memo to turks

Thursday, August 25, 2011
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SUMMING UP
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The ideal dupe is he
who doesn’t believe he is one.
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The true believer is he
who believes anyone who doesn’t share his belief system
is the dupe of a heresy.
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Mankind is divided between deceivers and their dupes.
As for the silent majority:
they might as well be an absent factor.
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If we judge an idea by its history,
we shall have no choice but to assert
belief systems are the source of all evil.
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“Since it was a religious war,
there were no survivors.”
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If you think religious wars
are a thing of the past, think again.
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Think again!
A useless, not to say, an absurd suggestion
to a believer who by believing
he declares his inability to think for himself
and must therefore rely on someone else’s thinking – no,
not thinking but believing,
which can also be defined as “not thinking.”
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And if you believe the age of prophets,
like the age of religious wars
belongs to the irrevocable past,
I for one will not be surprised to learn that
in the eyes of some historians
the 20th century is already known
as the century of false prophets –
Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, Kemal….
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“Believe those who are seeking the truth.
Doubt those who find it.”
Even better:
Believe only those who are engaged in rejecting lies.
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Friday, August 26, 2011
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WORDS
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We are told
“The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
We are told
to judge a tree by its fruit,
a man by his actions,
and an idea by its history.
What about religion?
If religion is such a good thing
why has it killed and continues to kill so many people?
Who will believe you if you say
“my religion is the only true one;
all others are heresies?
Not even your co-religionists.
Consider the case of Catholics and Protestants,
Shias and Sunnis, and generally speaking,
all orthodoxies and heresies.
But contradictions don’t end there.
In the Old Testament we are told
“Thou shalt not kill.”
But elsewhere God commands His Chosen People
to slaughter not only their enemies
but also their cattle.
Are we to believe even God contradicts Himself?
Or is it only when He uses words?
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Saturday, August 27, 2011
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MEMO TO MY TURKISH READERS
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Do you really think
you can run away from justice, like Talaat?
Surely you can’t expect us to believe
that your sources are more authentic
than Pamuk’s, Akcam’s, and countless other
western historians among them Turcophiles like
Arnold J. Toynbee and Bernard Lewis.
Last but not least,
you can’t be serious when you dare to suggest
you know better than Kemal
who at no time denied the reality of large-scale atrocities
and the only reason he didn’t use the word “genocide”
is that it had not yet been coined.
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