Hrant dink biography of christopher columbus

I. RESURRECTION

When I try to imagine my grandfather, the face that appears to me is a variation of a pencil drawing that hangs in my parents’ house. The drawing captures the earliest image of him that we have in our family. He appears to be in his thirties, and he stares down from the wall with a serious countenance, a sharply groomed mustache, a tall, stiff collar, a tie pin. He seems like a self-possessed man, with an air of formality: a formidable person.

I never had the chance to meet him. I was born in the nineteen-seventies, on Long Island, and he was born in the eighteen-eighties, in the Ottoman Empire, near the Euphrates River. He died in 1959—the year that the first spacecraft reached the moon, Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba, and Philip Roth published “Goodbye, Columbus,” though I suspect he would have known nothing of those things. What he knew was privation, mass violence, famine, deportation—and how to survive, even flourish, amid such circumstances.

My grandfather spent most of his life in Diyarbakir, a garrison town in southeastern Turkey. Magnificent old walls surround the city; built of black volcanic rock, they were begun by the Romans and then added to by Arabs and Ottomans. In 1915, the Ottomans turned the city, the surrounding province, and much of modern-day Turkey into a killing field, in a campaign of massacres and forced expulsions that came to be known as the Armenian genocide. The plan was to eradicate the empire’s Armenians—“a deadly illness whose cure called for grim measures”—and it was largely successful. The Ottomans killed more than a million people, but, somehow, not my grandfather.

He guided his family safely through the tumult, and he remained in the city long afterward, enduring the decades of subtler persecution that followed. There was no real reckoning for the perpetrators of the genocide; many of them helped build the modern Turkish republic, founded in 1923. The violence may have been over, but its animating ideolo

Donald Trump is definitely a nationalist, but he is not a patriot. When he was called up to serve in the US military during the Vietnam War, he had a friendly doctor testify that he was ineligible because he suffered from bone spurs in his heel. Later, he could not remember which foot it was.

At one of his mass rallies, in October 2018, (this was before the global Covid-19 pandemic), Donald Trump proudly, loudly proclaimed to his fevered supporters that he was a nationalist: “Really, we’re not supposed to use that word. You know what I am? I’m a nationalist, O.K.? I’m a nationalist. Nationalist! Use that word! Use that word!” Asked later, back at the White House, why he had claimed to be a nationalist, given its racist connotations (at least in the United States where it is associated with White Supremacists), he claimed ignorance of that connection: “I never heard that theory about being a nationalist. I’ve heard them all. But I’m somebody who loves our country. I am a nationalist. It’s a word that hasn’t been used too much. Some people use it, but I’m very proud. I think it should be brought back.”

As someone who has taught on nationalism, nations, and empires, and is currently writing a book about these subjects, I have puzzled long and hard over the meaning of nationalism. It is a word difficult to pin down. It has as many meanings as the people who use it. In fact, it is probably fair to say that the word means what the user means it to mean. When the Greeks stopped calling Turkish coffee Turkish coffee and called it Greek coffee instead, that was said to be nationalism. When Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea, that was said to be inspired by nationalism. Adolf Hitler was a nationalist, but so were his principal opponents Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle. Who indeed wasn’t a nationalist? Well, maybe Vladimir Lenin, who called for the defeat of imperial Russia, his own country, in World War I because he believed that its demise would ignite the world

In the first year of Hrant Dink Memorial Lecture on Freedom of Expression and Human Rights presented by Bogazici University History, Sociology and Political Sciences and International Relation departments, Arundhati Roy gave a lecture titled ' Listening to Grasshoppers: Genocide, Denial And Celebration.'

Suzanna Arundhati Roy is an Indian author who is best known for her novel The God of Small Things (1997), which won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 1997. In 2002, she won the Lannan Foundation's Cultural Freedom Award for her work "about civil societies that are adversely affected by the world's most powerful governments and corporations", in order "to celebrate her life and her ongoing work in the struggle for freedom, justice and cultural diversity". Roy was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize in May 2004 for her work in social campaigns and her advocacy of non-violence. Roy was featured in the 2014 list of Time 100, the 100 most influential people in the world She is a spokesperson of the anti-globalization/alter-globalization movement and a vehement critic of neo-imperialism and U.S. foreign policy.

Speech

I never met Hrant Dink, a misfortune that will be mine for time to come. From what I know of him, of what he wrote, what he said and did, how he lived his life, I know that had I been here in Istanbul a year ago I would have been among the one hundred thousand people who walked with his coffin in dead silence through the wintry streets of this city, with banners saying “We are all Armenians”, “We are all Hrant Dink.” Perhaps I’d have carried the one that said “One and a half million plus one.”

I wonder what thoughts would have gone through my head as I walked beside his coffin. Maybe I would have heard a reprise of the voice of Araxie Barsamian, mother of my friend David Barsamian, telling the story of what happened to her and her family. She was ten years old in 1915. She remembered the swarms of grasshoppers that arrived in her village, Dubne, whic

The following is the  text of a speech written by filmmaker Eric Nazarian for the Hrant Dink commemoration event in Los Angeles on Jan. 19, organized by the Organization of Istanbul Armenians. Nazarian was unable to attend the event; his message was read in his absence.

Dear beloved friends at the Organization of Istanbul Armenians,

I am sorry that I could not be with you this evening. I was looking forward to reuniting with you and collectively commemorating and honoring the everlasting memory and legacy of sourp hoki, Hrant Dink. Due to the recent alarming events unfolding in Turkey and Istanbul that has become a powder keg, I needed to return to Bolis in anticipation of this tragic day of Hrant’s assassination that will be commemorated worldwide.

How can I put into words all that is in my heart as I enter the 6th year of my journeys to Bolis? So much has happened; little has tangibly changed for the better and a lot has been destroyed just in the past six months. The so-called peace process and the dimming promise of a new era of minority rights and any ray of hope for democracy has rapidly eroded into the threat of a new civil war in the southeast. Tragically, the honorable fight for inalienable human rights that Hrant fought so hard for has taken a vicious turn for the worst during these explosive times in Istanbul, Turkey, and the whole of the Middle East.

Just in the past seven weeks, we’ve witnessed the arrest of Can Dundar, the editor-in-chief of Cumhurriyet who exposed the government’s clandestine transfer of weapons to Islamist rebels in Syria; the daylight assassination of Tahir Elci in Dikranagerd, a stone’s toss from Surp Giragos; the suicide bombing in Sultanahmet that killed 11 tourists; and the witch hunt against academics in Turkey protesting the war against the Kurds. As you already know as Bolsahyes, there is never a dull moment in Turkey, except maybe on Kinaliada in the summer, far from the madness of urban Istanbul.

In th