QUOTE (Artaxias @ Aug 23 2005, 10:24 AM)
Because we are Europeans, in many ways we are more European than most of them, save for Greeks, Serbs and a few others.
i hesitate to write this artaxias because i know you blow me out of the water in terms of knowledge of history, etc., but saying that we are european, does this mean we have more in common with say the english, the french, the swedes, than we do with a persian, a lebanese arab, or even a kurd? does this mean we can't jump, suck at basketball, play a boring, dull style of soccer that the brazilians run rings around, can't dance, play music based on nice, neat tempered scales in 4/4 time, copy other people's music (mainly blacks), and eat bland, tasteless food. greeks, bulgarians, serbs is about as far into europe as i care to liken armenians to.
europe is a well-defined geographical area but "european" is too vague a concept to be meaningful. does it mean way of thinking, food, music, approach to family life, language? i see the arguments that armenians are european, but the reality is that historically armenians have born very little resemblence culturally to the people living in the territorial area known as europe. this is true today too - i do not think armenians living in syria, iran, turkey, iraq, egypt, view themselves as european either. they are not cultural hermits in their countries, living in a bubble, they are fully a part of the cultural fabric of the societies they live in. is this all because armenians in those countries have lost their european culture and become islamized? maybe. but at the same time we don't ask to what extent 70 years of soviet rule changed armenian culture. did soviet armenia preserve the anatolian armenian culture that the victims of the genocide belonged to? i find the european armenian convention declaration very bizarre. how far do you have to go back to arrive at a time when armenians were european?
armenians living in the u.s., europe, and the russian empire is a recent phenomenon. for the bulk of their history, when not independent armenians lived under roman, persian, byzantine, arab, and turkish empires, all empires of the ancient and modern near eastern world. was king artaxias, living in the second century b.c., a european? what about tigran the great, was he a white european from the north conquering the middle east? well, certainly they were indo-europeans, but mesopotamian sources say that the babylonians, sumerians, traded with a "people of ararat". so did the "people of ararat" have more in common with the ancestors of anglo-saxons let's say, with whom they had no contact at all, than they did with the mesopotamians (ancestors of today's iraqis), who they traded with? so how far do you have to go back? probably by the time you get past all the periods of foreign rule you're at a time when there was nothing going on in europe!
frequently it's pointed out that armenian is an indo-european language. well, so are persian, pashtun, urdu, hindi, and sanskrit. nobody is going around claiming those people are european. armenians are christian? well, christianity is not a european religion. to me, that christianity is identified with europeans is an indication that an act of cultural theft has taken place. read the bible from cover to cover and you will not encounter a single white european in the entire narrative. not a single event related in the bible takes place in europe. instead the events take place in what is now egypt, iraq, syria, jordan, israel, iran, turkey, etc. the existence of armenians is a reminder to the world of the true origins of christianity. it was middle eastern civilization that gave rise to the spread of christianity. but starting with the crusades and right up to today, western europeans (which includes americans) have shown they have a racialized understanding of christianity. otherwise they would not have slaughtered all those eastern christians. this turns christianity into something like judaism - salvation and sharing in the kingdom of god only for one ethnic or racial group.
specialists of indo-european linguists who are proponents of the anatolian-farming hypothesis of indo-european origins tell us that all the european languages (with a few exceptions) descend from a single language that was spoken in anatolia thousands of years ago. this means that the languages of the people who were living in what is western europe today were gradually replaced by languages spoken by people originating from anatolia who migrated into europe. it is also thought that these anatolian migrants introduced agriculture into europe, which means that europeans were hunter-gatherers until people from the middle east introduced farming to them. to me, anatolia has much stronger historical and cultural links with mesopotamia, persia, the levant, north africa, etc. than it does with western europe. thus middle easterners in a sense gave europeans their language, agriculture, and their religion.
i think that by convincing ourselves and others that we are european we are abetting this act of cultural appropriation. instead we have to reassert the early foundations of christianity and remind the "western world" of the cultural debt they owe to middle-eastern people. teach them some respect. what western europeans have done over the last 600 years, conquering and exterminating other peoples (native americans, africans, australians, the list goes on) and even laying waste to countries (iraq) that gave rise to western civilization thousands of years ago, while carrying the banner of christianity, is a disgrace to christianity as a religion. we have now the u.s., a country of european origins lead by a "born-again christian", having invaded and occupied iraq, the land of ancient mesopotamia, killing tens of thousands of people, and treating their deaths as if they were roadkill. americans think they are there to bring "civilization" to iraq, and that they need to teach middle-easterners "western values". but who are the barbarians? how can they even think that when the earliest signs of a settled human civilization comes from iraq (mesopotamia)? the earliest of examples of writing come from there. the first law code was written there. agriculture is thought to have started there. abraham was born there.
today, people in positions of power (militarily, economically, culturally) are trying to create a world of black and white. but that's not the way things are in reality and this is in fact a disguised tactic of domination. take a look at this link:
http://www.macfdn.or...roudi_maria.htmshe's a greek scholar who won a macarthur genius grant recently for studying the cultural interactions between the byzantines and the arabs. this shows you that the borders between rival civilizations are very much blurred. those of us that inhabit those border areas (as armenians do) are the ones that stand the most to lose from ensconcing ourselves on one side or the other. we should do whatever we need to do to guarantee our security, but be very careful not to surrender our cultural sovereignty to something we are tricked into thinking we belong to. just as an example, integrating into european stuctures means the imposition of stronger freedom of religion laws in armenia. do we want more baptists and jehovas in our country?
check out this link. the following is the mission statement of a series of
musical workshops that take place every year in crete, greece. it kind of gets the point i am trying to make across, especially since armenians inhabit the world it is describing:
QUOTE
The center of all of our efforts at the musical workshop "Labyrinth" is definitely our educational projects. It is in this context that we regularly organize seminars and master-classes under the direction of some of the finest musicians of the world. The island of Crete (our location) has been for centuries a crossroads and meeting place for cultures form all over the Mediterranean as well as from other more distant lands. Crete, of course, is not the only place where such cultural exchanges have taken place.
Indeed all of the great musical traditions of the world owe their richness to the crossover of influences between all of the civilizations of history. For us a healthy future for music in general depends very heavily on the continuation of this process and not on the imposition of certain cultural forms by economically powerful nations through the medium of the entertainment industry. Many very remarkable and important musical traditions are in danger, either of being steamrolled into extinction by the political and commercial interests of the western world, or of being fossilized and stereotyped into quaint replicas reflecting another age, devoid of their creative dynamic. We firmly believe that all of the regional
musical traditions of the entire world are worthy of the greatest respect and that each and every one of them deserves an equal role in a worldwide dialogue of cultures. This dialogue does not aim towards the creation of a homogenized single world culture, rather it emphasizes very heavily the maintenance and cultivation of the integrity and individuality of even the most obscure of local idioms, while simultaneously encouraging an open-minded attitude to the cultures of all other peoples. Each musical culture must be approached on its own terms within the context of its own set of values. Qualitative comparisons between different musical cultures which employ the criteria of one or the other are demonstrably futile and only lead to false assessments which hinder intercultural understanding rather than enhance it.
kind of a rambling post i know but i gave you some of my ideas.
Edited by kumkap, 23 August 2005 - 04:57 PM.
