2015

[bell-the-cat]

Re: 2015

That's an interesting comparison, bell.

I'm probably oversimplifying things a bit there. In East Germany at the end of the war there were massive purges that affected anyone found to be or considered to be part of the Nazi regime, so there were many deportations and most civil servants and teachers were dismissed. But for the ordinary population there was not the requirement to have the feeling of collective guilt that existed (and that was encouraged to exist) in West Germany. It was only their former leaders who were at fault and had caused the disaster that had befallen Germany - and with the implication that those leaders were still entrenched in the purge and deportation-free West Germany. In East Germany, political parties (provided they were anti-fascist ones) were allowed by Russia to be establised in 1945, but in West Germany it was not until the 1949 that Germans there were considered "reformed" enough to be permitted to have political parties and engage in elections.

I remember seeing on ebay a strange book, a late 1940s soviet-era propaganda publication full of East German cartoons, in which the leaders of the West were quite explicitely identified as working with the Nazis and as being their successors. I wonder if I kept any of the sample images. Hitler, Churchill, and Roosevelt walking hand in hand, plotting together, that sort of thing. It does show that a population can be made to believe the most bizzare things and made to forget the truth (which explains a lot of the attitudes in today's Azerbaijan).

[TomServo]

Re: 2015

What's troubling is that while the Soviet-era East German propaganda was most likely produced for internal consumption, Azerbaijan has been exporting and spreading its anti-Armenian agitprop. And in a world of craven politicians, academics and Wikipedia administrators, nobody wants to be the one to say "wait a minute -- this is all bullshyt," so their temper tantrums are tolerated time and time again.

[TomServo]

Re: 2015

But my question is whether any of you know about the Azerbaijan SSR's reaction to genocide recognition? Since independence, it has emerged as the second state to deny the genocide at a governmental level, perhaps even more vehemently (and often, preposterously) than Turkey. But when the genocide was recognized by the Soviet Union, there was still a sizable Armenian minority within Azerbaijan, especially in Baku. Did the Azerbaijanis begin denying the genocide when the Karabagh movement gained traction or were they opposed to recognition before? I do not wish to conflate the Armenian and Azerbaijani Tatar conflicts in the Caucasus with the genocide of the Ottoman Armenians here -- I am asking about the latter, not the former.

Was reading this article on the bygone days of cosmopolitan Baku (which includes interviews with Azerbaijanis) and came across this:

We all knew how to react when Armenians would say ‘bizimdir, bizimdir, bizimdir’ (ours, ours, ours). It wasn’t all that nice. And sometimes you’d just want to stop and say, ‘Look, you live here, ‘Sizindir, da!’’ (Isn’t Baku what is yours?). But we would just laugh it off. Someone would be saying, ‘Ararat is ours, Karabagh is really ours’, and someone would break in, ‘And Novgorod?’ And we would all laugh. The jokes were, of course, legendary. . . . The Brezhnev period was such a time of humor because, who knows? Who could survive such nonsense? There was such an extraordinary difference between what people heard from up above and how people actually lived, people fed off of this irony. People just understood that talk about the genocide, Karabagh, Ararat – these things we had heard about all our lives – was just part of some Armenian inventory, part of their repertoire. The point is that it never came to conflict. We never came to blows over that.