more memos

August 1, 2010
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#4 MEMO TO MY TURKISH FRIENDS:
ON NATIONALISM
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What nationalism does is to create an a priori positive image of one's nation (“my country, right or wrong”) and to automatically reject anything that may be remotely negative.
Nationalism is less an ideology and more a pathology – a pathology if only in the sense that it divides mankind into us and them, Abels and Cains, friends and enemies -- the kind of enemies that, if you don't kill them first, they will kill you. As a result, murder one is classified as self-defense or at worst justified manslaughter.
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My nationalist Turkish friends expect me to believe their version of the past as gospel truth and to reject the version of my own nationalist brothers as a pack of distortions and lies. And because I have been critical of our nationalists too, they think I am on their side and I qualify as an honorary Turk.
I am told some of them even quote me in their writings, websites, and speeches to buttress their denialist position. Which may suggest that they are so hungry for evidence that they are even willing to fabricate it.
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What they miss is that my anti-nationalism targets not just Armenian nationalists but all nationalists, including theirs.
Their bias is such that it makes them blind to the reality of their position.
In their view it was not Turks but Armenians who committed atrocities against unarmed civilians. The bones in the desert are not Armenian but Turkish bones. Talaat is not a criminal but a statesman of vision who did not deserve to be gunned down like a dog in the street by a deranged Armenian assassin.
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A final comment on the myth of Armeno-Turkish coexistence in the Ottoman Empire.
Gandhi once called the British Empire “satanic.” As far as I know, no one in his right mind has ever described the Ottoman Empire as more civilized and humane than the British Empire. And if some day an ultra-nationalist Turkish historian somewhere calls the regime of the sultans “angelic,” that should be seen as irrefutable evidence of the fact that nationalism is less an ideology and more a pathology, and as such in need of medical treatment rather than philosophical refutation.
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August 2, 2010
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GROUPS
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“On your own you can do nothing. You must join a group,” I am told again and again.
Join a group? How can I if my aim in life is to expose the moral bankruptcy of all groups?
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What Shaw said of professions (that they are “conspiracies against the laity”) applies to groups regardless of credo, ideology, or political orientation.
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Speaking of Zarian, a Tashnak editor once wrote to a fellow Tashnak:
“If we publish him he may come to our side.
When he didn't, not only was he silenced but also rumored to be unpredictable, unreliable, untrustworthy, and mad.
Later when the Soviets promised to publish him, he believed them and by the time he realized he had been taken in, it was too late. He spent his final years as an outcast in his own homeland and died with the conviction that he had been killed.
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In their efforts to assert their own intellectual superiority and moral integrity, our mediocrities now spread the rumor that Zarian was an agent of both the CIA and the KGB.
I too have been accused to being an agent of, among others, the Mossad and the Grey Wolves. To which I can only repeat the words of Socrates: “My poverty is proof of my honesty.”
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Sooner or later all groups become criminal conspiracies.
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The longevity of a group or belief system guarantees nothing. Astrology has been with us longer than any organized religion.
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Where there is a belief system that asserts monopoly on truth, there will also be deceivers and dupes.
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Where faith enters, lies and prejudices are sure to follow.
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What needs to be glorified is not faith but doubt.
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The destiny of blind men is to be at the mercy of other blind men who will invariably lead them into the ditch.
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A member of a party is like a dog who knows his master but not his master's master.
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August 3, 2010
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#5 MEMO
TO MY TURKISH FRIENDS
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You dare to speak of six centuries of peaceful Armeno-Turkish coexistence in the Ottoman Empire. You forget that during this so-called brotherly co-existence you raped our daughters and forced them into concubinage; and you abducted our sons and forced them to kill and die in your imperialist wars of conquest. You did these things legally of course because your legal system was rotten.
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Times change and laws change but you continue to think with the old Ottomanized brain, hence the absurd notion that, like the Sultan before them, both Talaat and Kemal represented the Almighty on earth and as such they could do no wrong, and anyone who says otherwise is guilty of treason and deserves to die.
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A man can get used to anything. You got used to your own vileness and we got used to our own cowardly subservience. In that sense, the Ottoman Empire was not the blessing you like to believe it was, but a curse to both of us.
And if we massacred you whenever we had the upper hand it may be because as your subjects, we adopted and put into practice the values and methods of our masters. Before you blame us, blame yourself.
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In one of his Anatolian travelogues Lord Kinross, a notorious Turcophile and the future author of a mammoth biography of Kemal, quotes an old Turkish peasant as having said: “We taught the Armenians a lesson the will never forget.” This illiterate peasant understood what educated, modernized, denialist scholars pretend not to understand today, namely that, what you did to us can neither be forgotten nor forgiven or, for that matter, covered up.
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August 4, 2010
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DIARY
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Reading the TALMUD. Some good lines in it. “Love work, hate lordship, and seek no intimacy with the ruling powers.”
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A hundred years ago our writers knew how to deal with our bosses, bishops, and benefactors. We appear to have lost the art and with it our cojones. The offspring of our revolutionaries now refer to one another as “boys” and to our benefactors as “baron.” The only lesson they appear to have learned from their experience in the Ottoman Empire is respect for authority and everyone in its neighborhood even if they are no better than yes-men, brown-nosers, and the scum of the earth. Hence the saying, “Once upon a time we were slaves. We are now slaves of former slaves.” And this in the land of the brave and the free.
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Because I am critical of Armenians, my Turkish friends think I must be blind to their shortcomings. I will not apologize for disappointing them.
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Yesterday’s friend may be (and often is) today’s enemy, but today’s enemy will never be tomorrow’s friend.
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If you are wrong, they may forgive you. But if you are right, they will silence you.
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In the late 1860s Dostoevsky wrote: “Russian thought is preparing a grandiose renovation for the entire world…and this will occur in about a century – that’s my passionate belief.”
There you have it: one of the greatest writers of all times confusing wishful thinking with prophecy -- all in the name of faith and patriotism, of course.
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In a dictionary, I read the following definition:
“Party politics: Politics conducted only through the machinery of the party and against people’s interests generally.”
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