AN OPEN LETTER
Some years ago I organized a photo exhibition at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard. Argam Aivazian, an Armenian photographer, documented in a series of before and after photographs the systematic destruction by the Azeri state of thousands of intricately carved, inscribed medieval khachkars— “Cross-stones”— at the cemetery in Julfa, Nakhichevan.
This was the largest act of deliberate cultural destruction since the Second World War. I was physically attacked twice by an Azeri student, once on the Harvard campus at the opening, and a second time at a symposium on the exhibition in Belmont, Mass. The Azeri ambassador placed a personal call from Washington, DC to the president of Harvard University, accusing me of being an “Armenian terrorist”. (I am not Armenian, and in fact have encountered considerable hatred and prejudice in the Armenian community.)
The hatred of Armenians in Azerbaijan is pathological. In Boston I once met a quiet, kind Armenian shoemaker. He was from Baku. He inherited his craft from his father, whom a mob of Azeri pogromists killed in front of him. He fled— to Moscow, then to the US.
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When I was teaching Armenian and Iranian studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel, I was set upon and assaulted by two Jews from Azerbaijan in line for an El Al flight at the airport when they asked what I taught and I told them it was Armenian.
“But let us not pursue the tabulation of nonsense,” as Kinbote says in “Pale Fire”. Anybody who knows that water runs downhill knows also that the Christian Armenians were victims of jihad. Hitler appreciated the Armenian Genocide. It provided the pointers for the holocaust he was planning.
In the summer of 2015, back at Hebrew University to teach a course on Armenian epic literature, I went with my friend Michael Stone, also a professor of Armenian, to the Israeli Foreign Ministry. A low-level official received us and practically laughed us out of the room when I suggested improving relations with Armenia so as to make a back channel to avoid full-scale war with Iran. He explained that the Azeris were probably aware we were there and knew what I was saying.
Fast forward. Israel provided a great deal of military aid to Azerbaijan in the war in Nagorno-Karabagh two years ago. It wasn’t the only country to do so, and those who singled it out for blame had more than a whiff of prejudice. But a variety of Jewish and Israeli publications ran “letters” manufactured by Azerbaijan’s ministry of disinformation.
The screed was basically the same, but was tweaked to make it look like it came from various people. When I presented my credentials- emeritus Mashtots professor of Armenian at Harvard and so on- and suggested a more balanced, factual article, the editor of “The Tablet”, an American Jewish neocon magazine, told me to get lost. The fix was in.
In recent days, the Israeli press has been reporting that Israel is helping the Azeris to secure their gains in the Karabagh war, which the Armenians lost. Azerbaijan has choked off, blockaded what is left of Armenian Karabagh. The terms of the ceasefire stipulated that the Russian army would keep open the Lachin corridor for humanitarian access, but Azerbaijan and its patron, Islamist Turkey, are taking advantage of the situation to block the road.
A friend of mine in Erevan told me today that the first Karabagh Armenian to DIE OF HUNGER has just been buried. He says that people in Erevan are listless. They don’t know what to do. There is very little they CAN do.
In 1940 the Nazis confined the Jews, who were then a third of the population of the Polish capital and a tenth of the population of the whole country, to a small part of downtown Warsaw, which was walled in. Jews from other parts of the country and occupied Europe were herded into the Warsaw Ghetto, till there were about half a million people there. Poland was and is a violently anti-Semitic country and most of the population looked on with smug indifference as hundreds of thousands died of hunger and disease, then industrial massacre in the gas chambers of Treblinka.
Outside the ghetto, the Polish Home Army (AK) often took time out from fighting Germans to hunt and murder Jews. On Passover 1943 some of the few Jews left in the ghetto rose up in armed rebellion against the Germans and their Ukrainian henchmen. They held out longer than Poland itself had in September 1939. The Nazis, unable to defeat the Jews in a fair fight, set fire to the ghetto. As people burned alive, Polish children a few feet away were riding the carousel while their mothers paraded in Easter bonnets. But the Polish People’s Army (AL) fought against the Nazis and on the side of the Jews. The AL were Communists.
It takes bullets to kill people, but indifference pulls the trigger.
My parents’ families in Warsaw, Krakow, Brody, and Salonica were murdered by bullets and apathy. Salonica, once the “Jerusalem of the Mediterranean”, lost a higher percentage of its Jewish population than any other place in Nazi Europe.
But there were some who survived, because the Communist resistance helped them hide out, and fight, in the mountains of Greece. After the war, the US and England decided to install the old pro-Western, pro-Nazi collaborators and fat cats in Athens, and the Communist resistance, EAM-ELAS, said no. My Dad, a US Navy veteran, was by then a sophomore at Columbia. He and his pal George Andrews, a Greek-American and a great guy, used to go to Port Elizabeth and Hoboken late at night to help smuggle guns to the Greek Communists.
My Dad was a Red and so am I. The Karabagh Armenians today are the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto yesterday. Nobody cared then and who cares now. It sticks in my gullet when Israel, the only possible answer to the crime of the Holocaust, is enabling today’s Nazis– Azerbaijan. Fuck that. Nothing could be more wrong. Let’s turn it around. This Jew Commie stands with the Armenians in Karabagh and damn it, so should you, if you’re men. Pass the word.
James R. Russell
Mashtots Professor of Armenian, Emeritus,
Harvard University
