Sunday, March 12, 2006
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Speaking of Lord Byron’s involvement in the Greek war of liberation, John Mortimer writes: “He had found, like many of those who have struggled for great liberal and liberating causes and beliefs, that the difficulty isn’t so much fighting the enemy as stopping your friends murdering each other.”
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“If we have free speech,” Milton tells us, “truth will look after itself.” It follows, where there is censorship, there must also be lies.
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Somewhere in his MANDATE FOR ARMENIA (Kent, Ohio, 1966) James Gidney writes that the mandate was rejected because the prevalent view in Washington was that Turks and Armenians were two Middle-East tribes that had hated each other for centuries and to get involved in such an environment would amount to looking for trouble. In other words, Armenians and Turks were seen as variants of today’s Sunnis and Shias in Iraq. Which brings to mind the adage that the only thing we learn from history is that we can’t learn from history.
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Recycling propaganda enhances our prestige (in our own eyes) as it lowers our IQ (in the eyes of others) in addition to certifying our status as perennial dupes.
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I have said this before and it bears repeating: the victims were innocent. But not all Armenians were. One does not have to read Turkish historians or Turcophile apologists to know this but our own pre-Genocide writers like Baronian and Odian (both available in English) whose works make it abundantly clear that the Armenian communities in the Ottoman Empire were at the mercy of loudmouth charlatans who spoke with a forked tongue, very much like our Turcocentric dime-a-dozen pundits today.
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Monday, March 13, 2006
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QUESTIONS / ANSWERS
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WHY DO YOU CONSISTENTLY STRESS THE NEGATIVE AND IGNORE THE POSITIVE?
Because my job as a critic is to expose contradictions. A typical example of contradiction is saying one thing and doing the exact opposite.
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READING YOU ONE WOULD CONCLUDE THAT ALL ARMENIANS ARE SOVIETIZED OR OTTOMANIZED CHARLATANS.
The written word is not a perfect medium of communication. Even the word of God has been misunderstood and misinterpreted by learned theologians throughout the centuries. What I have been saying is that the nation is at the mercy of Ottomanized or Sovietized charlatans. I have at no time said, suggested, or implied that we are all of us charlatans.
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WHY IS IT THAT I DON’T RECOGNIZE MYSELF IN YOUR WRITINGS?
The obvious answer to that question is that what I write does not apply to you.
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I DON’TCARE WHAT YOU SAY, I AM AND I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN A PROUD ARMENIAN.
Can you really be proud of our countless victims, or the present regime in Yerevan, or the assimilation rate in the Diaspora, and the emigration rate in the Homeland? I say about pride what Camus once said about charm – that it is “sh**.”
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ARE YOU SUGGESTING WE SHOULD ALL HANG OUR HEADS AND SPEND THE REST OF OUR LIVES BEING ASHAMED OF OURSELVES?
No, because that would amount to accepting our present situation as a permanent condition ordained by God or some other immovable or irresistible force. I want my fellow Armenians to share my outrage, to say enough is enough. I want decent Armenians to spend less time saying, Yes, sir! I have at no time denied the fact that there are many decent Armenians. For all I know they may even be in the majority, in the same way that the majority of Germans under Hitler, or Russians under Stalin, or Italians under Mussolini, or Muslims today are decent folk. But they are not the ones who run things, set policy, make headlines, and shape the destiny of the nation.
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I HAVE NEVER SAID YES, SIR! TO ANYONE. ON THE OTHER HAND, HOW DO I GO ABOUT SAYING NO, SIR!?
You can begin by sending an e-mail to the editors of our Turcocentric weeklies and saying there is more to life than Turks and massacres, which shouldn’t cost you a penny or more than a minute of your time. I am reminded of the great American reformer, Saul Alinsky, who once said that to demand and introduce social change doesn’t have to be hard work; sometimes it can even be fun.
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Tuesday, March 14, 2006
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Kieslowski: “We are ashamed of being weak, hence our solitude.”
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If only one among a hundred writers is silenced on political or religious grounds, the worth of the other ninety nine is diminished if only because it reduces their status to that of conformists and yes-men.
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Malcolm Muggeridge: “Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream.”
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Roger Martin du Gard: “Our whole damned civilization has got to go before we can bring any decency into the world.”
Something similar could be said of our entire culture of lamentation and Turcocentrism.
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Nietzsche: “I may be a bad German, but in any event I am a good European.” And I say, what’s the use of being a good Armenian if it also means being a bad man?
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I once met a prominent Armenian poet, educator, and author of several textbooks who called the Nobel Prize a Zionist conspiracy. Next he said his former students now living in America number in the thousand. Which may explain the popularity of the Zionist conspiracy theory among Armenians.
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Wednesday, March 15, 2006
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My childhood ambition was to excel in a specific field so that I would enjoy the respect of my fellow men, make a living, and provide for my family. It was my misfortune to choose literature, and Armenian literature at that – a field in which the better you get the more you are abused. But by the time I discovered that however, it was too late, I had reached a point of no return. I now do my utmost to earn as much contempt as I can, and I am glad to report I am doing just fine, even if the better I get, the worst my prospects get.
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Whenever an odar editor rejected my work, I would ask myself, “What am I doing wrong?” Whenever an Armenian editor rejected my work, I would ask, “What am I doing right?” Odar editors wanted more sex and action; Armenian editors, more lies. Odar editors wanted to entertain their audience; Armenian editors wanted to brainwash theirs.
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Paul Valery: “My first word was NO; it will also be my last.”
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Nothing unites dishonest men more readily than the appearance in their midst of an honest man.
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Perhaps I was lucky enough to have a father who was educated enough to read newspapers but not arrogant enough to propagandize or speechify. If anything, he was a collateral damage of speechifiers and sermonizers.
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I propose the following epitaph for our sermonizers and speechifiers: “Here lies a charlatan the size of whose ego exceeded only by the length of his forked tongue.”
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