Sunday, August 06, 2006
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Being on the side of the victim and against his victimizer is easy. What’s hard is to determine who’s who. Israel today is surrounded by two hundred million hostile Arabs and many more anti-Semites around the world who would like to see it bite the dust. If you add to that their status as perennial victims throughout their millennial existence, you may have to admit that the line between victim and victimizer is blurred.
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Something similar may be said about Turks and us. In 1915 Turks saw themselves as victims and Armenians, together with Russians, Greeks, Kurds, Brits, and Australians, among others, as their victimizers.
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In my efforts to explain the Genocide am I justifying it? No. What I am doing is trying to understand it without resorting to the crude clichés and simplistic slogans of our nationalist historians and propagandists.
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Speaking of nationalist historians: another factor that complicates matters is that in a political context victims are almost always double victims, as we were in 1915 and as Palestinians are today – namely, victims of their enemies as well as victims of their misguided, non-representative (in our case) or theocratic and fascist leadership (in the case of Palestinians and Muslims in general). To say otherwise is to imply that mullahs and our own tribal leaders are objective observers, impartial judges, and competent statesmen, to which I can only say, “Give me a break!” and “Nothing further, your honor.”
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And now a question: what would happen to a nationalist historian if, like Toynbee, he were to adopt a more objective and impartial stance? The answer is: he would no longer be a nationalist historian, which means he would cease to enjoy the support of our bosses, bishops, and benefactors, his books would no longer be sold in community centers and churches, he would be thought of as a traitor to the cause, and he would thus acquire the status of an outsider, an internal exile, a persona non grata, a pariah, and a pro-Turkish revisionist. He would no longer be an Armenian but a non-person and an abominable no man. I know what I am saying: I have been there. I still am.
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Monday, August 07, 2006
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It has been said, “Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.”
Corollary I: The smaller the stakes, the more vicious the arguments.”
Corollary II: When nonentities disagree on nothing, the result is bound to be verbal massacre.
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In our controversies we are like Oscar Wilde’s foxhunters: “The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable.”
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“Why do you always find fault with us?” a reader demands to know. “Why are you afraid to criticize odars?” Odars interest me only in so far as they make visible that which we pretend not to see in us. And before I undertake the daunting task of collecting the garbage on Main Street, I like to clean up the mess in my own backyard.
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Let others preach hatred of the Turk; I prefer to get busy recognizing the Turk within me.
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The answer to conventional wisdom is not unconventional stupidity.
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It is in their efforts to appear deep that the shallow expose their lack of depth.
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Even the most ruthless dictator depends on the subservience of the majority, provided of course the majority remains unaware of this.
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My experience with Levantines is that, they think they are ahead of you if they are better at making money. Nothing runs deeper than the contempt of the merchant for the poet. One of our national benefactors is quoted as having said to one of our poets: “I hire and fire people like you every day.”
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Tuesday, August 08, 2006
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DIALOGUE, ARMENIAN STYLE
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When an Armenian disagrees with you he is not satisfied with a simple counterargument; he also feels the need to let you know that he wouldn’t mind tearing off a piece of flesh from your body. Hence, Zarian’s dictum, “Armenians survive by cannibalizing one another.”
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Let others brag about Armenians being the first nation to convert to Christianity. I prefer to deal with facts even when – especially when – they happen to be against us. Because then and only then may we learn to deal with reality as opposed to voicing chauvinist crapola and recycling such nonsense as “it may take two or three generations for our problems to be solved” — and this after centuries of subservience to ruthless tyrants, massacres, dispersion, exile, life in alien slums, and ongoing “white” genocide (assimilation in the Diaspora and exodus from the Homeland).
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Armenians excel in a certain and rare type of counterargument whose true intent is not to contradict but to be a carcinogenic agent.
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All pro-Palestinian arguments recycle mullah propaganda whose most irrefutable tenet is the reward of 78 virgins.
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I trust our televangelists more than their mullahs if only because even the most crooked televangelist – and there have been quite a few of them – has never dared to go as far promising a single virgin to sex-starved teenagers.
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A self-ASSessed Armenian genius will voice the argument of a certified mongoloid moron and see nothing inconsistent in it.
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Wednesday, August 09, 2006
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To be infatuated with one’s knowledge is as bad as to be infatuated with one’s ignorance. That’s because all knowledge is limited but ignorance is without limits, so that at all times and everywhere our ignorance far exceeds our knowledge.
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The real god (if there is one) and our conception of him are two different beings that may not even be remotely connected with each other. I would go further and say that one may well be a contradiction of the other in so far as the unknown and unknowable may be said to be a contradiction of a figment of our imagination. When Nietzsche said, “god is dead,” he was referring to the figment rather than to the unknowable, about which no man is qualified to speak.
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Victims are not the most objective judges of their victimizers.
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Turks believe what their historians tell them because they hate the stigma of being identified as bloodthirsty Asiatic savages. Armenians believe what their own historians tell them because they hate to be identified as perennially divided and inept tribal dupes who allowed themselves to be manipulated by the double-talk of foreign politicians. In their efforts to appear better than they are, both Turks and Armenians lie to their own people and are believed because the uneducated and half-educated masses are no match for the cunning and sophistication of the bourgeoisie.
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Even in countries where capitalism has buried communism and democracy has buried fascism there are people who miss the good old days when they could slaughter dissidents with impunity. I happen to be aware of their existence because some of them are my most faithful readers. Are they bloodthirsty savages or dupes? I will let you decide.
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