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FROM THE MARGINS | BY PATRICK AZADIAN
Los Angeles Times Valley Edition | Glendale News-Press | April 22 2006

A descendant of someone like Haig

Do human beings learn from history? We do...

And we don't.

Unfortunately, collective memory does not exactly work the same way as an individual's. We don't learn as quickly as a child burnt by the hot stove. As a collective, we suffer many blisters before we learn to avoid danger. And if instead of the stove, it is the electrical outlet, we don't always get a second chance.

History is filled with victims of such high voltage electrical outlets. Beginning with the Armenian Genocide, modern history has no shortage of proof on resistance to learning.

The enormity of the Jewish Holocaust, the killing fields in Cambodia, and the crimes in Sudan, all remind us that we are slow learners.

So how do we judge progress? How do we know we have graduated from "special ed"?

First, we should be able to recognize the common characteristics of genocidal acts, and be able to identify the conditions, which pre-exist such horrors.

A systematic plan to eradicate a people, the existence of an exclusivist ideology to justify the crimes, the opportunity of chaos and war to hide the horrors from the world, are some of the common threads in all acts of genocide.

Moreover, with every genocide comes a set of deniers. But whether it's the agents of Turkish government dressed in fine European suits, or the voice of neo-fascists in Europe, or the head of a fundamentalist state, they all share a similar intent.

The ability to identify the denialists is an important test in graduating from the class of learning.

If we are to learn from history, we should also have the capacity to understand the universal nature of the sufferings.

If we are only capable of mourning our own ethnocentric losses, while being indifferent to the suffering of others, then we have only learned that specific paragraph in the lesson.

I'd read about the Jewish Holocaust, seen numerous documentaries regarding the atrocities, but it was not until I visited the Museum of Tolerance when the gravity of the crimes took deep roots in me.

In the museum, I received a photo passport card with the story of a child whose life was changed by the Holocaust. Throughout the tour, the passport was updated and at the end, the ultimate fate of the child was revealed. It is at that moment, when the pain of that child and her family became my pain. It is exactly at that moment when, I believed human beings are capable of learning.

We can claim we have learned from history, only when we don't have to be Armenian to be respectful of the memory of the martyrs on April 24, when we don't have to be Jewish to realize the magnitude of the crime of Holocaust, when we don't have to be black to shut down shop on Martin Luther King Day, and we don't have to be Muslim to recognize that they too, can be victims of persecution and injustice.

Moreover, if we claim we are learning from history, we should also have the capacity to recognize the uniqueness of each and every genocide. Often, we can be caught up in the senseless competition of who suffered the most.

While understanding the common factors, each genocide should be recognized as a unique act. This will not only help us learn from each criminal process, but it is also the most dignified way to remember the victims.

And finally, during routine commemoration ceremonies, we can lose sight of individual stories.

The murdered millions were not a lump sum, but a sum of individuals, a sum of fragile young brides, grieving mothers, helpless infants, desperate young boys and inconsolable fathers. A genocide is also a sum of individual orphans without childhood, and their forever-wounded descendants.

If we are to learn from history, we cannot forget the stories of individuals like Haig Baronian: "At one place, my little grandmother... loudly cursed the Turkish government for their inhumanity, pointing to us children she asked, 'What is the fault of children to be subjected to such suffering.' It was too much for a gendarme to bear, he pulled out his dagger and plunged it into my grandmother's back. The more he plunged his dagger, the more my beloved Nana asked for heaven's curses on him and his kind. Unable to silence her with repeated dagger thrusts, the gendarme mercifully pumped some bullets into her and ended her life. First my uncle, now my grandmother were left un-mourned and unburied by the wayside." (From the Oral History Project on Armenian Genocide by Ara Oshagan and Levon Parian)

At the time, Haig was about 8 years old. I am a descendant of someone like Haig.

Copyright 2006 Glendale News Press