I wrote "Kinross considered the continuing Turkish denial of the Armenian Genocide and of everything Armenian as nothing more than a quaint and rather amusing local idiosyncrasy, and something that it would be socially impolite to object to. This attitude was held by almost all travellers to Turkey during this period (including scholars like Steven Runciman)."
It has been a decade since I wrote it, but think this was based on words written in Runciman's biography ("A Traveller's Alphabet", published in 2001).
Kinross was ignorant of the history, but it was his attitude to the bits of history that he DID KNOW that I was objecting to. Runciman would not have been ignorant of the history, but his attitude toward that Turkish "official viewpoint" was similar to Kinross, and was less excusable because of his greater knowledge and greater influence. In the 1950s and 1960s if people like Runciman, Charles Burney, Seton Lloyd, and many other well-known academics, had not remained silent but had objected to those Turkish views, then there would probably be far more Armenian monuments surviving in Turkey. And Turkish society in general would be in a better place. But they prefered to take the short term view, care only for their particular field of interest, and do nothing that might put their research permits at risk.
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