What Our Words Mean: Towards the Vindication of Medz Yeghern

Vartan Matiossian

 



People do not bother to look for attitudes and terminology
which will assert their unique identities,
but rather opt for popular and widely current formulas.
–The Armenian Weekly, editorial (1981)¹

 

‘Shoah’ or ‘Holocaust’?

A crime against humanity may trigger a catastrophe for the victims, as exemplified by the obliteration of Jewish life throughout continental Europe during World War II. The close relationship between evil, calamity, and crime should be regarded as one of the logical reasons for the adoption of the word Shoah (Catastrophe) as the name of a catastrophic crime against humanity.

It is interesting to recall that when the term genocide had not yet been coined, the Armenian extermination that began in 1915 was called “administrative holocaust” by Winston Churchill (1929). According to journalist William Safire (1929-2009), it appears that Raphael Lemkin’s word “struck many as too clinical a description of what happened” in Nazi Germany, and therefore gradually yielded its place to holocaust to name the Jewish genocide.²

The ‘Great Calamity’ Hoax: What ‘Medz Yeghern’ Actually Meant for the Survivors

Vartan Matiossian

 

“…All those human-like monsters who executed the Medz Yeghern
and tainted their hands with the innocent blood of the Armenians.”
Yervant Odian (1920)

During the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the word yeghern had already entered dictionaries of Modern Armenian and literary texts with the primary meaning of “crime.” It was used, both alone and within the phrase Medz Yeghern, as one of the names of the pogrom of Adana in 1909.

The echoes of this massacre had barely died out when a large-scale program of extermination was put into practice by the Ottoman-Turkish government. Along came the words yeghern and Medz Yeghern. This article will discuss their use in some of the many texts penned in the first two decades years after 1915.