“Who, After All, Speaks Today Of The Annihilation Of The Armenians?”

Ruminant With A View

SANTORINI, GREECE — (OfficialWire) — 10/14/07 — Elizabeth Boleman-Herring“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 formation 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?”

Thus spoke Adolf Hitler in 1939, his words demonstrating clearly two things we all actually know to be true: we learn by example, and we are all quite capable of unleashing our inner Hitlers, our inner Mehmet Talet Pashas.

Hitler’s “Final Solution” was not a novel idea; nor was the Ottoman government’s systematic 1915-1917 deportation-to-death campaign that resulted in the extermination of some 1.5 million Armenians. The compulsion to commit genocide is a permanent hue darkening the wide palette of human capabilities. To deny that we are all capable of turning on fellow human beings we conceive of as “other,” as “not us,” as “infidels,” as “intruders,” as “expendable,” as “sub-human,” etc., etc., is akin to denying our common humanity.

Denial. The Number One stage of grief, according to the late, visionary, Swiss psychiatrist, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.

When I read Turkish president Abdullah Gul’s latest proclamations in Friday’s International Herald Tribune, I immediately thought of Kübler-Ross. There are the bones of 1.5 million Armenians gently disintegrating under President Gul’s nose, right in his back yard, just down the street, as it were, and all he can say is that the US congressional committee vote to condemn the mass killings of Armenians in Turkey in World War I as an act of genocide “was an irresponsible move,” “an attempt to sacrifice big issues for minor domestic political games.”

Perhaps Dr. Kübler-Ross should—like the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and To Come—pay President Gul (and President Bush, and quite a few other idiots-in-power) a visit. The Five Stages of Grief, so brilliantly outlined in Kübler-Ross’s 1969 book, On Death & Dying, might just as well be called the Five Stages of Guilt. Grief and guilt are first cousins, at the very least, and perhaps siblings. Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance. Five responses to a horrific event, a horrific loss and, I posit, a horrific crime. And President Gul, and the Turks in general, have a long, long way to go, it seems, before they reach “Acceptance,” until they “own” and “own up to” the atrocities committed by their “tribe” against “an other.”

Here and now, I myself want to own up to the Hitler within me, the Custer within me, the Stalin within me, the Klansman within me, the Pol Pot within me, the so-called Israeli “settler” within me, the slave-ship owner, and, oh, so many other cast members who inhabit even my small, usually peaceable soul. I accept my part in every genocide that has ever been enacted, that will ever be enacted, and I accept my responsibility to shout, “Fire!”, even in a crowded theater: to state, loudly and clearly and as soon as possible, that a genocide has occurred, is occurring, will occur.

And I, as an American citizen state now, for the record, that my tax dollars have helped finance the genocide now occurring in Iraq. My words may do nothing to stop the killing, but I will not participate in the sleepy denial of most of my country-people. My “tribe” is wiping out thousands of another “tribe,” for oil and for “space” (for military bases), just as the Turks wiped out the Armenians, the Christian “others” in their midst, to seize Armenian lands and possessions. Oh, it’s such an old story, Such an old story, too, denial.

In reality, the Armenian genocide began circa 1896, and proceeded through 1908/9 and World War I, right up to 1923, according to Hebrew University’s Yehuda Bauer. It was called “Turkification” by a member of Germany’s diplomatic mission to Turkey (c. 1915) and, by Winston Churchill, “an administrative holocaust.” (He did have a way with words, unlike Hitler, Bush and Gul.) By any name, it was genocide, and the sooner we all accept and admit that that smell beneath our noses emanates from 1.5 million murdered Armenians, the better.

To paraphrase Pogo (oh best, now elderly beloved), I have beheld the enemy, and it is I, President Gul. I have beheld the enemy, and it is you; I, us, President Bush. Say it, and begin to free yourself. Say it, and begin to atone. Say 1.5 million Armenians died at the hands of the Turks and their hired Kurdish thugs. Say that thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens have died, are dying, will die, due to our insane incursion into Iraq. Say that the “other” you perceive as the enemy, the “to-be-exterminated,” even if “collaterally,” is none other than yourself.

Ah, Christ, I’m just bombinating in the void—don’t I know it. That indelible hue will reamin in my, your, Gul’s, Bush’s palette, bleeding into the other colors. Nothing I can say will erase it.

I’m sure you’ve all now heard about Ann Coulter(-geist)’s exchange with (Jewish journalist) Donny Deutsch, in which the inimitable Coulter ‘llowed as how she believes “we [i.e. Christians] just want the Jews to be perfected,” and “that is what Christians consider themselves: perfected Jews.” Bless Ann Coulter’s little black-eyed-pea of a heart, she’s just so out there, so direct: no denial lurking in her stuffy little soul.

The “other” needs to “be perfected,” to be made over in the image of. . .me, my tribe. Then, everything will be just hunky-dory. We’ll all be svelte, Christian, blonde, blue-eyed, heterosexual, Republican. . .and peace and harmony will reign.

Not so fast, my pretties. Eventually, the dirty-blonde, East-Coast Republicans will turn on the true-blonde, West-Coast Republicans, and the urge to commit genocide will come roaring out of the bottle, like the genie.

We. Have. To. Stop. This.

We. Have. To. Recognize. Each. And. Every. Genocide.

And we all have to atone.

My father, a psychoanalyst, born in 1915, used to urge me to eat my hated vegetables, admonishing me to remember the starving Armenians. In the early 1950’s, in Pasadena, California, the only Armenian I knew of was actor Danny Thomas. And starvation was an inconceivable concept. Now, I know better. And so do you.

– http://www.officialwire.com/main.ph...