Truth in Telling
Reconciling Realities in the Genocide of the Ottoman Armenians
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6002280 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ronald Grigor Suny (0009-0004-7525-0271, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2009 |
| Volume | 114 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 930-946 |
| Publication date | 2009-10-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The American Historical Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0002-8762 • E-ISSN: 1937-5239 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1086/ahr.114.4.930 |
| OpenAlex | W2078501257 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 14 |
the reporter Ron Suskind was told by a White House aide about displeasure with a critical article he had written."The aide said that guys like me," Suskind writes,were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality."I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism.He cut me off."That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued."We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.And while you're studying that reality-judiciously, as you will-we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out.We're history's actors . . .and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." 1 Sadly, not only self-styled current empires, but past empires, indeed most governments and their defenders, have been creating their own preferred realities and narratives of the past for much of recorded history.Nations and states have long been in the business of fabricating, more honestly at some times than others, myths and stories of their origins, golden ages, heroic deeds, victories, and triumphs, while eliminating the defeats and failures, even mass murders.What appears to be new in our own time is the brazenness of what is claimed, the un-self-reflexive cynicism of the perpetrators, and the potential reach through mass printed and broadcast media, the Internet, and film.Historians inevitably have been pulled into this war of words.Positioned on both sides of the discussion, historians have been both the producers of sanctioned historical memories and among the principal destabilizers of official narratives.A few years ago, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and President George W. Bush talked about "revisionist history," referring to those with different memories of why the United States invaded Iraq-the second time. 2 Long before its latest political deployments, the term "revisionist history" had its own controversial
Aesthetics · Empire · Empiricism · Enlightenment · Epistemology · Genocide · Political science · Sociology · sort · Computer Science · History · Law · Philosophy · Turkey's Politics and Society
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Can Turkish-Armenian music diplomacy emulate the Turkish-Greek example
Negationist Denialism in the "Comfort Women" Issue in Japan
From Roots to Stones
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Turkey’s “Apology” and Image Repair on the Centennial of the Armenian Genocide
Les nomades, les paysans et les vagabonds dans l’Empire ottoman (XIII e siècle – début XX e siècle)
Istanbul sounding like revolution
Don't Look Back in Anger
The Promise and The Lost City of Z
| Citations per year | 0.25 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1969 - 2026 (58) |
| Highly cited | No |