Sunday, September 24, 2006
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THE TRIUMPH OF EVIL
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An elegantly dressed, coiffed, and bejeweled lady on Armenian TV spouting all the predictable clichés, among them:
“There is corruption in Armenia, certainly! But then there is corruption everywhere, including Canada.”
With one important difference: in Canada, when exposed, the corrupt are fired, sometimes even arrested, tried and jailed. Also, I have never heard a Canadian justify corruption by saying there is corruption everywhere.
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“We shouldn’t judge our brothers in the Homeland. Are we better than they?”
True! We are not. We too are at the mercy of charlatans with their perennial Panchoonie punch line, “Mi kich pogh oughargetsek” (Send us a little money); and because I have been saying this, I have become persona non grata, and in the eyes of our chauvinists, an enemy of the people. Besides, if we don’t judge the corrupt, in a way we judge and condemn the victims at the mercy of bloodsucking parasites.
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“The police stop and give you a ticket for traffic violations you didn’t commit.”
This may explain why everyone wants to emigrate except the police, who, according to a recent visitor “are the fattest and ugliest men I have ever seen.”
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“It may take two generations for our brothers in the Homeland to abandon their Soviet ways.”
Who benefits from this kind of talk? Surely not the victims. As for their victimizers: it is almost as if they were given a license to carry on with the full protection and consent of the people for another forty or fifty years – a license for which they didn’t even apply.
I have said this before and it bears repeating: our national sport is the blame-game: we blame the “red” massacres on the Turks and on the indifference of the Great Powers; the “white” massacre (exodus from the Homeland and assimilation in the Diaspora) on “social, economic, and political conditions beyond our control”; our tribalism on our climate and geography; and now, our corruption on the Kremlin. During the Soviet era I don’t remember any one of our chic Bolsheviks in the Diaspora complaining about Soviet corruption. On the contrary. We were told we were in the best of hands and we never had it so good.
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“Let’s not forget that, as a state, Armenia is only a new-born child.”
And yet, when it suits us, we claim to be one of the oldest civilizations, after which we brag about the fact that at a time when most of Europe lived in huts and caves, we enjoyed a Golden Age.
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To those who explain and justify our criminal conduct, may I remind them that evil triumphs only when the majority adopt a passive stance and they justify their cowardice, moral moronism, and absence of vision by engaging in charlatanism.
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Monday, September 25, 2006
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ODIAN’S ARMENIANS
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On reading Yervant Odian’s COUNCILMAN’S WIFE (first serialized at the turn of the last century, later published in book form in 1921) one thing becomes abundantly clear: the Armenian community of Istanbul consisted of morally bankrupt schemers (I am being politically correct now, because “a bunch of degenerates” would be closer to the truth) who spent their lives backbiting and plotting against one another.
What has changed? As far as I can see, only one thing: we no longer have writers like Odian willing to write about what they see and experience. What we have instead are academics and self-appointed pundits who, afraid to deal with the dark side of our collective existence (please note that I am not saying community life) feel more comfortable and safe writing about the past, and if it’s not the Middle Ages, it’s the massacres, as if we were “history”– I use the word in its colloquial meaning.
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Julien Green (1900-1998), Francophone American writer, on death: “It is only the liberation of the spirit from the flesh.”
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On biography: “Slices of cold mutton.”
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On first impressions: “They are not to be resisted or ignored. One should never come to terms with vulgar people and vulgar not only in manner but also in spirit.”
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On the self: “We are strangers to ourselves from the day we are born, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to understand and adjust ourselves to him.”
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On life: “What happens in the world is of little interest. What happens within, that’s what really counts.”
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Bernard-Henri Levy (contemporary French philosopher): “Only jackasses and the dead have nothing to hide.”
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Abdelwahab Meddeb (Tunisian writer and professor of literature): “Islamism is the most absolute fascism ever conceived by man.”
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Tuesday, September 26, 2006
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ON CORRUPTION AND RELATED ATROCITIES
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If we need two generations to de-Sovietize ourselves, how many generations do we need to de-Ottomanize ourselves?
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Corruption and cancer have this in common: unless surgically removed, they metastasize.
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Where the corrupt are in charge, honesty will be outlawed.
Where the mediocre are in charge, excellence will be suppressed. Which is why to adopt a passive stance towards the corrupt and the mediocre is to condemn the nation to the death of a thousand cuts. As for those who like to brag about our resilience, adaptability, and instinct for survival: I suggest, to drag on a degraded existence is worse than death.
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Do I repeat myself? Why not? How many times are our clichés and fallacies repeated? And I don’t mean harmless, infantile, and meaningless clichés, like first nation this and first nation that, but dangerous ones, like the one about two generations mentioned above….
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Instead of meritocracy we have mediocracy, and instead of honesty we have charlatanism. A corrupt power structure conducts a genocidal policy towards all honest men as surely as Talaat did towards all innocent women and children. Now then, go ahead and parrot the two generations cliché with a clear conscience, if you can.
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We were morally and politically right to rise against the Ottoman Empire. But we were dead wrong in our reliance on the verbal commitments of the Great Powers. Which means that even our so-called heroes behaved like dupes; even our so-called revolutionaries lacked self-reliance. And what could be more cowardly than heroes and revolutionaries who are afraid of free speech?
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If you make a study of censorship and its victims (from Socrates to Solzhenitsyn) you may notice that its aim is to silence not charlatans and liars but men of integrity and truth. My final question is: Do you really believe some day in forty or fifty years our charlatans and parasites will see the light and usher in another Golden Age?
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Wednesday, September 27, 2006
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CONFESSIONS AND ADMISSIONS
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Somewhere along the line I decided that I knew not only everything I needed to know but also what others needed to know, and ever since then my life has been a concatenation of blunders, among them my decision to be not just a writer but an Armenian writer. I know now that the certainty of being right is the greatest source of error.
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Socrates spent his entire life proving that we use words without knowing their meaning. When asked what he would do first were he called upon to rule a nation, Confucius is said to have replied, “To correct language.” In our own days, semanticists tell us we don’t even know how to use such simple and common words as “to be.” For example, one should not say “I am not good at math,” but “I didn’t receive good grades in math.”
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What is history? What else but the clash of two sets of charlatans and their dupes?
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Not being a historian I must rely on the testimony of historians, and when these historians contradict one another, common sense tells me to rely on historians who are in a better position to be objective and impartial. This automatically excludes all nationalist, tribal, and partisan historians.
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In his efforts to silence me, one of our flunkeys with “leadership qualities” (if you can imagine such an absurdity), once said to me: “Do you really think you are the only writer who has been unfairly treated?” To which I replied: “Of course not. That’s why I speak with the strength of many.”
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Since dialogue is anti-Armenian, it follows it is a waste of time to reason with a man you can silence.
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