Sunday, December 11, 2005
***********************************
CRIME STORIES
***************************
In thrillers, or mystery, suspense and crime novels the question is who is the murderer? In psychoanalysis, what is the complex? The question historians try to answer is, what happened and why? In philosophy, what is the meaning of life, or why things exist?
*
In his old age, Bertrand Russell used to read a crime novel a day (by judiciously skipping descriptive passages whose sole aim is to lend an air of authenticity to the plot and character, it can be done).
*
In his memoirs Sartre writes that he prefers reading crime novels to Wittgenstein, perhaps because the answers provided by even the ablest philosophers are never as certain as those to be found in crime fiction.
*
Propaganda has this in common with Hollywood movies and bad fiction in general: it divides characters into good and bad guys. It has been said that in a good play or work of fiction, as in life, the line between decent folk and villains is blurred.
*
In his efforts to explain the Armenian Genocide, Toynbee advanced the theory that the source of evil is in all of us and it is called original sin. Given the right or wrong combination of circumstances, we, all of us, are capable of behaving like Turks; or, as Puzant Granian once put it more bluntly, “There is a Turk in all of us.”
*
My fascination with crime fiction began with Edgar Alan Poe and Conan Doyle. Some of the most unforgettable titles in the genre that I have read and sometimes reread are:
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT by Dostoevsky,
THE KILLERS, by Hemingway,
DEAD YELLOW WOMEN by Dashiell Hammett,
FAREWELL MY LOVELY by Raymond Chandler,
A COFFIN FOR DIMITRIOS by Eric Ambler,
THE GOUFFE CASE by Joachim Maass,
NOCTURNE by Ed McBain,
POINT BLANK by Richard Stark, and
GRIEVANCE by K.C. Constantine.
#
Monday, December 12, 2005
***********************************
PARANOIA
*******************
Once more I have been accused of being a denialist. Under Stalin this type of baseless and irresponsible accusation landed countless innocent people into the Gulag.
*
I ceased being a proud Armenian on the day a proud Armenian insulted me in the name of Armenianism.
*
When Descartes said, “I think therefore I am,” he shifted human consciousness from god-centered (theocentric) to man-centered (humanist) and in doing so he ushered in the Age of Enlightenment. In the Middle or Dark Ages a statement like “I think therefore I am” would have been unthinkable. Medieval philosophy, or rather theology, explained everything by invoking the name of god. I think and I am because god created me with a brain. The sky is blue because blue is god’s favorite color. The earth is the center of the solar system, not to say the universe, because man is god’s favorite creature.
*
When one of our weeklies of 19 pages publishes 16 articles and commentaries on Turks (I am not counting the letters to the editor), an objective observer would have no choice but to conclude that Armenian consciousness in the 21st Century has become Turco-centric — a development that we owe to our massacrists (genocide scholars), hai-tahd peddlers, dime-a-dozen pundits and editorialists.
*
To have a Turco-centric consciousness means to have a consciousness that wallows in self-pity, hatred, and rage against an unjust world. It follows, in the same way that a paranoiac sees enemies lurking in every dark corner, a Turco-centric Armenian sees denialists everywhere and he does so with the unshakable conviction that he is discharging his patriotic duty.
#
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
************************************
XENOPHOBIA
**************************
“Xenophobia assassinates life,” writes Carlos Fuentes in his latest book, THIS I BELIEVE: AN A TO Z OF LIFE (New York, Random House, 331 pages, 2005). For us, the quintessential alien is the Turk. But as far as I can see, after 600 years of cohabitation, the only discernible difference between them and us is that we are not guilty of genocide.
*
What motivated the Turks to exterminate us was xenophobia, and they were afraid of us because they thought we (as opposed to a small and non-representative group of revolutionaries), together with Kurds, Greeks, Russians, and the Great Powers of the West, threatened the integrity of their homeland.
*
Fuentes goes on: “The lesson of our unfinished humanity is that when we exclude we are made poorer, and when we include we are made richer.”
*
If xenophobia is assassination, our xenophobia of Turks may be said to be a bloodless genocide.
*
We cannot exorcise the Turk within us by hating him or by refusing to acknowledge his existence. He is there and he has been there all along, and he will continue to be the dominant factor in our collective existence until we come to terms with the fact that the reason why we are not guilty of genocide is rooted not in moral superiority but in military inferiority.
#
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
****************************************
Faith is the greatest deceiver. To say “I believe therefore it’s true” has been the biggest and most dangerous lie ever invented by man.
*
Why did Toynbee change his mind? Why is it that after writing several books on the tyranny of the Turks and the Armenian massacres he became a Turcophile? Even so, it should be noted, repeated, and emphasized that he at no time went as far as denying the reality of the Genocide. On the contrary – very much on the contrary – he went on saying and repeating in nearly every other book he wrote that the Armenian Genocide and the Jewish Holocaust were the two greatest crimes of the 20th Century.
*
I like these lines from THIS I BELIEVE by Carlos Fuentes: “There are more idols than realities in this world of ours, and convictions have a tendency to be prisons.”
*
Perhaps Toynbee knew something we don’t know, one of which is that history is nothing but an endless catalogue of atrocities, truth is our common enemy, and politicians, regardless of race, color, creed, or tribe, speak with a forked tongue.
*
Toynbee probably agreed with Pascal when the latter said: “What a chimera then is man! What a novelty, what monsters! Chaotic, contradictory, prodigious, judging everything, mindless worm of the earth. Storehouse of truth, cesspool of uncertainty and error; glory and reject of the universe!”
*
Please note that I am not questioning the innocence of our victims. What I would like to question however is the motives of our politicians and the integrity of historians who recycle the party line, any party line. And whenever I think of our politicians I remember Gostan Zarian’s dictum: “Our political parties have been of no political use to us; their greatest enemy is free speech.” And they have every reason to be afraid of free speech because free speech may expose their blunders.
*
No man exposes his shortcomings as transparently and surely as the man who adopts a holier-than-thou stance.
#