BALANCED PORTRAYAL AN EXTREMIST’S WORST NIGHTMARE: PBS DOCUMENTARY “ARMENIAN GENOCIDE”
Elizabeth Frierson
Cincinnati Enquirer, OH
April 24 2006
A remarkable new documentary, “The Armenian Genocide,” was broadcast
nationwide on PBS last Monday – except in Los Angeles. This controversy
is at heart, behind all the bloviating rhetoric, over freedom of
speech and freedom of inquiry, basic human rights that KCET quashed –
in the United States of America – by suppressing this documentary. Our
local affiliates did not buckle under the pressure.
Why did this documentary upset extremists on both sides of this
history?
Emmy Award-winning producer Andrew Goldberg tells as big a story
as possible, showing not just what happened, but why, not just two
sides with their own versions of events, but multiple victims and
perpetrators with differing points of view. In other words, this
balanced portrayal is an extremist’s worst nightmare.
Viewers see starving Muslim refugees from Christian atrocities in
the Balkans before WWI. This complicates the idea that Muslims were
always the aggressors and Christians always the victims in ethnic
conflict. The documentary also shows Armenian guerrilla fighters
attacking Turks. Neither Christian atrocities nor Armenian resistance
justified genocide. Still, these stories are often downplayed, as
if people today couldn’t make those distinctions, and need to be fed
simple lies in order to be horrified by atrocities.
Second, the film shows ordinary Turkish citizens telling family
stories of atrocities against Armenians, expressing their grief and
disgust over what happened. This shows that ordinary Turks – despite
the government’s denials of genocide – today are ready to acknowledge
and mourn this tragedy. This upsets extremists on both sides.
Third, we meet scholars and writers who are, even as you read this
paper, on trial in Turkey just for using the term “genocide” to
describe what happened. These courageous Turks do research and publish
results knowing that they put their lives and livelihoods at risk by
doing so. They are actively supported by Armenian colleagues who are
equally sickened by easy answers to messy questions on the Armenian
side. This kind of cooperation across boundaries is what frightens
extremists on both sides most of all, precisely because it threatens
to break boundaries of hatred that make life simpler than truth and
reconciliation would require. It is ironic that Turkish journalists on
trial were rendered invisible by intimidated broadcasters in the U.S.
Rwanda, Sudan, Iraq, Bosnia, WWII Europe – it’s a long and filthy list,
and to many an incomprehensible, and therefore unstoppable, part of
“human nature.” It is neither incomprehensible nor unstoppable, as
long as we are free to see the whole picture, including its shades
of grey. Messy truth may be hard to take, but that’s precisely why,
in this country, censorship is illegal. Except, apparently, in L.A.
Elizabeth B. Frierson, Ph.D., is Associate Professor, History of the
Middle East and North Africa, University of Cincinnati, and editor
of The Turkish Studies Association Journal. She was among the experts
interviewed for “The Armenian Genocide.”
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