Reprisal attacks, or a reprise of attacks?

I had a further discussion with the grand Turk across the way. In the process of handing me some Ottoman coins, after all he is an ambassador for his nation as well as being a Fulbrighter, he began to gloat about the certain death of Pelosi’s Armenian genocide resolution.

The context of our meeting wasn’t abnormal as far as my office is concerned: a little veranda commune, though my veranda is nothing more than the roof of the prison-cum-departmental hall. To get there you have to enter through a rectangular opening (window) that has just enough aperture to prevent possums from coming in but not graduate students out. We drank the nearest thing to a good Turkish coffee: Starbucks French roast, brewed to its most bitter.

Cahil, as he will be known, blathered about the Armenians being too whiny, opined about the fragility of the American polity, for why would they allow such idiocy to continue? And then the news of Turkey’s vote on an incursion into Kurdistan came up.

“507 to 19 was the vote,” Cahil reassured me, “this thing will be clean and easy. Not like Iraq. We know how to manage these things, especially since it’s only with this small party.”

Forget for the moment that my dear colleague called the Peshmerga a small party, for they actually represent two parties, namely the PUK and the KSP, and are in fact composed of between 80,000 and 175,000 troop.

The real question is if things are alright in the Middle East because the Turks have a record of successfully engaging in armed conflict. More than the Armenian lobby in San Francisco begs to differ.

Turkey Lurkey

That Turkey has such a difficult time dealing with its genocidal past should come as no surprise. After all, no US President has ever apologized for slavery (though, it can be argued Bush came the closest with his sparkling prose in Senegal). It will be years before state actors in the Balkans, Sudan and the like recognize their contrition for mass killings and/or genocide.

But Turkey is an ethnic state, and the national consciousness over the plight of the Armenians in WWI may never be raised high enough to appease any Western governments. My recent interaction with Turks should prove as nothing more than anecdotal evidence, but it’s illustrative of a kind of thinking that’s best suited for manufactured homes in the Louisiana bayou, not the cosmopolitan society that modern-day Türkiye has become.

This morning, for instance, the Turkish language instructor across the hall was in an outrage. He was spitting venom about the whole congressional committee vote, and he seemed to infer that he’d take this out on his class (entitled “Modern Turkish Syntax,” no less). “Those Armenians are always crying,” he wailed to me after I brought up the morning’s news, “they don’t know that 360,000 Turks died under the Ottomans, too. They just like themselves, only themselves.” It should be noted that this professor is a Fulbright Scholar who, one would think, also likes himself (and his people), lest the tens of Turkish flags festooned around his office portray otherwise.

Rewind to five months go, a time when I was still a part-time caterer in San Diego. While working an event one night, a corporate affair replete with employee awards and a semi-listenable band of ambiguous origin (Persian electronica-cum-Barry Manlow?), I had the opportunity to interact with some hotel personnel. Banquet service can be a high-end job in the industry, and the two gentlemen I became familar with, both Turks, were no stranger to this phenomenon. Both were from Istanbul, both were pursuing their degrees in hotel management with a education abroad opportunity tied in.

“Armenians,” the chubby one guffawed when I brought up the allegations of genocide, “have you seen their women? Like dogs–disgusting. They always WOOF WOOF–like bitches, you know?”

“Yeah,” the more taciturn one started up, “they just have to let things go, because Turkey won and it is done.” He was pleased with his rhyme, it should be noted.

And finally 6 months ago, while enrolled in a bartending class, my “lab partner,” a senior systems engineer for Qualcomm began to spill some drinks. The alcohol is of course water in bartending school, though the dye used to simulate various liquids could probably break through your epidermis, and yet I saw this as an opportunity to make a flippant remark: “I hope you don’t serve that drink to me just because I look Armenian.” The context was poor, and I admit the joke was of Jay Leno quality, but she froze up. Wouldn’t speak to me at all for the rest of the class, a week in duration. Not once did she even sit close to me.

There are any number of issues to cite with the Armenian genocide. Many Turks do have a point that Ottoman rule was a brutal one for its own ethnic population as well, but that argument obscures the truth. White Rebel soldiers died in droves defending the Confederacy, but that no less blunts the subjugation of human life that was the backbone of the American South, and America itself before that.

Obviously Turks have more face to lose than we do, both in national mythology and imagined community. Should they concede on this front, people might even have to rethink Atatürk. And yes, the stakes are higher with the EU knocking at the door, or with influence in Iraq increasing by the day.

Yet I am still blown away by this brand of nationalism that has cut through a large swath of Turkish citizens living and working in the US. And though I never ONCE mentioned the issue while I was actually traveling in Turkey, I almost have to believe that their comments are the status quo.

But it was a Ukrainian security guard at the hotel that night who put it in perspective when he heard what was being said by the future Turkish hoteliers : “Armenians, Turks, you are both dirty [expletive]. Both of you are dogs, but Armenians are smaller dogs.”

Will blind nationalism and bigotry subsume each other over time?