Originally posted by Yedtarts
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Turks use Western academia perhaps as "revisionism" to attack the Armenian church's historiography we cling onto, which in this day and age, taken on its own 'without further inquiries'/'at face value', holds no currency outside of Armenia, just like the historiography told by the Old Testament without any serious re-analysis because to do so is to question the word of God, holds no academic currency either. So by holding onto this church history of ours, of course it becomes very easy to see some kind of "international conspiracy theory" run by "xxxs and Turks, who want to wipe us out". In reality, what is going on here is just coincidental preferences of some findings made by Western scholars about Armenia that suit the interests of Turks to make a lot of noise about in order to attack the legitimacy of our history in other areas where there is less ground to disprove, such as perhaps, the fact that Eastern Turkey is a homeland to Armenians. The western scholars would never say such a thing, and by attacking them just because Turks use their work out of context to attack our history in an academically bankrupt way... is just as ridiculous as what the Turks are doing.
In reality, the intent on the part of western scholars to make these conclusions that are so outrageous to Armenians such as that interviewer, is nowhere near genocidal. In fact they are eager to work with Armenians for linguistic and archaeological purposes and do not wish to steal any credit from Armenia for discoveries they have found about her history. What they don't defend are stories about Armenia's history which stand on shaky ground, such as the conclusion that Movses Khorenatsi's history of Armenia being written by a single author in the 5th century, without question. Or about how the Armenian Alphabet came into Mesrop Mashtots' head from a divine dream. The only people who would defend those things (and be outraged by scholars who don't defend them, but openly challenge their legitimacy) are patriotic Armenians who are not coming from the same worldview as these scholars, and are not familiar with academia, and thus are oblivious to ways it can actually be used to Armenia's advantage. It reminds me of a similar situation with Tibet and China... On the one hand, the western academia which doesn't begin from a Tibetan Buddhist historiographic standpoint, contradicts the mythical beliefs of Tibetans being held as historical facts, and on the other, proves beyond question through its diligent inspection of facts about Tibetan civilization and its chronology (even if the story being told contradicts the traditional religious narrative of Tibetans) that China is occupying land that it cannot claim as Chinese in history and culture. This is a very similar situation to what is going on between Armenians and Turks concerning the regions that are being denied by Turks as being historically Armenian in not just demographics, but also in civilization.
Of course if people start to question our traditional myths taken as truth, it's gonna anger Armenians who take the church stories to be the real deal. But the fact of the matter is, international academia will be as reluctant to accept, at a wholesale level, the credibility of an anachronistic story, or a divinely written alphabet when records reveal human records of its characters used up to 800 years prior to the earliest attestation of the Armenian Alphabet, than they would accept the idea that Turks are descended from a she-wolf and that the islands of Turks & Caicos was colonized by Turkish merchants in the 15th or 16th century, navigating out of the Mediterranean sea, across the ocean to the Caribbean, just because that's part of "Turkish History", and is apparently good for any healthy, patriotic Turk to know about.
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