ideas

[arabaliozian]

Sunday, April 19, 2009
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ON RECEIVED IDEAS
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At a time when I didn't know who Shakespeare was, I heard an adult say, “HAMLET is Shakespeare's greatest play.” I immediately adopted that line as dogma and repeated it whenever Shakespeare was mentioned, until I heard someone say, “I prefer MACBETH.”
If all ideas are open to contradiction, received ideas are doubly so.
“Notwithstanding what the Good Book says about divided houses,” a reader tells me, “there are benefits to being divided. If one part is defeated and perishes, the other survives. Perhaps that's the secret of our survival."
Maybe so, but what kind of life is it whose sole aim is survival? No doubt to survive is better than the alternative, but I believe, and I hope you will agree with me when I say, there are greater goals in a nation's life than mere survival.
Such as?
Such as creating a new civilization.
We did that once.
Which means we can do it again.
And how do we do that?
We begin by questioning the validity of all received ideas, one of them being that since to endure is one of our greatest achievements, we can now relax and say “yes” to whatever we are told by our “betters,” who on closer inspection may well be nothing of the kind. They may even be our worst!
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Monday, April 20, 2009
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REFLECTIONS
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The fascist mind comes in two parts: the ideological and the criminal; and the function of the ideological is to camouflage the criminal.
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Politicians who profess family values see nothing morally inconsistent in screwing the nation.
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Because our enemies won, we were not allowed to name our traitors.
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Like most Armenians, I have followed many controversies in our media, and I have witnessed many more, but I have at no time heard an Armenian say: "I was wrong!" or, even better, "I was dead wrong because I placed my own ego, interests, family, political party, church, or tribe above the interests of the nation."
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A power structure that has all the answers will view questions as subversive.
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A woman raising her skirt in public will attract a bigger audience than a writer spilling his guts out.
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At one end of the spectrum we have decent human beings who happen to be Armenian, and at the other, carcinogenic agents who wrap themselves up in the flag in order to hide their true colors.
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Tuesday, April 21, 2009
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VARIATIONS ON A FAMILIAR THEME
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We are told sex and violence in movies lower the moral standards of a nation. What we are not told is that intolerance in organized religions and ideologies, in addition to lowering moral standards, it claims many more innocent victims. Intolerance also divides a nation thus making it more vulnerable to rape and massacre (of the “red” as well as the “white” variants). Don't get me wrong. I am not advocating for more sex and violence in movies. What I am doing is exposing the double-talk of religious and political leaders who speak with a forked tongue and are believed by dupes.
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The guiding principle of all men at the top is, if the truth will harm your power, prestige, and integrity, it's okay to lie your head off. But the problem with lies is that they invariably create a chain reaction of more lies until the truth is buried beneath them like a needle in a haystack. Case in point: If the Turks are bloodthirsty savages, why were we their most faithful subjects for six hundred years? And if we are smart and they are dumb, why is it that it took us six centuries to unmask them? And even more to the point: if they are pathological liars and we speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, why are we against dissent and free speech? What are we afraid of? And if we have produced more heroes per capital than any other nation on earth, allow me to pose the following question: What could be more cowardly than fear of free speech?
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Wednesday, April 22, 2009
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WHY HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF
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History repeats itself for the simple reason that the men at the top are bastards and the people are as gullible as children. Thoreau was right when he said Egypt would have been better off if the people had drowned the pharaohs in the Nile like dogs instead of building pyramids for them; and Shaw was also right when he said we would have no more wars if soldiers took aim and shot not at the enemy but at their own sergeants. One reason he was an enthusiastic supporter of the Soviets is that Russian soldiers in World War I did exactly that.
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Homer was dead wrong when he decided not to quote Greeks who said they resented killing and dying in defense of the non-existent honor of a xxxx who happened to be the wife of an impotent fool.
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I once heard one of our notorious bloodsuckers say, if he were to work for an odar organization, he would make twice as much. In nature, parasites do their work in silence; among us, they demand our gratitude.
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Among my readers, I have critics (which is understandable), enemies (which is less so), and mortal enemies (whose hatred of me is so visceral that it might as well be Ottoman).
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[jgk3]

Re: ideas

WHY HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF
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History repeats itself for the simple reason that the men at the top are bastards and the people are as gullible as children. Thoreau was right when he said Egypt would have been better off if the people had drowned the pharaohs in the Nile like dogs instead of building pyramids for them.

What would happen after they drowned their pharaohs (I know it is all just a figurative example from Thoreau, don't worry)? I'd say civil war between the pharaoh's loyalists and the revolutionaries, just leading to more and more strife until one of them won. The result is a decay of civilization in favour of upkeep for a new power structure.

A country or society can be lead by qualitatively different laws, and in my view, the best one is not one imposed by force but by belief in a supranatural law of the universe that is followed on a highly personal path. If everyone in Egyptian society believed in more or less the same ideas about God, why is it such a horrible thing if there is a man who has similar DNA to them, sitting on the throne being the recipient of all his people's works that are dedicated to him physically, but more importantly, symbolically? Is the case not the same with a queen ant or queen bee? Would Thoreau also want the ants and bees to drown their queen?

I think the shortsightedness here comes from lack of appreciation about qualitatively different social functions within a civilization, and more about how on an individual to individual basis, you find people abusing their social functions for personal gain (which is bound to occur for humans rather than with ants or bees). As a result of all these royal dynasties meeting their ends by social revolutions, armed with guillotines, axes, firing squads, etc... a civilization's form changes, from a pyramid, to a blob. Old structures that once gave form have been tossed away as garbage along with the king's head. So I ask... what do you plan to fill this civilization to return it to order and definition in a quest for enlightenment?

and Shaw was also right when he said we would have no more wars if soldiers took aim and shot not at the enemy but at their own sergeants. One reason he was an enthusiastic supporter of the Soviets is that Russian soldiers in World War I did exactly that.

Though I too can certainly understand why the soldiers in WWI would turn against their sergeants (as their newborn political dogma was especially flimsy for the purpose of fighting Germans, let alone for hoping to find loyalty amongst a starving population who has yet to experience the Utopia of the socialist revolution and on top of this, must be severely oppressed under the new government, where ambitious talk of reforms serve to mask the reality of a nation with its head cut off with opportunists having their bellies nearly bursting from feasting off of the country's blood), why should war be seen always as such a bad thing? Considering what I've just described, the general population after the revolution were really, really.... I mean REALLY not in the mood to fight a external enemy, they were still in the preliminary process of being screwed by their revolution.

Anyways...

The object of a war varies depending on the leadership of its protagonist.
If the leadership seeks survival for its people facing genocide, war might repel their destruction.
If the leadership seeks to purge an internal enemy, war might allow the country to function as a united entity.
If the leadership, internally united, is at odds with external foes, war might allow them to establish an imperial hegemony.

War is not stupid in nature, but an approach towards war might be stupid.

If a leadership is under the threat of extinction, or have an internal enemy, and they join a war seeking imperial aspirations, then they are fools.
If a leadership has no regards for the needs of its people, he may push them to highly self-destructive levels to pay for his battles, this too is foolish.

And so on... So I think we must learn to discriminate between wars by seeing how they are analogous to the laws of nature, so as not to follow modern liberal/pacifist dogmas that function on gross generalizations, Utopian ideals for humanity, and the purest of contradiction when governments who preach them decide to go out and invade a developing country that refuses to adhere to the shackles of mercantile slavery.

War is part of nature, it is the pursuit of order by one party, after having identified chaos in its environment. To lead your people to fight a war, a variety of means can be used, and by far, one of the most popular is fear by distorting the enemy's humanity to give off a monstrous or sub-human aura. This doesn't mean war is bad, it means we are drawing from ignorance to find the inspiration we need to slaughter an enemy. Our pacifists don't make this distinction and seek Utopian ideals as an alternative. I don't. I think the most enlightened way is to embrace an element of fighting for every endeavor we seek on this Earth, otherwise there can be no triumph, and that we must always strive to determine for ourselves whether the enemy is indeed an enemy at all. Ultimately, who is a friend or foe on this Earth depends on what we live for.