A review by beejai
They Can Live in the Desert But Nowhere Else: A History of the Armenian Genocide by Ronald Grigor Suny
4.0
This was definitely not an easy read but it is definitely a book that needed to be written. From cover to cover, the reader is bombarded by detail, statistics and documented fact after fact after fact. This is definitely the most meticulously researched book I have read on the subject of the Armenian genocide. Sometimes the sheer level of research presented gets in the way of an easy flowing narrative to bog the reader down. This isn't a good book for the casual reader on the subject. For that, I would recommend The Burning Tigris.
Like I said, however, this book is one that needed to be written. It came out on the centennial of the forgotten Armenian genocide and since I live here in Turkey, I understand how pervasive the denial of what happened here still is at every level in society. This mountain of irrefutable facts flies in the face of the lies the Turkish government to this day continues to shovel out to a public that doesn't care to know the truth of what their grandparents and great-grandparents did.
Ronald Grigor Suny wraps up his book with a few conclusions that left me scratching my head. He claims that this genocide was carried out by only a few masterminds and villains and that the public at large was not complicit. He also says that these killings were politically and not religiously motivated.
While there are certainly a few villains that deserve a higher level of ignominy, it is clear that hundreds of thousands of Kurds and Turks participated in the atrocities that happened around the turning of the twentieth century. They were the ones who occupied the homes, looted the shops, raped and married young women and adopted the children ripped from their parents' arms. While I understand that certain cultural-political situations like in 1930's Germany and in the American Jim Crow South can lead otherwise good decent people to do heinous acts, that does not let them off for the acts they have committed (or even their knowing silence in the face of evil).
There was also a very strong religious motivation for the crimes that were committed. While it was not the only motivation, nearly every single eyewitness account he quotes time and time again point to the Muslim hatred of Christians so present on the Anatolian peninsula at this time period. Just because there were other factors at work here does not in any way make the religious motivation less of a factor. A fatwa was declared, jihad was called, and in cities throughout the Anatolian peninsula men answered the call by killing their neighbors. There is no getting around this tragic truth.
Like I said, however, this book is one that needed to be written. It came out on the centennial of the forgotten Armenian genocide and since I live here in Turkey, I understand how pervasive the denial of what happened here still is at every level in society. This mountain of irrefutable facts flies in the face of the lies the Turkish government to this day continues to shovel out to a public that doesn't care to know the truth of what their grandparents and great-grandparents did.
Ronald Grigor Suny wraps up his book with a few conclusions that left me scratching my head. He claims that this genocide was carried out by only a few masterminds and villains and that the public at large was not complicit. He also says that these killings were politically and not religiously motivated.
While there are certainly a few villains that deserve a higher level of ignominy, it is clear that hundreds of thousands of Kurds and Turks participated in the atrocities that happened around the turning of the twentieth century. They were the ones who occupied the homes, looted the shops, raped and married young women and adopted the children ripped from their parents' arms. While I understand that certain cultural-political situations like in 1930's Germany and in the American Jim Crow South can lead otherwise good decent people to do heinous acts, that does not let them off for the acts they have committed (or even their knowing silence in the face of evil).
There was also a very strong religious motivation for the crimes that were committed. While it was not the only motivation, nearly every single eyewitness account he quotes time and time again point to the Muslim hatred of Christians so present on the Anatolian peninsula at this time period. Just because there were other factors at work here does not in any way make the religious motivation less of a factor. A fatwa was declared, jihad was called, and in cities throughout the Anatolian peninsula men answered the call by killing their neighbors. There is no getting around this tragic truth.