Abstract

This chapter critically examines the scholarly and political discourse since the 1960s on “the Armenian Genocide.” This discourse represents not only a forgetting or continued unawareness that there were Assyrian and Greek victims of the anti-Christian massacres of the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish republic, but an active suppression of our existing historical knowledge about Assyrian and Greek victims. There were between two and seven million Greeks and approximately 500,000 Assyrians living in the Ottoman Empire in 1914, but only about 258,000 Christians of all kinds remaining in Turkey by 1927, even though Turkey once included substantial Assyrian and Greek regions.5 Two potential explanations for the ongoing concealment of the Assyrian and Greek genocides are that there was little writing on Ottoman mass killing in general prior to the 1970s, or that recent scholarship made the Assyrian and Greek genocides prominent within genocide studies. Neither of them holds water, because there was abundant documentation of the Ottoman Christian genocide before the allegedly forgotten Armenian genocide began to be remembered, and very recent scholarly works minimize or completely ignore Assyrian and Greek victims.