Thursday, June 14, 2007
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AS I SEE IT
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We have two distinctive, perhaps even contradictory, approaches in our dealings with the Turks: treating them as enemies or as potential friends. To those who say, Turks are destined to remain our enemies for the foreseeable future and nothing can change that, I reply: Allow me to rephrase my question: Will the chances of reaching a consensus with them be enhanced if we treat them as potential enemies as opposed to future friends? While you ponder that question, please remember that the present generation of Turkish diplomats are products of a culture and an educational system that has consistently denied any past crimes against their minorities, and it goes without saying, they trust their culture, educational system, and leadership more than they trust our own, in the same way that we trust our own schoolteachers and bosses more than we do theirs. To those who may object and say our schoolteachers and bosses are morally superior to theirs, therefore more trustworthy, I suggest all assertions of moral or any other kind of superiority are suspect and will convince only those whose ego is flattered by such transparent flattery. On a more personal note: I have dealt with some of our bosses and educators long enough and often enough to say that I don’t even trust them as far as I can throw them, preferably in the nearest garbage dump. Or, to repeat my favorite mantra first formulated by Zarian, “Our political parties have been of no political use to us. Their greatest enemy is free speech.” And now, imagine if you can, an educational system that bans free speech or educators who are afraid to speak of fundamental human rights.
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P.S. I read today that one of our notorious bosses, also right-hand man of a national benefactor and self-appointed pundit – we might as well refer to him as a renaissance man – has been expelled from the party on grounds of corruption. Are you surprised? I am not. And I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if some day those who expelled him are themselves exposed as both corrupt and inept.
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Friday, June 15, 2007
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TO BRAG IS TO BRAY
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Angela Carter: “I think it’s one of the scars in our culture that we have too high an opinion of ourselves.”
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Al Gore: “Why do reason, logic and truth seem to play a diminished role in the way we make important decisions?”
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Sometimes readers verbally abuse me because I dare to expose failings that are universal in nature. Case in point: when I speak of divisions, I am reminded there are divisions everywhere, as if that were enough justification to cover up and ignore that particular failing in our collective existence. Who profits from this line of (un)reasoning? The dividers, of course. As for the nation: we have an answer for that too: we have survived where many others have perished. It follows; even the Genocide must be seen as a positive factor in our history because we survived it. What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. Our genocide thus becomes the ultimate test of our endurance. First nation to survive genocide in the 20th century! Who could ask for more? As for the best and the brightest that did not survive because they were betrayed to Talaat’s and Stalin’s butchers: that too is good because it allows the jackasses among us to parade as leaders and pundits. And then there is the narcissistic fraud who becomes infatuated with what he writes and ends up believing what he says regardless of its transparent absurdity. As the often quoted Armenian saying goes, “Mart bidi ch’ellank” (We shall never acquire the status of human beings). Now then, go ahead and brag about that.
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Saturday, June 16, 2007
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A SELF-SERVING THEORY
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The question that is consistently avoided by our Turcocentric pundits is: Where did we go wrong? We had so many warnings in 1894, 1895, 1896, 1909…Why is it that we trusted the empty verbiage of the West and ignored the actions of the Turks? Was it wishful thinking? What else? Why is it that we cling to the theory that the Genocide was an inevitable fact of life? If it was so inevitable, why didn’t we see it coming? History, it has been said, is a series of occurrences that could have been avoided. Subscribing to the theory of inevitability is the phoniest of all justifications. Even more dangerous: if history is predetermined, it follows we can’t learn from past blunders; and if we can’t learn from past blunders, what’s the use of studying it?
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