A Haunting Presence
Not content with the quasi-extermination of this nation between 1890 and 1990; that is, from the Kumkapı reprisals to the Baku pogroms, the policy – official or unofficial – of Turkey and Azerbaijan continues a logic of hate accompanied by obsessional impulsions to wipe the Armenian people, and the memory of their existence, off the land. A phobia that spurs the “two brothers” to join hands and celebrate their victory in the 2020 Artsakh War over a people that serves as a constant reminder that their own origins lie elsewhere is the very thing that drives an uncontrollable compulsion to annihilate once and for all any trace of Armenian identity.
Fear has created and prolonged this obsession. Fear of the Other, of the inability to overcome the invasive emotions that keep peeking over the horizon of the past. The incapacity to suppress the angst that accompanies fear, or to neutralize the gnawing phobia that sharpens it, illustrates quite clearly that the presence of this Armenian-Other has fostered a veritable mental disorder, even a policy of Statehood. This obsession with the presence of Armenians, and its reminders, has generated a neurosis among the populations of Turkey and Azerbaijan, one periodically manifesting into lynchings, massacres, pogroms and genocide.
These displays of rampant and hysterical hatred should not be interpreted as a juxtapositioning of events, but as a succession of them, forming a continuum, by which each event is interlocked with one another in Time and Space. Each episode of violence is a note in a cohesive melody; the song is the intention of conquest and elimination… of genocide.
This kind of obsession has emerged from an ontological and existential void,[1] due to the abandonment of a fundamental ontological identity through migration. It rejects unknown or alien forms, images or actions, but this rejection widens or deepens the void because it filters the invasive phenomena in view of integrating or assimilating them. Being estranged or unknown, the individual or the nation in question cannot relate to these infringing phenomena. Hence, their own ontological void becomes more and more apparent to them, a yawning emptiness threatened by the values of the Other. Out of the reluctance to reconcile with them, suspicion, envy and jealousy will spring. Now some may argue that migrants who enter a new land will integrate (but not necessarily assimilate) the values of the people already on that land. And this is true! The Turkic peoples, having migrated from their ancestral homelands of Southern Siberia and Mongolia, had all but abandoned their Far Eastern culture, which indeed possessed its own Göktürk script, statehood represented by the empire of Bilge Khan, an aristocracy and a religion: shamanism.
Yet, this solid ancestral identity was abandoned both in Time and Space, creating thus an ontic discontinuity, a juxtaposition of identities and not a continuum of one. The migrating Turkic peoples sojourned among numerous peoples and “filled in” the ontological and existential void that this abandonment produced, attempting to accommodate the novelty of so many unknown and alien forms to which they were constantly exposed: linguistic elements, religious rituals, customs, etc.
Turks and Azerbaijanis were heavily influenced by the Byzantine and Persian culture. They were not able to swallow the culture of the Armenian-Other, with whom they have lived for centuries. The indigenous Armenian-Other who, in spite of wars and periods of religious intolerance, worked together with the Ottoman and the Persian authorities; this Armenian-Other, loyal or disloyal, came to speak the Turkic language perfectly, to understand Turkish customs perfectly, but remained anchored in its own language and traditions, which the Turks never mastered.
Read more: https://www.evnreport.com/raw-unfiltered/turkish-azerbaijani-identity-void-and-genocide