Ravished Armenia
Tags: murder

Plot synopsis:
The author Arshaluys (Aurora) Mardiganian was born in the city of Çemişgezek, near Harput (Kharpert), (present-day Turkish province of Elâzığ), Ottoman Empire. She was the daughter of a wealthy Armenian financier in the city. The story starts in 1915 when Arshaluys was 14 years old. She personally witnessed the murder of her father, mother, brothers and sisters. She was taken to the harem of a number of Turkish pashas, but had remained attached to her Christian Armenian faith despite being tortured repeatedly at the hands of her captors.
She found refuge with Frederick W. MacCallum, a Canadian doctor and missionary stationed with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), who safely returned her to Erzurum, which had come under Russian control. She later moved to Tbilisi (Tiflis) in the Caucasus and, through the mediation of General Andranik Ozanian and orders of the Russian military leadership in the Caucasus, was sent to the United States for recovery and to bear witness to the sufferings of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire.
Aurora Mardiganian, a survivor of the Armenian genocide of 1915–1923, recalled sixteen young Armenian girls being "crucified" by their Ottoman tormentors. The film Auction of Souls (1919), which was based on her book Ravished Armenia, showed the victims nailed to crosses. However, almost 70 years later Mardiganian revealed to film historian Anthony Slide that the scene was inaccurate. She described what was actually an impalement. She stated that "The Turks didn't make their crosses like that. The Turks made little pointed crosses. They took the clothes off the girls. They made them bend down, and after raping them, they made them sit on the pointed wood, through the vagina. That's the way they killed – the Turks. Americans have made it a more civilized way. They can't show such terrible things."
The book was written by journalist Henry Leyford Gates, whose novelist-wife Eleanor Brown Gates became Mardiganian's legal guardian in America.

Review: those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. After centuries of imperial powers committing genocide against the colonized peoples, the first documented one made news in 1915, as the Ottoman Turks massacred almost half the Armenian population, a mass slaughter unequaled until the Third Reich. The first movie made about it was Oscar Apfel's "Ravished Armenia", also known as "Auction of Souls", starring survivor Aurora Mardiganian. Most of the movie is now lost, but the surviving part is horrific enough, although Mardiganian later admitted that the crucifixion scene didn't really happen. The Turks made Armenian girls strip, raped them, and made them sit on little pointed crosses, impaling them. No less vicious. Indeed, when Hitler was about to invade Poland, he reportedly got asked how he thought people would remember him, and responded "Who today speaks of the annihilation of the Armenians?"Alas, this first genocide of the 20th century faded from memory, and Turkey (one of the key US proxies in the Middle East) not only denies that it ever happened, but arrests people for saying that it happened; no surprise that Turkey leads the world in the number of imprisoned journalists.I understand that one of the first famous people to take up the cause of the Armenians was Jackie Coogan, co-star of Charlie Chaplin's movie "The Kid". As for this one, I see that I'm the first one reviewing it. I had to watch it on YouTube. Other movies focusing on the genocide include "Ararat" and "The Promise".In a Russian course, I learned about a link to the Russia-Georgia War. Seeing the mass slaughter of the Armenians, the peoples of the Caucasus turned to Imperial Russia for help against the Turks, and nascent countries there eventually became part of the Soviet Union. When they won their independence in 1991, Abkhazia wanted independence from Georgia, but didn't receive it, so the Abkhaz people waged their own war. In 2008, Georgia responded with force, and Russia invaded. (the professor was from Russia, so I got that bias)To crown everything, the Versailles negotiations further screwed everything up. Most notable was that the reparations imposed on Germany set the stage for Hitler's rise to power. On top of that, Armenia got reduced to a fraction of its former territory, with no access to Mt. Ararat. The Palestinians, Kurds and Yazidis didn't even get their own countries; a British soldier bragged about dropping bombs on "the Arab and the Kurd". It's no accident that the Sykes-Picot Agreement set the stage for the current bloodshed in the Middle East. But lesser known is that a young Ho Chi Minh appealed to Woodrow Wilson, but Wilson (a racist thug if there ever was one) refused to listen.All in all, I recommend the movie.