My cultural experience of Armenianness tells me that in the course of modern Armenian Diaspora history the practice of raising children who have successfully proven themselves as professionals, while remaining predominantly complacent and inactive as political beings, has been the norm rather than the exception.

This type of relationship between the personal and the social has not been without its reasons. As my generation of Armenian youth came of age in the decades that followed the end of World War II, our parents, teachers, cultural and athletic workers, and political leaders engaged in a general campaign aimed at dissuading us from involvement in issues of social justice. Instead, they encouraged us, with considerable degrees of skill and shrewdness to their credit, to succeed at the politics of the personal.

Whether it was to obtain entrepreneurial savvy, or to attain social status and fame, the definitions of such success often included two criteria, safety and comfort, both of which have since assumed emblematic proportions in the lexicon of Armenian cultural upbringing in the Diaspora. While busy inculcating the politics of indifference towards what happened in the world at large, our leaders did not desist from reminding us of the terrible injustices committed against the Armenians by the perpetrators of the 1915 Genocide, and in that light, of our responsibility—as the youth who were soon to inherit the burden of restituting the forsaken motherland—to make sure that the Armenian Cause received the redress it so justly deserved.

To prepare for this goal both the mainstream Armenian political parties and the Armenian Church made a variety of educational, cultural, athletic, and political activities available to us. This was done so that we would be ready, as it was customary to say then, for the day of reckoning—the time, when it came, to rise and demand of the world the reparations we had been blatantly denied throughout the darkest moments of our history.

As that day is yet to arrive, so few people ever took the time to alert us, back then, to the obvious reality that to expect others to throw the weight of their support behind the Armenian Cause, while Armenians remained reluctant to commit themselves unequivocally and universally to issues of social justice, was at best a non sequitur. Unless, of course, we were primarily interested in the delivery of justice from the vantage point of power politics rather than truth, a position evidently favored by our leaders.

As our generations matured, the nature and range of justifications used by the political and cultural leadership of the Armenian Diaspora to reign in and goad their followers into the particular brand of political awareness that has since become synonymous with the core meaning of contemporary Armenian political activism became clearer.

The limits of this awareness, this political position, are defined by a scheme, which is characterized by its advocacy of Eurocentric and orientalist ideologies, and by its implicit discouragement of any systematic attempt at critiquing the West’s current hegemonic control of the world. As it espouses these ideologies, the scheme ranks the peoples and cultures of the world on a totem pole at the top of which sit the Anglo-Germanic cultures of Europe and North America. Within this hierarchy a precarious niche is reserved for the Armenians, one that places them in close proximity to the pinnacle of power, to things and ways of being European.

Precarious, because in such positioning the scheme pays little credence to the inherent role played by power politics in the logic of the hierarchy. Instead, it inflates the importance of such criteria as Armenia’s presumed, yet contested, geographic proximity to the West, and Armenians’ denominational affiliation with the West’s major religion, Christianity. In other words, we are sold an ideological package, which tries to reassure us that the price we need to pay in order to have Westerners treat us as their cultural equals, and accept our mutual denominational kinship, outweighs the demerits of the tepid positions we as a people have assumed vis-à-vis issues of social justice globally. This is the price we must pay; we are told, in order to secure the future survival of Armenian nationhood.

The range of the disenfranchised, those who occupy the lower rungs of the totem pole of power within the hierarchy, is broad. It includes numerous constituencies of national, ethnic, racial, and religious origin, mostly of darker shades of skin. All Moslems, for instance, notwithstanding the bitter and brutal experiences Armenians have had with and under the Turks, qualify. But so do others, most of whom are virtually not to be blamed for the havoc that was the Armenian Genocide.

The list includes the blacks, whether of African or African American ancestry, various constituencies of Asian descent, and the indigenous inhabitants of the American and Australian continents. So is set the stage for young Armenians to degrade and mock covertly, and when social circumstances allow, overtly, those they have been culturally conditioned to view as their racial subordinates. Other types of implicit justifications and rationalizations have also been used by the mainstream Armenian power brokers to exclude: the poor, “because they are inherently lazy and incapable, otherwise they would have made more of themselves than they have”; the communists and socialists, “because they oppose the sanctity of private property and the private initiative, and because—since they too are lazy—of an ostensible tendency to look to the state for hand me downs, instead of living by the sweat of their brow”; and the homosexuals, because of an unexamined and unchallenged Armenian fixation on the types of biblical interpretations that define this population and their behavior as immoral and sinful.

As it labels those worthy of inclusion, and those on the fringe, the undesirables, the scope of negative impact displayed by the scheme of Armenian ethnic exclusionary politics reaches broad constituencies of Armenians and non-Armenians alike. The stigma the scheme doles out for the latter is more obvious, its discriminatory and otherizing intentions more brazen. The Odars (foreigners; the others)—as many Armenians use the term in mixed dosages of affection and xenophobia to refer to non-Armenians—are not the same as us, the story goes.

The “WE” of identity, is how the severance from self is implemented in this instance. The more subtle and hushed up aspect of the process of exclusion is saved for the insiders, however, the next of kin, and those among them who may embody one or more of the traits sanctioned as undesirable by the scheme.

An important consequence of the inward turn in bias and prejudice by this scheme (another consequence being the kind of infighting and deceit that plagues the cultural quality of intra-Armenian relationships in the Diaspora) is the virtual marginalization of large numbers of Armenians across the globe.

These are personalities who have made outstanding contributions to society, yet remain relatively or totally unknown to the Armenian rank and file, beholden as they are to the political dictums and machinations of the mainstream Armenian establishments and their allies and affiliates.

A quick review of the causes championed by these unrecognized and unsung Armenians reveals their oppositional stance to the norms of Machiavellian power politics, as it does their advocacy of social values and rights known to speak truth to power. The names of Ben Baghdikian, Charles Garry (Garabedian), and David Barsamian in the United States; Misak Manouchian in France; and Avedis Mikaleian and Vartan Salakhanian in Iran, are but a few on a much longer list.

• Ben Baghdikian: It was Baghdikian, Dean Emeritus of UC Berkeley School of Journalism, and a former editor at Washington Post, who facilitated the reading into public records of portions of the highly confidential “Pentagon Papers”, a voluminous stack of documents that exposed multiple instances of the United States Government lying to the public about its military operations in Vietnam and in other locations throughout Southeast Asia.
• Charles Gray (Garabedian): It was the outspoken leftist civil rights attorney, the late Garry, who in the midst of what was seen by many to be a volatile, if not intimidating, political situation boldly accepted to represent several members of the Black Panther Party leadership, as well as the anti-Vietnam War activists of the Oakland Seven.
• David Barsamian: It has been through Barsamian’s intellectually outstanding and tireless efforts, as independent journalist and activist, that the ideas and works of such seminal public intellectuals as Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali, Edward Said, and Arandati Roy have received the kind of promotion and circulation they deserve, both in the United States and internationally.
• Avetis Mikaelian: Mikaelian, known by most Iranians as Solatanzadeh, was a co-founder and leader (along with Heydar Amoghli), in the year 1920, of the Iranian Communist Party. This was a considerable accomplishment at the time, given the small size of the Armenian community in Iran, and the significant impact on the world political arena of the international workers’ movement.
• Vartan Salakhanian:  Salakhanian’s reputed valor in the face of torture and death by the Shah’s secret police inspired Iran’s prominent poet, the late Ahmed Shamlou, to write his famous ode to Vartan, entitled, “The Death of Nazli.” This poem has apparently become a symbol of resistance to oppression in today’s Iran, as some political prisoners are said to recite it to boost morale under captivity.

Recently, certain individuals and tendencies within the Armenian establishment have opted to introduce their constituents to a few of the figures in the above. Encouraging as these initial attempts appear, they leave a good deal to be desired. First because they lack consistency, and second because it is unclear whether they are primarily aimed at advancing the political interests of their sponsors, or, as it is claimed, horning the legacies of the personalities they promote.

An interesting example of such ambiguity was evident in the highly publicized case of the slain Turkish-Armenian journalist/activist, Herant Dink, where despite much genuine outpouring of grief and anger that surrounded the case, it was hard not to suspect attempts at double-dealing.

As one mainstream Armenian political organization/party after another rushed to praise Dink’s legacy, traces of the fast rule, which implies, “What’s in it for us as powerbrokers in our communities other than the fact that Dink was an Armenian?” were easy to detect. The proof: considerable care was taken by these establishments to expunge what in Dink’s biography did not match the usual range of the attributes that have come to define the meaning of Armenianness as seen through the straightjacket of nationalism.

Given the thinness of the veil of familiarity and kinship that separates next of kin from Odar, the more selective and discriminatory the nature of our politics in regard to non-Armenians—the greater the split between self and other—the more discombobulated the quality of our intra-Armenian relationships—our tendency to exclude those perceived as undesirables amongst next of kin. Likewise, given the inextricable bond between the inward and outward aspects of ethnic exclusionary politics, the more lucid and transparent we are in our interactions with those we call “our own”, the greater the hope that our younger generation will be more prone to embrace others, and take to the cause of social justice in its universality.

This would mean standing on the side of the downtrodden and the oppressed, not due to expectations of in-kind nature, but because of the moral imperative called for by such an act. Until then, the hopes of attaining durable and pliant strength within our internal ranks as Armenians are to remain negligible, and with it, the opportunity to truly celebrate the uniqueness and diversity of the culture that has made Armenians so resilient in the world. For too many years Diaspora Armenians have abstained from any significant participation in events and struggles in support of social justice and change around the world. We have been absent not only as activists, but also as informed and concerned citizen observers. From the popular mass mobilization movements and social revolutions in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Brazil, The Philippines, and South Africa, to multiple US military invasions and interventions in the continent of the Americas; from the repugnant and vicious effects of America’s wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan (and now in Pakistan), to wanton American support of Israel’s relentlessly pernicious anti-Palestinian policies, Armenians, young and old, have by far remained silent. Frequently than not, we have even resisted the “simple” option of speaking about these issues to one another.

Our voices have not been raised, except in support of the powerful, our peculiar silence, but to approve of the injustices committed. With the shift to the outward aspect of Armenian Diaspora’s ethnocentric as well as personal comfort and expediency politics, I would like to momentarily focus on the tragic story of Neda Agha-Solatn, the young Iranian woman who was gunned down in cold blood while protesting Iran’s much contested presidential election of Summer 2009. Ms. Agha-Solatan’s case could be likened to the eye of the storm that has since enveloped Iranian society, months beyond President Ahmadinezhad’s inauguration. People inside and outside Iran have broadly mourned Neda’s death.

Posthumously, university scholarships have been established abroad to honor her memory, and The Times of London has named her person of the year, “a symbol of justice unserved.” Meanwhile a smaller group of pro-government activists inside the country have retorted by blaming those they call “Agents of the West” for the fatal incident.

My own reasons to choose this case are both personal and societal. In the latter instance, the sheer human impact of Neda’s death offers a new opportunity to unlock the clutches that frequently impound us within the boundaries of our ethnic, national, and religious identities.

This brutal assassination is the kind of event that has the potential to reunite our usually divided sense of self as communities of people. It provides the possibility of fusing what are ordinarily the divergent fragments of the “us and them” dichotomy—identity and its difference—as it brings us closer to an acknowledgement of the fundamental principles of social justice in the universal sense of this concept.

On a personal level Neda’s killing has rekindled the processes of my identity formation, this time in the renewed context of what has emerged as a significant social movement in Iran. As a result, the need to rethink my relationship to Iran, my birthplace, the home of the Armenian community where I was raised, has been jolted out of its latest phase of dormancy.

The incident has also caused a sudden resurfacing of an episode from my own deep past, a story of early adolescence, which combines issues of growth and morality in a manner so characteristic of

that stage of our lives.

Neda Agha-Soltan (1982-2009) Tehran, Almost a half a century ago when the Shah was the undisputed ruler of Iran, and to think that one-day an Islamic Republic would rise to supplant his rule required a leap in imagination; I ended up killing a bird.

Sitting across the factory building owned by a childhood friend’s family, I spotted the creature that was soon to become my prey. It was a tiny and scrawny bird, perched on a sapling nearby, a stone’s throw from my location. It took split seconds for the pebble, which I had picked off the ground ambivalently and thrown at my target, to blur the definitions of being and not being into the image of death.

I watched in a mix of bewilderment and bravado, as the fallen bird lay motionless on the grass, still cool beneath the heat of an intensely bright summer sky. How was I to come to grips with the responsibility of depriving an innocent creature of its right to live—a right I had robbed—I heard myself think. The pain and the emotions I felt subsequent to this incident proved to be too tender, too unexpected, for a child who had yet to reach puberty.

They were to linger in time, when I went home to confess to my mother, and beyond, as I grew into adolescence, and later, adulthood. San Francisco, Sunday, June 21, 2009. As I sat at my laptop to read the news, my eyes were quick to frame the blood-strewn image of a young woman who lay still on a pavement somewhere in the world. Her eyeballs seemed to be permanently glued to the corners of her sockets; her ashen face covered by crusty rivulets of blood she must have spewed out while bleeding form a mortal wound. Soon, my street sense for Iran’s capital city, and the time I had sunk into tracking the ongoing social turmoil in that country, combined to let me seize what it was that lay in front of my eyes. I clicked on the gruesome image to learn more about the story.

Lost in the silence of a cold summer morning in the fog city, interrupted only by thoughts of my own daughter, safely tucked in her bed upstairs, I found myself witness to the dying moments of Neda Agha-Soltan, the child of a mother whose grief I knew I could share, and sobbed. Somehow, watching Neda wheeze out her last breath of air reminded me of the rawness and intensity of the pain I had felt when killing my bird of prey, long ago.

Despite their obvious incompatibility—the malicious intent of an adult gunning down an apparently peaceful citizen in full knowledge of the lethalness of his action, compared to the benign innocence of a child’s near accidental slaying of a bird—the two incidents did not seem totally unrelated to me. Both made un-foreboding and circumstantial targets of their victims who in turn surrendered their lives unassumingly, although not painlessly, to their aggressors.

Both incidents left me in the role of a bystander who stood and watched the spirit of the dying disappear into the countless black holes of our massive universe.

Both pointed to the degree of vulnerability all living beings suffer when faced with violence and aggression. Finally, both could be read as testimonials to the fragility of lives forcibly interrupted at the cost of destroying what is no less than the future of hope. Neda was at the anti-government demonstration out of sheer love for the right of all human beings to freedom—not to cheer Moussavi or hiss Ahmadinejad—has since stated her fiancé.

Neda’s participation at the event on June 20, 2009, was to show her strong disapproval of what she considered to be a mockery made of the political process during her country’s latest presidential election. Here is to the authenticity of the spirit that may have moved this young woman to act for justice.

May this spirit serve as a source of perpetual strength for all those in Iran who are standing up to be counted and affirmed during these trying times? May it dispel the prangs of fear that grip our souls and throttle our courage in the face of hateful villains and oppressors, wherever they may dare to raise their heads, lash their weeps, and blast their guns.

And, may the memory of a bloodied Neda’s last word, “Misoozam, (I am burning, in Persian),”as retold by one of her companions on the march, return to fuel and refuel the fires of resistance in the hearts of the brave new generation of Iranian women and men struggling to build a free and just society.

As Armenians we will continue to find it difficult to see the relevance of such stories to our sense of self, and to our present cultural identities, unless we begin to concern ourselves with issues of social justice that move beyond the political interests of our own Armenian Cause. To rise to this challenge, we will need to transform our current ideas and practices of what it means to be a socially conscious, politically aware, and ethnically responsible citizen.

Most of all, we will have to cultivate a sense of being truthful to our memory and to the neglected and unexamined whispers and cries of our collective conscience. Walking this path will be crucial to the future well being of our culture and nationhood, even though in the process we may find ourselves colliding with the accepted narratives and norms of the Armenian Cause, questioning our Eurocentric ideologies, and challenging the truth of our Armenian identities as prescribed and mandated by the nationalist agenda.

No less than a resolute commitment to the wisdom that hinges a more profound grasp of what we consider to be next of kin upon the daring act of entering the entrails and rethinking the identities of the otherized, requires that we embark on this path, nothing less than the imperative of carrying out our ethical responsibility to the memory of the martyrs of our own Genocide.

Yeprem Mehranian