It was a bit surprising to see a somewhat obscure bit of World War 1 history make headlines this week. I was dozing over a cup of tea when CNN broke in with the upheaval being caused by a House resolution condemning the Armenian genocide perpetrated by the Turks during the war.
I perked up, not only because it was an actual piece of news and not a bunch of drivel about Britney Spears and her lack of parenting skills, but an actual story about history colliding with current events.
I was a history major in college and now just a joe history buff, with a brain full of relatively useless knowledge, history trivia, and the ability to kick some ass at Trivial Pursuit at times. I do have other history geek friends and we have these long form discussions about stuff hardly anyone else cares or knows about.
The tragedy about how history is taught and presented in this country is that it is presented as boring facts about people who are long since dead and dates that these events happened. They teach history as if it is an exercise in examining a corpse. It is not. History is alive. We live everyday with the decisions of our ancestors, both their blessings and their curses. Believe me, our grandchildren will feel the consequences of the war in Iraq and Bush's presidency. I feel I can say it might be less of a "blessing" than our so-called "Christian" President may imagine.
The Armenian genocide question is an example of this happening today. Armenians were an ethnic/religious minority living Turkey during the first World War. Turkey was aligned with Germany against Great Britain, Russia, France (and after 1917) the United States. Prior to the war, there had been some persecution of the Armenians, but in 1915, it began in earnest and apparently in an organized fashion. Armenian towns were cleared out and mass murder occurred, there were incidents of torture and hideous violence, rape, and kidnapping of Armenian women. The people who survived this (mostly women and young children, since most of the men were killed) were sent on a forced march out of Turkey to Syria. With no food, shelter or supplies, and terrorized by the Turkish army "escorting" them out of the country, many more thousands died horribly on the march to Syria.
To learn more I highly recommend two books by Peter Balakian: "The Burning Tigris" and "Black Dog of Fate." Also, another pesonal memoir of the Armenian genocide "Not Even My Name" by Thea Halo. In the "Burning Tigris" Balakian examines the American response to the Armenian genocide, which was a first for international relief efforts of the United States. Back then, Americans knew about the fate of the Armenians and had concentrated charitable efforts. Now it seems that we want to forget to appease our Turkish friends who help us get our arms and supplies into Iraq for today's war.
The reason I even became interested in the Armenian genocide topic is that when I was in graduate school studying history I did a research project on a wonderful, awesome Portland native named Esther Pohl Lovejoy. Esther was the first woman to graduate from the University of Oregon medical school. After medical school she married a fellow med school student and they traveled to the Klondike during the gold rush, tragically her husband and her toddler son died there. Esther came back to Portland and became the city's first woman health officer in 1909. (Before women could vote!) She was responsible for pushing through the effort to get the city its first motorized ambulance, and fought a potential outbreak of bubonic plague that came to Portland through our port! At America's entry into World War 1 she approached the Army about offering her services as a doctor overseas. The army said no, they would not permit a woman doctor, she could go as a nurse. Esther, realizing that it was futile to try to convince the Army that she was a capable doctor in spite of being a woman, connected to other women doctors and formed the American Women's Medical Association in Philadelphia. This group of women went over to Europe and found ample need among the civilians of war torn countries.
This wonderful woman and her comrades attended to refugee populations, including, incredibly, some surviving Armenian refugees in Syria and Greece. This intrigued me, and I wanted to find out more about the Armenian genocide. Then I read Balakian's books.
In this case old man history is really alive and kicking. The descendants of survivors want acknowledgement of the genocide. They want Turkey to be accountable for what occurred. They want the history of their people known. Turkey claims that the death of the Armenians were just a tragic by-product of a war that killed millions and millions of people, not an organized campaign by the Turkish government to exterminate Armenians. The Armenians argue that because the genocide was forgotten, that because there was no concerted international recognition and response, it fueled the holocaust. Hitler himself, before discussing his "final solution" for European Jewry, counted on it - Hitler said "For who now remembers the Armenians?"
The descendants of the survivors want acknowlegement for more intense, personal reasons as well. They as a people suffered greatly.
The Turks, for their part vehemently deny the Armenians claims to this day. It is illegal to mention the Armenian genocide in Turkey. They persecuted the author of "The Bastard of Instanbul" for mentioning it, and he was saved by an outcry by Amnesty International. The Turks have funded history chairs at Ivy League universities, and exercised their power in the United States to make sure no formal acknowledgement of the genocide by the United States is ever successful. The fact that they pulled their envoy, and that this resolution about an event 90 years in the past is causing such a ruckus is no suprise.
All this to say, history is not bunk as Henry Ford said. We are for better or worse born into it, we cling to our version of it, we make it and remake it everyday. It has been said "We may be through with the past, but the past isn't through with us."
