Constant battle against apathy, selective caring
In a distant city, a memorial called “Fortress of the Swallows” sits on a hill. The monument, an eternal flame covered by 12 stone slabs, has a spire that pierces the sky. Every April 24, on the Armenians’ day of mourning, thousands, cradling flowers, visit the memorial in Yerevan, Armenia. Since the memorial’s opening in 1967, it’s become the focus of national grieving.
I am an Armenian, and there’s a weight every Armenian carries that intensifies in late April. We’ve carried it for 102 years.
Even before I had a name to attach it to, I felt the genocide. I was aware of a distant disaster that had deeply affected everyone I knew. Then came knowing the name, Mets Yeghern. With the name came the fight to give it meaning, to argue its relevance. To try to illustrate the importance of the Yeghern, I’ve had to reduce the deaths of more than 1.5 million people to the basest terms.
Entire lives — all the component joys and sorrows, discoveries, hardships and triumphs — reduced to a few words. Lives like that of my grandmother’s uncle, Tigran.
Before the genocide began, Tigran’s grandfather was a member of the fedayis, a group of Armenian freedom fighters who organized to protect their people from racial violence. When Ottoman officials heard of the grandfather, they dispatched agents to his village. Gathering Tigran’s family in their home, the agents tortured the grandfather. They ripped his chest open, filled it with explosives, and blew him up in front of his family on their dining room table. The family was then slaughtered, with only the child Tigran spared. On April 24, 1915, the genocide began. A few weeks later, as Tigran turned 5, a wave of Armenian refugees swept through his village. The orphan joined them. Moving east in the hope of eluding Ottoman soldiers and roving groups of Kurd bandits, many refugees never made it. Tigran wound up in a refugee camp in Cyprus without a name, family or future.
Time and time again, stories such as this are trivialized in an attempt to make people care. There are countless horrific tales out there: Most won’t ever be known. Which is why every April, the indignity of trying to prove the importance of my people’s suffering to an apathetic world haunts every Armenian alive.
Some of my friends often lampoon the genocide when it comes up. They correct me by informing me that it was an “alleged genocide,” unlike the very real Holocaust. This commentary, however, is not solely a passionate appeal for recognition of the Armenian genocide.
There are many groups who are suffering or have suffered greatly in the past and have to contend with a world that doesn’t care. The Assyrians and Greeks also saw forgotten atrocities committed against them by the Ottomans in 1915. The 1994 Rwandan genocide has likewise been forgotten. The same goes for what happened in Bangladesh in 1971, in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, in Guatemala from 1960 to 1996, and in Bosnia in 1995. And it wasn’t until it became politically convenient that the atrocities taking place in Syria and Iraq suddenly were cared about.
Societal outrage is selective. Day in and day out people are slaughtered in the Middle East, and the media doesn’t report it. A handful of people die in an attack in Europe, however, and the First World is up in arms. This is not to belittle anyone’s death — all human life is sacred. The outrage must be proportional, however, and oftentimes isn't.
The fear of rural, Third World terrorism or barbarism is alien and abstract to us. Our first-world definition of an atrocity is different — we see the Twin Towers collapsing and subways exploding. Our media reinforces these fears. In superhero movies, the final battle doesn’t happen in the depths of Africa haunted by extremists or child soldiers. Final battles happen in New York or London. We’re sold a First World view by our leaders and news and movies, making it easy for us to care when Europeans become victims. As a result, caring when the people of the Second and Third Worlds face unspeakable horrors is difficult.
Our care-when-it’s-convenient mentality has to end. The apathy that goes hand-in-hand with this approach allows groups like the Islamic State to form. In the moral vacuum where good people become indifferent, the poisonous seeds of evil take root. Caring selectively is why presidents can suddenly allow themselves to consider the suffering of Syrian children because they need to distract from their approval ratings. Caring selectively is why announcing your undying support for a group of French far-left provocateurs you’d hate any other day constitutes meaningful humanitarianism. Caring selectively is why the atrocities of yesterday — all the genocides of the 20th century, starting with the Armenian genocide — repeat themselves over and over and over again.
Maybe the Fortress of the Swallows will one day stand as a monument to endurance and the human spirit, not sorrow. I pray that other peoples see their symbols of hardship transformed, as well. But until then we have to battle against apathy and indifference and ridicule. A battle for the importance of history and the sanctity of human life.