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Sunday, October 22, 2006
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HONESTY: A DEFINITION
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Public relations, political rhetoric, advertisements, and propaganda combine to legitimize bullshit and to redefine honesty as “disguised dishonesty.”
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In America you have to advertise even when what you are promoting is a book exposing the damage advertisements inflict on our perception of reality.
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ON TURKS
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The most important issue that unites us today is the Genocide, which also means (in the words of both Chekhov and Sartre, an unlikely pair) that the most lasting bond among people is hatred of the enemy.
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Our hatred of Turks may unite us, but what if this same hatred may make us more like them? Or rather, what we think of them.
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Whenever I speak of Armenian hatred of Turks I am reminded that Armenians don’t hate Turks or anyone else, they only love justice.
I am willing to concede that whenever I speak of Armenians I have a natural tendency to project; and ever since I was a child I saw Turks the way they are depicted in Armenian cartoons today: fat, mustachioed slobs in shalvars and fez wielding a yataghan dripping with blood – not exactly lovable characters, you might say.
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A VICIOUS CIRCLE
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Bullshit is widespread because it works; it works because most men are dupes; and they are dupes because their educational system was designed by bullshitters.
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Monday, October 23, 2006
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FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
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Once, when I asked a fellow Armenian if we are from the same planet,” he replied: “We are not even from the same galaxy.”
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Sometimes understanding a Turkish enemy can be as difficult as understanding an Armenian friend.
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God did not create Armenians in His own image, Turks did.
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Fortune Cookie: “The only rose without a thorn is friendship.”
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We emphasize the positive in us and cover up the negative without realizing that doing so amounts to engaging in deception, which is probably much worse than all our negatives combined.
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If we assume that in every conflict there is right and wrong, or good guys and bad guys, we shall have to conclude that we will have peace in this world only when the good guys doubt their goodness seven times every day.
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I would define a bad guy as a good guy who never questions or doubts his goodness. Certainty is the source of all evil.
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God has visited mankind with countless disasters and catastrophes like floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, storms, tsunamis, hurricanes, tornadoes, epidemics, starvation, and son on, but men continue to worship and thank him.
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When reminded of Stalinism or jihadism, defenders of Marxism and Islam will tell you that all systems, including Christianity, have had their share of abusers. But that to me is the best reason why we should question the validity or usefulness of all ideologies and organized religions.
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Tuesday, October 24, 2006
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BROTHERS, FRIENDS, ENEMIES
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Dale Carnegie once wrote a best-selling book titled HOW TO WIN FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE. Had he been an Armenian, he would have written a book titled HOW TO SURVIVE YOUR FRIENDS.
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Frederic Raphael on Carnegie’s book: “Probably among the dozen most blandly wicked books ever written.”
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Some day if I ever write my memoirs the shortest chapter in it will be subtitled “My Armenian Friends.”
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George Santayana has said that a friend is someone with whom “we can be most human.” It follows, an enemy is someone we dehumanize.
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Plutarch once defined a brother as someone “who has come out of the same hole.” (How about that for subtle elegance?) One could also define an Armenian as someone whose ancestors were born in a valley or on a mountain somewhere in Transcaucasia two thousand years ago.
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During the last few years I acquired two Turkish friends. At this rate my Turkish friends will outnumber my Armenian friends. To those who think the reason why I am making more Turkish friends and Armenian enemies may be because I am anti-Armenian: I suggest to confuse criticism with hostility is to subscribe to the notion that leaders and their dupes are always right and dissenters always wrong. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Saddam Hussein, and the Ayatollah subscribed to this notion too.
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Jose Maria Aznar (Spanish diplomat): “Why is it that we must always be apologizing to them and they never? Has anyone ever heard a Muslim apologize for having occupied Spain for eight centuries?”
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If Alexandre Dumas’s three Musketeers had been Armenian, their slogan would have been “Every man for himself!”
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Wednesday, October 25, 2006
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ON LOVE, HATE, FRIENDS, ENEMIES,
AND RELATED ATROCITIES
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A true friend is someone who in your absence, when others speak evil of you, does not add his voice to the chorus, and afterwards does not repeat their words to you.
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Friends play a central role in the lives of some, enemies in others.
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If I ever see the light and am born again, I will keep it to myself and let my words and actions speak for themselves.
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Faith tells us not to hate our enemies, and if we can’t manage that, to think of hatred not as a religious or patriotic duty but as a failing and an aberration.
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The word heaven in a religious context is not a place but a dimension, and the dimension is not outside somewhere but (very much like the kingdom of god) within us.
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When a Canadian writer said to a publisher she had written a book about the Armenians, the publisher said: “If it’s about the massacres, we will accept it.” There is no business like shoah business.
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According to an American pundit in this morning’s paper: “Far too many people have already been killed for Bush and his advisers to admit that their ‘war of choice’ was all a mistake.” True. The bigger the mistake, the harder it is to admit it. If you step on someone’s toes in a crowded place you can say “Sorry!” and get away with it. But what can you possibly say for killing two million innocent civilians except “I didn’t do it!”
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A cartoon by Bouchard depicting a slave in the middle of a Roman orgy declaring: “Someday we will all be equal and everyone will have his own slaves.”
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