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  • TelAviv: When whitewashing wins out

    Ha'aretz, Israel
    Dec 30 2011


    When whitewashing wins out

    We have here a struggle between the hypocritical good guys (Europe )
    and the sincere bad guys (Turkey and sometimes Israel ), who've not
    accepted the fact that history is nothing but a sequence of
    narratives.

    By Benny Ziffer

    Any cultured nation that rummages around in its past will find that
    its ancestors were responsible for horrible, intolerable deeds.
    National memory, however, is usually quick to falsify history, and
    lend it a respectable aura.

    To understand the magnitude of the distortion and inhumanity entailed
    in such a process, it suffices to read the books of the late
    German-American historian George Mosse, who studied the falsification
    mechanism of the collective modern-European memory. The European
    countries took the trouble - and are still doing so - not only to
    cover up the horrors they perpetrated on members of other nations, but
    above all to conceal the magnitude of the murderousness they inflicted
    on their own citizenry when, in all their national arrogance, they
    sent millions of young people to their deaths and then covered this up
    by establishing all kinds of commemorative rites and elaborate
    memorials.

    A number of nations on the margins of European culture have had the
    bad luck to have neglected, for various reasons, the colossal effort
    of cover-up and falsification, or woken up to it too late, thereby
    finding themselves the target of attacks from their more industrious
    sister-countries. For there is nothing more embarrassing - and
    therefore deserving of punishment - than publicly exposing things that
    most people do outside of the limelight.

    This, in my opinion, is the source of Europe's accusation of Turkey in
    the matter of the "Armenian Holocaust": "You idiots, of course it's
    clear all of us screwed up, but we have at least bothered to disguise
    things and lie properly, and to cover up the screw-ups with elaborate
    gilded monuments - whereas you fell asleep on your watch and present
    the world with a job half done. So: naughty, naughty, naughty you!"

    There is something especially embarrassing in the historical affair
    that has been named the Armenian Holocaust: After the historical
    account of the most terrible and absurd war of all, World War I was
    laundered and presented anew in a falsified way agreed on by all the
    cultured nations of Europe - all of a sudden a stubborn blot of truth
    appeared at the edges of the cover-up, which had not been dealt with
    properly. A huge screw-up. Not only the horror itself, but rather the
    fact that not enough was done to transform it into a rosy memory, the
    way the other cultured nations did with respect to the horrors taking
    place within their areas of responsibility during that war.

    That is to say, we have here above all a struggle between the
    hypocritical good guys (the nations of Europe ) and the sincere bad
    guys (Turkey, and by analogy, sometimes also Israel ), who in their
    foolishness have not accepted the fact that history is in any case
    nothing but a sequence of narratives. Or that the time has come to
    give up the passion for being absolutely right and to start being
    smart - i.e., hypocritical, i.e., prepared to update the national
    narrative in the spirit of the times.

    After all, there is nothing more fake and hypocritical - albeit also
    immeasurably effective and smart - than Germany's unambiguous
    acknowledgment of its responsibility for the Holocaust of European
    Jewry. In the long term, the narrative has proven itself perfectly,
    from Germany's perspective: The unquestioned acknowledgment of its
    responsibility has made it appear to be a responsible adult, worthy of
    leading the European Union. And thanks to Germany's courage in openly
    admitting its guilt, over time, people, including even the Jews, began
    to admire that country and to divert their hatred from it to the
    Poles, the Lithuanians and other small nations that collaborated with
    Nazi Germany.

    My late father, a native of Austria whose life was saved during World
    War II thanks to Turkey, was capable of throwing out of our a house a
    guest who dared to mention the Armenian Holocaust in his presence.
    Eventually, I myself traveled to eastern Turkey, where I saw the
    destroyed Armenian towns. In the city of Van I visited the museum the
    Turks built to commemorate the Armenian Holocaust: In their version,
    it was the Armenians who perpetrated a holocaust on the Turks and on
    themselves. Indeed, that same museum offers proof of the horrors
    inflicted with the help of the Russians on the inhabitants of eastern
    Turkey during World War I.

    According to official Turkish history, what came afterward was a
    drastic but legitimate response to the atrocities committed by the
    Armenians, who had hoped to establish a state of their own in eastern
    Turkey on the ruins of the sinking Ottoman Empire.

    Not long ago, during a visit to the annual Istanbul Book Fair, I
    stopped in front of the booth of the state of Azerbaijan. In one of
    the books I leafed though, my eyes lit upon a picture of a mass grave
    discovered in the city of Guba, where at the end of World War I
    Armenian troops buried the corpses of hundreds of Azeri Turks - among
    them, quite a number of Mountain Jews living in the area. All this is
    part of a continuing conflict between the Armenians and their Muslim
    neighbors, which has not ended to this day.

    Is there anyone who remembers the Armenian slaughter of Azeri Turks in
    the Nagorno-Karabakh region, which shocked the world when it took
    place, about 20 years ago? If anyone does, please keep quiet, because
    this is likely to spoil the accepted narrative.

    In other words: It is not fashionable these days to ask the question
    of who's absolutely right when dealing with conflicts between peoples.
    And the Turks, just like us, the Israelis, are tiring the world with
    childishly stubborn attempts to prove it was the others who started
    and that they were only reacting to their enemies' aggression, and so
    on and so forth. And the exhausted world mutters: "Okay, we get it -
    but for heaven's sake, when will you finally understand that what
    works nowadays is a nice narrative?"

    http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/week-s-end/when-whitewashing-wins-out-1.404545



    From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
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