Genocide, ignorance, and history repeating itself.

I must admit that before this book, I did not know about the Armenian Genocide. Reading about the atrocities committed against these people in 1915 was a visceral experience, in that I felt the tragedy and the horror of it coming off of the page. Balakian's choice to tell some of these tales in the voices of those who experienced the genocide first hand made it all the more real. I was especially moved by the narrative of Balakian's grandmother's cousin, and her story of how her father was murdered and she and her family were arrested and sent out on the death march. "The moon is terribly bright in August in the desert around the Euphrates. All that month it grew each night. It followed us. It was a wolf's eye. It was the opal charm of a Turkish sorceress ... I lay on my back and felt the grooves of my cuts made by the Turkish whips ease onto the hard ground, and I stared at the moon." (p. 211)

There were so many things about this book that struck me, that I'm having a hard time narrowing it down. One of the passages I took note of was when Balakian wrote, on page 163, "Implementing pan-Turkism so that the Turkish people would act on it not only meant demonizing Armenians, Greeks, and Zionist Jews ... now it was important to make a formal and political accusation that Armenians were a security threat to the nation." This jumped out at me because it is so similar to what is still happening in the world and in the United States today. In the aftermath of 9/11, we have crept closer and closer toward a police state, in the name of "security" against those that the government considers terrorists. Muslims and those of the Islam faith are persecuted and othered, in the name of security. It makes one wonder how far a government is willing to go in order to justify racism and extermination. As we have seen in this book, governments are capable of carrying out brutal massacres against its own citizens. We have seen this time and time again - the Holocaust, the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, Rwanda, Armenia. What drives this cycle of persecution and ignorance, what makes humans capable of committing these atrocities against other human beings? Is there an end in sight, or will we continue to repeat history over and over until there is nothing left?

I don't want to ramble too much here, so I'll leave this for now. I did also want to comment, however, on the craft of this book - I thoroughly enjoyed the way that Balakian framed his memoir, introducing us to his idyllic, suburban upbringing so that we could journey with him from being a boy who was somewhat "yeah, whatever" about anything that didn't have to do with his friends, or girls, or the teenage culture he was so attached to, to an accomplished writer discovering his own roots and ancestry, along with bringing the truths of the genocide to the public eye. I thought his prose was beautiful and the story-telling solid, to where I was engrossed in every aspect of the book. It was a wonderful reading experience.