Bloxham identifies McCarthy's work as part of a wider project of undermining scholarship affirming the Armenian Genocide, by reducing it to something analogous to a population exchange. Bloxham writes that McCarthy's work "to muddy the waters for external observers, conflating war and one-sided murder with various discrete episodes of ethnic conflict... [A series of easy get-out clauses for Western politicians and non-specialist historians keen not to offend Turkish opinion." Samuel Totten and Steven L. Jacobs write that Shaw's and his adherents' (especially Lowry and McCarthy) publications have "striking similarities to the arguments used in the denial of the holocaust": labeling the alleged genocide as a myth by wartime propaganda, portraying the presumed victims as having been real security threats, discounting eye-witness accounts, asserting that deaths occurred were from the same causes that carried away all peoples in the region, minimizing the number of victims, and so on. Likewise, Ronald Grigor Suny maintains that the number of Armenian Genocide deniers is small (the most prominent being Shaw, McCarthy, Lowry and Lewis) but "their influence is great by virtue of pernicious alliance with the official campaign of falsification by the government of Turkey".