Young Turks and Dead Armenians: MARIA ARMOUDIAN
Young Turks and Dead Armenians: MARIA ARMOUDIAN –
Maria Armoudian, PhD
It’s salt into the collective wound of the Armenian people, yet another reminder of our unacknowledged pain and injustice by Turkey, which was built upon the bones, blood—and land of Armenians.
Maria Armoudian, PhD
LA Progressive
Nobody with a modicum of humanity would rally around a program called “the Nazis,” and yet, all over “progressive” politics, The Young Turks are being promoted. Yet the Young Turks is the regime that organized and executed the annihilation of circa 1.5 million Armenians as well as Assyrians and Greeks—essentially the entire Christian population in what was then Ottoman Turkey.
And now, an internet and radio program with that name is being promoted all over leftist politics, hosting democratic debates, being featured in A-list movies. George Clooney, whose wife, Amal, has fought for the Armenian cause in the International Court, just featured a cameo of Young Turk leader, Cenk Uygar in his film, Money Monster, with that name, the equivalent of the Nazis for Armenians, right on the big screen.
It’s salt into the collective wound of the Armenian people, yet another reminder of our unacknowledged pain and injustice by Turkey, which was built upon the bones, blood—and land of Armenians.
I am one of the Armenians who deals daily with the pain of my family’s history regularly. My grandfather survived the genocide but his siblings—eight of nine—did not. He saw, felt, experienced the horror perpetrated on his family, friends and community, for no other reason than they were Armenian. He never recovered from that trauma, carrying the grief to the day he died. It lived through my father and continues to surface in my own life, manifesting itself in typical intergenerational trauma ways, inexplicable anxiety attacks, bouts of deep, dark depression, debilitating shame that freezes me like a catatonic deer awaiting its slaughter.
Of course, Armenians are not the only people who continue to suffer from the collective, intergenerational wounds. Native Americans, African Americans, and Jews continue to suffer the wounds of their ancestors
Psychologists and social workers today, for example, are working with Native Americans in effort to heal their collective historic traumas. What would help? Of course, an apology, for which many suffering groups still wait. Until then, we ask the rest of the world to not rub salt into our collective wounds by touting or elevating the names of murderous regimes like “The Young Turks.”
Maria Armoudian, PhD
Dr. Maria Armoudian is a lecturer at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, the host and producer of the radio program, The Scholars’ Circle, and the author of two books, Kill the Messenger: The Media’s Role in the Fate of the World, and Reporting from the Danger Zone: Frontline Journalists, Their Jobs and an Increasingly Perilous Future.
She served as a commissioner in the city of Los Angeles for six years and worked in the California State Legislature for eight years, working on many issues ranging from environmental sustainability to good government and corporate reform. In addition to her academic publications, her articles have been published by the Columbia Journalism Review, New York Times Syndicate, the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, The New Zealand Herald, the Los Angeles Daily News, the Progressive, Salon.com, Truthout, Alternet, Inc., Daily Variety and Billboard.