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Sunday, September 02, 2012
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SEMANTICS
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Freedom to a bully means
the freedom to bully the weak and defenseless.
Freedom to a racist means
the freedom to view a fraction of his fellow men
as inferior and himself as superior.
To a capitalist it means the freedom to exploit.
To a tyrant it means the freedom
to oppress, enslave, and when necessary, to slaughter.
*
Until very recently, in my own lifetime as a matter of fact,
“Anglo-Saxon democracy” in the Southern States
freedom meant classifying “Jews, Catholics, and niggers”
as alien, hostile, and undesirable minorities,
that is to say, the scum of the earth.
*
It is not enough to say what must be said;
you must also be careful to say it to the right person.
In that sense, all our writers have been preaching
to the deaf, dumb, and stupid.
*
Freedom is not the only word open to abuse however.
All important words – truth, justice, equality, objectivity…
among many others – can be easily perverted
to mean the opposite of what they really mean.
To a nationalist historian, objectivity means
to cover up the negative and to emphasize the positive,
and if there are no positives, to invent them.
*
To subscribe to an ideology or belief system means
to abdicate one’s common sense and reason,
and to accept a Big Lie as the Truth.
Patriotism in our context means love of one’s country
and hatred of one’s fellow countrymen beginning with those
who dare to disagree with us.
*
And speaking of Catholics:
An Irish priest to a little schoolgirl:
“Tell me, daughter, what do you want to be when you grow up?”
“A prostitute.”
“What’s that you said?”
“I said a prostitute, Father.”
“Thank God for that. I thought you said a Protestant.”
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Monday, September 03, 2012
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SEMANTICS (II)
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Speaking of words and their meanings:
When we speak of nationalism
what we really mean is tribalism.
In our context freedom means only the freedom
to choose a foreign master.
Patriotism means loyalty to a gang of partisans
and “mi kich pogh” panchoonies.
And what is our anti-Americanism
if not disguised pro-Bolshevism?
*
When an Armenian says to another Armenian
“I disagree with you,” what he really means is
my brainwashers disagree with your brainwashers.
Or, it is not we who disagree
but our bosses and bishops.
Which may suggest,
even our disagreements are not our own;
or to paraphrase Zarian,
even our trash has not been picked up from our own backyard.
*
I know I am on the right path
when what I think today
stands in direct contradiction
to what I was brought up to believe yesterday.
*
Zohrab is right: Subservience corrupts everything it touches,
including the noblest virtues.
When near in the end of his life
Charents dared to speak of solidarity
he was careful to hide his message in a poem so cunningly
that only his most loyal friends could locate it, and – you guessed it –
it was one of them who betrayed him to the authorities.
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Tuesday, September 04, 2012
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PROPAGANDA AND DISSENT
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Don’t think of me as someone who knows better.
Think of me as someone who provides a perspective
that contradicts a propaganda line.
*
How to recognize a propaganda line?
Easy! A propaganda line emanates from a power structure
and all power structures rely on a class of individuals
who make a more or less comfortable living
by misleading the people:
schoolteachers, priests, sermonizers, speechifiers, and the press.
Another peculiarity of propaganda is that
there will invariably be another propaganda line
that contradicts it; and by contradiction
I mean not only abstractions but facts.
(Genocide? What genocide? It never happened.
It’s a fiction of our imagination.)
*
All power structures have the means to silence dissent.
By contrast dissent is powerless as well as solitary and unprofitable.
Consider the case of our own dissenters.
Most if not all of them were silenced, starved, ostracized,
betrayed to the authorities or murdered in cold blood.
*
The Romans had a legal principle that said
the surest way of identifying the guilty party is by asking
“Who benefits by the crime?”
Dissent is not and cannot be a crime
(though more often than not it is treated as a capital offense)
because there are no beneficiaries, only losers – namely,
the dupes of propaganda and the dissenters themselves.
*
In America today there are two propaganda lines
that contradict each other,
and there are dissenters who say
it is not politicians that control events but corporations.
*
In our own Homeland and Diaspora
there is a propaganda line that says
we never had it so good
because we are in the best of hands,
and there are dissenters who say
our power structures are rotten
and we are experiencing not one
but two self-inflicted genocides:
assimilation in the Diaspora
and exodus in the Homeland.
*
Who is right and who wrong?
Up to you to decide.
And there you have another difference
between propaganda and dissent:
dissent gives you a choice.
Propaganda does not.
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Wednesday, September 05, 2012
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BENEFUCKTORS
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I don't trust the judgment of the powerful and the rich.
The greater the wealth, the emptier the suit.
In an environment where benefactors are kings,
only brown-nosers prosper.
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