I’ve read a bit of background but having lived in LA it just feels weird having Armenia in the news for a conflict that’s not with Turkey

Like I lived in Little Armenia, by Glendale, capitol of the diaspora, and that was what the SoCal Armenians presented as their defining thing, hating the Turks.

Like in a lot of ways they were indistinguishable from all the other post-Ottomans in the region: small but strong coffee, hookahs, pastries, tracksuits, a little lace-curtain overboard with the chandeliers…

But they Hated the Turks. (Also, appreciated System of a Down) that was their brand. On like Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day thered be all these leased BMW 3-series with Armenian flags on the bumpers dragging between Hollywood and Franklin, windows down, blasting System of a Down, scowling about the Turks.

I’m not making that up! If you’re from the East Coast, it was like Zionist politics as done by Jersey Italians. If you found and asked a Turk, he’d say Armenians were a reasonable Olympic or World Cup rival but he never really thought about them. (Which, I suppose, was the Turkish nationalists’ dream when they originally founded an ethnostate on land the Armenians had been using)

Anyway after that it’s just unbalancing to think of Armenia as being prominent as the focus of a different plotline