Sunday, June 04, 2006
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ELECTIVE AFFINITIES
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Canadian saying: If you hang around with sh**, don’t complain about the flies.”
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Propaganda has the power to transform a painful truth to a comforting lie. Expose the lie and make ten thousand enemies.
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History, especially our own, teaches us that God does not like to interfere in human affairs, and that we can no longer count on Him in a future conflict. Or, as the Yanks put it, you may praise the Lord all you want, provided you keep your powder dry.
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If all men are brothers and we are all His children, why would He choose only some of us? It makes no sense. That’s when propaganda comes in. It is no exaggeration to say that the aim of propaganda is to make sense out of nonsense by introducing a bigger nonsense; and this bigger nonsense is readily accepted because it flatters the collective ego.
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By refusing to flatter those who need to be flattered, I let them know they are more unchosen than chosen, and they may even be swimming in the same soup with those they despise. If you think politics makes strange bedfellows, try the truth.
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You may have noticed that people are more eager to correct you when you are right for the simple reason that they hate to be exposed.
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A fat slob once justified his hanging beer belly by saying: “A good workman always builds a shed over his best tool.”
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Canadian saying: “You can’t polish a turd.”
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Monday, June 05, 2006
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A CASE OF MUTUAL MISUNDERSTANDING
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Armenians don’t understand Turks because they don’t understand themselves. I speak from experience. For many years I did not understand not only my fellow Armenians but also myself. I confused what I had been taught (misleading platitudes, clichés, and slogans, that is to say propaganda) with reality. And now that I can tell the difference between a half-truth and a lie, I am misunderstood by self-assessed patriotic readers. This much said however, let me add that inability to understand others and oneself is not a peculiarly Armenian failing.
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What we (regardless of race, color, and creed) really mean when we speak of understanding is the kind of misunderstanding that supports a specific self-serving political agenda. And when we speak of being understood, what we really mean is being misunderstood in a manner that reinforces our image of ourselves. Like dog owners who say “Love me, love my dog,” even when the dog happens to be a drooling, crutch-sniffing ugly mutt with menacing fangs, we say, in effect, “Love me, love my failings, and if you can’t love them, pretend they don’t exist.”
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When it comes to misunderstanding others and themselves, Turks are no different. If Armenians accuse Turks of being guilty of genocide, Turks retaliate by accusing Armenians of inventing a genocide and believing it for a hundred years. (I wonder, does this have a parallel in human history?) They go further and accuse Armenians, if not of genocide (even they wouldn’t dare to go that far) than of committing indiscriminate massacres of innocent Turkish civilians. It follows, Armenians, unlike Turks, must be born liars motivated by raw hatred. It also explains why, as civilized, compassionate people, Turks are outraged whenever the world fails to understand them, or misunderstand them in a manner that supports their political agenda and reinforces their image of themselves.
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Armenians and Turks don’t hate one another, they hate reality.
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Tuesday, June 06, 2006
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Descartes tells us common sense must be just about the most widely and evenly distributed faculty because no one complains he hasn’t enough of it.
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It is common knowledge that what shapes human thought and action is not science or logic but the absurd and the irrational.
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Our religion teaches us not to judge our fellow men, but it also gives us the tools with which to divide mankind into believers and infidels, and sometimes even who lives and who dies.
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If you are dependent on the goodwill of another, you are only half a man. Subservience, even subservience to an ideology or religion, deprives a man of that which divides him from animals: his reason.
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For a number of years I made a living as an organist in a neighborhood Catholic church. The parish priest once complained to me, “You will be surprised how many people call me on Christmas Eve to ask what time is the midnight mass.”
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Let others say “Inshallah!” (God willing). We should teach ourselves to say, “God unwilling.”
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Wednesday, June 07, 2006
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THE WHITE AND THE BLACK
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If you want to understand the past, don’t listen to a politician, read a historian.
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If you want to read a historian, don’t read a historian who enjoys the support or agreement of politicians.
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The trouble with our ablest historians is that they enjoy the support of a political party with a specific agenda and propaganda line.
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If some people question our credibility it may be because we adopt the role of good guys and assign the role of bad guys to our adversaries, who, in retaliation, do the same. In other words we portray ourselves as white and our enemies as black. Life and common sense suggest that black and white distinctions may apply to Hollywood movies but seldom or never to reality, especially in cases where both sides portray the other as black and themselves as white.
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It is not my intention here to minimize the magnitude of a tragedy or to provide extenuating circumstances to killers, but to enhance our understanding of the past, of reality, and ultimately of ourselves.
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