hursday, October 21, 2004
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God is not a fascist but the god of fascists is. He will not tolerate deviationists and dissidents, also known as heretics and blasphemers. Hence the tragic and violent fate of those who at one time or another dared to challenge his authority.
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Teilhard de Chardin: “The way we treat people is the way we treat God.” I wonder how many Christians even came close to suspecting that when they were burning heretics at the stake, it was God they were burning?
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Dostoevsky: “A man is endowed with the faculty to rise above the human condition and to embrace eternity.” Though he was himself a devout Orthodox Christian, Dostoevsky did not say “a Christian,” but “a man.” I like that.
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A Christian needs an imam as much as a Muslim needs a bishop. As for a man: he needs neither one nor the other – unless of course he has the mind and soul of a sheep.
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A conviction is no longer a conviction if it is a result of conditioning or brainwashing. A child or a robot cannot have convictions. Convictions are convictions only when formed by reason and experience.
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Friday, October 22, 2004
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Smart prophets and pundits are like astrologers: the more vague and ambiguous their predictions, the better chance they have of not being wrong.
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Why do we feel the need to voice our disagreements and to insist that we are right and our adversaries wrong? According to Hegel as explained by Kojeve: “Man, to be really, truly man, and to know that he is such, must impose the idea that he has of himself on beings other than himself.”
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Sartre on Freud: “The dimension of the future does not exist for Freudian psychoanalysis.” Not quite: Freud concentrated on analyzing past wounds because he knew we are creatures of the past with wounds that must be healed and conflicts that must be resolved if we want to find the right path and fulfill our destiny. But Sartre is also right in so far as obsession with the past may turn us into pillars of salt.
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The Genocide is our collective wound and so far we have failed to heal it because we have made Turkish acceptance of responsibility as a necessary condition. In other words, as victims of murder, we have made ourselves dependent on the goodwill, decency, and sense of justice of murderers.
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As for world opinion: it remains divided because nations too are creatures of the past with their own open wounds and unresolved conflicts. Americans cannot side with us because they too, like Turks, are guilty of having adopted a genocidal policy towards their native Indians. And Israelis side with Turks because they live in fear of another holocaust and Turks happen to be their only Muslim friends in the Middle East.
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It is an illusion to think that on the day Turks plead guilty we will be born again as human beings and resolve our internecine conflicts.
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“The past is not a proof that can be corrected,” writes Herzen, “but a guillotine knife; after it has once fallen there is much that does not grow together again, and not everything can be set right.”
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What if our dependence on Turkish goodwill is another symptom of our slave mentality?
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Saturday, October 23, 2004
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It is not at all unusual for an Armenian to behave like a Turk in defense of his self-defined and self-assessed Armenianism and to see no inconsistency or contradiction in it.
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It is beyond me why in the eyes of some Armenians, Armenianism and civilized conduct appear to be incompatible concepts.
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As subjects of the Ottoman Empire, history appeared to us as immobile. But at the turn of the last century it began to move and to move so fast that so far we have failed to catch up with it, which also means we cannot grasp its meaning and perceive its direction.
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Hegel: “Each consciousness seeks the death of the other.”
When Hegel wrote that line he was not thinking of Armenians but he might as well have been.
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Great many incomprehensible things become comprehensible if you take into consideration the fact that we live in an imperfect world as imperfect beings with imperfect judgments. If you add to that mixture the fact that we are also torn by a set of conflicting and alien traditions, ideologies, religions, loyalties and vested interests, you may have to conclude that the most incomprehensible thing of all is the fact that we are alive – though battered, wounded, and sometimes even eviscerated, but still breathing….
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So many hooligans pretending to know better because they are better have insulted me, that I am beginning to develop the skin of a crocodile.
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Three funerals in less than two weeks: the shape of things to come or the shapeless thing getting closer?
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When a reader tells me to write more like Saroyan or Mark Twain or Michael Moore, I am tempted to ask: “And how do you like your pizza? – with or without anchovies?” Next question: “Do you think I am a pizza?”
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In his book, WITH BORGES, Alberto Manguel writes, Borges was so sentimental that he wept at the end of ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES, one of my favorite Jimmy Cagney movies which I have seen and enjoyed several times without shedding the shadow of a single tear…and I thought I was sentimental.
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