In his book Blood and Soil, Kiernan identifies three key features: a cult of antiquity, agrarian vision, and racism. These features combine with military power to devastating results.

Which brings me to the Young Turks

In the premodern and modern period genocide was, mostly, about Imperial expansion. Not always, Kiernan identifies two instances in southeast Asia that were reactions to Imperialist actions, but mostly it was about imperialism.

It is, however, always about expansion.

The Ottoman Empire was a pretty diverse place. Armenian Christians lived alongside Muslims, Jews, and Orthodox Christians. It was a Muslim empire and the rights and powers were distributed unevenly but it functioned.

Until the late 1800s.

The Ottoman Empire was losing ground all over the place. Russia was asserting authority over the provinces on it's border, to the east the Greeks achieved independence. As a result, the Armenian Christians now accounted for 6.5% of the population and the Ottoman Turks 35%

In some areas the Armenian Christians were most of the population, even so, under Ottoman Turk and Kurdish Turk authority.

Is this starting to sound vaguely familiar and contemporary?

It should.

In 1894 3 Armenian villages refused to pay what amounted to a double tax. We'll pay to either you Kurds or the Ottomans, we can't afford to pay both of you.

25 villages were slaughtered.

The Young Turks wanted to make the Ottoman Empire great again. MOGA hats abounded. Well, not really but you get the idea.

They wanted to bring back the good old days of the Ottoman Empire when Turks were Turks and everyone else was, well, not Turks.

Twenty years earlier Konstanty Polklozic-Borzecki left Poland for Turkey and remade himself as Mustafa Celaleddin. He wrote Les Turcs anciens et modernes and claimed that Turks belonged to the Aryan race, a subset called Turanian.

Racial theory: check

The Young Turks visioned a great race that included the Mongols and an empire that predated Islam and had once spanned from Peking to Montenegro, the heirs of Genghis Khan.

Ancient glory: check

The territory they already had, the geography of the Ottoman Empire, but it was shrinking and those dang Armenians had all the good land.

Agriculture vision: check

By the time WW1 happened, the Ottoman Empire was collapsing. Austria annexed Bosnia and Herzegovinia. Bulgaria had declared Independence. There were revolts in Albania. The Italians took Tripoli. Holy shit. All they had left had Armenians on it.

The Young Turks had political power now. To them, to be Ottoman was to be a Turk. They said things like "prevent the decay of the Turkish race" and aligned with Germany in the war.

The official policy was to deport the Armenians, but the actual practice prompted a doctor to send a telegram asking "Are the Armenians who are being deported from your area being liquidated?"

LIQUIDATED

Does this sound familiar yet?

The Young Turks were defeated abroad in WW1 and at home politically. The leaders were held accountable and indicted for "crimes of deportation and massacre." There was a military tribunal and two of the leaders received death sentences.

The May 1919 verdict states, in part, that ostensibly engaged in carrying out the deportations, in reality they organized the massacre and annihilation of the Armenians. Under the pretext of transporting them by sea, male and female infants were thrown overboard to be drowned.

The Young Turks appealed to ancient glory and racist ideas about Turkish identity that they believed made them superior and entitled them to land for both agriculture and state purposes. To that end they massacred Armenians.

That it has somehow come to mean young people who are eager for radical change to the established order is mind blowing.

They were indeed eager for radical change. And they were willing to slaughter Armenians to get it.