A Reader on Reading

Adolf Hitler, who had much practice in such things, asked his military cabinet, shortly before the invasion of Poland in 1939: “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” Hitler’s rhetorical question has thousands of answers because, ever since the terrible decade in which over a million and a half Armenians were massacred by order of the Ottoman Turkish government, Don Quixotes around the world have been repeating, “Here is an unforgivable atrocity, here is an evil deed that cannot be forgotten, here is a terrible act of great injustice. You may want to believe the impossible, that the great crime never took place. But it did. And nothing you can say can undo the tragic event.” From the anonymous protesters in America who in 1915 collected over a million dollars for the Armenian cause to individual brave voices such as that of Hrant Dink, Hitler’s question is not allowed to go unanswered.

And yet those thousands of voices are not enough. Since Hitler’s time, the world has condemned, and continues to condemn, the atrocities of the Third Reich, and Germany itself has recognized, and continues to recognize, those atrocities. “Yes,” the Germans say, “this happened. And we repent in the name of our forefathers. And we beg forgiveness, if such a thing is possible. And we will not forget nor allow anyone to forget what happened here, on our soil. And we will not allow this to happen again.” And every time a neo-Nazi group tries to reinvent the historical past, Germany and the majority of Germans say “No.” This is what I mean by the perseverance of truth.

But Turkey, or at least the Turkish government, unfortunately has not yet reached that stage of recognition. In spite of those thousands of acknowledging voices around the world, a large section of Turkish society, as if attempting to lend strength to Hitler’s question with an accomplice silence, still refuses to admit the historical facts: that the entire population of Anatolia, the oldest extant population in the region at the time, over a million and a half men, women, and children, was exterminated between 1909 and 1918 in what the poet Carolyn Forché has called “the first modern genocide.”

Hrant Dink wanted nothing more than that which every serious journalist, every honest intellectual, every self-respecting citizen wants: that the truth be recognized. His murder confirms Socrates’ assertion with which I began this essay, that “no man on earth who conscientiously prevents a great many wrongs and illegalities from taking place in the state to which he belongs, can possibly escape with his life.” Hrant Dink must have known this, and also Socrates’ corollary, that “the true champion of justice, if he intends to survive even for a short time, must necessarily confine himself to private life and leave politics alone.” Such a confinement, as Dink understood and as Socrates himself knew, is impossible, because everything we do, every decision we make, every opinion we give as private citizens has political consequences. Politics is, by definition, a collective activity in which a few occupy the seats of power and the rest of us the remaining myriad roles. No citizen is dispensable, no voice useless in the continuing struggle to render our societies less false in their pretences and more true to themselves. “My only weapon was my sincerity,” Dink wrote in his last published article. As Socrates knew all too well, sincerity is a weapon that is deadly in more ways than one. This was Dink’s final lesson: that even though the seeker of truth may be silenced, his sincerity (from the Latin sincerus, meaning “clean” or “pure”) will eventually do away with the lie.

AIDS and the Poet

“I think I should understand that better,” Alice said

very politely, “if I had it written down.”

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 9

IN THE LATE 1990s, THE PAPERS announced that the government of South Africa was going to set up a program to import and produce low-cost drugs to treat patients with AIDS. Almost four years after the announcement, the Association of Pharmaceutical Industries, representing several of the largest laboratories in Europe and North America, filed a suit in the High Court of Pretoria, claiming that the South African law which allowed for such a program — a law signed by Nelson Mandela—contravened the international copyright and patent agreement meant to protect the rights of scientists, artists, and writers.