Thursday, September 02, 2004
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MIKOYAN’S ROLE IN THE STALINIST PURGES.
TOLSTOY, DOSTOEVSKY AND SHAKESPEARE.
GREGORIAN CHANT.
WHAT IS ARMENIANISM?
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A number of Sovietologists have identified Anastas Mikoyan as the main architect of the Stalinist purges in Armenia. If he was, he was a reluctant one, writes Simon Montefiore. In his recently published book, STALIN: THE COURT OF THE RED TSAR, based on interviews with the children of survivors, post-Soviet studies, and newly opened archives, he writes that Stalin chose Mikoyan for that grim task to test his loyalty. “In late 1937,” we read here, “Stalin tested Mikoyan’s commitment by dispatching him to Armenia with a list of three hundred victims to be arrested. Mikoyan signed it but he crossed off one friend. The man was arrested anyway.”
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While in Siberia, Dostoevsky read some stories by a writer who signed himself “L.T.” Dostoevsky liked the stories but he said, “I believe he will write very little,” adding, “but perhaps I am wrong.” He sure was! “L.T.” stood for Leo Tolstoy, one of the most prolific writers of all time.
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Though contemporaries, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky avoided each other. But the last book Tolstoy read shortly before his death was Dostoevsky”s BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, perhaps because his home situation, from which he was running away, was more Dostoevskian than Tolstoyan.
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Tolstoy and Dostoevsky shared one thing in common: they didn’t much care for Shakespeare.
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Readers sometimes complain that I don’t always answer questions. The truth is everything I write is an answer to a specific question, even when the questioner is anonymous and even when the question is disguised verbal vandalism and hooliganism. Case in point: on a number of occasions I have been asked if my mother was a concubine in a Turkish harem. My mother became an orphan at the age of one and was brought up by French Catholic nuns in Lebanon. Instead of lullabies she sang Gregorian chant to me, which to this day is my favorite kind of music – music in its purest form: simple, accessible, melodic, incandescent, with none of the technical fireworks of J.S.Bach or the rhetoric of Beethoven.
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Whenever I read an ugly e-mail from an Armenian, I cannot help wondering: what if in our case the concept of survival of the fittest should be replaced with the concept of survival of the nastiest?
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There are open minds and closed minds, but when an Armenian decides to close his mind, he locks it with seven rusty keys.
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Why is it that some Armenians use the massacres as a license to do to civilized discourse what the Turks did to us? And more often than not, they are the very same Armenians who demand our unconditional love on grounds of Armenianism.
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Writes Denis Donikian: “At one time or another we have all been victims of Armenianism.” Perhaps because no one has yet defined what Armenianism is and every Armenian thinks his own brand is the only true one.
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Friday, September 03, 2004
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BAYROU ON TURKS.
MONTEFIORE ON MIKOYAN.
AXIOMS.
MEMO TO MY CRITICS.
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Francois Bayrou, identified as the President of the UDF, in a recent interview published in LE POINT (August 5, 2004): “Turkey’s geography, history, and sociology are not European. Its anthropology is not the same as ours. During a recent conversation with Turkish Prime Minister Nayyip Erdogan, he said: ‘For us, Europe must be a place where different civilizations meet and coexist,” thus conceding that our civilizations are indeed different. In order to qualify as a member of the European Union, Turkey must meet certain criteria. Even the recognition of the Armenian genocide, an indispensable condition in our eyes, is open to negotiation and compromise. That’s not the real stumbling bloc. The real stumbling bloc is the question: Is Turkey’s membership compatible with the political unity of Europe? My answer is, No.”
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Simon Montefiore on Anastas Mikoyan: “This Armenian who had studied for the priesthood like Stalin himself, was slim, circumspect, wily and industrious, with black hair, moustache and flashing eyes, a broken aquiline nose and a taste for immaculate clothes that, even when clad in his usual tunic and boots, lent him the air of a lithe dandy. Highly intelligent with the driest of wits, he had a gift for languages, understanding English, and, in 1931, he taught himself German by translating DAS KAPITAL.” (And to think that most people can’t understand DAS KAPITAL even when they read it in their mother tongue).
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We know what we think and how we feel. It is only by knowing what others think and feel that we may acquire a better understanding of our fellow men, and by extension, of the world in which we live – that is to say, reality.
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Can we really understand ourselves if we don’t understand others? And if we don’t understand others, what can we really understand?
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Understanding of reality is a seamless web. Partial understanding might as well be misunderstanding, and action based on misunderstanding is bound to fail.
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Memo to my anonymous critics: “The merit of a criticism is diminished when the critic is too afraid to identify himself.”
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Saturday, September 04, 2004
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THE ORIGIN OF WISDOM.
SOCRATES AND ERASMUS.
PERVERTED PATRIOTISM.
ARMENIAN-HATERS.
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All wisdom begins with the realization that what we know is only a very small fraction of knowledge, and very often so small that it would be more accurate to admit, like Socrates, that all we know for certain is that we don’t know.
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And speaking of Socrates: there are people who reject ideas simply because they are new ideas. Whenever in history great men, like Socrates, have been persecuted, you can be sure of one thing: the persecution was organized by such people, namely, the scum of the earth who, in the words of Erasmus, prefer “the smell of their excrement,” simply because they are familiar with it.
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Where hooligans are allowed to hijack the word “patriotism,” love of country becomes hatred of fellow countrymen.
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To those who at one time or another have accused me of being an Armenian-hater, I say: You have no idea what you are saying. A real Armenian-hater is one who hates Turks not because they massacred us, but because they didn’t do a more thorough job; and I happen to be personally acquainted with such an Armenian, and he happens to be a genuine, bona fide, dyed-in-the wool born-again Christian whose every other line is a quote from the Bible. And he feels as he does because he is convinced Armenians are evil and the Turks massacred them because they were following orders from God – not their Allah, be it noted, but our God who can do no wrong. And if you were to say, I should be ashamed to admit that I have such friends, I will reply: I have made it my business to understand all kinds of Armenians and not just a fraction of them.
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