The Armenian Genocide Within A Framework of Compelling Evidence
Year: 2002
The book contains the printed text of a lecture by noted genocide specialist Prof. Vahakn Dadrian given at Harvard. It incorporates an introduction by Prof. James Russell of Harvard University, a brief biography of Prof. Dadrian, and an extensive, up-to-date bibliography of the noted scholar’s writings. The lecture, titled “The Armenian Genocide and the Principle of Compelling Evidence,” was delivered before a packed audience of some 500 people, including faculty and students of Harvard University at a commemoration of the 86th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. In the lecture, Dadrian begins by explaining the key points of the denial by the perpetrator camp and the need of an appropriate methodology suited to counter and overwhelm this culture of persistent denial. In Dadrian’s definition, this is called the methodology of “compelling evidence,” that revolves around the principles of reliability, explicitness, incontestability, verifiability. Dadrian then proceeds to reconstruct the Armenian Genocide in terms of its four major components: premeditation, genocidal intention, the organization of the genocide, and the implementation of the genocide. The Zoryan Institute is also offering as part of this package Dadrian’s most recent article, which appeared earlier this year in The International Journal of Middle East Studies. Titled “The Armenian Question and the Wartime Fate of the Armenians as Documented by the Officials of the Ottoman Empire’s World War I Allies: Germany and Austro-Hungary,” this major article is the product of some two dozen trips to such archival centers as Bonn, Potsdam, Freiburg im Breisgau in Germany, and Vienna, Austria over the last twenty years. Supported and corroborated by 115 endnotes, it is the result of extensive research and is one of the most definitive analyses exposing the premeditated genocide of the Armenians. It should further be noted that this journal, published by Cambridge University Press, is the official organ of the Middle East Studies Association, to which dozens of Turkish historians, and experts on the Middle East, Ottoman Empire, as well as modern Turkey belong.
