On Dangers of Historic Manipulations

by Yervand Kochar

We should preserve the whole image and the whole history regardless of our current views. The revisionist histories are like bad translations; the words are there but the meaning is lost.
The preservation of history is not a partisan issue. It is a moral issue and if thoroughly examined a legal issue. The historic lie is the worst form of lying and carries the most devastating impact on generations to come. Parties and politicians make mistakes. People and nations make mistakes. Facing historic reality and the sins of the past is a great step to redemption and liberation. The denial of history, moreover, its manipulation, disintegrates the psychological sanity of an entire nation. It is a more dangerous process than even those who consciously convey it from the blind spot of their limited political existence can perceive.

History is not a discipline one learns in books. As every human being has his or her biography so does every nation. History is a vibrant memory of the nation. History is a Memory of Our Spirit. Those who rewrite history rewrite memory. Memory is a cornerstone of the psychological balance, whether individual or national. The temple of life is founded on memory. Disintegrating memory is a way to destruction of the temple. The loss of memory is the first step to insanity.

The Civil War was a direct result of this process. The national hysteria erupted because the memory of our nation was confused and finally lapsed. People began to interpret history, to bend it, to manipulate it to their political goals. Lincoln's speech at the Copper Union that gained him the Republican nomination was dedicated to this very issue. In his detailed investigation of the Founding Fathers, Lincoln proved that, although owning slaves themselves, most of the Founding Fathers were in core opposed to the expansion and existence of slavery. This speech had an enormous healing impact because it clarified history for a big segment of a confused nation. It gave the Union men moral clarity and confidence in the cause and tradition of freedom. It proved that they were continuing their fathers' job and that their fathers were not bad as many stated consistently.

The Cooper Union speech came too late to extinguish the fire of National Psychosis. The nation fell into a very dark place and the only way out was the terrible therapy of war. A war that still continues today in different shapes.

Every generation experiences psychosis to some degree. What is important to remember is that a possibility of a complete nervous breakdown known as Civil War is not as remote as it appears. Up to the first shot of the Civil War people rejected it's probability. The war of one hemisphere of the American psyche against the other was unbelievable and was rejected vehemently. It took almost two years for the people in the Union to accept the fact that they were in war against their fellow Americans. The danger of the fierce conflict must not be neglected. The physical confrontation is just a tip of an iceberg. The eruption of the physical Civil War had been brewing since the beginning of the American Republic. Whether it is a physical confrontation or a civil war of thoughts, the impact is devastating. It is a national schizophrenia in which two sides of psyche designed to work in balance work against each other. The frequency and intensity of the National Neurosis is proportional to the degree of historic distortion.

Every totalitarian regime begins with rewriting history. Whoever controls the past, or the psychic foundation of the nation, controls the future. The only way to control the past is through culture. If the mindset that controls culture is not happy with the memory of the nation, it can rewrite it through books, films, media, any form of communication. Media connects us to our past. If the connection is infiltrated with people who do not feel comfortable with the way history progressed, they can simply reshape it. The examples of this are numerous and results are devastating.

History is a Memory of Our Spirit. It has to be transmitted not controlled. Any force over the memory is a violation of the Spirit that shapes time. Reclaiming history, however harsh and unpleasant it might be for the recaller, is a personal responsibility. Knowing history and fighting for history has a therapeutic significance.
When Hitler was outlining the Holocaust, he was warned that a massive termination of Jews may cause a public outrage. Hitler dismissed the warnings by saying, "Who remembers millions of Armenians murdered in 1915?". The Armenian Genocide, executed by the Turkish government only 25 years prior, was forgotten. The Turkish government had done everything possible to silence history, manipulate it and destroy the evidence. A whole generation of Armenians, scattered all over the world as a result, was and is still traumatized by this historic injustice. The denial of history affects everyone involved. Those who are denied justice and those who deny it are equally in danger. Cutting "the mystic cords of memory", as Lincoln put it, cuts us from our tradition, from our source. And the object cut off its source floats chaotically and falls very often on the barren grounds of forgetfulness. The dynamics of the fall is the same whether it's a distorted legacy of one person or of a whole nation. This fall is experienced by many to some degree, and, perhaps, it was experienced most dramatically by Hamlet, the insane prince of Denmark, who lamented before his untimely death that "the chain of times has been broken."