution of deflecting the
claim of genocide. Lewy’s work has therefore become worthy of lavish praise and assis-
tance from those quarters, including active distribution of his book.19
In the same University of Utah series, Lewy, in 2012, has followed up with Essays
on Genocide and Humanitarian Intervention, the description of which reads:
The essays in this book . . . discuss episodes of mass murder that are often consid-
ered instances of genocide: the large-scale killing of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey
during World War I, the near-extinction of North America’s Indian population,
the vicious persecution of the “Roma” or Gypsies under the Nazi regime. But in
line with Article II of the Genocide Convention of 1948, Lewy stresses the crucial
importance of looking closely at the intent of the perpetrators. In contrast to the
Holocaust, the killers in the atrocities mentioned above did not seek to destroy an
entire people, and so, these three large-scale killings do not deserve the label of
genocide.20
The message is clear.
Hakan Yavuz, Utah, and Turkish Coalition of America

Yavuz, professor of political science at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, has
become a major figure in the trade of contemporary efforts to deny that Armenians suf-
fered genocide. With strong financial support from the Turkish Coalition of America
(TCA), an organization that aggressively attacks the truth of the Armenian Genocide,
he has furthered Turkish studies at his university and has sponsored a publication series
there.21 He began his visible role with the publication of Lewy’s problematic work in
2005 and has continued the series with a number of like volumes. He has organized
international conferences on Balkan, Middle Eastern, and Caucasian topics, at which he
has helped to host a large number of scholars, including a handful of Armenian aca-
demics,22 in gatherings that are supported by an organization that prides itself on com-
bating educational activities related to the Armenian Genocide and on distributing, free
of charge, the publications of authors who dispute that Armenians were subjected to
genocide.23
Something must be said about the TCA, which has become a driving force behind
contemporary efforts to deny the truth of the Armenian Genocide. Established in 2007
by Turkish-American manufacturer and government contractor Yalçın Ayaslı with ini-
tial “seed money” of approximately $30 million, the organization, with offices in Wash-
ington, DC, Boston, and Istanbul and directed by G. Lincoln McCurdy, former
commercial attaché of the US consulate in Istanbul, has established and contributed
well over $1 million to the Turkish American Legal Defense Fund (TALDF).24 The
TALDF has been at the forefront of litigious actions against universities and institutions
that do not give space to the denialist position, such as the University of Minnesota and
the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (in which it filed an amicus brief in support of a
lawsuit against the Department of Education for excluding material denying the Arme-
nian Genocide from its genocide curriculum guide), as well as the Southern Poverty
Law Center (for publishing a scathing account of Lewy’s book and its alleged source of
financing). The TALDF promoted its role in defending and exonerating Congress-
woman Jean Schmidt of Ohio regarding a charge in 2009 that she was in receipt of ille-
gal contributions from sources linked to the Turkish government. Subsequently in
2011, however, the House Ethics Committee ruled that the roughly $500,000 for legal

234 Hovannisian
services provided to Schmidt by the TALDF had been “improperly paid for” by the
TCA and that she had to return the money.25 Following that setback, the TCA seems to
have reduced the visibility of the TALDF and channeled most of its support for legal
action through other avenues. Another of the TCA’s activities is congressional outreach,
which receives very generous annual funding and, among other activities, sponsors trips
of congressional delegations and state attorneys general to Turkey. And, separately, the
TCA’s Political Action Committee makes direct political contributions to congressional
members and candidates who are regarded as sympathetic to or supportive of the
TCA’s positions and who are or will likely become members of the Congressional Cau-
cus on US-Turkey Relations and Turkish Americans.26
As for the Turkish Studies Project at the University of Utah, the TCA has contribu-
ted hundreds of thousands of dollars to the initiatives of Yavuz.27 It has sponsored the
publication and distribution of denialist treatises in Yavuz’s series appearing under the
auspices of the University of Utah Press and has also subsidized the works of Yavuz
himself, McCarthy, Gunter, Yücel Güçlü, and Edward Erickson, among others.28 Yavuz,
in his own writings on the Armenian question, has resurrected the issue of “Oriental-
ism,” attributing a continuing negative image of the Turks to an outdated Western
imperialist and Orientalist approach to the Middle East and its peoples. It was within
this context that the alleged Armenian “genocide” found an illegitimate home, he ar-
gues, but these unjustified prejudices must be repudiated in modern scholarship. Insofar
as the Armenian issue is concerned, it was, Yavuz insists, the Soviet Union that first
raised the issue for political purposes: “After 1965, due to a number of reasons, espe-
cially the concerted efforts of the Soviet Union, the Armenian diaspora, under the lead-
ership of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF), redefined the events of 1915
as genocide.”29 Contrary to this assertion, it is well known, of course, that the question
of the Armenian Genocide was long suppressed in the Soviet Union, but Yavuz’s argu-
ment may appeal to those still affected by Cold War and anti-Russian mindsets. As the
guest editor of an entire special issue on World War I of the journal Middle East Cri-
tique, published by Routledge in 2014, his lead article, “Orientalism, the ‘Terrible Turk’
and Genocide,” asserts (as McCarthy has done) that the negative images of the “terrible
Turk” during World War I were merely politically motivated propaganda and that
there is currently a “recycling” of these outdated materials in a concerted effort to dele-
gitimize the Republic of Turkey and to “otherize” the Turks as “genocidal.”
The editor of Middle East Critique, Eric Hooglund, in his own introduction to the
special issue, parrots Yavuz’s erroneous ascription:
It was the Soviet Union that first used the term genocide in the late 1960s to
describe the events of 1915. For the Soviet Union, the term had propaganda value
in its overall competition with western Europe and the United States during the
Cold War. However, the term had an appeal among Armenian diasporic commu-
nities, and “Armenian genocide” gradually replaced “Armenian massacres” by the
1980s.30
When Hoogland was questioned by this writer on such an uncritical replication in a

journal that bears the name Critique, no reply was forthcoming.
Yavuz also engages in public discourse, as in his 2012 op-ed piece in the Jerusalem
Post, coauthored by Tal Buenos, an Israeli graduate student at the University of Utah,
in response to the Education Committee of the Knesset taking up the question of the
Armenian Genocide. The long exposition as to the negative aspects of this potentially
disastrous situation includes the following admonition:
Is Israel prepared to sacrifice the integrity of its current president, whose position
symbolizes Israeli consensus, and say that when [President] Shimon Peres an-
nounced unequivocally in April 2001 that what happened to the Armenians was
tragic but not genocide, he sold morality for political gains? Tragically, by blurring
the differences between the Holocaust and the massacre of Armenians, Israel is
harming itself by lending a hand to the continued practice of irresponsible use of

the term genocide in other arenas of conflict, such as the conflict Israel itself has
with the Palestinians.31
The pair then proceeds to detract from the humanitarian and moral motivations of
Raphael Lemkin in coining the word genocide by labeling him an employee of the US
government, which, they claim, used the term to legitimize its harsh treatment of Ger-
many in its campaign to de-Nazify that country.32 The attack on Lemkin has continued
in an article by Buenos published in the Daily Sabah of Istanbul in September 2014. His
byline reads, “As Raphael Lemkin’s studies on the concept of ‘genocide’ acutely reveal,
political motivations often overshadow the integrity and impartiality of academic en-
deavors. This fact has recurred in many case studies including the Turkish-Armenian
conflict.”33 And it is Buenos, following McCarthy’s earlier visit to Canberra, who trav-
eled to Australia to speak against recognition of the Armenian Genocide on the eve of
its centenary anniversary, in 2015, cautioning, “It is not advisable to create a national
identity crisis for Turks or Muslims in Australia by following a political ordinance from
the US or the UK to twist history.”34 Buenos has continued with a stream of op-ed
pieces and interviews to denigrate Lemkin and repudiate the factuality of the Armenian
Genocide.35
Justin McCarthy to Yücel Güçlü
The number of books in the Utah series continues to grow. Lewy’s book in 2005 was
followed by Justin McCarthy’s coauthored The Armenian Rebellion at Van (2006).
Furthering the assertions of his teacher, Stanford J. Shaw, McCarthy, with his associates,
maintains that it is the Armenian who is the ruthless revolutionary and the dangerous
enemy within. The Armenians joined with the Russians in World War I, attacking Mus-
lim civilians and disrupting Ottoman military supplies and communications. They
explain that the initial success of the Armenian rebellion was the result of piecemeal
Turkish reinforcements, lack of strategic coordination between the civilian and military
authorities, and failure to grasp critical opportunities, such as assassinating or executing
Aram Manukian and other leaders of the defense of Van (i.e., “Armenian rebellion”).
The authors make it seem as if the taking to arms by the desperate Armenians of
Van was not really about self-defense at all but rather was a part of a coordinated plot
to ensure the success of Russian military objectives:
In World War I the Armenians did exactly what was needed to aid Russian victory:
holding down Ottoman units many times the size of the rebel forces, crippling mili-
tary communications, forcing hundreds of thousand [sic] of refugees onto the
roads to hinder army movements, and ultimately making the Ottomans abandon
strategies that might have won the war in the East.36

236 Hovannisian
McCarthy also engages in creative mathematics as he manipulates the figures that this
author has cited regarding the number of Western (Turkish) Armenian refugees in the
Caucasus region in order to reach the conclusion that some 70% of the native Armenian
population of the easternmost provinces of Erzerum, Bitlis, and Van had survived the
war.37 Anyone with a sound knowledge of the wartime losses of the Armenian popula-
tion in these regions cannot be but astonished at this arithmetic. The authors of The
Armenian Rebellion at Van conclude their flawed narrative by moralizing that, for the
Armenians, “despite all the difficulties of life in the Ottoman East, remaining loyal to
the Ottoman Empire would have been the better choice.”38

In his The Turk in America (2010), published by the same press, McCarthy de-
plores the propaganda of both the American missionaries and the British government
regarding the Armenian issue as reaching “the pinnacle of prejudice.” He complains,
“Incapable of admitting that the other side might have any justification and unwilling
to accept that massive numbers of Turks and other Muslims, as well as Armenians had
died, the missionaries had a vision of Armenians as solely victims and Muslims as solely
villains.” This position was “a continuation of the one-sided tales of massacre and atroc-
ity that had been a staple of reporting in the nineteenth century, recycled for a new gen-
eration of readers.”39 This assertion notwithstanding, even a cursory knowledge of what
actually happened to the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire makes the claim untenable.
Regardless of how many “Turks and other Muslims” may have died in combat and
from other causes, just as “massive numbers” of Germans perished in World War II,
that has little bearing on the fact that the Armenian population was specifically targeted
for wholesale annihilation by deliberate government action, as the evidence abundantly
demonstrates.
These negationist themes appear again in one of the most recent volumes in the
Utah series, McCarthy’s coauthored Sasun: The History of an 1890s Armenian Revolt,
with research once again being funded by the TCA.40 As might be expected, the Arme-
nians of Sasun in 1894 are portrayed as dangerous insurgents driven by brutal revolu-
tionaries, causing mutual bloodshed between Armenians and Kurds and ultimately
requiring the Turkish army to intervene to restore order. Admittedly, the Sasun crisis
was complex, including rapidly changing political and economic structures affected by
the extension of firmer governmental control in the eastern Ottoman provinces, the
sharpening of relations between the Armenian peasantry and the local Kurdish tribes
and their exacting agha chieftains, and the agitation of Armenian activists who urged
the villagers to resist. These and other factors created an ominous scenario of Armenian
defiance, Kurdish retribution, and Ottoman military involvement, ending in brutal kill-
ings and plunder of large numbers of Sasun Armenians and destruction of many vil-
lages.
Despite the complexities and the cumulative, multifaceted historiography on the
subject, the authors make their mission clear from the outset: they will tell the story of
Sasun “as it actually occurred,” since “virtually every aspect of the widely circulated
story of Sasun was wrong” and the “fabricated account of Sasun as it appeared in the
1890s has remained a widely accepted story to this day.”41 To that end, the voluminous
corpus of contemporary press accounts, missionary reports, consular dispatches, diplo-
matic correspondence, and official publications and the findings of the European dele-
gates who were attached to the Ottoman Sasun Commission of Inquiry are examined,
and each, in turn, is found to have contributed to the distortion of what really happened

and to creating the false impression of Armenian victimhood and Turkish and Kurdish
aggression, when, as the authors would have it, the Armenians were in revolt and the
truth was more or less the opposite. The brashness with which such a wide variety of
sources—American, British, French, German, Russian, Armenian—is rejected makes it
seem as if the entire world, except the government of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, was dead
wrong in its perception of the Sasun “case.”
The authors attribute what they consider to be the myth of murder and mayhem in
Sasun to Western, especially British, propaganda and hostility toward Turks and Islam
and to the desire to find a pretext to interfere in Ottoman affairs: “In order to intervene
further in the empire, it was necessary to construct a narrative of Ottoman oppression
of Christians.”42 They make no effort to put into context the decades of persecution and
grievances of the Armenian peasantry and the causes for the ultimate formation of
Armenian revolutionary groups. Ignoring the repeatedly failed reform programs to safe-
guard Armenian life and property in the eastern Ottoman provinces, the authors assert
misleadingly and with obvious implication that the primary objective of the revolution-
aries was to create an independent Armenian state.
Half of the text is devoted to discrediting the condemnatory report of the European
delegates attached to the Sasun commission by describing it as being full of deception
and falsehood:43
For the European Delegates to the Sasun Commission of Investigation, the com-
mission’s meetings and deliberations amounted to a trial. The accused were the
Turks and Kurds. The Delegates’ Report was intended to be a summary of evidence
and a verdict. In fact, their report was the case for the prosecution. They did not
hesitate to lie to make their case.44
From the authors’ viewpoint, “reporting on the ‘Sasun Massacres’ marked the beginning
of a crusade that was to culminate in portrayals of a genocide of Armenians during
World War I.”45 That assessment seems to fit neatly with a larger undertaking to pres-
ent the Armenians as treasonous and in a state of continuous rebellion from the 1890s
to the 1920s, hence requiring successive Ottoman and Turkish governments to take
existential countermeasures against this chronic danger.
These themes reappear in the publication of Turkish career diplomat Yücel Güçlü,
who in Armenians and the Allies in Cilicia, 1914–1923 (Utah series, 2010) again por-
trays Armenians as a seditious element collaborating with the enemy, forcing the
Ottoman government and the post-war Turkish Nationalist authorities to act in self-
defense against revolutionary and separatist movements. However tragic the outcome
for the Armenians, they (along with the Allied Powers) are responsible for their own
fate. He explains, “In Western scholarship, most investigations of the issue have been
conducted from the Armenian standpoint and have had as an underlying concern the
search for intentional mass extermination. They offer little insight into domestic or
international political developments from an Ottoman perspective.” He complains, “A
number of advocates affirming the genocide as a historical fact does not make it so.”46
Güçlü finds it perplexing that “although the claims of genocide have been officially re-
jected by Turkey, there remains no shortage of discussion on the subject.”47 In a sus-
tained selective use of facts taken out of context, Güçlü first whitewashes the Adana
massacres of 1909 and then, at every opportunity, attempts to blame the Armenians for
compelling the Ottoman government to “relocate” them in 1915.48 He states, “It is
238 Hovannisian
worthwhile noting that Armenian diatribes against the Turks totally ignore the fact that
many Armenians served as a fifth column for the Entente powers in their spying and
sabotage activities along the Cilician coast during the First World War.”49 He then con-
centrates on the treacherous behavior and manipulation of the Armenians by the British
and French when Allied armed forces occupied parts of Cilicia for a period after World
War I.50
Like Shaw and others after him, Güçlü lists the Ottoman government’s measures to
protect and care for those Armenians affected by the relocation decrees of 1915, stres-
sing that various classes of Armenians were exempted from having to move at all:
Ottoman officials promulgated regulations intended to protect Armenian life and

property and excusing some classes of Armenians, who were not viewed a threat,
from relocation. These included the sick and blind, Catholics and Protestants, civil
servants, merchants, and certain skilled and unskilled workers. Those serving as
soldiers, officers, or medics of the Ottoman army were exempted from relocation,
along with their families, as were Armenian officials employed in the branches of
the Ottoman Bank, Régie and Public Debt Administration and foreign consulates.
Other Armenians exempt from relocation included those engaged in commercial
and similar activities, parliamentarians and their families, orphans, and widows.51
Also like Shaw, he does not say whether or for how long these exemptions were ho-
nored, for, as is well known, neither sick nor blind, widow nor orphan, military family
nor merchant, Catholic nor Protestant ultimately escaped the deadly reach of the
Young Turk regime.
In other parallels, Güçlü, like Gürün and Lewy, does not deny that countless thou-
sands of Armenians perished during the relocations, but he insists that this was not by
intent but, rather, because of insufficient resources to protect the people, attacks by law-
less bands and plundering tribesmen, and “severe hardships associated with poorly ad-
ministered measures of relocation, including exhaustion, sickness, starvation, and
epidemics.” He tells the reader, “All in all, the real intention of the Ottoman govern-
ment was to exile the Armenians, not to kill them. The rulers were genuinely shocked
when they heard what had befallen the Armenians.”52 And echoing McCarthy, Güçlü
deplores the fact that the stories of these hardships were exploited by the British and
Americans to make anti-Turkish wartime propaganda in the West.53 Furthermore, in
an argument most forcefully advanced by another genocide denier, Erickson, he offers
the following rationalization regarding the measures taken against the Armenians:
“They were a threat and a provocation to the Sublime Porte. Ottomans were faced with
a widespread and coordinated Armenian uprising from within at the very time their
state was in mortal danger from without.”54 And following the logic of the aforemen-
tioned Turkish press attaché of the Turkish embassy in Washington in the 1950s, Güçlü
links the Ottoman government’s measures for self-preservation with the US govern-
ment’s removal of the Japanese population from the West Coast during World War
II.55 Finally, positing a favorite argument used by Holocaust deniers, he writes, “The
fact that much of the Armenian population, including large numbers of displaced per-
sons, survived also can be cited as evidence against the presumption of genocide.”56
Güçlü calls for steps toward Armenian-Turkish reconciliation by balancing histori-
cal narratives and taking into consideration the sensitivities and positions of both
sides.57 Finally, he enacts the recent tactic adopted by the Turkish state: while firmly

rejecting the reality of an Armenian Genocide, it is nonetheless possible and useful to

acknowledge the “shared suffering” of all parties involved during that tragic period in
human history and thereby help to obfuscate the truth.
Güçlü has also published The Holocaust and the Armenian Case in Comparative
Perspective (2011) in the Studies on Judaism series of the University Press of America,
now also in French translation. He argues that there is no valid comparison between the
so-called Armenian Genocide and the very real Holocaust. For many years, deniers of
the Armenian Genocide have addressed themselves to Jewish readers by emphasizing
the uniqueness and absolute difference between, on the one hand, what was indeed a
real, horrific genocide and, on the other, what they call the hoax of a politically moti-
vated Armenian claim of genocide. They appeal to their audiences not to dishonor the
hallowed memory of millions of true victims by acquiescing in the commingling of that
memory with pure fabrication. This theme is evident in the publisher’s description of
the book:
There are only a small handful of mass deaths in all of history that have been
deemed, by consensus, a genocide. The tragedy of the Armenians is not one of
those events. For that reason, those who view the Armenian case as genocide have
long sought to connect it explicitly to the single event that is most clearly associated
with the word genocide—the Holocaust. Many ethnic groups in history have suf-
fered massacres, forcible mass exiles, and the like. The Holocaust is unique in that
it stands alone as the archetype of a rare class of historical events. Therefore, the
effort to equate the suffering of Armenians with that of Jews is not accidental.58
Such caveats, of course, ignore the large corpus of Holocaust scholars and Jewish civic
leaders who not only recognize the Armenian Genocide but also call upon the Turkish
authorities to do so.59
Michael Gunter and Edward Erickson
Aside from the several authors appearing in the University of Utah series, Gunter, who
regards himself as a specialist on Kurdish affairs, has joined the effort to reject affirma-
tion of the Armenian Genocide. Starting first in 1986 with Pursuing the Just Cause of
Their People: A Study of Contemporary Armenian Terrorism, in which he enumerates
the acts of Armenian violence against Turkish officials, Gunter more recently has some-
how been able to publish, through Palgrave MacMillan, a very badly written and poorly
argued volume entitled, Armenian History and the Question of Genocide (2011). This
book, too, was subsidized by funds provided by the TCA.60
In a strangely personal narrative, Gunter makes an unconvincing case as to why
the label genocide does not fit the Armenian events. He engages in repeated dispar-
agement of critics for having dared to challenge him, self-aggrandiisingly listing his cre-
dentials and publications, which he believes make him eminently qualified to write on
the subject. He is immodest enough to boast, “My book proceeds logically and reads
well.” He nonetheless concedes, “My book presents the Turkish position regarding the
Armenian claims of genocide during World War I and the continuing debate over this
issue.” Although the word genocide is a useful concept when it comes to extreme evil
such as in the Holocaust in World War II and in Rwanda in the 1990s, “the term has
also been overused, misused, and therefore trivialized by many different groups seeking
to demonize their antagonists and win sympathetic approbation for them. I include the

240 Hovannisian
Armenians in this category.” He states, “It was neither a premeditated policy perpe-
trated by the Ottoman Turkish government, nor an event unilaterally implemented
without cause.”61
Gunter is either sadly uninformed or else sensationally dramatic in asserting that
he has uncovered the “long-suppressed” works of former Armenian prime minister
Hovhannes Kachaznuni (The ARF Has Nothing More to Do) and of K. S. Papazian
(Patriotism Perverted), which include strong Armenian self-criticism.62 What Gunter
should have come to learn was that both of these booklets and their historical political
contexts are well known to any specialist in the field and that they have even long ap-
peared on Turkish governmental and other denialist websites. There is no certainty, of
course, that Gunter would have altered his claims regarding his discovery and use of the
“long-suppressed” works even if he had been aware that Kachaznuni wrote his pam-
phlet as a required mea culpa in order to be allowed to emigrate from the Diaspora to
Soviet Armenia in the 1920s. Gunter concludes his self-evaluation regarding Armenian
History and the Question of Genocide as follows: “Some will argue this book is a Turkish
apology. It is not! Rather the book is an attempt to show how the Armenians have mis-
used the term ‘genocide’ for their one-sided political agenda.” The Republic of Armenia,
he states inaccurately, “has implicitly recognized this by agreeing to establish an histori-
cal commission to analyze these events, which my book does.”63
It should come as no surprise that the circle of mutual praise extends to Gunter as
well. Lewy, whom Gunter had previously commended for The Armenian Massacres in
Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide, gives Gunter’s work the following endorsement:
“This book fairly and dispassionately presents and elucidates the Turkish position on
what Armenians call the first genocide of the twentieth century. I recommend it as a
useful addition to the literature on this controversial and acrimoniously debated sub-
ject.” In his tribute, Yavuz simply paraphrases Gunter’s own words in the book’s intro-
duction: “The author illustrates that although ‘genocide’ can be a useful concept, the
term has been overused, misused, and therefore trivialized by different groups, includ-
ing the Armenians, seeking to demonize their antagonists and win sympathetic appro-
bation for themselves.” And negationist Edward Erickson, after bestowing high praise
on the Lewy’s A Disputed Genocide, gives an exceptional rating to this volume as well:
Gunter has written a superb book that fills an important gap in our understanding
of the forces which have shaped the contemporary debate over the alleged Arme-
nian Genocide in 1915. His elegant linkage of the past with the politics of the pres-
ent gives the book great currency and relevance. Of particular note is Gunter’s
comprehensive exposition of the evolution of the transgenerational and “hypermo-
bilized” Armenian lobby. It is an indispensable read for anyone seeking to under-
stand these events.64
Perhaps the distinction of being the most resourceful and seemingly scholarly of
contemporary authors who deny the Armenian Genocide belongs to the same Erickson,
a retired US Army officer who served in the Middle East and Turkey and, apparently,
has gained some proficiency in the Turkish language. Currently teaching military his-
tory at the Marine Corps University in Virginia, he entered the ranks of those produ-
cing texts that deny the Armenian Genocide at the start of this century with his study
Ordered to Die: A History of the Ottoman Army in the First World War (2001). Citing
extensive archival sources to describe and analyze the organization, hardships, suffering,
and staggering wartime losses of the Ottoman army, he concludes that there were solid
grounds to be deeply concerned about a potential nationwide Armenian rebellion and
to regard the Armenians as foreign agents. He privileges military reports and correspon-
dence without suggesting that many of these communications were simply in keeping
with the wishes and intent of the Young Turk dictators who were determined to solve
the Armenian question once and for all. Based on these and some secondary sources,
Erickson reasserts a well-worn scapegoating of Armenians for the failures of the Otto-
man army by maintaining that there were Armenian insurgents by the thousands who
harassed and hampered supply lines and communications and departed en masse for
Russian territory in order to join the enemy armies. It therefore became an existential
necessity to clear the Armenians from the most vulnerable front of all—the Caucasus.
As it happened, during this process, there were many unfortunate acts of commission
and omission that took a very heavy toll, but there was no governmental plan or intent
to annihilate the Armenian people.65
In a precursor to his second volume on the subject, Erickson notes that there had
been a series of Armenian uprisings in the nineteenth century before making the follow-
ing startling allegation: “In 1910, the Daşnaks (a revolutionary Armenian nationalist
society) launched a campaign of terror in eastern Anatolia. Both Armenians and Turks
were killed in the thousands, and the army again was called upon to help restore
order.”66 As if military reports and dispatches cannot be skewed or intentionally convey
false information to serve a particular purpose, Erickson cites numerous archival docu-
ments as he explains, in the words of one favorable reviewer,
that the appalling loss of life can be attributed, without invoking a conscious policy
of extermination, to the effects of divided lines of authority, administrative inepti-
tude, paucity of resources, and sheer callousness in relocating Armenians, many of
whom were in an active state of armed rebellion, away from strategically critical
military lines of communication.67
Such rationalizations are characteristic of modern-day strategies to deny that Ar-

menians were subjected to genocide: of course, there was widespread suffering in a
most unfortunate human tragedy, but there was no intent, so the label genocide cannot
be rightfully affixed. Still, Ordered to Die may be regarded as a relatively mild forerun-
ner to his most recent volume, Ottomans and Armenians, in which he displays a signifi-
cant radicalization in his approaches and assessments. This steady transition can be
traced in articles he published in the journals Middle East Quarterly, in 2006, War in
History, in 2008, and Middle East Critique, in 2011.68
Ottomans and Armenians, published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2013, is dedicated
to the memory of Stanford J. Shaw and begins with profuse thanks to Hakan Yavuz,
“without whose unstinting and creative quest to help me find a publisher this book
would still be an unpublished manuscript on my desk.”69 The cover of the book alone is
enough to reveal its thrust: a posed photograph of an armed Armenian partisan group
and, in the title, the counterpoising of the terms “Ottomans” and “Armenians”—clearly
indicating that, like the Young Turk dictators in their ideological exclusion of Arme-
nians from true Ottoman society, the author does not regard the Armenians as being
bona fide Ottoman citizens but, instead, as an internal alien element.70 The subtitle, A
Study in Counterinsurgency, is equally indicative of the defensive brief that has been as-
sembled to rationalize the purported unavoidability of the “counterinsurgency
242 Hovannisian
campaign” conducted by the “Ottomans” to deal with the destabilizing Armenian men-
ace, particularly by removing the internal enemy from the strategic eastern Ottoman
provinces and certain centers of communication. To make a connection with Russian
instigation of the Armenians and interference in Ottoman affairs, Erickson states that
during negotiations for an Armenian reform program prior to World War I, two Rus-
sians from St. Petersburg traveled to Constantinople to meet secretly with Armenian
leaders there. He identifies the “Russians” as being Sirakan Tigranian and Professor Ni-
colas Adonts.71 Surely, a specialist in his field should have known or learned that the
former was an Armenian legal expert and the latter a noted Armenian scholar. Erick-
son’s erroneous reference may be regarded either as sad ignorance or possibly inten-
tional misrepresentation, but in any case, it creates the misimpression of Armenian
disloyalty and collaboration with a traditional enemy even before the outbreak of
the war.
The author tries to attenuate the severity of actions against the Armenians by draw-
ing parallels with the strategies employed by Western powers. Because of war needs and
insufficient manpower, the Ottomans adopted the effective Western method of regional
population relocation to separate the insurgents from their base of popular support, just
as had been done by the Spanish in Cuba, the Americans in the Philippines, and the Brit-
ish in South Africa. The Armenians, it is said, were relocated from only six of the existing
twenty Ottoman provinces. It was purely a response to a military situation and not based
on political, social, or ideological motivations.72 This, of course, is patently false, as Ar-
menians were subjected to massacres and deportations throughout the length and
breadth of the country, from hundreds of towns and villages extending far to the west of
the “six” provinces all the way to the Aegean Sea and Sea of Marmara—from Kesaria
(Kayseri), Yozgat, and Everek-Fenese (Develi) to Bursa, Adabazar, and Izmid and as far
as Rodosto (Tekirdagh), Malgara, and Adrianople (Edirne) in European Turkey, to
name just a few, without so much as taking into consideration the entire region of
Cilicia.
Like Shaw and others before him, this author, too, uses loaded terms in relation to
Armenians, such as “enemies within”—“bandit”—“gang” (çete)—“guerrilla”—“rebel”—
“revolutionary”—“insurgent”—“committee member” (komitacı). He states that, before
the war, the Dashnaks remilitarized the Armenian communities and created a “large
number of armed Armenian detachments,” yet in 1915, the Ottomans were somehow un-
prepared for the “enemy from within.” When hostilities did begin, the Armenian revolt
and seizure of Van during a simultaneous Russian offensive “was viewed by the Ottoman
high command as a template for future enemy operations.” The alleged Armenian insur-
rection, which involved heavily armed revolutionary committees, supposedly spread to
many other areas behind the Ottoman frontlines, jeopardizing the avenues of supply and
communication and becoming “a genuine security imperative requiring an immediate
solution.” It was “an existential threat to the survival of the empire’s armies.” At Van, for
example, Governor Jevdet Bey “tried to disorganize the gathering rebellion by ambushing
and assassinating the leaders of Van’s Dashnak committee”73 (the reference being to the
treacherous murder of the highly respected leader Ishkhan and three companions while
on a mission to ease Armenian-Kurdish tensions in the outlying district of Shadakh).
Pointing to a number of sequential Armenian uprisings in 1915, he concedes, “It is true,
to date, no historian has been able to produce authentic evidence of a coordinated Arme-
nian master plan for revolution. However, what is perceived as real is real in its effect.”74

In a blatant example of double standards, the author, who cannot discover trustworthy
evidence of the reality of a genocide about which many thousands of documents and ac-
counts exist, is quite willing to embrace and defend the Young Turk government’s “per-
ceived” reality of an organized empire-wide Armenian insurgency.
Erickson also admits that there were 30 unarmed labor battalions (amele taburları)
made up largely of disarmed Ottoman Armenian soldiers, but he insists that these were
“an essential part of the Ottoman logistics architecture and an absolute requirement to
keep the roads operational” and that the heavy mortality rate in those ranks was not by
intent but, rather, because of the hardships experienced everywhere and the costly re-
treats necessitated by the advances of the Russian armed forces.75 He contends further
that Talât Pasha’s declaration that “the Armenian issue pertaining to Eastern provinces
has been solved” has been taken out of context, for what the minister of interior really
meant was that, because the situation had stabilized, no further punitive action regard-
ing the Armenian population was necessary. Furthermore, Talât supposedly exempted
Catholics, Protestants, railway workers, and other categories of people and ordered an
end to the deportations in 1916, after the success of the six-month counterinsurgency
campaign against the rebellious Armenians. Of course, there is no discussion of whether
or how long those exemptions were honored.76
The questionable or spurious assertions made in Ottomans and Armenians are far
too numerous to list in their entirety. Perhaps the following concluding excerpt might
suffice to encapsulate the thesis that the author meticulously develops throughout his
narrative:
The decision to relocate the Armenians was an evolving counterinsurgency

response that began with localized population removal but which, by late May
1915, escalated to a region-wide relocation policy, involving six provinces. There
was little else that the thinly stretched Ottomans could have done. . . .
As to the question of whether the relocation was necessary for reasons of Otto-
man national security in World War I. From the perspective of what the Ottoman
government believed was happening—the answer is yes. In fact, there was a direct
threat by the insurgent Armenian revolutionary committees to the lines of commu-
nications upon which the logistics of the Ottoman armies on three fronts depended.
The consequences of failing to supply adequately its armies in contact with the Rus-
sians, in particular, must have led to the military defeat of the Ottoman Empire.
The Ottoman high command simply could not take that chance . . . the Ottoman
government chose a strategy based on relocation—itself a highly effective practice
pioneered by the Great Powers.77
An Appraisal
This brief survey of contemporary authors claiming that Armenians were not subjected
to genocide makes one wonder about commonalities among them. Almost all are citi-
zens of the Turkish state or have lived and served in the Turkish Republic. The Turkish
authors are all past or present officials of the Turkish foreign ministry. With rare excep-
tion, the others appear to have strong bonds with individuals and institutions in that
country. There seems also to be something of a “warrior of truth” syndrome, setting out
to reverse Western stereotypes common to Orientalism, but, in the process, engaging in
reverse stereotyping and distortion. They are selective in their use of documents and
evidence to further their primary thesis that there was no Armenian Genocide or even

244 Hovannisian
genocidal intent. Armenian propaganda, they contend, has for decades held the atten-
tion of the Western world, but in fact, the Armenians were not innocent victims and
much of what befell them was of their own making and that of Russia and the European
powers that manipulated them. They strive to create an alternate narrative of events
through the semblance of maintaining scholarly standards that, hopefully, will influence
students and others who may have little previous knowledge of the facts.
All this brings one to wonder about the prepublication refereeing process of the
publishing houses involved. It seems evident that there is a strong linkage among sev-
eral mutually sympathetic reviewers, yet apparently, the publishers have failed to submit
the manuscripts to peer reviewers who may have substantial grounds for critical evalua-
tions. With the passing of the entire eyewitness and survivor generation, Stanford Shaw,
Heath Lowry, Guenter Lewy, Justin McCarthy, Yücel Güçlü, Hakan Yavuz, Michael
Gunter, Edward Erickson, and others like them have directed the compass toward ratio-
nalization, relativization, and the fashioning of counter-memory. Unfortunately, the
historical reality of the Armenian Genocide is under assault by increasingly visible and
resourceful detractors. They are rewarded by having their manuscripts published under
the imprint of reputable university and commercial presses, by complimentary distribu-
tion of their books, by the commendations of others in the group, and/or by various
forms of encouragement offered by the sources from which denial has emanated for a
full century. It is a serious challenge that demands a measured, thoughtful response.78
There is, of course, cause for some optimism. The vast majority of genocide scho-
lars and their organizations worldwide are steadfast not only in their recognition of the
Armenian Genocide but also in calling upon others, including the Turkish government,
to acknowledge the historical reality and help pave the way toward eventual concilia-
tion. Moreover, the trend away from macro-histories of the Armenian Genocide, which
was the mission of the previous generation of scholars, toward the present generation’s
(including conscientious Turkish researchers) multifaceted micro-histories that open
up new vistas and provide even more compelling evidence of the intended genocidal po-
licies offers encouragement in the ongoing struggle against the ominous forces of con-
temporary denial.
Richard G. Hovannisian is the first holder of the Armenian Educational Foundation Chair in Modern
Armenian History at the University of California, Los Angeles, a chancellor’s fellow at Chapman University,
and an adjunct professor of history at the University of Southern California, where he works with the
Shoah Foundation. He has published 30 books, including 5 volumes on the Armenian Genocide and
13 volumes on historic Armenian cities and provinces in the Ottoman Empire.
The author gratefully acknowledges the valuable assistance of Marc A. Mamigonian,

director of academic affairs of the National Association for Armenian Studies and
Research, in the preparation of this essay.
Notes
1. This essay follows the general usage of the term denial to mean assertions that an event understood as
genocide (typically founded on extensive analysis of evidence by reputable experts) is in fact not geno-
cide, whether by representing the events as something else or claiming that the core events in question
did not occur at all.
2. See, for example, Verité sur le mouvement révolutionnaire arménien et les mésures gouvernmentales
(Constantinople, 1916); Aspirations et agissements révolutionnaires des comités arméniens avant et
après la proclamation de la constitution ottomane (Istanbul, 1917), reissued in 2001 by the Prime Min-
ister’s State Archives of the Republic of Turkey; Ahmed Rustem Bey, La guerre mondiale et la question

turco-arménien (Berne: Staempfli, 1918); and Documents sur les atrocités armeno-russes (Constantino-
ple: Société Anonyme de Papeterie et d’Imprimerie, 1917).
3. See Richard G. Hovannisian, “The Armenian Genocide and Patterns of Denial,” in The Armenian
Genocide in Perspective, ed. Richard G. Hovannisian (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1986), 111–34.
For a bibliographic essay on this subject, see Roger W. Smith, “Denial of the Armenian Genocide,” in
Genocide: A Critical Bibliographic Review, vol. 2, ed. Israel W. Charny (New York: Facts on File, 1991),
63–85.
4. See the Musa Dagh file in file 861.4061, General Records of the Department of State, record group 59,
US National Archives. See also Edward Minasian, Musa Dagh: A Chronicle of the Armenian Genocide
Factor in the Subsequent Suppression, by the Intervention of the United States Government, of the
Movie Based on Franz Werfel’s The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (Nashville: Cold Tree, 2007).
5. Altemur Kilic, Turkey and the World (Washington, DC: Public Affairs, 1959), 18, 141.
6. Lewis V. Thomas and Richard N. Frye, The United States and Turkey and Iran (Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard UP, 1951), 60–1.
7. See especially Stanford J. Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, vol. 2, coauthored
with Ezel Kural Shaw, Reform, Revolution and Republic: The Rise of Modern Turkey, 1808–1975 (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge UP, 1977); Roger W. Smith, Eric Markusen, and Robert Jay Lifton, “Professional
Ethics and the Denial of Armenian Genocide,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 9,1 (1995): 1–22; and
Heath W. Lowry, The Story Behind Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story (Istanbul: Isis, 1990).
8. Kamuran Gürün, The Armenian File: The Myth of Innocence Exposed (New York: St. Martin’s, 1985),
214–5.
9. Guenter Lewy, The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide (Salt Lake City:
University of Utah Press, 2005), 256.
10. Ibid., 208.
11. Marc A. Mamigonian, review of The Armenian Massacres: A Disputed Genocide, by Guenter Lewy,
Journal of Armenian Studies 8,2 (2006): 74.
12. Lewy, Armenian Massacres, 61.
13. Ibid., 119.
14. James G. Harbord, Conditions in the Near East: Report of the American Military Mission to Armenia,
S. Doc. No. 266-66, at 9 (1920).
15. Ibid., 7.
16. Ibid.
17. Lewy, Armenian Massacres, back cover.
18. See Scott Jaschik, “Going after a Scholar’s Critic,” Inside Higher Ed, May 4, 2009, https://www.
insidehighered.com/news/2009/05/04/lewy (accessed 2 Nov 2015).
19. For the list of books, including Lewy’s volume, as well as those of Justin McCarthy, Michael Gunter,
Edward Erickson, Kamuran Gürün, Heath Lowry, and Stanford Shaw, offered without charge by the
Turkish Coalition of America, see “Recommended Books,” Turkish Coalition of America, http://www.
tc-america.org/issues-information/recommended-books-60.htm (accessed 10 Jun 2015).
20. Guenter Lewy, Essays on Genocide and Humanitarian Intervention (Salt Lake City: U of Utah P, 2012).
In the introduction to the volume (pp. 1–11), Lewy stresses the “unprecedented character of the Holo-
caust” and insufficient evidence of “intent” in order to label other cases, such as that of the American
Indians, Armenians, and Gypsies, as “genocide.”
21. See the TCA annual reports for 2009, 2010, and 2011, at TCA, “About Us,” http://www.tc-america.
org/about.htm (accessed 10 Jun 2015).
22. For details, including information on sponsors, see the conference programs at “Turkish Studies,” Uni-
versity of Utah, http://poli-sci.utah.edu/turkish-studies/ (accessed 10 Jun 2015).
23. See sources in notes 18 and 21 and, for example, TCA, “University of Utah Turkish Studies Project En-
ters its Fifth Year,” http://www.tc-america.org/news-events/events/university-of-utah-turkish-studies-
project-enters-its-fifth-year-831.htm (accessed 2 Nov 2015).
24. See the TCA annual reports for 2009, 2010, and 2011, at TCA, “About Us,” http://www.tc-america.
org/about.htm (accessed 10 Jun 2015).
25. See, for example, Eric Lipton, “Ethics Panel Takes Action in 3 Cases,” New York Times, 5 August 2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/06/us/politics/06ethics.html (accessed 15 Jul 2015).
26. See the website of the Turkish Coalition USA Political Action Committee, at http://www.tenthousand
turks.org (accessed 2 Nov 2015). See also Center for Responsive Politics, OpenSecrets.org, “Influence
& Lobbying,” “Turkish Coalition USA PAC,” https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=
C00432526 (accessed 2 Nov 2015).

246 Hovannisian
27. In 2009, the TCA announced a “multi-year major grant” to the University of Utah. According to its
own annual report for 2010, the TCA contributed to the Utah program (rounded to the closest thou-
sand) $175,000; 2011, $163,000; 2012, $174,000; and 2013, $231,000. The report for 2014 is not cur-
rently available. TCA, “About Us,” http://www.tc-america.org/about.htm (accessed 10 Jun 2015).
28. See, in particular, the annual reports of the TCA for 2009 through 2013, cited in the previous note, as
well as thankful acknowledgements of individual authors themselves. See also note 19 above for the
link to the books offered, free of charge, by the TCA.
29. M. Hakan Yavuz, “Orientalism, the ‘Terrible Turk’ and Genocide,” Middle East Critique 23,2 (2014):
111–26, 118–9.
Eric Hooglund, “Editor’s Note,” Middle East Critique 23,2 (2014): 107–10, 108.
30.
31. M. Hakan Yavuz and Tal Buenos, “Armenian Genocide: Israel Must Maintain Its Moral Compass,”
Jerusalem Post, 14 January 2012, http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Armenian-genocide-Israel-
must-maintain-its-moral-compass (accessed 15 Jun 2015).
32. Ibid.
33. Tal Buenos, “Many Genocides of Raphael Lemkin,” Daily Sabah, 11 September 2014, http://www.
dailysabah.com/opinion/2014/09/11/many-genocides-of-raphael-lemkin (accessed 22 Jun 2015). The
conspiratorial theme has continued to appear in his subsequent pieces.
34. For the full text of his talk on 24 November 2014, see “The Address Delivered by Mr Tal Buenos at
NSW Parliament,” Australian Turkish Advocacy Alliance, https://www.ata-a.org.au/tal_buenos_
speech/ (accessed 15 Jun 2015).
35. Examples of relevant op-ed pieces by Tal Buenos include the following: “The Lemkin Hole in the Swiss
Case,” Daily Sabah, 1 August 2014, http://www.dailysabah.com/opinion/2014/08/01/the-lemkin-hole-
in-the-swiss-case (accessed 28 Jun 2015); “Genocide-Labeling Has Always Been Political,” Interna-
tional Affairs Forum, http://www.ia-forum.org/Content/ViewInternalDocument.cfm?ContentID=8330
(accessed 28 Jun 2015); “How the US Government ‘Nudges’ Its Armenians,” Daily Sabah, 5 November
2014, http://www.dailysabah.com/opinion/2014/11/05/how-the-us-government-nudges-its-armenians
(accessed 28 Jun 2015); “The Year of an Anglo-American Apology to Armenians and Turks,” Daily
Sabah, 13 January 2015, http://www.dailysabah.com/opinion/2015/01/13/the-year-of-an-angloamerican-
apology-to-armenians-and-turks (accessed 28 Jun 2015); and “The Armenian Issue and the Public Figure
Effect,” Daily Sabah, 23 April 2015, http://www.dailysabah.com/op-ed/2015/04/23/the-armenian-issue-
and-the-public-figure-effect (accessed 28 Jun 2015).
36. Justin McCarthy, Esat Arslan, Cemalettin Taşkıran, and Ömer Turan, The Armenian Rebellion at Van
(Salt Lake City: U of Utah P, 2006). Quotations, 258–66.
37. Ibid., 273–5.
38. Ibid., 266.
39. Justin McCarthy, The Turk in America: The Creation of an Enduring Prejudice (Salt Lake City: U of
Utah P, 2010), 158.
40. Justin McCarthy, Ömer Turan, and Cemalettin Taşkiran, Sasun: The History of an 1890s Armenian
Revolt (Salt Lake City: U of Utah P, 2014). See acknowledgement of TCA support at xiii.
41. Ibid., 2.
42. Ibid., 193.
43. Ibid., 117–93, 209–59.
44. Ibid., 183.
45. Ibid., 1.
46. Yücel Güçlü, Armenians and the Allies in Cilicia, 1914–1923 (Salt Lake City: U of Utah P, 2010), 8.
47. Ibid., 9.
48. Ibid., 39–50.
49. Ibid., 18.
50. Ibid., 102–56.
51. Ibid., 80.
52. Ibid., 82–3.
53. Ibid., 190.
54. Ibid., 189.
55. Ibid., 190–1.
56. Ibid., 200.
57. Ibid., 3–4.
58. Yücel Güçlü, The Holocaust and the Armenian Case in Comparative Perspective (Lanham, MD: UP of
America, 2011), back cover.

59. See, for example, “126 Holocaust Scholars Affirm the Incontestable Fact of the Armenian Genocide
and Urge Western Democracies to Officially Recognize It,” The New York Times, 9 June 2000, p. A29.
60. See the TCA’s annual report for 2010, where the title of the then-unpublished book is given as “Politi-
cization of the Armenian ‘Genocide’ Claims,” “to be published soon by Palgrave.” TCA, “About Us,”
http://www.tc-america.org/about.htm (accessed 10 Jun 2015).
61. Michael M. Gunter, Armenian History and the Question of Genocide (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2011), ix.
62. Ibid., x.
63. Ibid., x–xi.
64. Ibid., back cover.

65. Edward J. Erickson, Ordered to Die: A History of the Ottoman Army in the First World War (Westport,
CT: Greenwood, 2001).
66. Ibid., 96.
67. John F. Guilmartin Jr., review of Ordered to Die: A History of the Ottoman Army in the First World
War, by Edward J. Erickson, Middle East Journal 56,1 (2002): 168–70, at 169.
68. Edward J. Erickson, “Armenian Massacres: New Records Undercut Old Blame,” Middle East Quarterly
13,3 (2006): 67–75; Edward J. Erickson, “The Armenians and Ottoman Military Policy, 1915,” War in
History 15,2 (2008): 141–67; Edward J. Erickson, “Armenian Relocations and Ottoman National Secu-
rity: Military Security or Excuse for Genocide?,” Middle East Critique 20,3 (2011): 291–8.
69. Edward J. Erickson, Ottomans and Armenians: A Study in Counterinsurgency (New York: Palgrave
MacMillan, 2013), xi.
70. Compare this with Lewy’s similar approach discussed above, on page 231. For an image of the book’s
cover, see http://www.netread.com/jcusers2/bk1388/209/9781137362209/image/lgcover.9781137362209.
jpg (accessed 1 Jun 2015).
71. Erickson, Ottomans and Armenians, 100.
72. Ibid., 79–96.
73. Ibid., 161–9.
74. Ibid., 181.
75. Ibid., 178.
76. Ibid., 209–10. Taner Akçam addresses this issue in some detail in The Young Turks’ Crime against
Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton: Prince-
ton UP, 2013), 373–83.
77. Erickson, Ottomans and Armenians, 213–4. For an overall positive review of Ottomans and Arme-
nians, see Richard Outzen, “Between Counterinsurgency and Genocide,” War on the Rocks, 18 Sep-
tember 2014, http://warontherocks.com/2014/09/between-counterinsurgency-and-genocide/ (accessed
2 Jun 2015). The reviewer, a faculty member of the National Defense University, cautions, “If the
United States were to recognize the Ottoman treatment of the Armenians as genocide, its relations
with Turkey would be forever changed.”
78. The Internet has become an important asset in disseminating deceptive denial information and litera-
ture. When one uses a search engine for the topic “Armenian Genocide,” it is likely that among the
top links will be disguised denialist sites that patently reject the truth of the genocide and advance
reverse arguments regarding responsibility and culpability.

Denial of The Armenian Genocide 100 Years Later - Richard G. Hovannisian

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Denial of the Armenian Genocide 100 Years Later:

The New Practitioners and Their Trade

© 2015 Genocide Studies International 9, no. 2 doi:10.3138/gsi.9.2.04

become necessary to relocate a limited number. Appealing to American sensitivities, he

ization, as seen in the 1951 publication of Lewis V. Thomas of Princeton University,

© 2015 Genocide Studies International 9, no. 2 doi:10.3138/gsi.9.2.04

The Modern Phase: Kamuran Gürün and Guenter Lewy

© 2015 Genocide Studies International 9, no. 2 doi:10.3138/gsi.9.2.04

The message is clear.

Hakan Yavuz, Utah, and Turkish Coalition of America

© 2015 Genocide Studies International 9, no. 2 doi:10.3138/gsi.9.2.04

When Hoogland was questioned by this writer on such an uncritical replication in a

harming itself by lending a hand to the continued practice of irresponsible use of

© 2015 Genocide Studies International 9, no. 2 doi:10.3138/gsi.9.2.04

the Ottoman Empire would have been the better choice.”38

© 2015 Genocide Studies International 9, no. 2 doi:10.3138/gsi.9.2.04

Ottoman ofﬁcials promulgated regulations intended to protect Armenian life and

© 2015 Genocide Studies International 9, no. 2 doi:10.3138/gsi.9.2.04

rejecting the reality of an Armenian Genocide, it is nonetheless possible and useful to

© 2015 Genocide Studies International 9, no. 2 doi:10.3138/gsi.9.2.04

Such rationalizations are characteristic of modern-day strategies to deny that Ar-

© 2015 Genocide Studies International 9, no. 2 doi:10.3138/gsi.9.2.04

The decision to relocate the Armenians was an evolving counterinsurgency

© 2015 Genocide Studies International 9, no. 2 doi:10.3138/gsi.9.2.04

The author gratefully acknowledges the valuable assistance of Marc A. Mamigonian,

© 2015 Genocide Studies International 9, no. 2 doi:10.3138/gsi.9.2.04

© 2015 Genocide Studies International 9, no. 2 doi:10.3138/gsi.9.2.04

© 2015 Genocide Studies International 9, no. 2 doi:10.3138/gsi.9.2.04

64. Ibid., back cover.

© 2015 Genocide Studies International 9, no. 2 doi:10.3138/gsi.9.2.04

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