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Thursday, October 12, 2006
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People who say, “It can’t be done,” are either opportunistic cowards or apologists for the status quo. Avoid them. What cancer is to the body, they are to creativity and daring. It is better to fail on your own terms than to succeed on theirs.
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On the day you find your right path, success and failure, greatness and mediocrity, misery and joy will become irrelevant concepts.
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The license of a preacher who does not practice what he preaches should be revoked. To say, “Do as I say, not as I do” is to legitimize abuse.
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To speak of abuse in our environment means to succeed only in uniting the abusers against you.
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Orhan Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize for two reasons: (one) in addition to being a good writer, he enjoyed Turkish popular support, and (two) he exposed the lies of Turkish propaganda. You may now guess why so far no Armenian writer has been awarded the Prize.
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If we don’t betray them to the authorities, we beat them up or silence them. For Armenians divide themselves only against their enemies…. If you read the biographies of our greatest writers… What am I saying? There are no biographies of Oshagan or Zarian.
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Friday, October 13, 2006
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TWO SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT
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The first says our leaders are our saviors, and the second, they are our dividers and destroyers. If you subscribe to the first school, you are a dupe of our propaganda; if you subscribe to the second, it means you trust the judgment of our writers (from Khorenatsi and Yeghishe in the 5th Century to Massikian and Zarian in the 20th) more than the charlatanism of our wheeler-dealers – sorry, I meant to say, our political leaders, bosses for short.
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LITERATURE AND PROPAGANDA
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Propaganda is more popular than literature because disoriented people prefer lies that validate their prejudices and fallacies. Those who say Blacks are savages and Jews are rats will never think of themselves as swine. What Blacks and Jews are to racists and anti-Semites, Turks are to us. Turks are what binds Armenian to Armenian. They are our glue. Delete Turks from our consciousness and our communities will collapse like a house of cards. Literature is less popular because it exposes contradictions and charlatans who speak with a forked tongue.
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CRITICIZING CRITICS
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If you are in the business of exposing contradictions, your critics will detect contradictions in everything you say; and if you say you are against A, B, and C, they will accuse you of all three aberrations plus X, Y, and Z.
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ASSUMPTIONS AND AMBITIONS
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Because we come from a long line of victims, we cannot be victimizers, or so we would like to believe. It is more accurate to say, however, that as perennial victims we think of progress only in terms of how soon we can behave like the opposition, even if it means victimizing our own brothers.
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Saturday, October 14, 2006
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APOLOGISTS OF THE STATUS QUO
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Very much like our self-appointed Turcocentric
pundits, they are a dime a dozen and they come in
all sizes, shapes, and colors of the rainbow, and
they operate on the assumption that they know
things you don’t know because they have sources
of information available to no one but
themselves. Even more to the point, unlike you,
they love and understand their country and fellow
countrymen. Theirs is therefore a superior brand
of patriotism. And their reasoning goes something
like this: our problems are not ours alone; we
did not invent them; rather they are an integral
part of the human condition; they will be found
even in the most prosperous, progressive, and
developed democracies in the world, including the
United States of America. Internecine divisions
and conflicts, corruption in high places,
catastrophic policy blunders, fraud, mafias, drug
trafficking, homelessness, unemployment,
destitution, prostitution…these things have been
with us since time immemorial and they will
probably be with us as long as there is life on
earth.
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What these apologists neglect to tell you is that
the overwhelming majority of nations around the
world did not experience six hundred years of
Ottoman oppression followed by its equally
nefarious Soviet variant, neither were they
serial victims of massacres and a genocide which,
according to the perpetrators and their allies,
may well be a figment of our imagination.
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True, the majority of uncivilized as well as
civilized nations have had their share of
traitors and collaborators with the enemy, but,
with the possible exception of Ireland, treason
and betrayal are not an integral part of their
collective experience and identity.
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All people tend to blame their problems on
others, but they do not adopt the blame-game as
their favorite national sport. Furthermore, no
other nation is experiencing the same high rate
of alienation, assimilation, and emigration.
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Somewhere Avedik Issahakian (not a dissident or
critic, but a poet) has said: “We have been
thrice cursed with earthquakes, bloodthirsty
neighbors, and brainless leaders.” He should have
added “and brainwashed apologists and
opportunistic academics and monomaniacal pundits,
all of whom enjoy the support of Big Money and
are united only in stifling criticism and
dissent.”
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Speaking of Big Money, in this morning’s paper I
read the following quotation by Jack Welch
(retired chairman of General Electric): “You are
the last person to know who the jerks are,
because they are all putting on a face for you.”
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