Announcement

Collapse

Forum Rules (Everyone Must Read!!!)

1] What you CAN NOT post.

You agree, through your use of this service, that you will not use this forum to post any material which is:
- abusive
- vulgar
- hateful
- harassing
- personal attacks
- obscene

You also may not:
- post images that are too large (max is 500*500px)
- post any copyrighted material unless the copyright is owned by you or cited properly.
- post in UPPER CASE, which is considered yelling
- post messages which insult the Armenians, Armenian culture, traditions, etc
- post racist or other intentionally insensitive material that insults or attacks another culture (including Turks)

The Ankap thread is excluded from the strict rules because that place is more relaxed and you can vent and engage in light insults and humor. Notice it's not a blank ticket, but just a place to vent. If you go into the Ankap thread, you enter at your own risk of being clowned on.
What you PROBABLY SHOULD NOT post...
Do not post information that you will regret putting out in public. This site comes up on Google, is cached, and all of that, so be aware of that as you post. Do not ask the staff to go through and delete things that you regret making available on the web for all to see because we will not do it. Think before you post!


2] Use descriptive subject lines & research your post. This means use the SEARCH.

This reduces the chances of double-posting and it also makes it easier for people to see what they do/don't want to read. Using the search function will identify existing threads on the topic so we do not have multiple threads on the same topic.

3] Keep the focus.

Each forum has a focus on a certain topic. Questions outside the scope of a certain forum will either be moved to the appropriate forum, closed, or simply be deleted. Please post your topic in the most appropriate forum. Users that keep doing this will be warned, then banned.

4] Behave as you would in a public location.

This forum is no different than a public place. Behave yourself and act like a decent human being (i.e. be respectful). If you're unable to do so, you're not welcome here and will be made to leave.

5] Respect the authority of moderators/admins.

Public discussions of moderator/admin actions are not allowed on the forum. It is also prohibited to protest moderator actions in titles, avatars, and signatures. If you don't like something that a moderator did, PM or email the moderator and try your best to resolve the problem or difference in private.

6] Promotion of sites or products is not permitted.

Advertisements are not allowed in this venue. No blatant advertising or solicitations of or for business is prohibited.
This includes, but not limited to, personal resumes and links to products or
services with which the poster is affiliated, whether or not a fee is charged
for the product or service. Spamming, in which a user posts the same message repeatedly, is also prohibited.

7] We retain the right to remove any posts and/or Members for any reason, without prior notice.


- PLEASE READ -

Members are welcome to read posts and though we encourage your active participation in the forum, it is not required. If you do participate by posting, however, we expect that on the whole you contribute something to the forum. This means that the bulk of your posts should not be in "fun" threads (e.g. Ankap, Keep & Kill, This or That, etc.). Further, while occasionally it is appropriate to simply voice your agreement or approval, not all of your posts should be of this variety: "LOL Member213!" "I agree."
If it is evident that a member is simply posting for the sake of posting, they will be removed.


8] These Rules & Guidelines may be amended at any time. (last update September 17, 2009)

If you believe an individual is repeatedly breaking the rules, please report to admin/moderator.
See more
See less

Community Conversation with Peter Balakian

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Community Conversation with Peter Balakian

    Community Conversation with Peter Balakian
    Event Date: 05/14/2009 Event Fee: No Fee
    Event Time: 7:30-9:00 PM
    Location: Los Angeles, CA
    Facing History & Ourselves uses lessons of history to challenge teachers and their students to stand up to racism, antisemitism, and other forms of bigotry and hate.



    Armenian Golgotha: An Eyewitness Account of Genocide and Survival



    San Francisco, CA, May 12, 2009
    and,Los Angeles, CA, May 14, 2009
    Thu. Noon. Free. Glendale Community College, SR 138 Krieder Hall, 1500 N. Verdugo Road, Glendale. Also, 7:30 p.m. Free. Creative Artists Agency, 2000 Avenue of the Stars, Los Angeles. R.S.V.P. required. (626) 744-1177, ext. 23.














    Scholar and best selling author Peter Balakian will discuss the newly translated book, Armenian Golgotha, a dramatic eyewitness account of the first modern genocide and the implications for human rights issues today. The story of Grigoris Balakian, Peter Balakian's great-uncle, is a brilliant witness to what human beings can overcome and endure. Peter Balakian is also well known for his past works, Black Dog of Fate and The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response. He is the recipient of many awards, including the Raphael Lemkin Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He holds a Ph.D. in American Civilization from Brown University and teaches at Colgate University, where he is a Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of the Humanities.

    Reservations required. Free self-parking with validation.

    Book sale and signing to follow program.

    Facing History and Ourselves and The Allstate Foundation present a series of community-wide dialogues across the US. Prominent scholars, authors, filmmakers, and policy leaders will speak and participate in discussions about civic engagement, individual and collective responsibility and tolerance.
    "All truth passes through three stages:
    First, it is ridiculed;
    Second, it is violently opposed; and
    Third, it is accepted as self-evident."

    Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

  • #2
    Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1918 (Vol. 1 & Vol. 2)

    And This Is How We Shall Kill You
    A Memoir Of Evil Intent
    By Donna-Lee Frieze
    Published May 27, 2009, issue of June 05, 2009.



    Pondering an Unimaginable Future: Grigoris Balakian as a theology student at the University of Berlin in 1914, where ‘Armenian Golgotha’ begins.


    Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1918 (Vol. 1 & Vol. 2)
    By Grigoris Balakian
    Translated by Peter Balakian with Aris Sevag
    Knopf, 509 pages, $35.00.

    Before we learned to say “never again” came our silence. The unheralded attempt to obliterate the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire ushered in the 20th century: a century of genocide.

    The belated appearance in English of Bishop Grigoris Balakian’s groundbreaking testimony “Armenian Golgotha” (first published privately in Armenian in 1922) means that the reader is confronted with scenes that are today grotesquely familiar: death marches, macabre killings, rape and torture, all directed at a specific ethno-national group. As Peter Balakian (the bishop’s great-nephew) writes in his introduction, the book is not a scholarly history of the genocide but documents the “social and political process” in a way that may be unprecedented for survivor memoires of this genocide.

    In 1918, Grigoris Balakian, a survivor of the atrocities, did not have the word “genocide” at his disposal to describe the actions he’d witnessed. He wrote the two-volume memoir (covering the period of 1915 through 1918) decades before the word appeared in our lexicon. A year before Balakian died in 1934, Raphaël Lemkin, the brilliant Polish-xxxish jurist, attempted to outlaw what he termed “acts of barbarity” and “acts of vandalism.” By the time the word came into print, through Lemkin’s seminal 1944 work, “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress,” the two terms had coalesced (around the idea of intentionality) into one term — “genocide.”

    Balakian and Lemkin’s paths never crossed; however, the historic trial of Soghomon Tehlirian affected both men deeply. Tehlirian assassinated Talaat Pasha — an instigator of the Armenian Genocide — and his trial, along with Balakian’s presence at the trial “to prove the fact of the Armenian massacres,” sparked Lemkin’s questioning of a legal system that tries one person for murder but leaves mass atrocity unpunished.

    Both writers spent at least the second half of their lives driven by the deep conviction that genocide against religious, ethnic or national groups must be made visible. Both believed in the power of witness and testimony of genocide. Lemkin, a Holocaust survivor, had also written a memoir, but did not complete it before his death. In it, Lemkin shows how deeply his studies of the Armenian Genocide colored his description of the atrocities of occupied Europe. He writes that the Armenian Genocide is an event that demonstrates “definite intent of total destruction.” It is “intent,” not destruction alone, that differentiates genocide from other human rights crimes.

    For Peter Balakian (poet, memoirist and professor of English at Colgate University), here translating with the help of Aris Sevag (a writer, translator and editor), the singularity of “Armenian Golgotha” resides in the work’s comprehensive historical information regarding the Ittihad government’s intent to destroy the Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire. The bishop was able to survive and record the intimate details of an empire bent on a genocide, which, by 1920, had killed 1.5 million Armenians. Not unlike the Holocaust, this was a genocide committed by a government as a pretext to war, with its fair share of deniers, including the present-day Turkish state.

    Grigoris Balakian had a privileged position as a vartebed (celibate priest) in the Armenian community before the genocide, and the respect and leadership continued after 1915, as Armenian deportees relied on him for information, prayer, physical and spiritual survival, and even bribes from Turkish officials in exchange for shelter, food and life. Although Balakian was condemned to death, his position as a mediator between the Turks and Armenians meant that he had to strike a balance between responsibility for his compatriots and accommodation with the Turks, a responsibility that the bishop often reports as overwhelming. After the genocide, and notwithstanding the evident pain of reliving past horrors by retelling them, Balakian honors his pledge to document all he has heard, seen and experienced.

    Balakian’s memoir, of course, is harrowing. Page after page, Balakian describes the intimacy of the genocide, conducted with axes, cleavers and knives, indeed any implement the killers could find. Despite the explicit nature of Balakian’s testimony, he still feels that the graphic scenes he witnessed cannot be fully represented in writing: “It is impossible to imagine, let alone write about, such a crime or drama in full detail; to have an imagination that powerful requires the special inner capacities of criminals.” As an intellectual influenced by the enlightenment ideas of his era, Balakian has a writing style that is often florid, but it is also strained by the trauma he attempts to convey.

    Balakian has no interest in understanding the minds of the perpetrators — not the government, not the police, not the criminals who were released from jail in order to execute the genocide. One of the most extraordinary passages in the book describes Balakian’s death march to the desert, accompanied by Captain Shukri of the Yozgat police, who bluntly confides the strategies of the genocide to Balakian. During this march, Balakian’s only interest in eliciting information about the genocide from the outspoken criminal is so that he can, if he should survive, report the captain’s crimes and testimony.

    As if deliberately foreshadowing later atrocities, Shukri, who had “overseen the deaths of 42,000 Armenians,” often used the word paklayalum (cleanse) to describe the massacres. Long before the Nazis used the rhetoric of pest extermination, or Slobodan MiloševiŤ first popularized the term “ethnic cleansing” for alleged actions against Serbs in Kosovo, Balakian’s perpetrators used the euphemism “cleanse” to explain the torture and intended destruction of an ethnic minority.

    Many eyewitness accounts of genocide are understandably concerned with individual suffering. In a self-abnegating act of imagination, Balakian’s memoir, at least for the first of the two volumes, concentrates on the suffering of the group. Genocide is a crime targeted toward intended group destruction, and “Armenian Golgotha” is replete with narratives that focus on collective suffering, marking this memoir as one of the few to explicate the true nature of the crime.

    Testimony is strong armor against denial. Memory is always selective — as, indeed, is rigorous historical research — but to question the minute details of the eyewitness and victim is to slip dangerously down the precipice of denial. Balakian’s memory is extraordinary, but so, too, are his intellect, his compassion and his ethical obligation to immortalize his beloved co-nationals, who, as Balakian outlines, suffered incomprehensible tortures. History lives through being told and retold.

    At the beginning of the 21st century, with Darfur still in the news, it is sobering to read a memoir about the first modern genocide of the 20th century that details the components of intended group destruction in all its complexity. The intended annihilation of a group that motivated Lemkin to name genocide and ensure the crime would be outlawed on the international stage forces us to remember, and act on, our cry of “never again.”

    Donna-Lee Frieze is a research fellow and genocide studies scholar at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia.

    Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1918 (Vol. 1 & Vol. 2) By Grigoris Balakian Translated by Peter Balakian with Aris Sevag Knopf, 509 pages, $35.00. Before we learned to say “never again” came our silence. The unheralded attempt to obliterate the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire ushered in the 20th century: a...
    "All truth passes through three stages:
    First, it is ridiculed;
    Second, it is violently opposed; and
    Third, it is accepted as self-evident."

    Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

    Comment

    Working...
    X