On

[ara baliozian]

ON CENSORSHIP

***************************

There are a thousand phony reasons

to justify censorship and just when I think

I have heard them all, I hear another.

Though I have myself attacked censorship,

if not a thousand then at least a hundred times,

I feel the need to attack it once more

because censorship is a hydra-headed monsters

that refuses to be slain.

*

A phony may be satisfied with a phony reason

but he should be reminded once in a while that

not everyone is a phony and sooner or later

he may be exposed for what he really is,

namely, a fool who thinks so is everyone else.

*

Even in the best Armenian it is not always easy to tell

at which point the patriotic Armenian ends

and the Turkish gypsy takes over,

or at which point the defender of democracy

surrenders to the temptations of fascism.

*

Censorship and cancer share much more in common

than the third letter of the alphabet.

A state whose press is controlled by censorship

is as much in peril as a man

whose body is threatened by terminal cancer.

*

To defend censorship amounts to defending fascism.

*

God punishes fascists by withdrawing their creative powers.

Who has ever heard of a fascist masterpiece?

*

All fascists are mediocrities

whose greatest enemy is excellence.

*

Where dissenters are silenced

everyone thinks alike

and where everyone thinks alike

no one thinks,

and no one feels the need to think

because the state does their thinking for them.

And who or what is the state?

Without a free press and free speech,

the state is a machine that will crush its citizens

on the flimsiest of excuses:

because they are members of a different

race, color, creed or sexual orientation,

or simply because they are different, period.