Remembering the Armenian Genocide 1915-2015
Disgrifiad | Description
- ISBN: 9781845275464
- Canon Patrick Thomas
- Publication May 2015
- Format: Paperback, 215x138 mm
Patrick Thomas is the author of several books, including From Carmarthen to Karabagh: a Welsh Discovery of Armenia. He has spent much of the past ten years studying Armenian history, culture and religion. In 2013 he was designated ‘Honorary Pastor to Armenians in Wales’ by the Armenian Primate of Britain and Ireland. Dr Thomas is Vicar of Christ Church, Carmarthen, Canon Chancellor of St David’s Cathedral, Pembrokeshire, and a member of the Anglican Oriental Orthodox International Commission.
The government sanctioned extermination of over a million Armenians in Ottoman Turkey during the First World War is sometimes described as the ‘forgotten genocide’. For a variety of reasons, it was ignored by governments and air-brushed out of history books. As a result, it provided the blueprint for later atrocities. It was no accident that in 1939, on the eve of the Second World War, Adolf Hitler remarked “Who now remembers the annihilation of the Armenians?”
2015 is the centenary of that Armenian Genocide. In this moving and powerful account of the suffering undergone by Turkish Armenians, Patrick Thomas draws on eye-witness material from a wide variety of sources. He shows why it remains profoundly important to acknowledge and remember this first major genocide of the twentieth century. Recent events in the Middle East have underlined the threat of violent annihilation that still faces many vulnerable minorities there. The fate of the Armenians a century ago provides a timely warning to us today, one that should never be forgotten.
\'The Armenian genocide has been dubbed the first modern genocide\' – Professor Donald Bloxham
\'The 1915 Genocide of Armenians was truly a twentieth-century phenomenon in its blend of racism and rationalism; its perpetrators had shuffled off the restraints which had historically shackled the darkest of man\'s political desires; laid bare was a remorseless and unalloyed desire to kill.
Christopher Walker, Armenia: The Survival of a Nation