problems

Thursday, March 27, 2008
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ON PROPAGANDA
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There is no such thing as an original propaganda line. All propaganda is derivative. All propaganda is not only a lie, but also a big lie, and not just a big lie but also a plagiarized lie. If propaganda works it’s because it flatters the ego, and vanity, it has been said, is an omnivorous as well as a ravenous monster. To the humiliated and degraded, propaganda says, “You are God’s chosen people.” To the scum of the earth, it says, “You belong to a superior race.” To the dumb, it says, “You are smart, and maybe even smarter than anyone else!” (“It takes seven Jews to fool an Armenian”). That may explain why our bosses, bishops, and benefactors are more popular than our intellectuals. In their effort to understand and explain reality, intellectuals are more interested in exposing contradictions than in flattering egos – contradictions that exist between the lies of propaganda and reality; contradictions between what our speechifiers and sermonizers tell us (“we are progressive, civilized, and smart”) and the popular phrase “mart bidi ch’ellank!”
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Friday, March 28, 2008
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AS I SEE IT
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“To serve is to rule.” All other forms of rule lead to oppression.
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In the eyes of our leadership, our greatest enemies are neither the Turks nor the Azeris, but the Armenian who thinks for himself.
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Nothing could be more naïve than to think if you read only Armenian sources, you can form a more or less balanced view of our history, culture, and identity, on the grounds that no one knows and understands Armenians better than an Armenian. My own impression is that when Armenian scholars write or speak publicly about Armenians, they stress only half of what they know and cover up or ignore the other half. But then, this is true not only of Armenians but also of all nations. Americans are known for their pragmatism and energy, Russians for their capacity to suffer, the French for their love of argument, the English for their cool, and the Italians for their excessive love of la dolce vita and bella figura. No nation is known for its love of truth.
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Freud once said that the aim of analysis is to replace hysterical misery with common unhappiness. If what I say depresses you, it may be because I deal with reality, and our reality is not exactly an invitation to joy.
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The saying “It takes seven Jews to fool an Armenian,” is to me less a compliment and more an insult, because its hidden message is a warning to all those who contemplate dealing with an Armenian in the marketplace to keep their eyes open or even to count their fingers after shaking hands with an Armenian.
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Speaking of identity: whenever I identify myself as an Armenian to a fellow Armenian, I immediately sense a note of caution in his body language, as if I were about to make unreasonable demands on him and force him to say, “Sorry, what you are asking me to do is against the law.”
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Saturday, March 29, 2008
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THE ROOT OF OUR PROBLEMS
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Our ghazetajis, sermonizers, and speechifiers have combined to create an atmosphere in which even the hint of dissent is equated with anti-Armenianism.
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In the eyes of some readers I seem to have developed a quality peculiarly unattractive in an Armenian, namely, an obstinate, perhaps even an obsessive, need to see not the best but the worst in us.
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Whenever I am urged to be more positive in my approach to our affairs, I immediately raise the question: To what extent our weakness for the positive has contributed to our status as victims? Consider our genocide as a case in point. To what extent the optimism of our revolutionaries and their blind faith in the verbal commitments of the Great Powers were contributing factors to the final catastrophe? To what extent our blind faith in the Kremlin contributed to our Soviet nightmare? To what extent our own chauvinist crapola (“we are smart, we are progressive, we are civilized”) contributes to our arrogance, dogmatism, intolerance, authoritarianism, divisiveness, fragmentation, and ultimately to our self-inflicted “white massacre”? It seems to me what we need is not a more positive approach to our affairs but the exact opposite.
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Naregatsi, our Dante and Shakespeare combined, did not see the best but the worst in himself, and by extension, in his fellow men. I suspect our need for optimism, far from being a solution, is at the very root of our problems.
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