Sen Bir Ermeni Ben Bir Ermeni

Gece geç vakit Rostov’da bir birahanenin önünden geçiyordum. İçeride beyaz üniformalı bir garson gördüm. Ermeni’ ydi besbelli. Kapıdan daldım, Nasılsın dedim, evi başına yıkılasıca, nasılsın? Ortak dilimizi kullanarak tabii. Garsonun Ermeni olduğunu nasıl anlamıştım bilemem, ama anlamıştım işte. Hayır, esmerdi diye değil. Burnun kıvrımı da yetmez. Gür, keçe gibi saçlar, dipdiri gözler, bunların hiçbiri belirleyici değil. Bugün dünyada aynı esmerlikte olup aynı burnu ortalıkta gezdiren, saçı, gözleri tastamam böyle bir sürü insan var... ama bunların hiçbiri Ermeni değil. Eşi benzeri yok bizim kabilemizin; işte ben de onların yurduna doğru yol almaktaydım, gecenin bir vakti.

Ama işin aslını sorarsanız, yok öyle bir yer. Ermenistan yok, bu da beni müthiş bir kedere boğuyor.

Evet, Küçük Asya’nın minik bir köşesinde insanların Ermenistan diye bildiği bir yer var, ama doğru değil bu. Ermenistan değil orası, öylesine bir yer. Ovaları, dağları, nehirleri, gölleri, kentleri var bu yerin, ve hepsi çok güzel (dünyanın herhangi bir yerinden daha az güzel değil), ama Ermenistan değil. Sonuçta Ermenistan yok ama Ermeniler var. Bu insanlar dünyada yaşıyorlar, ve saygıdeğer baylar, bu dünyada Ermenistan yoksa Amerika da yok, İngiltere de yok, ne bileyim Fransa yok, İtalya yok, hiçbiri yok; sadece dünya var. Baylar.

Ve ben o güdük Rus birahanesine girdim, sıladaşıma merhaba demek için.

Vay, dedi, dilimizi, konuşmamızı komediye çeviren o abartılı şaşkıyla. N’edersin burada?

Ecnebiliğim okunuyor tabii: Üst baş, şapka, pabuçlar, hatta belki yüzüme sinmiş bir Amerikalılık.

Nasıl buldun burayı?

Çapulcu seni, dedim sevecen bir edayla, yürüyüşe çıktıydım. Memleket neresi? Nerede doğurdular seni? (Şöyle dedim Ermenice: Dünyaya nereden girdin?)

Muşluyum, dedi. Yolculuk nereye? Buraya hangi rüzgâr attı seni? Amerikalısın, belli esvabından.

Muş. Ne severim o şehri. Görmüşlüğüm yok (zaten artık öyle bir yer de yok), şehrin sakinlerini sorarsanız sizlere ömür, insan eliyle... ama severim işte. Babam gençken ara sıra ziyaret edermiş

**

Hadi bakalım, silin bu halkı yeryüzünden. Yine 1915 olsun yıl. Savaş sarsın dünyayı. Mahvedin Ermenistan’ı. Bakalım becerebilecek misiniz? Atın evlerinden, çöllere sürün. Ne ekmek verin ne de su. Yakın evlerini, kiliselerini. Görün bakalım yeniden yaşama dönmeyecekler mi. Görün bakalım bir gün yine kahkahalarla gülmeyecekler mi. Görün bakalım bir halk yeniden canlanmayacak mı, yirmi yıl sonra iki tanesi birahanede karşı karşıya gelip kendi dillerinde gülüşüp sohbete dalmayacaklar mı. Hadi elinizden geliyorsa önleyin. Bakalım dünyanın o pek ulu düşüncelerini tiye almalarına engel olabilecek misiniz, sizi gidi köp’oğulları, işte alın size hoşbeş eden iki Ermeni, hadi onları da yok etmeyi deneyin bakalım.

Exit West

It might seem odd that in cities teetering at the edge of the abyss young people still go to class—in this case an evening class on corporate identity and product branding—but that is the way of things, with cities as with life, for one moment we are pottering about our errands as usual and the next we are dying, and our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does.

**

IN TIMES OF VIOLENCE, there is always that first acquaintance or intimate of ours, who, when they are touched, makes what had seemed like a bad dream suddenly, evisceratingly real. For Nadia this person was her cousin, a man of considerable determination and intellect, who even when he was young had never cared much for play, who seemed to laugh only rarely, who had won medals in school and decided to become a doctor, who had successfully emigrated abroad, who returned once a year to visit his parents, and who, along with eighty-five others, was blown by a truck bomb to bits, literally to bits, the largest of which, in Nadia’s cousin’s case, were a head and two-thirds of an arm.

**

War in Saeed and Nadia’s city revealed itself to be an intimate experience, combatants pressed close together, front lines defined at the level of the street one took to work, the school one’s sister attended, the house of one’s aunt’s best friend, the shop where one bought cigarettes. Saeed’s mother thought she saw a former student of hers firing with much determination and focus a machine gun mounted on the back of a pickup truck. She looked at him and he looked at her and he did not turn and shoot her, and so she suspected it was him, although Saeed’s father said it meant nothing more than that she had seen a man who wished to fire in another direction. She remembered the boy as shy, with a stutter and a quick mind for mathematics, a good boy, but she could not remember his name. She wondered if it had really been him, and whether she should feel alarmed or relieved if it had. If the militants won, she supposed, it might not be entirely bad to know people on their side.

Neighborhoods fell to the militants in startlingly quick succession, so that Saeed’s mother’s mental map of the place where she had spent her entire life now resembled an old quilt, with patches of government land and patches of militant land. The frayed seams between the patches were the most deadly spaces, and to be avoided at all costs. Her butcher and the man who dyed the fabrics from which she had once had made her festive clothes disappeared into such gaps, their places of business shattered and covered in rubble and glass.

Military Technology is a Recent Phenomenon

Obsession with military technology – from tanks to atom bombs to spy-flies – is a surprisingly recent phenomenon. Up until the nineteenth century, the vast majority of military revolutions were the product of organisational rather than technological changes. When alien civilisations met for the first time, technological gaps sometimes played an important role. But even in such cases, few thought of deliberately creating or enlarging such gaps. Most empires did not rise thanks to technological wizardry, and their rulers did not give much thought to technological improvement. The Arabs did not defeat the Sassanid Empire thanks to superior bows or swords, the Seljuks had no technological advantage over the Byzantines, and the Mongols did not conquer China with the help of some ingenious new weapon. In fact, in all these cases the vanquished enjoyed superior military and civilian technology.

The Roman army is a particularly good example. It was the best army of its day, yet technologically speaking, Rome had no edge over Carthage, Macedonia or the Seleucid Empire. Its advantage rested on efficient organisation, iron discipline and huge manpower reserves. The Roman army never set up a research and development department, and its weapons remained more or less the same for centuries on end. If the legions of Scipio Aemilianus – the general who levelled Carthage and defeated the Numantians in the second century BC – had suddenly popped up 500 years later in the age of Constantine the Great, Scipio would have had a fair chance of beating Constantine. Now imagine what would happen to a general from a few centuries back – say Napoleon – if he led his troops against a modern armoured brigade. Napoleon was a brilliant tactician, and his men were crack professionals, but their skills would be useless in the face of modern weaponry.

As in Rome, so also in ancient China: most generals and philosophers did not think it their duty to develop new weapons. The most important military invention in the history of China was gunpowder. Yet to the best of our knowledge, gunpowder was invented accidentally, by Daoist alchemists searching for the elixir of life. Gunpowder’s subsequent career is even more telling. One might have thought that the Daoist alchemists would have made China master of the world. In fact, the Chinese used the new compound mainly for firecrackers. Even as the Song Empire collapsed in the face of a Mongol invasion, no emperor set up a medieval Manhattan Project to save the empire by inventing a doomsday weapon. Only in the fifteenth century – about 600 years after the invention of gunpowder – did cannons become a decisive factor on Afro-Asian battlefields. Why did it take so long for the deadly potential of this substance to be put to military use? Because it appeared at a time when neither kings, scholars, nor merchants thought that new military technology could save them or make them rich.

The situation began to change in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but another 200 years went by before most rulers evinced any interest in financing the research and development of new weapons. Logistics and strategy continued to have far greater impact on the outcome of wars than technology. The Napoleonic military machine that crushed the armies of the European powers at Austerlitz (1805) was armed with more or less the same weaponry that the army of Louis XVI had used. Napoleon himself, despite being an artilleryman, had little interest in new weapons, even though scientists and inventors tried to persuade him to fund the development of flying machines, submarines and rockets.

Science, industry and military technology intertwined only with the advent of the capitalist system and the Industrial Revolution. Once this relationship was established, however, it quickly transformed the world.