Thursday, September 14, 2006
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The blunders of youth are the heaviest burden of old age.
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Those who speak of “social and political conditions beyond our control,” do so to justify their past failures and present inadequacies.
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After 600 years of life in the Ottoman Empire, subservience comes naturally to us, and subservience means loyalty to the master even if he happens to be an alien tyrant; and to be loyal to an alien master means to betray your own people. Hence Raffi’s dictum: “Treason and betrayal are in our blood.”
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You can hide your thoughts all you like, you can even say the opposite of what you feel, but you cannot hide your body language and style. In life, as in the boxing ring, you can run away but you can’t hide.
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I don’t trust people who make a comfortable living because they will do and say anything in defense of their comfort.
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Leaders are the curse of mankind. This is a rule with very few exceptions.
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Friday, September 15, 2006
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THERE IS NO BUSINESS
LIKE SHOA BUSINESS
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There are Turkish charlatans as surely as there are Armenian charlatans, and they are the ones who have reduced the Tragedy of our genocide to a game of political football, each side blaming the other and adopting a morally superior stance. “When the rich fight,” Sartre says somewhere, “it is the poor who die.” Likewise, when political wheeler-dealers argue, truth is sacrificed on the altar of propaganda. As for the cries of the victims, past, present, and future: no matter how hard I try I cannot take seriously the crocodile tears of our self-assessed dime-a-dozen pundits who blabber endlessly and ad nauseam about genocide. I grew up among survivors and I don’t remember any one of them uttering the word “tseghasbanoutiun” (genocide) or wasting a single moment trying to prove that it happened.
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Capital, Marx said, dehumanizes not only the worker but also the capitalist, society as whole, and human relationships. Constant and endless talk of Turkish denials dehumanizes not only Turks and us, but also our relations with the rest of mankind, including our fellow Armenians. Anyone who does not share our view of Turks as bloodthirsty barbarians is labeled a denialist.
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A victim will see the world only in terms of victims and victimizers, or those who are committed to the Cause and denialists. Because I speak of tolerance, respect for fundamental human rights, and a more objective assessment of the past, I have been called a pro-Turkish denialist. Armenian dehumanization of Armenian has already become a routine occurrence with us. I see it every day in Armenian discussion forums on the Internet, which are less discussion forums and more arenas of mutual verbal abuse.
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There are decent Armenians as there are decent Turks, and they don’t need the arguments of propagandists to be convinced of what happened. Such arguments convince only dupes and children of all ages who have not yet acquired the ability to think for themselves.
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I remember the late Puzant Granian (himself a survivor) saying, “At the rate we are going, we will be known to the rest of the world only as a nation that has contributed a million and a half victims to Turkish massacres. Our millennial history and countless other achievements will be ignored, forgotten, and buried.” But endless talk of genocide buries not only our other achievements but also our present problems, some of which (assimilation in the Diaspora and exodus from the Homeland) are of genocidal dimensions. Our monomaniacal obsession with Turkish denialists has made of us denialists of two “white genocides” and all talk of “social and political conditions beyond our control” is as convincing to a decent observer as the arguments of Turkish denialist charlatans.
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Saturday, September 16, 2006
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All slaughters begin with the slaughter of common sense and decency. Hence, the post-World War II slogan, “We are all assassins.”
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The ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA (Chicago, 1979) on Talaat Pasha (or, as the BRITANNICA spells it, Talat Pasa): “A man of swift and penetrating intelligence and integrity…an idealist, forceful but never fanatical or vengeful.”
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Genocides are perpetrated not by serial killers or criminals but by law-abiding, patriotic citizens with leadership qualities and superior intellects, whose sole aim in life is to defend and protect the nation and its interests against all enemies foreign and domestic.
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Nothing comes more easily to a mediocrity, a charlatan, and a moral moron than to convince himself he is a patriot with superior brains and leadership qualities.
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An Armenian pundit: Anyone who reads TIME or NEWSWEEK and one of our weeklies.
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