Israeli right shifts stance on Armenian genocide amid Turkey spat

Akiva Eldar

 

As long as I can remember, I've known that there was only one unique Holocaust in the history of humankind. We learned that the Armenians had suffered a “genocide” and that “a people’s massacre” had been perpetrated in Rwanda. We learned that Israel’s Arab citizens experienced a catastrophe, known in Arabic as the “Nakba,” when the state was established 70 years ago and they were uprooted from their homes. We were told that the use of the term “Shoah,” Hebrew for “Holocaust,” to characterize atrocities committed after World War II does a moral and historic injustice to the 6 million Jews exterminated by the Nazis.

The United States Museum of Holocaust Kitsch

David Rieff

 

The historian Tony Judt once recalled that during a visit to Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, he saw “bored schoolchildren on an obligatory outing [playing] hide-and-seek among the stones.” He argued, “When we ransack the past for political profit — selecting the bits that can serve our purposes and recruiting history to teach opportunistic moral lessons — we get bad morality and bad history.” To which one should add: We also get kitsch. 

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

Acerca del Genocidio Armenio: la respuesta de un puñado de historiadores

Bernard-Henri Levy

Traducción de Vartán Matiossián 

¿Esta gente es realmente incapaz de comprender? ¿O simplemente pretenden no comprender?

La ley cuyo propósito es penalizar el revisionismo negacionista, votada antes de Navidad por el Parlamento francés, no propone escribir historia en lugar de los historiadores. Y esto es por la sencilla razón de que esta historia ha sido dicha y escrita, bien escrita, durante largo tiempo. Esto lo hemos sabido siempre: que, desde 1915, los armenios fueron víctimas de un intento metódico de aniquilación. Una rica literatura ha sido dedicada al tema, basada en particular sobre las confesiones de los mismísimos criminales turcas, empezando por Hoca Ilyas Sami, casi inmediatamente después del hecho. Desde Yehuda Bauer a Raul Hilberg, desde los investigadores de Yad Vashem a Yves Ternon y otros, ningún historiador serio tiene dudas sobre esta realidad o la niega. En otros términos, esta ley no tiene nada que ver con la voluntad de establecer una verdad de estado. Ningún representante de la Asamblea Nacional francesa que la votó se vio como sustituto de historiadores o su tarea. Juntos, sólo intentaron recordar este simple derecho, el de no ser atacados, y su corolario, el derecho de reclamar reparaciones por esta ofensa particularmente ultrajante que es el insulto a la memoria de los muertos. Es una cuestión de derecho, no de historia.