TRUE BUT WEIRD: Anniversaries can really hang you up sometimes. They’re hell if you forget, but even worse if you can’t. Just ask the government of Turkey, still refusing to come to terms with its Armenian genocide. One hundred years ago last Friday, the Ottoman government launched a blood-soaked campaign that left 1.5 million of that empire’s ethnic Armenian population dead. It turns out the word “genocide” was originally coined to describe the sustained systematic slaughter that ensued. Ever since, the world has been arguing the extent to which the “G” word actually applied. Aggressively espousing the negative position has been the Turkish government. The Armenian death toll has been greatly exaggerated, we are told; it was “an inter-communal conflict,” not genocide. The Armenians aligned themselves during World War I with enemies of the Ottoman Empire and were forcibly expelled. Stuff happens.
On the other side, however, is pretty much the whole world, though the United States — for geopolitical reasons that no doubt have nothing to do with all the blood on our genocidal hands — has embraced less stringently judgmental language. In one of the worst PR moves of all time, the Turkish government — eager to deflect unwanted publicity attending the Armenian genocide centennial — opted to celebrate the 100th anniversary of its landmark victory in the Battle of Gallipoli last Friday instead. The only problem is that for the past 99 years, Turkey celebrated this birth-of-a-nation event on March 18. In the United States, 1.7 million of us demonstrated we’d never succumb to such moral amnesia by tuning into Bruce Jenner, the putative paterfamilias of the most famous Armenian family in America, the Kardashians, as he described the agonies of being a woman trapped in a man’s body. I missed this two-hour slice of history as I watched endless reruns of myself blathering on Jerry Roberts’s talking-head news show, City Desk, now on public-access TV.
As usual, Santa Barbara’s separation from groundbreaking world events is much less than the traditional six degrees. Back in the early 1970s, the Armenian-Turkish conflict reared its bloody head in a cottage suite of Montecito’s acclaimed Biltmore hotel. When it was over, two Turkish diplomats lay dead on the floor and a longtime Santa Barbara resident named Gourgen Yanikian would emerge as the international poster child of Armenian vengeance. Yanikian was built like an oversized potato with a big boulder of a head and a white mane of hair. He wrote books, he put on plays, he’d been a not-so-successful developer but an accomplished civil engineer who built railroads in Iran. And he was also a regular in Santa Barbara’s burgeoning folk-dance scene. By any standard, Yanikian the Armenian seemed to qualify as a bona fide renaissance man. But in 1972, he was living on welfare, having lost his shirt on medical care for his chronically ill wife and a series of bad investments. What would emerge later is how Yanikian saw his older brother’s throat slit by Turkish hands during WWI and how similar atrocities befell other family members.