By Theodore Shoeabat
The prime minister of Armenia, Nikol Pashinian, recently declared that Turkey wants to conquer Armenia and continue the Armenian Genocide from where the Ottoman Empire left off. As we read in a report from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
Armenia has repeatedly claimed over the past week that Turkey sent Syrian fighters to Azerbaijan and that the Turkish military is aiding Azerbaijan’s.
“Turkey and Azerbaijan are pursuing not only military-political goals,” Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian said Saturday in an address to his nation. “Their goal is Armenia, their goal is continuation of the genocide of Armenians.”
Some 1.5 million Armenians died in mass killings in Ottoman Turkey beginning in 1915, which Armenia and many other countries have labeled a genocide. Turkey firmly rejects that term, contends the total number of victims is inflated and says the deaths were the consequence of civil war.
The ones who deny a genocide are the ones who wish to repeat it. Those who control the past, control the future. If people in Turkey do not believe that a genocide was ever orchestrated by their country’s former empire, then if Turkey were to ever try to invade Armenia and slaughter the people there, any reference to history would be rejected under the assumption that such history was faked up and would be supported under the pretext of ‘national security.’ Moreover, since Turkey did indeed slaughter over a million Armenians in the past, it is quite disturbing that they are so fixated on Armenia. The Turks will argue that they are merely trying to defend their ally, Azerbaijan. But, wars are usually done under camouflage, and the fact that Turkey butchered so many Armenians and is willing to heavily involve itself in a war against Armenia, should bring one’s mind to the past, when so many innocents were butchered in a war against the Cross, in a vicious contagion of Ottoman tribalism that wanted to force all of the empire’s subjects to become ottomanized.
No matter how many years may pass, the spirit of a nation does not change. History is merely the reading of what embodies the particular spirit of a nation. The events that transpire are mere patterns that reflect that spirit. That spirit may be tempered by good moral teaching, but nonetheless it still lies, ever waiting to react to what is around it. How a nation reacts, how it justifies itself, how it perceives certain occurrences — these things are all determined by the spirit of that particular nation. To understand trends is to be aware of a nation’s spirit. What is this spirit? It is the character of that particular people. Every nation has one, and those who do not believe me should one day take the time to leave America and see how other country’s are. In the United States it is easy to find people who are very much in favor of Israel. When you leave the United States, it is very easy to find people who not only sympathize with the Palestinian cause, but who actually hate Israel (you see this a lot in Latin America). In America, there is an emphasis on good service (“the customer is always right” is the creed of our food industry), but in other countries it is very common to see schemes trying to milk the customer of as much of his money as possible, while giving him less as possible on his plate (I saw this type of thing in Italy). What is the point of explaining this? We should understand and recognize the ways of nations, and acknowledge that people — generally speaking — do not change. Turkey worked to exterminate the Armenians, and if given a chance, they will resume from where they left off in that dark epoch of the Great War.