Justin McCarthy (American historian)

Justin A. McCarthy (born October 19, 1945) is an American

McCarthy's work has faced harsh criticism by many scholars who have characterized McCarthy's views defending Turkish atrocities against Armenians as genocide denial.^[6][7][8][9] Hans-Lukas Kieser considers that McCarthy has "an indefensible bias toward the Turkish official position."^[10]

Background

McCarthy served in the

McCarthy's studies concentrate on the period in which the Ottoman Empire crumbled and eventually fell apart. He holds that orthodox ^[clarification needed] Western histories of the declining Ottoman Empire are biased as they are based on the testimonies of biased observers: Christian missionaries, and officials of (Christian) nations who were at war with the Ottomans during World War I.^[13][14][15]

Able to read Ottoman Turkish, McCarthy has focused on changes in the ethnic composition of local populations. Thus, he has written about the ethnic cleansing of Muslims from the Balkans and the Caucasus, as well as the Armenian massacres in Anatolia.^[13]

Some scholarly critics of McCarthy acknowledge his research on Muslim civilian casualties and refugee numbers (19th and early 20th centuries) brought forth a valuable perspective, previously neglected in the Christian West: that millions of Muslims also suffered and died during these years.^[16][17] Donald W. Bleacher, although acknowledging that McCarthy is pro-Turkish, nonetheless called Death and Exile "a necessary corrective" to the model of all the conflict's victims being Christians and all the perpetrators being Muslims.^[17] However, others have accused McCarthy of exaggerating the number of Muslim victims in the Balkans.^[18]

McCarthy's current concentration is on the factors that caused the Ottoman loss in the East in World War I.^[13] According to him, the milestone events are the Battle of Sarikamish and what he terms the "Armenian Revolt" at Van.^[19] Norman Stone praised Justin McCarthy's The Ottoman Turks: "a brave scholarly attempt, not shrinking from the economic side."^[20] Similarly, The Ottoman Peoples and the End of Empire was recommended by The History Teacher.^[21]

McCarthy also worked, especially in The Creation of Enduring Prejudice, with a focus on anti-Turkish prejudices disseminated between the beginning of the 19th century through 1922.

Armenian genocide

McCarthy agrees that a large number of Armenians were killed or died of unnatural causes during the

One may pick arguments with specific interpretations of events depicted in the work, but the statistical data appear generally valid. McCarthy succeeds in providing factual material for bringing the European historiography of the later Ottoman Empire into more objective balance.[31]

Historian Robert Olson writing in the International Journal of Middle East Studies says of the same book:

Like all of the author's other works, this one offers positions that become pivots for rebuttals, disagreements, counter-arguments, different interpretations, and probably some recriminations. Nonetheless, Justin McCarthy's solid demographic work contributes to achieving a better balance and understanding that he so ardently desires for the history of these regions and peoples.^[32]

Historian and

Although he succeeds in recounting the plight of Muslim communities, he is less successful in demonstrating state policy or proving intent. Moreover, McCarthy is inconsistent in assigning blame. When the Ottoman state failed to control the depredation of Armenians at the hands of Kurds and Circassians, it was due to lack of resources and authority; when Russian, Bulgarian and Greek soldiers declined to stop similar events against Muslim peasants, it was done deliberately. The question of intent underlies the book's greatest flaw.^[33]

Historian Dimitris Livanios notes that the title of the book clearly refers to "Muslims", a religious identity that was shared by many Turkish, Tartar, Albanian, Bosnian and Greek ethnic groups in the Balkans and the Black Sea, however, it insists in using the term "ethnic" to describe their destruction, although the ethnicity of these groups played little role in their expulsion or their identity.^[34]

According to historian Hakem Al-Rustom, who is critical of the book:

Justin McCarthy is an apologist for the Turkish state and supports the official version of history, which denies the Armenian genocide. He thus might have exaggerated the number of Muslim victims in the Balkans in order to underplay the number of Armenian victims in Anatolia.^[18]

According to Michael Mann McCarthy is often viewed as a scholar on the Turkish side of the debate over Balkan Muslim death figures.^[35] Mann however states that even if those figures were reduced "by as much as 50 percent, they still would horrify."^[35]

Donald Bloxham, a University of Edinburgh historian specializing in genocide studies, states that "McCarthy's work has something to offer in drawing attention to the oft-unheeded history of Muslim suffering and embattlement... It also shows that vicious nationalism was by no means the sole preserve of the CUP and its successors", but notes that:

McCarthy goes much too far, eliding individual agency, specific ideology, historical contingency, the extremity of the Armenian fate compared with that of other groups, and the history of the massacre of Armenians in the Ottoman empire. He writes as if the CUP were just another government swept along powerlessly by an irresistible meta-historical force... [McCarthy's works] serve to muddy the waters for external observers, conflating war and one-sided murder with various discrete episodes of ethnic conflict. They provide a series of easy get-out clauses for Western politicians and non-specialist historians keen not to offend Turkish opinion. The death of a now-indeterminate number of Armenians in an era of mass death is seen as ‘distressing’, possibly, as ‘unfortunate’, certainly, but not as substantive grounds to criticize a state fighting for its survival in a dog-eat-dog world.^[36]

Armenian genocide

McCarthy's work has been the subject of criticism from book reviewers and a number of genocide scholars.

Bloxham identifies McCarthy's work as part of a wider project of undermining scholarship affirming the Armenian genocide by reducing it to something analogous to a population exchange.[36] Bloxham writes that McCarthy's work "[serves] to muddy the waters for external observers, conflating war and one-sided murder with various discrete episodes of ethnic conflict... [A] series of easy get-out clauses for Western politicians and non-specialist historians keen not to offend Turkish opinion."^[36] Samuel Totten and Steven L. Jacobs write that Shaw's and his adherents' (especially Lowry and McCarthy) publications have "striking similarities to the arguments used in the denial of the Holocaust: labeling the alleged genocide as a myth created for wartime propaganda, portraying the presumed victims as having been real security threats[...] discounting eye-witness accounts and survivor testimony, asserting that whatever deaths occurred were from the same causes that carried away all peoples living in the region, minimizing the number of victims," and so on.^[47] Likewise, Ronald Grigor Suny maintains that the number of Armenian genocide deniers is small (the most prominent being Shaw, McCarthy, Lowry and Lewis) but "their influence is great by virtue of pernicious alliance with the official campaign of falsification by the government of Turkey."^[48]

Reactions

Armenian Assembly of America

McCarthy lent support to the

• McCarthy, Justin (1982). The Arab World, Turkey, and the Balkans (1878-1914). G.K. Hall. p. 309.
  ISBN 978-0-8161-8164-3.^{[permanent dead link}
  ]
• McCarthy, Justin (1983). Muslims and Minorities: The Population of Ottoman Anatolia and the End of the Empire. New York University Press. p. 248.
  ISBN 978-0-8147-5390-3.^{[permanent dead link}
  ]
• McCarthy, Justin (1990). The Population of Palestine: Population History and Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate. Institute for Palestine Studies Series. Columbia University Press.
  ISBN 978-0-231-07110-9
  .
• McCarthy, Justin (1996). Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821-1922. Darwin Press, Incorporated.
  ISBN 0-87850-094-4
  .
• McCarthy, Justin (1997). The Ottoman Turks: An Introductory History to 1923. Longman.
  ISBN 978-0-582-25656-9
  .
• McCarthy, Justin (2001). The Ottoman Peoples and the End of Empire. A Hodder Arnold Publication.
  ISBN 0-340-70657-0
  .
• McCarthy, Justin (2002). Population History of the Middle East and the Balkans. Isis Press.
  ISBN 975-428227-7
  .
• McCarthy, Justin (2003). Who Are the Turks? A Manual for Teachers (PDF). American Forum for Global Education. p. 242.
  ISBN 978-0-944675-71-7
  .
• McCarthy, Justin (2006). The Armenian Rebellion at Van. University of Utah Press.
  ISBN 0-87480-870-7
  .
• McCarthy, Justin (2010). The Turk in America. The Creation of an Enduring Prejudice. University of Utah Press.
  ISBN 978-1-60781-013-1
  .

• Şükrü Elekdağ Award of the Assembly of Turkish American Associations
• Chairman's Education Award of the Turkish American Friendship Council
• Order of Merit of Turkey (1998)^[11]

References