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Sunday, October 10, 2010
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PROPAGANDA & DISSENT
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For eight years I worked in an insurance company that employed thousands.
What did they produce?
Nothing. Only paperwork.
What did they sell?
The certainty that if you die tomorrow or next year, your family will be awarded a goodly sum – depending on the amount of insurance you bought and provided you paid your monthly, quarterly, or annual premiums.
There is money in certainty no matter how unfounded and false.
There is none in doubt no matter how justified.
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People hate uncertainty perhaps because there is so much of it in life.
They need to be told there is life after death -- even eternal bliss provided you do what you are told.
Propaganda (be it religious or political) pays because it deals in certainties and it is constructive in so far as it speaks of dreams -- even as it delivers nightmares. Propaganda promises the millennium -- that is, peace and prosperity for a thousand years, even as it delivers war, the concentration camp, and the Gulag.
By contrast, all dissent can do is expose lies.
What could be more negative and destructive?
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The best dissent can do is question and doubt, thus replacing optimism and hope with pessimism, despair, and anxiety.
Once in a while I get letters asking me, sometimes even begging me, to be more positive and constructive – never more objective and truthful.
I regret to say I am in no position to promise eternal bliss or, for that matter, seventy-three virgins. And yet, that's what the average dupe wants me to do – to deliver empty promises, illusions, and lies.
That may explain why propagandists are amply compensated with power and money and dissenters are ostracized, persecuted, silenced, sometimes even tortured, starved, and killed.
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Monday, October 11, 2010
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FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
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Nowadays almost everyone has either written a book or is busy writing one. When asked to identify my racket, I say I am a retired church organist. A writer has as much prestige today as a mental masturbator.
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You can behead kings and assassinate heads of state but there isn't much you can do to a faceless and anonymous bureaucrat who may exercise more power on you than any king of head of state.
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The greatest blunder committed by Turks at the turn of the last century was to think that a tiny and non-representative group of misguided young fools with their heads in the clouds could be a threat to the survival of the Empire.
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The problem with speechifiers and sermonizes is that they don't even recycle their own crap. What they do is recycle someone else's who did the same. What they say has therefore as much value as the evidence of a comatose parrot.
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You cannot change that which you hate: that may explain my failure. Perhaps what we need is not critics but messiahs. Anyone interested in being crucified?
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A partisan thinks it is his patriotic duty to defend everything his party does and to agree with everything the boss says. But I happen to be of the opinion that the Pope is not infallible, Mussolini was not always right, and Suleiman the Magnificent was not magnificent. I further believe the Good Lord has given us a brain with which to think and judge for ourselves, and there is nothing praiseworthy in subservience even when it is promoted in the name of discipline, loyalty, patriotism, and truth.
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Tuesday, October 12, 2010
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NARRATIVES
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For every narrative there is a counter-narrative.
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Our perception of reality is limited.
The human eye, like the eye of a camera, can take in countless details, but the human mind can select and focus only on a limited number of them.
In the Soviet era, for example, the Kremlin provided its own narrative and dissidents like Solzhenitsyn provided a counter-narrative. And for a good number of years, or until Khrushchev's withering speech against the cult of personality, the dissidents' counter-narrative was dismissed by most Sovietologists as reactionary propaganda subsidized and disseminated by the capitalist West.
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Another case of narrative and counter-narrative is the Turkish version of the Genocide. According to the Turkish official narrative, our genocide is fiction. But according to such dissidents as Pamuk and Akcam, the official narrative is state propaganda.
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The central concern of our official narrative today is the Genocide. If we had a counter-narrative, its central concern would be democracy and human rights.
We may not have a counter-narrative today, but we had one at the turn of the last century and two of its most important exponents were Baronian and Odian, both of whom are now identified as humorists. Their main concern, however, was neither to entertain nor to amuse their readers, but to expose our moral bankruptcy.
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Why is it that we had a counter-narrative in the Ottoman Empire but not today in the land of the brave and the free?
The answer is: Under the Sultan, our bosses, bishops, and benefactors did not have the power to control the press.
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Moral I:
Where there is only one narrative, it can be asserted with some degree of certainty that the counter-narrative has been suppressed.
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Moral II:
Where crooks and liars are in charge, the press will be controlled; and where the press is controlled, the fundamental human right of free speech will be violated.
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Wednesday, October 13, 2010
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FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
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There are those who say if you believe in a Big Lie, that lie ceases to be a lie. I am not one of them. I don't believe in faith as magic because i don't believe in magic.
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What happened to us was not inevitable. Anyone who says otherwise is a liar who is too arrogant to admit that like the rest of mankind he too is prone to error.
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I may sound like an angry young man but I am in fact a serene old man who has come to terms with his own limitations.
Everything I say contains a silent mea culpa.
I don't accuse, I confess.
And by confessing I hope to achieve a higher degree of serenity.
Consider that a symptom of my Catholic upbringing.
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There are many little truths in all organized ideologies and religions, but their core is a Big Lie.
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Truth has never been a central concern of organizations.
Power, yes.
Truth, never!
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Truth is a metaphysical abstraction with no counterpart in reality. And of reality we are equipped to perceive only tiny fractions. Which is why no two men will ever agree on everything.
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I don't write to be popular.
I believe there is more merit in unpopularity than in fame and fortune.
And I rate indifference to fame above fame.
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Did you know that Mongolia's population is 2.7 million? – which means there are many more mongoloids than Mongols – meant to say, many more Armenians.
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