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Sunday, February 03, 2008
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REFLECTIONS
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When told non-violence is for cowards, Gandhi replied: “I prefer violence to cowardice. A coward has no right to call himself a member of the human race.”
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A nation whose rulers are ignorant philistines, both ignorance and philistinism will be the norm and anyone who refuses to conform will be an enemy of the people – not an enemy of ignorance and philistinism, but a traitor to the cause.
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There are honest men and there are liars, and i prefer an honest Turk to a lying Armenian.
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In his efforts to assert his Armenianism, one of our nationalist leaders claimed to have traced his ancestry all the way back to the Mamikonians (Chinese) -- or was it the Bagratunis (Jews)?
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“There is no such thing as a Turk,” a Turkish friend once informed me. “We have all been bastardized and mongrelized. We are all the offspring of mixed marriages that go back hundreds of years. There is a Greek, an Armenian, a Jew, a Kurd, and an Albanian in all of us.”
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In the Armenian ghetto where I was born and raised there was a blond barber called Alaman (German in Turkish) and a greengrocer named Kurdoghlanian (Son of a Kurd). They were accepted as Armenians and no one questioned their pedigree, perhaps because everybody was too busy trying to survive in an alien environment to care about such impure concepts as “pure blood.”
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No matter how hard they try, they will never convince me that honesty and objectivity are anti-Armenian, or that the statement “All men are brothers” is pro-Turkish.
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To brainwashed dupes who question my Armenianism on the grounds that I am critical of fellow Armenians, I ask: If I speak the truth and in doing so I expose liars, am I good or bad? After long centuries of living in fear, aren’t you tired of lies? Why should truth be a source of dread? What if in treating an honest Armenian as if he were a Turk, you succeed only in exposing your Ottomanism?
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A historian is not judged by the degree of his patriotism, nationalism, loyalty or subersvience to a power structure, but by his honesty and impartiality. For more on this subject see Michael Grant’s GREEK AND ROMAN HISTORIANS: INFORMATION AND MISINFORMATION (London, 1995).
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Monday, February 04, 2008
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RANDOM THOUGHTS
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If you speak the truth to liars, they will call you a liar. What else can they do? If you are an honest man among crooks, they will call you a crook. That’s their only line of defense and they will take it for all it’s worth.
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To deprogram someone against his will can be a formidable undertaking and it doesn’t always work. The alternative – to hope that he will deprogram himself – may take years and sometimes decades, depending on a number of variables which are not worth going into. The fact remains that because we are all products of a cultural milieu with its own specific and clearly defined educational system and dominant ideas, we cannot claim to be who we are in the same way that a wooden table of chair can no longer claim to be a tree in a virgin forest.
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Crooks and liars are relatively easy to deal with because they are aware of who they are and they feel vulnerable to exposure. Dupes who have been brainwashed to believe they are honest men are infinitely harder to deal with because the lies they recycle are not theirs but someone else’s. This fact makes them invulnerable to reason because there exists between them and reality an impenetrable wall of illusions, and nothing comes more naturally to us than to confuse illusions with reality. Consider what happened to us at the turn of the last century when our revolutionaries thought the Great Powers cared for us. And consider what happens to us today whenever a political candidate, for obvious reasons of his/her own, promises to recognize the Genocide.
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It is said, investigative reporters are the eyes and ears of a nation. Where are our investigative reporters? Do we have them? Did we ever have them? Why is it that we have dozens of papers but not a single investigative reporter? Are we afraid of what they will uncover?
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Turks worry me less than the Turk within us.
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Tuesday, February 05, 2008
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TURCOPHOBIA
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Dionysius of Halicarnassus (first century B.C.), in THE ANCIENT HISTORY OF ROME: “The majority of the Hellenic public have been misled by the false view that founders of Rome were uncivilized vagrants and outlaws who were not even freeborn; and that the secret of Rome’s gradual advance in world dominion has not been her righteousness or her fear of God or any moral quality, but some blind, mechanical and immoral operation of Fortune, who has bestowed her greatest gifts upon her most unprofitable servants, and the lowest of savages…It is my hope that the discovery of the truth may induce a proper appreciation of Rome, unless they are her fanatical and irreconcilable enemies.”
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Istanbul is not Rome, granted; but neither is Armenia the Garden of Eden.
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A reader born and raised in Turkey tells me, “Turks can be very nasty if you ever dare to say anything remotely critical about them in their presence.”
Are we different?
“Maybe not, but they massacred us, we didn’t massacre them.”
According to impartial witnesses whenever we had the upper hand, we did to them what they did to us.
“They massacred two million; how many did we massacre, two thousand or two hundred?”
That doesn’t make us more civilized or morally superior. To say otherwise is to confuse military inferiority with moral superiority. You cannot live under a ruthless master for six hundred years without assimilating part of his ruthlessness. Neither can you say to a man, “I want to be friends with you but only on condition that you admit to being a cold-blooded murderer, a thief, a liar, and a bloodthirsty barbarian who should have stayed in Mongolia and never ventured westward where you will never be accepted as a member of a civilized community.” But if you do, don’t be surprised if he doesn’t respond with expressions of gratitude and joy.
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Do you want to know why sooner or later Hitler’s name props up in Armenian arguments? The following easy-to-remember formula may be as good an explanation as any:
nationalism + antiSemitism + anti-intellectualism = fascism.
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Wednesday, February 06, 2008
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OUR BETTERS OR OUR WORST?
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Since time immemorial man has known that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” And yet, the only enterprise in which our leaders have been consistently successful throughout our millennial existence has been in dividing us and in keeping us divided.
Our writers have called them “useless” (Zarian) and “brainless” (Issahakian), and if you think they overstated their case, you should hear what they (our leaders) call one another.
Once, many years ago, when I published an interview with a Tashnak leader, which dealt not with politics or history but with childhood reminiscences and the personalities that had shaped his character and worldview, a Ramgavar leader published an attack so nasty that I was left speechless. This may explain the gutter mentality of some of my brainwashed partisan critics.
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When things didn’t work out for them, the Bagratunis moved to Georgia, and from Georgia to Russia. When our revolution in the Ottoman Empire failed, our revolutionaries abandoned the people at the mercy of butchers and kept themselves busy by writing long-winded memoirs. They had a Plan B for themselves but only a Plan A for the people.
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They flatter us by bragging about our survival in an environment where many others perished. They are right: “they” survived all right while countless others did not. They survived to what end and for what purpose? To divide us, of course, and to make sure we stay divided. That’s because that is the only undertaking in which they excel – after all, they had millennia of practice in which to refine and master the technique.
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Are they our betters or our worst? I will let you answer that question in the hope you will come up with the right answer not because you are smart (I will let them use the maneuver of treating you like fools after flattering you to believe you are just about the smartest people on earth) but because I trust you are capable of using your common sense, which, it has been said, is the least common of all faculties.
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"Intellect is invisible to the man who has none."
Arthur Schopenhauer