A SHAMEFUL ACT: THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE AND THE QUESTION OF TURKISH RESPONSIBILITY
Publishers Weekly Reviews
September 4, 2006
REVIEWS; Nonfiction; Pg. 53
A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of
Turkish Responsibility Taner Akcam. Metropolitan, $30 (448p) ISBN
978-0-8050-7932-7
The story of the Ottoman Empire’s slaughter of one million Armenians
in 1915-a genocide still officially denied by the 83-year-old modern
Turkish state-has been dominated by two historiographical traditions.
One pictures an embattled empire, increasingly truncated by
rapacious Western powers and internal nationalist movements. The
other details the attempted eradication of an entire people, amid
persecutions of other minorities. Part of historian Akcam’s task
in this clear, well-researched work is to reconcile these mutually
exclusive narratives. He roots his history in an unsparing analysis of
Turkish responsibility for one of the most notorious atrocities of a
singularly violent century, in internal and international rivalries,
and an exclusionary system of religious (Muslim) and ethnic (Turkish)
superiority. With novel use of key Ottoman, European and American
sources, he reveals that the mass killing of Armenians was no byproduct
of WWI, as long claimed in Turkey, but a deliberate, centralized
program of state-sponsored extermination. As Turkey now petitions
to join the European Union, and ethnic cleansing and collective
punishment continues to threaten entire populations around the globe,
this groundbreaking and lucid account by a prominent Turkish scholar
speaks forcefully to all. (Oct.)