Sylvia Kasparian

Extreme Violence and Massacres during the First World War: A Comparative Study of the Armenian Genocide and German Atrocities in the Canadian Press (1914–1919)

The First World War brought extreme violence to the battlefields of Europe and to its civilian population. Following the invasion of Belgium and northern France, during the summer and fall of 1914, German troops resorted to abuses and slaughter against Belgian and French civilians (Horne & Kramer, 2001). French, Belgian and British authorities quickly set up inquiries, and they produced reports denouncing “German atrocities.” A few months later, in the spring of 1915, news from the Ottoman Empire described systematic massacres, wide-scale deportations and the slaughtering of the Armenian civil population (Kevorkian, 2011). In May 1915, in a joint statement, the Triple Entente — France, Great Britain and Russia — accused the Turkish government of “crimes against humanity and civilization” (Racine, 2006: 3–8).

Introduction: Representations of the Armenian Genocide in the Mass Media

In 1915, one of the first genocides in contemporary history was witnessed by representatives of powerful countries such as the United States of America, Italy, Germany, and Russia. Between April 15, 1915 and November 1916, at least 1.5 million Armenians were massacred on Turkish territory, as ordered by the government. When this news was made public in international newspapers, it was already too late to intervene. The Armenian population of Turkey was in the process of being exterminated. The process was put in place in March 1915 by order of the Turkish government itself, headed by the Young Turk Revolution Party and its main leaders Ismail Enver Pasha and Mehmed Talaat Pasha.