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Jonathan Kay speaks to famed Middle Eastern historian Benny Morris, whose latest book explores the ethnic cleansing of Turkey during the last decades of the Ottoman Empire

(...) The book examines three episodes: first, the massacre of perhaps 200,000 Ottoman Armenians that took place between 1894 and 1896; then the much larger deportation and slaughter of Armenians that began in 1915 and has been widely recognized as genocide; and third, the destruction or deportation of the remaining Christians (mostly Greeks) during and after the conflict of 1919-22, which Turks call their War of Independence. The fate of Assyrian Christians, of whom 250,000 or more may have perished, is also examined, in less detail.

The authors are distinguished Israeli historians. Benny Morris, a chronicler of the fighting that attended Israel’s birth, has written bluntly about incidents in which Arabs were killed or expelled. He also argues (contentiously) that it would have been better if the result had been total separation between Jew and Arab. His co-author, Dror Ze’evi, is a fellow professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

(...) Between 1894 and 1924, they write, between 1.5 million and 2.5 million Ottoman Christians perished; greater accuracy is impossible. Whatever the shifts in regime, all these killings were instigated by Muslim Turks who drew in other Muslims and invoked Islamic solidarity. As a result the Christian share of Anatolia’s population fell from 20 percent to 2 percent.

The reader is left wondering what the authors ultimately feel about the treatment of civilians in situations of total war. Nothing in the United Nations conventions implies that military expediency can justify the removal, whether by ethnic cleansing, killing or both, of populations whose presence is inconvenient. But by weighing up arguments for and against certain acts of expulsion, Morris and Ze’evi seem at times to be taking a less purist view.

La langue ne se raconte pas seulement à l’écrit chez Bescherelle, elle se raconte désormais aussi à l’oral dans un podcast inédit : L’histoire de la langue française. Cette série en 10 épisodes permet de prolonger le plaisir de la découverte grâce aux talents d’orateur de Jean Pruvost, chroniqueur de langue et habitué des studios. Les 10 épisodes du podcast sont à retrouver sur toutes les plateformes.

Quillette‘s Toby Young talks to free speech advocate and Brookings Institution Fellow Jonathan Rauch about his new book The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defence of Truth. It’s a follow-up to his celebrated defence of free speech, Kindly Inquisitors.

Into this depressing reality comes Jonathan Rauch, who has turned himself into a kind of philosopher-journalist as a writer for the Atlantic and a fellow at the Brookings Institution. He sees clearly what a mess we have on our hands, but he also sees something much more hopeful: a centuries-old tradition of embracing the scientific method that has enabled what Rauch calls the “reality-based community” to win broad support for true and accurate judgments about all sorts of subjects that once were hopelessly controversial or unimaginable.

Trump is the villain in Rauch’s book, and Rauch takes him with dead seriousness. “With skills he had honed for decades by manipulating journalists, deploying what he called ‘truthful hyperbole,’ and starring on reality TV, he was easily the most artful practitioner of disinformation since the 1930s,” Rauch writes.

Rauch’s respect for Trump’s skills may surprise liberal readers, but it certainly seems deserved. He credits Trump’s original ideologist, Steve Bannon, with a clear understanding of how the communications techniques of the digital age can be used to confuse and disorient. He quotes Bannon: “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with s---.” Rauch continues: “Although the formulation is crude, there could be no more concise and accurate summation of what modern information warfare is all about.” Trump’s reliance on lies in his public discourse indicates that he has taken Bannon’s insight to heart.

But I also found myself worrying that Rauch is too indulgent of the ugliest phenomena he writes about and too optimistic about the damage they do to the reality-based community. Not that he avoids the issues raised by radical activists who have transformed some university campuses into battlefields by turning against free speech for those with whom they disagree. He disapproves sharply of those who justify silencing opinions that make some people uncomfortable for the sake of some ill-defined “emotional safety.”

He also offers pointed criticism of the “cancel culture” that has destroyed lives and careers, recounting gruesome specific anecdotes, including how some students and professors have been hounded and abandoned by colleagues and friends.

But then Rauch made me uncomfortable. After powerful pages that seemed ominous and alarming, after acknowledging widespread discrimination on American campuses against conservative students and professors, he finds comfort in polling numbers and interviews that show broad support for tolerance and diversity among professors, students and ordinary citizens, too. “Most Americans, including left-leaning Americans, do not want to see debate chilled and speech policed,” he writes, as though that should somehow be reassuring.

Jonathan Rauch is among America’s more thoughtful and rigorously honest public intellectuals. In his new book, he addresses the rise of disinformation and its pernicious effects on democratic culture.

What he calls the “reality based community [is] the social network which adheres to liberal science’s rules and norms … objectivity, factuality, rationality: they live not just within individuals’ minds and practices but on the network”. This community includes not only the hard sciences but also such fields as scholarship, journalism, government and law, in a “marketplace of persuasion” driven by pursuit of truth under clear standards of objectivity.

There is much here and the diagnosis is superb, with clear explanations of how and why disinformation spreads. Rauch finds glimmers of hope and positive change, as digital media act “more like publishers … crafting epistemic standards and norms”. Solutions, though, involve self-regulation rather than government action. Rauch cites Twitter’s Jack Dorsey in noting “that the battle against misinformation and abusive online behavior would be won more by product design than by policy design”.

Il était un crime, c'est le podcast qui raconte les grandes affaires alsaciennes. Le 17 mai 1995, Carole Prin disparaît alors qu'elle est sur le point d'accoucher. Son conjoint Roland Moog signale son absence. On ne la reverra plus vivante. Après avoir longtemps nié le meurtre, il passe aux aveux des années plus tard. La France entière apprend alors comment ce projectionniste dans un cinéma de Strasbourg, fan d'Alfred Hitchcock, a élaboré un scénario meurtrier. Celui qui l'a conduit à emmurer les corps de Carole Prin et de son enfant à naître derrière une salle de cinéma.