KeghartBy Ara Baliozian, 28 December 2008
There are many ways to violate someone’s fundamental human right of free speech, from a bullet in the neck and the Gulag to censorship and a steady barrage of insults. In the case of insults: if you fall silent as a result of them, they win. If you continue to exercise your right of free speech, they lose.
By Ara Baliozian, 28 December 2008
There are many ways to violate someone’s fundamental human right of free speech, from a bullet in the neck and the Gulag to censorship and a steady barrage of insults. In the case of insults: if you fall silent as a result of them, they win. If you continue to exercise your right of free speech, they lose.
Free speech allows fascists to expose themselves as fascists. That’s one of the many beauties of democracy. Free speech allows even a garbage-mouth inbred moron with a negative IQ to parade as a genius (self-assessed of course) and to bray like a jackass pretending all the while to be Pavarotti singing “Nessun dorma.” Have I said this before? Probably. What else can I say to a fascist except that he is a fascist and that his days are numbered as surely as those of his predecessors.
For a long time I couldn’t understand why Germans had embraced Nazism, Italians fascism, and Soviets (including my fellow Armenians) Stalinism. How could ordinary law-abiding, decent citizens, I would ask myself, allow themselves to be taken in by the belief system of thugs, sadists, and cold-blooded-murderers? I have my answer today. There is a killer in all of us. The post-World War II French slogan “Nous sommes tous des assassins” (We are all assassins) could also be rephrased as “We are all fascists.” Only in a society ruled by laws, rather than men, that is to say, only in a democracy, our inner killer or fascists is exposed and checked. Which is why I say “God bless America!” As for Armenia and Armenians: may all our fascists (of which we have more than our share even in America), I say, “May they all go to the Devil!”
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Among us, politics (the art of the possible) is confused with ideology (the art of the impossible), and inevitably, ideology is confused with theology (the art of the incomprehensible), and theology is confused with pathology. Some day, in a future progressive and enlightened Armenian democracy, if our partisans are arrested and put on trial, they will be absolutely right in pleading not guilty by reason of insanity.
To recycle propaganda means to allow others to do your thinking for you; which also means to abdicate your responsibility as a human being and to repudiate one of the most precious possessions that God or the forces of the universe have endowed you: your brain.
The evil is not Turkish, German, Italian, or Russian fascism; but fascism, period! including Armenian fascism.
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You cannot persuade a man that what he believes in is wrong. The very best you can hope to accomplish is to seduce him into considering the possibility of alternative beliefs, and that only after assuring him that his own brand of inbred moronism is the greatest wisdom between heaven and earth.
The difference between a critic and a commissar is that a critic relies on words and a commissar on bullets, and in the absence of bullets, verbal abuse.
Intolerance is a double-edged sword. If you live by it, you will die by it. History provides us with many instances. Robespierre comes to mind; and more recently, Stalinists, who after killing dissidents, proceeded to kill the executioners.
The nobler the idea or ideology, the more crooks it will attract.
To our Levantines, book-wise means life-foolish.
Crooks spend so much time honing their act of projecting an honest image that they end up appearing more honest than truly honest men.
If what you say makes sense, let your words speak louder than your emotions.
The more unwavering a man’s commitment to his own self-interest, the more altruistic the principles he pretends to espouse.
The fascist mind comes in two parts: the ideological and the criminal; and the function of the ideological is to camouflage the criminal.
Assessing oneself as infallible may well be the surest symptom of terminal cretinism.
Politicians who profess family values see nothing morally inconsistent in screwing the nation
Keghart
Keghart
1 comment
Thank you Mr. Baliozian
As an odar, exposed to the Western Armenian world, I always appreciate Baliozian’s sharp views and wordings.
Could Armenians, Western and Eastern and those in-between too, produce more of such stuff ?
Because, you see, self-criticism is not a weakness in democratic systems.
It is just part of mental hygiene and liveliness.
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