Sunday, July 08, 2007
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TRUTH AND PROPAGANDA
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According to Marcus Aurelius, “Our life is what our thoughts make it.”
This may have been true two thousand years ago when the people were not exposed to mass media. Our lives today are shaped less by ideas and more by propaganda. Literature is praised but propaganda believed. Who reads books today? But everyone reads newspapers, watches TV, and listens to the radio. Many more Germans were shaped by MEIN KAMPF than by THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN. Many more Russians were taken in by Stalin than shaped by the ideas of Solzhenitsyn, or for that matter, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. It is an undeniable fact of modern life that we are, all of us, at the mercy of spin doctors, public relations men, advertisers, sermonizers, speechifiers, and phony pundits who expect us to believe they speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. In the words of a contemporary American philosopher: “We live at a time when many quite cultivated individuals consider truth to be unworthy of any particular respect.”
For more on this subject see Harry G. Frankfurt’s (the philosopher quoted above) two most recent books: “ON BULLSHIT (New York, 2005), and ON TRUTH (New York, 2006).
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Monday, July 09, 2007
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OBSERVATIONS
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If there is one lesson that history keeps drumming into us is that we will be better off if we consider all politicians, regardless of race, color, and creed, guilty until proven innocent beyond a shadow of a doubt.
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If Turcophile is a pejorative term, why should Armenophile be any different? To an objective and impartial outsider, who knows little and cares even less about Turks and Armenians, both labels may suggest prejudice and as such of questionable validity.
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Where there is an oversized ego there will be an undersized brain. I have said this before and I will say it again because an undersized brain also means an even more undersized memory; and, in the words of Socrates, favored by my Italian teacher of algebra, “to know is to remember.”
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Like most people, I operate on the assumption that I am right. But I also know that to be right in one’s own eyes is easy. What’s hard to the point of being impossible is to convince oneself and others that, since truth is beyond our reach, we all of us engage in some form of charlatanism when we speak. As the old Chinese adage has it: “He who speaks does not know.” And according to a contemporary American philosopher: “Is love of truth itself merely another example of bullshit?” (Harry G. Frankfurt, ON TRUTH, page 14).
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Tuesday, July 10, 2007
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MEMO TO OUR TURCOCENTRIC PUNDITS
AND THEIR READERS
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If talk of Turks, massacres, and atrocities will make you a better person, more understanding and compassionate, by all means, go ahead, knock yourself out, make a career of it. But if it will make you more vengeful and prone to hate not only your enemy but also your fellow countrymen simply because they do not share your hatred (I have seen this happen), then I suggest it may be in your interest as well as that of your “cause” to leave the field to others better equipped to deal with it.
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Wednesday, July 11, 2007
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WHAT IS ARMENIANISM?
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Observe an Armenian who has lived in the United States for sixty years and you may notice that he is more American than Armenian. Now consider what happened to us after six hundred years of life in the Ottoman Empire, and you may begin to understand why Turks prefer to call us as “Christian Turks.”
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One way to classify an Armenian-American is to say that after being Ottomanized he has been Americanized. That doesn’t mean Americanization expunged Ottomanization. Identity is not a single-layer cake.
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Armenianism: what is it exactly? I don’t know. But I do know that everything our propagandists tell us is wishful thinking and lies. We are not what we pretend to be. Nobody is!
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