Sunday, February 18, 2007
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DEBUNKING MYTHS AND OTHER SCANDALS
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What could be more misleading, not to say arrogant, than for political leaders identifying themselves with the nation. They have more reason to identify themselves with the enemy, especially when they promise heaven and deliver hell.
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Slaughters don’t happen in a vacuum and slaughterhouses don’t exist in the middle of nowhere. Where there is a slaughterhouse there will also be shepherds leading the sheep to butchers.
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Political leaders add insult to injury when they have the temerity to say we should judge them by their intentions, even when their intentions were based on lies and illusions, the biggest lie being that they deserve our trust because they know better what’s good for us.
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Inside every whore there is a Cinderella whose prince failed to show up. That is a tragedy deserving our sympathy. But the tragedy becomes a farce when this very same whore, now an aged bordello madam, identifies herself as a virgin.
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The older I grow the more disappointments I accumulate. For a long time I believed experience combined with the wisdom of old age would make life less unbearable. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Almost every word I read these days, except “the” and “a,” has an unpleasant association.
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Speechifiers and sermonizers speak of certainties. My own certainties –assuming I have any – are buried beneath so many layers of doubts and questions that they might as well be beyond reach. Which is why I will never speechify or sermonize. I even find the prospect repellent.
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The best way to understand others is to examine one’s own heart, which is something self-assessed admirable specimens of humanity are incapable of doing.
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No one can be as ruthless and wrong as he who places his own narrow self-interests above the interests of his fellow men. Aberrations from massacres to verbal abuse stem from this egocentric view of life.
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One good thing about the verbal abuse of imbeciles is that they all sound alike, so that after reading the first line or even word I don’t feel the need to read the rest.
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Monday, February 19, 2007
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Because I don’t particularly care for loudmouth imbeciles who pretend to be smart, they say I don’t like Armenians.
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Good explanations are not final answers, only small steps in their general direction.
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To be dependent on the goodwill and understanding of another is to live in oppression.
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It is not that he has a low opinion of you; rather, he has a very high opinion of himself.
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Man doesn’t hate the truth, only those who speak it.
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I have yet to see a politician, even an honest one, who did not sound like a compulsive liar.
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Amiel: “One becomes a charlatan without knowing it.”
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Sainte-Beuve: “Celebrity might as well be synonymous with prostitution.”
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Lamartine: “Homeland: a structure that stands on the ashes of the dead.”
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Tuesday, February 20, 2007
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ON PROPAGANDA AND
RELATED ATROCITIES
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On the radio this morning: “Censorship: When the powerful tell the less powerful what to say.”
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Where there is power, there will also be propaganda.
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Do we practice censorship? If you ask this question to a dupe or charlatan, you will never get the right answer.
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It is the heights of naiveté to think that only the enemy engages in propaganda.
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Alice completely divorced herself from reality by following a rabbit into a hole. The difference between Alice and the propagandist who believes in his own propaganda is that the propagandist becomes a permanent resident of Wonderland.
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If we are alienated, it may be because our thought processes have been contaminated by propaganda.
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Propaganda alienates people by divorcing them from reality, which is also what happens to compulsive liars when they start believing in their own lies. This may explain the short-lived and disastrous regimes of Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin. As they became more and more dependent on their own lies, they further removed themselves from reality and its inflexible laws, one of them being, you cannot fool all the people, including yourself, all the time.
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Wednesday, February 21, 2007
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ON A QUINTESSENTIALLY
ARMENIAN ABERRATION
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We have all met the arrogant ignoramus who, just because he knows something about Armenians you don’t know, says with an air of self-satisfaction bordering on triumph: “And you call yourself an Armenian?” Asserting superiority even on flimsiest of grounds must be a quintessentially Armenian need. One reason why we have allowed the Genocide to become a collective addiction is that it allows us a sense of moral superiority. There is