“Propaganda of the Victims”: Atrocity Denial, Ethnic Nationalism, and the Disparagement of Assyrians in Middle East Studies

Abstract Atrocity denial suffuses the bedrock of the academic field of modern Middle East studies. One of the most frequently cited works about modern Assyrians is a 1974 revisionist account of the 1933 massacres of Assyrians in Iraq. Its author, Khaldun S. Husry, dismisses Assyrian recollections of the violence as “propaganda of the victims.” Examining how Husry’s article came to be published reveals that the editor who published it, Stanford Shaw, promoted its logic as part of his denial of the Armenian genocide. As a result of the influence of this denialism, Assyrians—who continue to face displacement and dispossession over a century after hundreds of thousands of them, alongside Armenians, were killed by the Ottoman Empire—are systematically demeaned in academic literature. Scholars routinely treat Assyrians as problematic, questioning their legitimacy through racist lines of inquiry. They then claim, as moral licensing for their contempt, that their aim is to critique ethnic nationalism and colonialism. Analyzing the disparagement of Assyrians in the Middle East studies field offers lessons about what good and bad critiques of ethnic nationalism look like, how to avoid historiographical and citational pitfalls when writing about marginalized people, and why revisionist histories of atrocities are profoundly harmful.