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#1 ara baliozian

ara baliozian

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Posted 11 July 2003 - 11:06 AM

Friday, July 11, 2003
*******************************
Commissars are not uniquely Soviet phenomena.
Every other Armenian I meet in the Diaspora these days
harbors the ambitions of a commissar who given the power
would be as ruthless in his dealings with dissidents as Stalin.
*
In the same way that we speak of
“Red” and “White” massacres
(massacres in the Ottoman Empire
and assimilation in the Diaspora)
we could also speak of “Red” and “White” purges:
Stalinist purges in the Homeland
and the expulsion and alienation by our political parties
of actual and potential members of the party
in the Diaspora.
*
Speaking for myself:
I consider membership in one of our political parties
as an unmistakable symptom
of political HIV and moral syphilis.
*
We live in a complex world
in which even the bad guys
think of themselves as good guys.
*
Question: What does it take to be a good guy
even if you happen to be a murderer of innocent civilians?
Answer: The conviction that you are acting in the name
of an abstraction which may well be
a figment of your febrile imagination –
Allah, historic imperative, patriotism, justice,
the dictatorship of the proletariat….
*
Our planet, it has been said, is an insane asylum
in which one man’s god is another’s devil.
*
If a fanatic were to agree with a moderate
he would be a moderate.
*
Even underdogs have underdogs.
So that to some underdogs,
other underdogs are top dogs.
As an Armenian writer I become aware of this
whenever an Oriental rug merchant
or a fascist hooligan decides
to share his wisdom with me,
which in our context means
issuing directive on how to live
and what to think and write.
*
We are educated to believe
killing the enemy in the name of God and Country
is a good thing.
What we are not told is that so is our enemy.
*
The nobler the idea or ideology,
the more crooks it will attract.
*
Crooks spend so much time honing their act
of projecting an honest image that
they end up appearing more honest than truly honest men.
*
The fascist mind comes in two parts:
the ideological and the criminal;
and the function of the ideological
is to camouflage the criminal.
*
Raffi: “Even those among us
who have taken it upon themselves
to educate the people are nothing but
uneducated ignoramuses.”
*
Ruben Ter-Minassian: “Our cultural achievements
and intellectual abilities may be superior to those of our neighbors,
but without solidarity we are bound to be defeated,
victimized, and exterminated.”
*
The words of an honest man don’t need definitions;
but the commas of a crook
should be carefully examined under a microscope.




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