EVERY LOVE AFFAIR HAS A PAST
Around 1.5 million Armenians perished during the Ottoman genocide. More than a century later, denial cannot silence the innocent blood that still cries out for truth and remembrance.
Another blast from the past! This image is a reworking of a 1939 Turkish cartoon by Ramiz Gökçe, published in Karikatür magazine shortly before Republic Day.
In the original, the personified Turkish Republic embraces a handsome soldier while a battered figure of Peace looks on enviously. Its boast was: “The whole world envies our Republic.”
This version restores the historical context missing from that patriotic love affair - “Darling, with you beside me, we can forget everything.”
Everything?
An ancient Christian people uprooted from their homeland. Families driven into the desert. Men, women and children murdered. Churches emptied. Homes seized. Property redistributed. Names erased.
Approximately 1.5 million Armenians gone from the lands that became modern Turkey. Also other Christian minority groups - such as Assyrians and Greeks - faced mass killing, deportation, and persecution during the same period.
The genocide was perpetrated principally by the Ottoman authorities during the First World War, before the Turkish Republic was proclaimed in 1923. But the Republic inherited the emptied towns, confiscated property and demographic transformation-and cultivated a national story in which the dead were expected to remain silent.
That is what national amnesia looks like.
The textbooks look away.
The politicians deny.
The flag is spread over the grave.
Patriotism is recruited to protect the nation from its own conscience.
But the grave will not remain closed.
A skeleton clutches the soldier’s ankle. Another hand pulls the flag toward the tomb. Across the landscape, the forgotten dead rise like a terrible harvest.
The Republic gazes lovingly at military strength.
Peace gazes horrified at what lies beneath its boots:
“The blood of the innocent cries out!”
Every love affair has a past....So we are putting the missing historical context back into the picture.
A nation cannot bury its past without burying its conscience.
“The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.” — Genesis 4:10
