# Armenian Genocide The **Armenian Genocide** was the [[Ottoman Empire]]'s destruction of its Armenian population during and after the First World War — roughly 600,000 to 1.5 million killed between 1915 and 1923 by deportation, death march, starvation and massacre, with a mid-range consensus near a million. It is the first genocide of the twentieth century, the case that gave the word its meaning, the origin of the modern denial industry, and — for this vault — the founding example of the impunity gap that international criminal law was invented to close. ## What happened On **April 24, 1915** the Interior Minister, Talaat Pasha, ordered the arrest of several hundred Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople; most were killed. On May 23 the Council of Ministers approved the Temporary Law of Deportation (the Tehcir Law), under which 800,000 to 1.2 million Armenians were removed from Anatolia toward the Syrian desert. The deportations were the method: columns were marched without food or water, robbed, raped and massacred at designated killing sites by the Special Organization, the paramilitary of the ruling Committee of Union and Progress — [[The Young Turks]] — under Talaat, Enver and Djemal. Property was seized under an "abandoned property" law; women and children were absorbed into Muslim households. The empire's Assyrian and Greek populations were destroyed in parallel campaigns. The genocide was carried out in wartime, under the cover of a security rationale (Armenian disloyalty on the Russian front), by a nationalist government remaking a multi-ethnic empire into a homogeneous state — the pattern [[Ethnic Cleansing]] and [[Dehumanization]] describe in the abstract. ## The impunity gap The postwar Ottoman courts-martial convicted the CUP leadership of mass murder and sentenced eighteen to death, but the principals had fled to Germany and only three were executed; the Allied plan to try them at Malta collapsed. On March 15, 1921 the survivor Soghomon Tehlirian shot Talaat dead on a Berlin street; a German jury acquitted him in June, after a trial that put the genocide itself in evidence. A young Polish law student, [[Raphael Lemkin]], read the reports and asked the question that became his life: why could a man be tried for killing one man, while the state planners who had killed a million could not be tried at all? His answer — the word *genocide* (1944) and the [[Genocide Convention]] (1948) — is on the [[Genocide]] page; its first instance is this one. The [[Holocaust]] page records Hitler's reported 1939 remark, "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?" ## Denial as state policy The Republic of Turkey has denied the genocide as a matter of official doctrine for a century — acknowledging deaths, rejecting intent, prosecuting citizens who say otherwise, and spending heavily on lobbying against recognition abroad. [[Recep Tayyip Erdoğan]] has continued the policy while offering "condolences." [[The Memory Hole]] uses it as the type case of organized forgetting. Recognition has advanced anyway: 36 countries now formally recognize the genocide; the U.S. House did so on October 29, 2019 and the Senate on December 12, 2019, and on **April 24, 2021** Joe Biden became the first U.S. president to use the word in an official statement. The [[French Mandate for Syria and Lebanon]] page carries the diaspora that the deportations created. ## Why the vault cares Three uses. The genocide is the vault's reference case for how a security emergency, a nationalist party and a legal instrument ("temporary deportation") combine into extermination — the sequence the [[Dehumanization]] and [[Ethnic Cleansing]] pages formalize. It is the origin of the legal architecture ([[Genocide]], [[Genocide Convention]], Lemkin) that the [[International Law Hub]] pages build on. And it is the case that shows denial is not the absence of memory but a program — which is why [[Christian Reconstructionism]] and [[R.J. Rushdoony]] appear here: Rushdoony, whose father fled the genocide, built a theology of covenantal judgment on it, an instance of atrocity-memory feeding an American ideology by an unexpected route. The [[Oriental Orthodoxy]] page carries the Armenian Church. ## See Also - [[Genocide]] · [[Genocide Convention]] · [[Raphael Lemkin]] · [[Holocaust]] · [[Ethnic Cleansing]] · [[Dehumanization]] - [[Ottoman Empire]] · [[The Young Turks]] · [[Recep Tayyip Erdoğan]] · [[The Memory Hole]] - [[Oriental Orthodoxy]] · [[French Mandate for Syria and Lebanon]] · [[R.J. Rushdoony]] · [[Christian Reconstructionism]] - [[International Law Hub]] · [[Religions and Right-Wing Politics]]