Justin McCarthy (American historian)

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Prof. McCarthy
Prof. McCarthy

Justin A. McCarthy is an American demographer, who is a professor of history at the University of Louisville, in Louisville, Kentucky. His areas of expertise include the histories of the Ottoman Empire and the Balkans, and he has authored several texts in those fields.[1][2]

McCarthy has attracted controversy for his unorthodox view of the Ottoman-era persecution of Armenians, which most historians accept as genocide but which his historiography subsumes in the general chaos of World War I. For his various works and speeches that seek to dispute the genocidal nature of the Armenian Genocide, he has often faced scrutiny and harsh criticism. The controversial nature of his views and works, which many critics have condemned as genocide denial, have made them the subject of much scholarship in themselves.

Contents

Background

McCarthy served in the Peace Corps in Turkey, from 1967-1969. He also taught at the Middle East Technical University and Ankara University during this time.[3] He earned his Ph.D. at University Of California, Los Angeles in 1978.[4]

He later acquired an Honorary Doctorate at Süleyman Demirel University in Turkey.[3]

Views

McCarthy is known for his active promotion, through books, articles, conferences, and interviews, of his view that the Armenian Genocide did not occur.[5] He was one of four scholars who participated in a controversial debate hosted by PBS about the genocide.[6]

McCarthy does not deny that hundreds of thousands of Armenians died, but claims that "millions of Muslims" [7] in the region were also massacred in this period.[8] He has contended that all of those deaths during World War One were the product of intercommunal warfare between Muslims and Armenians, and did not involve an intent to commit genocide by the Ottoman Empire.

Criticism of his work

Historian Yair Auron has suggested that McCarthy "leads the list of deniers of the Armenian Genocide".[9] Donald Bloxham praises McCarthy's work for highlighting the oft-overlooked suffering of the Muslim populations of the Balkans during the demographic catastrophes of 1912-1923, but suggests that McCarthy's work in this field is part of the same project of undermining the scholarship affirming the Armenian Genocide, by reducing it to something analogous to a population exchange.[10] Bloxham suggests that McCarthy's work "serves to muddy the waters for external observers, conflating war and one-sided murder with various discrete episodes of ethnic conflict... [A] series of easy get-out clauses for Western politicians and non-specialist historians keen not to offend Turkish opinion."[10]

While Guenter Lewy has often faced criticism for revisionist or politically-interested historiography himself, for his work in several fields, Lewy distances himself from McCarthy's view of a "civil war". Lewy writes that he agrees with Turkish historian Selim Deringil, who once wrote that "no historian with a conscience can possibly accept the 'civil war' line, which is a travesty of history."[11]

McCarthy has also faced criticism for his involvement with the Turkish government, which has financed a large body of revisionist literature in regards to the Armenian Genocide.[12][13]

Works

  • Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821-1922 Darwin Press, Incorporated (March 1996), ISBN 0-87850-094-4
  • The Ottoman Peoples and the End of Empire ("Historical Endings" series) (April 2001)
  • The Ottoman Turks : An Introductory History to 1923 (March 1997)
  • The Armenian Rebellion at Van (Utah Series in Turkish and Islamic Studies) (September 2006)
  • Muslims and Minorities: The Population of Ottoman Anatolia and the End of the Empire (December 1983, ISBN 0-8147-5390-6 hardcover)
  • Who Are the Turks?: A Manual for Teachers (January 2003) Who Are the Turks? PDF
  • The Population of Palestine (1990)
  • Arab World, Turkey, and the Balkans, 1878-1914 (1982)

Awards

  • Order of Merit of Turkey in 1998

See also

Notes and References

  1. ^ David Wilson on Justin McCarthy
  2. ^ University of Louisville :: The Expert Source :: Expert Details
  3. ^ a b Mustafa Aydın(2004)Turkish-American Relations: Past, Present, and Future
  4. ^ Bloxham, Donald. The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians. 2005, page 214.
  5. ^ Jaschik, Scott. "Genocide Deniers", October 22 2007. 
  6. ^ "A PBS Documentary Makes Its Case for the Armenian Genocide, With or Without a Debate", The New York Times, April 17, 2006. Retrieved on 2006-09-02. 
  7. ^ McCarthy, Justin Let the Historians Decide, Ermeni Arastirmalari, volume 1, Ankara 2001.
  8. ^ McCarthy, Justin Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821-1922 Darwin Press, Incorporated (March 1996), ISBN 0-87850-094-4
  9. ^ The Banality of Denial: Israel and the Armenian Genocide, by Yair Auron, 2003, p. 248
  10. ^ a b Bloxham, Donald. The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians. 2005, page 211.
  11. ^ Lewy, Guenter. The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide. 2005, page 122.
  12. ^ Imber, Colin (1999)Book Review, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Vol 26, No. 2.
  13. ^ Edward Tabor Linenthal (2001)Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum

External links

Languages