ABSTRACT
The murder of over a million Armenians in Turkey between 1915 and 1923 presaged Adolf Hitler's even more gargantuan assault on European Jews in the 1940s. However, for decades, the events were almost forgotten. Fortunately, Hitler's rhetorical question cannot sensibly be asked today – except in Turkey. Over the past four decades, a growing movement for apology and restitution has established the Armenian catastrophe as one of the three canonical genocides of the twentieth century, alongside the Holocaust and Rwanda. Historian Hannibal Travis, a specialist on the Assyrian genocide, notes that at the time of the anti-Christian atrocities, “newspapers in London, Paris, New York, and Los Angeles regularly reported on the massacres of Assyrians living under Ottoman occupation.” A “Christian genocide” framing acknowledges the historic claims of the Assyrian and Greek peoples and the movements now stirring for recognition and restitution among Greek and Assyrian diasporas.
