diary

Thursday, December 2, 2010
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FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
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Nationalists are not born but made. Same with fanatics. And what makes them is education -- a euphemism for systematic brainwashing that starts at a very early age.
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There is a natural tendency in all of us to “stick to our own kind.” There is an equally strong tendency to be intrigued (and attracted) by the strange, the alien, the unknown, and the “other.”
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If Wittgenstein is right – and I have every reason to think he is – we may have answers to many questions but not to the most important ones. It follows, anyone who claims to have them is either a liar or a dupe who simply repeats what a liar told him.
For more on this subject, see LOGICOMIX: AN EPIC SEARCH FOR TRUTH by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou, Art by Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna (New York, 2009) which is less about Wittgenstein and more about Bertrand Russell, who was Wittgenstein's teacher.
LOGICOMIX has been described by critics as “breathtaking,” “a titanic artistic achievement,” “extraordinary,” “daring,” “engaging,” and most important of all, “accessible.”
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In Antonia Fraser's diary, we read: “In the spring of 1985 Harold Pinter visited Turkey with Arthur Miller on behalf of PEN International, to protest against the imprisonment and torture of intellectuals. Their guide incidentally was a young writer called Orhan Pamuk.”
We further read here that Pinter's play “Mountain Language” was written after “he learnt that the Kurdish language was forbidden, even among Kurds themselves.”
To my Turkish friends who have written a thousand lines to prove that the Armenian genocide is a fiction of our imagination, I ask: “Have you ever written a single line against torture?”
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Friday, December 3, 2010
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FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
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Heine: “Whenever books are burnt, men, also in the end are burned!”
And whenever writers are silenced, tongues are also cut out.
The question we should ask is not “Where does Ottomanism end and Armenianism begin,” but “When will Ottomanism end?”
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The ideal candidate for membership in an Armenian political party is a dupe who has not yet acquired the ability to think for himself.
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Is the silent majority with me or against me? Neither. You don't have to be a Russell or Wittgenstein to see that you cannot be for or against someone whose existence you don't acknowledge. And when I say “me” I don't mean myself but our dissidents from Khorenatsi to Massikian whose ideas I recycle.
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A man is shaped by his mistakes. Those who assert infallibility are monsters.
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I hate to work for money. Hence the choice of my present job. Please note that I say job and not career.
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While I lived in Athens and Venice it never occurred to me to say I was walking where Socrates and Plato, and Vivaldi, Thomas Mann, and Stravinsky had walked.
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The disagreement of a single honest man means much more to me than the agreement of a thousand fools and ten thousand dupes.
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In a dictionary, I read the following definition:
“Party politics: Politics conducted only through the machinery of the party, as against people’s interests generally.”
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Friday, December 3, 2010
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FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
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Power means first and foremost the power to brainwash.
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Once upon a time we were brainwashed to believe
what the Pope is to Catholics,
the Sultan and Stalin were to the subjects of their respective empires
and anyone who dared to say otherwise
was declared guilty of a capital offense.
If I have been and continue to be subjected
to verbal abuse by readers
it's not because they disagree with me
but because I disagree with those
who brainwashed them.
Which means, we are the slaves of former slaves
who have brainwashed themselves to believe they are free.
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Sometimes reality can be
more fantastic than science fiction.
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