Armenians, Turks and a century of genocide: a village where a serial killer is hailed as a hero
▻https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/armenians-turks-and-a-century-of-genocide-a-village-where-a-serial-kille
▻https://www.irishtimes.com/image-creator/?id=1.2186819&origw=960
What happens when there is a serial killer in a village, but instead of arresting him the police uses his services from time to time, the judge calls him a “hero”, and the schoolteacher tells the children to follow his example? What happens to the families of the victims in this village, and how does the crime change the behaviour of its inhabitants?
Four years ago I started researching my new book Open Wounds, where I asked the question: what were the consequences of the century-long denial of the Armenian genocide? At the time I was conscious of the negative consequences of denialism on the descendants of the survivors, Armenians as well as Greeks and Assyrians, Christian nations that were part of the tissue of the Ottoman society, and suddenly their state wanted to eliminate them. What I was to discover was how much the denial of the genocide had changed our world, polluted our political culture.