Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust Book

I read Melson's excellent comparative analysis of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust for one of my Holocaust & Genocide Studies courses, and it offers a clear and eye-opening conceptual framework for understanding the relationship between genocide and revolution.

Something to note: Not every revolution leads to genocide AND not every genocide is a product only of revolution. However, Melson points out that genocide can, many times, result when an old regime unravels and a regime with a new ideology attempts to recreate society with a vision that excludes certain groups and casts them as the "enemy."

There are significant similarities between the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide, including the fact that the Jews and the Armenians were ethnoreligious minorities under old regimes in Germany and the Ottoman Empire that held inferior status but had experienced rapid social progress. This led to the regimes considering how to deal with them for they represented a "problem" to the regime. Though each group suffered persecution under the old regimes, genocide was not activated until after a revolution had occurred in each place.

Ideologies and political myths in both cases contributed to the policy of genocide that the state sanctioned. In the case of the Armenian Genocide, Turkish nationalism drove them to recognize the Armenian as a "mortal enemy" that could never be a part of the empire and had to be eliminated. Nazi racial and antisemitic ideology served to fuel a genocidal plan that saw the Jew as a global danger that also must be eliminated.

Melson additionally highlights differences between the genocides in terms of the statuses of the Armenians and the Jews, the ideologies of the Turks and the Nazis, and the methods of destruction in each case.

As illuminating as Melson's book is, it's a grim and difficult topic, but an important one.

I appreciated Melson's points in his conclusion: "Revolutions fought in the name of justice must not abandon justice as the principle of governance." There's an interesting quote by Camus that I think the reader can reflect on further: "Nothing is given to men [and women] and the little they can conquer is paid with unjust deaths. But man's greatness lies elsewhere. It lies in his decision to be stronger than his condition. And if his condition is unjust, he has only one way of overcoming it, which is to be just himself."