Awareness of atrocities first step to preventing persecutions

By Helen E. Mardirosian

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.