After my interview I gave yesterday for state television is aired and reading the story below about my grandfather, you should better understand that the Armenian saying of the apple not falling too far from the tree was not just someone being poetic, but a result of someone’s theory on genetics. At very least it shoud give you a better understand why I do what I do.
AWOL (Armenian Weekly On-Line) August 23-29, 2003
Shahan Natalie: A Retrospective
By Jack Danielian
EXETER, NH-Karabagh's Punic Publishing has rendered a valuable service to an English-speaking readership by reprinting and translating into English Shahan Natalie's The Turks and Us, his political writings from the 1920s. The Punic Press is to be commended for recognizing that these early writings of Shahan Natalie possessed a truly remarkable quality of timelessness; indeed they are at many points unnervingly prescient.
Shahan Natalie (1884-1983) was an accomplished writer and dramatist who during the Hamidian massacres, at the age of 11, had come face to face with the brutal murder of his family in his native village of Husenig, Kharpert. Instead of becoming paralyzed by the genocidal atrocities he witnessed, he responded with furious outrage in speech and in print. In the process, he demonstrated an unerring acuity concerning the psychological and political necessities for the survival of the Armenian people.
An activist and patriot of the first order, Shahan Natalie was nevertheless at times not hesitant to be critical, especially of the Armenian leadership across the political spectrum. He feared the perpetuation of such mindsets would inexorably lead to the eventual demise of Eastern Armenia as well, and therefore to the final end of the Armenian people. Perhaps only a universally accepted patriot of his people could offer such personal criticisms.
What were these mindsets Natalie most feared? He cited three areas of primary concern. First, Armenians have had difficulty seeing the true goals of the Turkish people, despite living amongst Turks for over 600 years. For example, Armenians could not understand how they, as a minority, could so quickly go from favored millet to hated infidel.
Natalie reasoned that Armenian attempts at rationalizing Turkish perceptions were misguided. He maintained that neither Armenian culture nor religion nor economics was involved in the plight of the Armenians. Rather, it was the relentless goal of the Turks of Anatolia who wanted to establish monolithic Turkism from the Mediterranean to the Caspian-in Natalie's words, the "unification of Anatolia with Azerbaijan over the corpse of Armenia." How else to explain, he wrote, that Turks were able to establish an empire from a clan of 400 people.
It is often in the nature of trauma that victims become unsure of themselves and self-referential. But Natalie's analysis would lead to the conclusion that any ethnic group standing between Turkish Anatolia and Turkish Baku should expect to face the same mortal danger. Currently we see monolithic Turkism oppressing the only remaining ethnic group still present on these lands-the Kurds. The fact that the Kurds are co-religionist with the Turks will offer them, as Natalie prophetically predicted, no safely whatsoever from annihilation.
A second forewarning concerning Armenian mindsets involved what Natalie called "the lullabies of various orientations." He states in several places that Armenians often enough had never met an abstract "ism" they couldn't countenance and that, charmed by universalism, the Armenian mind had taken on a separate existence from the Armenian heart, lulling Armenians into a false sense of security. Seduced by universalistic abstractions from Europe, he felt that Armenians became distracted from their already very palpable life-and-death struggle with the Ottoman Turk and with the possibility of the horror of their own extinction.
To think of Turks of that time as incompetent Asians was in Natalie's view to commit a double crime-underestimating the commitment of the Turks to empire building by any means imaginable, and overestimating the capacity of the Armenian leadership to forewarn the Armenians of their only true options. These were Shahan Natalie's observations, recorded in the 1920s.
Finally, in his essay "An Offense Committed is an Act Permitted," Natalie cites the ancient saying that "if a man commits an offense and repeats it, it becomes in his eyes something permitted." There were never any effective sanctions placed against the Ottoman Turks for their crimes. The European and Western powers in their own self-interest allowed the architects of the Armenian Genocide to escape unpunished.
Natalie witnessed this charade and almost immediately realized that if the perpetrators were left unpunished, the Armenian Genocide itself would rapidly be forgotten and over time even be denied. This was his warning to his people. Of course, that is what precisely happened in the course of the next 80 years. In the face of massive denial by successive Turkish governments and in the face of moral collusion by the US and other major powers, Armenians lapsed into a grievous silence.
As Natalie presciently anticipated, virulent denial and opportunistic quasi-denial of the Armenian Genocide has had serious ramifications for the children and grandchildren of this ancient people. The prolonged Armenian silence had not been, however, a silence of procrastination, indifference, or insularity. Rather, it was a silence of paralyzing loss, the magnitude of the silence perpetuated by wave upon wave of international denial, each denial further compounding the trauma.
Shahan Natalie fought against his own trauma and the trauma of his people with every fiber of his being. His legacy is firmly secure. He was a man of letters, a man of science, and a man of action. Calling on his enormous passion and will to not allow his trauma to disconnect his mind from his heart, he was able to transcend his own visceral pain, maintain his integrity against staggering odds, and, in the darkest of all moments 80 years ago, chart an early course for the recovery of his people.
AWOL (Armenian Weekly On-Line) August 23-29, 2003
Shahan Natalie: A Retrospective
By Jack Danielian
EXETER, NH-Karabagh's Punic Publishing has rendered a valuable service to an English-speaking readership by reprinting and translating into English Shahan Natalie's The Turks and Us, his political writings from the 1920s. The Punic Press is to be commended for recognizing that these early writings of Shahan Natalie possessed a truly remarkable quality of timelessness; indeed they are at many points unnervingly prescient.
Shahan Natalie (1884-1983) was an accomplished writer and dramatist who during the Hamidian massacres, at the age of 11, had come face to face with the brutal murder of his family in his native village of Husenig, Kharpert. Instead of becoming paralyzed by the genocidal atrocities he witnessed, he responded with furious outrage in speech and in print. In the process, he demonstrated an unerring acuity concerning the psychological and political necessities for the survival of the Armenian people.
An activist and patriot of the first order, Shahan Natalie was nevertheless at times not hesitant to be critical, especially of the Armenian leadership across the political spectrum. He feared the perpetuation of such mindsets would inexorably lead to the eventual demise of Eastern Armenia as well, and therefore to the final end of the Armenian people. Perhaps only a universally accepted patriot of his people could offer such personal criticisms.
What were these mindsets Natalie most feared? He cited three areas of primary concern. First, Armenians have had difficulty seeing the true goals of the Turkish people, despite living amongst Turks for over 600 years. For example, Armenians could not understand how they, as a minority, could so quickly go from favored millet to hated infidel.
Natalie reasoned that Armenian attempts at rationalizing Turkish perceptions were misguided. He maintained that neither Armenian culture nor religion nor economics was involved in the plight of the Armenians. Rather, it was the relentless goal of the Turks of Anatolia who wanted to establish monolithic Turkism from the Mediterranean to the Caspian-in Natalie's words, the "unification of Anatolia with Azerbaijan over the corpse of Armenia." How else to explain, he wrote, that Turks were able to establish an empire from a clan of 400 people.
It is often in the nature of trauma that victims become unsure of themselves and self-referential. But Natalie's analysis would lead to the conclusion that any ethnic group standing between Turkish Anatolia and Turkish Baku should expect to face the same mortal danger. Currently we see monolithic Turkism oppressing the only remaining ethnic group still present on these lands-the Kurds. The fact that the Kurds are co-religionist with the Turks will offer them, as Natalie prophetically predicted, no safely whatsoever from annihilation.
A second forewarning concerning Armenian mindsets involved what Natalie called "the lullabies of various orientations." He states in several places that Armenians often enough had never met an abstract "ism" they couldn't countenance and that, charmed by universalism, the Armenian mind had taken on a separate existence from the Armenian heart, lulling Armenians into a false sense of security. Seduced by universalistic abstractions from Europe, he felt that Armenians became distracted from their already very palpable life-and-death struggle with the Ottoman Turk and with the possibility of the horror of their own extinction.
To think of Turks of that time as incompetent Asians was in Natalie's view to commit a double crime-underestimating the commitment of the Turks to empire building by any means imaginable, and overestimating the capacity of the Armenian leadership to forewarn the Armenians of their only true options. These were Shahan Natalie's observations, recorded in the 1920s.
Finally, in his essay "An Offense Committed is an Act Permitted," Natalie cites the ancient saying that "if a man commits an offense and repeats it, it becomes in his eyes something permitted." There were never any effective sanctions placed against the Ottoman Turks for their crimes. The European and Western powers in their own self-interest allowed the architects of the Armenian Genocide to escape unpunished.
Natalie witnessed this charade and almost immediately realized that if the perpetrators were left unpunished, the Armenian Genocide itself would rapidly be forgotten and over time even be denied. This was his warning to his people. Of course, that is what precisely happened in the course of the next 80 years. In the face of massive denial by successive Turkish governments and in the face of moral collusion by the US and other major powers, Armenians lapsed into a grievous silence.
As Natalie presciently anticipated, virulent denial and opportunistic quasi-denial of the Armenian Genocide has had serious ramifications for the children and grandchildren of this ancient people. The prolonged Armenian silence had not been, however, a silence of procrastination, indifference, or insularity. Rather, it was a silence of paralyzing loss, the magnitude of the silence perpetuated by wave upon wave of international denial, each denial further compounding the trauma.
Shahan Natalie fought against his own trauma and the trauma of his people with every fiber of his being. His legacy is firmly secure. He was a man of letters, a man of science, and a man of action. Calling on his enormous passion and will to not allow his trauma to disconnect his mind from his heart, he was able to transcend his own visceral pain, maintain his integrity against staggering odds, and, in the darkest of all moments 80 years ago, chart an early course for the recovery of his people.
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