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Saturday, September 15, 2012
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ON IDEOLOGIES & RELIGIONS
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Sooner or later all ideologies and religions
develop a power structure;
and where power enters murder is sure to follow –
not to say war and massacre.
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Religions may benefit individuals
here and there, now and then
but societies, never!
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Religions have been and continue to be
as dangerous as biological and nuclear weapons.
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Freedom of religion means
license to brainwash.
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Friday, September 14, 2012
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FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
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There are two ways of being popular
in an environment dominated
by charlatans and dupes:
by inventing new lies and
by recycling old ones.
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I don’t write for dupes.
I write for readers who almost think as I do.
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Who takes Armenian writers seriously?
Not even Armenian writers.
Speaking for myself,
I have nothing but contempt for writers
who write about many things –
from the Middle Ages to massacres –
but carefully avoid our present problems.
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If everybody loved to play the same instrument
we wouldn’t have an orchestra.
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An Armenian reader may agree with me
on one or two points, but three points? –
that would be like a minor miracle.
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Saturday, September 15, 2012
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GUILTY AS CHARGED
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Benefactors write checks, build schools and community centers;
bishops sermonized in the name God;
bosses speechify in the name of Country and Mount Ararat;
and after leading a more or less comfortable life
they die in bed.
By contrast, successive generations of our writers
have been reduced to the status of beggars,
silenced, exiled, and murdered.
Why?
Simply because they refused to engage in deception
and to mislead the community into thinking
they never had it so good
because they are in the best of hands.
And because I write as I do
I have been called a Turk, an enemy of the people, and a shit.
*
When in his eighties Zarian died in Yerevan
after sustaining injuries in a fall,
he was sure he had been pushed and murdered
by agents of the State.
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When Baruir Massikian,
a brilliant playwright, short story write and essayist,
who was also a successful lawyer,
was visited in his deathbed by a delegation of Panchoonies
parading as concerned community leaders
asked him to leave his wealth
to the Armenian Educational Foundation,
he said he’d much rather leave it
to whores in a Cairo bordello.
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You may see me as a pessimist
and a dealer in gloom and doom.
I see myself as an honest witness
who refuses to commit perjury.
If that’s a crime,
I am more than willing to plead guilty as charged,
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