THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE AND THE ETHICS OF REMEMBRANCE

FrontPage Magazine
April 15 2015

April 15, 2015 by Vladimir Tismaneanu and Marius Stan

“To conceal or deny Evil is the same as allowing a wound to bleed
without bandaging it.”

This statement by Pope Francis in April 2015 was linked to the first
official Vatican use of the word genocide to deplore and condemn
the state-sponsored mass murders perpetrated against a huge civilian
population a hundred years ago in what used to be the Ottoman Empire.

The Pope is right: Forgetfulness, denial, and silence cannot but
perpetuate a culture of complicity with Evil.

The massacre of a million and a half Armenians (men, women, elderly
people, and children) initiated in April 1915 and appallingly
completed by 1923, was the first genocidal experience of what an
American historian called the age of social catastrophes. That
exterminist cataclysm was the Armenians’ Holocaust. We use the term
exterminist in the sense put forward by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen in
his book “Hitler’s Willing Executioners.” The purpose was not just
exclusion and elimination, but complete annihilation of the targeted
collectivity, in this case the Armenians, later the Jews, the Gypsies,
the Tutsis and so on. It was not a spontaneous explosion of murderous
hatred, but a meticulously designed and methodically executed plan
to physically destroy those labeled as sub-humans or even non-humans.

Killing an Armenian–or later a Jew, a Kulak, a Bosnian, any member of
a community stigmatized as superfluous (a term introduced by Hannah
Arendt)–was the same as getting rid of a pernicious insect. The
hateful genocidal propaganda always referred to the “obnoxious
vermin.” Symbolic dehumanization made way for physical termination.

Ideology precedes and legitimizes the hecatomb. The ultimate goal is
the ethnically or socially pure (and purified) community.

For Hitler, who openly admired Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and saw himself
as a “Father of the Nation,”, the Armenian massacre (the term genocide
had not been coined yet) was proof that humankind is quick to forget,
that one should not be held back by moral reservations.

Totalitarianism bets everything on opportunism, cowardice, and
amnesia. And, most obviously, on sadism–be it social or racial.

In conversations with his minions, Hitler used to mention the following
when explaining the “necessity” to exterminate the European Jews:
“Who even remembers the Armenian annihilation nowadays?” What is truly
terrifying is that many of those who committed these mass murders
seemed normal people, persons who “wouldn’t hurt a fly” (a point made
by Croatian writer Slavenka DrakuliÄ~G in her book “They Would Never
Hurt a Fly” ). They wouldn’t harm an ant, but mercilessly massacred
women and children. And even took pictures of it…

Here is a copy of a famous painting by Arshile Gorky, born Vosdanig
Adoian. Alongside creations by Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock,
Gorky’s work was American Abstract Expressionism’s moment of supreme
glory. The artist was himself a genocide survivor, his mother died
of starvation in 1918.

It is admirable that Pope Francis urges humanity not to forget
Evil and we agree with his stance. In the spirit of Albert Camus,
Nadezhda Mandelstam, and Monica Lovinescu, we advocate the ethics of
unforgetfulness. Because remembrance is always the result of a will
not to forget Evil. The democratic ethos is rooted in this need to
acknowledge the tragedies of the past. Forgiveness cannot be granted
in the absence of repentance. Yet we dare to wonder whether the term
“Stalinism” used by Pope Francis in his speech (together with Nazism)
is clear enough to help understand that it comprises the communist
crimes of the last century, including those perpetrated by Maoism.

Just between 1958 and 1961, during the so-called “Great Leap Forward”,
45 millions of Chinese citizens died.

These crimes against humanity have been genocidal. They should be
called by name, known, condemned, and commemorated with sorrow and
empathy, regardless of what the various chancelleries specialized in
the diplomatic concealing of the truth might say. Regardless of what
the self-proclaimed experts in “linguistic hygiene” might say.

To conclude, we recommend here Charles Aznavour’s moving song “Ils
sont tombés.”

Vladimir Tismaneanu is a professor of politics at the University of
Maryland (College Park) and author of numerous books, including most
recently “The Devil in History: Communism, Fascism, and Some Lessons of
the Twentieth Century.” Marius Stan is a Romanian political scientist,
author of books in Romanian and Polish, and currently a postdoctoral
fellow at the University of Bucharest. This essay was translated from
Romanian into English by Monica Got.

From: A. Papazian