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Awareness of atrocities first step to preventing persecutions
GENOCIDE: Todays youth can change future, must speak boldly, take action
We mourn death, we cry for those who pass and their souls linger in our hearts and minds. Yet, something of great peculiarity to the human condition is the tendency to intermingle the two poles of life and death, dark and light. Eighty-six years ago one and a half million Armenian people were brutally massacred at the hands of the Ottoman Turks. The systematic extermination of my ancestry leaves me with many haunting thoughts and pensive spirits. Death preceded my life, yet I know that nothing but life and progression must follow.
Imagine a feeble old woman, cloaked in black from head to toe. Her hands quake with age. You can see the glint of terror in her eyes as she tells a story that brings shame to her modest sense of womanhood. She recalls a circle of Armenian virgin brides, whipped and forced to dance before the Turkish soldiers.
The female forms writhe as the flames lick their bodies. The lewd soldiers leer and chant as they anoint the scorching bodies with more kerosene.
The old woman continues through her path of recollections to find piles of decapitated bodies. A few feet down the road are their heads posted upon wooden stakes. The Turkish soldiers prized these heads as a hunter would regard his game. The aged body of this lady quivers with her tears. She does not want to continue, but the horror of the sights are relentless.
The years have not dulled the crimson of the blood spilled, the decades have not quieted the sounds of the victims' cries. The magnitude of inhumanity witnessed and the brutality experienced transcend time. Something so inhumane defies all laws of time and space.
Generations later, her words make my own body quake with a shudder. The past lives on in the minds and actions of its youth. The unspeakable crimes committed against my forefathers must be verbalized. It has taken our people years to get to this point of open communication.
To understand this, one must understand the Armenian culture. The concept of modesty and humility is paramount. It is a triumph in itself to have an aging Armenian woman speak of such horrendous violations. She felt shame for those women who died, yet their nakedness provoked the baring of her own soul.
Our youth feels no shame for these atrocities. The same atrocities that warranted silence in our elders now provoke vocalization in our youth. We have overcome the silence and shattered the barriers that stifled our ancestors' cries. The next motion of remembrance is through the action of the Armenian youth.
In recalling our painful past, we strive harder to live and grow. We take death and suffering and we find the strength of will and determination necessary to rebuild and regenerate. In celebrating our culture and protesting all crimes against humanity, all genocides, all brutalities, we defy the darkness of death. We shed light on death and make it something to grow and emerge from.
I have spoken as an Armenian thus far, but first and foremost, I speak as a human being. The 20th century has been a bloodbath in the tub of civilization. The World Wars preoccupied governments, and larger political maneuvers took precedence over the more vital issues of life, civility and justice. To have an era that boasts of its advances commit some of the most heinous crimes imaginable to humankind renders its people a hollow shell, lifeless and cold.
This past century opened with the Armenian Genocide as the first in a long list of brutality committed in the name of mass hatred. Even to this day, we hear of how callous people can be, how maliciously prejudice manifests.
Governments deny, look away and forget. When politics dictate protocol, power and wealth instruct righteousness to see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.
I speak to my fellow students. I beseech the entire student body to see, hear and speak of past horrors so as to prevent future atrocities from occurring. Every individual who has felt the pain of betrayal and victimization, no matter how displaced or distant in time, has an obligation to fellow humankind.
I have spoken of one massacre in the name of all crimes against humanity. The Armenian Genocide proved it is possible for the world to sleep while hell is realized for an entire race of people. To this day, people are slaughtered in the name of furthering civilization while the fundamental precept of civility is undermined by the butchery of fellow humans.
By visualizing the slayings, hearing the wailing victims, and speaking against the carnage, we have faced evil. We can walk into the dark past of this world and illuminate it with our awareness. By commemorating, testifying, and making the past live in our minds, words and actions, we can resurrect a life force from the sorrows of death.
In acknowledging the first genocide of the last century, we ensure that
there will not be one to mark the next one.
Armenian, Assyrian and Hellenic Genocide News Archives