Armenian Genocide - Tumblr Posts
Israeli Caterpillar bulldozers are so symbolic of settler violence and brutality towards Palestinians; they are literal death machines. D9 bulldozers are sold by Caterpillar Inc., based in the US, and are equipped with armor and can be fitted with machine guns and grenade launchers. The nickname for these machines in Israel is "Doobi" - meaning teddy bear.
In 2004, Human Rights Watch called on Caterpillar to suspend bulldozer sales to Israel because of their use in the demolition of Palestinian property and infrastructure. Caterpillar makes military specifications for the D9 and sells them to Israel as weapons under the U.S Foreign Military Sales program, upon arrival, they are armored by Israel Industries Ltd. Before Israel pulled out of the Gaza Strip in 2005, D9s were used to demolish over 2,500 Palestinian homes in Gaza, most being in Rafah where the Israeli Government tried to expand a "buffer zone" along the border with Egypt. This was almost 20 years ago.
During these demolitions within Gaza, Rachel Corrie, an American activist who had been protesting against these home demolitions across the occupied territories, was buried with dirt by an Israeli bulldozer and repeatedly run over. Israeli military sources blamed her and the other activists who were protesting the demolitions, the IDF investigations found themselves not to blame, and no charges were brought for her murder (In the aftermath of her death, Israeli soldiers made fun of her through Facebook communities called "Rachel Corrie Pancakes and Fun", so no justice, the IOF murdered her and then laughed about it).
A federal lawsuit was filed against (which was later dismissed) Caterpillar on behalf of Rachel Corrie's parents and four Palestinian families that had members who were either killed or injured by these bulldozers trying to demolish their homes (including children). The CCR's lawsuit was "on behalf of these families charges Caterpillar, Inc. with aiding and abetting war crimes and other serious human rights violations on the grounds that the company provided bulldozers to the Israeli military knowing they would be used unlawfully to demolish homes and endanger civilians in Palestine. "
And again in 2018, more human rights groups condemned international construction firms (Caterpillar, JCB, and Liugong) for their roles in the destruction of Palestinian villages - Khan al-Ahmar was a small bedouin village in the West Bank that was planned to be razed and bulldozed for a new road for Israeli settlements, but due to international outcry, postponed the eviction. However, in Sur Baher, several Palestinian homes were demolished by bulldozers after a long legal battle that ruled in favor of the IOF. Israel often uses the guise of 'security' as a justification for these demolitions, but ultimately they are used to make way for settlements.
Massafer Yatta is another Palestinian village that has been under threat of Israeli demolitions for years now and was greenlit for destruction. Bulldozers crushed the village's school and destroyed the homes of 121 families in the area. The Palestinians who had their homes crushed by the bulldozers were forced to live in caves (which they were forbidden to even renovate), it is a decision between leaving their land and community or trying to build a new home that will be demolished by Israelis.
Palestinians throughout the West Bank know that the arrival of a bulldozer means the same thing time and time again: "You have 24 hours to flee, or we will shoot you." There are countless towns/villages/communities that have faced demolitions by the IOF throughout the decades of Israel's existence, I couldn't even begin to name all of them here.
In cases of public infrastructure, bulldozers were used to crush the main water pipelines of Al-Auja. The iof forced their way into the village and welded-shut the sole pipeline which supplies water to more than 1,200 people and used a bulldozer to crush it beneath the land. This is part of a larger history of Israeli oppression, specifically in regard to stolen water, which is supplied to Israeli settlements (it also forces Palestinians to buy water directly from Israel).
Outside of home and public infrastructure demolitions, the military bulldozers are also used in Israeli raids. In August this year (2023), the IOF raided Nablus in the Balata refugee camp, accompanied by a military bulldozer that destroyed several homes. I can't even pick a date for raids in Jenin refugee camp, which has been raided continuously this year and years before, but Israeli bulldozers have been filmed tearing up streets in Jenin and leaving them in rubble, making the roads unusable.
The Armenian quarter is not safe from settler encroachment either, as demolitions in the West Bank continue, real estate companies have sent in settlers and bulldozers to steal land belonging to Armenian Church property and Several Armenian families. Settler attacks have continued on the Armenian community and Palestinian Armenians have been getting arrested for defending themselves from these mobs.
And now, we have not only gotten the confirmation that these D9s will be used in Gaza but images, testimonies, and videos of them being used on Gazan homes and infrastructure. They are also being used to crush Palestinians to death just as Rachel Corrie had been in 2004, just as those Palestinian families had been in 2002-2004, and (extreme trigger warning for mutilation of a corpse) videos are circulating of Israelis flattening already deceased Palestinians with bulldozers out of pure contempt for us. Almost 20 years since Israel demolished thousands of homes in Gaza (not even including the genocidal bombings campaigns and the blockade Israel has placed on Gaza for years), now they're back destroying anything in their path.
I will repeat: these bulldozers are death machines and are designed to be so. Caterpillar is complicit, the US is complicit, and both are actively benefiting from the mass murder and displacement of Palestinians. Keep your eyes on Gaza but also remember the Armenian Quarter and the West Bank, all of Palestine is under threat of demolitions.
The Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust, and Genocide Studies
OR how to not be ignorant and offensive when decrying the injustice of the silences in public memory
This is a post about the intersection of historiography and memory.
One too many times, I’ve seen people—online and off—assert that the Holocaust has somehow been raised above other genocides, or that people only care about it because it happened to “white people” (a dude in one of my grad school seminars literally SAID THIS and he is SO lucky that I skipped class that day).
Some people engage in this rhetoric without fully grasping the implications of their words; others don’t bother beating around the bush, and jump straight to “The Jews are using their global power to make everyone care about the Holocaust at the expense of other genocides and human rights violations.”
Now, to be fair, I haven’t seen much of this lately, but I’ve also only just reached the point where I can discuss these issues and the historiographic realities behind them without becoming an incoherent rage-monster.
Back in April, I had the occasion to conduct semi-deep secondary research on the Armenian genocide. After a while, I noticed a pattern in the historiography sections/essays of all of these works: they all, without fail, discussed the Holocaust, its impact on the field of genocide studies, and its relationship to the study of the Armenian Genocide. And this, is why:
In the wake of WW1, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the architect of the Turkish State, was not interested in constructing a nation-state deeply concerned with its past, or with any memory of the Armenians or their genocide at the hands of the Young Turks Party during the First World War. Ataturk went so far as to change the written form of the Turkish language to erase it from memory, and keep subsequent generations from learning about it.
For a while, this campaign of historical erasure was successful to the point that, before he invaded Poland, Hitler posed the question: “Who now remembers the Armenians?”
Now let’s skip forward to the 1960s. In the first two-ish decades after the Holocaust, it wasn’t really discussed in any public way. It was only in 1961, with the capture and subsequent trial of Adolf Eichmann, that it began to enter collective/public memory.
In 1963, Hannah Arendt published Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, based on her reporting on the Eichmann trial. In 1961, Raul Hilberg published his three volume The Destruction of the European Jews, a work largely understood to be the first comprehensive, scholarly historical treatment of the Holocaust.
So, it was in the early 1960s that awareness of the Holocaust spread throughout a good chunk of the West, and this is where we can definitively say that Holocaust history/studies emerged as a respected sub/field. And in the 1980s, Genocide Studies began to emerge as its own distinct field.
In that period, between the 1960s and the 1980s, academic study of genocide certainly existed, but most of its methodology used the Holocaust as a yard stick, or a framework for understanding genocide. While understandable due to the massively industrialized and bureaucratic nature of the implementation of the Holocaust, this framework is/was ultimately unsustainable as, of course, no two genocides—or indeed, any historical events—are the same.
As time went on, in the United States the Holocaust became sort of a safe issue for the US Government to perform grief, and engage in public commemorative activities over, because the Holocaust wasn’t their sin. To extend that performance of grief to Indigenous Americans, Black Americans, Japanese Americans, Mexican Americans—let alone victims of US policies abroad –would have forced the US Government to take responsibility for its own ethno-racial violence/ethnic cleansing/genocides.
The Holocaust, then, gave the US something to commemorate that it wasn’t responsible for, while allowing the US to spin the [bullshit] narrative that it saved the Jews, or that it entered the war to help save the Jews, or had humanitarian concerns for/about European Jews while it was all happening. I’m not going to waste too much time debunking these, as we all know that a. the US joined WW 2 because Japan bombed Pearl Harbor; b. US officials were actively working to bar Jewish refugees from entering the US 1933-1941 (look up the St. Louis incident if you feel like crying); and c. the Red Army was instrumental to the defeat of the Third Reich in the European Theater.
So, the Holocaust became a convenient humanitarian performance for the US, at the same time as Holocaust Studies was evolving into the field of academic study from which Genocide Studies would emerge.
Now, the Armenian Genocide is noteworthy here not simply because of Hitler’s bullshit, but because of its relationship with the entire concept of “genocide.”
The person who coined the term “genocide” was a Polish Jewish man named Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959). Lemkin became interested in mass atrocity and relevant international legislation when Talat Pasha, one of the primary architects of the Armenian Genocide, was assassinated in 1921. Lemkin studied law in Poland and spent the latter half of the 1920s, and all of the 1930s, working as a lawyer. In 1933, he appeared before the Legal Council of the League of Nations to argue for recognition of the “Law of Barbarity” as an international criminal offense for the protection national minorities.
During the Holocaust, Lemkin fled to Sweden in 1940, and received permission to enter the US in 1941. There, Lemkin taught law, lectured at military facilities, and coined the term “genocide” in his 1944 work, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.
After the war, he campaigned for the international recognition of genocide as a violation of international law. In 1946, the United Nations General Assembly resolved to recognize genocide as a violation of international law, and in 1948, that same body passed the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
So, both the study of and the international acknowledgement and formulation of the concept of “genocide” was founded, so to speak, by a Polish Jewish man, who lost most of his family in the Holocaust, in response to learning about the Armenian Genocide.
In conclusion, while the rhetorical use and abuse of Holocaust memory in comparison to other historical atrocities is certainly offensive and tacky, it was not something put there by The Jews. Further, the implication that Jews are somehow involved in the Holocaust’s “privileged” place in public memory is a violently anti-Semitic one, as it is based directly in Protocols of the Elders of Zion/Jewish Global Conspiracy thought processes, which, if you haven’t been keeping track, are responsible for the vast majority of anti-Jewish violence in the modern period.
It’s completely fine and normal to be angry about the erasure of yours and other ethno-racial groups’ historic victimization in mainstream thought and speech; I’m furious about it too. But when you choose to emphasize the shameful silence surrounding the events in question by comparing it to the attention given to the Holocaust, please know that your anger is misplaced, and your words—regardless of intent—carry with them the subtext of anti-Jewish violence.
NOTE: There is a separate but related discussion here about the State of Israel and its use of Holocaust memory in state-building and diplomacy (one day I’ll tell you the story about how I spent an exhibit opening fuming about the overt appropriation of the history of Jewish refugees in Shanghai for bullshit speeches about US-Israel-China relations), but I don’t think this blog, or this post, is the correct space for that conversation. Maybe if my first book goes well and I write a second good one, it can be in the third book. But oy not here.
source: learn4artsakh
For all those who message me saying, ''The past has passed,'' and we must turn the page; it's not the case when you're dealing with a ravenous beast devoid of any humanity.
today (april 24th) is the national day of remembrance of the armenian genocide. armenians today still deal with the trauma of this genocide (intergenerational trauma, being told our genocide didn’t happen by literal governments, etc)
there’s so much i want to say but i don’t know how to put it in words so i’ll say this - we absolutely deserve reparations from the turkish government, and the armenian genocide needs to be recognized by everyone. please please recognize the genocide of our people and educate people who think otherwise. i hope every armenian has a peaceful day today
It’s armenian genocide remembrance day! I’m an armenian artist with a crap ton of interests and love our culture so much <3
I drew our national animal (Golden Eagle) with forget-me-not flowers as a raffle for this week on toyhouse and i really like how it turned out! I learned that some forget me’s can be other colors and they look so pretty, i really wanna grow these someday in my garden
I do also want to mention that armenia is still going through a lot of genocide today and really hope people stand with armenia cause i’ve noticed our issues get pushed to the side A LOT in media and i don’t like that at all, it’s not fair. Take a moment of silence for all those affected, and make sure you let your loved ones know you love them! We’re all equal on this planet and there really shouldn’t be fighting when there can be peace.
It is over and everything is lost. This is the refrain repeated by Armenian families as they take that final step across the border out of their home of Nagorno-Karabakh.
In just a handful of days more than 100,000 people, almost the entire Armenian population of the breakaway enclave, has fled fearing ethnic persecution at the hands of Azerbaijani forces. The world barely registered it. But this astonishing exodus has vanished a self-declared state that thousands have died fighting for and ended a decades-old bloody chapter of history.
On Saturday, along that dusty mountain road to neighbouring Armenia, a few remaining people limp to safety after enduring days in transit.
Among them is the Tsovinar family who appear bundled in a hatchback littered with bullet holes, with seven relatives crushed in the back. Hasratyan, 48, the mother, crumbles into tears as she tries to make sense of her last 48 hours. The thought she cannot banish is that from this moment forward, she will never again be able to visit the grave of her brother killed in a previous bout of fighting.
“He is buried in our village which is now controlled by Azerbaijan. We can never go back,” the mother-of-three says, as her teenage girls sob quietly beside her.
“We have lost our home, and our homeland. It is an erasing of a people. The world kept silent and handed us over”.
She is interrupted by several ambulances racing in the opposite direction towards Nagorno-Karabakh’s main city of Stepanakert, or Khankendi, as it is known by the Azerbaijani forces that now control the streets. Their job is to fetch the few remaining Karabakh Armenians who want to leave and have yet to make it out.
“Those left are the poorest who have no cars, the disabled and elderly who can’t move easily,” a first responder calls at us through the window. “Then we’re told that’s it.”
As the world focused on the United Nations General Assembly, the war in Ukraine and, in the UK, the felling of an iconic Sycamore tree, a decades old war has reignited here unnoticed.
It ultimately heralded the end of Nagorno-Karabakh, a breakaway Armenian region, that is internationally recognised as being part of Azerbaijan but for several decades has enjoyed de facto independence. It has triggered the largest movement of people in the South Caucasus since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Azerbaijan has vehemently denied instigating ethnic cleansing and has promised to protect Armenians as it works to reintegrate the enclave.
But in the border town of Goris, surrounded by the chaotic arrival of hundreds of refugees, Armenia’s infrastructure minister says Yerevan was now struggling to work out what to do with tens of thousands of displaced and desperate people.
“Simply put this is a modern ethnic cleansing that has been permitted through the guilty silence of the world,” minister Gnel Sanosyan tells The Independent, as four new busses of fleeing families arrive behind him.
“This is a global shame, a shame for the world. We need the international community to step up and step up now.”
The divisions in this part of the world have their roots in centuries-old conflict but the latest iterations of bitter bloodshed erupted during the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Karabakh Armenians, who are in the majority in the enclave, demanded the right to autonomy over the 4,400 square kilometre rolling mountainous region that has its own history and dialect. In the early 1990s they won a bloody war that uprooted Azerbaijanis, building a de facto state that wasn’t internationally unrecognised.
That is until in 2020. Azerbaijan, backed by Turkey, launched a military offensive and took back swathes of territory in a six-week conflict that killed thousands of soldiers and civilians. Russia, which originally supported Armenia but in recent years has grown into a colder ally, brokered a fragile truce and deployed peacekeepers.
But Moscow failed to stop Baku in December, enforcing a 10-month blockade on Nagorno-Karabakh, strangling food, fuel, electricity and water supplies. Then, the international community stood by as Azerbaijan launched a 24-hour military blitz that proved too much for Armenian separatist forces. Outgunned, outnumbered and weakened by the blockade, they agreed to lay down their weapons.
For 30 years the Karabakh authorities had survived pressure from international powerhouses to give up statehood or at least downgrade their aspirations for Nagorno-Karabakh. For 30 years peace plans brokered by countries across the world were tabled and shelved.
And then in a week all hope vanished and the self-declared government agreed to dissolve.
Fearing further shelling and then violent reprisals, as news broke several Karabakh officials including former ministers and separatist commanders, had been arrested by Azerbaijani security forces, people flooded over the border.
At the political level there are discussions about “reintegration” and “peace” but with so few left in Nagorno-Karabakh any process would now be futile.
And so now, sleeping in tents on the floors of hotels, restaurants and sometimes the streets of border towns, shellshocked families, with a handful of belongings, are trying to piece their lives together.
Among them is Vardan Tadevosyan, Nagorno-Karabakh’s minister of health until the government was effectively dissolved on Thursday. He spent the night camping on the floor of a hotel, and carries only the clothes he is wearing. Exhausted he says he had “no idea what the future brings”.
“For 25 years I have built a rehabilitation centre for people with physical disabilities I had to leave it all behind. You don’t know how many people are calling me for support,” he says as his phone ringed incessantly in the background throughout the interview.
“We all left everything behind. I am very depressed,” he repeats, swallowing the sentence with a sigh.
Next to him Artemis, 58, a kindergarten coordinator who has spent 30 years in Steparankert, says the real problems were going to start in the coming weeks when the refugees outstay their temporary accommodation.
“The Azerbaijanis said they want to integrate Nagorno-Karabakh but how do you blockade a people for 10 months and then launch a military operation and then ask them to integrate?” she asks, as she prepares for a new leg of the journey to the Armenian capital where she hopes to find shelter.
“The blockade was part of the ethnic cleansing. This is the only way to get people to flee the land they love. There is no humanity left in the world.”
Back in the central square of Goris, where families pick through piles of donated clothes and blankets and aid organisations hand out food, the loudest question is: what next?
Armenian officials are busy registering families and sending them to shelters in different corners of the country. But there are unanswered queries about long-term accommodation, work and schooling.
“I can’t really think about it, it hurts too much,” says Hasratyan’s eldest daughter Lilet, 16, trembling in the sunlight as the family starts the registration process.
“All I can say to the world is please speak about this and think about us. We are humans, people made of blood, like you and we need your help.”
resources on how to help:
uyghur genocide palestinian genocide armenian genocide ukrainian genocide sudanese genocide
resources on how to help:
uyghur genocide palestinian genocide armenian genocide ukrainian genocide sudanese genocide
[left: Anam is 90 years old. She lived through the Nakba in 1948, and today she was displaced again from the city to the south of the Gaza Strip.]
via ig: belalkh
[right: Amalia born in Martakert, Artsakh in 1920. Older than the borders of her region. She has experienced genocide all her life. She is now a refugee.]
via ig: stufankjian
"Turks didn't commit genocide"
Man...your own government found them guilty of committing it😑
Source
24th April – remembrance of the Armenian Genocide
“Deportation of and excesses against peaceful Armenians is increasing and from harrowing reports of eye witnesses it appears that a campaign of race extermination is in progress under a pretext of reprisal against rebellion.” - AMBASSADOR MORGENTHAU, Constantinople, 16 July 1915
Although the Armenian Genocide of 1915-23 has it’s beginnings further back in history, the 24th April is used as the marker and the day of remembrance. In 1915, under the rule of the Three Pashas (Talaat, Cemal and Enver Pasha), the Ottoman state began its systematic extermination of its Armenian population – the deportations of thousands, many of whom would die on these death marches before ever reaching designated areas, to outright massacres and other atrocities. Estimates put it to around 1.5 million deaths. The actions taken against the Armenians would later lead to the Greek and Assyrian genocides.
“Their existence must come to an end, however tragic the means may be; and no regard must be paid to either age or sex, or to conscientious scruples.” - TALAAT, 16 September 1915
Today, Turkey (and other states) do not recognise the Armenian genocide and denialism still prevalent around the world. Denialism is spread through not just academic revisionist theories but also with the media (films/TV/social media) which depict the events as ambiguous of the intent or underplayed entirely (e.g. The Ottoman Lieutenant). Despite this, steps have been made in recent years for recognition and more states have begun to openly accept the term of genocide, including most recently the US (2019).
Images used: wiki + The Armenian Genocide Museum-institute (please be aware there is some extremely explicit content)