Re: elegy
February 15, 2010
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UNDERSTANDING HISTORY
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Some of our ablest writers lacked the faculty of understanding history or of seeing “the other side of the hill” (to use a military metaphor) or “the angularity of time” (Sartre). Face to face with history, even our realists remained romantics at heart. They were more influenced by French literature and less by real events that made headlines in the international press. I am not talking of prophetic insight or vision but simply of deciphering the writing on the wall. I am talking of a myopia so advanced that it might as well have been blindness.
Consider Zohrab as a case in point, without any doubt one of our most sophisticated, experienced, and politically savvy observers of the Ottoman scene. And yet, instead of warning his readers of the coming catastrophe, he wrote fiction about adulterous women, golden-hearted prostitutes, and the death of a salesman. He wrote a pamphlet about the Hamidian massacres, true, but he saw them not as preludes to a greater tragedy but as aberrations that if exposed may not be repeated. His naïve faith in the Ottoman power structure was such that he even saved the life of the future architect of the Genocide by risking his own. If one were to compile profiles of famous Armenian dupes, surely Zohrab would qualify as the greatest of them all.
As for Baronian and Odian: they wrote more about the moral bankruptcy of the Armenian community and ignored the apocalypse looming on the horizon.
If the sins of our intellectuals were sins of omission, those of our political leadership were sins of commission. Instead of doing their utmost to prevent the coming catastrophe, they did the exact opposite: they provoked it.
History repeats itself today. Our academics and pundits prefer to speak of past massacres and are blind to the “spitak chart” (white slaughter) or alienation in the Diaspora and mass exodus from the Homeland.
It seems to me, we worry too much about our identity and not enough about our soul, and “what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”
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February 15, 2010
************************************************** *
UNDERSTANDING HISTORY
*********************************
Some of our ablest writers lacked the faculty of understanding history or of seeing “the other side of the hill” (to use a military metaphor) or “the angularity of time” (Sartre). Face to face with history, even our realists remained romantics at heart. They were more influenced by French literature and less by real events that made headlines in the international press. I am not talking of prophetic insight or vision but simply of deciphering the writing on the wall. I am talking of a myopia so advanced that it might as well have been blindness.
Consider Zohrab as a case in point, without any doubt one of our most sophisticated, experienced, and politically savvy observers of the Ottoman scene. And yet, instead of warning his readers of the coming catastrophe, he wrote fiction about adulterous women, golden-hearted prostitutes, and the death of a salesman. He wrote a pamphlet about the Hamidian massacres, true, but he saw them not as preludes to a greater tragedy but as aberrations that if exposed may not be repeated. His naïve faith in the Ottoman power structure was such that he even saved the life of the future architect of the Genocide by risking his own. If one were to compile profiles of famous Armenian dupes, surely Zohrab would qualify as the greatest of them all.
As for Baronian and Odian: they wrote more about the moral bankruptcy of the Armenian community and ignored the apocalypse looming on the horizon.
If the sins of our intellectuals were sins of omission, those of our political leadership were sins of commission. Instead of doing their utmost to prevent the coming catastrophe, they did the exact opposite: they provoked it.
History repeats itself today. Our academics and pundits prefer to speak of past massacres and are blind to the “spitak chart” (white slaughter) or alienation in the Diaspora and mass exodus from the Homeland.
It seems to me, we worry too much about our identity and not enough about our soul, and “what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”
#
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