Pershing Lecture Series: Armenian Massacres - David Cotter

The violence visited on the Armenian populations of Ottoman Anatolia during the Great War is the subject of persistent debate. Long treated as a second-class segment of Ottoman society, a pre-war Armenian identity took root in the climate of modernization and reform brought forth by the Young Turks within the failing Ottoman Empire. As Armenians urgently pressed for equality, they were seen as defiantly challenging the existing socio-political system and complicit in the decline of the Empire. In widely held Turkish views, Armenians defied repeated and reasonable orders to revert to a longstanding subservience to the ruling power. As numerous Armenians joined Russian forces, Turkey’s chronic and implacable rival, the government cast Armenians as revolutionaries and insurrectionists.

Join David Cotter, Director of the Department of Military History at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, for a riveting conversation about how the Armenian quest for equality collided with the Turkish insistence on maintaining the status quo, constructing the conditions for the mass violence of 1915-1918.

* According to Congressional Resolution H.Res.296, United States Congress affirmed that it is the policy of the United States to recognize and remember the Armenian Genocide. *

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