Thursday, January 10, 2013 **************************************** SURVIVORS ************************ To understand history you must first understand the history of historians and their criteria for selecting facts. * The Ottoman Empire on the eve of its collapse: a regime of degenerate sultans, ruthless bloodthirsty buggers clinging to power by massacring innocent civilians by the thousand. Can you imagine anything more repulsive? – except perhaps a regime of former KGB agents. * It is to be noted that sultans were both political as well as religious leaders -- the equivalent of emperors and popes. My question is: why would a religious leader need a harem of a thousand concubines most of them, like himself, the offspring of “infidel dogs"? * The hardest thing in the world: to be an Armenian without making enemies. The easiest: to make enemies – enemies who have no interest in understanding what you are saying and why you are saying it. What they hate more than anything else, it seems, is your right to say what you think. * We fool ourselves when we say we are survivors. The real survivors are the Sultan and Stalin. # Friday, January 11, 2013 ************************************ NATIONAL HONOR ******************************* When was the last time any one of our former KGB agents in the Homeland and merchants in the Diaspora dared to utter the words “national honor”? * Thomas Jefferson: “Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.” * Now listen to our Raffi saying the same thing with fewer words: “Merchants are men without a country. Profit is their only homeland.” * Instead of Goya Aivazovsky; and instead of Shostakovich, Khachatourian. * Goethe: “Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action.” * If I am a second-rater it may be because our first-raters have been systematically silenced by KGB agents and merchants. Armenian literature has been an endless war on two friends. * They don’t like what I say because I don’t write what they think. They think? Strike that. Make it, “they think they think.” * They resent me because I refuse to behave like their unpaid secretary taking down their unspoken words. * An American on America, a Russian on Russia, a German on Germany: Don’t expect to hear the truth unless of course they are dissidents: Thoreau, Solzhenitsyn, Thomas Mann. # Saturday, January 12, 2013 ************************************ FASCISTS ******************** When Hitler lost World War II he blamed it on the German people. That’s the way it is with all fascists – they never make mistakes. * When Romney lost the election he at no time blamed it on his ineptitude and verbal blunders. * To this day our own revolutionaries expect us to believe their operation was a success even if the patient died. * Turks worship Kemal and they have every right to: after degenerate sultans any half-assed boozer and fornicator would be seen as a great statesman worthy of universal adulation. * The common language of all political leaders is the same – propaganda, based on the assumption that the masses are so dumb that they will believe anything they are told. * To this day Jews believe they are the Chosen; Brits believe they were born to civilize the rest of the world; and Armenians believe they are smart. * Speaking for myself: I believe only idiots fall for a propaganda line that flatters their vanity. On the day this is understood, mankind will be born again. #