Sobbing in Silence: Armenian Environmentalism
The worst thing that could happen, did. For hundreds of years, we witness a repeating cycle of colonization and capitalism. So deeply intertwined into the very roots of the entire superstructure of our society, the world watched unwavering at the original sin.
This piece is off the cuff, I am writing to get some feelings out, to articulate how this situation has impacted me. I am not trying to be a scholar or a historian, I am young and I am in pain. This world is cruel, and I am angry. Perspective is in short supply these days.
Uncontested was the theft and colonization of indigenous land in Artsakh, as another genocide commenced to steal land and claim it as their own, only to exploit it without care to those whose ancient churches littered the mountainous highlands. They lived down below, with ancient blood flowing into ancestral grounds, to be birthed and pass on the same soil that nurtured and fed an ancient lineage. Displaced ethnic Armenians flee their homes away from Azerbaijani aggressors, funneled out in spirit of the 1915 genocide; not much has changed today.
We posture as progressive, inclusive, warriors of the people and defenders of the land. Yet in all our posturing, we work within the confines to perpetuate a system that did nothing to defend indigenous peoples. Nothing more can be expected, the system in place does not allow anything to be done. Young people fled to their ancestral lands to fight and die for country, only for the Armenian PM to secede land and surrender to keep his people alive. Helpless to the greed of leaders before him that would sell their land for profit, that had promised to keep their word to puff up their wallets. The land, cleared of its indigenous people, is open to industrialization and mining, to make it worth owning to the capitalist machine, to the oligarchs that would call it theirs, to the greedy that seek to grow their wealth at any cost. Genocide, destruction, war, threats, bribes, blackmail; there is no rock bottom when there is profit to be made.
Stealing indigenous land is the foundation of the capitalist construct, it is the action that allows the rest of it to unfold, it is the very ground that we all walk on. There is not way to change it from within, it is the roots that hold all else up that are themselves the corruption. There is no justice to be had from within. And yet, there would only be more violence and death had Armenia not seceded its indigenous land, had soldiers of 18 years of age not martyred themselves in defense of what is rightfully their birthright. To be born, to live and thrive, only to worship the Earth and their gods, to love their family and themselves. All was stripped and taken away, by design, and it has impacted the Armenian diaspora around the world. No one would say anything, no one came to our defense. This is the way it is, by design. No one aided the Aborigines in Australia, the Native American Indians in the Americas, nor the African Indigenous when colonialism touched their soil. Their suffering is ours: it is modern, it is ongoing, its the same crime with the same outcome, the same goal.
Yet in the diaspora there is anger, and justifiable anger. I can understand them, I can feel the rage and sadness boiling inside. I identify with the helplessness to do much about it on my own. What I do know is that derision will weaken us, that militarization and violence will prolong our salvation, that recoiling in fear at the extents of their inhumanity and meeting it with bloody vengeance helps no one. Armenians that did not fight flooding the capitol building in violent protest at our surrender to Azerbaijan and Turkey because it is painful fails to capture the nuance of our predicament. We were sold out before we knew it, with allies like Russia it is hard to imagine we have enemies like Turkey.
There are calls to militarize Armenia for defense, the people looking at Israel as an example. They fail to see that Israel is a strong nation-state for the Jewish diaspora following the holocaust, but they are persecuting the Palestinians. They also sold the drones that would bomb Artsakh. We do not want that path I can guarantee it, we must be stronger, we must be mountains.
As the world silently watched genocide, as it has over and over again, I found myself paralyzed. No longer did my work matter, no longer did I want to feel happy, the time for joy, fulfillment, it has passed in an icy gust of wind sending shivers down my back. My work is in environmentalism, I operate with the hope that if we want to reverse climate change, nuclear energy must be a cornerstone of our green energy sources. For nuclear to be accepted and understood, there is decades of government and military injustice that must be addressed, that the people must know that they are at the fore front of our work, not profits or the aimless pursuit of science that has left our world on the cusp of irreversible climate change.
And still I am supposed to wake up and fight for the down trodden that are as helpless as me, impacted more than I, saved by my privilege from the ever strengthening grasps of racism, misogyny, transphobia, classism, and so on and so fucking on. People that were too busy trying to survive that they could not stand up for themselves, let alone stand up for their fellow. What more could be expected from them? I have no anger towards them, only towards our lords that keep us in this self-destructive cycle. Am I to stand on my own two feet, after sharing tears with my elderly matriarch, hearing the voice of my grandmother strained in pain living through genocide she never imagined to see. Old age only facilitating the horrors she must witness, and still be able to console her children. Who am I to complain.
Still there is global warming, still there is rampant spread of misinformation, state-monopolized violence, genocide, colonialism, capitalism, and nothing but time to spend. There are folk I can help directly from within, but what more am I than a bandage for their sickness. We need the kind of radio-therapy that kills the cancer on this earth, that removes us from this cycle. We don’t have long before the capitalist serpent devours the ground it stands on and poisons the air beyond breathe. What are we to do, and how are we to do it. If not for me, then for the next victims, Assyrians already lined up and bombed by Turkey after their conquest in Artsakh.
