Find the original article in Italian on formiche here: https://formiche.net/2022/12/appello-per-gli-armeni/
English translation below:
Armenia (and Artsakh), being a country that has always been linked with first the Soviet Union and then the Russian Federation, has paid dearly for every attempt at Westernization, considering that the security of its borders is somehow guaranteed only by the Russians. The intervention of Antonia Arslan and Vittorio Robiati Bendaud.
Hanukkah is a time of strength and of courage. And these are the holy days of Hanukkah.
Rachel Margolis, the librarian of the Vilnius Ghetto during the raging Nazi persecution, recounted that in the Ghetto there was the waiting list to be able to read The Forty Days of the Musa Dagh by Franz Werfel, the work that narrates the persecution and the genocide of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1922. The Jews, peresecuted and segregated, read this novel because “it described fates similar to ours at that time,” in the disinterest and the silence of the free world.
Hershel Rosenthal in organizing the resistance, at any cost, of the Bialistok Ghetto, said: “The only option we have left is to make this ghetto our Musa Dagh, adding a final honorable chapter to the history of Jewish Bialistok and our movement, the Shomer HaTzaìr.” Mordechai Tenenbaum wrote, on March 23, 1943, that the spirit of the Armenian resisters of the Musa Dagh animated him and his companions in resisting Nazi harassment.
Armenia suffered for years, especially the region of Artsakh, a contested territory in the mountains inhabited by Armenians, and Turkish and Azeri aggression continues jointly. Since the pandemic to today, strategically, they have taken every opportunity to attack them, in the deafening silence of the free world.
In this hour, the situation has precipitated further and the Lachin Corridor has been closed, the only road which connects this autonomous region with Armenia. These Armenians of the mountains are locked in a deadly grip, isolated without transit of goods and services, with the immediate possibility of a humanitarian catastrophe. Armenia (and Artsakh), being a country that has always been linked first with the Soviet Union and then the Russian Federation, has paid dearly for every attempt at Westernization, considering that its borders is somehow guaranteed only by the Russians.
Given the current international situation, and the Russian-Ukrainian war, the real risk is the total disinterest of the Western democracies in this regard, given that this exposes everyone to an immense mess. The people, the Armenians, suffer, ignored for calculations and convenience, exposed to the constant risk of elimination (after having suffered a genocide!) in a deafening and ubiquitous silence. The instrumental indifference and guilt of the West, couples with Putin’s cynical Caucasian strategies.
Erdogan knows it very well, the exceptional and patient strategist that he is, heir to centuries of Ottoman diplomacy – unlike the improvised and ramshackle Westerners. Especially now, Turkey has carved out an extraordinary geopolitical role for itself, granted to it by the West. And the Azeris know it well, that they can blackmail us with gas, and we will suffer much from the cold, ‘safe in our warm homes.’ First, the icy cold of the absence of decent ideas and animate individual life and free and democratic societies.
For the Armenians there is a new possibility of defeat; or the need to bow their heads before the heirs of those who already made them meat for the slaughter, never condemned and never denied; or, again, the very concrete possibility of further ethnic cleansing.
We must intervene, and immediately, to favor the Armenians. Let’s shake our consciences and react! It is not tolerable that this small and ancient people should once again suffer humiliation, terror and death and it is not possible that, once again, their captors, heirs of their great-great-grandfathers, get away with it and rage, playing with skill and blackmailing Western diplomacy, unfortunately far from innocent.
Today we must defend, at all costs, these mountain Armenians, this contemporary Musa Dagh, which means, in hindsight, also defending ourselves and freedom.