ARMENIAN GENOCIDE: A LESSON TO BE LEARNED
By Geghard Arakelian
Valley Sun, CA
April 19 2007
Guest Column:
Every year some light is shed on the atrocities that took place from
1915 to 1917 in Armenia; what follows is community support, genocidal
awareness and bigotry.
To start off, the Armenian Genocide was executed by what was known
as the Young Turk Government. This government viewed the Armenian
population that lived in the Ottoman Empire as second class citizens.
Through deceit and with extreme prejudice death squads were sent out
to round up Armenians and murder them mercilessly. It is estimated
that more than one million Armenian men, women and children died due
to this process.
Expansionism and ethnocentrism are two of the most cited reasons
these actions were carried out by the Turks.
Unfortunately there are people who grow tiresome and even irate by the
coming and going of the protests and information offered on either
TV or in the schools of the Glendale Unified School District every
April 24, the date in 1915 when the attrocities began.
But why should anyone feel annoyed or angered when it comes to
remembering those who died unreasonable and unjust deaths so long
ago? The answer is actually very simple: there are bigots among us.
When I was attending Crescenta Valley High School an acquaintance of
mine at school explained to me that he was upset about the observance
of April 24. When asked why, he said all Armenians deserved to die
because there is no proof of what the Turks did and that Armenians
are normally liars.
Two years later a math teacher turned off the classroom TV as soon
as a slideshow of the genocide was played following the televised
bulletin. He claimed that every year the same information was,
"shoved down his throat" and that remembrance needs to be given to
countries that have experienced greater mass exterminations. A few
classmates even backed him.
The Armenian Genocide should be remembered as much as possible. Those
who believe that the Turkish government should take responsibility
for the crimes of the past have no intentions of taking spotlights
off people of other ethnic backgrounds.
Mass killings aren’t like "American Idol," they’re definitely not
popularity contests and the killings are not tallied from cell
phone texts.
Those skeptical about what happened tend to argue that Armenians
weren’t the only ones that were at one point dealt a brutal hand.
After all, there are the causalities of all the wars in history and
every country on this planet has lived through some dark days.
But one cannot take the Armenian Genocide and throw into a general
pile of genocides without a label. The genocide of 1915 was an evil
crime against man and not simply against Armenians.
But the cultural and ethnic tag of any massacre can tell us where,
when, how and why it happened.
Imagine if people professed that the Holocaust should not be recognized
– that all Jews should shut their mouths because people are force
fed the same information and have seen Schindler’s List a dozen
times. What then? Do we go about forgetting why Hitler provoked a
war of aggression?
No one is asking people to stop their day for what happened in 1915,
those who are raising awareness are only asking that people take a
small fraction of effort to remember what happened so that it may
never happen again.
Hitler once asked, "Who after all will remember the Armenian
Genocide?" I’ve answered this question many times before and in the
same fashion: certainly not those who don’t want it remembered.
This April 24 egos, prejudice and apathy have to be put aside. Don’t
think of it as a day that Armenians want to start a ruckus. Think of
it as a day to remember those who died and the reasons for why they
were killed.
Why should people learn how the wrong came about? Simple intuition
leads me to believe it will teach people how to prevent the same
wrong from happening again.
If the reader is still uncertain of all the above then answer this
question: If you and your family were about to be brutally murdered for
an unjust reason, wouldn’t you want your last cries to be remembered
for generations on end?