By the time
Donald Trump was
condemning environmentalists
as the “perennial prophets
of doom” in
Davos, his impeachment
trial was opening in
Washington. But quite by
chance, at that very moment,
I was reading a new edition
of a book by a child
survivor of the 1915
Armenian Holocaust which,
hauntingly and poetically,
said more about America than
anything Trump – or Congress
– could ever utter.
Leon
Surmelian lost both his
parents in 1915 and, just
after the
Second World War, he
published I Ask You,
Ladies and Gentlemen with
the kind of horrific detail
that only accounts of the
Jewish Holocaust, a quarter
of a century later, normally
include. He remembered the
naked and mutilated body of
a young woman in a Turkish
river – “her long hair
floated down the current” –
and “a human arm caught in
the roots of a tree” and “a
long, long band of frothy
blood clinging to [the
river] banks”. No wonder
Israeli Jews speak today of
the Armenian “Shoah” – the
Holocaust, in Hebrew – which
first struck the Christians
of Ottoman Turkey.
But it was Surmelian’s
salvation when he travelled
later to Constantinople and
visited the US-run Robert
College, on a hill near
Istanbul’s Castle of Rome,
that caught my attention in
his book. The college, now
154 years old and still
perched between the two
Bosporus bridges,
coeducational and
independent, deeply
impressed the young Armenian
whose dream was to go to
America.
Here is what he wrote:
“The campus of Robert
College … with its modern
buildings, laboratories,
gymnasium, tennis courts,
track field, was an
impressive example of
American education. Nowhere
in the city were there such
fine school buildings, such
an exhibit of wealth and
education for the training
of youth. But to me the most
remarkable thing about it
was this: here Armenian and
Greek boys sat in the same
classroom with Turkish boys,
were … in daily contact as
members of one civilised
society, with no fights, no
racial catcalls between
them. There were also
Bulgarian, Russian, Jewish,
English, Persian students,
all living in harmony. As
America had no territorial
ambitions in our part of the
world, she enjoyed a unique
moral authority. And more
than the mechanical wonders,
the industrial progress and
power of America was this
moral authority, possessed
by no other nation on earth.
In my own mind, the concept
of America was based on
that…”
And there you have it.
Everything America was,
Trump is not. And everything
America is now did not exist
in the
Middle East at the end
of the
First World War.
