600 years

[arabaliozian]

Re: 600 years

AT THE BEGINNING
WAS THE WORD
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Be positive!
Promote friendship among nations.
Ban the “G” word
Obama must know something
we don’t.
*
Mozart on first seeing a Bach score:
“One could learn from this.”
*
At the beginning was the word.
At the end garbage,
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[arabaliozian]

Re: 600 years

A historian is not judged by the degree of his patriotism, nationalism, or loyalty to a power structure, but by his honesty and impartiality. For more on this subject see Michael Grant’s GREEK AND ROMAN HISTORIANS: INFORMATION AND MISINFORMATION (London, 1995).
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[arabaliozian]

Re: 600 years

Plato tells us in an anti-intellectual environment, a philosopher cannot but be like “a man who has fallen among wild beasts..."

[arabaliozian]

Re: 600 years

NOTES / COMMENTS
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Our 1% may know better
but they are not equal to the task.
*
Incompetence in a physician
spells death to the patient.
Incompetence in the leadership
spells genocide to the people –
if not “red” than “white.”
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[arabaliozian]

Re: 600 years

ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM
IN ARMENIAN LIFE
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An Armenian is a being
who pretends 600 years of subservience to Turks
has had no discernible effect on him.
*
I read the following on dogs:
“Dog is man’s favorite pet
because it is the animal most slavish
in its disposition and nastiest in its habits.”
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[arabaliozian]

Re: 600 years

When told I am a comfort to our enemies, I say, we are a greater comfort when
we divide ourselves.

[arabaliozian]

Re: 600 years

My greatest liability:
I never mastered the art
of flattering the powerful and the rich --
i.e. the scum of the earth.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: 600 years

NOTES / COMMENTS
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The quintessential Armenian counterargument:
“I’d rather be an idiot my way
than anything else in yours.”
*
Most men may indeed be crypto-chauvinist pigs.
That’ doesn’t make most women models of integrity.
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I have been wrong so many times
that I no longer aim at being right
but at being less wrong.
*
As a boy I read with my body and soul.
Now I read with only a small fraction of my cranium.
*
For 600 years we were neither brave nor free,
but in 1915 we decided almost unanimously
to protect and defend that which was rightfully ours.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: 600 years

A Turkish-Armenian is more Turkish and less Armenian.
A Soviet-Armenian is more Soviet and less Armenian.
An Armenian-American is more American and less Armenian.
An Armenian from the Middle-East is more Levantine and less Armenian.
Something similar could be said of French-Armenians,
Greek-Armenians, Italian-Armenians
(assuming there are some left), and so on.
That's because, in Krikor Zohrab's words:
“As impressionable as soft wax,
the Armenian acquires indiscriminately the virtues as well as the vices
of the country in which he happens to be living.”
*
And I remember a retired Armenian schoolteacher in her eighties
(may she rest in peace and may the blessing of the Lord be upon her)
saying, “Armenians are fast learners of all the wrong things.”
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[arabaliozian]

Re: 600 years

For most of our historic existence
our identity was shaped by swine.
Our most important project today
is to reject as much of it as possible
in order to be born again as human beings.