The Armenian transnation as unified in opposition to its Ottoman past
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history 1789 to present
presentation
published 08/07/2008
review : Completed
level : Advanced
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At the turn of the twentieth century, the Armenians were already a dispersed people; one scattered around the world but primarily divided between the Ottoman and Russian Empires. Their dispersion, however, became part of their self-conception as a people in 1915, when the Ottoman Armenians found themselves being systematically deported from their homes to other remote parts of the Empire by the powerful Turkish nationalist faction the Committee of Union and Progress. Whatever the intent of the CUP Armenians deportations was, the result was manifested in the suffering and ultimate death of approximately anywhere from 600,000 to one million Armenian men, women, and children. Since then, to use the words of Armenian scholar Lorne Shirinian, Armenian people around the world have refused to forget their destruction at the hands of the Ottomans, [absorbing] catastrophe, wandering, exile, diaspora and rebirth into their very self-conception. And yet, in 1991, almost a century after the genocide of 1915, this self-proclaimed wandering people was officially granted its own nation-state, the fledgling Republic of Armenia. Accordingly, the issue has become how this new Armenian Homeland is supposed to define itselfthat is, how it is to supposed to unite itself with what is often referred to as the Armenian transnation, or the five million Armenians born and living outside of the Republics borders
Table of Contents
- Armenian 'transnation' is self-defined and ultimately unified by the Armenian genocide of 1915.
- Republic of Armenia's villainization of its Ottoman past.
- The fledgling Republic of Armenia.
- Dispersion scholars such as Khachig Tololyan.
- The Armenian transnation's victim psychology.
- The most notorious Armenian villainization of the Ottomans.
- Pushing a policy of genocide recognition.
