Thursday, November 04, 2004
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FOUR MORE YEARS
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I feel like a Jew in 1933.
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The Christian Right in America may stand for love, mercy, and compassion, but not for tolerance. It views tolerance as un-American, therefore, anti-Christian.
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Dozens of books have been published by highly reputable scholars and investigative reporters in which Bush’s lies, inconsistencies, contradictions, and dirty tricks are exhaustively exposed and documented, but Bush was re-elected because the average born-again hillbilly trusts televangelists more than intellectuals.
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In 1933 Germans trusted Hitler more than Thomas Mann. Marx is right. History repeats itself, first time as tragedy, second time as farce.
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A Nazi is also one who, after hanging a label on a fellow human being, sees only the label.
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In 1915 we were the Jews of the Turks. And today, I am the Jew of our own bosses, bishops, and benefactors.
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All organized religions preach love, but after hanging a label on a fellow human being (heretic, anti-Christ, infidel, giaour, Untouchable) practice intolerance and hatred.
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All power structures speak with a forked tongue. Where there is power, there will also be pathological liars and dupes.
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We have all been Jews and Nazis at one time or another. “Jew” and “Nazi” are labels, granted, but only in the sense that “victim” and victimizer” are labels. To label another is not the same as to assume to have a license to kill.
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My ambition as an Armenian is to be able to criticize Armenians and to be perceived not as a good Armenian (that would be too much to ask), or even as an Armenian, but as a concerned fellow human being.
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Friday, November 05, 2004
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VERSIONS OF THE PAST
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When it comes to the past, every major historian will have his own version of it. Which version do we teach our children? Not a difficult question to answer: the version that is most flattering to our collective ego, provided it bears the seal of approval of a regime or power structure, of course.
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Elementary schoolteachers don’t teach history, they recycle propaganda. This may explain Mark Twain’s celebrated dictum: “I have never let schooling interfere with my education.”
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SELF-KNOWLEDGE
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We are products of history. To understand history is to understand ourselves. Hence, Herder’s description of history as the education of the human race.
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THE REASON BEHIND THE REASON
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What if the reason, the real reason, why we were massacred, was our ignorance of the world?
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QUESTION
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Was Napoleon a great man, a military genius, a spectacular loser, a hero, a tyrant, a bloodthirsty monster? Even French historians don’t always agree. What if, by occupying Germany, he stimulated German nationalism, which resulted in Hitler?
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THE STERILITY OF LITERATURE
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After Shaw wrote, “One fashionably dressed woman may cost the life of ten babies,” did the number of fashionably dressed women go down?
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IN PRAISE OF SOLIDARITY
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Chinese proverb: “To hunt tigers one must have a brother’s help.”
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WAR AND PEACE
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“Islam is a religion of peace,” according to an imam quoted in our paper today, “but like all religions, it is open to misinterpretations.” Which may be why Socrates, Buddha and Jesus did not write a single line. But then, Marx, who wrote copiously and in exhaustive detail in order to avoid misunderstanding, created the nightmare of Stalinism.
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Saturday, November 06, 2004
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THE TAO TE CHING ON NATIONS
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“A great nation is like a great man,
When he makes a mistake, he realizes it.
Having realized it, he admits it.
Having admitted it, he corrects it.
He considers those who point out his faults
As his most benevolent teachers.
He thinks of his enemy
As the shadow that he himself casts.”
(A lesson that the Chinese are in the process of relearning and we have yet to learn.)
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VOLTAIRE ON THE ORIGIN OF RELIGIONS
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“…From the meeting of the earliest scoundrel with the very first fool.”
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PAUL VALERY ON EDUCATION
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“Education in depth consists in undoing one’s first education.”
(In other words, if you want to understand the world, forget what you were taught by your elementary schoolteachers and learn to think for yourself.)
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PANAIT ISTRATI ON ARMENIANS
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In his book of Armenian travel impression, Denis Donikian quotes the following passage from Panait Istrati: “The Armenian is a fellow I know as well as I know the Greek and the Jew. I like all three a lot, notwithstanding their defects, the most obvious being their conviction that, if the sun were to set forever, they would be the first to adapt to the new reality.”
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CLAUDE IMBERT ON BUSH
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“A president that consults God before breakfast will always enjoy the support of a good half of his fellow Americans.”
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“America under Roosevelt defeated fascism. America under Reagan defeated communism. Two planetary triumphs that confirm America’s mission to fight evil [i.e. jihadist Islam].”
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WITTGENSTEIN ON THE ART OF TEACHING
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“My aim is to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense.” (Or, from charlatanism, whose sole aim is to deceive and mislead you by flattering your vanity, to transparent nonsense that cannot obstruct your understanding of the world and arrest your mental development.)
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