Saturday, March 15, 2008

notes/comments

Thursday, March 13, 2008
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FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
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One can always say the majority is on my side in a community where the majority is either silent or alienated.
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Nationalist history is to history what military music is to music.
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Being critical of our bosses, bishops, and benefactors is like conducting a war on three fronts. I don’t have a chance.
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A popular Armenian writer is first and foremost a cover-up artist.
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Two occurrences that convinced me to take myself seriously: (one) a long letter by one of our eminent academics to an odar editor saying I am unreliable, untrustworthy, and uninformed; and (two) a unanimous decision by our editors to reject everything I write.
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Men of power prefer slimy brown-nosers to honest men. In the words of Julius Caesar: “If bandits and cut-throats support me, I will call them friends.”
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OVERHEARD
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What’s the difference between an Armenian wedding and an Armenian funeral? One less loudmouth.
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“After my grandfather was beheaded by the Turks, he made me promise to hate them until I die.”
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Asked if he experiences shortness of breath when he exercises, the 82-year old John Mortimer, who loves his morning drink and cigar, is quoted as having said: “How should I know? I never exercise.”
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Friday, March 14, 2008
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REFLECTIONS ON PROPAGANDA
AND THE PRESENT SITUATION IN THE HOMELAND
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When it comes to someone else’s propaganda, we have 20/20 vision; but when it comes to our own, we pretend to be deaf, blind, and stupid.
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What an insider knows and what the average citizen thinks he knows may be as different as black and white. Why are we surprised if the average Turk does not know as much as Pamuk and Akcam do?
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Propaganda: when insiders conspire to manipulate the people with lies.
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We all know that Gomidas Vartabed was a saintly musician who, as far as is known, never harmed a soul. How many of us know that he operated in a hostile environment in both Etchmiadzin and Istanbul, and that the very same individuals who should have supported him, did their utmost to obstruct his path? Was his breakdown, from which he never recovered, a sudden reaction to the massacres or the last straw that broke the camel’s back?
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We are brought up to be proud of ourselves even when – or is it, especially when –we have little or nothing to brag about. In that respect, animals are superior to men. You will never hear spiders and scorpions bragging about surviving dinosaurs and saber-toothed tigers.
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A writer must be prepared to disappoint his readers. The more readers he disappoints the closer to the truth he gets. The alternative is pandering to their narcissism.
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When you don’t agree with a self-assessed smart Armenian, he will call you a fool, an idiot, and worse: an anti-Armenian and a pro-Turkish denialist s.o.b. I speak from experience. If your opponents call you an s.o.b. and make it abundantly clear that you will make them happy on the day you drop dead, you can be sure of one thing: you have hit paydirt.
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If you can’t come to terms with angels, you may have to deal with devils. One could say that we were victimized in the Ottoman Empire because we ignored the warnings of Raffi, Baronian, Odian, and Voskanian.
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If Churchill were alive today, he would sum up the present situation in the Homeland thus: “Kocharian is riding a tiger, and the tiger is getting hungry.”
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A headline in our paper today reads: “A danger to Canadian democracy: Prime minister’s concentration of power could lead to abuses, Gomery says.” We don’t have that problem because “Armenian democracy” might as well be an oxymoron.
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Saturday, March 15, 2008
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ON RECENT DEVELOPMENTS
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What we have been witnessing since March 1 is nothing short of a mass conversion. Everyone it seems is for democracy, free speech, and honest elections (did we ever have one in the Diaspora?)
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I remember a very brief conversation I once had with one of our bosses, who had expressed his affection for me because I had written about the double-talk of a rival boss. Asked why he supported a corrupt leader like Levon Corleone (first o with an umlaut), he replied: “If we don’t support him, he will not let us help the people.” “You mean he is so evil that he would rather see his people suffer and starve rather than…” I should have guessed. He didn’t let me finish. He lost his composure and said something to the effect that he thought this was going to be a friendly chat rather than a third degree.
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As for our dime-a-dozen Turcocentric pundits: they have suddenly discovered they have more than one set of barbarians to deal with.
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As far as I know, no one wants to have anyone’s human rights violated, but everyone comes up with excellent reasons why sometimes it is necessary…in the name of patriotism…in the interest of the people…for the sake of certain noble principles…and so on and so forth. Translated into everyday parlance, all these circumlocutions stand for one thing: in our environment, the ego is king.
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Top dogs, underdogs, corruption, stupidity, greed, subservience, propaganda, riots…they are what they are regardless of nationality, and they are to be found everywhere. If you accept this simple fact and keep it in mind, a great many incomprehensible things become comprehensible. As for patriotism: it’s amazing the amount of crap that is dished out in its name.
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As recent events in Lhasa may suggest, even Buddhists, who believe the world is an illusion, riot, and their rioting is no illusion.
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