This is from the June 2009 issue of my alternate history newsletter.

The twentieth century was the century of genocides—organized, systematic attempts by governments to physically eliminate ethnic groups that they considered enemies. The challenge: Find Points of Divergence that eliminate some or all of the major 20^th century genocides attempts.

1. The Armenian Genocide: The Ottoman empire did several preliminary massacres of Armenians, with a major set of them coming in 1896-97, but the main effort to eliminate Armenians came during World War I, starting in 1915. There were additional massacres as Turkish armies crushed a short-lived Armenian Republic shortly after World War I. For an isolationist country the US was heavily involved in the Armenian question, with huge outpourings of support for Armenian civilians in the form of private relief efforts and diplomatic pressure on the Ottomans to alter their policy on the Armenians. During the massacres in the first part of World War I, US diplomats saved as many Armenians as they could, sheltering them in diplomatic compounds. After World War I, there was actually talk of a US League of Nations mandate over historically Armenian parts of the old Ottoman empire.

The Armenians were a classic case of a vulnerable ethnic group. They were of a different religion than their neighbors, and many of them were better educated. Many excelled in business and were wealthier than their neighbors, giving a financial incentive for dispossessing and/or killing them. While in some of the earlier massacres some Armenians had fought back, by 1915 they were for the most part disarmed and lacked military training.

So, what POD would it take to prevent most if not all of the Armenian genocide? What would the impact of stopping that genocide have been? How would it have impacted later history? Would there have been an independent or semi-independent Armenia between the wars? How would the Turkish reaction to your POD have changed World War II?

2. The Stalinist purges and collectivization famines. I’m not sure if Stalin’s actions actually constituted genocide, but they certainly targeted specific ethnic groups such as the Ukrainians, and they certainly killed very large numbers of people. How could they have been stopped? What impact would stopping them have had on Soviet industrialization in the lead up to World War II?

3. The Ustashi (Croatian fascist) massacres in Yugoslavia during World War II.

4. Of course, the Nazi massacres of Jews, gypsies, etc in World War II. What if standard German militarists rather than Nazis had taken over Germany in 1933? Or what if Hitler had been a nominal anti-Semitic—using the slogans while not actually taking them seriously? There was apparently a time early on when his anti-Semitism wasn’t particularly strong.

5. The Rwandan massacres.

Posted on March 26, 2010.

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