Sunday, February 25, 2007
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BARBARIANS WITHIN THE GATE
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To civilize a barbarian is easy. What’s hard is to civilize a barbarian who thinks he is better than you. I am willing to concede that our Turcocentric pundits may know more about Turks than I do, but I know something about us that they may not, namely, we are not all as civilized as we think we are and, which is worse, there are those among us who don’t seem to be favorably disposed towards civilization.
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DISAPPOINTMENT
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We are disappointed in people because we cannot be objective about them, which means that the source of disappointment is not them but us.
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HYENAS
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There is a type of reader who follows you from a safe distance hoping you will stumble, fall, and break your neck so that he can feast on your carcass,
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FIRST AND LAST IMPRESSIONS
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My first impression of Canada: I thought I had landed on an alien planet. I now feel that way when I visit an Armenian community center.
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ON THE ART OF WRITING
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I will tell you all I know about writing provided you promise to ignore and forget everything I say. What matters in writing is not following in someone else’s footsteps but in finding your own path.
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I LOVE BRAHMS
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After a visit and on his way out, Brahms would say, “I apologize to anyone I may have failed to insult.”
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ON COPS
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Charles-Louis Philippe: “It is practically impossible to speak to a policeman without seeming to lie to him.”
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Monday, February 26, 2007
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EXPLAINING THE INCOMPREHENSIBLE
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For 600 years Armenians and Turks lived side by side in the same country, breathed the same air, ate the same food, and spoke the same language, with only one difference: Turks did these things as masters and Armenians as slaves. For 600 years Turks had their way with us, so much so that they think they can now convince us to believe the Genocide is a figment of our imagination.
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Turks cannot understand Armenians because they continue to think as masters and they expect Armenians to behave as slaves.
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Being subservient to Turks for 600 years! I cannot imagine a worse nightmare, except perhaps being subservient to Armenians for 6 minutes. That’s because it is one thing to be slaves to masters and another to be slaves to former slaves.
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Turks may begin to understand Armenians only if they imagine themselves to have been subservient to Armenians for 600 years, for which they may need an imagination of Shakespearian cast.
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As masters, Turks think it is not up to slaves to question their conduct or integrity. So that if the master rapes and murders one of his slaves and afterwards asserts the slave died of natural causes, the surviving slaves in his household have no choice but to corroborate his testimony. Not to do so would amount to mutiny and a capital offense. Hence, Hrant Dink’s execution.
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After the Will of Allah comes the will of the master. And the Will of Allah is to the master what the will of the master is to the slave.
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To convince Turks they are guilty of genocide is as hard as convincing a Stalinist (and our chic Bolsheviks) to believe Stalin was wrong and his innocent victims (all 25 million of them, give and take a million or two) were right; or to convince a jihadist to believe that he is on the wrong warpath.
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As far as the average Turk goes, the Ottoman Empire is not dead but very much alive – if only in his own heart; in the same way that in the heart of every good Christian Jesus not only lives but also saves.
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If you want to know more about masters and slaves, Hegel is your man. As far as I know Hegel did not write a single line about Turks and Armenians but he had a great deal to say about masters and slaves, and what he had to say is just about the best thing I have read about Turks and Armenians.
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Tuesday, February 27, 2007
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ONCE MORE ON IDENTITY
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Identity is one of those concepts about which you can say anything you want and get away with it provided you preach to the converted. Speaking for myself, I see my identity as a burden, or the final stage of a succession of tragedies, degradation, lies, blunders, and above all, futile efforts to misrepresent them as triumphs of endurance, nobility, perseverance, strength, dedication to principles…in short, not defeats but moral victories. If true, we should be grateful to our enemies, because if it weren’t for them, we wouldn’t have become the paragons of virtue we pretend to be.
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The very same people who at the turn of the last century believed if we rise against the Turks we will be rewarded, now believe if we corner them into pleading guilty to the charge of genocide we will ditto. Even when some dreams turn into nightmares, daydreamers will continue to engage in self-deception.
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There are those who don’t like me.
I don’t understand them.
Others like me.
I understand them even less.
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He lived in fear of death all his life and as he was dying he thought living had been infinitely harder.
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Wednesday, February 28, 2007
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THE DEMANDS OF PATRIOTISM
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It is an unfortunate fact that the demands made on all of us by patriotism are stronger than the demands of truth, perhaps because all state-sponsored educational systems emphasize god and country at the expense of objectivity and honesty.
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Once upon a time I too was infatuated with my own ignorance. So much so that, whenever I consider my past convictions, I feel like digging a hole and burying myself in it.
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Some of my Turkish friends are disappointed in me because I refuse to accept the fact that the Genocide is a figment of our collective imagination. Because I have been critical of our political leadership, these Turkish friends assume I am the kind of Turcophile who thinks, as admirable specimens of humanity, Turks can do no wrong and are therefore as white as the driven snow.
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I may question everything our side says but I have no reason whatever to question the testimony of such pro-Turkish historians as Lord Kinross, Bernard Lewis, and Arnold Toynbee (among many others) – and I don’t mean the young Toynbee who began his career as a bureaucrat in the belly of the British imperial machine, but the mature Toynbee who acquired Turkish friends, studied the Turkish language, and concluded that Armenian territorial demands at the turn of the last century had been totally unjustified. Even so he at no time questioned or doubted the reality of the Genocide and the ruthless brutality with which it was carried out.
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