Sunday, August 20, 2006
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Some of my very best friends (no poetic license intended) have become my worst enemies (ditto) because they disagreed with something I said. So much for Armenian friendship, tolerance, dialogue, and Ottomanism….
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One can speak of facts and nothing but facts and one can lie; all one has to do is ignore other equally valid and important facts.
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Since I was brainwashed to believe I was smart, I thought I was being smart even when I behaved like an idiot. That’s what propaganda does to innocent and defenseless minds.
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Readers, who have programmed themselves to disagree with you, will contradict you even when they agree with you. It is almost as if they preferred to disagree with themselves rather than agree with a mortal enemy.
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When it comes to writing about Turks, the challenge for an Armenian is to be readable by Turks without running the risk of being dismissed as another unforgiving victim with a score to settle.
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Anyone can persevere if he thinks he has even a remote chance to win. The trick is persevering when you know you will lose.
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Monday, August 21, 2006
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THE FIRE NEXT TIME
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Since they couldn’t save us from the massacres, they now want to make up for it by convincing the world that we were massacred. First they bite more than they can chew and now they expect us to chew on an imaginary carrot…as the massacre continues.
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There is a tendency in all of us to pretend to know more than we do, except when we run the risk of testifying against ourselves. And yet, it is in our efforts to avoid confessing that we confess.
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If you are going to plead “Not guilty,” make sure not to sweat bullets. The body language of bad liars invariably contradicts their words.
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Propaganda is the body language of nations.
Even as they assert Armenians victimized them, they go about victimizing Kurds and anyone else who dares to deviate from their propaganda line.
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To be born again sometimes consists in replacing one racket with another. I am personally acquainted with an academic who taught atheism in Yerevan, but after the collapse of the USSR he came to America, saw the light, and is now making a comfortable living as a minister praising the Lord from Whom all blessings flow.
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The more you sermonize, speechify, and editorialize the less you act. Action and palaver are mutually exclusive. I speak from experience. Palaver is my racket.
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The Chinese say of the 36 (or is it 63) ways to fight, running away is the best; and we say of the 36 or 63 ways to solve a problem, procrastination is the best. That’s because Father Time is the universal problem solver and God is an Armenian.
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A headline in today’s paper reads: “Arab leaders discuss rebuilding Lebanon.” Either they are jumping the gun or they have so much money that they don’t know what to do with it…a clear-cut case of the triumph of hope over experience, or the triumph of illusion over reality, or the triumph of garbage over the Word, or that which is said to have been at the beginning of all things.
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Tuesday, August 22, 2006
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ON FUNDAMENTALISTS,
FANATICS, AND RIFFRAFF
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When it comes to ideologies, religions, and metaphysical systems in general, a truly civilized and tolerant person does not say, “I am right,” but “I could be wrong.”
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Dogmatism and intolerance promote the kind of mindset that says, “My belief system is the only true one and all others are heresies”; or “My values and ideas are positive and the values and ideas of those who disagree with me are negative and should be anathematized.”
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Muslim fundamentalism is the central theme of Oriana Fallaci’s LA FORZA DELLA RAGIONE (The Force of Reason), now available in English (New York, Rizzoli, 2006). Far more dangerous than Muslim terrorism, Fallaci writes here, is Muslim immigration because “Muslims breed like rats.” She quotes the Orientalist Turcophile Bernard Lewis to the effect that in less than a hundred years “Europe will be numerically dominated by Muslims.” Further down she argues that there is not and cannot be such a thing as a moderate Muslim because all Muslims believe in the suras of the Koran, five of which clearly state that infidel dogs don’t deserve to live. The real ambition of all Muslims, she explains, is to dominate Europe, which is not a recent development but a policy that has a millennial history.
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Fallaci is fair enough to also point out that fundamentalism is not an exclusively Muslim aberration and that all closed systems of thought (like Mussolini’s Fascism, Hitler’s National Socialism or Nazism, and Stalin’s Bolshevism) spawn fundamentalist riffraff who adopt an ideology or religion only to legitimize their murderous instincts and bloodthirsty disposition.
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When Marx said he was not himself a Marxist, he meant to say that he was not a killer but a thinker whose theories attempted to explain a fraction of reality that had been misinterpreted or neglected by his predecessors. By contrast, Stalin’s commissars were not thinkers but killers in search of a belief system that would allow them to murder with a clear conscience. Something similar could be said of our own phony patriots and partisans who pretend to be on a mission from God and armed with that conviction they feel authorized to silence or insult anyone who dares to contradict them. But as Fallaci says and repeats like a mantra, “Their insults are my medals.”
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Wednesday, August 23, 2006
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OF CABBAGES AND KINGS
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It is said of Augustus II, The Strong, king of Poland (1670-1733) that his illegitimate children numbered exactly 354 and some of his many daughters became his mistresses who also had affairs with their half-brothers. Since he ruled by divine right and with the approval of the Church, my guess is, his conduct did not attract media attention, his approval rate didn’t go south, and no one dared to whisper the word impeachment in his presence. If you consider the abuse leveled at Clinton and Woody Allen, you may have to conclude that the masses and the media today have higher moral standards than the Good Lord and his representatives on earth.
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What do we know about our own kings and “betters” in general? How many Armenians know that Calouste Gulbenkian believed fornicating with young girls would prolong his life?
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I remember to have read somewhere that old age has three consolations: power, wealth, and fame – provided of course one is not saddled with impotence, Alzheimer’s, and scandal. Tolstoy had more fame than anyone else, except perhaps Napoleon and Elvis, but he had a very miserable old age. In his eighties he ran away from home and died in the middle of nowhere in the house of a total stranger.
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We expose ourselves as dupes and unreliable witnesses when we expect people to believe that our leaders don’t make mistakes, they don’t lie, mislead and propagandize, lust for power is a vice alien to them, and butter wouldn’t melt in their mouth or anywhere else.
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