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.
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References
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1. On the basis of the United Nations definition, it is possible to distinguish between genocide in whole and genocide in part. In this article, a total domestic genocide is a genocide in whole directed against a group of a state's own society, while a partial genocide is a genocide in part. Total genocide implies extermination and/or massive death of such an order that a group ceases to continue as a distinct culture. Partial genocide stops at extermination and the annihilation of culture. For further discussion of these distinctions, see Robert F. Melson, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 22-30.
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2. See Roderic H. Davison, “Turkish Attitudes Concerning Christian-Muslim Equality in the Nineteenth Century,”American Historical Review, 4:844-864 (1954).
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3. See Melson, Revolution and Genocide, pp. 43-69.
4.
4. See Feroz Ahmad, The Young Turks (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p. 153.
5.
5. See Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961).
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6. See Vahakan N. Dadrian, “Genocide as a Problem of National and International Law: The World War I Armenian Case and Its Contemporary Legal Ramifications,”Yale Journal of International Law, 2:221-334 (Summer 1989).
7.
7. See Richard S. Levy, The Downfall of the Anti-Semitic Political Parties in Imperial Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975).
8.
8. See Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1967; new ed., New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985).
9.
9. See Melson, Revolution and Genocide, p. 137.
10.
Ezra Mendelsohn , The Jews of East Central Europe Between the World Wars (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983).
11.
11. Cited in Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, The Jews in the Modern World: A Documentary History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 273.
12.
12. See Saul Friedländer, “On the Possibility of the Holocaust: An Approach to a Historical Synthesis,” in The Holocaust as Historical Experience, ed. Yehuda Bauer and Nathan Rotenstreich (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1981), p. 2.
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13. According to Helsinki Watch, genocide is taking place in Bosnia and other former areas of Yugoslavia. Although all sides have been accused of atrocities, it is the Serbian side, especially in Bosnia, that is charged with genocide. See War Crimes in Bosnia-Hercegovina (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1992), p. 1.
14.
14. See Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), for discussions of how groups validate their claims to status and power. A basic distinction lies between those who have historically dominated an area and migrants who are new arrivals. The first, the “sons-of-the-soil,” make their claims on the basis of ancestral privilege; the second cannot. Thus Armenians in Anatolia could make a claim to the land, the way Ibos in the North could not.
15.
John J. Stremlau , The International Politics of the Nigerian Civil War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977).
16.
16. See Melson, Revolution and Genocide, pp. 264-267.
