Thursday, March 08, 2007
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SELF-DECEPTION
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A jury of his peers has found Vice-President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff guilty of lying to the authorities. Nothing new in that. Vice presidents lie, presidents lie, the press lies, everybody lies. We deceive not only others but also ourselves. All power (political as well as religious) is based on a big lie. Nothing can be more naïve than to divide mankind into two and say, “Their side lies, ours does not.”
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We all have a dominant idea that colors and orients our thinking. Mine is self-deception – or the infinite number of strategies we adopt in order to appear better than we are. The big lie in political leadership is that the men at the top know better what’s good for the people; and when they declare war and lose it, they blame it on others. Hitler blamed the loss of World War I on Jews, and the loss of World War II on his fellow Germans, because, he said, they had failed to live up to his vision. To this day Stalinists blame the collapse of the Soviet Union on dissidents like Solzhenitsyn. And we blame our genocide on the barbarism of the Turks, most of whom (very much like Sultan Abdulhamid II and Talaat) may have been part Armenian.
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In everything that is said, a great deal remains unsaid.
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A good answer is one that leads to at least two new questions.
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Alain: “To think is to say no.” (It follows; to say yes is to allow others to do your thinking for you.)
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Julien Green: “The oppressed console themselves by believing to be morally superior to their oppressors.”
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Henry de Montherlant: “In man, it is the butterfly that turns into a worm.”
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Friday, March 09, 2007
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VARIATIONS ON A FAMILIAR THEME
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James Thurber: “You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.”
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Jean Cocteau: “There is an ape and a parrot in all of us.”
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A headline in our paper today reads: “Japan denies its wartime atrocities.”
Sounds familiar?
In the article that follows we are informed that during World War II, Korean and Chinese girls as young as 14 were kidnapped by Japanese soldiers to work as sex slaves or “comfort women.”
Rings a bell?
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My mother is fond of saying, “Even if guilt were made of the most expensive fur, no one would want to wear it.”
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Control the flow of information and you control knowledge. Control knowledge and you shape the human mind. Where there is censorship there will be dupes.
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In a totalitarian state people have as much freedom of thought as caged animals in a zoo, with one difference: the animals can see their iron bars.
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The less you know, the more easily you are hoodwinked, flimflammed, and bamboozled. The ideal dupe is a total ignoramus.
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Saturday, March 10, 2007
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BENEFACTORS
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If I understand them correctly, they are the kind of people who feel more at home in the company of calculating machines and number rather than human beings and ideas.
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AS FOR BOSSES
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Given the choice between yes-men or conformists and people who think for themselves, they will invariably choose conformists. The ability to conform is a talent, like any other, and I don’t mind admitting, I have none of it.
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TURKS AND ARMENIANS
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“Armenians and Turks, Turks and Armenians,” I can imagine some readers thinking. “Man, am I getting tired of that sh**!” to which I can only say, “Welcome to the club.”
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A NEW BOOK
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IRENE NEMIROVSKY: HER LIFE AND WORK, by Jonathan Weiss (200 pages, Stanford University Press, 2007). An excellent biography of a remarkable French writer of Jewish descent who ended her short life in a German concentration camp during World War II. We are informed here that she disliked both Jews and Armenians: a writer after my own heart, not because I love haters but because I find self-satisfied people arrogant, obnoxious, stupid, and unworthy of Planet Earth.
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PEARLS BEFORE SWINE
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Jean Giroudoux: “Plagiarism is at the root of all literatures, except the first which is unknown.”
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Henri Michaux: “Anyone who does not contribute to my perfection: zero.”
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