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Thursday,June 5, 2008
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WHAT I KNOW ABOUT FASCISTS
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In his memoirs, Elia Kazan writes that ordinary Turkish citizens don't just shake the hand of a political leader, they go down on their knees and kiss it. Our political leaders are different. They prefer to have another part of their anatomy kissed.
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I have yet to meet an Armenian with political ambitions was not a fascist.
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As a long-time observer of the Armenian scene, I can recognize a fascist by the fact that he doesn't just criticize, analyze, attack, or insult anyone who dares to disagree with him, he goes further. He adopts the role of commissar and issues guidelines.
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Hitler was proud of German culture. So are we of ours. Even Armenians who know little or nothing and care even less about culture, like to brag about it.
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The best argument for an Armeno-Turkish alliance is that most Turks are not Turks, neither are most Armenians Armenians. The only thing that separates them is an incompatible educational system – that is to say, two different sets of brainwashers.
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An Armenian who hates Turks and a Turk who hates Armenians: take away the direction of their hatred and they might as well be two interchangeable units. I speak from experience. I have received hate-mail from both and I see no difference between them.
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Fascists excel in solving problems, even if in the process they create many more.
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June 6, 2008
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A QUESTION OF EMPHASIS
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I should like to read an autobiography in which the emphasis is on prejudices, blind spots, and defects. I should also like to read a nationalist historian who stresses not military victories but moral failures. Sartre's autobiography comes close to my ideal. So does Spengler's treatment of the West in his DECLINE OF THE WEST, and Toynbee's treatment of British history in his STUDY OF HISTORY.
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What propels us to greater knowledge is awareness of ignorance. Some of the most asinine opinions I have been exposed to issued from the mouths of individuals who believed they knew everything they needed to know.
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To emphasize the negative: that is to me the true meaning of patriotism. All our pseudo-patriots want flattery – first nation this, first nation that – and the more they brag, the more of their backside they expose, and they lack the decency and common sense to see this.
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Saturday, June 7, 2008
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LITERATURE
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When our bishops, bosses, and benefactors (or rather, their flunkies) get involved in literature, they do so not to promote it, but to control it. A bishop once asked me to prepare an anthology of Armenian literature. “We have the money,” he said, using the royal pronoun. When I asked if I would have complete freedom of selection, I never heard from him again. In his obituary I read that he had subsidized the publication of over fifty books. “They” had the money, all right.
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Whenever I am verbally abused by one of our ubiquitous hooligans parading as superpatriots, my first thought: “He must be a bishop or the son of one.”
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I once asked one of our Turcocentric ghazetajis if he had read a single Armenian writer, he said he hadn't and he seemed proud of the fact.
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Our Turcocentric ghazetajis have their counterparts among the Turks who blame everything on the degenerate and corrupt West and on Armenian criminal conduct, and whenever a Turkish intellectual dares to think for himself, he is imprisoned or forced into exile. If I am not the inmate of a gulag today it's because we don't have gulags in the diaspora.
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