As I was reading Lonely Planet’s guide to Turkey, I found a few interesting things in their history section. I browsed the timeline before I read the main text and here’s what I saw:
See anything interesting? I don’t — namely I don’t see anything about the Armenian genocide, an event that surely qualifies as important enough to make it to the timeline, which is a summary of the “main” events. But it gets worse: there is no mention of the genocide at all in the main text of the history article except this reference to a side panel which calls it a “scenario”:
But it gets much much worse. The panel itself is completely denialist, using a heap of all the classical tricks of the denialist trade. How many can you spot?
I found:
- Veiling in the denialism in the form of JAQing off (Just Asking Questions). The title goes so far as to make it seem like there’s a question about whether the Armenians of Turkey had a fate worth mentioning.
- Referring to controversy (which implies that there’s a controversy within historical academia). Of course the only real controversy is the political one about the extent to which denialism and revisionist history can be pushed.
- False balance: presenting “both sides” of the story as if they’re equally valid.
- A whole host of weasel words and expressions. Genocide is in scare-quotes. Armenians “maintain” that it happened, as if they are stubbornly clinging to dogma. On the other hand, Turkey “refutes” it — note the use of refute which implies they have shown with evidence that this did not happen as opposed to a milder “denies”
Are there any tactics that you can see?
Now, I do get that LP has an issue on its hands. Their Turkey guidebooks will be carried by their customers inside Turkey. Turkey has laws about “insulting Turkishness” which are regularly used to suppress the idea that there was an Armenian genocide. Accurately reporting the historical consensus (that there was a genocide, although of course the exact details can be foggy as they are with all mass crimes) can in fact put their customers at risk just by the fact that they’re carrying the guide with them. I get that.
But to me, Lonely Planet went above and beyond this murky call of duty. They could have made the panel shorter while referring the reader to some web resources. A reference to something as inoccuous as the BBC website would probably have made the printed book itself ok to carry in Turkey. They did not have to do the denialists’ work for them.
Shame on you Lonely Planet. I may have to avoid buying anything from them in the near future if they think this is ok.
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