‘From humanitarian catastrophe to planetary armageddon: plotting the 1922 Smyrna “holocaust” through an Anthropocene lens’

How should we understand the Asia Minor catastrophe as encapsulated in the Smyrna ‘holocaust’ of September 1922? As a specific tragedy inflicted on Greeks, Armenians and the other peoples ethnically cleansed and/or, genocided by Kemal Atatürk, and, thus, forever engraved within their specific cultural memories? Or as something over and beyond genocide; a powerful indicator, perhaps, of the trajectory of twentieth-century prometheanism and ‘development’, of system dysfunction, even of the cul-de-sac condition of human society in its Anthropocene twilight? In this piece we argue that traditional historical method is no longer adequate nor sufficient to understanding a catastrophic event such as Smyrna, set against probable civilisational collapse as a near-term consequence of the contemporary anthropogenic assault on the planet. Instead we seek to interrogate the accelerated nature of human-induced cataclysm since Smyrna as well as within a deeper history of catastrophism, in order to consider its significance within a global human ‘civilisation’ hurtling towards biospheric nemesis.