Paradigms of Genocide: The Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, and Contemporary Mass Destructions

Abstract

When confronted with mass death and forced deportations, the contemporary world community has often reached for the Holocaust as a paradigmatic case of genocide in order both to make sense of and to condemn current events. This article suggests that the Armenian Genocide sets a more accurate precedent than the Holocaust for current mass disasters, especially such as those in Nigeria and in the former Yugoslavia, which are the products of nationalism. Conversely, the Holocaust is a prototype for genocidal movements that transcend nationalism and are motivated by ideologies that have global scope.

The Nigeria–Biafra war: postcolonial conflict and the question of genocide

“…98 Thus, although Melson acknowledged that 'over a million Biafrans starved to death as a result of the deliberate Nigerian policy of blockade and disruption of agricultural life', the policy could not be called genocidal because the FMG policies 'did not include extermination of the Ibos'. 99 Melson also implied another feature intrinsic to genocide. Igbos were not being killed for ideological reasons and purely for their identity but because they were a party to a secessionist civil war.…”

Re‐evaluating otherness in genocidal ideology

“…Cathie Carmichael summarises this relationship by defining genocide as cases where ‘nationalizing regimes tried to impose radical solutions and displace, expel or murder those defined as outside the national group’ (2010: 397). Generally, genocide scholars use a sense of otherness to explain why certain groups are selected to play the scapegoat victim role: because they are unlike the nation, a particular group instils a sense of fear and uncertainty in the nation (for more on otherness and fear see Gagnon ; Melson ; Young ). Though limited to genocidal cases of conflict, this conception of ‘otherness’ carries similar problems of inflexibility and a lack of complex analysis as when posed by scholars of nationalism more broadly.…”

“…This reticence was used in propaganda as further ‘proof’ of Armenian injustice against the nation (Akçam : 33; Astourian : 125). Around this time period, Sultan Abdul Hamid II began claiming that Armenians were wealthier and better educated than their Turkish compatriots; note that this perception of wealth does not diminish perceptions of inequality, but enhances it as education and wealth were claimed to have been obtained at the expense of the Turkish nation, else such a ‘degenerate community’ would not be able to rise to such an elevated lifestyle (Akçam : 43; Melson : 159). Note as well that these claims portrayed the Armenians as having secured wealth in a time when the Ottoman state was in economic disrepair, particularly when compared against the growing European market (Özmucur and Pamuk : 312–13).…”

The example of the Armenian genocide and the role of the millet system in its execution

“…The victims were a territorial ethnic group that had sought autonomy, and the methods of destruction included massacre, forced deportations, and starvation' (Melson, 1996). This dramatic shift in ideology and identity, from Ottoman pluralism to an integral form of Turkish nationalism, had profound implications for the emergence of modern Turkey.…”