Sins of the Turkish Fathers

I recently noted yet another publication devoted to the long-term psychological effects of the Armenian Genocide. And then Herder and Herder, now published by Crossroad, sent me their newest catalogue in which we find a book released this year: The Sins of the Fathers: Turkish Denialism and the Armenian Genocide by Siobhan Nash-Marshall  (Crossroad, 2018), 256pp.

About this book the publisher tells us the following:

We hear much talk today about post-truth. Journalists and intellectuals describe it as a shocking new phenomenon caused by recent electoral campaigns. They point to contemporary political statements as horrendous post-truths. Nothing is more misleading. ‘Historical engineering’ is not a new phenomenon. Nor are the events to which journalists point as exemplary instances of ‘post-truth’ particularly poignant. ‘Historical engineering’ is the intellectual twin of ‘social engineering’ and has been taking place on increasingly large scales since the dawn of the modern world. It is a consequence of the premises, methods, and ambitions of modern philosophy. This book is the first part of a trilogy – The Betrayal of Philosophy – that concerns the roots of the post-truth phenomenon. Its intent is to provide the philosophical world with a phantasm in which it can see not just the what of ‘historical engineering,’ but the why: to show the flaws of modern philosophy itself. The phantasm regards the most successful modern project of historical and social engineering: the Armenian Genocide. It includes both Turkey’s ‘historical engineering’ – its official policy of genocide negation – and the massive late Ottoman project of social and territorial engineering which led to the murder of the first Christian nation: Armenia.