Between 1894 and 1924, the Ottoman Empire and its successor state, modern Turkey, carried out one of the most systematic religious and ethnic purges in modern history. Under Sultan Abdul Hamid II, the empire initiated its first large-scale assault on Christians, primarily Armenians and Assyrians.

In the eastern provinces, especially in Diyarbekir, Ottoman soldiers and Kurdish irregulars carried out coordinated massacres. Entire villages were leveled. Men were butchered. Women and children were burned alive in churches. Somewhere between 100,000 and 300,000 Christians were slaughtered, an opening act to what would become a long nightmare.

The Young Turk regime, intoxicated with nationalist ideology, escalated the extermination effort during World War I. Under the cover of war, the Armenian Genocide was launched. 1.5 million Armenians were deported, starved, raped, and murdered. As Ottoman forces crushed resistance and restructured the empire, they turned against the Assyrian and Greek Christian populations.

In Pontus, Ionia, and Thrace, Greek communities were subjected to massacre, forced deportation, and labor camps. The burning of Smyrna in 1922, under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s command, marked the final expulsion of Greeks from Asia Minor, ending 3,000 years of Hellenic presence. In Hakkari, Tur Abdin, and northern Mesopotamia, Assyrian Christians were annihilated village by village. Entire dioceses vanished. Ancient monasteries were looted, clergy executed, and Christian communities that had survived since the apostolic era were erased.

As documented in The Thirty-Year Genocide by Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi, three campaigns, Hamidian, Young Turk, and Kemalist, left more than 1 million Armenians killed and thousands of churches desecrated or repurposed.

Who, after all, speaks?

After World War I, there was a moment when accountability could have happened. The Treaty of Sèvres (1920) initially promised to prosecute Ottoman leaders for war crimes and genocide. But that treaty was replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, which effectively absolved Turkey of further responsibility. The Allied powers were eager to stabilize the region and rebuild after the war, and they chose geopolitics over justice.

With Lausanne, the Armenian claim was diplomatically buried. The international community abandoned the project of enforcing accountability, and the perpetrators faced no real consequences. That diplomatic choice sent a signal: mass killing could be committed and then swept aside if it suited the interests of powerful states.

The Republic of Turkey, emerging from the remnants of the Ottoman Empire, made denial a central part of its national identity and political strategy. Denial was not a fringe position; it became official state policy. Documents were destroyed, archives were closed, and narratives were rewritten. Scholars and educators who challenged the official line faced intimidation and legal threats.

The years between the wars were marked by fatigue, revolution, and the rise of totalitarian movements. The League of Nations, conceived to prevent atrocities after World War I, proved ineffectual. Europe and the United States turned inward. Isolationism dominated U.S. policy. European powers, drained by conflict, prioritized stability over justice. Russia underwent revolution and civil war. Memories of genocide were subordinated to geopolitical realignments.

On August 22, 1939, the Associated Press bureau chief in Berlin received a report quoting Hitler as saying the following:

“I have issued the command, and I will have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad, that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formations in readiness, for the present only in the east, with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space (Lebernsraum) which we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”

The perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide were not dismantled. They were not permanently punished. They were not removed from power. On the contrary, many were absorbed into the new Turkish state, which emerged not as a pariah but as a recognized member of the international system. The world normalized relations. Trade resumed. Diplomacy continued. The crime receded into the background of “complex history.”

By the late 1930s, Hitler and his inner circle were deeply engaged with questions of historical precedent. They studied imperial collapses, population transfers, and earlier mass killings. The Armenian Genocide stood out because it was modern, bureaucratic, ideological, and, most importantly, successfully erased from international enforcement.

The absence of accountability after World War I had taught a dangerous lesson: the international order was unwilling to impose justice if doing so threatened stability or strategic interests. The League of Nations had proven incapable of enforcing its own principles. War crimes tribunals never materialized. Moral language replaced legal action.

In his August 1939 address, Hitler was telling his commanders that history favored ruthlessness when it was paired with decisiveness. That the world’s memory was short. That outrage fades. That documentation does not deter. That victims without power do not shape outcomes.

The New Armenians

Kurdish areas were next. Civilians were killed. Local leaders were arrested or disappeared. Homes were burned. Families fled. Kurdish self-defense structures that had fought ISIS on behalf of the West were dismantled, leaving entire populations exposed.

Middle Eastern minorities were abandoned strategically. Washington and its allies chose short-term interests. They prioritized surface-level stability over the protection of vulnerable communities that lacked leverage. Because minorities complicate negotiations, slow down deals, and demand commitments that extend beyond election cycles.

This is the same mistake Europe made after the Armenian genocide. The United States and Western governments are now repeating that error, but in a more dangerous form. In the Armenian case, forgetting came after the slaughter. Today, forgetting is happening while the slaughter is ongoing. The Druze, the Alawites, and the Kurds are not being erased by ignorance; they are being erased while the facts are visible, reported, and known.

When violence produces no consequences in real time, no cost, it tells every armed group, every terrorist movement, every dictator that mass violence against minorities is not a red line. No wonder how the Ayatollah regime has killed more than 30,000 people in one month.

Short-term stability purchased through abandonment always produces long-term instability. It radicalizes perpetrators, delegitimizes moderates, and teaches violent actors that restraint is unnecessary. It also guarantees that future interventions will be more costly, because they will come later, after patterns have hardened.

Today, the new Ottoman who is killing the new Armenians, who said many times before his transformation that his eyes were fixed on Jerusalem, forces a question: will forgetting the new Armenians turn him into the next Hitler and his followers into the new Nazis?