I remember hearing System of a Down doing their Wake Up the Souls Tour. The tour commemorated the 100 year anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. Armenian Genocide?! What Armenian Genocide?
Genocide is the eradication of culture. The systematic effort to eliminate any trace, artifact, or memory of a culture. It obviously includes killing people. The Armenian Genocide was intense. While researching what had happened in the Ottoman Empire a century ago, a distressing feeling developed. How had I not been more aware of this? How many other groups of people had their stories totally obliterated? If not wiped out, then unilaterally twisted into the incomplete and distorted narration of the world known as history. As it would be, I’m more aware of genocide than I thought. Manifest destiny is genocidal. From Tibet to the Killing Fields, Rwanda and America, the lists are staggering.
Researching the eradication of nations and cultures is easy. Anti life zealotry is a repetitively horrific feature of “civilized” beings that runs through the stories of societies all over this planetary realm. Oppressive dominance, and the endeavor to achieve it, doesn’t seem to be reserved to any one particular race, or group. However, the systematic nature of planning, persuading, and executing are consistent. Power grabbers through the ages have exploited the predictability of their fellows’ emotional responses to leverage dominance again and again. After gaining a critical amount of public trust, burgeoning control organizations introduce, and continuously reinforce, the prime influencer of personality… fear. With threat leverage applied to the minds of subjugated groups, formidable formations develop which provide social control masterminds access to commandos of a most mind washed brand. The ensuing nightmares of exploitation and eradication then take place with a truly baffling cosmic rationale. Mass murder and total destruction then ensue in the names of diplomacy, justice, security, and peace. In the ensuing tug of information war, schisms of worldview develop, clarity evaporates, propaganda is brokered, confusion reigns, and history narrations develop in selfishly distorted ways. Once the lopsidedness of the story telling evolves. reality gets inverted, and it as if what has always been, never was.
I’m finding the stories of cultural preservation compelling. Races that become aware of their own pending demise have demonstrated a commitment, conviction, and resolve that re-balances nightmarish extermination with hope. Control over story telling is not reserved. As overwhelmingly tragic as genocidal mass murdering and cultural scrubbing is, is as brilliant are the stories of emergency preservation of culture that oppressed groups have made. Within the huddled critical mass of those still living begins a fascinating transcendency. We are not dependent upon dominators to care for our own story. We are going to need keepers. Keepers of the heritage, the memories, rites, and customs. Oh faith… Oh favor… It is never a bad time to listen for the song of the nation while it can still be sung; fearlessly sung.
Word by word, a written history can be manipulated. The victor writes a story, not the story. Taking responsibility for the preservation of one’s own story is survival. Obviously, the key is to know it. Wake Up the Souls is a down stream example of a nation that would not let the memorial version of their own story disappear. The story of how this, and other, peoples that have not been successfully choked out by the stranglehold of murderous genocidal efforts which had them on the brink of disappearance, now gets told along with the oppressors’ story. Coherence is a revelation away, and the cadence of truth is revelation’s antecedent. Down the ages the sages sing abundantly lively that, “We’ve been here.” As the chorus grows, our collective voices raise. Heart harmonies bulge, swell, and reveal that it is much easier to voice memorial truths than to adjust a bastardized jumble of convenient heroics which always and only favor one cause. The strategy of twisting the story to favor the winner has run its course. Desperate overlords of the status quo are resorting to absurdity to mask an exposed, recognized, ongoing, ever expanding, genocidal attack. With this, the world of the oppressors shrinks, cooperation the sickness stops,. and an age infused with truth, vitality, and authenticity rises. Reconciling ourselves to the actuality of existence is far from easy, although doing it interrupts the race to blind oblivion that dark force agents, that have laid waste to nations, insist upon. Eradication is no given.
Take hold of alternatives. Learn and tell your story! Knowing that we’ve been living in a progressively sickening organ is a start. Informational bastardization engineering will always be a strategy. It cannot prevail. It is built to fail. Look and listen through each sentence and hymn. The oppressors have tipped their hands. It is wise to invert the official narrative. Ensuing understandings won’t near be perfect, but they will be heading in a different direction. The voices voicing the survival of the crushed have a weight and merit that raises and carries all of us to a new experience with ourselves. The prevailing residuals will announce that we have very much lived, done it in our long standing traditional way, and survived.