 Thousands of young people with long hair and studded tongues pay good money
several dozen times a year to listen to lectures about genocide. Well, “lecture”
is perhaps not the best way to describe Serj Tankian's delivery.
The tall lanky
Tankian, who has cascades of curly hair and looks like the long-lost offspring
of Frank Zappa and Cher, is a natural on stage. But when he grabs the
microphone, he is more likely to shout than to talk.
Serj Tankian is the lead singer of System of a Down, a popular
rock group on the cusp of heavy metal. SOAD, as its fans like to call it,
is part of a new generation of politically engaged rock groups. Like Rage
Against the Machine or Green Day, SOAD produces some rousing antiwar songs (like “BYOB” with its chorus of “Why don't presidents fight the war? Why do they
always send the poor?”).
But the group also has a very specific political goal:
to educate the world about the Armenian genocide.
A new documentary, Screamers, tells the story of the 1915 genocide
through the words, music, and activism of the four Armenian-American members of
System of a Down. The film comes at a particularly important time. Despite
repeated public avowals of “never again” by many government leaders—after
Bosnia, after Rwanda—genocide is again in the headlines because of Darfur. And
Turkey continues to evade responsibility for the Armenian genocide even as it
attempts to join the European Union and cement its alliances with the United
States.
Screamers, as genocide expert Samantha Powers explains in the film, are people
who react viscerally to the horror of atrocity and won't stop screaming until
something is done about it. The raw energy of System of a Down clearly resonates
with its audience. But will such musical activism make waves outside the concert
halls as well?
Political Metal
Heavy metal, according to convention, is all about Satan, death, and doom. It is
a musical form about as far removed from politics and foreign policy as a
lullaby or a mazurka.
Dig a little deeper, though, and even heavy metal turns out to be more
complicated than that. Ozzy Osbourne's Black Sabbath, for instance, would seem
to be the epitome of reactionary, white-boy rock. Long before his reality show
resurrection, however, Ozzy took aim at the Vietnam War in the song “War Pigs”
and blasted the insanity of Cold War deterrence in the song “Children of the
Grave.” Today, heavy metal bands wear their politics even more prominently on
the sleeves of their black T-shirts. Bands like Lamb of God write songs
castigating U.S. foreign policy, while Cattle Decapitation takes on the protein
industrial complex.
It's one thing to rile up an audience of recruitment-age young people with songs
about the idiocy of the Iraq War. System of a Down, however, aims at the more
difficult goal of activating young people around an event that occurred nearly a
century ago. In 2005, during a concert tour devoted to the 90th anniversary of
the Armenian genocide, the band put photographs of the atrocities on the big
screen in the concert hall and ran TV footage of Peter Jennings discussing the
meaning and contemporary significance of the term “genocide.”
“Today, more people learn about the Armenian genocide from System of a Down than
through all the other efforts combined,” says Aram Hamparian of the Armenian
National Committee.
And it's not just Armenians or the descendants of other genocide victims (Jews,
Cambodians) who groove to SOAD's message. Although the band refuses to play in
Turkey, Serj Tankian reports, “We have a lot of fans there. We've gotten into
the heads of some of the younger generation, and hopefully something will happen
one day with that.”
For SOAD, the crusade is deeply personal. In Screamers, the band members each
relate stories passed down from their grandparents and great grandparents about
who survived, who didn't, and the unspeakable things that were witnessed.
Scholars estimate that 1.5 million Armenians died during the genocide. “A whole
race, Genocide. Taken away, all our pride,” SOAD sings in “PLUCK.”
There's Something About Turkey
The stakes reach well beyond settling personal scores or even setting the
historical record straight. System of a Down is very clear about the geopolitics
of its work. Throughout the Cold War, Turkey fended off all outside pressure to
alter its policies—regarding Cyprus, its mistreatment of Kurds, or its
interpretation of its national history—by emphasizing its anticommunist
credentials. With the Cold War over and membership in the European Union
beckoning, Turkey has been willing to make some concessions, such as abolishing
the death penalty and providing more rights to the Kurdish community. But
diplomatic recognition of Cyprus is still off the table, and the Armenian
genocide remains a forbidden topic.
Several prominent Turkish writers, including Nobel Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk,
have run afoul of the authorities for merely mentioning the genocide. One of the
first Turkish historians to grapple honestly with the issue has published a new
book on the genocide—from his exile in Minnesota. In A Shameful Act: The
Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility, Taner Akcam argues
that acknowledging the true nature of what happened in 1915 would require
accepting that the architects of modern Turkey were war criminals. In her New
Yorker review, Elizabeth Kolbert calls Akcam's psychological explanation “a view
of Turkish ethnic pride that gets dangerously close to a national stereotype.”
Given that most U.S. citizens are similarly unwilling to associate the
establishment of the United States with the attempted eradication of Native
Americans—and that related complexes flourish in Australia, Israel, and many
other countries—Akcam has not so much fallen back on an ethnic stereotype as he
has articulated a more general psychological trait: the universal impulse to
deny the horrors that lie beneath all nation-building.
Turkish efforts to stifle discussion on the Armenian genocide extend far beyond
the country's borders. Peter Balakian describes in his landmark book Black Dog
of Fate how the Turkish Embassy intervened in a textbook project convened by the
New York State Department of Education. Embassy officials told the organizers of
the textbook project on 20th century genocides that inclusion of a chapter on
the Armenian genocide would jeopardize U.S.-Turkey relations. “I traveled to
Albany several times … and sat in overheated offices imploring state
bureaucrats, who were horrified by the Turkish assault, to hold firm on the
chapter,” writes Balakian, a professor of English at Colgate University. “The
Turkish contingent was threatening to call President Reagan. Letters went back
and forth. The Education Department grew increasingly befuddled. Before it was
over, the Turkish government had succeeded in forcing changes to the textbook.”
At a much higher level of politics, as Screamers documents, the Turkish
government has lobbied the U.S. Congress to prevent the passage of a resolution
on the Armenian genocide. Although the House International Relations Committee
passed two resolutions in 2005 identifying the atrocities as genocide, the
Republican-controlled leadership blocked passage in the House as a whole. With
Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats now in charge, however, there is a good chance
that the resolutions will be brought to the floor and passed.
The Politics of Screaming
Unlike many largely forgotten atrocities, the Armenian genocide is well
documented. The accounts of survivors and contemporary observers, the
photographic evidence, and even documentation from the Ottoman leadership itself
make it impossible to dispute the attempt to wipe out an entire race of people.
Historians are still filling in the gaps and piecing together motivations. Books
like Black Dog of Fate or Atom Egoyan's exquisite film Ararat about the Armenian
artist Arshile Gorky explore the impact of the genocide on subsequent
generations.
However, these historical investigations take place in academe. The books and
movies are powerful but are ultimately, like most high culture, understated and
nuanced.
System of a Down is not interested in nuance or understatement. The band members
are passionate and angry, and they scream out shocking lyrics often full of
expletives. When Serj Tankian visits Congress to lobby legislators, he seems,
without a microphone and an opportunity to raise his voice, like a fish out of
water. But with Turkey still playing the geopolitical card by threatening to
stop buying U.S. arms and hosting the U.S. military, a little screaming might be
in order—not just in concert halls but in the halls of power as well.
By John Feffer,
IRC
Read Several Reviews of Screamers in Here
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