Sunday, July 10, 2011
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POLITICS
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You tell them what they want to hear
and when things don’t work out as planned,
you blame it on the opposition
or factors beyond your control.
If you promise them heaven
and you deliver hell,
you can always blame it on God – if, that is,
you run out of unpredictable hostile factors;
or, in the words of Louis XIV:
“Has God forgotten what I have done for Him?”
*
Everyone has his way of judging people and nations.
I judge them by the manner in which they treat writers.
History provides us with many precedents,
the most recent being Talaat’s Turkey
Stalin’s Soviet Union,
and our own faceless flunkies
who operate anonymously
from behind closed doors.
*
Being an Armenian writer
amounts to being a shoemaker in a country
where everyone prefers to go barefoot.
#
Monday, July 11, 2011
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DESPAIR
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Edmund Burk:
“Do not despair,
but if you do,
work on in despair.”
*
Separating a nation from its myths and propaganda
is harder than separating Siamese twin –
an operation that requires a team of expert surgeons.
I can’t even stand the sight of blood on TV.
I apologize whenever I step on an ant.
*
If I cannot convince Armenians to do
what’s in their own best interest,
how can I, or anyone else for that matter,
convince Turks to do what’s against their own interest?
*
To Turks we are no better than “Indians.”
To our own leadership, we might as well be “white niggers.”
*
They control the media, the educational system,
the church, and the community centers.
What do I have in my favor?
Only a touch of common sense – the least common
of all faculties, it has been said,
and so it appears to be.
*
Our tribal chiefs agree only on one thing:
to silence dissent.
*
A hundred years ago we were slaves.
We are now slaves of former slaves.
#
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
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PATTERN
*******************************
When Hitler lost the war,
and shortly before he committed suicide,
he blamed it on his people,
the very same people he had brainwashed to believe
they were la crème de la crème.
*
Like most Armenian children
who had an Armenian education
I too was brought up to believe
we were just about the smartest people on earth.
I know now that the very same people
who brainwashed us to believe that
have been and continue to be
the instruments of our destruction.
This to me is now as clear as daylight
and as inevitable as night follows day.
#
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
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WHY I LOVE
BERTRAND RUSSELL
*******************************
ON ENVY
********************
“Instead of deriving pleasure from what he has,
[the envious person] derives pain from what others have.”
*
ON MARRIAGE
*********************
“Often and often, a marriage hardly differs from prostitution,
except being harder to escape from.”
*
ON SERMONIZERS
****************************
“The human race has not hitherto discovered
any method of eradicating moral defects;
preaching and exhortation only add hypocrisy
to the previous list of vices.”
#