(Translated from Italian as featured in La Verità.)
The Skylark Farm is the sad book by Antonia Arslan on the extermination of the Armenians. The writer lives in Padova. Another must-read on the extermination of the Armenians is The Sins of the Fathers: Turkish Denialism and the Sins of the Fathers (2018), by Siobhan Nash-Marshall.
This one is a professor of theoretical philosophy and holder of the Mary T. Clark Chair of Christian Philosophy at Manhattanville College in New York. Siobhan Nash-Marshall explained to me in a long telephone interview the roots of the conflict. When Stalin hated something, wicken things ensued. Stalin hated the Armenians.
A dark legend narrates that this visceral hatred was due to a brief stay with the Mechitarist fathers on the island of San Lazzaro in Venice. It may be. But the concrete fact is he did everything in order to weaken Armenia. In his office as Lenin’s plenipotentiary for the Caucusus, he gave parts of the Armenian territory to Turkey (Mount Ararat, Kars and Ardahan) and parts to Azerbaijan (Nakhichevan and Nagorno-Karabakh, which the Armenians call Artsakh).
The borders followed the principle of divide and conquer: Nakhichevan is not contiguous to Azerbaijan, and Nagorno Karabakh is like an island in the territories assigned to Azerbaijan. Stalin however also gave both of these territories the status of oblast: autonomous province. That is, he did not impeed the Azeris in their slaughter of the Armenians of Nakhichevan, then eliminating every trace of their presence.
In the last two years, his shadow has weighed greatly on the Armenians of Nogorno Karabakh. In September 2020, Azerbaijan flanked by “Turkish cousins”, unleashed a deadly war attack in order to “retake” this autonomous province. Since then, it has been constantly raiding along the borders of Karabakh. The goal, as even Erdogan affirmed in May 2020, is to clean up the entire region of “the remains of the sword.”
In this moment there is a school besieged. They are more than 600 pupils at the Antonia Arslan Armenian-Italian school in Stepanakert, in Nagorno Karabakh. 600 young souls caged in the Azeri vice, which is slowing strangeling them. They have passed 15 days since Azerbaijan closed the Lachin Corridor, the only road of access remaining to Armenia from Artsakh: the lung of the country, the road of aid, of food, of life.
This time they have not blocked the road with soldiers: like a sinister mockery, the agents disguised themselves as environmentalists. How can a country be a champion of the environment which in the past two years has launched attack after attack on Armenia and on Nagorno Karabakh, a country that fearlessly violates the convention of Ginevra, a country that with impunity transmits videos of tortured and mutilated women, a country that has built a park-museum to the war in order to humiliate the Armenians after the terrible hostilities of 2020, only because it is the holder of the supremely vital oil industry?
The seiges are not a new thing for the Armenians. We all know, thanks to Franz Werfel, the history of Mussa Dagh, the only capital with a happy ending in the immense tragedy of the Armenian Genocide. It is not a new thing for the Armenians who see the specter of hunger up close, of the slow deaths, of the expulsion from their ancestral lands. As Antonia Arslan remembers in her splendid ballad Song for a nation that dies, they remained on the peaks of the mountains of the only Armenian acrocorus “the ghosts of the archers of Van”. For the millions of Armenians that lived, danced, sang, prayed, and in the western valleys of Ararat, not even the churches remained, the monestaries, the tombs. It is not a new thing for the Armenians to smell the stink of this hatred towards the descendants of Noah that the leaders of the turanical nations carefully feed in the heads and in the hearts of their students. It is not a new thing, the complicated implication of the Western governments amid the assassination of the first Christian nation.
What is new is the deafening silence of the Western press in confronting this new chapter of the Armenian Genocide. Today, where are the thousand and thousand of articles that fill the pages of the daily papers of the Adanced West on the massacres of the Hamadians (1894-96), and also the massacre of Adana (1909), and also the Armenian Genocide (1915-18)? What is new is the Western indifference before this latest calamity for the Armenians.
The 600 pupils of the Antonia Arslan school have siblings beyond the barred road. They were, in fact, on a trip in Armenia a few days before the arrival of the so-called “environmentalists”. They watch with horror what is happening to their siblings, to their parents, to their aunts and uncles, to their teachers. But they know that, unlike them, their siblings still can go to school. The Armenians of Artsakh are stubborn. However much they are confronted with the stench of turanical hatred, however much they know that the great illuminated cross that stands upon the hill outside of Stepanakert is the target of Azeri soldiers stationed in the ancient Armenian city of Shushi, the Armenians of Artsakh go on. It is no coincidence that their herladric animal is the donkey.
We, the Western world, are once again keeping silent, for the umpteenth time we know nothing of what is happening. The cross is at the heart of Armenian and Europe hates the cross. The Prince of Davos has just declared Christ “fake news.” The deadly attack upon Christianity began with the extermination of the Armenians and the indifference of the Christian world, a carefully constructed and instilled indifference. The world is always filled with the cry of pain of others, a form of constant distraction. When there are no others, there is the Earth and there are seals to save. It is from the Armenian people that the reconquest of the truth must now begin.
The blood of Armenians has been flowing for more than a century like worthless liquid, they are abandoned in the face of their enemies by those who should be their friends and are not. We entrust the Armenians to Saint George, and we too could learn courage from him. Faith is courage. Atheism is a cowardice. Siobhan Nash-Marshall has published her first short novel George (Crossroad Pub. Co., New York, 2022 and Ares, Milano 2022), because sooner or later George will arrive and then times are hard for dragons.
Original article published in Italian by La Verità.