Condemned to Repeat It

"The real ruler, to whom everything is permitted, destroys Toulon, butchers in Paris, forgets an army in Egypt, expends half a million men in a Moscow campaign, shakes himself free with a pun in Wilno, and when he is dead they put up statues to him; everything is permitted to him.  No!  Such people are plainly not made of flesh, but of bronze!"  --Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment

Turkey recalled its ambassador to the Vatican yesterday, hours after Pope Francis used the word "genocide" in connection with the death of as many as 1.5 million Armenians between 1915 and 1918.  There wasn't more to it than that--in the very brief opening address at Mass in St. Peter's commemorating the 100th anniversary of the genocide, Francis did not mention Turkey or Turks, did not elaborate on the details of the slaughter, and did not call for revenge, reparations or punishment.

The Foreign Ministry of Turkey took it upon itself to fill in all those blanks.  Responding as if accused (which Francis did not do), the Foreign Ministry complains that Francis did not mention the suffering of Turks or Muslims during World War I, raises a legalistic accusation of slander, relies for its own defense on the fact that no "competent court" has found Turkey guilty of genocide, and somehow also throws in what must be a purely reflexive reference to the "cruelty of colonialism."

What the Pope and the Foreign Ministry agree on, at least superficially, is that we must look to the future.  Official Turkey would have us think that, to get to a peaceful future, history must be forgotten.  Mentioning the deaths of Armenians, even without use of the "G-word", has resulted in criminal prosecution in Turkey.  Francis, on the other hand, paraphrases Santayana's warning about forgetting history:   'It is necessary, and indeed a duty, to honour their memory, for whenever memory fades, it means that evil allows wounds to fester. Concealing or denying evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it!'  The Pope's reference to the past means to draw attention to the present--a "third world war" in the here and now against "our defenceless brothers and sisters who, on account of their faith in Christ or their ethnic origin, are publicly and ruthlessly put to death – decapitated, crucified, burned alive – or forced to leave their homeland."

The wound that Francis wants to heal is not in the past--it bleeds in the present.  The news of violence this year against Christians, simply for the offense of being Christian, is horrifying:  forced exodus, decapitations, mass murder.  

Outside of Turkey, there doesn't seem to be much disagreement as to whether what happened to the Armenians 100 years ago was genocide--in fact, the word was invented to describe it.  As is ever the case with evil, it can't call itself by its own name.  To survive, it needs distraction, dissembling and darkness.  Denial of the evil in plain sight is the only way to allow the evil to continue.