GPN presents a Special Issue of our Web Magazine, Co-Victims in the Armenian Genocide.The Issue pertains to the relatively little known Assyrian Genocide, the largely unknown Yezidi Genocide and the partially but still less known Greek Genocide.
In presenting this Special Issue, it is important to make it clear that in no way whatsoever does information on co-victims in the Armenian Genocide reduce, detract or minimize the events and significance of the Armenian Genocide as it is focused on the Armenian people. We have fought long and hard for full recognition of the Armenian Genocide and will continue to do so without reservation.
It is somewhat amazing, and it is certainly painfully disconcerting, but it turns out that right beneath our eyes some major victim peoples have been denying/concealing/minimizing and perhaps most of all evading the FACTS that there were other peoples who were their co-victims in the same overall genocidal event. Thus, many of us genocide researchers have made this point about evasion or minimization of information about non-Jewish victims in the Holocaust and insist that full respectful attention also be directed to these non-Jewish victims. (See the excellent book by Michael Berenbaum whom we also recognize as a major leader in the building and first years of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. entitled Non-Jewish Victims in the Holocaust).
The Special Issue provides meaningful introductions to the Assyrian, Yezidi, and Greek Genocides, and if only because of its unusual interest also a brief introduction to the opening salvos of a possible genocide in the making of Jews in Ottoman-ruled Palestine at the time.
The GPN Special issue concludes with an article by Israel W. Charny that was the basis of a lecture at a conference in Athens on "Three Genocides, One Strategy" in September 2010. This essay seeks to present a psychological model for understanding victim peoples' evasion and denial of co-victims and comes to the conclusions that there is basically a quest of superiority and exclusiveness, and further that this striving for superiority mirrors similar dynamics in the perpetrators we all hate. We - really all of us - have our humanness-work cut out for us to do, to protect all human beings.