August 23, 2021: In 2015, I was in New York for the Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity event during which Noubar Afeyan, one of the co-founders of the Prize, asked me if I knew what “the antonym of genocide” was. I was totally puzzled. I didn’t have an answer to his question.
Until that moment, I had never considered the “antonym of genocide” as a possible expression. I had lived with the trauma of genocide as a descendant of two Genocide survivors and thought that, over the ye
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Nice article. I must mention just that the antonym or opposite of the word ‘genocide’ was already coined by Stepan Partamian a few years ago with his idea of ‘genolive,’ which is what he uses to describe the genocide survivors’ contributions to world civilization and culture as a direct result of having been uprooted and dispersed into the more developed parts of the world, where they created new communities and lives.
Incidentally, this dialectic already echoes in Malcolm X, the famous American civil rights activist. The “X” in his name is not simply a designation for lost African roots and family traditions that one must revive. It also designates a unique chance of freedom, of creating a new universality, which is more inclusive than that of the white people.
Mr. Sarkissian, as a businessman and a corporate executive it is understandable that you would not know about the anatomy of genocide, but how much are you willing to financially invest in your own suggested ideas?
I read with interest this article, and noted that it was from a gentleman who is on the Board of the Zoryan Institute. I recently contacted the Zoryan Institute to see if I might find some specific interviews, ones that I had conducted in the early 80’s. I was told that it was a private archive and unless one was an academic or family member, there was no access to the tapes. I was also told that even if access was granted, that one could not use them publicly. It reminded me of the Richard Brautigan book called The Abortion where people bring books to a library to die. I could go on, but in general I strongly disagree with this policy. It was certainly not the understanding when we donated materials free of charge to them. Is this the Antonym of Genocide?