By Vahan Zanoyan
Special to the Mirror-Spectator
“Erase a people’s past, and you control their future.” – George Orwell
The collective understanding of its history has always been central to the survival of the Armenian nation. The past matters. History forges and strengthens identity. It not only sheds light on present realities but also forms the foundation on which a future compatible with its sense of national identity can be built. Tampering with “the past,” the way a nation collectively understands, remembers, and identifies with it, is not just an inconsequential exercise in academic historical revisionism. It derails that nation’s aspirations and corrupts its vision of the future.
“Erase a people’s past, and you control their future,” rings true today as we pay attention to what is going on in Armenia, even though that sentence, while widely attributed to George Orwell, is in fact an interpretation and rewording of a different statement made by him. The original Orwell phrase is: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” 1984, Book 1, Chapter 3, page 34.
If the political power that controls the present wants, or needs, or is forced to change the aspirations of a nation regarding its future, it must first revise how that nation perceives and understands its past. This can work in either direction — either over-glorify the past and raise the bar of national aspirations to unrealistic levels, or question the very foundations of national historical rights and lower that bar to equally unrealistic and untenable levels. Armenia’s neighbors have displayed an insatiable appetite for the former, whether in the form of Turkey’s compulsion to return to the glory of the Ottoman Empire, or Azerbaijan’s aggressive and expansionist “Western Azerbaijan” rhetoric. There have also been some “maximalist” Armenians in this category who dream to reclaim Tigran the Great’s empire.