This is a big week for the memory of genocide. Today is Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. At 1000 local time, the vibrant life of the entire state of Israel will come to a halt for two minutes, as people stop whatever they’re doing and remain motionless in silence.
Last year my inaugural post was about Robert Rozett’s five best picks of books on the Holocaust. I won’t add to that list, or to the ones I suggested then. But it wouldn’t be a bad thing if you took a couple of minutes at 1000 your time to stop what you’re doing and think about the triumph of evil when good men choose to do nothing.
But Yom Hashoah isn’t the only day of remembrance for this week. On Friday, 24th April, we commemorate the day in 1915 that the “modern” Turkish government led by the Young Turkey movement began the racial cleansing of Armenians within the Ottoman Empire.
By the time they were done, 1.5 million Armenians were dead.
These systematic massacres were documented at the time. Diplomatic and military representatives of Turkey's allies in World War I, Austria and Germany, wrote about and deplored the murders. But nations of the world community were busy either fighting or avoiding fighting in the war, and they averted their moral eyes.
Well, except for one young corporal serving as a runner in the Western Front. In 1939, when Adolf Hitler's generals questioned the opprobrium his command to wipe out every Pole (man, woman, child) who stood in the way of blitzkrieg would engender, he sanguinely asked, "Who now remembers the Armenians?"
Ever since then the Turkish government has consistently and vehemently denied these acts of mass murder. The most you ever got from them is that “some Armenians died along the route as we were resettling them away from the front.”
They’re so adamant about this that they imprison and punish their own citizens for bringing up the topic—to this day. And of course, if you want the Turks as your “allies”, you daren’t mention that little disturbance way back in the mists of time.
I come from Pasadena, a city with a very large Armenian population (increased during the Lebanese civil war in the 70s). We ran a couple of our grape vines out back to our neighbors' yard, so they could make dolmas without walking around the block to get the leaves.
It’s part of my home-memory that periodically there’d be news of some official from the Turkish consulate in LA being found dead in a burnt-out VW or the like a few blocks from where I lived. I didn’t understand it then, but I’ve come to see that it’s not just the genocide (and that’s what it is—after about 700K, you’ve moved from mass murder to genocide) that infuriates the Armenian community. It’s the denial of it.
And in the congress of nations this refusal to acknowledge the past not only impedes whatever forward progress Turkey might make. It seriously puts into doubt the country’s reliability as an ally, as NPR’s Scott Simon points out.
I understand that we need friends in the Middle East. But I’m not convinced that a nation that can eradicate 1.5 million of its citizens like spraying for roaches, and then spend the next 90 years refusing to admit the crime really has genuine friend potential.
Who now remembers the Armenians? We should.
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