Editor’s Introduction -- By: John Warwick Montgomery
Journal: Global Journal of Classical Theology
Volume: GJCT 03:3 (Jun 2003)
Article: Editor’s Introduction
Author: John Warwick Montgomery
Editor’s Introduction
Regular readers of the GLOBAL JOURNAL will recall that the Editor’s Introduction to the last issue took off from a film (“Men in Black II”). The same is true for this issue. Yes, the Editor is a bit of a film buff, and, donkey’s years ago, actually refused even to consider a position at Wheaton College because of its legalistic, unbiblical prohibition against movie attendance. (Will one really be corrupted by Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”? Does one refuse to read all books because some books are immoral and/or disgusting?)
The film to which we point our readers is not easy to find, though it was released late in 2002 and has an international cast, including Christopher Plummer (remember him as Captain Von Trapp in The Sound of Music?) and distinguished French actor (better known as singer and composer of popular French chansons) Charles Aznavour. The film is titled “Ararat” and was produced in Canada (in English, with some subtitled French and Armenian). It is now showing in Paris, where I recently saw it, as well as in select movie houses in major cities in other countries.
“Ah,” you, say, “Ararat. Of course Montgomery could not resist, having carried on extensive Ark research on the said mountain in the 1970’s and even climbed to the peak of that formidable mountain.” (See my Quest for Noah’s Ark, which Bethany Fellowship Publishers has allowed to go out of print, presumably to make way for the evangelical romantic novels they now publish.) But No! The film “Ararat” does not in the least deal with the search for the Ark, and the only appearances of the mountain itself in the film come by way of what appears to be stock footage. The point of the title is that Mount Ararat in Eastern Turkey has always been the symbolic centre of Christian Armenia.
The film “Ararat” is the first attempt to document, by way of a major motion picture, the hideous genocide of Armenians in Turkey from 1914 to 1918. That genocide has been almost entirely ignored, in some degree because it occurred when the West was preoccupied with World War I. And the Nazi genocide of the Jews during the Second World War explains to some extent the lack of historical awareness of what the Turks did to the Armenians (the Jews have been much better propagandists than the Armenians in publicising their loss). But the blame for ignoring what was done to Christian Armenia lies especially with the Turkish nation, which has systematically denied that anything significant even took place!
In point of fact, the Turkish régime of the time effectively destroyed the Christian Armenian community by slaughtering vast numbers and forcing the emigration of the survivors to Europe (especially France ) and ...
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