Thursday, November 30, 2006
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BEFORE AND AFTER
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For most of my life others set the terms and conditions and I had no choice but to accept them. (Sounds familiar?) I was born again as a human being on the day I decided to set my own terms and conditions; and even when I lost (which I did most of the time) I felt as though I had won.
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Like parrots, the brainwashed have no use for free speech.
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“Treason and betrayal are in our blood,” Raffi tells us. So are criticism and dissent. Not even our toughest critics, including Gregory of Narek, have gone as far saying “Mart bidi ch’ellank!” (We will never acquire the status of human beings.) Compare this popular mantra with such propaganda lines as “first nation this” and “first nation that,” and “Armenians are smart.” How can anyone be smart who is also deaf and ignorant of what people are thinking and saying?
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For the brainwashed there are two kinds of propaganda – theirs and ours. As for honesty and objectivity: they might as well be subversive concepts. If honesty is subversive and objectivity an instrument of the devil, does that mean we have a marked preference for dishonesty and charlatanism? What’s next? We might as well get out our shovels and start digging – and I mean digging our own graves. Toynbee is right: nations are not killed, they commit suicide.
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Friday, December 01, 2006
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A QUESTION OF CREDIBILITY
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Why would anyone choose to believe a minor, disgruntled, and marginalized scribbler who can’t make ends meet and ignore textbooks written by established academics? You may choose to believe whomever you wish of course (and I say this to readers of all colors, creeds, and races, including Armenians and Turks) as long as you keep in mind that academics are hirelings of the state, that is to say, politicians, and as such they are as subservient to the power structure as diplomats and bureaucrats. Even the mightiest empire in the world, like the United States of America, cannot afford to choose textbooks written by historians who emphasize its dark side and its crimes against humanity, or textbooks written from the perspective of its victims (“white man speaks with a forked tongue,” or “white man is the devil”). Until the collapse of the USSR, Communist textbooks did not mention the Gulag; so much so that even Nobel-Prize winning intellectuals of the West dismissed all talk of the Gulag as capitalist-inspired anti-Soviet propaganda.
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Textbooks, commentaries, editorials, and memoirs of the Genocide are safe because they stress what has been done to us at the expense of what we could have done and what we can do today to solve our many problems. When it comes to what we can do today, for instance, we are given to understand we can do nothing but wait and hope that in two or three generations the corrupt among us will see the light and solve our problems, after which we may live happily ever after. Our subservience to “the blind forces beyond our control” is such that we have become deaf and dumb to the fact that by adopting a passive stance we are committing genocide by other means (exodus from the Homeland, assimilation in the Diaspora). I am not advocating covering up and forgetting the 1915 Genocide. What I am saying is that we should not allow it to paralyze our will.
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A Turcocentric view of life marginalizes the nation as surely as our bosses, bishops, and benefactors marginalize anyone who refuses to say “Yes, sir!” to whatever they say, no matter how absurd. As for the corrupt seeing the light and solving our problems: don’t hold your breath; they will be too busy proving their integrity, statesmanship, self-sacrifice, patriotism, and moral superiority, not to say defending with everything they’ve got the source of their power, prestige, and wealth, to have any time left for solutions.
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Saturday, December 02, 2006
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GRANDMASTERS OF THE BLAME GAME
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Shortly before she died, one of our self-appointed partisan pundits wrote me an angry letter saying I had ruined the Armenian-American community. There was a time, she explained, when everyone was happy. Now everybody was bitching. And everybody was bitching because my kind of writing had started the trend. She was lying of course. And she was lying because lying comes naturally to our pundits. Had I been born before the Tourian assassination in 1933, she would have pinned that on me too, no doubt.
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The other day I read an editorial in one of our partisan weeklies written by still another self-appointed partisan pundit that said, in effect, Armenians are their own worst enemies because Armenians like Rouben Mamoulian had not helped a single Armenian in Hollywood. The implications were unmistakable: what had prevented the Armenian community from going down the drain had been the idealism, dedication, hard work, and vision of statesmen like him and his kind. As for legitimizing intolerance and promoting divisions and mediocrity: they must be ascribed to my kind of bitching, of course.
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I could have written a letter to the editor but I didn’t. I knew better. Once, many years ago, when I didn’t know better, I wrote a letter to the editor of this same weekly pointing out some factual inaccuracies in an editorial, only to be told: “We don’t as a rule publish letters that question our editorials.” I did not ask why not because I guessed the answer: “Because we are infallible!” If the Catholics have their Pope, if Muslims have their imams, and Turks have their Ataturk, why can’t we have a corresponding figure, and if we don’t have him, why can’t we pretend to have him, and by feeding him royal jelly, elevate him to the status of a king, that is to say, a representative of god on earth?
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