Opinion
What I Choose It to Mean: On ‘Yeghern’ as the Armenian Translation of ‘Genocide’
“The term Yeghern, or Medz Yeghern, is the only word that really captures the essence of what happened in 1915. The survivors used that word. It is the only word that could really explain what happened in 1915. In a world without genocide denial, it would be the best word.”
–Khatchig Mouradian (2009)1
‘Medz Yeghern’: the Proper Name of the Genocide
In the concluding installment of this study on the semantics, history, and politics of the phrase Medz Yeghern, it is crucial to
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The term Medz Yeghern reverberates in me in ways that the word tseghasbanutiun (ցեղասպանութեան) never did and never will. I find the latter devoid of sentiments, embodying only and only body count.
Vartan Matossian’s timely scholarly study of the term Medz Yeghern has given life to the term that, to my chagrin, seemed to be destined for erasure out of sheer literary ignorance than anything else.
Dear Vartan
It could not have been summed up any better than your concluding paragraph:
“In the end, any pretense of “denialist terminology” to refrain from calling things by their 90-plus-year-old Armenian proper name—as it has been misguidedly suggested following presidential statements of “Meds Yeghern” and Turkish mistranslations of “Great Calamity”—would be an act of self-censorship, playing straight into the hands of the denier. Moreover, it would be the most tragic irony in the ultimate stage of genocide: denial unwittingly self-imposed by those who are bound to fight against denial.”
Your treatise of the expression Meds Yeghern not only was educational for me it also gave me a much needed confidence that the term has its learned advocates and henceforth will not be a subject for capricious dismissal.
Thank you
I have chose Armenocide = Հայասպանդ