tsitsernakaberd

tsitsernakaberd.
monument and museum of the armenian genocide.
between 1915 and 1916 the then ottoman empire exterminated (yes, really, exterminated) some 1.5 million armenians living as citizens of the ottoman empire, in what was then known as western armenia (a part of turkey, i might add).

they started off by ordering (and completing) the cold-blooded slaughter of some 60,000 armenians in the ottoman armed services, proceeded to deport most armenian intellectuals and political leaders from the cities of western turkey, and went on to attack, and systematically kill the aforementioned (and horrendously large) number of armenians, while simultaneously destroying almost all of a few thousand old armenian churches in the country.

it has largely been forgotten.
it is denied vehemently by the turkish government, who have gone so far as to close their borders with the current state of armenia, calling them liars and pretending it did not happen.

yet there are enough eye-witness accounts, photographs and other historical evidence to make a pretty convincing case for the fact that this was indeed a very real event in the sad history of 20th century europe.

tstsernakaberd is a very noble, and pretty monument, honouring those who died, and trying to commemorate those terrible events. events that had the bad fortune of occuring during a world war, when so many terrible things were happening, and when so much political shite was being spewed that it largely managed to cover up the genocide that occurred in one small corner of one of the empires that fought and subsequently lost the war.

i don't want to get into the details of genocide, atrocities towards human-kind, or related matters, but visiting the museum at tstsernakaberd made me realize just how scary this really is.

is it imaginable, that just because this genocide happened 25 years before the next one it has already been forgotten. will the holocaust all but fade into distant memory by the time i'm middle-aged?

and how can it be that people like myself, while often getting disgusted by the perversity of holocaust-deniers, has spent little or no time thinking about the perversity of an entire nation (and a large on at that) continuously denying the systematic destruction of a culture, including the killing of 1.5 million people?

although i know the world at large has not forgotten the suffering, i also know that compared to comparable (if not similar) acts in the 20th century this genocide is nothing but a fading memory.