Emotions versus Logic in the Face of Defeat

Two modes of thinking since the announcement that Artsakh is going to be divided up, much of it given to Azerbaijan including Shushi, the smoldering ruins of whatever is left placed under the watch of Russian peacekeepers. 

First, the emotional, initial gut feeling. I am going to get this off my chest. For this, as is typical of me, I have a song that this reminds me of. A song I had not heard for years before it entered my brain when this news dropped.

“No one saved us. No one’s gonna save us now. Not even God.” “Where do you expect us to go when the bombs fall?“ Very relevant lyrics, all things considered.

This week, we have learned that ethnic cleansing, genocide, torturing to death prisoners of war, bombing cities with carpet bombs that are supposedly “illegal”, burning down forests with phosphorus bombs that are supposedly “illegal”, paying terrorist mercenaries $100 for every severed head they can produce, is rewarded in this world. It will get you what you want. If you have enough money, the word “illegal” becomes meaningless. The rest of the world will look the other way. The UN is powerless and meaningless. You can make a weapon illegal, but who’s going to enforce it? Laws only apply to the poor, not the rich. There is no such thing as justice. Justice does not fucking exist. Karma? Ha! Turkey and Azerbaijan are above karma. Hundreds of years have gone by, and they’ve never once been punished. Might as well wait for the United States to be punished for their treatment of Native Americans. It’s never going to happen. There is no such thing as karma. How many times do you need to be let down? How many times do your prayers need to fall on deaf ears? No one is listening. No one cares.  What a shitty world. I hate it here. I hate this place. 

Do I blame Nikol Pashinyan for signing away Armenia’s land and what little independence it still had? When I first learned of the news, my initial reaction was to blame him. But, now that I have had time to process everything, I see that perhaps it was the only thing he could do in those dire circumstances. But I would have appreciated it if he’d been more honest. This was all done behind everyone’s back. We were fed bullshit by the media that we were winning. Certainly keeping morale up is important, as is not giving information to the enemy. But really, my confidence in Armenian news media is shaken, perhaps forever now. I feel like I let myself fall victim to the echo chamber. I should have paid attention to neutral sources. Now, we are at Russia’s mercy. As soon as they stop giving a shit, and they pull out their peacekeepers, that will be it for Armenia. Turkey will take the rest. Maybe it will happen in fifty years. Maybe it will happen next year. No one will remember Armenia when it is gone. Its history will be erased, as it has been in every other part that the Turks have taken. But, perhaps there is some small comfort in knowing that this is the eventual fate of every country on Earth. The human race can’t have too much longer before they drive themselves to extinction, after all. Nothing is forever. Not even this planet and the star it orbits.

The second response: logic. Here’s a good interview that presents the more logical take.

Pashinyan acted before the situation could get even worse. Artsakh is not completely gone, yet. The rest of Armenia is intact, for now. And for the first time, the remaining people of Artsakh do have some kind of legal status and security guarantee. And most importantly, the war is finished, and the killing has stopped. After all, people’s lives mean a lot more than humanity’s abstract lines in the sand. Armenia lost around 1,300 people to this madness (that number will inflate once the bodies are counted, sigh). And for now, it is over. Or at least, on pause. And from the Azeri side, they still didn’t get all of Artsakh like they wanted, and now, they have  Russian soldiers on their soil. They are now a Russian colony just like Armenia is. The real winner of this war, despite Azerbaijan coming out on top, is Russia. Azerbaijan paid a heavy price for their gains. They think they’ve won, but let’s wait until it sinks in. It will be interesting to see what happens to them in the long run, when their oil reserves run out, and perhaps with it, their free pass to commit all the genocides they want.

Going forward, the only solution for Armenia is unity. Division does no one any favors. It doesn’t help. All the crying in the world isn’t going to change reality. This is the way things are now. We have to adapt. Things are grim right now. They’ve always been grim though. Perhaps grimmer. Maybe there is still a way for Armenia to survive. Doom and gloom doesn’t help anything. This may be every politician’s favorite excuse, but Pashinyan has inherited this mess from his corrupt predecessors. He should have acted before Shushi was lost I think, but, we don’t know the whole story, do we? I sure don’t. I’m not going to be an armchair general. Bottom line is I don’t think this is all his fault. I am not loyal to him, but I think Armenia is better off keeping him around instead of trading him for a Russian lackey, in my humble estimation, as much as my opinion from the diaspora counts, which is not for much.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I desperately need some kind of a distraction from the world. I have not slept well for the past two nights, I got maybe 4 hours of sleep last night over this stuff. I need to tune it out for my own well being. There’s just nothing at all that I can do about this. I won’t be sharing this blog entry around, this was just something I wrote to work through my feelings, but if you did manage to find it, well, I hope you learned something. 

Struggling Against Hate in Times of War

 

 

“You have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate – the unloved and the unnatural.”

            -Charlie Chaplin, The Great Dictator

           

            Is there anything unnatural about hate? Is it in humankind’s nature to hate? We all hate something or someone. We use the term hate in a variety of ways. You can hate sitting too long at a traffic light. You can hate a type of food. You can hate an entire race or nationality. You can hate yourself. Hate is anything stronger than dislike, which itself is a more polite, less emotional hate. Hate though, is not the absence of love. The absence of both love and hate is indifference, or apathy. Whether you love or hate, it means you care deeply about something. They are mirror images. Perhaps we use the word “hate” too freely.

 

            I have struggled with hatred throughout my life. Especially in my teens. I hated school. I hated most of my teachers. I hated the faculty. I hated homework. I hated the people who bullied me. I hated the entire prisonlike atmosphere of school. This burning hatred made me an angry and depressed person. It was making me sick.   

            Hatred has its place. I believe that there are things that are okay to hate, and things that aren’t. “Hate the sin, not the sinner” is a phrase that Christians tend to use, although they don’t always follow their own advice. To an extent I can agree with the sentiment, even if I may sometimes disagree with what a Christian might consider sinful. It is better to hate behaviors than to hate people. It was a long path to get me to that point. Yet perhaps I’m not even all the way there yet. I feel that once someone causes enough harm they are beyond forgiveness. And those are the people I hate. The people in positions of power, mainly, who engineer oppression and suffering behind the scenes. Then there are people who personally wronged me somehow. Again, it takes a lot to earn my hatred, more than it used to anyway. But I could name at least a couple people I hate for personal reasons. 

 

When I was in my teens and first learned about the history of the Armenian genocide, how it was perpetrated by Turkey and denied to this day, its orchestrators treated as heroes with streets named after them, Armenia’s historic lands stolen, yes, I will say I hated the Turks. This was only reinforced by every Turk I ever met online being just as hateful toward all Armenians. It wasn’t hatred from a position of power, like white supremacy is for instance. It was like a Jew hating Germans; that is, if Germany still denied the Holocaust and had streets named after Hitler. But I did not yet have the means to think rationally and critically. I was young. Then there’s the Azeris, of Azerbaijan. Joseph Stalin (another man I hate) gave them control of Armenia’s Artsakh province during the Soviet Union. The province successfully broke away with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and declared independence. The Azeris deeply hate Armenians over this. They’re taught from preschool up to hate Armenians, because they think Armenia “stole” their land. Sore losers. The government has turned the Armenians into a boogeyman, in order to instill a national unity and direct people’s ire toward a perceived enemy, rather than where their ire ought to be directed, at their totalitarian government. One particular episode that opened my eyes to just how much the citizens of Azerbaijan are taught to blindly hate all Armenians was the treatment of Ramil Safarov, who murdered an Armenian, Gurgen Margaryan, in his sleep while they were both at a military academy. He was imprisoned for a few years in Hungary until Azerbaijan paid to have him transferred back home, where he did not live out the rest of his prison sentence, no; he was awarded medals and treated like a hero. For murdering someone in their sleep. Because he was an Armenian. I hated the Azeris right back at one time.

 

            As I got older, and perhaps wiser, I learned to let go of this kind of hate. It was gradual, but I awakened to the fact that nations and races are mere artificial social constructs. And I awakened to the fact that you cannot defeat hate with hate. You defeat it with logic, rationality, and yes, love. Or at least indifference. You don’t stoop to their level, you rise above it. There are plenty of Turks and Azeris who have also reached this point. You can’t paint them all with the same brush. I don’t hate anyone just for their nationality or race. I hate Turkish and Azeri nationalism, and the genocidal tendencies their ideologies lead to. I hate the leaders of their countries who enforce this ideology. I can say that I hate Erdogan and Aliyev, just as I hate Talaat Pasha and the rest of the orchestrators of the Armenian genocide. I don’t feel bad saying that, because again, I feel that they are unforgivable at this point. I can hate people if they give me enough of a reason. But, I don’t hate the common people. Not anymore. They can’t help that their government brainwashed them their whole lives. Whatever racist or hateful thing a Turk or Azeri says online, I no longer reflect that upon their entire ethnic group. There are a few brave enough to speak out against their governments and the historical revisionism that their governments try to teach their citizens. Those who can transcend beyond blind nationalism. People like Taner Akcam and Umit Kurt, the latter of which came to my university to give presentations many times while I was in Graduate School, who have studied what happened and don’t deny it. They helped open my eyes, and gradually, I let go of most of my hate. I became a better person for doing so.

 

            Right now, as I write this Artsakh and Armenia are under heavy bombardment by Azerbaijan, with an assist from Turkey. It is war. People are dying on both sides. Their hatred for Armenia is so vitriolic they wish to wipe it off the map and destroy its people and history. Although I am on the other side of the planet, the bombardment impacts me too. I’ve sunk into a deep depression. Yet I am helpless to do anything about it. I can offer little more than “thoughts and prayers”. I have no power to stop it. To my regret I’ve had to take a break from social media, because following the news is just tormenting me. This is madness, madness driven by pride and above all hatred. I don’t want to give into it. I don’t want to let it consume me. But it fills me with such rage and sorrow. Although I want more than anything for Armenia to emerge victorious, I don’t want to start cheering for the death tolls of Azeri soldiers. They are the victims of government brainwashing. Mere pawns. I have to work hard not to hate the people, just the ideology. The ideology of nationalism that drives a man to kill another man who they haven’t even met, based on lines on a map and what colored cloth they fly. It is a sick ideology that turns people twisted and demented. Turns people into monsters, who celebrate carnage and torture. You can still love your own country and culture without it driving you to want to see other cultures and countries destroyed. But all too often people can’t seem to do that. You know, there’s no good reason a piece of land has to belong exclusively to one ethnicity. Ethnicity itself is a made up concept. We should just be able to live together, without borders. Humanity would be better off without nation states. It’s all bullshit. People dying over idiotic made up concepts. It makes me sick of living on this planet. The Earth would be better off without humanity.

 

            That sort of hatred has long infected the United States as well. Racism and white supremacy. It is the same thing anywhere you look in the world, and it is nothing new. Is hatred as “unnatural” as Charlie Chaplin claimed? Or was he just naïve?

The US Senate Recognizes the Armenian Genocide and Turkey’s Response

Okay, it’s time for me to finally get political for an entire post. If there are any Turkish nationalists in the room, or American conservatives for that matter (spoiler: I don’t like the Orange Man), please step outside, because I am about to express opinions that contradict your own and will as a result make you angry. Luckily, I really hate talking about American politics, so when the urge to get political and alienate potential followers of my blog arises, I’ll usually be addressing less-volatile subjects, like Armenia vs its angry neighbors (yes, even that’s a less volatile subject than American politics). Although when the topic of religion rears its head it will probably get rid of anyone who disagrees with me anyway. But today’s topic deals with American politics. Oh joy.

So recently, something happened that genuinely shocked me. Something I never thought I’d live to see. The senate of our corrupt dystopian country where nothing good ever happens, recognized the killing of 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turkey as genocide. The US has been in bed with Turkey since the Cold War, has a nuclear base in the country, and has a common heritage with Turkey of being founded by invaders and built over the blood and bones of natives. They seemed the perfect pair. Until Turkey made America mad by invading Syria after America left, and finally doing what they’d longed to do for about a century: kill off the Kurds. Also, they’re probably mad about the oil. Because that’s what it always comes down to. As punishment, in late October 2019 the House of Representatives dusted off the old Armenian genocide resolution, which is something they’ve been threatening Turkey with for years. Normally Turkey pleads for forgiveness, or makes empty threats, and it gets shelved by whoever’s president and forgotten. But something strange happened this time. It passed!

Now people rightly criticized Rep. Ilhan Omar, known for taking a stand on human rights issues, for giving a hypocritical “present” vote instead of being for it.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/10/30/ilhan-omar-criticized-present-vote-armenian-genocide-resolution/4100304002/

This annoyed me too. See genocide deniers have this fallacy they like to trot out, and it goes something like this. They think every country should recognize its own genocides before they recognize another country’s genocide; and that a country shouldn’t be obligated to recognize their genocides until every other country on Earth recognizes their own first. That way no one ever recognizes a genocide. I wonder if anyone has ever named this fallacy. It's basically "what-aboutism", and probably a variant of the Red Herring Fallacy. Ilhan Omar apparently believes at least the first half of this fallacy, and this was her given reason for voting “present”. But it still passed in a landslide, Omar did nothing to stop it. Sure, it was annoying and made me lose all respect for Omar, but people really blew it out of proportion, honestly. No one went after the Republicans who voted “no”, suspiciously. I don’t trust American politicians anyway, even the ones who claim to be on the left. They’re all puppets of the rich. Actors. But tellingly, a lot of the same people criticizing Omar had nothing to say about Trump’s efforts to kill the resolution, nor his inviting Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan over to the US to give a speech, during which he denied the Armenian genocide yet again, and claimed that Armenians were simply nomads and not native to their own lands; proving he could have had another career as a historical fantasy writer. Trump just stood there and nodded during this casually racist speech. 
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posttv/video/world/erdogan-condemns-house-resolution-recognizing-armenian-genocide/2019/11/13/b997c829-26c5-4137-b8b9-8b20eeb60430_video.html
This of course didn’t surprise me, and it was a waste of time being angry about it. But all the while, Armenian Trump supporters stuck their heads in the sand while muttering “What about Obama?” to whoever confronted them about it. If you’re an Armenian conservative and you still support Trump at this point, when he’s clearly shown us who’s side he’s on, I don’t know what to say to you. Except that you’re a hypocrite, and a traitor to your ancestors. There, I said it. What now, you mad? You gonna cry? Go stick your heads back in the sand and cry about it, traitors. Hazar amot! Ամո'թ քեզի, հազար ամոթ:

They’re still doing mental gymnastics to justify their Orange messiah.

And that’s as edgy as the blog will get, ladies and gentlemen. If this blog pisses anyone off, I’ll take solace in the fact that someone finally cares what I think, even if they hate it. That said, I don’t think I’ll be sharing this one in any Armenian groups on Facebook. As opinionated as I am, and as much as I want to share my genius with others, I hate internet arguments. You’ll never change anyone’s mind over the internet. I have so many better things to do with my time.

Now of course, I thought the recognition by the House of Representatives was a fluke. Surely Turkey and America would make up, and at Trump’s urging, the Armenian genocide resolution would be shelved again until the next time Turkey pissed off America. Something just like this happened under Obama, more than once, and I think Bush too if I recall. And it happens every few months in Israel. Really, it does, look it up. Except…that’s not what happened, this time. On December 12^th, the US Senate recognized the Armenian genocide. And I still can’t believe it.

https://artsakhpress.am/eng/news/118370/us-senate-unanimously-recognizes-armenian-genocide.html

(By the way, Artsakhpress is a great little news website that needs more traffic).

And predictably, Erdogan is butthurt and throwing a hilarious hissy fit. In their usual “what-aboutism”, red herring fallacy retort, Erdogan is now threatening to recognize the genocide of the Native Americans as a genocide.

https://www.urdupoint.com/en/world/erdogan-threatens-to-recognize-genocide-of-na-787992.html?fbclid=IwAR1VcvNOFFvTBKjIVcfLmz0MfNOJwqx32EyJydP5QSOj4sqrzu7BlfI-OY8

(And here’s one of my comics from my days doing Artsakhball on Facebook. Which will be another blog post, I assure you.)

Talk about doing the right thing for the absolute worst reasons. Thing of it is, although people often make excuses for and justify the genocide of Native Americans (which is a horrible thing to do, by the way), I’ve never once heard someone claim it never happened. Nor does anyone pretend Europeans were here before the Native Americans, or claim that any ruins or artifacts left by the Native Americans were actually made by ancient Europeans. Aliens, maybe, but not ancient Europeans. Generally speaking. No one is saying the Native Americans were never here, as far as I can tell. This is how Turkey handles denial of the Armenian genocide. Turks were always on the lands they occupy now, Armenians never lived there, and so on. The United States should officially recognize more genocides against individual tribes and give more in reparations, sure. I agree with that. But you can’t equate America’s response to the Native American genocide with Turkey’s response to the Armenian genocide, which is what Erdogan is trying to do in order to distract people. They’re two very different things.

Where do we go from here? Well the hope is that this will get other countries who’ve been dragging their feet with Armenian genocide recognition, such as the United Kingdom, Australia, and Israel, to finally recognize it. And eventually, Turkey will have to admit that it happened and face their dark, bloody past. And then they can pay Armenia reparations, give us back at least some of our historic land, stop lying about history, stop oppressing other minorities as well, and we can all open the borders and be friends. I remain pessimistic that this will be a short process, if it even happens before civilization finally crumbles, but I’ve been wrong before. Of course, maybe Turkey will succeed in getting America to backpedal on the resolution, although that actually doesn’t seem too likely. It’s never good to be too pessimistic, nor too optimistic. The aim is to be realistic.