How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

by Jason F. Stanley

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Ottoman Empire experienced a tremendous collapse, losing more than 400,000 square miles of territory in Africa and Europe, including Libya, Albania, Macedonia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Crete. The Ottoman sultanate was overthrown in 1908, and in 1913 the empire was taken over by extremist ultranationalists who preached a vision of a completely mythic pure ethnic Turkish past that was placed in threat by the presence of non-Turkish, non-Muslim minorities (the mythology here is particularly extreme, as the Ottoman Empire’s home of modern-day Turkey was the site of one of the world’s most powerful and longest-lasting Christian empires, Byzantium). They were able to exploit the sense of humiliation and resentment and loss of territory to bring about, in the second decade of the twentieth century, one of the more horrific crimes in history, the massacre of the Armenian Christian population of Turkey.