In fact, the dress rehearsal for the Nazi extermination
of the Jews took place exactly 100 years ago, in 1915. The genocide was carried
out by Turkish authorities, and it murdered more than 1 million Armenians, a
people who were overwhelmingly Christian. Religion wasn’t the only reason for
the killings – ethnic and economic resentments of Turkey’s Armenian minority
played an important role – but Muslim contempt for the “unbelievers”
legitimized the violence and was a powerful current throughout the killings. Men,
women and children were turned out of their homes, marched to exhaustion and
starved, beaten, hanged and burned to death by the tens of thousands. The
systematic murder campaign went on in bloody waves into the 1920s. Witnesses
recalled Turks taunting their victims with shouts of “Where is your Christ now?
Where is your Jesus? Why does he not save you?”
***
Lent is a time for self-examination and repentance; a
time for good spiritual reading and the sacrament of penance. It’s also a time
for renewing our sense of solidarity with fellow Christians around the world.
It’s a moment to remember the witness of so many Christians who’ve died simply
because they were Christian.
The world rightly remembers the mass murder of Jews and
other minorities by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. In its scope, the
Shoah dwarfs anything in human history, and its echoes continue today in the
rise of anti-Semitism in Europe, much of it driven by radicalized Islam. But
the Shoah was by no means the only mass murder carried out in the 20th century.
In fact, the dress rehearsal for the Nazi extermination
of the Jews took place exactly 100 years ago, in 1915. The genocide was carried
out by Turkish authorities, and it murdered more than 1 million Armenians, a
people who were overwhelmingly Christian. Religion wasn’t the only reason for
the killings – ethnic and economic resentments of Turkey’s Armenian minority
played an important role – but Muslim contempt for the “unbelievers”
legitimized the violence and was a powerful current throughout the killings.
Men, women and children were turned out of their homes,
marched to exhaustion and starved, beaten, hanged and burned to death by the
tens of thousands. The systematic murder campaign went on in bloody waves into
the 1920s. Witnesses recalled Turks taunting their victims with shouts of
“Where is your Christ now? Where is your Jesus? Why does he not save you?”
To this day, Turkey has never adequately acknowledged the
Armenian genocide. As President Jimmy Carter once remarked, “there weren’t any
Nuremburg trials” for the mass murder inflicted on the Armenians. During the
Cold War, Turkey was a NATO ally. The United States and Europe found it easier
to turn a blind eye to history than to resurrect a crime from the past.
Today, with the resurgence of militant Islam inside
Turkey itself, a full national truth-telling by Turkish authorities may be even
more remote. Armenians were the first nation in the world to formally adopt
Christianity in A.D. 301. Today, in their historic home regions of modern
Turkey, their culture and memory have been wiped out.
Every year on April 24, Armenians around the world
celebrate Remembrance Day for the victims of the 1915 genocide. This year, on
the centenary of that mass murder, Christians from every tradition need to
remember and pray for the victims of that genocide, which remains one of the
worst unrepented crimes in history.
We also need to remember that the persecution and murder
of Christians still continues at the hands of ISIS and radicalized Islam
throughout the Middle East. And to date, our national leadership has been
utterly ineffective in stopping it – or even fully engaging it.
We Americans take for granted our traditions of religious
liberty, human rights and judicial process. We see the coexistence – and even
the friendship — of different religious communities and beliefs as quite normal.
But it’s not. We too often don’t understand the uniqueness of that gift.
Today, in many places around the world, living as a
Christian invites discrimination, hatred and violence. The beheading of
Christians by ISIS is the latest crime in a long history of Middle Eastern
Christian martyrdom – not the phony and homicidal “martyrdom” that involves
blowing up innocent women and children, but the real martyrdom of being
murdered for one’s belief in Jesus Christ.
Lent is a time of repentance. It’s also a time for
forgiving even the wicked. But it’s also a time to remember and learn from
history — even when the whole world wants to forget it. This Lent we need to
remember and pray for the Armenian Christians who died 100 years ago. Like us,
they were part of God’s people; the people of Jesus Christ. The memory of their
suffering should turn our hearts and our energies to helping the millions of
Christians now suffering in the Middle East and around the world.
***
For background on the Armenian genocide, read “The
Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response,” by Peter
Balakian (HarperCollins, New York, 2004; available on Kindle and in paperback).
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