Saturday, December 22, 2012 ***************************************** ON SUBSERVIENCE… AMONG OTHER THINGS. ************************************* Subservience is subservience no matter how you slice it. It makes no difference whether you are subservient to a Turk, Russian, or any one of our bosses, bishops, or benefactors. The free Armenian who is neither alienated nor assimilated is an absurdity, he doesn’t exist, he is a fiction of someone fertile imagination. An Armenian needs his subservience the way others need their freedom. * To be a good Armenian means to recycle the propaganda line of a dogmatic ideology, orthodoxy or mafia even when the propaganda line happens to be no better than verbal vomit. * “This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” translated into Armenian reads: “This is the beginning of a lifelong feud.” * To be a Turk to Turks: that’s the secret ambition of Armenians who are proud to identify themselves as patriotic Armenians. * As far as I know no Armenian poet has ever written a poem titled “To my sweet fellow Armenians.” # Friday, December 21, 2012 ************************************* THE UGLY ARMENIAN *********************************** If you are an Armenian from the Middle East don’t read what follows. It may not be flattering to your colossal ego. * An Armenian from the Middle East knows all there is to know about Armenians, Turks, Jews, Arabs, and Americans. What he doesn’t know can’t be worth knowing. He is born to explain, not to understand. As a result, on the day he dies he will be as ignorant as on the day he was born. * I have no doubt whatever in my mind there are Armenians from the Middle East who know their limitations but I have yet to meet one. * One difference between Armenians and Americans is that Americans have published a best-selling book titled THE UGLY AMERICAN. * Between a general who is caught in adultery and another who burns down and levels towns and villages in distant places, I am all for dedicating a monument in a city park to the fornicator. * Say yes or no but always leave some room for the unknown and the unknowable because that’s God’s dwelling place. * Propaganda flatters, therefore it is wrong. As yanks are fond of saying after delivering a cliché, “That’s my philosophy.” * Dogmatic assertions can’t be right because they demand not only agreement but also subservience. * At the turn of the last century in the Ottoman Empire we were paranoids in reverse – we saw friends everywhere but didn’t see the mortal enemy next door. # Saturday, December 22, 2012 ******************************************* WHY I AM AGAINST PATRIOTISM ******************************************* First and foremost because some of the worst crimes against humanity were committed in the name of patriotism. * Patriotism means to place more value on a fraction of mankind than on mankind as a whole. * To be a patriot means to trust the judgment and integrity of politicians, that is to say, individuals that history has exposed again and against as habitual and compulsive liars. * To trust habitual and compulsive liars means to abdicate not only one’s responsibility but also logic, common sense and decency. That is to say, to be not human but subhuman – a dupe, a vessel of lies and prejudices whose aim is not to enhance life but death. * To be a patriot means to admit our understanding of reality is so limited and defective that we need others to tell us what to think and understand even when these others are corrupt and incompetent, that is to say, no better than the rest of us. * Patriotism can’t be right if only because everybody says my patriotism is better than yours and no one has ever said my patriotism is second class but yours is first class. * Speaking as an Armenian I could go on and say I have 1,500,000 more reasons but I doubt very much if that will convince any one of our patriots to give up his patriotism. It may even have the opposite effect. #