Sunday, October 23, 2005
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GUARD DOGS AND DISSIDENTS
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Intellectuals may be divided into two categories: defenders of the status quo (or, in the words of a French philosopher “guard dogs”) and dissidents. It goes without saying that the guard dogs enjoy the full support of those in power, and the dissidents are ostracized, alienated, and, whenever possible, silenced, starved, poisoned, or shot.
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The history of our literature is rich in dissidents. But when guard dogs compile anthologies and textbooks they tend to cover up the dissent and emphasize the patriotism and nationalist propaganda. Writers like Raffi, Baronian, Odian, and Avedik Issahakian, who were merciless critics of our leaders, are misrepresented as patriotic versifiers, historical novelists or comedians. Many others (Voskanian, Massikian) are relegated to the status of non-persons.
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Was Narekatsi a guard dog or dissident? Hard to say. He was quintessentially non-political. He concentrated on himself as a sinner. He blamed no one but his own evil inclinations. If he were a contemporary and if he took it upon himself to write about our genocide, my guess is he wouldn’t even mention the Turks. He would have said what a born-again, Bible-thumping, fundamentalist friend of mine in his 80s once said to me: “Armenians were massacred because they were evil and they deserved to be punished by God.”
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Were Khorenatsi and Yeghishe, two of our greatest historians of the Golden Age, guard dogs or dissidents? It is true that most of our medieval chroniclers were propagandists of a prince with dynastic ambitions. In order to fulfill their duties they had no choice but to attack political adversaries and expose corruption in high places. In so far as they did that, they too may be said to have been dissidents.
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What about Sylva Kaputikian? When the USSR collapsed she declared herself to have been a proud member of the Communist Party, the very same Party that had systematically eliminated some of our ablest intellectuals. Shortly thereafter she also published an autobiographical book in which she portrayed herself as a dissident. If true, she must be the only Soviet dissident who was awarded the Stalin Prize.
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Monday, October 24, 2005
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RELIGIOUS TRUTHS ARE BIG LIES
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In a recent interview published in a learned French periodical, a Muslim scholar proves to his complete satisfaction that Islam is a better religion than Christianity, and the only reason Christians outnumber Muslims is that Christianity is six centuries older. In the next six centuries, he goes on, Islam will surpass all other organized religions in popularity. That is one of the central problems with all men of faith: they think they know better and they are closer to God even when they behave like swine. And you may have noticed by now that it is not the good and the honest who assert moral superiority but charlatans and riffraff. “If I am no good,” they seem to be saying, “the least I can do is pretend to be better even if it means engaging in double-talk and lies.”
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The world will be a better place on the day scholars concentrate their efforts in exposing the shortcomings of their own belief systems and the blunders of their own tribes instead of asserting moral and intellectual superiority with arguments that convince no one but themselves and their dupes.
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If the Pope doubts his faith seven times every day, as Italians are fond of saying, let him say so if only because in matters of faith doubt is more civilized than certainty.
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And if God is infallible, why has He created an imperfect world in which man’s inhumanity to man is a constant and war and massacre are routine occurrences? To those who say wars and massacres are men’s doing, not God’s, because God has given man free will that allows him to choose between good and evil; I say, the free will argument may apply to the victimizer, not the victim. Given the choice, who would freely choose to be the victim of fanatic butchers?
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Tuesday, October 25, 2005
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A headline in our local paper today reads: “Rosa Parks’ defiance changed a nation.” What it does not say, or what it covers up, is that the compliance of millions of others perpetuated an unjust, not to say, an evil system.
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If in crime it’s cherchez la femme, in all verbal communications it’s cherchez the unsaid or the covered up – there it is, step on of deconstruction 101.
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To believe a nation’s own version of its past amounts to believing a criminal’s plea of not guilty.
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If a ruthless serial killer were to write his memoirs, you can be sure of one thing: he would portray himself as a victim rather than a victimizer.
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Every nation thinks of itself as a role model among nations.
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Propaganda may also be defined as emphasizing the positive in us and the negative in our enemies.
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To believe in an Armenophile’s version of Armenian history makes as much sense as believing in a Turcophile’s version of Turkish history.
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The history of our literature is rich in writers who, like Rosa Parks, defied the status quo. But their voices have been silenced so effectively that whenever they are quoted or paraphrased, our propagandists are scandalized. I speak from experience.
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Wednesday, October 26, 2005
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So far we have been emphasizing our status as victims or extensions of someone else’s will, be they foreign aggressors, tyrants, denialists, revisionists, Turcophiles, and ultimately our own mini-sultans and neo-commissars. How do we liberate ourselves from that mindset? There are no easy answers. But we could start by seeing things as they are.
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One of the functions of leadership is to convince the people that their leaders know better even when they don’t. That’s because all leaders prefer sheep to wolves. If the German nation had followed Hitler to the end, it would have committed suicide and that would have been the end of their story. Something similar could be said of the Japanese.
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Leaders may pretend to know better, but they don’t. Our status as perennial victims and losers is a result of foreign barbarism and domestic incompetence. All other explanations are propaganda whose sole aim is to mislead us into thinking that patriotism consists in allowing ourselves to be an extension of our leaders’s will, in other words, to adopt the mindset of sheep.
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