The Thirty-Year Genocide

Turkey's Destruction of Its Christian Minorities, 1894-1924

By: Benny Morris, Dror Ze'evi, Claire Bloom

Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki

A reappraisal of the giant massacres perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire and then the Turkish Republic against their Christian minorities from 1894 to 1924

Between 1894 and 1924, three waves of violence swept across Anatolia, targeting the region's Christian minorities, who had previously accounted for 20 percent of the population. By 1924 the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks had been reduced to two percent. Most historians have treated these waves as distinct, isolated events, and successive Turkish governments presented them as an unfortunate sequence of accidents. The Thirty-Year Genocide is the first account to show that the three were actually part of a single, continuing, and intentional effort to wipe out Anatolia's Christian population.

The years in question, the most violent in the recent history of the region, began during the reign of the Ottoman sultan Abdulhamid II, continued under the Young Turks, and ended during the first years of the Turkish Republic founded by Ataturk. Yet despite the dramatic swing from the Islamizing autocracy of the sultan to the secularizing republicanism of the post-World War I period, the nation's annihilationist policies were remarkably constant, with continual recourse to premeditated mass killing, homicidal deportation, forced conversion, mass rape, and brutal abduction. And one thing more was a constant: the rallying cry of jihad. While not justified under the teachings of Islam, the killing of two million Christians was effected through the calculated exhortation of the Turks to create a pure Muslim nation.

Revelatory and impeccably researched, Benny Morris and Dror Ze'evi's account is certain to transform how we see one of modern history's most horrific events.

©2019 Benny Morris and Dror Ze'evi (P)2019 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Tragic, Gut Wrenching, Informative

My wife is Armenian and picked this title up to get more details of what befell the Armenian race during one of the darkest times in their history. The atrocities committed by the Ottomans/Turks during this period is appalling, evil and down right sadistic.

What is truly baffling to me is how this part of history is so unknown or not talked about in today’s society. I think this should be taught in schools just as holocaust is as a grim reminder the savagery of mankind when extreme zealotry and fanaticism of religion has no restraints.
I HIGHLY RECOMMEND THIS TITLE! For anyone who is a history buff and wants to learn more about the events that took place over this 30 year time span of history. It’s well written with accurate times/dates listed and the narration was superb.

Mispronunciations

Some Turkish words are mispronounced. Some truly very badly. A Turkish speaker would have done a better job.
The body of work is excellent.

Exhaustive research on a story little known today

What we often call the Armenian Genocide today turns out to be a bigger work of killing by the thousands than we often hear about. The last years of the Ottoman Empire and the first years of the modern nation of Turkey saw a focused effort to remove all non-Muslim peoples from Anatolia under Turkish control. It was more than Armenians. It included Greek Christians, other groups of ancient Christian communities, and those of other faiths who were exiled, starved out, or simply killed. This is a work that helps understand the complicated world that is modern day Turkey and the surrounding region that includes the Kurds and other groups but few Christians. There were killings on both sides with Greece invading in the post World War I mess that was Turkey and the surrounding region. But the vast portion of the killing was at Turkish hands and the authors argue it was ordered from the highest levels of the Turkish government that eventually came under the control of Ataturk. A good listen. Some awkwardnesses with Turkish names and places but not overly distracting. Would have been inproved with more pronunciation preparation.

History, war, Ethnic cleansing

As I was listening to this book, I started to think about something. It takes so much energy and so much time to cause pain and death. What would happen if we took all that time and all that energy and work towards peace instead? Terrible things happened between 1894 and 1924 in the land of Turkey in the Ottoman empire. When will we learn how to get along with each other and work with each other rather than kill each other? Very upsetting book. But we’re the read.

Appalling Slaughter, 20th Century Evil

The book covers a topic I knew only very little about. Stefan Rudnicki is 1st class Narration. He's American, so he pronounces things like an American. Performance is excellent.

The Armenians and Pontic Greeks had always lived on the razor's edge since the Eastern Roman Empire collapsed and Turks conquered Anatolia. Although an independent nation, the Armenians still do. The modern Armenian state is nestled between Azerbaijan, Iran, Kurdistan, and Turkey. Not a great place for a Christian minority to live. The killing was part of life since the early middle ages. Raids since and Byzantine-Seljuk wars. The book explains that that the Ottomans were feeling the pressure of so many defeats in the Balkans and Caucuses, they were seeing the Armenians as the gateway to further collapse.

The biggest detail that I did not know was how the local populations participated in the evil work. The Turkish Army and National Government participated, but you also had neighbors attacking neighbors. You had the Kurdish tribes murdering Armenian villagers in the east. Not accidentally murdering, but graphic and brutal murder. Also the sexual exploitation of women and children.

These folks had been living together for 800 years when this happened. Grotesquely, the Turks even used bandits, released criminals and irregular militia forces to terrorize and decimate the Armenians.