Armenian Genocide: Blog Assignment 2

Armenian Genocide: Blog Assignment 2

I had heard about the Armenian Genocide before, but never in school. My uncles lived in California, where there is a large Armenian population, and we would sometimes visit them during the Armenian Remembrance Day. Aside from that, however, I didn't hear about the Armenian genocide in any larger context, either in school or in the media, until 2006, when I read an article in The New Yorker about "A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility," a history of the Armenian people in Turkey, written by Taner Akcam. After I read that review, that name, and talk of the Armenian Genocide, seemed to crop up constantly, and I began to wonder how I hadn't heard of it before.

But then again, there are so many things that I didn't learn in school that, looking back, seem so thoroughly necessary to learning about the world. How many murders like this have there been in history, that we simply haven't heard about? Or haven't learned about? I don't remember any mention of Pol Pot's forced agrarian utopia in Cambodia; I don't recall anyone teaching me about the Hutu-Tutsi conflict in Rwanda, that is until Rwanda became a more popular topic following the release of "Hotel Rwanda;" Stalin's forced famine; I even continue to be surprised by everything I don't know about the Holocaust, despite having been taught it almost every year since grade school. And this list is just from the twentieth century! What about everything that happened before? What about the Spanish Inquisition--the number of deaths pales in comparison to something like the Armenian Genocide or the Holocaust, but considering the amount of carnage the Inquisition caused during its time, it is obviously a very important part of history that I feel was glossed over or ignored completely in my history classes.

Obviously, not everything can be taught. There are millions of years of history that we're supposed to know--or we desire to know--and simply not enough time in school to learn it. But I don't understand why there was so little concentration on these types of conflicts in school. Why was there not a class to not only inform us of what happened, but also why it happened? For example, what was the state of the world when the Armenian genocide took place? What was happening to allow Hitler to not only come into power, but kill millions of people? And now, we should be learning why most leaders since the 1900s refuse to call the Armenian genocide by that name. Every teacher in school told me that I was learning history so that it wouldn't repeat itself, but what good were the cursory descriptions of every ruling monarch in England for preventing future murder? If I was truly being taught history so that my generation could hope to refrain from making the same mistakes, then I should have been taught the mistakes of history, not just the timeline.

--From Danielle