The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey’s Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894–1924

by Benny Morris, Dror Ze'evi

A Financial Times Book of the Year
A Foreign Affairs Book of the Year
A Spectator Book of the Year

“A landmark contribution to the study of these epochal events.”
― Times Literary Supplement

“Brilliantly researched and written…casts a careful eye upon the ghastly events that took place in the final decades of the Ottoman empire, when its rulers decided to annihilate their Christian subjects…Hitler and the Nazis gleaned lessons from this genocide that they then applied to their own efforts to extirpate Jews.”
―Jacob Heilbrun, The Spectator

Between 1894 and 1924, three waves of violence swept across Anatolia, targeting the region’s Christian minorities. By 1924, the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks, once nearly a quarter of the population, had been reduced to 2 percent. Most historians have treated these waves as distinct, isolated events, and successive Turkish governments presented them as an unfortunate sequence of accidents. The Thirty-Year Genocide is the first account to show that all three were actually part of a single, continuing, and intentional effort to wipe out Anatolia’s Christian population. Despite the dramatic swing from the Islamizing autocracy of the sultan to the secularizing republicanism of the post–World War I period, the nation’s annihilationist policies were remarkably constant, with continual recourse to premeditated mass killing, homicidal deportation, forced conversion, and mass rape. And one thing more was a the rallying cry of jihad. While not justified under the teachings of Islam, the killing of two million Christians was effected through the calculated exhortation of the Turks to create a pure Muslim nation.

“A subtle diagnosis of why, at particular moments over a span of three decades, Ottoman rulers and their successors unleashed torrents of suffering.”
―Bruce Clark, New York Times Book Review

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Middle East, Religion, Audiobook, War, Christianity

672 pages, Paperback

First published April 24, 2019

About the author

Benny Morris is professor of history in the Middle East Studies department of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in the city of Be'er Sheva, Israel. He is a key member of the group of Israeli historians known as the "New Historians".

Reviews

[Charles Haywood · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book, a massive study by two Israeli historians, aspires to answer why and how Turkey exterminated its Christian population in the thirty years between 1894 and 1924. Usually this extermination, or part of it, is referred to as the Armenian Genocide, except by the Turks, who to this day deny their crimes, and so don’t refer to it at all. That usual term is misleading, however. As Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi document exhaustively, the primary target was all Christians, and the primary goal religious cleansing of the Turkish nation. Proving this is the object of "The Thirty-Year Genocide."

No serious historian denies the Genocide occurred. Not even the Turks deny that they killed Christians, though they minimize the numbers and, more importantly, ascribe the killings to their justified reaction to perfidious Armenians and Greeks, rebellious and disloyal, supposedly working to further the interests of Russia, Greece or other enemies of Turkey. Disproving this claim is the other major object of "The Thirty-Year Genocide."

The authors identify three distinct phases of the Genocide, each with somewhat different motivations and practices, but all with the same lethal core rationale: 1894–1896, 1915–1916, and 1919–1924. According to them, theirs is the first major study of the first and third phases. A central premise of this book is that although a different Turkish government was in charge during each phase (respectively, Sultan Abdülhamid II; the “Young Turks”; and Mustafa Kemal), they were in complete agreement, for somewhat differing reasons, on the need to eliminate all of Turkey’s Christians. As the authors summarize:

At play were fears of foreign machinations and interference, Turkish nationalism, ethnic rivalries, economic envy, and a desire to maintain political and social dominance. Perpetrators sought power, wealth, and sexual gratification. A combination of these motivations was manifest in each period and location. In the course of our research we have also concluded that these forces were joined by another overarching element: Islam. As an ethos and an ideology, Islam played a cardinal role throughout the process, in each of its stages.

The immediate objection by some will be, I suspect, that post-Ottoman Turkey was supposedly an aggressively secular state, so claiming Islam bound together the latter two phases of the Genocide must be historically inaccurate. However, as the authors show, putative secularism of the top leadership did not change the view of nearly all Turks, from top to bottom, that Turkey was a Muslim state and that non-Muslims had to go. Kemal may have wanted to reduce the power of the clerics; he was in total agreement with them that Christians were a dangerous alien presence in Turkey that needed to disappear, and nearly every Turk, whatever his religiosity, was happy to cooperate to make that happen. Supposed secularism had no effect at all in diminishing the Genocide, or the cardinal role of Islam in it.

The authors carefully describe their research. Most of the relevant Turkish archives are sealed, and those that are not have been carefully purged of incriminating material over the past hundred years, though enough shows up to corroborate some specific events. The bulk of evidence, and it is very bulky, is contemporaneous writings from Western observers throughout the dying Ottoman Empire, ranging from pro-Turkish diplomats (including the historian Arnold Toynbee) to anti-Turkish Christian missionaries. The authors examine and cross-reference these sources, as well as news reports, summaries made immediately after World War I of Turkish documents that have since disappeared, and other sources such as memoirs. From the beginning, the authors knew that the Turkish response to any scholarship about the Genocide (which can also be seen in reactions to this book) is always, and has been for a century, to simultaneously claim that it is all lies, and that anyway the victims deserved it, and, by the way, the Armenians and Greeks did the same things that the Turks didn’t do. Still, in their usual careful manner, Morris and Ze’evi examine and discuss, and then dismiss, each of these contradictory objections as transparently false.

It’s not really surprising that to this day the Turks conspire to deny what they did. They were never conquered, and so have never been forced by others to face up to their sins. During the Cold War, the United States, which usually performs the role of global moral enforcer, had good reason to not annoy the Turks, so the Genocide faded further into the background. And even today, nobody, except perhaps the Russians, and naturally the Armenians and the Greeks, has much reason to talk about the Genocide. As a result, most discussion of it is confined to academic works, and occasional mentions in the newspaper, usually when Turkey throws a fit upon the mention of their crime by some ambassador or global leader.

As the nineteenth century wound down, the rise of nationalism combined with the accelerating decline of the Ottoman Empire to unsettle the Turks, who had generally lived more or less in peace with their subjugated Christians, so long as they hewed to the requirements of dhimmi status. The Russo-Turkish war, ending in 1878, resulted in Turkish losses in the Balkans and, perhaps more importantly, a siege mentality combined with an inferiority complex for the Turkish ruling class. Armenians and Greeks were very numerous in both rural and urban areas of Turkey; they were there long before the Turks arrived, of course, and many urban Greeks stayed after the Ottomans conquered Constantinople in 1453.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, the Armenian intellectual elite began to foment some Armenian national sentiment—more, surprisingly, than the Greeks, who by this time had an actual nearby nation to look to for support. As a result, a small, but active, Armenian independence movement operated in portions of the Empire. However, the actual threat from Armenians to Turkish interests or lives was nil. The Greeks lacked a similar independence movement—for reasons that partially escape me, but could be various, the Greeks even today tend to take a highly conciliatory attitude toward the Muslims. This is true, for example, of the Ecumenical Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church, and was true of Greeks and their religious leadership during this time period as well.

The first phase of the Genocide, under the Sultan Abdülhamid, from 1894 to 1896, was disorganized, just like the Empire of the time. That did not make it less effective; it is easy to kill masses of people without tight central control, if you don’t care how it’s done and you can appeal to varying motives, from Islamic supremacy to the desire to steal to the desire to rape. Most Christian villages were already under the thumb of local Muslim tribes, often Kurds, who had long preyed on them without the government interfering, and it was not a big step to simply encourage the Kurds to make an end of the sheep entirely, paying them to do so if necessary. In larger towns, however, the local administration generally coordinated an assault on the Armenian population, upon orders from higher up. Greeks were largely spared in this phase, aside from occasional impromptu massacres by over-zealous local administrators.

Very soon the authors establish the pattern for this book; a village-by-village, town-by-town, area-by-area close examination of what happened to the victims of the Genocide. The broad process is similar everywhere; the result almost always the same. Any variations are in the details. Torture and rape, along with simple killing, were both nearly universal and explicitly condoned by those administering the Genocide. (The authors note that in all their research, which documents innumerable rapes and forcing of young girls and women into permanent sexual slavery, including establishment of public slave markets, not once did they ever come across any reference to any punishment of a Turk for any sexual crime.) Killing was sometimes done on the spot, but very many times victims were marched out of their home area, for “resettlement,” and shot, or hacked to death, along the way in isolated areas. Armenian property was then confiscated and shared out among Muslim neighbors, or hired Kurdish or Circassian killers, or local Ottoman officials. The Turks did not care that those killed were very economically productive and in many cases provided craft and professional services difficult to replace; such arguments carried no weight with the authorities. Rinse and repeat, off and on, for thirty years.

This first phase ended up with, the authors decide after carefully evaluating various alternative calculations, about 100,000 Christians (almost all Armenians) directly murdered, and at least that many more, and perhaps twice as many, dying of resulting causes, including exposure to the elements and disease. That was small potatoes compared to the second phase, which overlapped World War I. The authors go to great lengths to analyze possible motives for this second phase, during which the so-called Young Turks, formally called the Committee of Union and Progress, ruled. The war was one factor, but another was the First Balkan War, ending in 1913, which the Ottomans lost and which resulted in perhaps 1.5 million Muslim refugees flooding the Empire, with stories of hardship and oppression, inflaming Muslim opinion. Tensions rose steadily, and various incidents of mass removal of Armenians and Greeks occurred, in part to seize housing for Muslim refugees. In Armenian areas, the forced conscription of young Armenian men for the Turkish army, thousands of whom were killed by the Turks as the war went badly for the Turks and they were perceived as possible traitors, inflamed Armenian opinion as well.

But the second phase only formally kicked of in 1915, with coordinated mass deportations followed by killing essentially everyone, beginning in the mountain town of Zeytun. I will spare you a summary; it is more of the same, for 250 pages, documenting a million or so dead. As with most chronicles of mass killing, from Christopher Browning’s "Ordinary Men" to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s "The Gulag Archipelago," the reader becomes numb from what seems like an endless recitation of murder and torture (though sadism and torture was more prominent in the Genocide than under either the National Socialists or the Soviets). This is not the sort of book that a reader will enjoy, or a casual reader is likely to finish. What makes it worse, perhaps, is that the reader knows that no justice was meted out to the Turks, and none will be, in this life, at least. They got what they wanted and they paid no price. Nonetheless, as with the Holocaust, studying the details is extremely valuable, because it fights against the human tendency to gloss over the past. And studying the Genocide has another benefit—it reminds us that the Holocaust was not, as some like to think, a one-time aberration, but one of multiple such events, where modern technology and modern ideologies and technologies combined with ancient hatreds to produce something very new and very bad. Rwanda and ISIS have shown us more recently that genocide is not on the way out, whatever UN bureaucrats tell us, and there is no reason, in fact, that such events could not happen here in America, given the right circumstances.

Morris and Ze’evi examine mountains of evidence trying to evaluate the degree of central coordination, sifting documents, dates, and events. Their conclusion is, in essence, that there was more central coordination in the second two phases than under the Sultan, but as in the Holocaust, less than complete central coordination as to the specific means. Every so often a planned massacre would be called off, if a Western observer that the Turks wanted to keep in the dark arrived in the area. Of course, the ability to call off imminent, already-organized massacres (which were often initiated with a single call from the muezzin’s minaret) suggests strong central control, as the authors point out. (It is also interesting to note that any observer from the United States was treated with extra delicacy. “In particular, the United States was viewed as an unknown, but powerful, quantity, having previously demonstrated its naval strength against Barbary Coast pirates in Ottoman territory.”)

And the third phase, from 1918 through 1924, was yet more of the same, under Kemal and the Nationalists, not the CUP, but for these purposes, that’s a distinction without a difference. Kemal was better than the CUP at playing off the Allies against each other, thereby enabling him to quickly bring to an end the brief postwar period where the British and French tried to protect Christians and even help some move back. The Allies mostly ended up supervising mass exoduses from Turkey, of Christians from Thrace and other areas not directly part of the Genocide. Woodrow Wilson’s desire to carve an Armenian homeland out of Turkey died stillborn, and Kemal was given a free hand to complete what his predecessors had begun.

The Nationalists focused primarily on the Greeks, who were incidental to earlier killings and ethnic cleansing. Part of that was a reaction to the Greek occupation of parts of Anatolia during the Greco-Turkish war of 1919 to 1922, but removal of the Greeks was necessary to complete the vision of Turkey for the Turks. (The few Jews left also were strongly encouraged to leave, suffering various economic persecutions if they did not, resulting in only a tiny number of Jews remaining in Turkey today.) Deportations alternated with killings, so a somewhat higher percentage of those persecuted survived in this third phase. Nonetheless, perhaps close to another million Christians died in these years (including the Assyrian Christians, who had largely escaped past persecutions). And that was the end, since there was nobody left to kill.

One theme that jumps out at the reader is how many times the first thing the Turks did to Christians was confiscate any and all weapons. Variations on this must show up at least fifty times in the book. Sometimes this was demanded on pain of instant death; other times it was sold to victims as the path to ensuring peace, by “decreasing tensions.” The result was always the same—all the communities who gave up their weapons were massacred, whatever promises were made, with metronomic regularity, with the job made smooth by the earlier removal of weapons. I wasn’t surprised; such an approach is universal among tyrants and killers, as Stephen Halbrook has documented for the Third Reich. It’s not clear that refusal was an option—in some cases, the Turks merely brought up artillery and shelled uncompliant villages. But in some cases, armed Christians were able to make the cost too high for the Turks. Assyrian Christians made a stand at Diyarbekir in 1915, as did Armenians in Musa Dagh, near the Turkish-Syrian border—by which is today the only Armenian village in Turkey. Still, such examples were very much the exception, and it is hard to say if coordinated defensive violence would have ended better for the Armenians. On the other hand, it couldn’t have ended worse. Regardless, such historical examples are why resisting the calls of proto-tyrants of the Left for further gun control in the United States are critical. As we approach our own days of flame, any agreement to disarm is likely to have fatal consequences, and must be resisted with vigor.

Another theme is coerced conversions to Islam, which were extremely common. Usually adult men were still killed after conversion; perhaps that is why few adult men did convert. For children and for young women, though, the Turks sometimes preferred conversion; the children could be raised as Muslims, and the women handed over to Muslim men as second or third wives, or used as sex slaves for local notables. (Such sexual slavery is approved under certain brands of Islam; it occurs in the modern world on a massive scale in areas controlled by adherents to those brands, including Nigeria and under ISIS, and was strongly approved of by all levels of Turkish authority.) Widespread coercion to convert, obviously, supports the authors’ thesis of the centrality of Islam to the Genocide.

Naturally, the “Islam is a religion of peace” people were displeased by this book, which not only assigns blame to Islam but specifically calls out “the ideology of Muslim supremacy” which is at the very core of Islam. Every so often the authors attempt to split hairs and suggest that they are not arguing that Islam is the problem. They try to distinguish Islam and “political Islam,” which is like separating the vodka out of a Screwdriver cocktail, but it’s nice of them to make the effort. They also go out of their way to name and document individual Muslims who helped victims. Such a superficial sugar-coating isn’t a new approach; Morris and Ze’evi quote the British Ambassador to the Sublime Porte, in 1896, similarly assuring the Sultan, “The religion of Mohammed [is] highly respected in England and that no one attributed the crimes that had been committed to its teachings.” Then they say, “This was hogwash.” Everyone in Britain, from highest to lowest, most definitely attributed the crimes to Islam, pointing to the Sultan’s deliberate whipping up of religious hatreds in a desperate attempt to keep his rule from fracture, and British diplomats, even aside from the killings, reported an enormous wave of anti-Christian animosity. Such sugar-coating is no more convincing today.

Something else this book taught me was the dubious history of the Kurds. In the United States, the Kurds are often viewed positively today, since they have fought with us against ISIS, and they present themselves as scrappy warriors espousing a moderate brand of Islam. What the Kurds want is their own nation, to be carved largely out of Turkey, but also out of Iraq and Syria, and they seem to have a good propaganda team. Still, we should not let soldierly sentiment and propaganda blind us. So-called Kurdistan mostly consists of where Armenians once dominated, and a great many of the Armenians killed were slaughtered by the grandfathers or great-grandfathers of today’s Kurdish allies. The Kurds are not our friends, even if they are sometimes temporary allies, any more than Saladin, a Kurd as well, was a friend of the Crusaders. Mutual respect does not mean shared goals.

But it’s not like the Armenians are going back to their ancestral homelands. Perhaps one conclusion to be taken from this book is a harsh one. Namely, that through evil the Turks succeeded, and there is no way to reverse what they did. Sometimes there just is no solution, or no solution that is accessible through conceivable human action. I am certainly in favor of turning Istanbul back into Constantinople, and the Hagia Sophia back into a church, but short of mass conversion of the Turks, neither goal could be accomplished without imposing even more suffering than the Turks imposed on Christians. There are, after all, only 2,000 Greeks left in Constantinople. We have, in fact, recently exacerbated the problem of Christianity’s destruction in its ancient heartland, by dynamiting order in the Middle East over the past fifteen years, resulting in further extermination of Christians (thanks, George W. Bush!). We are responsible, but we cannot effectively now protect Christians in the Middle East from the consequences of what we have done (not that we try to do so), much less reverse what happened a hundred years ago. I’d be all for, say, letting the Russians carve an explicitly Christian homeland out of parts of Turkey, but let’s not pretend that could be done without a truly massive degree of violence.

[Review completes as first comment.]

[Clif Hostetler · Rating 3 out of 5]

In 1894 the Christian population of Anatolia (modern day Turkey) was about twenty percent; by 1924 it had declined to two percent. Much recent scholarship has focused on the Armenian genocide that occurred in 1915. However, this book ties together the three waves of killing that swept across the Christian population of Anatolia from 1894 to 1924 because this period of time among the Turks was “a ‘continuum of genocidal intent’ and a ‘continuum of ethnic cleansing’.”

The first 1894-95 wave massacred hundreds of thousands of Armenians. Then during WWI in 1915 the far larger genocide occurred resulting in the deaths of millions of Armenians and Assyrians. Finally in 1920-24 the killing and deportation of the remaining Christians, many of whom were Greek, resulted in many additional deaths. Over the three decades, between 1.5 million and 2.5 million Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks were murdered. A substantial portion of the Greek population survived by being deported to Greece, but only a small fragment of the Armenian and Assyrian populations survived.

Reading this book is a long hard slog through decades of pogrom after pogrom, massacre after massacre, all in mind numbing detail. Variations of rape, starvation, and torture are described to the extent that instances of kidnapping of young women for service in Turkish harems began to sound like a blessing. Conversion to the Muslim faith was a possible way to survive in some cases, but not always.

In the Summary section of the book near its end the authors provide a comparison of the genocide of the Christians in Turkey with the Holocaust during WWII. I have decided to provide one of the more troubling differences they noted:

And whereas the German people acknowledged collective guilt, expressed remorse, made financial reparation, tried to educate itself and future generations about what had happened, and has worked to abjure racism, successive Turkish governments and the Turkish people have never owned up to what happened or to their guilt. They continue to play the game of denial and to blame the victims. (p. 505)

This is not a book read for pleasure, but for me taking time to read it is a means to extend a token of respect and recognition to the victims of unjust mass murders. Another reason for my interest in this history is the fact that my uncle (my mother’s older brother) served as a volunteer for The American Committee for Relief in the Near East in 1920-22. In May of 1922 he brought 110 Armenian orphans from Mardin, Turkey by foot and horseback to Sidon, Lebanon a distance of over 500 miles (800 km). My mother told me he managed to reunite one of these orphans with his mother. I don’t know the fate of the rest of the orphans, and my mother is no longer available to ask for additional details.

This book was on my to-read list for a couple years before I was finally motivated to go ahead and read it after listening to the following talk given by David Cotter, a retired U.S. Army colonel, director of the Dept. of Military History at the Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth. The title of the talk is Armenian Genocide: Changing the Meaning of Massacre .

The following is a link to a Time Magazine article titled, "Don’t Just Remember the Armenian Genocide. Prevent It From Happening Again."
https://time.com/6273756/armenian-gen...

[Jimmit Shah · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you thought the horror of the Holocaust was the only large scale, deliberate, state-run persecution of minorities on religious grounds, think again. What the Armenians faced was significantly more horrific as their very way of life has nearly been annihilated. As the book aptly summarizes, the Nazi atrocities, as horrific they might have been, lasted for seven years. Armenians faced systemic destruction of their identity and their very existence over a horrific 3 decade long campaign. What is more galling is that the hatred against the Armenians seemed to have seeped into every level of the Turkish society, to the extent that ordinary Turks took to raping, pillaging and butchering their century old neighbors. Nazis killed Jews in concentration camps in a near clinical fashion whereas Armenians (and later the Greeks) were forced to watch as their women were gang-raped and as their neighbors came to kill them with axes, swords and stones

I picked up this book because in 2019 because of a prominent anti-Semitic US Congresswoman's refusal to condemn the genocide. After reading this book, I am forced to question the humanity of such a person and the horrible moral code that would allow such a person to sleep at night.

[Johnathan Nazarian · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very thorough examination of available documents and testimonies from German, British, American, French, Kurdish, Armenian and Turkish eyewitnesses to the events that happened in Ottoman Turkey from 1894-1924. During that time between 1.5 to 2.5 million Armenian, Greek and Assyrian Christians were forcefully deported and/or systematically massacred. (The vast majority being ethnic Armenian Christians 1.5M+). Every atrocity that happened in the hollocaust happened there, except for the gas Chambers. Concentration camps, rape, brutal murder, starvation and more. Men women and children. In the most gorey and disgusting manners.

Morris and Ze'evi seem to genuinely try to be fair in ascribing blame for all of the details and events of the time, dispelling myths and exaggerations on both sides of the debate. However, the overwhelming evidence stands against the three Islamic regimes over as many decades. While the hollocaust has been admitted and reparations have been attempted, the 30 year genocide is denied, ignored and politically covered up. The victims have never been honored and the crimes of the past have never been admitted. When we don't learn from (or even about) the atrocities of the past, they are left to be repeated.

Turkey has been allowed to cover up and even attempt to reverse the details for far too long. Even Hitler acknowledged what happened in Turkey when saying "After all, who remembers the Armenians?" as he attempted to justify his actions. So here we stand, almost a century since these massacres ended, and there has been no action.

While the current Turkish government is not guilty of the crime, they are guilty of still covering it up and attempting to silence others. Morris and Ze'evi are so detailed that it is, at times, difficult to even process the depth of these events. Not for lack of writing ability, but for lack of the ability to process such horror. This is the most thorough examination of history on this topic that I've seen. Excellent book.

[Leon · Rating 4 out of 5]

The best scholarly indictment of Turkey’s crimes against humanity. Covers the period from Abdul Hamid II’s rule (1894-1899), through the Young Turks’ regime (1914-1916) and under the Nationalists led by Kemal Atatürk during the Turkish War of Independence (1920-1922). It focuses on revealing and documenting the extensive, systematic eradication of Christian minorities from Anatolia, encompassing not only the well-documented Armenian genocide but also the violence inflicted upon Greek and Assyrian communities. It is excellent, the time of events is reconstructed perfectly with exhaustive references and evaluation of primary sources.

Only problem, the book is too concerned with the microdetails. What is most important to me is analyzing the perpetrators’ motivations in the broader socio-political and historical context, including the role and positions of various institutions pre-genocide. It lacks in that respect. I was hoping the dynamics leading up to the ethnic cleansing would be more sufficiently addressed, rather it is more like a thorough catalog of atrocities committed by the Ottoman Empire. The argument that the CUP’s chief intent as a government body was purely religious is not entirely convincing when you account for their emphasis on national identity over Muslim governance, and this is not to minimize the atrocities, only that the interpretations set forth by Morris lacks nuance. The complexities of the genocide is also overlooked somewhat; Morris paints a picture of a monolithic narrative of persecution despite each group’s genocide involving distinct motivations and being subject to various influences. In short, while the book is an indispensable documentation of the genocide’s scale, it glaringly provides minimal insight on a few key points and doesn’t delve much into the geopolitical landscape that contributed to the events. Most importantly though, the book shines a much-needed spotlight on the egregiousness of Turkey’s genocide denialism in the face of all the evidence

[Trish · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many people forget there were significant populations of Christians in the Middle East, long before Western missionaries ever set a foot there, and indeed, before Christianity arrived in the western world.
The three Abrahamic religions all originated in those regions and all regard Jerusalem as a very holy place, with, as is evident, enduring conflict.

This book documents the genocide of Armenians and other minority Christian ethnic groups in the Ottoman Empire/Turkey over 30 years, which Turkey still denies to this day. The authors piece together evidence from many sources, which must have been hard work, given that official archives have been repeatedly redacted.

This genocide was horrendously brutal, medieval in its violence. It did not have the terrible industrial, bureaucratic efficiency of the Shoah, but it is arguably more heartbreaking for its sickening cruelty- rape- generally of women and girls, but sometimes of men and boys, too - evisceration, torture and dismemberment of men, women and children.

The calumnies against the Armenians have some similarities with those which have (and are still) directed towards Jews. Too successful, dubious loyalties, “racial” inferiority, dishonesty, but with the addition of adherence to the “wrong” faith.

The attrition of indigenous Christian communities in the Middle East continues to this day. The western world may not be aware of these Christians belonging to denominations far older than Anglicanism, Methodism, and less familiar than Catholicism and Orthodoxy.

This is not an easy read! But it is important.

[Paulo Reimann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book revolting story

The Armenian massacre is likely one of the least discussed or mentioned among genocide history. Is recent. Revolting. Covered by official denial makes even more revolting. Turks should stand up and apologize for every Armenian they find. The turk government pay all damages. But as narrow minded, dead in culture government(s) ain't happening. The best book about the subject. Tough reading though.

[Cliff Ward · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not a book for the casual reader. It is sickening. However, it is an essential document of the terrible and barbarous murder, torture and rape of Christian Armenians and Greeks that happened only a hundred years or so past.
The Turks have continued to deny, and much evidence, although as the authors painstaking demonstrate, not all evidence, has been destroyed or suppressed. During three instances, 1894-96 under Sultan Abdulhamid II , 1915-16 under the Young Turks, and 1919-24 under Mustafa Kemal there were were extensive campaigns to 'cleanse' Turkey of Christians and to do so in the most horrific and unorganized, inhumane way.
The details described of what was done to these people, although very closely pictured in this book, is often too much to take in. There is sickening event after sickening event. I wanted to give up, but I also wanted to respect the victims. Even if this book cannot obtain any real justice if can be a testament of respect to the millions of victims, and I stand in respectful silence and shed a tear for them, then that is something much more than to be just simply forgotten.
It can also teach us a very harsh reality that the Nazis were not uniquely inhuman. That what happened during any form of ancient or modern slavery, or under Stalin in the Russian camps or to those who disappeared under Pol-Pot, in western sponsored dictatorships in Chile or Argentina, or what happened in Rwanda or under ISIS, or Mexican drug cartel wars, are not just isolated examples of the past. There is a real and universal human, extremely dark tendency that we should always be aware can occur at any time.
It is not limited to the Muslims, the Christians, or to the non-believers. Evil can strike and in a power vacuum the worst of the unimaginable worst can and does come out.
I say in a power vacuum because the Turks were very afraid during this whole period to do any of the same deeds to the likes of the Europeans or Russians, and especially the Americans since Thomas Jefferson had used warships to end the tyranny of the Barbary Pirates. The power base of the Imperial nations was the only thing that saved them from the same fate where their Christian citizens were involved in contact with these lands.
It is a reminder that any law must be backed by the potential of physical force at such a time it is contradicted. That no-matter how futuristic or liberated we might feel we have become, we need to think and protect against the worst kind of human behavior. It is a reminder that governance of a society, no matter in what form it establishes itself, must create order and protection for the weak and vulnerable. It must never cease in its vigilance to maintain this.
As our modern societies continue to throw away the values that have protected most of us for hundreds of years, as we continue to forget about past sacrifices our close and distant ancestors have made, as we continue to be cowards to the obvious truths around us, to unquestioning believe any form of propaganda, and to turn to the immediate dopamine rush of endless social media and other meaningless drivel the stark redemption of reality comes creeping ever so much closer.

[Scott Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Audiobook) This was a detailed, depressing work about a series of mass killing in the Ottoman Empire/Turkish nation that occurred over a 30 year period. While most might have heard about the Turkish/Ottoman massacres of the Armenians in 1915-1916, this work looks at a series of other actions, and not just against Armenians. Assyrians, Greeks and other Christians were all victims of the Ottoman/Turks during this time period. In the midst of the various stories of murder and other horrific acts, the authors attempt to offer an explanation for why these actions were happening. As the Ottoman Empire was in its death throes, many of the Islamic majority, seeing the fall of their once powerful empire and their position of prominence, saw the Christian minorities as significant threats to their positions.

As a result, those in power in the Ottoman Empire/Turkey looked to eliminate the threat, which ultimately resulted in the various mass killings/deportations that were focused on the Christians. These actions ebbed and flowed in the midst of the fall of the Ottoman Empire, WWI and the chaos of the post-World War I environment. The actions were almost textbook for genocide, in the various efforts to eliminate the Christians from society, from extortion, deportation and mass murder. The Ottomans/Turks made great efforts to cover their tracks, limiting coverage and trying to purge records of these actions. Still, there was enough first-hand accounts to formulate a story of what happened in that 30 year period.

Overall, this work will inspire a great deal of thought (and will probably never be sold in Istanbul). It is a tough read, but important. It is not simplely Islam vs. Christianity, even if Christians are the primary target. This is a series of various factors, and the end-game of genocide is something that was not initially planed for, or desired, but what happened. With Turkey again trying to highlight its Islamic credentials, it is not out the realm of possibility that Turkey could go down this route. Still, we need to learn from the past, so that it does not happen again. Hopefully, if the work can educate folks about the dangers of genocide, it might fulfill its purpose. Until then, we have to continue to learn. This is a good start for future research. Audiobook or hard/e-copy, worth the time to study and review.

[Thomas Rumeau · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really did not know much about the Armenian genocide besides the constant opposition by Turkey to acknowledge it and the few news stories stressing the name of governments recognizing it. I thought this book would give me some insight and boy did it do it.

Sometimes I thought the narrative was a bit repetitive, the same atrocities were repeated over and over in different parts of the Ottoman Empire and the authors repeated the same story line but in a different location, which became a bit tedious. Although if you wanted a thorough analysis about each area, it seems that they documented that well. I learned many things from this book, that Armenians accounted for almost 20% of the Ottoman population and now there are probably less than 1% of Turkey; that Greeks were also a significant minority when now there might be less than 2000 people living in Istanbul; that they were population exchanges between Greece and Turkey; That people are willing to commit horrible acts when they consider their enemies as worthless; that the Turkish government destroyed or is hiding historical documents; etc...

At the end of a book I usually want to dig deeper into the topic to satisfy my curiosity. Now there are 2 things I want to learn more about, the expansion of the Ottoman Empire and the history of the Armenians. There are probably large topics but sometimes it’s good to learn more about history beyond your borders to appreciate where you live.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

“... successive Turkish governments and the Turkish people have never owned up to what happened or to their guilt”.

“They continue to play the game of denial and to blame the victims.”

[Oren Mizrahi · Rating 4 out of 5]

gloriously well-researched, meticulously well-cited. it’s also shameful that morris exists in a world where he needs to emphasize the existence of the genocide and to try to prove it to someone with the assumption of it being a fiction. there are many deniers that should be ashamed.

the book is like 95/5 details/analysis and it would have been so much more helpful for learning if it was 70/30. the genocides were so complex and very non-hierarchical/unorganized (compared to the holocaust, for example) and this lends itself to a very complex history with many details. the geopolitics was lost because of attention to these details.

[Sherif Gerges · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exceptional. One of the most important, and challenging, books I’ve ever read. I thought Benny Morris hit a slam dunk with "1948", publishing one of the most important books on the subject that placed him in a small but elite cadre of historians who re-wrote a part of Israel's history. However, in collaboration with Dror Ze'evi, he has done it once again; producing an impressively comprehensive account of the genocidal campaign of Christians that unfolded over several decades.

In this book, both authors argue that the Christian genocide was distinguished in that it was not secular, but rather the product of extremely violent patterns which persistently invoked Islam as justification for the ethnic cleansing of Turkey, particularly in Anatolia. Central to their thesis is the assertion that this violence manifested through forced conversions to Islam, systematic abductions of women and children, rampant sexual violence, and the widespread pillaging of Christian communities. These atrocities even transpired during the ostensibly secular regime of Atatürk, leading to a grim tally, albeit imprecise, of between 1.5 and 2.5 million Christians slaughtered from 1894 to 1924.

Consequently, the proportion of Christians in the Anatolian population plummeted from 20 percent to a mere 2 percent. At the books denouement, Morris and Ze’evi conclude with a thought-provoking and quite candidly gut-wrenching comparison between the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide. Typically I would recoil at the comparison, but in this context it appears an apt comparison in some ways, given the brutality described.

I am no expert on this subject, and while the events of the Armenian genocide is well known to scholars (albeit less so to the public), I cannot debate the finer points about "declared jihad" and purported deeper role of Islam, although I find it a very believable claim. Furthermore, this would be in line with my understanding that anti-minoritarian violence was usually masked in one way or another during the period, and comports with the broad experience of Christians in the region over the last 1,000 years. It is noteworthy that the authors exercise caution not to present a monolithic view or ascribe inherent malevolence to Islam as a religion.

Despite coming in at over 600 pages - I could not put this down - a real page-turner consisting of exasperating violence.

[Leon McNair · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Thirty-Year Genocide

A good book to pair with this reading might be - The Young Turks' Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide And Ethnic Cleansing In The Ottoman Empire, Taner Akcam


This meticulously well-researched tome of a book, that took ten years of investigating and combining vast numbers of extant documentation to produce the historical narrative, had me constantly feel as though my stomach was being riddled with punches by a World-class heavyweight boxer; mixed emotions of expressed anger, unfounded hope, and lamentation. Both Revelation 6:9-11 and Revelation 21:4 entered my mind throughout reading it. Such strong feelings emerged within only the first one-hundred pages.

One will not be able to escape the certain evident similarities to the Nazi German regime of the Holocaust, and it may certainly be said that the atrocities that faced the Christians from 1894-1924 was "a grand Holocaust", as Corinna Shattuck, a missionary whom experienced the massacre at Urfa, describes.

One-sixth of the book itself is dedicated to its references: 115 pages of over 2,000 citations, emanating mostly from British, French, American, and Greek sources and diplomats, missionaries, and businessmen living or visiting Anatolia, although Austria-Hungarian, German, and Turkish sources are also used.

"...after defeat by the Allies and appropriate regime changes,... whereas the German people acknowledged collective guilt, expressed remorse, made financial reparation, tried to educate itself and future generations about what had happened, and has worked to abjure racism, successive Turkish governments and the Turkish people have never owned up to what happened or to their guilt. They continue to play the game of denial and to blame the victims." p.505

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pandemic Book Review

The Thirty Year Genocide: Turkey's Destruction of Its Christian Minorities 1894-1924 -Benny Morris and Dror Ze'evi (2019)
A Coffin for Dmitrios - Eric Ambler (1944)
The Cut - directed by Fatih Akin (2014)

The Thirty Year Genocide is an important, comprehensive review of the genocidal massacres of Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrian Christians conducted as the deliberate policy of the Ottoman and successor Turkish governments, with the collusion of Muslim clerics and some Kurdish tribes. Although these massacres occurred over a century ago, to this day Turkish officials continue to suppress the truth, and just flat out lie, as Trump's pal Erdogan just did recently, in response to President Biden's acknowledgement of the Armenian Genocide. In spite of these efforts, the massacres were witnessed and documented by American, European, and Japanese diplomats, journalists, and missionaries. Survivors and humane Turks and Kurds who opposed the massacres also reported what they saw.

This is not enjoyable reading since it is an exhausting 500 page catalogue of massacres and atrocities in Anatolia and Northern Syria. It gets kind of repetitive since the the massacres in cities towns and villages tended to come a general pattern. Although this is an important book, I'll save you the trouble of reading it with this summary.

The first wave of genocide occurred in 1894-1896 under Sultan Abdul Hamid II, and was primarily concentrated on Armenians. 200,000 to 300,000 Armenians were killed, resulting in 50,000 orphaned children.

There was a smaller scale massacre of in 1909 in the region of Adana in which over 20,000 Armenians and 1300 Assyrian Christians were killed.

The second and biggest wave of mass murder occurred during World War I (1914-1918), after the sultan was sidelined by the Committee of Union and Progress, a political party better known as the Young Turks, whose leaders were a triumvirate consisting of Mehmed Talaat Pasha (1874–1921), the Grand Vizier (prime minister) and Minister of the Interior; Ismail Enver Pasha (1881–1922), the Minister of War; and Ahmed Cemal Pasha (1872–1922), a military commander. The Three Pashas are all implicated in the genocide, although Cemal was less bloodthirsty than the other two, preferring assimilation and expulsion from Turkey. He did allow about 150,000 Armenians to escape to Greece and Russia, but over 100,000 Armenians were murdered in areas under his control. Between a million to 1.5 million Armenians were killed during this wave. In 1915, the Assyrian genocide, also known as the Sayfo, took place. Approximately 250,000 Sryiac Christians living in what is today eastern Turkey and western Iran were killed or deported to die the Syrian desert. About half a million Ottoman Greeks were deported during WWI and as many as 200,000 of those were murdered or died from mistreatment.

The massacres tended to follow a general pattern. First, community leaders and clergy would be arrested and tortured to extract false confessions to treasonous plots against the government which would be used by Muslim clerics and newspapers to rile up the Muslim population who would then be encouraged attack Christians, steal or destroy their property, kill the men and kidnap woman and girls, who would be raped, sold as slaves, or forced to marry Muslims. Some Christians were permitted to escape death by converting to Islam, but a substantial number of Christians chose death over conversion. Christian were sometimes herded into churches which would be set on fire. Christians in coastal areas were taken out in boats and dumped into the sea. Christian clergymen would often have their eyes gouged out before they were murdered. These crimes often occurred under the nose of or with the help of the police and military, who might step in later to restore order. As the genocide became more organized in the second wave, the healthy adult males would be conscripted to be worked to death on road gangs. Old men, women and children, would be marched into desolate areas where they were subject to predation and rape by brigands. Often the Christians were shot or had their throats cut by the side of the road. Those that survived the death marches were herded into camps in the Syrian desert where they died of malnutrition and disease.

Turkey sided with Germany during World War I and was defeated. Portions of Turkey were occupied by allied troops in 2018. The Three Pashas fled and were later sentenced to death in absentia by military tribunals.

Talaat fled to Berlin where he was assassinated in 1921 by Soghomon Tehlirian, an Armenian revolutionary. Tehlirian was tried in a German court but acquitted on the grounds of temporary insanity because he had witnessed the murder of his family in 1915. In Turkey, Talaat is viewed as a great statesman, a skillful revolutionary, and a farsighted founding father, and many schools, streets, and mosques are named for him

Cemal fled went to Central Asia, where he worked on modernising the Afghan army. He ravelled to Tiflis Georgia to act as a military liaison officer and he was assassinated on July of 1922 by Stepan Dzaghigian, Artashes Gevorgyan, and Petros Ter Poghosyan, as part of Operation Nemesis, a program of Armenian revolutionaries to exact retribution against the perpetrators of the genocide.

In August of 1922, Enver was killed by the Red Army in Tajikistan leading a small contingent of troops as part of the Basmachi revolt against the Soviets.

The third wave of genocide occurred from 1919-1924 after the Nationalists, led by General Mustafa Kemal (later known as Ataturk), had taken over leadership of the Turkish military forces. The Nationalists completed the religious cleansing of Christians from Turkey. By 1924, almost all the Christians in Turkey, which had been about 20 % of the population of Asia Minor and Eastern Thrace in 1900, had either been killed or deported. Although there was more focus on expulsion during this period, the massacres continued.

Roughly 1.2 - 1.5 million Turks living in Greece were expelled during this period. These Turks were called muhajirs. Although some Turks were massacred, the scale of the killings was much smaller and there is no evidence of a Greek governmental policy of genocide, as there was in Turkey. There is evidence of substantial killings of Turks by the Greek Army during its retreat to the sea in 1922. These killings and the brutal Turkish retaliation against Greeks and Armenians when the Turkish Army recaptured Smyrna (Ezmir) are described at the beginning of Eric Ambler's excellent thriller, A Coffin for Dimitrios (1939), which was made into an equally good movie in 1944.

The only mention of the Jewish community in the book is that, during WWI, Turks expelled 5,000 Jews living in the Dardanelles and that Jewish cemeteries in Smyna were desecrated during the widespread destruction in Smyrna in 1922. My cursory research indicates that aside from this, the Jewish community was basically left alone by the Ottoman and the successor Turkish governments. There was a substantial Jewish community in the Ottoman Empire (about 200,000 in 1900, mainly outside Anatolia), Jews were not perceived as a threat, because the number of Jews in Anatolia was relatively small and there was no evidence the Jews had any major separatist aspirations beyond the nascent Zionist movement which had barely started and had no potential to threaten the Turks. During the destruction of Smyrna, the Turkish officials were apparently instructed to protect Jews and their property from the carnage inflicted on Greeks and Armenians, because witnesses saw "Jewish house" written in chalk in Turkish on the sides of undisturbed buildings, suggesting the populace had been instructed to leave the Jews alone. (Most of Turkey's Jews later emigrated to Israel or elsewhere)

A recent movie, The Cut, depicts the Armenian genocide from the perspective of an Armenian man forcibly conscripted to work on a road crew in the Syrian desert whose throat is cut during a mass killing, but survives and escapes and his subsequent efforts to find his wife and daughters. It is a decent film, but relatively tame in comparison to what actually happened.

[Loukios Nousios · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read.

Really well written and a very important chapter in European/world history.

Very depressing history, especially if you belong to any of the main nations involved.
Whether Turkish, Armenian, Assyrian, Kurdish or Greek, this book covers the darkest part of middle eastern history with detail and objectivity.

Again, a must read.

[Kevin Moynihan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brutal stuff. Incredibly detailed with a mix of individual cases along with the underlying history. I learned a lot from this book.

[Gary · Rating 5 out of 5]

A bit academic for a casual read, but a shocking eye opener about this tragedy. The authors show how the murder of all Christians was the government and popular policy of the Ottomans and then the Turks. Highly recommended.

[Gabriel Perlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Full of horrific stories and gruesome detail. Ottoman Turks were not far from ISIS in their barbaric persecution of Christians during this time period.

[Mr Siegal · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Harrowing Read

I have always been interested in finding out what happened to the Christian population of the Ottoman Empire during its final years. This was a book that has been long due, and I believe that it is a vital addition to the historical event which Benny Morris and Dror Zeʼevi have named the Thirty-Year Genocide.

I knew it would be a tough read, but after a while you get numb to the constant references of pillage, murder, genocide, rape, and so on. The authors have gone into great pains so as to provide an unbiased overview of what went on during that time, and I believe that they have succeeded, though I must stress that I am no historian. I found the conclusion quite enlightening, and I appreciated the time they took in comparing the Thirty-Year Genocide with the Holocaust. Overall, they highlight that though the Nazis killed far more Jews and other ‘lesser races’, the Turks where more savage in their methods. In addition, I appreciated the discussion on the role that Islam played in the entire affair; indeed, the Muslim populace was usually encouraged to take arms under the rubric of a holy war so as to clear away the infidels. The fact that the Kurds also played a big role, especially when it came to the Armenian Genocide, was something that I did not know; what they now claim as parts of Kurdistan was once populated by Armenians too, but they conveniently massacred them. Finally, I also liked the fact that they tried to pinpoint whenever Armenians or Greeks committed atrocities, though even with such evidence, the fact that the Turks committed a genocidal campaign on their subjects remains the same.

A question that arose while reading this book is why is there not more discussion or acknowledgement of the Turkish atrocities? I believe that discussion is barred chiefly by three factors (though there may be more or less). Firstly, the events are still quite numb for the countries and populations who experienced them. Though the majority of people who survived those events have died, the notion of ‘out of sight out of mind’ still exists. Secondly, geopolitics plays a big role; we must not anger Turkey and as a result, the majority of the West is quite quiet on the matter (even Israel). Thirdly, I believe that there is a peculiar sort of bias that Middle Eastern countries cannot have empires like western ones. Though I believe that the Ottoman Empire was indeed not something to be particularly proud of, the subjugation of its populace remains the same; Christians were second-class citizens. This certain bias then has the result of people simply not caring, something which is peculiar in the age of post-colonialism. While the ills of imperialism are now justly part of mainstream conversation, we shy away from the Ottoman Empire; at the end of the day, it was just another imperialist state, so lets treat it as one.

The sad conclusion to the story is that Turkey succeeded in her mission of cleansing Asia Minor of her Christians. The Pontic Greeks had a presence in Asia Minor from 700BC to 1922, well before the Turks came along (≃1080) while the Greek presence in Ionia (area around modern day Izmir) has a similar timeline. The Armenians are referenced in Herodotus, so that makes them present at the in Asia Minor and its borders at least since 440BC), though thankfully they still exist beyond Asia Minor and have now their own country, albeit in a fraction of what used to be their historic lands.

On a side note, what I have always found quite ironic is that Greece is called Yunanistan in Turkey, and Greeks are called Yunan. Yunanistan translates to ‘country of the Ionians’, and Ionia is historical name for the area around current day Izmir (the Greeks still refer to it as Ionia). Hence, Greece for Turkey has its namesake from the very place they expelled thousands of inhabitants…

In conclusion, what I hope that this book does is to create a discussion; this is the same hope that the authors hold. Indeed, it would be nice if Turkey acknowledged that at the end of the day, she is to blame for what happened, and to own up to her history. Such a positive step would, I think, benefit all parties tremendously, though sadly, I highly doubt that it will happen any time soon.

Overall, a highly recommended, yet harrowing read.

[Joshua Horn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Before reading this book I near very little about the Armenian genocide beyond hearing the name. The authors here argue that the definition of the event should be expanded to a thirty year period, and should cover not just the Armenians, but other Christian minorities that the Turkish government worked to eradicate from their borders. I think they do a good job arguing their case, though I was more interested in the narrative rather than that particular point. Overall I found it interesting, a lot of compelling stories, if just a touch dry.

This is a very dark read. You will find atrocities on nearly every page. While the Christian minorities are not 100% blameless, it is a constant story of Muslims killing, robbing, starving and raping Christians. Their usual method was to order a group moved to another part of the country, but to purposely make the journey a starvation or death march, and allow bandits to kill and otherwise harass the column as much as possible. The question of central planning is much debated, and often argued in this book, but to me the answer is simple. The central government bore complete responsibility, because if these things were done by rogue commanders, the government would have immediately put a stop to the serial-killer like actions of their subordinates. If not done on the government's orders, it was done with their approval, when they had the duty to stop them. This applies at an institutional, individual, and community level. There are many marks of genocide here that we would do well to be aware of, so that if it ever comes to that in America, we don't buy the lies, but open our eyes and expose the evil that would be going on around us.

There's a few remarkable statements near the end, that in all the years covered there was not one account of the Christians forcing a Muslim to convert, and many of Muslims forcing Christians to convert. There were many accounts of Muslim imams leading massacres, but not one led by Christian pastors or priests.

The authors mark these events as the major turning point of the recent "de-Christianization of the Middle East" by the Muslims. I see it slightly different. The churches destroyed by the Turks were heretical - eastern orthodox, nestorianism, etc - and had been heretical for many centuries. There were a small number of Protestant converts, but the traditional churches opposed these. The Protestants were, at certain points, spared by the Muslims, but often ended up caught up in the general destruction of Christians. The heretical churches had some Christian testimony - they were some of the most productive members of society, and some (though certainly not all) refused to convert to Islam when ordered to. Although their massacre was tragic, it was divine judgment against false churches that refused to reform, even when presented with the true gospel. When threatened or struck, instead of repenting, they often turned to the mirage of nationalism, a force which seemed to actually bring on swifter destruction. Rather than just mourning, let us also be warned.

While this account was tasteful, not one for young readers due to the brutality of the event

[Yoda · Rating 5 out of 5]

An Excellent thoroughly Researched Book that More than Shows there Really was a Genocide

In this day and age there is considerable effort expended by Turkey and its Diaspora to claim that there was never any attempt during the First World War, or in the following or proceeding years, to exterminate or ethnically cleans territories under its control of Christians, in particular Armenians (but not exclusively). One has only to watch a few YouTube videos to see how deeply this "hoax" is held by Turkish political authorities as well as members of the Turkish Diaspora. All one needs to do is go to YouTube and type in "Armenian genocide Turkish Protests" or some variation there to witness this. In addition, and even worse, there plenty of well educated academics such as Justin McCarthy and his minions who claim that the Armenians were either not killed en masse or that the killings were not tantamount to an effort to exterminate them in Turkish occupied areas but instead were due to Armenian’s (and Christian) "insurrection" and/or "terrorism". This was also, originally the views espoused by Abraham Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League (and of the League itself) while Israel and Turkey were at the peak of their reproachment under Erdogan. This view quickly changed once those two nation's relations went cold.

The two Israeli professors Benny Morris and Dror Ze'evi, though very thorough research, examining original documents, debunk this view. They clearly show that the years between 1894-1924 this was not the case but, instead, the Turkish authorities, no matter who they were, wanted to rid lands under Turkish sovereignty of Christian peoples. The authors clearly demonstrate, through their extensive research, that these efforts started a good two decades before the First World War, thus debunking Turkish claims (and the claims of professors like McCarthy) that these exterminations were in "self defense". The authors also clearly show that this policy of extermination and ethnic cleansing was carried out physically by just about all strata of Turkish citizenry, unlike the Nazi extermination of the Jews that was not, physically and in person, engaged in by German society as a whole but by very specific elements (i.e. SS, military units, death camp apparatus, etc.).

Dr. Morris and Ze'evi provide this extensive documentation and evidence in a very academic and dry manner (how can any academic book not be?) in this almost 700 page opus. In an age when "fake news" is prevalent and the Turkish government and diaspora is making extensive efforts to put forth its "self -defense" arguments or that far fewer Christians were exterminated or expelled than actually was the case, the book is a breadth of fresh air. Five stars.

[Hunter · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wanted very much to like this book, and to be sure, it has some clear, obvious strengths. Its treatment of the Armenian Genocide is very good, I find, building off previous scholarship well and presenting a very well done picture of things.

But I was specifically drawn as I was interested in the frame presented by the authors which seemed to promise to tie things together, connecting the other massacres and genocides into a cohesive picture, and I don't think the book lived up to that billing. In the first, I don't think it simply did a good job presenting a clear, connective thread to call it all one genocide. While stages often did change focuses, I think that it hurt by being so chronological, and essentially treating the Armenian Genocide as one focus and the Pontic as another, rather than flitting back and forth. And finally... the was really a book about the Armenian genocide with mentions of others, which unfortunately was what I wanted the most, feeling I have a decent grasp of the former but wanted to better understand how the others of the period related in. The Pontic Genocide at least got some focus, but the Assyrian Genocide felt like it was barely mentioned, which was frustrating.

There also of course is the issue of Morris himself, who is not without controversy. Not that he isn't praised as a good historian, but he has his obvious detractors. Fitting into what I already knew on the topic, I don't think it is inherently fair to say that bleeds into here - perhaps because what issues he can be accused of relate so specifically to Israel-Palestine - but still does warrant approaching with caution, especially as more recently he then went and wrote an op-ed which was... kinda of weird... Still though, whatever its issues it was a solid book, just fell short in a few ways.

[Anthony · Rating 2 out of 5]

You would think that a book about mass killings of any group of people would be an emotional book, and yet here we are. “The Thirty-Year Genocide” tells a horrific story in the most unemotional way possible. How does it do that? It’s delivered in a text book style that, despite not sparing details, manages to separate the reader so much from the events being described that the reader is completely unaffected by the brutality and senselessness of the events.

There is almost no personal accounts and the few that are given feel like they were acquired third hand. It’s fact after fact, political event after event, massacre after massacre. The details of the massacres are even the same just the dates change. All the men are killed. The women are raped and sold to Muslim men to marry, or they are raped and killed, but always raped. The children are killed, raped and killed, or left orphaned. With thirty years of atrocities detailed one would think the details potentially would change but they really don’t. From the set up to the completion of each massacre the most the details change is the date.

What the book does do is give another example of how Christianity, since its inception, stands alone with Jews as the most persecuted people in the world. It also links the events in Turkey to the Holocaust performed by the Nazi’s. A lot of the methods were the same, but, as bad it sounds, the Nazi’s were more efficient.

Overall, the book was a bit boring. The information might need to be out there for people to know and learn from, but I struggled with understanding any other purpose for this book existing. I was also convinced there was a better book out there that detailed the events in a way that didn’t feel robotic. At the end of the day the book is literally a text book and if viewed that way then it’s fine, but a text book wasn’t what I was looking for.

[Talha Alt · Rating 1 out of 5]

When you read that the Christian population have been decreased to 2% from 20% you assume the %18 is killed. In reality, between 1894-1924 Ottomans lost a lot of land with Christian population in it. After the WWI,Greece and Turkey swapped Muslims vs Christians that further decreased Christians in Anatolia. The book is a false propaganda piece, full of biased information.
Read Bernard Lewis's books for example The Emergence of Modern Turkey for a better understanding of that era...

On another note, ironically, in an interview with Haaretz the author stated that an ethnic-cleansing is necessary when conditions require.
“Even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians. There are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history.
There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing. I know that this term is completely negative in the discourse of the 21st century, but when the choice is between ethnic cleansing and genocide - the annihilation of your people - I prefer ethnic cleansing.”

[César · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can hear some insane Turkish and Azeri nationalists raging in the background. Good. Keep seething, denialist bastiches.

This book is definitively not of the kind that you read out of pleasure, or a sick enjoyment of watching human depravity unfold.

Within its pages, a litany of crimes that descended upon the Christian minorities of the Ottoman empire is shown, front and centre, and the many reasons these were perpetrated by many of the last few Ottoman governments (which include, but are not limited to, slave raids, reprisals for repelling nomad Muslim encroachment, nationalism, ethnocentrism, etc.), the carefully methodical approach in which the Ottomans approached this. After all, the Armenian genocide was the template of how the Nazis carried over the Holocaust, and you're able to feel it through how the events unfold in this book.

However, unlike the Holocaust (where the German people has worked tirelessly to make up for all the evil committed in that timeframe), the Turkish governments after WWI have bent over themselves into pretzels trying to justify the actions of the predecessors or minimize what happened here with euphemisms, propaganda films, and whatnot. The fact that the Azeris are on the verge of doing the same (if they haven't done so already in Nagorno-Karabakh) is telling.

Alas, we can only hope for a future in which Armenia remains unscathed, given the hostile geopolitical neighbourhood it is in.

[SpiritualKungFu · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Armenian Apostolic Church canonized all victims of the Armenian genocide, it is the largest canonization service in history and the first for the church in 400 years.

The two main points in the book are that, the Armenian Genocide 1915-1916 was part of a larger ethnic cleansing that took place between 1894-1924 and that the governments at the time Sultanate, CUP and the nationalist had planned and organised for the it, I find it slightly difficult to consider the 1894-1896 events in the same vein as the mass deportation and executions that occured during the great war, but it's true they are unavoidably linked in that the attitude and will to cleanse ethnic minorities was present that later allowed for the genocide, that the whole thing was planned by the government and even enabled by locals is unquestionable in my mind, the vast resources and planning alone makes it seem impossible that these things just happened without any forethought, the crimes described here are inhuman to say the least, had this been committed in or by western Europe it would be similarly thought of as the holocaust in some cases exceeding the cutely there but unfortunately it's barely spoken of.

[Joanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thorough account of not only the Armenian genocide but also the fate of Anatolia’s Greeks and Assyrians. It’s also valuable for its inclusion of the period after WWI ended, which is not always included in histories of these events.

It’s unfortunate, then, that the authors’ explanation for why the genocide happened turns out to be lacking, reliant on stereotypes of jihad without really grappling with the ideologies of the CUP or Mustafa Kemal’s nationalists. This blind spot is partly because they rely almost exclusively on European sources. To an extent this is only natural, as the Turkish government has had a long time to get rid of anything incriminating in the Ottoman archives. But when it comes to examining motivations, it’s hard to have any insight into the perpetrators’ mindsets without using their own words, or at least the words of people who knew them and shared their background.

[Ehssan Elmedkouri · Rating 5 out of 5]

If it wasn't for my Armenian partner, I would have never known about the Armenian genocide which is not only sad but also disappointing. I remember learning about the Ottomans in school but it didn't cover the years after the 1500s. When my partner and I started talking about the genocide, I wanted to educate myself and I turned to books as I always do. I found this book in a list of top books to read about the genocide and I immediately got it. I listened to the audiobook by Stefan Rudnicki and it made the whole reading experience much more intense. My brain was a sponge to every word uttered in this book. At some point, I had to pause reading for months because it was too intense. Then I told myself: If reading this book is hard, imagine how the people who suffered really felt. SO I buckled up and kept on reading. I HIGHLY recommend it and I thank the authors for summing up decades of suffering in this book..

[Clarissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book gives a detailed historical account on the genocide and expulsion of Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians (all Christians) in modern Turkey or Anatolia/Asia Minor. It is well written and easy to follow.
The main critic is that there are not enough clear maps for the reader to follow with the locations mentioned. Also the maps use different names of the cities than the text: Constantinople (text) = Istanbul (map). This is very confusing and forces the reader to check on an Atlas or internet. Also, there are quite a few repetitions of the same massacres or events in the chapter.. some editing would be needed.
Nevertheless, the high stars are because I was able to get an understanding on this genocide that is not as discussed as the German Holocaust.