Issue #3

Why Did the Translator Choose This Piece?

It was Armenian Big Shots that thoroughly disabused me of the vague suspicion that the lack of intelligent and virtuous national leaders evident all around us was somehow the result of the dysgenic effects of the targeted killings of hundreds of intellectuals that preceded the Genocide. Having published Armenian Big Shots in 1880, well before 1915, and even before the Hamidian massacres in the 1890s, it became clear to me that the genocide hadn’t led to a lack of good leaders, but that the lack of good leaders had led to the genocide. After giving voice to this discomforting sentiment in a talk I gave on Baronian nearly five years ago for Hamazkayin, I was scolded by an elderly man for, in his words, “doing the Turks’ work.” But I think the very recent history of the last two years alone, after the ethnic cleansing of the Armenians of Artsakh, has completely vindicated this observation. We were all eye-witness to the Prime Minister of Armenia raising the alarm of genocide at the hands of Azerbaijan one day, and, the very next day, advising residents of Artsakh to remain in Artsakh. Once they had been blockaded, starved and, finally, completely ethnically cleansed with nary a peep from the Armenian government, the PM’s right-hand man, Alen Simonyan, could be seen publicly taunting refugees, asking them why they had fled, why they hadn’t stayed to be butchered. On top of it all, the PM himself started saying publicly that this tragedy had been a good thing and had made Armenian statehood stronger and more sovereign.

There’s no denying it now: the genocide hadn’t led to a lack of good leaders; the lack of good leaders had led to the genocide.

Read the original source here.