collapsedsquid:

kontextmaschine:

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 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

I mean Azeris are considered ethnic turks, are you sure they were making that distinction?

>@quoms said: From Armenians’ perspective this is still About Turks, they call Azeris “Turks” most of the time and constantly say that defending Karabakh is about preventing a continuation of the Genocide

>Also Turkey is largely behind the current escalation anyway.

I think it’s just that the Story Of Armenians, Who Hate Turks was presented as this epic, existential history of blood and suffering, resonant with American 20th century Wilsonian and “human rights” themes, the Genocide ready for adoption as an appendix to American history like the Holocaust and Potato Famine were to make sense of earlier immigrant waves…

And this just feels like mundane history, borderlands gonna border war. If anything up there with Syria as “as the hyperpower age ends, the Near East has the right combination of regional powers perpendicular to American interests to geopolitically unfreeze first”

Maybe Armenia will become important to America because California ethnic politics the same way Ireland, Israel, and Cuba became so prominent because Massachusetts, New York, and Florida. But as is it feels a little too under-theorized/mythologized to be central.