The tragedies happening far away are not troubling, wrote Antonio Gramsci, one of the founders of Italian Communist Party, who still remains one of the most cited Italian thinkers abroad.

Italian socialist newspaper Il Grido del popolo published several of his excerpts in its March issue. The article reads:

“This is always the case. For something to touch us and become part of our internal life it is necessary that it happen near us and with people who we have heard of. In “Father Goriot,” Balzak puts such a phrase in Rastignac’s lips: “If you knew that every time you ate an orange, one Chinese would die, would you give up eating orange?”  And Rastignac answers: “I know oranges, but the Chinese are so far that I don’t even know whether they exist or not.”

Of course, our answer will never be as cynical as that of Rastignac. But when we hear that the Turks exterminated hundreds of thousands of Armenians, do we feel the same horror as during the occupation of Belgium by the Germans?

In the most difficult moments, Armenia never received anything but platonic expressions of compassion and contempt for its enemies. The words “Slaughter of Armenians” are repeated as a saying, but nothing is visualized behind these words. They can’t imagine living humans from flesh and blood. It was possible to suppress Turkey, which had so many interests with all the European countries. But nothing like this was done - at least nothing that would yield specific results.  

There was less talk about the Russians’ leaving of Erzrum, and possible return of Turkish troops to all the Armenian regions, than about the forced landing of zeppelin in France. The Armenians living in Europe should have made their homeland, history and homeland more known.

The same thing happened both to small Armenia and great Persia. Who knows that the greatest Arabs (Averroè, Avicenna, etc.) were in reality Persians? Who knows that the civilization which we got used to name Arabic is Persian in a lot of ways? And do many of us know that the recent reforms and development of Turkey are in many ways connected with the Armenians and Jews? The Armenians should have done so that people knew Armenia better.

Something is happening in Turin. For several months “Armenia” newspaper has been published, which shows who the Armenian people are and what they want. This could be followed by a series of books, which would give Italy an idea about the Armenian nation.”