Sunday, August 27, 2006
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CRITICIZING CRITICS
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When I criticize Communists our crypto-Stalinists accuse me of McCarthyism. When I criticize Muslim fundamentalists our anti-Semites (meant to say anti-Zionists) accuse me of racism. And when I criticize Armenians, I am described as a self-hating pro-Turkish whining ignoramus. If I am to believe my critics, verbal abuse is the most legitimate school of criticism or the only good critic is a dead critic.
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I am all for analyzing and understanding hatred, intolerance, and prejudice, but may I confess that I feel helpless with individuals who combine prejudice, hatred, and intolerance with perversion; as when an Armenian expresses nothing but visceral contempt for Americans and Jews but has nothing remotely unkind to say about Bin Laden, mullahs, ayatollahs, and fundamentalist fascist fanatics who hate not only Jews and Americans but also modernity, the West, an important fraction of their fellow Muslims, and women in general (which amounts to about 90% of mankind), and in whose eyes all Christians are infidel dogs unfit to share the earth with the children of Allah and the followers of the Guidance.
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When asked in a televised interview about Muslim terrorists killing defenseless civilians, Bin Laden replied: “Americans have killed many more innocent civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” I find that many pro-Muslim and anti-American Armenians from the Middle East use the same argument to explain and justify Muslim terrorism, which may suggest that there are self-assessed smart people out there who find Muslim propaganda more credible than its American counterpart. What Bin Laden and his followers forget is that Americans dropped atomic bombs on Japan only after calculating that civilian as well as military casualties on both sides of the conflict would have run into millions had they continued the war with conventional weapons, and that even after Hiroshima the Japanese refused to surrender because to them surrender is worse than death.
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Diplomacy and dialogue become inadequate tools when one’s adversary values death more than life. Muslim extremists believe they will win in the end because, in their own words, “You [in the West] love life; we love death.”
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Europe thinks “that to achieve peace no price is too high: not appeasement, not massacres on its own soil, not even surrender to terrorists… Europe is impotent, a foul wind is blowing through [it]… the idea that we can afford to be lenient even with people who threaten us… This same wind blew through Munich in 1938… It could turn out to be the death rattle of a continent that no longer understands what principles to believe.” This is not Oriana Fallaci speaking but Marcello Pera, President of the Italian Senate. See WITHOUT ROOTS: THE WEST, RELATIVISM, CHRISTIANITY, ISLAM by Joseph Ratzinger and Marcello Pera (London, 2006). Please note that Pera’s co-author is today’s Pope of Rome.
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Monday, August 28, 2006
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When I ignored his repeated insults, a reader complained that it was getting increasingly difficult to insult me, implying perhaps that I have a thick skin. I don’t. I am as vulnerable as anyone else, but I also make allowances for youth, inexperience, ignorance, poor upbringing, Ottomanism, and a taste for the gutter.
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My most cherished illusion, which so far I have been unable to shed, is that Armenia is a state and Armenians are a nation — as opposed to being fragmented and scattered collections of disoriented tribes without a common language, purpose, and character.
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In our environment, the very same people who created our problems and are now actively engaged in perpetuating them say, “What we need is not criticism but solutions.” But since doubletalk is their only medium of communication, they see nothing inconsistent between their actions and words.
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Never trust anyone who knows more about the law or can afford a better lawyer.
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Tuesday, August 29, 2006
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WHAT IS AND IS NOT CRITICISM
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Criticism whose aim is to prove the critic’s moral, intellectual, or patriotic superiority is not criticism but hypocrisy whose sole aim is to mislead and deceive.
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The function of a critic is not to solve problems but to expose contradictions. I recognize contradictions because I harbor them. To expose a contradiction also means to identify the individuals who are at its roots.
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The problem with Nazi Germany was National Socialism or Nazism or Hitler. The problem with the USSR was Bolshevism. And the problem with both Nazism and Bolshevism was contempt for human rights and free speech. (What is the aim of Solzhenitsyn’s magnum opus, THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO, if not a detailed documentation of this aberration?)
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Human problems should not be confused with abstract mathematical or scientific problems, which may be solved by a single mind on a piece of paper. To find solutions to human problems is easy (e.g. the problem with alcoholics is alcoholism), implementing them is not.
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I once heard a preacher say that if mankind had followed Christ, there would have been no need for Karl Marx and other reformers who operated on the assumption that they could change the world by ignoring the Word of God. Whenever I am told, “We don’t need critics, we need solutions,” I think of this preacher and cannot help wondering: “If the Son of the Almighty could not solve our problems, what makes anyone think a minor scribbler can?”
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Why do I go on? Good question. Two tentative answers follow: When you witness an injustice or a crime, you are confronted with two options: to expose the criminals or to join them in covering it up. Since this example may imply moral superiority on the part of the witness, here is a better and more selfish one: The house next door is on fire. You either ignore it and hope for the best or you call 911, which is what I have been doing – calling 911, even after being told repeatedly by the voice at the other end to shut up and mind my own business, as if my own home were not my business.
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Wednesday, August 30, 2006
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The Word of God: the quintessential hearsay evidence.
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You want to be objective? Begin by thinking against yourself. Question your fondest assertions in which the “I” is present. Your “I” may be your most valuable possession but to the rest of the world it is the least significant.
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I don’t remember to have ever met a man about whom I could not say, “There by the grace of God…”
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As victims of racism, racism comes naturally to us. For many years I instinctively denied the existence of good Turks, and to this day the combination of these two words – “good Turks” – has to me an oxymoronic aura, like “cold fire,” or “compassionate sadist.”
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Charm and honesty are mutually exclusive concepts. In the kind of world we live in, being honest means being obnoxious.
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Caravans are magnates for idle dogs and dung beetles.
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Wars between men end, but wars between gods never do.
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If their Allah and our God ever met, would they need a translator?
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