notes/comments

Sunday, July 31, 2011
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ON INFALLIBILITY
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As the number of blunders goes up,
so do assertions of infallibility.
*
The greatest mistake is to think we are right
and those who disagree with us wrong.
*
Prove an infallible man wrong
and make an enemy for life.
*
Infallible men don’t learn
because they are in the business of teaching.
*
On the Genocide issue
Americans see Turks as reflections of themselves
and Armenians as white niggers.
*
Our political and religious leaders
praise solidarity with words
and bury it with actions.
*
Nothing can be transparently more dishonest
than to expose the crimes of our enemies
and to cover up our own blunders.
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One of the most important functions
of all educational systems is to identify the enemy.
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What holds a nation together
is the threatening presence of the enemy.
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If the enemy dies,
so does the glue that holds the nation together.
*
The unspoken aim of all organized religions and ideologies
is to legitimize double-talk:
to say one thing and do the opposite.
*
I don’t write for the enjoyment of the reader.
Neither do I write to flatter.
I write to point out the fact that
no one is infallible,
we all make mistakes,
and the beginning of all wisdom is acknowledging them.
#
Monday, August 01, 2011
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ON COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS
& FALLACIES
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Readers who know nothing about me
assume just because I criticize Turks
I must be pro-Armenian; or, again,
just because I criticize Armenians
I must be pro-Turkish.
These readers appear to live
in a one-dimensional either/or universe
in which the dominant colors are black and white.
It never even occurs to them that
criticism may be motivated
more by an objective assessment of facts
and less by means of nationalist bias.
*
If you tell me you know and understand
all you need to know and understand,
you give me no choice but to conclude that
your needs must be extremely narrow.
If you tell me reality is an open book to you,
you will corner me into saying
that may be because you read nothing but comic books.
There are more shadows than light in life,
and more shades of gray than black and white.
*
Whenever a historian asserts
he has figured out the past and how it works,
he is immediately attacked by other historians
as well as philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists,
and theologians who inform him in no uncertain terms
that his facts are all wrong,
his assumptions unjustified,
and his conclusions misguided.
*
For more on this subject, see Arnold J. Toynbee’s RECONSIDERATIONS,
volume xii of his STUDY OF HISTORY.
See also the critical fire aimed at Oswald Spengler
by, among others, Toynbee himself in the opus cited above.
*
To my uninformed readers, may I add that
Spengler and Toynbee are two of the greatest historians
of the past century.
May I also add that public opinion is shaped
less by great historians and more
by politicians, propagandists, and ghazetajis
who operate on the assumption that
a nation’s own version of its past is the only true one.
#
Tuesday, August 02, 2011
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A TURKISH FRIEND
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Some Turks appear to be obsessed
with what they did to Armenians during World War I
as surely as some Armenians are.
They are Armenocentric to the same degree
that some Armenians are Turcocentric.
*
I have a Turkish friend
(he may no longer consider me a friend, but I do)
who has written a big book –
the biggest I know on the subject – in which
he attempts to prove that Armenians have
not only invented a genocide and
believed in it for almost a century
but they have also somehow succeeded in convincing
an important fraction of the civilized world,
including one of the greatest historians of all time
and several Nobel-Prize winners
(among them a Turkish one).
*
This friend of mine believes Talaat
was the best friend Armenians had;
and Kemal was a great statesman
who was never wrong (in his own words:
“he was right 99% of the time”).
*
By contrast, I was brought up to believe
Talaat was to Armenians what Hitler was to Jews.
All wrong! my Turkish friend is eager to inform me.
The only reason Talaat did what he did
is that Armenians returned his friendship
by trying to assassinate him.
But since (I assume) he could not arrest the perpetrators,
he took it out on defenseless civilians.
If attempted assassination were sufficient ground for genocide,
we would have genocides as frequently as soups du jour.
*
As for Kemal being a universally admired statesman
about whom even western historians have written
voluminous biographies:
my good friend may not be aware of the fact that
western historians have also written voluminous biographies
of Hitler and Stalin.
*
To my Turkish friends I say,
if I continue to call you a friend it’s because
(one) I don’t consider disagreement sufficient ground for divorce;
(two) I believe with Gandhi that no man is beyond redemption; and
(three) convictions, even belief systems,
are subject to error and change.
So that I for one will not be surprised in the least
if we become friends once more.
#
Wednesday, August 03, 2011
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FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
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Them and us is a misleading classification
because there is a great deal of us in them
and vice versa.
*
To say that a question is unanswerable
is also an answer.
*
To convert to a religion or ideology
is to legitimize one’s status as a dupe.
*
The rich defend their privileges
with the same intensity as the starving search for food.
*
The difference between being infallible and 99% right
is about the same as the difference
between charity and a loan for 99 years.
#