I'm just listening to Sarah Kanowski in ABC Australia's Conversations program talking to Gina Perry about the latter's book The Lost Boys about the 1954 Robbers' Cave experiment.
In the talk Sarah referred to the Armenian Genocide by Turks in 1915-17 as "serious disputes between ethnic groups". (Armenian and Genocide were words not uttered).
This was in fact the world's first recoded genocide and the reason the word genocide was invented. Unlike Germany thirty years later Turkey has always denied the genocide. (Or played it down— everyone was fighting innit?).
And really... I can't not say it.... calling that a "dispute between ethnic groups is the same, exactly the same, as calling the murder of six million Jews "an ethnic dispute between Christian and Jewish Germans". I mean, the SAME.
Poor ABC. Poor Sarah. Do they even know the violence they are doing to history? All because they are wary of "hurting the feelings" of the good Muslims of Turkey.
"The Lost Boys" is a great story, by the way.
