Sunday, January 15, 2006
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A writer is first and foremost a national nuisance. On the day he achieves popularity he has outlived his usefulness.
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There are as many explanations of the past as there are perspectives. God’s perspective is the only one that matters. But since a worm cannot have the perspective of an eagle, to speak in the name of god must be just about the surest symptom of charlatanism.
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If you are brought up to believe you are right, you can be sure of only one thing: that’s the worst kind of being wrong.
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To sum up: We may not be dumb but we are far from smart, and in politics our performance has been an unmitigated fiasco. Our leaders may be compared to a drunk driver without a license who keeps having head-on collisions but is allowed to go on driving. And the source of our poor performance has been and continues to be intolerance of dissent, which also means a total inability or stubborn unwillingness to engage in dialogue.
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To those who ascribe my views to 20/20 vision, I say it doesn’t take the expertise of a political scientist or the foresight of a historian to guess that a tribal revolution against an empire, and a wounded empire at that, has the chance of a snowball in hell.
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Monday, January 16, 2006
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Most of my thinking goes into exposing what they are thinking.
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Propaganda works because it flatters the go; criticism doesn’t for the opposite reason.
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If you ignore the ignorance factor in human affairs a great many things remain unexplained or they are ascribed to so-called “unforeseen factors beyond our control.”
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The past is a seamless web and everything is connected with everything else. Understanding consists in connecting two apparently unconnected dots.
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If anyone ever dares to criticize one of our bosses, bishops or benefactors, an entire chorus of brown-nosers, parasites, hangers-on, flunkies and yes-man rise to his defense. But if a dissident is silenced, it’s like a tree that falls in the middle of an uninhabited forest on a different planet.
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Tuesday, January 17, 2006
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I don’t believe in the moral superiority of the victim if his secret ambition is to be a victimizer.
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My conception of great distances: that which exists between what politicians know when they speechify and what they don’t know when they are accused of an offense or a blunder.
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If the average Armenian doesn’t much care about the integrity and competence of his leadership, why should the world give a damn?
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If I were to identify the most repellent facet of our collective existence today, it would have to be the blatant opportunism and cowardice of our academics that jabber endlessly about the Middle Ages and the Genocide as if our present degrading conditions were of no concern to anyone.
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We talk too much about God and Country and not enough about honesty. It should be the other way around. Only then may we count on God’s cooperation.
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I shall attain wisdom on the day I give up writing. But as long as I think by writing I can change things or anyone’s mind I am condemned to remain an obstinate fool.
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Wednesday, January 18, 2006
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Whenever our editors see a positive story about Armenians and a negative one about Turks they print it to reinforce the by now familiar propaganda line that says Armenians are good and Turks evil. As an Armenian I find this editorial policy prejudicial and embarrassing. In the name of tolerance, objectivity and fair play I should like to see more stories about the thousands of Armenians who live happy lives as Turkish citizens and at least one story about a happy Turk in Yerevan. To those who say “We are not guilty of genocide, they are!” I say I have every reason to suspect, for the same reason that I would hate to be identified with any Armenian political party or regime, there are many Turks today with a similar disposition, and they may turn out to be our best friends, or at least much better friends than countless other people who know little or nothing and care even less about what happened to us at the turn of the last century.
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