march / 3

Thursday, March 01, 2007
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WHEN GOOD PEOPLE BEHAVE BADLY
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Some of my Turkish friends are outraged that their fellow countrymen stand accused of having committed unspeakable acts against innocent and unarmed civilians. To them I say, don’t take it so hard. Some of the most civilized people on earth – from Golden-Age Greeks (5th-century BC) and more recently to Germans – have been guilty of such acts. Most Turks may indeed be decent folk but that doesn’t and cannot alter the fact that raising and running an empire has at no time been an activity compatible with decency. Remember, even Mahatma Gandhi at one point called British rule in India “satanic,” and satanic is how the powerful appear to the powerless. As for the powerless themselves: on the day the British quit India, millions of innocent Hindus were massacred by Muslims, and vice versa. Which may suggest that if you give power to the powerless, they too will commit satanic acts; which is also why I have consistently maintained that if the Ottoman Empire had been an Armenian Empire, and the Turks had been a minority within that empire, the chances are we would have done to them what they did to us. Man is not only capable of behaving like a predatory beast in the jungle, but also doing so in the name of a loving, merciful, and compassionate god. Figure that one out if you can.
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Friday, March 02, 2007
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FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
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Sometimes when one is right on one level one may be wrong on another. Life or reality is more accommodating to contradictions than logic and the human mind.
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When two versions of the past are in conflict, it is self-serving to believe the version that is more flattering to our ego.
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Another way to define a coward: “One who prefers propaganda to truth.”
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One of the easiest things in life is to confuse what we should think and feel with what we really think and feel.
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The world is full of disappointed people because they trusted their friends and mistrusted their enemies.
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There is such a thing as being too self-righteous to be right.
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To the oversensitive person, every encounter with reality can be a traumatic experience.
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Whenever I take myself too seriously someone is sure to call me an idiot.
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Valéry Larbaud: “Affairs begin in champagne and end in chamomile.”
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Eugene Goodheart: “The cure for loneliness is solitude.”
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Anatole France: “Without irony, the world would be like a forest without birds.”
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Saturday, March 03, 2007
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FRACTIONS
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For a long time I thought Armenians were incapable of committing certain acts because they were more civilized than Turks, Kurds, Arabs, Muslims in general, Gypsies, Jews, Japs, Greeks, Germans, Americans, Russians…in short, the rest of the world. I know now that we all swim in the same soup. We are what the world made us and the world is not a nice place inhabited by nice folk. And whenever I hear a Turk saying, when others speak about them they lie, and when they speak about themselves they speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, I know I am in the presence of someone who knows little about the world and even less about himself and his fellow men.
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In a court of law, when a witness is caught in a lie, his entire testimony becomes suspect even if there is evidence to suggest he speaks the truth. Which is why when someone makes an absurd assertion, as I did about Armenians when I was a dupe, forever after what he says is tainted the way a perjurious witness’s testimony is.
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It is a sure symptom of immaturity and insecurity to identify oneself with a group, be it a political party, a tribe, a nation, a race or religion. No one can speak for another or explain why he behaved as he did. When Freud, Adler, and Jung analyzed the human psyche, they began with their own: the first emphasized sex, the second power, and the third myths and archetypes. In other words, each saw only a fraction of the whole. Who was right and who wrong? They may have been right as far as the fraction goes, but wrong about the whole; thus proving that the human mind is better at dealing with fractions. But “a fraction of the truth,” is how propaganda is defined. The question we should ask at this point is: when one is wrong about oneself, can he be right about anyone else?
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