Sunday, January 07, 2007
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NO EXCEPTIONS
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A key passage in Taner Akjam’s A SHAMEFUL ACT: THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE AND THE QUESTION OF TURKISH RESPONSIBILITY (New York, 2006) reads: “…there remains the high probability of such acts [i.e. genocides] being repeated, since every group is inherently capable of violence; when the right conditions arise this potential may easily become reality, and on the slightest of pretexts. There are no exceptions.”
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Translated into dollars and cents this simply means, none of us can afford to assume a morally superior stance. It follows, to pretend that we Armenians are better than Turks is racist nonsense. If we have not committed genocide it may be because we had neither the opportunity nor the power. To put it differently: if the Ottoman Empire had been an Armenian Empire and if the Turks had been a hostile minority with territorial ambitions, we would have done to them what they did to us. That’s the meaning of the final “no exceptions.”
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Like prosecutors eager to prove their case, our Turcocentric pundits and academics have been stressing Turkish responsibility to the exclusion of all other considerations. It has been their position, as it was Toynbee’s in his first phase, to ignore all questions dealing with Armenian responsibility and to focus exclusively on Turkish actions. To separate morality from political or legal issues is, I believe, to commit the same mistake that Turks commit when they deny the reality of the Genocide.
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There is another and a far more practical reason why we should not look down on Turks by calling them “bloodthirsty Asiatic barbarians” or other derogatory terms. In addition to being self-serving it is also politically inadvisable because it may alienate even Turks, like Akjam and Pamuk, who are on our side.
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A final comment on the misconception of moral superiority: a morally superior human being does not as a rule assert moral superiority because he is too busy examining his own conscience and reflecting on his failings and transgressions. I would go further and say that asserting moral superiority is the surest symptom of moral inferiority.
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Monday, January 08, 2007
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MYSTERY / I
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It is beyond me why people like Tiny Tim, Donald Trump, Paris Hilton, Pamela Anderson, and O.J. Simpson become celebrities in America. In my kind of world they would be arrested for making a public nuisance of themselves.
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MYSTERY / II
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Why is it that phonies are idolized and honest men shunned, sometimes even crucified? We say we hate wars but we look up to war makers. We are against bloodsuckers but we admire exploiters.
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HUNGER
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In the Ottoman Empire we were politically starved. During the Genocide the “hungry Armenian” became a cliché in America. The survivors were economically starved in alien slums. Today we are culturally starved by our own Turcocentric academics. So much so that whenever I take the liberty of paraphrasing Raffi, Baronian, Odian, Zarian, and Massikian, our brainwashed defenders of the faith call me a pro-Turkish degenerate denialist.
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QUESTION
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What if, when I finally see the light, all I will see is the darkness in man’s heart?
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DEFINITION
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Dupe: anyone who believes in human beings and their institutions. Relax! I am only paraphrasing the First Commandment: “Thou shalt have no other gods.”
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SEMANTICS 101
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The Brits associate the world “loss” with the loss of their Empire. “Survival” to Canadians means surviving American influence. To Americans yesterday is “history.” To us these words have a far more literal meaning.
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ON DECLINE AND DISINTEGRATION
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I remember to have read somewhere that the decline of the British Empire began at the turn of the last century when an English writer published a commentary in which he said something positive about British rule. One could say that our moral disintegration began on the day one of our charlatans bragged about us being the first nation to convert to Christianity.
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INTOLERANCE
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In this morning’s paper I read that Orhan Pamuk has published an editorial criticizing “the Turkish news media and government for suppressing free expression.” To him I say, “Welcome to the club.”
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Tuesday, January 09, 2007
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I THINK THEREFORE I MAY NOT BE
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The older I grow the more ignorant I feel, perhaps because the more aware I become of all those things that I know nothing about. As a boy I was not aware of my blind spots; now I am more aware of them than the sum total of all those things that I have learned. For a long time I thought of the famous Socratic dictum “The only thing I know is that I don’t know” as a purely theoretical rather than pragmatic assertion. I know now that it stands for the difficulty, not to say the impossibility, of knowing anything. I think therefore I am? What if what I think is a mechanism within me of whose operation I know nothing about, in the same way that I know nothing about my being on its molecular or even cellular level? And to say that one doesn’t have to know anything about molecules or cells to know about being on a human level, is like saying one doesn’t have to know anything about trees to know all about forests.
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CRITICAL CRITERIA
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I have learned much more from my critics than they have learned from me, perhaps because I have everything to learn from them and they have nothing…I mean, nothing to learn from me, of course. One of the things that I have learned is that, if it were up to them, before they start writing and publishing, writers would apply for a license with two requirements: first, knowing and understanding everything; and second, being infallible. Failure to fulfill these two requirements would result in being disqualified as a writer. As for our bosses, bishops, and benefactors: like the Pope of Rome, who is said to be infallible in matters of faith, they are infallible so long as they speak in the name of God and capital – make it Capital and god. Which means, they don’t need a license to operate the machinery of state or community. Facts are on their side. History proves that we owe our very survival to them. If it weren’t for them we would have shared the fate of all those empires, nations, and tribes that have bitten the dust and ended on the garbage dump of history. As for our victims: you can’t have an omelet without breaking a few eggs – or, in our case, a few million of them.
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GOD IS AN ARMENIAN
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We were comparing Armenians to Jews – this motor-mouth anti-Semite and I – and when I said something to the effect that Jews like Jesus, Marx, and Freud shaped the thinking of entire continents and civilizations, unlike our own thinkers who cannot even change the mind of a single loud-mouth know-it-all smart-ass dupe with a single-digit IQ, she retorted: “Marx and Freud have been curses on mankind rather than blessings. As for Jesus: he was more Armenian in spirit than he was Jewish, because Jews rejected him and Armenians were the first nation to accept him.” I challenge anyone to assert, suggest, or imply that we are not the real Chosen People.
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Wednesday, January 10, 2007
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ARMENIANS AND THE NOBEL PRIZE
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There are several theories as to why no Armenian – except perhaps Raymond Damadian – has ever come close to winning the Nobel Prize, one of them being the charge of plagiarism, which was leveled against Damadian himself by a fellow Armenian scientist. Since I am not personally acquainted with Damadian and my scientific knowledge is less than rudimentary, I am in no position to testify on Damadian’s integrity as a man or a scientist. But I do know his accuser and I have no reason to suspect he is motivated by anti-Armenian sentiments. On the contrary, he happens to be an ardent patriot.
There is of course nothing new about the charge of plagiarism in reference to Armenians. Similar charges have been leveled against some of our ablest writers by their peers – see Oshagan on Zarian, Zarian on Charents, and Shahnour on Siamanto.
Let me expand on the question placed at the beginning of this article: Why is it that nearly 200 Jews have been awarded the Nobel Prize but not a single Armenian? The answer favorite by our anti-Semites (of whom we have our share) is that the Nobel Committee is an integral part of the Zionist conspiracy. By contrast, honest Armenians (we have some of them also) maintain that the reason is much simpler: no Armenian has ever deserved the Prize.
My favorite theory is that, whenever an Armenian is mentioned as a possible candidate, the Nobel Committee receives a mini-avalanche of letters written by Armenians accusing the nominee of moral turpitude, terrorist sympathies, mediocrity, dishonesty, and a number of other failings and secret vices. Either that or a member of the Nobel Committee has an Armenian adviser who kyboshes every Armenian nomination.
In the investigation of a crime, they say “Cherchez la femme.” About the Nobel Committee’s anti-Armenianism, I say, “Cherchez l’armenien.”
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