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#1 ara baliozian

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Posted 06 August 2001 - 09:50 AM

ON CRITICISM
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"There are two kinds of criticism," I read in one of our weeklies today: "criticism which is an end in itself, and serious criticism which is based on facts."
For a nation that has consistently silenced and ignored its critics, we seem to be obsessed with the subject.

There are two kinds of criticism: destructive criticism or that which our adversaries practice, and constructive criticism, which, on closer inspection, turns out to be the flattery of a brown-nosing hireling, hanger-on, or parasite.

There are two kinds of criticism: national criticism which has the interests of the nation as its focus, and tribal criticism which says the other tribe is always wrong because it can’t do anything right, and our tribe is always right even when dead wrong.

#2 timucin

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Posted 08 August 2001 - 11:57 PM

I beg to differ here. Your nationalistic and tribal critiques ned to change places. It is usually the nationalist critique that does what you seem to think the tribal does. Perhaps, the triabal is just being used metaphorically here, but even in this, there is the implication that gives more credence to the idea of nationalistic approach as if it was a step better than what the tribal stood for. What is crucial to understand here, in my humble opinion, is that the tribal can embrace in better ways a multiplicity of national feelings in it than the national can ever hope to do, and turn these into the goal and agenda of the tribal. At the end, you do certainly have the good of the tribe as many examples from the history of the tribal nations can show rather than an inherent trait in this group. But, when this good is turned into the good of the nation, the transformation is actually from something that can be changed in accordance with the conditions to one that is condition-free, above the conditions, to something that is inherently shared and unchangeable. Whereas the tribal can actually go ahead with the daily requirements of the conditions, the national actually needs to concentrate on other nations in order to work on the preservation and believability of those so-called inherent qualities. So, every nationalistic appraoch or critique must, sooner or later, create its bad nation, the nation they are not, the nation they should not be, and the nation they should continue fighting against.

Just some comments

t.




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