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Sunday, November 19, 2006
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Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), Italian philosopher and dissident: “There are those who lament and others who curse. But no one, or very few, ask themselves, had I lived up to my responsibility as a citizen, had I done what I should have done, maybe what happened wouldn’t have happened.”
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When Orhan Pamuk mentioned the Armenian genocide in a recent interview, he was not being “a good Turk” as defined by the regime in Ankara, but an honest man. And when we blame all our misfortunes on others, including the Good Lord (“we are what God made us”) we speak not as honest men in full possession of our faculties but as dupes of nationalist leaders whose first and most important concern is not to serve the people but to project the image of competent statesmen.
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And speaking of competence: It makes no difference how competent a right-wing (conservative) or left-wing (liberal) critic is, he will convince only his partisans. The same could be said about an Armenian or Turkish critic.
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What matters about a critic is not his love of country, or his commitment to this or that ideology or school of thought, but his honesty and objectivity. A critic without honesty and objectivity is not and cannot be a critic, only a propagandist.
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My analysis of the Armenian psyche is based on a close reading of our writers, beginning with Gregory of Narek (who at one point in his LAMENTATIONS identifies himself as “an abusive contradicter”), personal observations and encounters, and last but far from least, self-analysis. If I call some of my readers dupes, fanatics, and hoodlums it’s because I was all of these things. I at no time have said anything about my fellow Armenians that I am not prepared to say about myself. And when our dupes and hoodlums assume a morally superior stance and look down at me as a lesser man or a bad Armenian, I have every reason to suspect they fool no one, not even themselves. Hence, their faceless, nameless cowardly anonymity.
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Monday, November 20, 2006
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Daniel Varoujan (1884-1915), Armenian poet and Genocide victim: “What’s the use of acquiring knowledge and developing one’s esthetic judgment in a world run by ignorant scum?”
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Anonymous (dates unknown), one of the greatest and most prolific thinkers of all time, very probably of Armenian descent: “In troubled waters, the scum rises to the top.”
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Insulting Turkishness is against the law in Turkey today. Nothing new in that. Because in one of his letters Solzhenitsyn made a derogatory remark about Stalin, he was bundled off to Siberia. I assume there were corresponding laws under Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, Franco, and Genghis Khan.
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What is considered an insult in Turkey? Mentioning the Armenian genocide for one, thus implying that the founders of the Turkish Republic may have been war criminals.
We are lucky; we don’t have a law against insulting Armenianism. That doesn’t mean, however, that if you dare to mention our scumbags (of which we have our share) you won’t be called a scumbag by loudmouth gutless, faceless, nameless. anonymous scumbags.
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If Baronian and Odian were alive today and wrote with the same degree of honesty about our bosses, bishops, and benefactors as they did at the turn of the last century, not only they would be called scumbags by our ubiquitous commissars of culture and defenders of the faith, they would also be alienated, silenced, ignored, forgotten, and buried alive. There is more than one way to send an innocent man to the Gulag.
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A thousand years ago Gregory of Narek (in addition to being a saint, also our Dante and Shakespeare combined) in his celebrated BOOK OF LAMENTATIONS (translated into English by Mischa Kudian, among others), made a long list of his personal failings (“a wicked and slothful servant, an abusive contradicter, an ass’s foal, inscrutable, wild and uncouth; the broken lock on a door; the useless coin buried beneath the soil; ever active in satanic inventions; slow in mine observance of promises; diligent in malignant acts of ribaldry,” and so on and so forth). If anyone were to write in that vein today, what would happen to him? Who would read him? How would our holier-than-thou brown-nosers react?
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What happened to us between then and now? Is it conceivable that the only thing we learned from the Genocide are intolerance, dishonesty, doubletalk, and cowardice? Is it possible that the Turks did not just massacre our bodies but also our critical faculties?
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To end on a more positive note: All nations spawn their share of white trash. Why should we be an exception?
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A digression and a p.s. here: Has anyone ever accused Washington or Jefferson of war crimes? Why would anyone, let alone a Turk, even consider questioning the greatness, integrity, and nobility of such statesmen of vision as Talaat and Kemal? Unless of course… No, strike that! It is not my intention to cast aspersions on anyone here. I am just asking questions because, I don’t mind admitting, I know next to nothing about Turkish history, and I don’t understand, neither can I guess why, noble specimens of humanity like Talaat and Kemal would be in need of a law whose unmistakable intent is to protect their impeccable reputations.
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Tuesday, November 21, 2006
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NOW THANK WE ALL OUR GOD
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Siamanto (real name Adom Yerjanian: 1878-1915) poet and victim of the Genocide: “Our perennial enemy, the enemy that will eventually destroy us, is not the Turk but our own complacent superficiality.”
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If our misfortunes are not our fault but must be ascribed to factors and circumstances beyond our control, such as bloodthirsty neighbors, geographic position, and the Good Lord Himself, it follows: literature lies, propaganda speaks the truth.
Political leaders are honest men, writers enemies of the people.
Which also means, our politicians have been consistently right and our writers consistently wrong.
Let us therefore trust our leaders and ignore our writers, and whenever possible, silence and starve them. They deserve no better.
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Since our problems are not our problems but someone else’s, there isn’t much we can do except adopt a passive stance and wait until our bloodthirsty neighbors see the light and turn into vegetarians, our mountains and valleys yield oil or gold or some other valuable mineral, and the Good Lord takes pity on us.
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Yeghishe was dead wrong when he said, “Solidarity is the mother of good deeds, divisions of evil ones.” Solidarity is for wolves. We prefer to live as divided sheep because we are morally superior to wolves.
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Raffi was wrong when he said we have no future in Turkey. Mass exodus from Turkey in the 19th century would have been a tragic mistake. As for mass exodus from Armenia today (a million and a half so far): that must be seen only as a temporary minor setback in the aftermath of war and earthquake (those damn carnivorous neighbors and cursed geography again).
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To conclude: we have nothing to worry about because we are in the best of hands. Let us therefore go down on our knees and give thanks to the Lord and His representatives on earth (our bosses, bishops, and benefactors), and count our blessings.
Amen.
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Wednesday, November 22, 2006
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MEMO
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To readers who find my comments disturbing enough to foam at the mouth: In Hollywood, to put things into perspective, even when there are reputations and millions of dollars at stake, they say, “It’s only a movie.” And I say to you, “Relax, it’s only one man’s opinion.” There is no law that says only the right opinion by wise men may be voiced. None of us, not even you, can claim to be consistently right and wise. Only the abysmally ignorant and arrogant think their way of thinking is the only right one and all others should be ignored, and whenever possible, silenced. When I was young and foolish I too thought there were only a very limited number of ideas and worldviews and my familiarity with all of them allowed me to know which were right and which wrong. I was a fascist and I didn’t know it. I had no doubt whatever in my mind that all Turks were rapists and butchers, it was the patriotic duty of all Armenians to hate them, and the only good Turk was a dead Turk. It took me many years to appreciate the advantages of living in a multicultural and multiracial democracy and enjoying the fundamental human right of free speech. I wonder how many of my readers, be they bosses, bishops, benefactors, editors, and publishers of weeklies and periodicals suspect that treating someone who disagrees with them as an enemy is neither patriotic nor Armenian but fascist. This indeed may well be one of our most dangerous blind spots: namely, our tendency to confuse an Ottomanized and Sovietized brand of fascism with Armenianism. Speaking on this very same subject, Zarian has this to say in his TRAVELLER AND HIS ROAD: “They are spitting on Raffi. They are spitting on Aharonian. They are spitting on Derian. And that with the borrowed, consumptive spittle of Muscovite ‘masters.’ Even their filth is second hand. Even their trash has not been picked up from our streets but from foreign gutters. Danger, danger, danger!”
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