notes

Thursday, March 31, 2011
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OBSERVATIONS
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The hardest thing in writing
is the search for the simplest words.
*
A lie that flatters
will be more popular
than a truth that hurts.
That’s why propaganda
is more popular than dissent.
*
It took me thirty years to realize
I had been brainwashed.
*
If you don’t think you have been brainwashed,
you have been.
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Friday, April 01, 2011
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COWBOYS AND INDIANS
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Today’s champions of human rights,
Americans were yesterday’s champion violators
who probably claimed more victims
than Genghis Khan, Suleiman the Magnificent,
Talaat, and Stalin combined.
As for their victims (both Indians and Africans):
in their endless tribal wars and massacres
before the white man appeared on the scene,
they were champion victimizers in their own right.
*
History is not written but rewritten and
it is not white man alone
who speaks with a forked tongue.
*
Speaking of the European conquest of America,
Toynbee writes:
“As soon as they had accomplished their murderously romantic historical mission of clearing the North American barbarians out of the way, they themselves were swiftly sucked back into the prosaic Main Street of a pullulating Middletown. The culture of this Middletown had lapsed into a conspicuous vulgarity and barbarism in the realm of Art.”
*
When two sets of barbarians clash, the result will not be a new civilization – though historians will be assigned the task of misrepresenting it as such.
*
Turks rewrite history?
Don’t we?
We do worse:
We pretend to care about the past to the point of obsession
in order to avoid thinking and assessing our present and future.
We have replaced Ottomanism with Turcocentrism.
What’s the difference?
Don’t ask me because I don’t know.
*
A question that our historians consistently avoid raising:
What has been our contribution to our own history --
besides providing victims to victimizers?
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