24 April 1915: "Red Sunday"—The deportation (& eventual massacre) of Armenian intellectuals from Constantinople, capital of the Ottoman Empire, the formal beginning of the Armenian Genocide.
Lest we forget.
The Savage Wars of Peace
I briefly considered placing "Never again" next to our customary closing exhortation, "Lest we forget." When I was a younger man, I embraced the words "Never again," especially their use in the context of the Holocaust during the Second World War & the Armenian Genocide during the First World War. This after watching as the "international community" turned its head & sat on its hands during the 1994 Rwandan Genocide & being utterly bewildered that such a thing could be allowed to happen. In the two decades since, I've grown cynical; I regard "Never again" as the blackest of gallows humor. A more honest, though less flattering, declaration of purpose—or rather purposelessness—would be "Ever again." The world will never tire of tut-tutting all manner of atrocities & bloodlettings, will never tire of holding symposia on "what should be done," which is code for prattling on until the most-recent unpleasantness is mercifully pushed off the front page by the latest salacious celebrity news or hyperbolic domestic political fracas. The world will ever again say that such horrors cannot be tolerated, & will then carry on merrily tolerating them.
I'm so wearied by popular indifference that I have no grand, coherent point to make. One hundred years after the Armenian Genocide, the Turkish government continues to deny that it happened, & yet Turkey is not treated as a pariah. I'm rendered inarticulate by a cocktail of pity, fatigue, & rage. I haven't time to read anything else, but I've requested Samantha Power's "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide from the library, I suppose as a salve.
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