An Armour of Lies
I.J. SINGH
 For once, I am
utterly confused.
Many
historians say that in 1915, the
Ottoman Empire
was responsible for the death of a million Armenians in an organized
campaign of genocide. But there are important voices, admittedly
just a few, that deny any such happenings or mass killings ever
occurred.
Most recently, at a
Barnes & Noble bookstore last month, when Margaret Ajemian Ahnert
read from her book, "The Knock on the Door", about her mother's
survival during those days, some people in the audience heckled her,
holding up signs that proclaimed, "It Never Happened."
This history is less
than a hundred years old. Could records be so difficult to
interpret? Could memory become degraded so quickly?
Then I am reminded
of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany's efforts to eliminate the Jews.
I can understand disagreements over the fine points and details of
exactly what was done to whom and under what circumstances, but the
basic facts and the larger framework are established beyond doubt.
Yet, only a few
months ago, the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, opened a
conference in Teheran, whose sole focus was denial of the Holocaust
as a historical event.And the history of the Holocaust is young -
barely sixty years old.
The glaring
distortions that emerge from such attempts to rewrite history become
obvious from ironic twists - like the fact that mentioning the
Armenian genocide in Turkey is a crime, but denying it would be
illegal in France. Denying the Holocaust would be unacceptable in
Israel;
in Iran, insisting that it occurred would be equally unacceptable.
Then my mind goes to
a gathering that I attended just days ago. It was a largely Indian
group, with only a sprinkling of Sikhs. The focus was to take note
of the events of June 1984, and rejoice in the fact that India and
Indians were moving forward.Yes, we are moving ahead, as we should.
(For the
uninitiated, I summarize the events here: Between June 2 and 5,
1984, a massive force of the Indian army invaded the Golden Temple (Darbar
Sahib) at Amritsar, wreaking extensive havoc on the premises
and killing countless numbers of pilgrims. Five months later, in
precisely orchestrated attacks on Sikh homes and businesses,
thousands of innocent men, women and children were killed in several
cities across India, including its capital, New Delhi.
Much of Punjab was
sealed off from the outside world and, over the next decade,
thousands of young Sikh men disappeared. Ten judicial
commissions and investi gative
reports later, there is no accounting of the dead, and justice is
still pending.)
One
way to move forward would be to remember what happened, so as not to
repeat history. By nurturing and preserving the history in our
cultural memory, we would honor it so that our goal would become,
"Never Again."
The alternative
would be to bury the painful and the unpleasant by denying it ever
happened, and that is precisely what many speakers, even some Sikhs,
attempted to do at this conference that I attended.
Speaker after speaker insisted
that the damage to the
Darbar Sahib
was minimal, there were only scattered, random killings of Sikhs,
and no fake encounters or extra-judicial killings ever occurred.
To be fair, a few
speakers did present evidence against such a rosy view, but the
prevailing, most powerful, voices dismissed such claims as sporadic
events of no consequence. Claims of organized mayhem against the
Sikhs were clearly unfounded, they argued, because such brutality
would never occur in a civilized society like
India.
So, they said, these atrocities never happened as alleged.
I heard this
Kafkaesque reasoning and I thought my head would spin. It is like
the claim that President Bush or his aides might make that our army
never brutalizes prisoners in Iraq.
I know that "History
has cunning passages and contrived corridors.... And deceives us by
vanities," as T.S. Eliot reminds us, but the events of 1984 happened
only 23 years ago. That is not even a full generation ago. The
evidence is still available; it is degraded somewhat, but not
entirely.
Oral history can
still be preserved. And already we have deniers of this history. If
we fail to preserve it, fifty or a hundred years from now, its
deniers will be seen as reputable scholars.
Then I remind myself
that the mind is the most powerful organ of the human body. It
is both a shield and a weapon. Perhaps the deniers of history are
trying to protect themselves from it.
 Denial
then can become both a powerful armor, as well as a sharp lance,
when offense serves as the best defense.
Affirming
painful history can be cataclysmic and shattering to one's sense of
self. It is more comforting sometimes to tell a lie than to confess
a painful truth. Self-preservation and self-protection are
universal human needs. The harsher the truth, the greater the need
to lie. All religions revere the Truth.
Hinduism, for
example, tells us that truth is ever triumphant. "Ye shall know the
Truth and the Truth shall make you free," promises the Bible.
Guru Nanak, the
founder of the Sikh faith, too, reminds us that "Truth is the
panacea of all ills," and that "Truth is high, but higher still is
truthful living." Truth is God and is eternal, according to
Sikhi. This sentiment lives through the daily greeting of the
Sikhs, "Sat Sri Akaal." Other religions speak similarly.
The other side of
the coin highlights the quiet desperation of our lives. T.S. Eliot
reminds us that, "Between the conception and the reality, falls the
shadow." It is eloquently captured by the celebrated Modern Greek
poet, C.P. Cavafy:
"With words,
countenance and manners,
I shall make an
excellent suit of armor ...
None will know where my wounds are, my vulnerable parts,
Under all the lies that will cover me."
(Courtesy sikhchic.com)
6 June, 2007
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