To Destroy History

To Destroy History:

The Belmont Club has a video of the smashing of tombstones by Azerbaijani attempting to erase the history of Christian Armenians in what is now their territory.

Asked about it, the government declared that it was impossible they could have destroyed the cemetery, as there were never any Armenians there at all.

There is a certain evil to that, which rises above the normal evils of the world. It surpasses even the evil by which a people is pushed out of a land, which has been the story of all human history, even in the island nations: the earliest histories of Ireland are recorded in The Book of Invasions. Yet that book points to the honest way, the way that honors and remembers the men who came before you. It is one thing to say, as Chingachgook did in the movie version of Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, that:

The frontier moves with the sun and pushes the Red Man of these wilderness forests in front of it until one day there will be nowhere left. Then our race will be no more, or be not us.... And one day there will be no more frontier. And men like you will go too, like the Mohicans.

And new people will come, work, struggle. Some will make their life. But once, we were here.

It is another thing to say, "There were never any Mohicans." "There were never Armenians here."

The truth, of course, is that there are still Mohicans, and the Armenian graves did truly rest in those hills. And neither are the last of we frontiersman gone, even if the frontier is harder to define today.

A curse on those men who seek to destroy the past, in the hope that no one will then be able to dream an alternative to them. May they fare better than the ones they have taken as enemies, but only this much better: may we always remember them, and spit.