What did the Armenian Genocide have to do with extermination?

Answer 1

The Armenian Genocide was the attempt by the Young Turks to completely exterminate the Armenian population of Anatolia and much of the Ottoman Empire.

This attempt to commit genocide, which is a full scale extermination, was very well planned. Given that the Young Turks were claiming (without evidence) that the Armenians were subversive, the methods used to achieve that outcome make little sense. The first group of Armenians attacked and murdered were the Armenian intellectuals in Istanbul, which were the very people who would be most attached to the Ottoman State and willing to argue against independence in their communities. It makes sense to kill intellectuals if you are trying to destroy an ethnic group, not if you are trying to pacify internal disquiet. Next, entire villages were expunged of the majority-Armenian, majority-Greek, and majority-Assyrian inhabitants and the names of the cities completely altered to create "theoretical" Turkish names in a process called Turkification. Again it would not make sense to target a civilian population if the threat is a military one, but it makes perfect sense to target a civilian population if genocide is the goal. The Armenians were marched to Deir ez-Zur in the Syrian desert without food and water (the Pontic Greeks and the Assyrians were marched to other places). There were numerous massacres and concentration camps along the route to Deir ez-Zur. That genocide was the goal is basically assured. This is not to mention the courageous work of Gregoris Balakian who detailed how the system was organized.