It’s been 100 years since the Armenian Genocide, denialism going strong

This Saturday, April 25th, Australia will commemorate the ANZAC Centenary. On April 25th 1915, the ANZAC troops landed in Gallipoli, and there will be plenty of information about that in the media and in official channels –– before, during and after.

This makes it likely that at least in Australia, the other major anniversary won’t get the attention it deserves –– a sad irony since they’re so related. Because the day before the ANZACs landed (April 24th 1915), a very short distance away, the events that would lead to the Armenian Genocide got started. And the Armenian Genocide itself has in a way taken the spotlight for all the atrocities in Turkey in those decades, meaning people aren’t aware of the other genocides, massacres and ethnic cleansing that occurred.

In an article that describes a rare forged photograph from the Armenian Genocide, Abraham D. Krikorian and Eugene L. Taylor say that “the Armenian Genocide does not need to be validated through photographs”. This is a very important topic but for this reason I won’t post any gratuitous photos. The photo known as ‘[a] Turkish official taunting starving Armenians with bread’ is apparently a forgery but the myriad of others are real enough.

Instead of photos, here are some charts. Below is the percentage of the population of the area inside the current Republic of Turkey who were non-Muslims over time.

From a top level, the photographs are superfluous when we have this chart, which so succinctly summarises the ethnic cleansing of Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians and other “non-Turkish” people from Turkey. Another vignette is this chart showing the Greek-Orthodox population of Istanbul. Those last few bumps are the 1955 anti-Greek pogroms which brought a four-five decade-old project to completion.

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