The US House Foreign Relations Committee’s decision to brand the mass killings of Armenians in Turkey during World War I as “genocide” prompted predictable anger from the Turkish Government and its citizens. As Guy Rundle noted in Crikey this week, the extent to which the Armenian massacres amounted to systematic extermination is the subject of genuine, and inevitably furious, debate.

In truth, however, the use of the term “genocide” has nothing to with its accuracy as a description of historical reality, and everything to do with undermining the moral authority of those so labelled. To be accused of genocide is the ultimate ad hominem attack, aligning the target with the gold-standard practitioners of extermination, the Nazis (who carefully studied the Armenian massacres).