A POWERFUL AND ARMOR PIERCING LANCE
By I.J. Singh – For once, I was utterly confused.
Sikh News Network
June 3 2007
On My Mind
Many historians say that in 1915, the Ottoman Empire was responsible
for the death of a million Armenians in an organized campaign of
genocide. But there are important voices, admittedly just a few,
that deny any such happenings or mass killings ever occurred.
Most recently, last month at a Barnes & Noble bookstore when Margaret
Ajemian Ahnert, read from her book "The Knock on the Door" about
her mother’s survival during those days, some people in the audience
heckled her, holding up signs that proclaimed, "It Never Happened."
This history is less than a hundred years old. Could records be so
difficult to interpret? Could memory become degraded so quickly?
Then I am reminded of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany’s efforts to
eliminate the Jews. I can understand disagreements over the fine
points and details of exactly what was done to whom and under what
circumstances, but the basic facts and the larger framework is
established beyond doubt. Yet, only a few months ago, the Iranian
President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, opened a conference in Teheran, whose
sole focus was denial of the Holocaust as a historical event. And
the history of the Holocaust is young – barely 60 years old.
The glaring distortions that emerge from such attempts to rewrite
history become obvious from ironic twists — like the fact that
mentioning the Armenian genocide in Turkey is a crime, but denying
it would be illegal in France. Denying the Holocaust would be
unacceptable in Israel; in Iran insisting that it occurred would be
equally unacceptable.
Then my mind goes to a most recent gathering that I attended just
days ago. It was a largely Indian group with only a sprinkling of
Sikhs. The focus was to take note of the events of June 1984, and
rejoice in the fact that India and Indians were moving forward. Yes,
we are moving ahead, as we should.
(For the uninitiated, I summarize the events here. Between June 2 and
5, 1984, a massive force of the Indian army invaded the Golden Temple
at Amritsar, wreaking untold havoc on the premises and killing untold
numbers of pilgrims. Five months later, in precisely orchestrated
attacks on Sikh homes and businesses, thousands were killed in
several cities across India. Much of Punjab was sealed off from the
outside world, and for the next decade, thousands of young Sikh men
disappeared. Ten judicial commissions and investigative reports later,
there is no accounting of the dead and justice still awaits.)
One way to move forward would be to remember what happened, so as
not to repeat history. By nurturing and preserving the history in
our cultural memory, we would honor it so that our goal would become,
"Never Again."
The alternative would be to bury the painful and the unpleasant by
denying it ever happened, and that is precisely what many speakers,
even some Sikhs, attempted to do at this conference that I attended.
Speaker after speaker insisted that the damage to the Golden Temple
was minimal, there were only scattered, random killings of Sikhs, and
no fake encounters or extra-judicial killings ever occurred. To be
fair, a few speakers did present evidence against such a rosy view,
but the prevailing, most powerful, voices dismissed such claims as
sporadic events of no consequence. Claims of organized mayhem against
the Sikhs were clearly unfounded, they argued, because such brutality
would never occur in a civilized society like India. So these alleged
atrocities never happened.
I heard this Kafkaesque reasoning and I thought my head would spin.
It is like the claim that President Bush or his aides might make that
our army never brutalizes prisoners in Iraq.
I know that "History has cunning passages and contrived corridors….
And deceives us by vanities," as T.S. Eliot reminds us, but the
events of 1984 happened only 23 years ago. That is not even one
generation ago. The evidence is still available; it is degraded some,
but not entirely. Oral history can still be preserved. And already
we have deniers of this history. If we fail to preserve history,
50 or a hundred years from now deniers of history will be seen as
reputable scholars.
Then I remind myself that mind is the most powerful organ of the
human body. It is both a shield and a weapon. Perhaps the deniers
of history are trying to protect themselves from it. Denial then can
become both a powerful armor, as well as a sharp lance, when offense
serves as the best defense.
Affirming painful history can be cataclysmic and shattering to one’s
sense of self. It is more comforting sometimes to tell a lie than to
confess a painful truth. Self-preservation and self-protection are
universal human needs. The harsher the truth, the greater the need
to lie.
Most religions revere the Truth. Hinduism tells us that truth is ever
triumphant. "Ye shall know the Truth and Truth shall make you free,"
promises the Bible. Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh faith, too,
reminds us that "Truth is the panacea of all ills," and that "Truth
is high but higher still is truthful living." Truth is God and is
eternal, according to Sikhi. This sentiment lives through the daily
greeting of the Sikhs, "Sat Sri Akaal."
The other side of the coin shows the quiet desperation of our lives.
T.S. Eliot reminds us that, "Between the conception and the reality,
falls the shadow. It is eloquently captured by the celebrated Modern
Greek poet C.P. Cavafy:
"With words, countenance and manners, I shall make an excellent suit
of armor None will know where my wounds are, my vulnerable parts,
Under all the lies that will cover me."
Note: The author, Inder Jit Singh, is a professor of anatomy at
New York University. He is on the editorial advisory board of the
Calcutta-based periodical, ‘The Sikh Review’. I.J. Singh is also
the author of four books: ‘Sikhs and Sikhism: A View With a Bias’,
‘The Sikh Way: A Pilgrim’s Progress’, ‘Being and Becoming a Sikh’,
and the most latest release, ‘The World According to Sikhi’.
[email protected].
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