Sunday, January 13, 2013 *********************************** ACTION ********************* We didn’t have to rise against the Sultan to topple him: the Young Turks were going to do that for us. As for the Young Turks: Kemal was going to deal with them in his own time. And Kemal had his own nemesis and killer: booze. * We were wrong again when more recently we adopted Palestinians as our role models and engaged in random acts of assassination. * When I say “we” I don’t mean the majority of the people who after long centuries of subservience under brutal tyrants learned to wait, but a non-representative group of self-appointed “freedom fighters” (in their own version of the story) and terrorists (as others, not all of them odar, saw them). * For once history was on our side but we were too blind to see it; and “when the blind lead the blind…” * Moral: Sometimes inaction is the best action. * Moral II: “Nothing can be as terrible as ignorance in action.” # Monday, January 14, 2013 ************************************** RECAPITULATING ******************************* In politics and diplomacy objective judgment is better than emotional involvement. The Brits are right: there are no friends and enemies in politics; only interests. * Anger is a short madness. So is hatred and in general all emotions that cloud and distort one’s judgment. * There are two kinds of leaders: the competent and the incompetent. Avedik Issahakian is right: we have been cursed with earthquakes, a bad neighborhood, and fools as leaders. * The astonishing ease with which a fool will convince himself or allow himself to be brainwashed to believe he is smart. * Memo to our leaders: Unless you study history and learn from your blunders, you will be a curse not a blessing to you nation. * Our enemies, our real enemies are neither Turks nor Russians but Ottomanized and Sovietized Armenians. * Q: The brainwashed: are they men or apes? A: Apes who speak like parrots. * In an article dealing with the leadership of native Indians in Canada I read the following words in this morning’s paper: “mismanagement, misappropriation, incompetence and poor accountability.” Poor Indians. Poor Armenians. # Tuesday, January 15, 2013 ***************************************** CALLING A SPADE A SPADE *********************************** All power structures engage in propaganda, including the Catholic Church. As a child I once met Cardinal Aghajanian who handled Vatican’s propaganda department– identified as “propagation of the faith.” He was a sweet old man, all smiles and small talk. * The aim of propaganda is to legitimize political gangsterism by moronizing the masses. Like all Armenians I have been exposed to my share of speechifiers who engaged in partisan propaganda. It didn’t even occur to me to question their integrity. * Propaganda and commercial advertising might as well be twins. The aim of advertising is to sell more products by emphasizing the positive and covering up the negative, like cancer in tobacco. * The hidden aim of political propaganda is to raise another generation of killers. * Dupes of propaganda come in all sizes and shapes, including highly intelligent men with impeccable credentials. Two cases from the Vietnam era that come readily to mind: George Romney (a governor as well as a presidential candidate, very much like his son Mitt) and Robert McNamara, one of Kennedy’s “best and brightest.” Romney admitted publicly to have been “brainwashed” (his word) and McNamara acknowledged his blunder in his war memoirs. * Remember, no one can claim a monopoly on truth. If you want to be born again as a human being as opposed to a moronized dupe, reassess periodically your fundamental assumptions and the dogmas of your belief system. # Wednesday, January 16, 2013 **************************************** STATUS QUO ************************* Three generations of our ablest men have lived and died trying to solve our problems. Result? We now have a generation of dupes who believe we never had it so good because we are in the best of hands and that our greatest problem is a handful of malcontents whose sole aim in life is to promote gloom and doom, pessimism, negativism, and defeatism. * And then there are the brainless who think (if you will forgive the overstatement) just because they have a computer they are also entitled to have an opinion. Or, in the words of an eminent Canadian poet (may the Good Lord have mercy on his soul) “just because they have an asshole, they must also have an opinion.” * To say we are free to subscribe to a belief system of our own choice even when it is a false one is like saying we are free to choose slavery. Or again, if I believe my lie to be the truth, no one is in a position to tell me otherwise because I know what’s best for myself. * When this kind of mentality because the dominant mindset, genocide becomes not a possibility but a certainty. * When on the eve of the Genocide Zohrab warned “This time they will slaughter us indiscriminately,” they said “Zohrab effendi is exaggerating,” thus implying they knew better. What has changed? #