Thursday, March 16, 2006
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We brag as naturally and thoughtlessly as a canary sings. But whereas canaries have no credibility problem, we do.
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In a letter from the Publisher of a new Armenian magazine I read the following: “We are one of the few people of the ancient world that have survived to modern times with a language, culture, and memory of our history.”
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Whenever I read assertions of this type I am seized by an irresistible urge to footnote the text if only for the sake of accuracy and honesty; also in order to inform readers that we are not all braggarts or dupes of braggarts.
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We have survived to modern times? What if most of us, among them the best, did not survive?
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With a language? What if most of us neither read nor speak the language?
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Culture? I see more culture in yoghurt than in an Armenian community center. An odar friend, who is more interested in our literature than most Armenians, tells me: “I have yet to meet an Armenian who has read a single book by Raffi or Zarian.”
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Memory of history? What’s there to remember? Military defeats and moral victories followed by centuries of oppression, subservience, lamentation, betrayal, collaboration with the enemy, massacres, dispersion, internecine conflicts, and more lamentation….
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Friday, March 17, 2006
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Things change, people change, life changes, and I am no longer what I used to be. Once upon a time I too was a cliché-spouting, loudmouth chauvinist propagandist. Then I met a Jewish boy from, of all places, Azerbaijan, and bragged about Armenians being the smartest people on the face of the earth. To prove it I went into the old routine of making a list of our celebrities:
“Anastas Mikoyan,” I said.
“Karl Marx,” said he.
“Aram Khachaturian,” I said.
“Mendelssohn, Mahler, Schoenberg, Aaron Copland,” he countered.
“William Saroyan,” I said next.
“Shalom Alecheim,” he said.
“Alecheim Shalom,” I replied.
“I meant the writer,” he said.
“Never heard of him,” I said.
“FIDDLER ON THE ROOF,” he said.
“He wrote that?”
“Who else?”
“Akim Tamiroff,” I said next.
“Who is he?” he wanted to know.
“One of the greatest actors in the world,” I explained.
“Charlie Chaplin,” he said.
“Beat Calouste Gulbenkian if you can, the wealthiest man that has ever lived,” I said.
After a few moments of reflection, he said:
“Jesus Christ, Freud, Einstein.”
And that was the last time I ever bragged about our celebrities.
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Saturday, March 18, 2006
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Historian David Irving six years ago in a British courtroom: “More women died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz.”
Found guilty in an Austrian court of law, Irving is now having second thoughts on the subject. If only he had taught himself to put aside his personal prejudices and to say, “I don’t know,” or “I am not sure,” or even “I have studied many documents but not all of
them.”
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And consider Toynbee who, after an interview with Hitler in the 1930s, stated: “I am now
convinced Herr Hitler wants peace.”
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According to a French historian, Louis XIV never said, “I am the State.” On the contrary,
on his deathbed, his final words were, “I go, but the State remains.” What if this was a
case of deathbed conversion?
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According to a Biblical scholar, Jesus was in his fifties when he was crucified.
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One can prove anything by quoting historians who are notorious for their inability to get
their sh** together. Something similar could be said of political and religious leaders: One can legitimize all crimes by quoting them.
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Marx called some nations “unhistorical,” because they contributed nothing to world progress. We owe our status as a “historical” nation to the fact that we have contributed many things, but mostly victims.
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We must teach our children to listen to the other side of the story, and by that I don’t just mean the Turkish side, but also the Armenian moderate, non-partisan, and anti-partisan side.
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To those who question the validity of my assertions, I can only say that everything I write is based on the published works of our writers and my own experience. I may not have God and capital on my side (or is it Capital and god) but I do have that which is God-given, namely logic and common sense.
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