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100 Years Of Genocide, Or Why My Grandfather Didn't Want To Be Armen

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  • 100 Years Of Genocide, Or Why My Grandfather Didn't Want To Be Armen

    100 YEARS OF GENOCIDE, OR WHY MY GRANDFATHER DIDN'T WANT TO BE ARMENIAN

    By MassisPost
    Updated: February 3, 2015

    By Pierce Nahigyan

    If my grandfather had it his way, he never would have been born
    Armenian.

    A Bostonian to the bone, and a fish monger at that, he once spent
    an afternoon telling me about all the work he lost on account of his
    race. "To hell with it," he said. "It's not worth it."

    He was descended from Soo-ren Nahigian, an atheist Bible salesman who
    changed the "i" in his last name to "y" on the hope that it would
    get folks to stop pronouncing the "g" like a "j." In the 100 years
    or so of Nahigyan family history, it has yet to do the trick.

    Soo-ren came to America for his education, but when it was time to
    return to Armenia his father wrote to him saying don't come back. My
    great-great grandfather was Kashador - or maybe Kachador - Nahigian,
    and he died with the rest of the Armenian Nahigians in 1915.

    My great-grandfather Soo-ren didn't talk about Armenia with my
    grandfather. My grandfather resented being Armenian to my father,
    and my father, second-generation and with a Bostonian accent thicker
    than his father's, was just a very hairy American. Because of this
    tumultuous family history, and because my father died when I was seven,
    and because my mother is as white as a loaf of Wonder, I didn't learn
    about the Armenian Genocide until I came upon a very disconcerting
    paragraph in my sixth grade History textbook.

    It is a quote by Adolf Hitler that is now inscribed on a wall in
    Washington, D.C.'s Holocaust Memorial Museum. The quote is from a
    speech he gave a week before the German invasion of Poland in 1939
    [emphasis added]:

    "I have issued the command - and I'll have anybody who utters but one
    word of criticism executed by a firing squad - that our war aim does
    not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction
    of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formations
    in readiness...with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and
    without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and
    language. Only thus shall we gain the living space which we need. Who,
    after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"

    No one in my life.

    I stared at the page and tried to fathom what exactly der fuhrer was
    talking about. Below the quote was another disconcerting paragraph
    mentioning that somewhere in the neighborhood of a million Armenians
    had been killed earlier that century. In my century. My life has
    been predicated, I suddenly realized, by a million, dead, unknown
    Armenians. Chief among them had always been my father, but behind him,
    I now knew, were the shades of not just ancestors but their neighbors,
    and their neighbors' wives and their children, and the villages where
    they lived in the twentieth century. Until they suddenly didn't,
    anymore.

    It was a very big thought for a very small paragraph, and for a very
    long time that day I didn't know what to think - because I kept asking
    myself why no one had mentioned this to me before. Because it is,
    still, a very big thought.

    "A single death is a tragedy," Josef Stalin is supposed to have said.

    "A million is a statistic."

    This April will mark the 100th year since the beginning of the
    Armenian, Assyrian and Greek Genocide. Its historic roots stretch back
    roughly 3,000 years and if I had that many pages to describe them I
    would still not have a decent explanation for you, because there are
    no decent explanations for killing a person, let alone 1.5 million.

    I can say that the killings began in 1915 and continued through 1923.

    Turkish soldiers and mercenaries took Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks
    into the Anatolian and Syrian deserts and made them march until they
    died. Some were shot, some were roped together and thrown in rivers,
    some were thrown off cliffs or burned alive, and some were crucified.

    There is evidence of these murders for anyone who goes looking
    for it, be it in photographs or around the hill of Margada in the
    eastern Syrian desert. Bones can still be found there buried in the
    shallow dirt.

    Children below a certain age were taken from their parents and, if
    not shot and buried in shared graves, given to Turkish families to
    be converted to Islam and raised Turkish. This offends me far less
    than more zealous Armenians, because, after all, the children did
    survive - even as their mothers, fathers and elder siblings were
    slaughtered and their homes given over to the Turks. What disturbs
    me more are the thousands of women who would go on to raise children
    born from the mass rapes of this era, and the decades of agony that
    follow these families unto the present day.

    The Western Front According to journalist Robert Fisk in his article,
    "The First Holocaust," U.S. diplomats were among the first to record
    the Armenian genocide. Leslie Davis was the American consul in Harput
    at the time and wrote an account of seeing "the remains of not less
    than ten thousand Armenians" around Lake Goeljuk. Germans, too, who
    had been dispatched to Turkey to help organize the Ottoman military,
    reported mass slaughters and even more abominable acts. In the United
    States itself, The New York Times first began reporting of Armenian
    rapes and exterminations as early as November 1914. British diplomats
    across the Middle East, Fisk writes, received first-hand dispatches of
    the systematic slaughter. Private diaries of Europeans living in the
    region at the time exist and contain grisly and despairing passages
    of the event.

    The West has known about this from the beginning. There is no disputing
    the fact that Armenians and other ethnic groups were massacred in
    Turkey in the early twentieth century.

    In Turkey, however, it is effectively illegal to admit this. Today,
    Article 301 of the Turkish penal code prohibits citizens from insulting
    the Turkish nation or government. Even suggesting that the Turks of
    100 years ago pursued an agenda of ethnic cleansing can be rewarded
    with death.

    Journalists have been killed for writing about the genocide. In truth,
    writing anything in Turkey can be hazardous to one's health. It ranks
    154th in the World Press Freedom Index (out of 179 listed countries),
    and is currently "the world's biggest prison for journalists."

    And because Turkey refuses to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide as
    a genocide, the United States, too, has remained mute on the subject.

    >From a legal standpoint, recognizing a genocide brings with it a host
    of complicated issues for a country - all of which perhaps pales in
    comparison to simply accepting blame for the planet's most heinous
    criminal act. Turkey is a rare international ally for America -
    a Middle Eastern state that retains a non-violent relationship with
    Israel. For that reason, the United States has refused to officially
    recognize the Armenian Genocide. Doing so would be politically
    impolite.

    This socio-political problem has transcended administrations and
    party lines. A resolution to recognize the Armenian Genocide was
    introduced by the 110th Congress in 2007, but then-President George
    Bush II publicly opposed it. Before succeeding the office, Barack Obama
    pledged that he would do what Bush could not. In 2006, Senator Obama
    criticized Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for firing John Evans,
    the Armenian Ambassador at the time, "after he properly used the term
    'genocide' to describe Turkey's slaughter of thousands of Armenians
    starting in 1915." Those are Obama's own words.

    "I shared with Secretary Rice my firmly held conviction that the
    Armenian Genocide is not an allegation, a personal opinion, or a point
    of view," he added, "but rather a widely documented fact supported
    by an overwhelming body of historical evidence."

    In 2008, Obama reiterated his stance: "America deserves a leader who
    speaks truthfully about the Armenian Genocide and responds forcefully
    to all genocides. I intend to be that President."

    In the six years since taking office, Obama has not been that
    President. He has refused to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide
    even once.

    With Justice for All I was not raised to hate Turks. As my mother
    would have it, I was not raised to hate anyone. But as I have grown up
    and learned more about the world and pursued my career in journalism,
    there is one prejudice that has been impossible to fight. I hate lies.

    I hate any form of enforced ignorance that claims "2 + 2 = 5" and
    strikes down the indomitable voices that scream "4" until they're
    silenced. By denying genocide, by denying the forced marches of
    Assyrians, of Greeks and of Armenians, by denying the tortures and
    the rapes, by denying the crucifixions and persecutions, Turkey is
    denying a final peace for so many. And they have been doing so for
    far too long.

    My grandfather doesn't think of himself as Armenian. He is a Bostonian
    first and a New Englander second, an American third and a businessman
    fourth. This fight for recognition is not his fight. This is not to
    say he bears no love for his father's country; it is simply that time
    has moved on, America is now his home, its pledge the only allegiance
    he knows. The stories and the prayers of Kashador - or Kachador - and
    the traditions of the dead Nahigians are now a century extinguished.

    What I've learned about Armenia has come from books, from fellow
    Armenians who have reached out, and from a diaspora that refuses to
    let the wax of its own dying candles cool. It wants what any culture
    wants, what any human deserves - and that is the truth.

    My grandfather never wanted to be Armenian. But I am. And one hundred
    years later, I know how much that means.

    Pierce Nahigyan is the editor-in-chief of Planet Experts
    (http://www.planetexperts.com/author/piercen/).

    His articles have appeared in several publications, including Foreign
    Policy Journal, Intrepid Report, the Los Angeles Post-Examiner,
    New Internationalist and SHK Magazine.

    http://massispost.com/2015/02/100-years-of-genocide-or-why-my-grandfather-didnt-want-to-be-armenian/

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