Sunday, December 18, 2005
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Sometimes I repeat myself because I find it extremely difficult to ignore questions by new readers. Some recent questions follow.
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Q: Why do you write the way you do? What is your real aim?
A: To understand and explain, not because understanding and explaining will make me a happier man but because I am tired of being deceived and manipulated by frauds whose number one concern is number one.
Q: Do you have anyone in particular in mind?
A: Almost everyone who is in a leadership position.
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Q: Don’t you feel it is one of your duties as a writer to encourage the next generation of writers?
A: As things stand, what the nation needs more than writers is readers.
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Q: Who is the most important Armenian writer today?
A: I can’t think of anyone. The ones I know write about the massacres, as if that were the most important issue we confront today.
Q: Isn’t it?
A: No!
Q: Why not? Is not defending our rights important?
A: They may want you to think they are defending our rights but in reality all they are doing is promoting miserabilism.
Q: If recognition of the Genocide is not an important issue today, what is?
A: Corruption, incompetence, exodus from the Homeland, assimilation in the Diaspora, divisiveness, which also means waste of resources and personnel, spineless academics who kow-tow to our bosses, bishops, and benefactors, charlatans who parade as pundits…
Q: That’s quite a list!
A: That’s quite a mess we are in.
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Monday, December 19, 2005
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When enemies disagree, they agree on nothing. When friends disagree they agree at least on one thing: they agree to disagree. And where there is agreement on one thing, there will be hope for agreement on two or more things. Let us therefore be friends with the Turks. Even more important, let us begin by being friends with fellow Armenians who disagree with us.
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All major historical events have two or more interpretations. This is true of World War I and World War II, as it is of the American, French, and Russian Revolutions. It all depends on which side of the fence you find yourself.
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Whenever I take a walk with a friend I notice that he sees things that I don’t see. Four eyes are better than two, they say, and when it comes to understanding reality, dialogue is better than monologue. In a political environment where dissent is stifled, understanding is diminished, and the ability to deal with reality is impaired.
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If we want to understand ourselves and the world in which we live, we must also try to understand the Turkish side of the story. And we must do this for purely selfish reason.
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Tuesday, December 20, 2005
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ERROR MANAGEMENT
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On the radio today an interview with an Australian professor whose field is error management that consists in predicting, preventing, minimizing and compensating for errors. At one point, the good professor said mankind is divided into two categories: “people who have made mistakes and people who will make mistakes.” But like all rules, this one too has its exceptions, namely Armenian leaders.
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Armenian leaders are such masters of assigning blame that they have no use for error management. Result? Since they could not predict, prevent, and minimize the damage of the “Red” massacres of 1915, they have been doing the same with the “White” massacres (exodus from the Homeland and assimilation in the Diaspora). The first massacres they blame on the Turks and the degenerate West, the second massacres on historic, social, economic, and cultural factors beyond their control.
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What do they mean by “cultural factors”? The answer must be obvious to everyone except themselves: the vacuum of our own culture, because that’s what happens to a culture when the best and the brightest are systematically alienated, silenced, and starved.
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Speaking of the blame game: perhaps the source of all our problems is our geography. As a landlocked country we have no use for ships and captains and for a tradition that says the captain goes down with the ship. Our captains survive and go on to sink other ships, and the more ships they sink the merrier.
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Wednesday, December 21, 2005
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ON PROPAGANDA
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No nation on earth is as good as its propaganda. Moreover, by emphasizing the positive and covering up or ignoring the negative, propaganda impairs our understanding of reality. Our revolutionaries in the Ottoman Empire were dupes of the West because they were dupes of their own propaganda.
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ON CAPITALISTS
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Raffi (Hagop Melik-Hagopian: 1835-1888): “They are the most corrupt and degenerate members of the community. Nothing good can come out of them. These people worship only money. They are men without a country. They belong to no nation on earth. Profit is their only homeland.”
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K.C. Constantine in BOTTOM LINER BLUES (New York, 1993): “They got no nationality. Their only nationality is money.”
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For more on this subject see the sections on Ken Lay (page 171) and Dennis Kozlowski (page 172) in Bernard Goldberg’s 100 PEOPLE WHO ARE SCREWING UP AMERICA (New York, 2005).
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HISTORY AND REAL ESTATE
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Eric Hobshawn in ON HISTORY (London, 1997): “Denmark does not claim the large part of eastern England which was settled and ruled by Danes before the eleventh century, which continued to be known as the Danelaw and whose village names are still philologically Danish.”
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