Mike Cornelison

Letters from the Lunar Outpost

Month: April 2020

The Armenian Genocide

On today’s date, 105 years ago, we mark the horrific beginning of the slaughter of the Armenians at the hands of the Turkish Muslims. The death toll is said to be at 1.5 million.

1,500,000 people slaughtered for no other reason than their ethnicity.

It’s such a hard number to wrap your head around it reminds me of the Stalin quote, “The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.”

Let’s try to really, honestly comprehend what a slaughter of 1.5 million people looks like.

Have you every been to Dodger Stadium with a pretty full house? It looks like this:

Dodger Stadium, attendance somewhere around 50,000.

That’s a whole heck of a lot of people. 50,000 people is a number you can comprehend as you sit there in the stands and look around you and see 50,000 people of all shapes and sizes and creeds and colors and types. 50,000 people is a number you can comprehend as the game comes to an end and you see 50,000 trying to make it to the exits. I can comprehend 50,000 people.

But it’s very hard to imagine what 1.5 million dead people look like, so let’s return to Dodger Stadium.

Picture the horror of a packed house at Dodger Stadium and every single member in attendance slaughtered by some terrorist method like a chemical weapon. Picture that entire stadium and all 50,000 people slumped over in their chairs and laying dead in the aisles.

It’s about sixteen times the death toll of 9/11, a nightmare beyond belief, but I can visualize 50,000 dead in that stadium.

Now if you really want to visualize the scope of the Armenian Genocide, imagine that full house of dead people at Dodger Stadium, and then beside it, another Dodger Stadium full of victims, and then a third, and a fourth, and a fifth, a sixth, a seventh, an eighth, a ninth, and a tenth and that would make for half-a-million corpses.

Now imagine three times that, thirty full houses at Dodger Stadium, thirty packed houses full of 50,000 dead people in each and that might give you a visual of what 1.5 million dead people looks like.

If I recite to you the dry fact that the Muslim Turks slaughtered 1.5 million Armenians 105 years ago, it’s too big a number to even register, but if I told you they slaughtered a capacity crowd at Dodger Stadium and then did it 29 more times, maybe that might help bring home the magnitude of what the Turks did to the Armenians.

And oh by the way, a big fuck you to the previous president and all those who continue to NOT CALL IT A GENOCIDE.

It Turns Out That . . .

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