Thursday, March 28, 2013 **************************************** WHEN I THOUGHT I KNEW ************************************** When I thought I knew, I didn’t! * State a problem clearly and its solution will fall on your lap. * When it comes to solving our problems we may well be just about the dumbest people on earth. * In an anti-intellectual environment to call someone an intellectual is the same as identifying him as a mental masturbator, a parasite, and a daydreamer who knows nothing about real life. An Armenian may identify himself as a professor or an academic, but only a retard will call himself an intellectual. To those of my readers who dismiss me as an intellectual I therefore say, one does not have to be an intellectual, a vodanavorji, or anything else for that matter to recognize a jackass when he sees one. * To those who say “I know what I need to know,” I say: Knowledge is not and cannot be a final product but a work in progress. # Friday, March 29, 2013 ************************************ WHAT IF OUR BETTERS ARE OUR WORST? ************************************** The problem with a drug addict is not his addiction but his refusal to kick the habit. Likewise, our problem is not the absence of solutions but the rejection of all solutions, one of them being solidarity. * Next time you hear someone parrot the line “what we need is solutions,” you may classify him as a habitual and compulsive liar. * More often than not we are not deceived; we consent to be deceived. We are brought up to believe we are smart to cover up our status as dupes of idiots. * We believe our “betters” to be la crème de la crème when in fact they are la crème de la scum. # Saturday, March 30, 2013 *************************************** ON CROOKS AND LIARS ********************************* An honest man cannot solve the problems of a crook. Neither can he solve the problems of a nation run by crooks. Which may explain why our literature has failed to solve a single problem, prevent a single death, expose a single liar. * Between an unprofitable truth and profitable lies, most men will choose lies. This may explain why nationalist historians outnumber the others a thousand to one. * To write about crooks and liars means never to run out of things to say. * My ambition: to say things nobody says and everybody thinks. * Like the last Ottoman sultans who had a thousand concubines in their harems, the average propagandist has a thousand lies. You want proof? Think the opposite of what a speechifier says and you may see more sense there. #

Monday, March 25, 2013 ************************************* NOTES & COMMENTS ******************************* If both sides believe Truth to be on their side it must be a Big Lie. If both sides believe God to be on their side, it must be the Devil. In a historic context Homo sapiens may be defined as a being who cannot tell the difference between God and the Devil. * Q: Is it true that you are more critical of Armenians than of Turks? A: As an Armenian I criticize Armenians. I leave to Turkish critics the task of criticizing their own. * When tyrants silence writers, they invariably target the best. * The reason I am a pessimist or see the dark side of things is that I refuse to be moronized by the 1%. * In murder it may be “cherchez la femme.” But in war and crimes against humanity it’s cherchez moral and intellectual hoodlums parading as statesmen. * The 99% don’t make history; they only suffer it. # ***************************************** NOTHING IS WHAT IT SEEMS OR GENOCIDE BY OTHER MEANS ************************************************** Learning also means unlearning what you were taught as a child. Loving your people also means hating their enemies. The average dupe loves to brag about the lies he has been taught as a child and to ignore the evidence to the contrary. * We in Canada are brought up to brag about our multiculturalism and to forget that there was multiculturalism in the Ottoman Empire too; so much so that after 600 years of “brutal oppression” we produced literary giants like Baronian, Odian, Zabel Yessayan, and Zohrab. * Now then, name a single Canadian-born Armenian who is capable of writing a single decent line in his mother tongue. * I have heard smart Canadians define multiculturalism as “let them dance.” Obviously because they can read between the lines of their state propaganda better than outsiders like us. * In the obituary of the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, I read the following this morning: “He spent much of his adult life in the United States but resisted literary honors from a government he refused to accept.” In other words, he refused to be taken in by a policy of genocide by other means. * If you want to read more about the many ways the 1% has of misleading, deceiving, confusing, bamboozling, flimflamming, exploiting, and hoodwinking the 99% read MYTHOLOGIES by Roland Barthes. # IDIOTS *********************** Armenians who say there are divisions everywhere are simply parroting the words of an idiot whose sole aim is to explain and justify his own powers and privileges. * There are divisions even in the most advanced democracies? It is equally true that, unlike us, advanced democracies have a centralized power structure because they have been successful in overcoming their tribalism, namely the misconception that my political party, my church, my backyard and my chickens matter more than all others. * There are divisions everywhere? There are also rapists and murderers everywhere. Should we therefore accept them as inevitable facts of life and adopt a live and let live stance in the name of compassion, tolerance and patriotism? * There are divisions everywhere? There are also crooks and idiots everywhere. Does that mean we should allow them to be in charge of our collective destiny? # Wednesday, March 27, 2013 *************************************** MEMOS TO MYSELF ********************************** Political leaders prefer dupes to dissidents. * The plea of not guilty may be available to dupes but not to their deceivers. * Power corrupts, weakness castrates. * On the art of writing: the less art the better. * To write too much is not a sin; to discard too little is. #

Sunday, February 24, 2013 *************************************** TRUTH AND LIES ******************************** We love the truth and hate lies or so we say and like to believe. But truth is one and elusive and lies are real and without number. * The 99% don’t think. They let the 1% do the thinking for them. Until very recently the 99% didn’t even know they were 99%. * The 1% may know better but to know better is not the same as to know. The 1% is the most dangerous people on earth. * We are not survivors. We are dead men walking. So is all of mankind. * The real aim of justice is to legitimize injustice. Slavery and the torture of heretics were as legitimate undertakings as the massacre of innocent civilians was and continues to be today. * Our real enemies are not other people. Our real enemies are politicians beginning with our own. * Literature is powerless against propaganda. A ballpoint pen is not mightier than a tank. Writing is a waste of time. # Monday, February 25, 2013 ************************************************ ON BEING SMART AND PROGRESSIVE **************************************************** History is not written but rewritten, and rewritten history is a political tool. * Where politics enter, deceivers and dupes are sure to follow. * We like to believe we are smart and progressive and that it was these two attributes that allowed us to foresee the advent of Christianity as a universal religion. The question is: Why is it that we failed to foresee the Genocide? * Not only did we fail to foresee it, we also ignored the warnings of those who did. “Zohrab effendi is exaggerating,” some said; and “the Turks wouldn’t dare!” said others. * One is therefore compelled to conclude that being smart and progressive are not permanent but ephemeral conditions and worse: even the smart can be systematically moronized. * Now then, imagine if you can a political candidate running for office on a platform that says we are or have become a bunch of moronized dupes. My progressive instinct (whatever traces are left in me) tells me such a candidate will have a far better chance to be elected if he runs as a deceiver and treats his supporters as dupes by saying they are the opposite of what they really are– namely smart and progressive. # Tuesday, February 26, 2013 ************************************** HOMO IGNORAMUS ******************************** Turks are brought up to believe they are noble specimens of humanity and it is their patriotic duty to be proud of who they are. * Armenians are brought up to believe they are smart, progressive, civilized, compassionate and so on and so forth and an Armenian who is not proud of his identity must be classified as the lowest scum on earth. * More often than not conflicts and disagreements arise from the clash of two sets of lies as opposed to lies and the truth. The bigger the lies the more ferocious the disagreement. Hence Voltaire’s dictum: “Since it was a religious war there were no survivors.” * The biggest and most universal lie is to speak in the name of God (in theory) and to do the Devil’s work (in practice). * Religious and political leader may disagree on many important issues but they are unanimous in the necessity of brainwashing children and deceiving the masses. * More often than not our choice is not between a lie and the truth but between a lie and a bigger lie. # Wednesday, February 27, 2013 **************************************** THEORY AND PRACTICE ****************************************** God is love. Justice for all. All men are created equal. Generalities, abstractions, and theories are one thing, reality another. * The unspoken aim of all ideologies, belief systems, and political parties is to moronize the masses and turn them into dupes. * Justice favors the mighty. Justice is on the side of top dogs. Justice is with the more competent lawyer or dream team. Justice is for the 1%. Justice is anything but justice. Justice is full of holes. * Marxist theory contradicts Marxist reality. Communism is state capitalism. Or, in the words of a Polish slogan: "In capitalism man exploits man. In communism it’s the other way around." * To the 99% I say: Don’t be duped by the 1%; and it makes no difference if his first name is Serge or Raffi. # Thursday, February 28, 2013 ******************************************* THE MORE THINGS CHANGE… ******************************************* Nothing changes. Life continues to be one damn thing after another. Everybody tells a writer what to write and writers tell everybody what to think. Result: no one profits from the other’s advice. There you have it: a profile of our history and culture. * Our destiny as a nation has been shaped not by statesmen or philosopher-kings but by sultans, shahs, pashas, padishahs, czars, commissars, our own wheeler-dealers, and mass murderers like Abdulhamid II, Talaat and Stalin. The only variable in this equation has been the number of victims per year. * Will anything change in the foreseeable future? Can anyone see the distant glimmer of a light at the end of our endless tunnel? You say we have survived and we will continue to bugger on – or is it buggered on? You may call it survival if you are so inclined; I call it the death of ten thousand cuts. # Saturday, March 02, 2013 ************************************ ON PRIDE ************************ If proud Turks, Armenians, Americans, Germans, Greeks, Russians, Jews, and the rest of mankind were to spend five minutes reflecting on their own failings, blunders, and unsolved problems, they would have a thousand reasons to be humble and not a single reason to be proud. * If you were to say Russians could be proud of their literature, I would say, if we were to take a closer look at the lives of their great writers we would discover that most of them were persecuted, excommunicated, misunderstood, rejected, exiled to Siberia, murdered and on the whole treated the way most other nations, including Armenians, have treated their own great writers and thinkers beginning with Greeks and Socrates. * Why do nations treat their best and brightest abominably? The answer must be, because those in power are almost always hopeless mediocrities and moral midgets whose greatest enemy is excellence. To cover up their status as nonentities they preach, promote, and legitimize pride, that is to say, prejudice and contempt for others and ultimately hatred, war, and massacre. # Saturday, March 02, 2013 ******************************************** ON NATIONALISM ***************************** The first time I heard a Canadian say “We stole the land from the Indians fair and square,” and no one contradicted him, I remember to have thought: “So it is possible to be objective about one’s homeland without being accused of treason!” * One way to judge your degree of objectivity is to consider the distance that exists between your infantile illusions and adult convictions. The greater the distance, the more objective the judgment. * How did Urartu become Armenia? Was it marriage or rape? * An empire without plunder is like an omelet without eggs. * In the 19th century nationalism made perfect sense because it was an ideology that opposed imperialist oppression. * An infallible dupe is a contradiction in terms, and yet, there are so many of them! #Sunday, March 03, 2013 ************************************** HISTORY: WRITTEN AND UNWRITTEN **************************************************** When Madoff and his most important clients were identified as Jews, my first thought was: “They trusted Madoff; they did not trust Jesus.” * Has anyone ever written an autobiography in which the stress is not on what was done but on what was not done out of ignorance, stupidity, and fear? Sartre came close with his memoir, WORDS, whose final message is: literature is a useless passion and writers are dreamers who hate to give their infantile illusions. * What happened to Urartu? Until the appearance of the Armens, Urartu was an empire that successfully resisted one of the mightiest military powers in the history of mankind, namely the Assyrians next door. * When the Armens appeared from the West they were either welcomed or tolerated; and that, in retrospect, may have been the worst political blunder Urartu made. * For unlike Urartians, Armens were not warlike and, to compound the felony, their sense of solidarity was deficient. Again unlike Urartians, they were not a single entity with its own clearly defined ethos and character, but a collection of wandering tribes that either refused or could not give up their tribal ways. The rest, as they say, is history. * And that is the kind of unwritten history I would like to read – a text in which the emphasis is on blunders as opposed to victories, be they military, moral, or imaginary. A text moreover in which all facts would be as clearly seen and accessible as traffic signs. # Monday, March 04, 2013 ************************************** ENCOUNTER WITH A PARTISAN ****************************************** One of our elder statesmen came to see me once. During the course of our conversation I noticed two things: (a) he didn’t agree with my definition of words, and (b) he couldn’t stand being contradicted. At one pointed he even raised his voice and lost his temper reminding me of the Chinese dictum “He who loses temper has wrong on his side.” * I never saw him again. Shortly thereafter he died (may the Good Lord have mercy on his soul). * Who among us will dare to suggest that (a) in political action we have been consistently guided more by reason and knowledge and less by emotion and ignorance; and (b) emotion is a more reliable guide to action than objective judgment, knowledge, and understanding? # Tuesday, March 05, 2013 *************************************** FROM MY NOTEBOOKS ************************************* Dashiell Hammett on speechifiers: “The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.” * Syria today: what happens to a country whose leaders cease to think of themselves as public servants.” * Armenia today: Syria without the bloodshed. * A world without Turks: What a subject for an Armenian science fiction novel! * When God created angels, he also created devils, which may suggest God rates balance or equal opportunity above love, truth, mercy, and justice. * He who trusts liars cannot be an honest man. # Wednesday, March 06, 2013 ****************************************** AS I SEE IT ************************* Individually we have excelled in all fields of human endeavor; collectively we have developed the profile of useful idiots. For 600 years we were faithful servants to Turks and for 60 years little brothers to Russians. * To console ourselves we count the number of tribes, nations, and empires that have ceased to exist. * What matters in writing is to say what everybody thinks but refuses to say it. * No one knows all there is to know or, for that matter, knows enough to form an infallible opinion. * There is an old saying: “If you sit by the river long enough, you will see your enemy’s carcass float by.” The opposite is also true: the carcass may be yours and the fellow by the river your enemy. # Thursday, March 07, 2013 ************************************** FROM MY NOTEBOOKS ********************************* Our enemies come in all sizes and shapes but their favorite disguise is as Armenian political leaders. * At the beginning the Turks were few and we many… * I do my utmost to avoid my fellow Armenians. I can deal with them only in my writings which I do at a safe distance. * I became an atheist on the day I realized God was not on my side. * Of how many Armenians I could say, “To contradict is a temptation he cannot resist.” * Isolated voices of dissent have no effect on a brainwashed majority. * Madmen at the top outnumber madmen at the bottom. * We were defeated by our enemies, destroyed by our own leadership. # Friday, March 08, 2013 **************************************** PREDATORS **************************** With the blessing of a bishop, a regular paycheck from a boss or the financial support of a benefactor, any idiot can assert moral, intellectual, and patriotic superiority. There you have it: the profile of an average fund-raiser, Turcocentric ghazetaji, academic, speechifier and sermonizer whose main function is to brainwash children and to convince the masses that they never had it so good because they are in the best of hands. * In the 19th century we were “sheep without a shepherd” (Raffi). Today we are sheep at the mercy of wolves disguised as shepherds. * Our elites are the scum of the earth. # Saturday, March 23, 2013 ************************************* FROM MY NOTEBOOKS ********************************* After we were overrun by barbarians we became barbarians. Some day we may be civilized. But that is only a hope and hope is not a policy. * To be an authentic Armenian means to be constantly engaged in shedding the impurities of alien cultures. * To paraphrase a Mexican saying: “Armenians: so close to Turkey, so far away from God. * “Because we hate to say we don’t know and we don’t understand, we have created gods, angels, devils, and life after death –a veritable Tower of Babel without foundations. * I don’t write for my friends; I write against my enemies beginning with myself. * People tend to be more fanatical when they are wrong. One could go further and say, fanatics are wrong even when they are right. # Sunday, March 10, 2013 **************************************** QUESTION ************************* The average patriotic Armenian sees himself through the eyes of our historians, speechifiers, and sermonizers. I see myself as a member of a perennially divided nation that has suffered a long series of defeats – some of them catastrophic – and continues to be at the mercy of corrupt and incompetent leaders who appear to be more interested in their own powers and privileges than in the welfare of the people. * Now then, gentle reader, tell me who is closer to reality? Who is more objective? Whose judgment is more to be trusted? Finally, who is more patriotic -- the dupe who believes everything he is told or the other, who thinks twice before saying “Yes, sir!” to someone whose number one concern is number one? # Monday, March 11, 2013 *************************************** AS I SEE IT *************************** To be objective means to ask: What if what others (including our enemies) think of us has more merit than what we think of ourselves? * “Do not speak in the hearing of a fool, for he will despise the wisdom of your words.” PROVERBS, 23:9 * How could I have said or done that? Happy is the man who doesn’t ask that question at least once every day. * The longer I live the greater the distance between my countrymen and myself. * After the break-up of the Soviet Union, we are told, over a million Russians emigrated. Which raises the question: Is Armenia on its way to becoming a no-man’s land? # Tuesday, March 12, 2013 ************************************* SLAVES ******************* A thousand years of subservience to bloodthirsty tyrants has taught us to value pilaf and shish-kebab above ideas. We even have a popular saying to that effect that has been quoted to me on several occasions by my critics: “You cannot cook pilaf with words.” * If you say, “What choice did we have?” I will invite you to reflect on the following words of William Pitt: “Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.” The creed of slaves! Some words are worth repeating even when they cannot produce a single spoonful of pilaf. * Mankind may be divided into masters and slaves and the ambition of every slave is to be a master. This has been said before but it bears repeating. Moral superiority is a fiction of our collective imagination. * An empty bag cannot stand upright. Likewise, an empty brain cannot be right. # Wednesday, March 13, 2013 **************************************** NOTES & COMMENTS ********************************* Good laws are useless in a country of bad judges. * The truth is never in the lines but between the lines – unseen, unread, ignored. * Lies come in all sizes and shapes – small, white, big… and worst of all, propaganda. * Disagreements are almost always between dupes and opponents of propaganda. * Armenians and Turks agree on nothing because they continue to trust their propagandists more than their dissidents. * We are divided because we see all our hidden failings in the opposition. * I judge my success by my degree of popularity: the less popular I am, the better I feel. * We are not what we could have been. After centuries of subservience we are not even the shadows of what we could have been. # Thursday, March 14, 2013 **************************************** WORTH REMEMBERING ******************************** Two things that we forget at our own peril: (one) a belief system can be as misleading as a big lie; and (two) where there are sheep there will be wolves. * To have all the answers is a luxury only dupes and fanatics (but I repeat myself) can afford. * Our understanding of history is never finished, only interrupted. * There is a good reason why we prefer to speak more about the past and less about the present. We can blame the past on our enemies… # Saturday, March 23, 2013 *********************************** PROBLEMS ******************************************** The source of all our problems, too much history – and bad history at that. * Brainwashed dupes are blind to contradictions. They would be fully justified in pleading not guilty by reason of insanity. * The road to hell is paved with propaganda. * Seeing the invisible and questioning the infallible – that indeed is the aim of literature. * Armenia’s destiny is now in the hands of thieves, liars, and brown-nosers. In short, nothing has changed and it’s business as usual. # Saturday, March 23, 2013 ************************************* SATANIC RELIGIONS ******************************* When Salman Rushdie published his SATANIC VERSES many intellectuals, diplomats and politicians in the West sided with the imams who issued a fatwa (or contract) on him on the grounds that he was guilty of insulting “a great religion.” But there is no such thing as “a great religion.” It is a mistake to judge the magnitude of a religion by the number of its adherents or dupes. One could go further and say the greater the religion the greater the number of its victims, or crimes against humanity, or death of innocent civilians. Think of what’s happening today in Syria. And consider the number of victims of illegal abortions and AIDs in South America and Africa all because the Catholic Church refuses to sanction the use of condoms and legal abortions. # Saturday, March 23, 2013 ************************************* DANGEROUS WORDS ******************************** The two most dangerous words in the world: “I believe.” * Like most people I too was brought up to respect men of faith. I now view them as potential criminals without a conscience. * As a child I too subscribed to many fallacies one of them being all Armenians to be my friends. * Half-truths can be as dangerous as big lies. * Any one who claims to have found the truth is an enemy of mankind. * Once upon a time, for every faithful member of the Communist Party in Soviet Armenia, there was a “chic Bolshevik” in America who believed Russians to be our big brothers. Speaking of such a specimen a friend once said to me: “I don’t blame him. He was sincere in his beliefs.” I know now that to be sincere in one’s beliefs is the same as pleading not guilty by reason of insanity. * If you say “I know many men of faith who have harmed no one,” I say, when we speak of faith and belief systems in a historic context, we mean not the sheep but the wolves; we mean not the meek and the humble who believe what they are told but the policy-makers. * In a historic context the meek and the humble might as well be anonymous, irrelevant, and marginalized to the point of disappearance. # Monday, March 18, 2013 ************************************** A BILLION CATHOLICS ************************************ Q: There are a billion Catholics in the world, and yet you expect me to believe they are all wrong and you are right? A: Why not? There are a billion Muslims in the world and you expect me to believe they are all wrong. Q: You may have a point there… A: Listen, when it comes to belief systems, numbers are meaningless. All religions are minority religions. The overwhelming majority of mankind is neither Catholic nor Muslim but Hindu, Buddhist, atheist, agnostic, Mormon, and so on. Q: But you are against all of them, right? A: When it comes to belief systems I say to each his own. What I am really against is brainwashing children. I will go further and say I consider brainwashing children if not a crime against humanity than the source of intolerance and countless wars and massacres. # Tuesday, March 19, 2013 **************************************** GREAT IDEAS **************************** Great ideas are conceived by great men, implemented by nameless mediocrities, and perverted by faceless nonentities. That may explain why if a belief system preaches love it ends up practicing hatred; and if it preaches communism it ends up practicing state capitalism. * Sooner or later all belief systems and ideologies degenerate to the point of becoming their own contradictions because where power enters, greed is sure to follow; and when greed becomes the driving force nothing good survives. * Martin Luther was right when he said you don’t need the Pope to go to heaven; all you need is a copy of the Bible. But he was wrong when he failed to predict the advent of televangelists. * And speaking of bloodsuckers: Republicans tell us the 1% are job creators even when recent history tells us they are job killers; and if they create jobs they are not motivated by altruism but by self-interest, that is to say, greed, and where greed enters catastrophe is sure to follow. * I therefore feel justified in saying, if you ever come up with a great idea, mankind maybe better off if you keep it to yourself. # Wednesday, March 20, 2013 ************************************ FOR THE RECORD ****************************** Q: Let me begin by quoting some of your critics. Are you a denialist? A: No! Q: A self-hating Armenian? A: I can’t say I am particularly fond of myself, no. Q: Why not? A: Because like most Armenians I allowed myself to be moronized by morons. Q: Do you hate Armenians? A: Only the shish-kebab and pilaf variants, Turcocentric ghazetajis and their dupes. Q: Turcocentrism: could you define the word for us, please? A: The misconception that all our problems begin and end with Turks. Q: Isn’t the recognition of the Genocide a central issue? A: So is the responsibility of our leadership that promised freedom and our historic lands and delivered the hell of massacres followed by dispersion, division, alienation, and assimilation or bloodless slow-motion genocide. It seems to me, it is dishonest to emphasize their responsibility and cover up our own. Q: How do you explain our survival? A: You call it survival; I call it the death of a thousand self-inflicted cuts. Q: So far you have said nothing positive. A: The only positive I can think of is our literature. Notwithstanding the fact that our ablest writers were either systematically slaughtered or silenced for refusing to moronize the people by recycling the propaganda of foreign and domestic apes, they carried on. They are our greatest heroes and our only hope. # Thursday, March 21, 2013 ***************************************** ON GOLDEN AGES ****************************** The trouble with golden ages is that they don’t last and they are not even golden. This is as true of the Greek Golden Age (5th century BC) as it is of our own (5th century AD). As for the American Golden Age: they don’t have one. Their brief history may be divided into two distinct periods: barbarism and neo-barbarism -- (I am now paraphrasing better men than myself). * Both Socrates and Dostoevsky were condemned to death for exercising their fundamental human right of free speech. The execution of Socrates was carried out; Dostoevsky’s wasn’t because seconds before the execution the Czar sent a messenger with a pardon. The experience so traumatized Dostoevsky that he became more Czarist than the Czar. In today’s parlance, he was born again as a member of the Tea Party. * As for our treatment of our own writers: it has been more Ottoman and Stalinist than Armenian. Like the rest of mankind we too appear to be infatuated with our own limitations, prejudices, and ignorance. * American writers are seldom silenced by repressive administrations; they prefer to silence themselves by committing suicide or becoming alcoholics or drug addicts. # Friday, March 22, 2013 ************************************** WAR OF WORDS ******************************** Turcocentrism is a recent misconception or fallacy. It is absent in the works of Baronian and Odian, and more recently in Arlen and Saroyan. There is even a key passage in Saroyan where he states we should feel sorry for Turks. * Turcocentrism is less an ideology and more a tool of propaganda whose ultimate aim is to convince dupes there is nothing wrong with us because we are role models of what a nation should be – united against all enemies foreign and domestic and immune to corruption, therefore morally superior. It further states, whatever problems we have we must ascribe to Turks. If it weren’t for Turks we would now be living in our own Eden happily ever after. * To combat this propaganda line Turks have come up with their own whose aim is to convince their dupes that like all truly civilized and progressive people Turks are against violations of fundamental human rights, except when they do the violating; and they have always been against murdering defenceless civilians except when they do the murdering. # Saturday, March 23, 2013 ************************************** DEAD OR ALIVE? ************************************ The King is dead. Long live the King. Stalin is dead but Stalinists continue to rule. Jesus was crucified but supporters of crucifixion are very much alive. They may no longer use trees, hammers and nails but they exist as surely as racists in post-Civil War America. * Nothing bad ever dies. Moral progress is an illusion. There is no such thing as collective enlightenment. Instead of a single sultan we now have many mini-sultans, and we cannot say “Forgive them, Lord, for they don’t know what they are doing,” because they are too damn smart to plead not guilty by reason of ignorance. #