Column: Thoughts from Dr. Joe: It’s true history repeats itself, and we’re sometimes complicit in that
The famous quote, “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it,” is attributed to George Santayana. The phrasing itself certainly is catchy, and I believe the sentiment is true. Since history is often horrific, this saying ought to guide the collective policies of nations. Those who watch closely can see that history does nothing but repeat itself.
In looking at the world’s history, I am led to believe that humanity has evolved from genocide. Rudolph Rummel’s “Death by Government,” published in 1995 by Rutgers University, calculates that more than 200 million human beings have been deliberately killed by governmental decree. A greater percentage of the human race was murdered by government during the 20th century than in any previous century.
Will Durant said, “So the story of man runs in a dreary circle, because he is not yet master of the earth that holds him.” Perhaps that’s the most salient of all lessons history has to teach.
After viewing the film “The Promise,” a love story that depicts the Ottoman government’s systematic extermination of 1.5 Armenian Christians, it is apparent to me that when there is no end to butchery, a blanket of silence spreads throughout the civilized word. After all, it was Hitler who said, “Who speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
I recall countless family gatherings where my wife Kaitzer and her father Papkin Hovasapian told stories of the Armenian Diaspora when millions of Armenians escaped mass murder at the hands of the Young Turks and fled worldwide.
“You have to know your history to know who you are,” Kaitzer says. Subsequently, our library has well over 100 books on Armenian history. Kaitzer has also said, “The most effective way to destroy a people is to destroy their own understanding of their history.”
To many, “The Promise” is a personal story. Both sets of Kaitzer’s great-grandparents were murdered by the Ottomans. Three of her grandparents walked through the Syrian desert as young children to escape the massacre. Since we live in an idyllic town, it’s difficult to comprehend that level of human misery.
Our daughters are named after flowers of Armenian courage, Gayaneh Sabine after the martyr Saint Gayaneh and Gareen Simone after a town whose heroics in resisting the Ottomans is legendary
“The Promise” has a myriad of themes that resonate throughout the film. It’s a love story that sends its viewers beyond the whimsical pleasantries of love to the essence of all human connection. Vulnerability! For much of humanity life teeters on a razor’s edge. Survival! “To survive is to avenge,” the heroine says.
Turkey denies the genocide, yet historical accounts abound. Henry Morgenthau, the U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during the genocide wrote, “When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well, and, in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to conceal the fact.”
Taliat Pasha, Enver Pasha and Kamal Pasha, the Turkish architects of the genocide, were involved, per their own accounts. There is no point in using the word “impossible” to describe something that has clearly happened.
Atrocities refuse to be buried; denial does not work. History is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told. Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims.
“The Promise” is indeed worth seeing. The movie should make us understand that we are not responsible for the past; but if we do nothing, we are then complicit in the present that has been created by the past.
JOE PUGLIA is a practicing counselor, a retired professor of education and a former officer in the Marines. Reach him at doctorjoe@ymail.com. Visit his website at doctorjoe.us.
