Sunday, August 13, 2006
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DO YOU DISAGREE WITH ME?
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Nothing unusual in that. Our bosses, bishops, and their main supporters, our benevolent benefactors disagree with one another all the time. Why shouldn’t we?
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As a child I believed everything I was told by my elders. As a teenager I believed nothing. As an adult I see very little value in both belief and unbelief, or agreement and disagreement. Disagreement in itself is meaningless. What matters is whose disagreement, or what is the stage of development or arrested development of the person who disagrees. Is he a six-year old who cannot yet think for himself, a sixteen-year old rebel, or a sixty-year old who has not yet outgrown his Peter Pan stage?
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AM I BORING YOU?
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Nothing unusual in that either. Even my most favorite writers sometimes bore me stiff, but I go on reading them because if I were to skip a paragraph or page or chapter I may miss a line that may change my life. Call it one of the superstitions of the trade.
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I love Shakespeare. I have learned to recite entire soliloquies from RICHARD III and HAMLET by heart not because I was told to do so by a teacher but because rereading and reading these two plays is to me a perennial source of pleasure. This much said, however, I don’t mind admitting that I have not yet read his complete works and I don’t plan to do so in the near future. And consider Shakespeare’s counterpart in music, J.S. Bach. Everyone loves his Toccata and Fugue in D minor, but only organists know his Toccata and Fugue in F major, probably because the first is an accessible masterpiece and the second sounds like a boring academic exercise.
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ON BEING HUMAN
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We all make mistakes, except self-appointed Armenian pundits. Being wrong to them would be akin to the collapse of the papacy and the disintegration of Vatican’s moral authority.
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Do I make mistakes? Since I have made it my business to question the legitimacy of those in power and the nonsense in all dogmatic assertions, I am less vulnerable to that particular charge. But if it will make you feel better, I am willing to reiterate that the subtitle of everything I write could be “I Could Be Wrong.”
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I mentioned above lines that may change one’s life. Here is a sentence that may change if not your life than some of your fundamental assumptions on Asiatic barbarians versus their European counterparts. Speaking of 17th-century Europe, an American historian writes: “Rape and massacre became the soldiers’ recreation, and revenge was terrible when peasants with pitchforks found themselves in a position to exact it.” (James R. Gaines, EVENING IN THE PALACE OF REASON: BACH MEETS FRDERICK THE GREAT IN THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT [New York, 2005], page 20.)
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Monday, August 14, 2006
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Because the Armenian is a bundle of contradictions, Neshan Beshigtashlian once described him as an enigma that resists all solutions. If true, one of these contradictions must be that he thinks he is smart and behaves like a fool.
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Because I am for solidarity I have becomes an enemy; and because they divide the community they are patriotic activists.
Because I expose the dangers of intolerance and tribalism I am accused of repeating myself, and because they keep preaching dogmas that are of use to no one but themselves, they expect us to believe they are defenders of the faith.
Even as they commit suicide by the death of a thousand cuts they brag about their highly developed instinct of survival.
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What have they learned from the Genocide except to hate Turks? And because lying comes naturally to them they say they hate no one, they want only justice; and they love justice so much that anyone who disagrees with them is stigmatized as a pro-Turkish revisionist, that is to say, the lowest form of animal life.
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The virtue they value most is unquestioning obedience and loyalty, which is why they consider dogs superior to men.
Because they can dish it out but can’t take it, they consider dialogue anti-Armenian.
Some day the Pope of Rome and his Muslim counterpart in Mecca may engage in dialogue and reach a consensus of sorts, but I doubt if two Armenians who hold opposite views will ever concede that as human beings they could be wrong.
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On the day they teach themselves to say “I could be wrong,” I will be out of business.
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Tuesday, August 15, 2006
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IN THE DEVIL’S KINGDOM
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In a book from J.S. Bach’s library an underlined passage reads: “If you try to help people they will express their gratitude with a kick, after which they will wipe their shoes on you. Before you try to change the world, try to understand that the world is not disposed to accept your suggestions or follow your directives.”
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What have I accomplished so far? How many minds have I changed? I cannot even identify myself with Sisyphus – he hoisted a rock, it seems all I have been doing is hoisting a feather. My defeats have been many; my victories few and most of them I now suspect may well have been figments of my imagination. The one or two real victories have left a bitter aftertaste. Were they worth the effort? What if the damage I caused was disproportionate to the injustice that was inflicted on me?
I am not made for conflict and I find all conflict distasteful. But what I find even more distasteful, not to say repellent, is to say “Yes, sir” to fools who pretend to know better.
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Another passage underlined by Bach reads: “A fool is of no use to himself, and fools are everywhere. We have no choice but to live among them and to work for them. The world as we know it is the devil’s kingdom.” Further down: “If you expect things to go your way, prepare yourself for disappointment, sadness, and heartache.”
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What if, when in the Lord’s Prayer, we say “Thy kingdom come,” we express an awareness of the fact that the kingdom we live in today is not His but the Devil’s? And what if further down when we say “Do not lead us into temptation,” we go further and identify Him with the Devil?
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Wednesday, August 16, 2006
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The Middle East is the cradle of civilization and judging by its recent history its ambition now is to be its grave.
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Beirut is the Paris of the Middle East but a Paris without its Enlightenment, which may suggest that its mindset belongs to the Dark Ages.
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Where philistines and fanatics are in charge, it’s always the Dark Ages.
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J.S. Bach had his share of critics and he took them seriously because he was financially dependent on the goodwill and generosity of his philistine employers.
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Armenians are guilty of “ethocide” (the murder of ethics), according to a Turkish writer, because they ignore Turkish victims. Turks by contrast cannot be said to be guilty of the same crime (ethocide) on the grounds that you cannot ignore something that doesn’t exist.
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To know only one side of the story is worse than not to know the story.
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Why read the plays of a phony like Shakespeare? It’s common knowledge that he did not write them. It was another fellow whose name also happened to be Shakespeare.
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