Saturday, December 24, 2005
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The most important question we should ask about our history is neither what happened nor why, but where did we go wrong. We already know what happened and why, or we think we do, because we have been told we do. There are probably hundreds, not to say thousands of textbooks, memoirs, articles in encyclopedias, monographs, studies, and essays on the subject. But as far as I know very few that tell us where we went wrong, so few in fact that most of us are convinced our conduct has been flawless and beyond criticism.
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Where did we go wrong? The reason I consider this to be the most important question is that it may change the line of our destiny. But instead of asking where did we go wrong we ask where did they go wrong, thus implying our sole contribution to our history has been victims.
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To ask where we went wrong also means asking what we are doing wrong. A hundred years ago we were at the mercy of Turkish brutality and foreign meddling and manipulation. What has really changed? Today we are victims of Turkish intransigence and economic and cultural factors beyond our control, or so we claim. Beyond our control also means our only option is to adopt a passive stance and contribute more victims. Which of course is dangerous nonsense.
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There is a great deal we can do to combat and minimize these negative factors by demanding accountability from our leaders and promoting our culture. By promoting our culture I don’t mean supporting or helping our writers – a repellent concept in itself, as if writers were beggars in need of handouts. By promoting our culture I mean emphasizing the importance of ideas, practicing dialogue, and being receptive to dissent as opposed to dealing in chauvinist propaganda, practicing censorship, delivering speeches and sermons, and publishing commentaries and editorials replete with clichés, platitudes, and verbal crapola.
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Sunday, December 25, 2005
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MYSTICISM AND LOGIC
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Speaking of the gravedigger, Hamlet says, “How absolute the knave is! We must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us.”
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The language of mystics is an incomprehensible medium full of equivocations, paradoxes, and contradictions because its aim is to make us understand that god or truth resides in a realm of meanings beyond our reason, common sense, and logic. And because I first came across this idea in Zen Buddhism, I thought of Christianity as an inferior religion. It is not. All religions have produced mystics and all mystics speak the same language regardless of nationality. (For more on this subject, see Aldous Huxley’s PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY.)
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Most failures in communication occur when one speaks the language of mystics and the other of logic.
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Great writers like Tolstoy and Shaw make writing seem easy because they have the ability to simplify complexities, and when we read them, we see only the result, not the labor that preceded it, and the labor consists in making the invisible visible, and the incomprehensible accessible. Tolstoy was an atheist who believed in Christ, and Shaw was an agnostic who believed in the Holy Spirit.
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If I were to reduce our problems to a single formula, I would have to say that we are good at thesis, better at antithesis, but lousy at synthesis.
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To make of thesis and antithesis permanent stages (as opposed to one that is transitory) also means to arrest progress.
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Monday, December 26, 2005
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Ignorance is bliss, they say, and knowledge is power. If knowledge is power it is also the power to understand, and to understand means above all to be able to see what’s on the other side of the hill. It was because he lacked the power to understand his own brother that Abel became Cain’s victim; and he did not understand his brother because he did not want to understand him. It never even occurred to him to ask: “What’s eating you, bro?”
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Adam and Eve lived in bliss in the Garden until they ate the fruit from the tree of knowledge. What followed was shame, exile, hard labor, pain, and murder, that is to say, history.
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For 600 years we lived in ignorance under the Turks. Then our revolutionaries ate the fruit from the tree of freedom, whereupon history fell on us like a thief in the night: deportation, starvation, massacre, civil war, destitution, envy, divisiveness, corruption, alienation, exodus.
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How much of this we have understood? The answer must be, nothing, because we prefer to live in blissful ignorance.
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Tuesday, December 27, 2005
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According to a news item on the radio this morning, Viagra doesn’t work with 30% of patients suffering from erectile dysfunction. I could not help reflecting that if they ever discover a Viagra-like pill that combats intolerance, it may not work with 90% of Armenians, and the chances are 99% of them will have no use for it because they don’t think of themselves as intolerant.
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The first time someone called me a racist, I dismissed him as a politically correct fascist. A racist, I thought, is someone who lynches Negroes, massacres innocent women and children, or incinerates Jews in ovens. Since I had done none of these things, I could not qualify as a racist. I know better today.
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I know now that whoever it was that called me a racist understood me better than I did. And now that I know better, I find it extremely difficult to be tolerant, and I suspect most people who sermonize and speechify against intolerance today are hypocrites whose favorite medium is double-talk.
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If others are sometimes better judges of ourselves than we are it may be because objectivity is a rare virtue, especially among those who have been brainwashed at an early age to believe that they are good Christians and possess all those virtues unique to Christianity, among them love, compassion, and tolerance.
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Wednesday, December 28, 2005
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THEM AND US
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They have fascist ideologues.
So have we. We even brag about our “tseghagrons,” or partisans who elevated race to the status of religion.
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They massacred indiscriminately defenseless women and children. So did we. Ask any Tashnak who is remotely acquainted with the history of his party and he will tell you General Antranik was expelled from the Party because he massacred indiscriminately. To this day Azeris think of him the way Jews think of Hitler.
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For everyone we massacred, they massacred ten. That’s because they outnumbered us ten to one.
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What happens to a second-generation Armenian-American?
He behaves more like an American than an Armenian – assuming an authentic Armenian exists and we know his code of conduct.
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What happened to a 24th-generation Ottoman-Armenian? Was he less Ottoman and more Armenian? Or was it the other way around?
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Speaking for myself, I am neither a fascist nor a killer of innocent civilians; and I would resent it like hell if someone identified me with an Armenian in a leadership position. Which is a mistake we make when we identify the people with the regime. It is not the people who deny the Genocide, it is the regime. Likewise, it is not the people who adopted and implemented a genocidal policy but the leadership, which was not elected by the people and cannot be said to have represented them.
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By identifying the people with the regime we succeed only in alienating the people, our best friends and greatest allies.
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