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Maintaining The Memories Of Genocide

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  • Maintaining The Memories Of Genocide

    MAINTAINING THE MEMORIES OF GENOCIDE

    Los Angeles Times
    http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-hagopian-20101224,0,4147242.story
    Dec 24 2010
    CA

    The late J. Michael Hagopian escaped the mass murder that claimed
    the lives of as many as 1.5 million Armenians. Through his 12 films,
    the atrocity will remain visible to all who are willing to see.

    Most who suffer unspeakably at the hands of others look for ways to
    forget, to resume a normal life as best they can. Some, however,
    assume the duty of witness in the hope that truthful memory will
    protect those who come after them. The passing of these heroic men
    and women ought not to go unremarked upon.

    J. Michael Hagopian, who died this month in Thousand Oaks, was one
    such man. He was just 2 years old in 1915, when his parents hid him
    in a well behind their home because they believed they were about to
    be killed by Ottoman Turkish soldiers, who were massacring Armenians
    across eastern Anatolia. The soldiers ultimately passed them by because
    the boy's father, a physician, had treated his Turkish neighbors. The
    Hagopians immigrated to Fresno, escaping the mass murder that claimed
    the lives of as many as 1.5 million of their fellow Armenians in the
    20th century's first genocide.

    The toddler who'd sheltered in a well went on to earn advanced degrees
    from UC Berkeley and Harvard and to become a distinguished teacher at
    UCLA and Oregon State. His great contribution, though, was a series of
    12 moving - indeed, heartbreaking - films documenting the attempted
    genocide of his people. The most sweeping of these, "The Forgotten
    Genocide," was nominated for an Emmy in 1976. He appeared in one of
    his own films, "Voices From the Lake," recalling that his mother had
    told him, "You can kill a people, but their voices will never die."

    The voices of the Armenians still are struggling to be heard in some
    quarters. Contemporary Turkey, which has no political connection to the
    Ottomans, continues to defy history and decency, and denies the mass
    murder was the result of anything but wartime civil strife. It is a
    claim refuted by every serious observer in that period. Raphael Lemkin,
    the Polish lawyer of Jewish descent who coined the term "genocide"
    in 1943, began his lifetime's work on the subject by studying the
    organized murder of the Armenians and that of Iraq's Assyrians in 1933.

    Thanks to an agreement Hagopian reached last spring with USC's Shoah
    Foundation, his vast archive of firsthand testimony by Armenian
    genocide survivors and witnesses to the Ottoman atrocities will be
    preserved and made available for study by scholars. Because of his
    courage and the Shoah Foundation, the voices of the Armenians will
    continue speaking to all who are willing to hear.




    From: A. Papazian
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