Author: arabaliozian

Sunday, October 15, 2006
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NOTES / COMMENTS
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Where the power of the few is dependent on the ignorance of the many, ignorance will be subsidized and knowledge censored.
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To brag is to expose one’s limitations.
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From ideas I disagree with I have a better chance to learn.
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The most important thing that a master can say to his disciple is: “If you think of me as your master, I have taught you nothing.”
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You can’t learn to ride a bike on a mattress.
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There is more wisdom in silence than in speech. Sermons and speeches are delivered by charlatans to an audience of fools.
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You cannot step into the same river twice not because the river has changed but because your perceptions run swifter than the fastest current.
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Overheard on the radio: “A pessimist is a better informed optimist.”
#
Monday, October 16, 2006
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THIS HAS BEEN SAID BEFORE
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It is said of Confucius that because he was honest he failed in politics. You may now draw your own conclusions.
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Is there anything I can say that hasn’t been said before at least a thousand times by far better men than myself? And I don’t just mean Greek philosophers, Indian mystics, Jewish rabbis, and German metaphysicians, but our own writers.
*
“I don’t give a damn about the people,” one of our academics once said to me. “I care only about my children!” What if they grow up to be selfish monsters? I didn’t say that. I too can be diplomatic once in a long while, when I set my mind to it.
*
In whatever I write I do not say I am right and you are wrong. What I say and what I have been saying all along is that, since I was wrong most of my life, it is conceivable that in the near or distant future you too may reach the same conclusion. Again, I am not saying or implying this is what will happen. What I am saying is that there is a very remote possibility.
*
When you hear someone speaking of tolerance, be careful not to react with violent hostility.
*
Diogenes (404-323), Greek philosopher: “The smart slave rules his master.”
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Muhammad (570-632): “Trust in God, but tie your camel.”
They now trust their camel and tie God. But that’s the way it is with men whenever they try to put theory into practice.
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In YOUR CALL IS IMPORTANT TO US: THE TRUTH ABOUT BULLSHIT by Laura Penny (Toronto, 2005), I read: “Bullshit is all about getting away with something, or getting someone to buy something in the broadest possible sense, which means covering arses or kissing them.”
Crude, my style.
Further down: “Nobody leaves office because they f***ed up; no, they want to spend more time with their families. No mogul says, I do it all for the money, suckers. They blah-dee-blah on about the company, or some magnificent abstract idea the company embodies.”
*
There are poor people because there are wealthy people, in the same way that there are slaves because there are masters. If the wealthy are not ashamed of their wealth it’s because they support publishers, teachers, and preachers all of whom conspire to misrepresent greed as one of the seven cardinal virtues.
#
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
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MORE ON B.S.
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In her book, YOUR CALL IS IMPORTANT TO US: THE TRUTH ABOUT BULLSHIT (Toronto, 2005), Laura Penny speaks about b.s. as if it were a recent development. She ignores the fact that b.s. existed even in the Golden Age of Greece (5th Century B.C.). Socrates lived (and died) exposing it.
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One of Laura Penny’s endnotes reads:
“Ben Bagdikian has been studying media consolidation since the early 1980s, and his latest book is THE NEW MEDIA MONOPOLY (Beacon Pres, 2004). He has a Web site at http: /”
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To the perpetrators, a million deaths is not even a statistic, it is victory. If the Nazis had won, the Holocaust would be remembered today as the ultimate triumph of good over evil.
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When propaganda is confused with knowledge, it becomes worse than ignorance.
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“Is it possible to be a writer in this day and age?” a young poet wants to know. My answer: “If you place survival over literature, choose survival.”
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“Speak truth to power!” Armenian translation: Tell them what they want to hear and if necessary swear on a stack of Bibles.
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With the connivance of the State, organized religions preach truth but practice lies. To put it more bluntly: when two sets of wheeler-dealers conspire, the result will be war and massacre.
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When during an argument I quoted Nikol Aghbalian to a fellow Armenian, he said: “I knew Nikol Aghbalian and I don’t think he was a great man.” Why look for greatness in honesty? Is not honesty in an Armenian greater than greatness?
#
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
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FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
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Whenever I read self-help or how-to books I note that I have been breaking all their rules, which can mean only one thing: I must be doing something right.
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A true disciple surpasses his master because he begins where the master ends.
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The aim of philosophy is to expose b.s., including the b.s. of philosophers.
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Know thyself also means to know that the self is invisible, unpredictable, unprintable, and unknowable.
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A blunder can be either a springboard (if we learn from it) or a cage (if we refuse to acknowledge it).
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A favorite Armenian technique of counter-argument is to be so shamelessly arrogant and brazenly absurd as to reduce the adversary to a pulp of helpless disgust, hopeless despair, and silence.
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“Try to be more like Mark Twain,” I have been advised on more than one occasion. “A touch of humor may make your ideas more palatable to the average reader.” And I can imagine friends advising Mark Twain to be more like Emerson if he wanted to be taken seriously.
#

Thursday, October 12, 2006
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People who say, “It can’t be done,” are either opportunistic cowards or apologists for the status quo. Avoid them. What cancer is to the body, they are to creativity and daring. It is better to fail on your own terms than to succeed on theirs.
*
On the day you find your right path, success and failure, greatness and mediocrity, misery and joy will become irrelevant concepts.
*
The license of a preacher who does not practice what he preaches should be revoked. To say, “Do as I say, not as I do” is to legitimize abuse.
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To speak of abuse in our environment means to succeed only in uniting the abusers against you.
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Orhan Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize for two reasons: (one) in addition to being a good writer, he enjoyed Turkish popular support, and (two) he exposed the lies of Turkish propaganda. You may now guess why so far no Armenian writer has been awarded the Prize.
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If we don’t betray them to the authorities, we beat them up or silence them. For Armenians divide themselves only against their enemies…. If you read the biographies of our greatest writers… What am I saying? There are no biographies of Oshagan or Zarian.
#
Friday, October 13, 2006
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TWO SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT
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The first says our leaders are our saviors, and the second, they are our dividers and destroyers. If you subscribe to the first school, you are a dupe of our propaganda; if you subscribe to the second, it means you trust the judgment of our writers (from Khorenatsi and Yeghishe in the 5th Century to Massikian and Zarian in the 20th) more than the charlatanism of our wheeler-dealers – sorry, I meant to say, our political leaders, bosses for short.
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LITERATURE AND PROPAGANDA
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Propaganda is more popular than literature because disoriented people prefer lies that validate their prejudices and fallacies. Those who say Blacks are savages and Jews are rats will never think of themselves as swine. What Blacks and Jews are to racists and anti-Semites, Turks are to us. Turks are what binds Armenian to Armenian. They are our glue. Delete Turks from our consciousness and our communities will collapse like a house of cards. Literature is less popular because it exposes contradictions and charlatans who speak with a forked tongue.
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CRITICIZING CRITICS
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If you are in the business of exposing contradictions, your critics will detect contradictions in everything you say; and if you say you are against A, B, and C, they will accuse you of all three aberrations plus X, Y, and Z.
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ASSUMPTIONS AND AMBITIONS
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Because we come from a long line of victims, we cannot be victimizers, or so we would like to believe. It is more accurate to say, however, that as perennial victims we think of progress only in terms of how soon we can behave like the opposition, even if it means victimizing our own brothers.
#
Saturday, October 14, 2006
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APOLOGISTS OF THE STATUS QUO
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Very much like our self-appointed Turcocentric
pundits, they are a dime a dozen and they come in
all sizes, shapes, and colors of the rainbow, and
they operate on the assumption that they know
things you don’t know because they have sources
of information available to no one but
themselves. Even more to the point, unlike you,
they love and understand their country and fellow
countrymen. Theirs is therefore a superior brand
of patriotism. And their reasoning goes something
like this: our problems are not ours alone; we
did not invent them; rather they are an integral
part of the human condition; they will be found
even in the most prosperous, progressive, and
developed democracies in the world, including the
United States of America. Internecine divisions
and conflicts, corruption in high places,
catastrophic policy blunders, fraud, mafias, drug
trafficking, homelessness, unemployment,
destitution, prostitution…these things have been
with us since time immemorial and they will
probably be with us as long as there is life on
earth.
*
What these apologists neglect to tell you is that
the overwhelming majority of nations around the
world did not experience six hundred years of
Ottoman oppression followed by its equally
nefarious Soviet variant, neither were they
serial victims of massacres and a genocide which,
according to the perpetrators and their allies,
may well be a figment of our imagination.
*
True, the majority of uncivilized as well as
civilized nations have had their share of
traitors and collaborators with the enemy, but,
with the possible exception of Ireland, treason
and betrayal are not an integral part of their
collective experience and identity.
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All people tend to blame their problems on
others, but they do not adopt the blame-game as
their favorite national sport. Furthermore, no
other nation is experiencing the same high rate
of alienation, assimilation, and emigration.
*
Somewhere Avedik Issahakian (not a dissident or
critic, but a poet) has said: “We have been
thrice cursed with earthquakes, bloodthirsty
neighbors, and brainless leaders.” He should have
added “and brainwashed apologists and
opportunistic academics and monomaniacal pundits,
all of whom enjoy the support of Big Money and
are united only in stifling criticism and
dissent.”
*
Speaking of Big Money, in this morning’s paper I
read the following quotation by Jack Welch
(retired chairman of General Electric): “You are
the last person to know who the jerks are,
because they are all putting on a face for you.”
#

Sunday, October 08, 2006
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ON THE MARK FOLEY SCANDAL
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Most crimes are never solved. Likewise, most cover-ups are never uncovered. Placed in this context, the Mark Foley cover-up makes perfect sense.
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ON ORGANIZED RELIGIONS
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If you have been successful in fooling millions of people for a thousand years or more, you have a good chance of fooling them for at least another thousand.
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GOOD VERSUS BAD IDEAS
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Even the best ideas are vulnerable to perversion. A good idea in step one may be a bad idea in step two. This explains why very often it is not easy to discriminate good from bad ideas.
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ON EDUCATION
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The true aim of education consists in preparing young minds to oppose injustice even if doing so may be against one’s own self-interest.
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ON UNDERSTANDING
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Understanding is acquired less by means of explanations and more through painful experiences.
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ON WRITING
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In an elementary school textbook on how to write, I read: “Turn someone you dislike into an animal.” I have never done that, but I have turned someone I disliked into two animals by calling him “Jack S. Avanakian.”
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Franz Kafka: “In the battle between the world and you, back the world.” He should have added: To write means backing yourself even when you know you are backing a sure loser.
#
Monday, October 09, 2006
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In the preamble of Arshak’s THE SOLITARY WOLFE: NOVELLAS (700 pages, Yerevan: 2005) we read the following: “In the 20th Century predatory nations used religion and ideology as weapons with which to annihilate their enemies. By contrast, we the naïve were taken in by new and old religions and sacrificed our homeland to them.”
*
We the naïve? I find that hard to swallow. I was brought up to believe Armenians are just about the smartest people on earth. So much so that even when I was taken in by idiots I thought of myself as smart. It took me not just years but decades to catch up with reality. Which may suggest that neither the Ottomans nor the Soviets were as successful in brainwashing us as we were in brainwashing ourselves.
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Bernard-Henri Levy (French critic and philosopher): “The Pope’s interpretation of jihad may have been offensive, but infinitely more offensive is justifying in the name of Islam human bombs, 9/11, the stoning of women caught in adultery, the beheading of a Jewish journalist, and the indiscriminate slaughter of fellow Muslims not only in Darfur but also in Iraq, as they stand by the gate of a mosque. The Pope should have mentioned these things.”
#
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
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HOW TO COMBAT CORRUPTION
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Corruption means much more than the penetration of the social fabric by crooks and bloodsuckers; corruption means the systematic alienation of all honest men, in the same way that mediocrity means the systematic alienation of all those whose aim is to achieve excellence.
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Corruption is as old as mankind; so are ways of combating it. History provides us with many examples. The following suggestions are based on methods that have been employed in the past with some degree of success.
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To editors and publishers: print more articles, case histories, and commentaries on corruption and less on Turkish denials; and if that’s too much to ask, adopt an equal opportunity policy: for every headline on Turks publish one on Armenians — and I don’t mean bald-headed tennis players.
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To lawyers: provide pro bono services to victims of corruption, take the bloodsuckers to court, and if necessary go to jail. They may jail a few, but they don’t have enough jails to lock up everyone.
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To benevolent institutions: withdraw financial support from organizations that lack high standards of accountability.
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To tourists: let the relevant agencies and bureaucracies know that henceforth you plan to stay home or travel only to countries where you are more welcome.
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To those who say some of these tactics may penalize the victims more than the victimizers, I say, maybe, but for only a limited time (less than a year or at most two). Which is far more preferable than the alternative of adopting a wait-and-see and hope-for-the-best stance until the rotten structure collapses under its own weight (which may take forty or fifty years).
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History is clear on this point: corrupt power structures do not as a rule reform themselves. Consider the cases of the Roman Empire, and more recently of the Ottoman and Soviet Empires? This much said, I am willing to concede that all this talk about combating corruption in our context might as well be an academic exercise in futility because we are as much victims of corruption, mediocrity, and incompetence in the Diaspora as they are in the Homeland. That’s because the number one concern of our self-appointed elites is number one, and to hell with underdogs and victims, even when they happen to be our brothers.
#
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
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MEN AND BOOKS.
GOD AND THE DEVIL.
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I approach a new book as if it held a secret that may change the course of my life. If most books disappoint me, it may be because I expect too much from them.
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If most men disappoint us, it may be because we make too many unreasonable demands on them. On the day we convince ourselves that the average man is very much like ourselves, a bundle of contradictions and a self-centered bastard with the potential of a hero or a saint, we may be more willing to see the potential and to ignore the actual.
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Divine impartiality makes sense only if both sides of a conflict are evenly matched. But when a hoodlum rapes and kills a child, we can no longer speak of divine impartiality, only of satanic indifference.
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For millions of years men believed in an Unnamable and Incomprehensible Being who was the source of good as well as evil. Traces of this belief survive today in the Lord’s Prayer when we say to God “Lead us not into temptation,” which we are taught to believe belongs to the Devil’s agenda.
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By departmentalizing the Incomprehensible into God and the Devil, so-called civilized man has allowed bloodthirsty fanatics to commit all kinds of atrocities in the name of God, when in fact it’s in the name of the Other one.
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Whenever pundits speak of Muslim aberration they feel obliged to cite the Crusades, religious wars, and the Inquisition, completely ignoring the fact that Christian aberrations belong to the irrevocable past, and that Muslim terrorism is rooted less in the Koran and more in money from oil — they have so much of it that they think they can take over the world.
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As the last but one Pope said when he visited a mosque, both Christians and Muslims believe in the same God who is love, mercy, and compassion. What the good Pope failed to say is that what we believe may well be propaganda.
#

Thursday, October 05, 2006
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GET A LOAD OF THIS!
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Bosses, bishops, and benefactors are Yervant Odian’s favorite targets too, and he is much tougher on them than I am, perhaps because concentrated as they were in Istanbul, the way beasts of prey are in a zoo, they could be observed and studied closely and at leisure.
When Ghougas effendi, the main character of FAMILY, HONOR, MORALITY (a wealthy merchant and one of the most repellent characters in all of Armenian literature), when Ghougas effendi dies a horribly slow death of a knife-wound sustained in a bordello scuffle, his funeral service is conducted “by the Patriarch, six bishops, fourteen vartabeds, and thirty-two kahanas.” In his eulogy, Odian writes, the Patriarch speaks of him as one “who enjoyed the affection and respect of the entire community…. His rectitude and unassuming nature were legendary and made of him an exemplary husband and father. His family was an altar whose sanctity he defended until his last breath. He dedicated his entire life to three principles – family, honor, and morality. Even in his generosity, which was boundless, he did his utmost to uphold these principles and consistently refused to help anyone who did not share his unwavering dedication to family, honor, and morality. To his friends and acquaintances he was a wise mentor, and to the perplexed, a lighthouse. Even a glancing acquaintance with him was enough to make the confused and lost to return onto the right path…” and so on and so forth. The Patriarch unload this verbal crap with the expertise of someone who has done it all his life; so much so that even those in the congregation, who know better, burst into tears. Who says you can’t fool all the people all the time?
#
Friday, October 06, 2006
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THE USES AND ABUSES OF THE PAST
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Guenter Grass (contemporary German author and winner of the Nobel Prize): “History is a clogged toilet. We flush and flush, but the shit keeps rising.” Why is it that we Armenians are incapable of producing such a sentence?
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By ignoring the dark side of our history, we sink deeper into filth. Is it conceivable that we will wake up from this nightmare only on the day we drown?
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To pretend that we had nothing to do in shaping our destiny as a nation and by extension our identity, or to pretend the Genocide was engineered by the doubletalk of the West and the savagery of the Turks, is to admit that adopting a passive stance has become an integral part of our identity, and so far we have done nothing to expose this scandal and to combat against it.
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The average Armenian thinks all he has to do to discharge his patriotic duty is to make periodic contributions to our Panchoonies.
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The average Greek today brags about Socrates but ignores the fact that it was average Greeks like him who condemned him to death. This is true not only of Greeks but also patriots of all nations. Patriotism is unthinkable without propaganda. No one who knows and understands history says, “My country, right or wrong!”
*
When Jesus said “They know not what they do,” he was talking about the average citizen who is capable of committing the most unspeakable crimes with a clear conscience on the grounds that his conduct is motivated by such selfless and noble principles as obedience to established laws and love of country. Even as he sinks deeper and deeper into filth, he pleads not guilty by reason of unawareness and ignorance.
#
Saturday, October 07, 2006
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WHO LOVES ARMENIANS?
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Let us not speculate about others and the rest of the world, most of which may not even be aware of our existence, and if it is, may not give a damn whether we live or die. Let us begin with ourselves. Do Armenians love Armenians? Is an Armenian capable of loving himself? Gregory of Narek or Naregatsi (our Dante and Shakespeare combined) was not particularly fond of himself; and very much like Yervant Odian, most of our ablest writers had no illusions about their fellow countrymen. As for our partisans: the less said about them the better. You may now draw your own conclusions.
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ATHEISTS
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My guess is there are as many atheists and agnostics in the Muslim Middle East as there are in the Christian West. If they refuse to stand up and be counted, it may be because martyrdom is incompatible with negation. It is easier to die for something you believe in than for something you don’t believe in.
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ON TRUST
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On the day Muslims see a connection between religion and progress or capacity to inflict pain on others without committing suicide, they will be tempted to convert to Christianity because their need to live and to win must be greater than their trust in their mullahs.
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ON FOLLOWING ORDERS
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When the Lord ordered Abraham to butcher his own son, Abraham did not object or ask any questions. Ever since then absolute and blind obedience has been the source of some of the most unspeakable crimes against humanity.
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ON PROPAGANDA
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Everybody engages in it, why shouldn’t we? One tentative answer: It hasn’t been working for us.
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THE REALITY OF WORDS
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Truth is only a word, like god and infinity. We have no way of knowing if it exists; and if it exists, whether or not our mind can grasp it.
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BOOMERANG
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By making me a charlatan, my education provided me with the means to recognize charlatanism when I see it.
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NEGATIVE ROLE MODELS
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Great men of wisdom have said many foolish things. We who are neither great nor wise must be careful to speak only words of wisdom.
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ON HAPPINESS
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It is possible to experience brief intervals of happiness, or the illusion of it, provided one forgets yesterday’s blunders and to ignore tomorrow’s hardships.
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ON STYLE
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Even when one is brief, clear, and impossible to misunderstand, one will be misunderstood. It comes with the territory. You may choose your style but you cannot choose your readers.
#

Sunday, October 01, 2006
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HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF
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Yervant Odian ends his novel, THE COUNCILMAN’S WIFE, abruptly in 1915 by saying most of his fictional characters, who had tried to inflict fatal damage on each other’s reputation, were arrested, jailed, and hanged. Those who survived ran away and joined the Russian army. The rest were allowed to stay in Istanbul on condition they refrain from getting involved in community affairs. One good thing about major catastrophes, Odian seems to be saying here, is that they solve all petty internecine problems.
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Odian died in 1926 and had no way of knowing that in our Soviet phase we would behave, and to some extent we continue to behave today in both the Homeland and the Diaspora, as though we had learned nothing from our tragedy of 1915 – nothing except to bitch about Turks.
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Odian had a sharp eye for Armenian doubletalk. Everyone in THE COUNCILMAN’S WIFE speaks about his honor in whose defense he is more than willing to behave in a dishonorable manner.
*
It is to be noted that the Soviets allowed the publication of Odian’s complete works, except his COMRADE PANCHOONIE, which is a savage attack on the misuse of language, political rhetoric, and Communist humbuggery. In one of his letters to the Central Committee (which ends, like all his other letters, with the words, “Send us a little money”) Panchoonie writes:

“We are all Armenians, we are brothers. Why can’t we live together? Why must we fight?” that filthy bourgeois kept repeating, not being able to comprehend that conflict is the basic condition of life, that class conflict is essential to socialist victory, and that it is impossible to do any good at all without at least a little bloodshed…. In vain did I repeat that violent class conflict must be waged between us, that they had to use against us every evil means at their command – betrayal, false accusation, force; without these it would not be possible to have a dirty bourgeois class, the existence of which was essential if we were to wage our noble revolutionary struggle against it.
#
Monday, October 02, 2006
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ON FREE SPEECH
************ ********* ********
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), English economist
and philosopher: “We can never be sure that the
opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false
opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would
be an evil still.”
*
HOW TO JUDGE A NATION
************ ********* ********* *****
Jean-Francois Revel (1924-2006), French essayist
and critic: “One can measure how civilized a
nation is by its willingness to consider itself
an object of ridicule or contempt.”
*
On Freud: “Since time immemorial all men have had
an Oedipus complex except Oedipus.”
*
On French influence: “When the sun of France was
at its zenith, I wonder why the world did not die
of sunstroke.”
*
FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
************ ********* ********* ********
As I grow older I become increasingly aware of my
shortcomings and the good qualities of those I
held in contempt.
*
When a man of power ceases to think of himself as
a servant of the people, he becomes a tyrant.
Where there is power there will also be abuse of
power. I never had much power to abuse but on
those extremely rare occasions when I did, the
temptation to abuse it was irresistible and I
don’t remember to have ever made any effort to
resist it.
*
As sinners we don’t mind confessing to other
sinners. What we mind is confessing to hypocrites
who pretend to be better than we are.
*
Remember me? The more correct question should be:
Do you consider me worth remembering?
*
When I was young I had a solution for every
problem. I must have been an unbearable pain in
the ass. Some of my readers are eager to inform
me that I still am. In a year or two I may agree
with them.
*
On more than one occasion I have been taken to
task for my negativity. What could be more
negative than six centuries of subservience to
Turks followed by a series of massacres? And yet,
I wasn’t even born when these things happened.
Have we fallen so low that all talk of reality
has become negative?
*
Speaking of his Nazi past, Guenter Grass said, “I
was too young to be guilty.” I have every reason
to suspect, had Germany won, he would have
bragged about his service to the nation.
#

Tuesday, October 03, 2006
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FAMILY, HONOR, MORALITY
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As a humorist, Yervant Odian (1869-1926) could be screamingly funny, but he could also be a realist in the manner of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Zola (all of whom he translated into Armenian). The intent of his two major novels, THE COUNCILMAN’S WIFE and FAMILY, HONOR, MORALITY, both written shortly before the Genocide, is not to amuse or entertain but to expose the hypocrisy, arrogance, and moral bankruptcy of wealthy Armenians who parade as pillars of society and benefactors.
When an impoverished widow with a sick daughter, following the advice of friends and neighbors, applies for financial support to an Armenian benevolent institution in Istanbul, she is told she must wait two or three weeks until her case is thoroughly investigated. When she explains that she has no source of income or savings, not even enough money to buy coal with which to heat her room (it’s winter), she is told by Ghougas effendi, the central character of FAMILY, HONOR, MORALITY, and one of the pillars and benefactors mentioned above: “Impossible, no way, can’t be done! We have rules and regulations here. No investigation, no money. We don’t know who you are and where you come from. You could be lying to us. We must first make sure what you are telling us is true. We are not in the habit giving away money to whoever walks in here, understand? For all we know you could be a whore.”
Ghougas effendi, like most of Odian’s fictional characters, is the quintessential Ottomanized Armenian. He sprinkles his speech with Turkish words, expressions, and proverbs, among them “pij,” “pezeveng,” “khaltakh,” (freely translated: bastard, pimp, floozy).
It is to be noted that, in addition to being a great novelist, Odian was also an investigative reporter. He invented nothing. To his contemporary readers, all his fictional characters had real and recognizable counterparts.
When he is publicly exposed as a fraud, a liar, and a rapist, Ghougas effendi muses: “Let them bark all they want… After I make a few generous financial contributions to the hospital, orphanage, and to a few newspapers, I will be once more a respected pillar of society.” Which is exactly what happens.
I challenge anyone to read FAMILY, HONOR, MORALITY and say he is proud to be an Armenian.
#
Wednesday, October 04, 2006
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NOTES AND COMMENTS
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The most effective counterargument is not questioning the common sense and decency of an adversary but mentioning a fact, no matter how marginal, that has been ignored.
*
I never say anything about my fellow men that I am not prepared to say about myself. Lying to others is bad enough. Lying to oneself is infinitely worse.
*
Suicide is a luxury the very poor can’t afford because they are too busy trying to survive.
*
In a corrupt democracy as soon as you throw one set of rascals out, another set moves in. Very often voting consists in rejecting a barrel of rotten apples for the sake of another.
*
To write means barking up the wrong tree in a desert.
*
If you think you know better, sooner or later you will run across someone who knows better.
*
Never underestimate the strength of underdogs and the weakness of top dogs.
*
The worst thing a mathematician can say about the work of another mathematician is, “That’s not math – it’s religion.”
*
Only after we reject all role models we may discover our true selves. Role models, even the very best, have the validity of hearsay evidence.
#

Thursday, September 28, 2006
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FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
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He who asks a rude question neither wants nor deserves an honest answer.
*
Two frequently used phrases in English that are never used in Armenian: “Speak truth to power,” and “The buck stops here.”
*
“The buck stops here,” and the blame-game are mutually exclusive concepts.
*
Sometimes the hardest word to pronounce is no.
*
Last night on CBC [Canadian Broadcasting Corporation] an interview with a Turkish novelist who was taken to court because in her latest book an Armenian character from San Francisco refers to Turks as “butchers.” The Turks, it seems, are so eager to achieve membership in the European Union that even a single word in a work of fiction bothers the hell out of them.
*
In the same way that we are brought up to believe we are a nation of heroes and martyrs, the Turks are brought up to believe they are a nation of empire builders and noble warriors, even if most of their so-called warriors were not Turks but brainwashed and castrated Christians.
*
People who give others ulcers, heart attacks, and cancer, die of natural causes.
*
I repeat myself because I consider it my duty to reassert the truth against ceaselessly repeated lies.
*
Bernard-Henri Levy (contemporary French philosopher): “Israeli writers are better politicians than Israeli politicians because imagination is a necessary ingredient of good politics. By using their imagination, writers are in a better position to understand what it means to be and feel like a Palestinian.”
#
Friday, September 29, 2006
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HOW NOT TO BE A WRITER
**********************************************
Misery likes company they say and they are right. If I encouraged anyone to adopt literature as a career, I have done so for purely selfish reasons.
*
Anyone who can write a sentence these days thinks he can also write a paragraph, a page, and a chapter. Result: an unlimited supply of trash most of which will never see the light of day. According to a recent statistic, only one in a thousand manuscripts is accepted for publication. That’s because for every honest man there are probably a thousand self-assessed geniuses, in the same way that for every authentic man of faith or servant of god there are a thousand mullahs, shamans, gurus, televangelists, fornicators, and child molesters; and for every statesman there are a thousand wheeler-dealers whose number one concern is number one.
*
It is said that writers are appreciated only after they die. What unmitigated nonsense! What unadulterated rubbish! I can name a hundred Armenian writers who are neither appreciated nor read even by the overwhelming majority of their fellow Armenians. As for courses in creative writing, how-to books, lectures, seminars, and symposia that have been mushrooming hiroshimally: the most practical advice you will get from them is of the kind that tells you to “stand still and wave a white handkerchief, this should confuse the elephant.”
*
Did anyone in Homer’s or Dostoevsky’s time even speak of such a thing as “creative writing”? My favorite advice, or rather anti-advice is: “Are you sure you are doing the wrong thing?” Because to do the right thing nowadays means to conform by saying “Yes, sir!” even when the right thing to do is to bellow “No!”
#
Saturday, September 30, 2006
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THE MEANING OF MEANING
********************************************
James Joyce once bragged that some of his puns have as many as five meanings. It is said of Saadi (13th-century Persian poet) that each word of his has as many as seventy-two meanings. Can you guess the number of meanings in an autumn leaf, a raindrop, an atom, a massacre?
*
Julien Green (1900-1998): “The young and not so young today speak platitudes, write platitudes, think platitudes. From one end of the world to the other – music, painting, architecture – it’s the triumph of mediocrity.”
*
“Your negativity is killing us,” a reader complains. Translation: Critics, no! Brownnosers, yes!
*
The only reason I concentrate on our failings is that we are in a position to do something about them. As for the failings of the rest of the world: what’s the use of bitching?
#

Sunday, September 24, 2006
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THE TRIUMPH OF EVIL
*****************************************
An elegantly dressed, coiffed, and bejeweled lady on Armenian TV spouting all the predictable clichés, among them:
“There is corruption in Armenia, certainly! But then there is corruption everywhere, including Canada.”
With one important difference: in Canada, when exposed, the corrupt are fired, sometimes even arrested, tried and jailed. Also, I have never heard a Canadian justify corruption by saying there is corruption everywhere.
*
“We shouldn’t judge our brothers in the Homeland. Are we better than they?”
True! We are not. We too are at the mercy of charlatans with their perennial Panchoonie punch line, “Mi kich pogh oughargetsek” (Send us a little money); and because I have been saying this, I have become persona non grata, and in the eyes of our chauvinists, an enemy of the people. Besides, if we don’t judge the corrupt, in a way we judge and condemn the victims at the mercy of bloodsucking parasites.
*
“The police stop and give you a ticket for traffic violations you didn’t commit.”
This may explain why everyone wants to emigrate except the police, who, according to a recent visitor “are the fattest and ugliest men I have ever seen.”
*
“It may take two generations for our brothers in the Homeland to abandon their Soviet ways.”
Who benefits from this kind of talk? Surely not the victims. As for their victimizers: it is almost as if they were given a license to carry on with the full protection and consent of the people for another forty or fifty years – a license for which they didn’t even apply.
I have said this before and it bears repeating: our national sport is the blame-game: we blame the “red” massacres on the Turks and on the indifference of the Great Powers; the “white” massacre (exodus from the Homeland and assimilation in the Diaspora) on “social, economic, and political conditions beyond our control”; our tribalism on our climate and geography; and now, our corruption on the Kremlin. During the Soviet era I don’t remember any one of our chic Bolsheviks in the Diaspora complaining about Soviet corruption. On the contrary. We were told we were in the best of hands and we never had it so good.
*
“Let’s not forget that, as a state, Armenia is only a new-born child.”
And yet, when it suits us, we claim to be one of the oldest civilizations, after which we brag about the fact that at a time when most of Europe lived in huts and caves, we enjoyed a Golden Age.
*
To those who explain and justify our criminal conduct, may I remind them that evil triumphs only when the majority adopt a passive stance and they justify their cowardice, moral moronism, and absence of vision by engaging in charlatanism.
#
Monday, September 25, 2006
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ODIAN’S ARMENIANS
**********************************
On reading Yervant Odian’s COUNCILMAN’S WIFE (first serialized at the turn of the last century, later published in book form in 1921) one thing becomes abundantly clear: the Armenian community of Istanbul consisted of morally bankrupt schemers (I am being politically correct now, because “a bunch of degenerates” would be closer to the truth) who spent their lives backbiting and plotting against one another.
What has changed? As far as I can see, only one thing: we no longer have writers like Odian willing to write about what they see and experience. What we have instead are academics and self-appointed pundits who, afraid to deal with the dark side of our collective existence (please note that I am not saying community life) feel more comfortable and safe writing about the past, and if it’s not the Middle Ages, it’s the massacres, as if we were “history”– I use the word in its colloquial meaning.
*
Julien Green (1900-1998), Francophone American writer, on death: “It is only the liberation of the spirit from the flesh.”
*
On biography: “Slices of cold mutton.”
*
On first impressions: “They are not to be resisted or ignored. One should never come to terms with vulgar people and vulgar not only in manner but also in spirit.”
*
On the self: “We are strangers to ourselves from the day we are born, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to understand and adjust ourselves to him.”
*
On life: “What happens in the world is of little interest. What happens within, that’s what really counts.”
***
Bernard-Henri Levy (contemporary French philosopher): “Only jackasses and the dead have nothing to hide.”
***
Abdelwahab Meddeb (Tunisian writer and professor of literature): “Islamism is the most absolute fascism ever conceived by man.”
#
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
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ON CORRUPTION AND RELATED ATROCITIES
****************************************************
If we need two generations to de-Sovietize ourselves, how many generations do we need to de-Ottomanize ourselves?
*
Corruption and cancer have this in common: unless surgically removed, they metastasize.
*
Where the corrupt are in charge, honesty will be outlawed.
Where the mediocre are in charge, excellence will be suppressed. Which is why to adopt a passive stance towards the corrupt and the mediocre is to condemn the nation to the death of a thousand cuts. As for those who like to brag about our resilience, adaptability, and instinct for survival: I suggest, to drag on a degraded existence is worse than death.
*
Do I repeat myself? Why not? How many times are our clichés and fallacies repeated? And I don’t mean harmless, infantile, and meaningless clichés, like first nation this and first nation that, but dangerous ones, like the one about two generations mentioned above….
*
Instead of meritocracy we have mediocracy, and instead of honesty we have charlatanism. A corrupt power structure conducts a genocidal policy towards all honest men as surely as Talaat did towards all innocent women and children. Now then, go ahead and parrot the two generations cliché with a clear conscience, if you can.
*
We were morally and politically right to rise against the Ottoman Empire. But we were dead wrong in our reliance on the verbal commitments of the Great Powers. Which means that even our so-called heroes behaved like dupes; even our so-called revolutionaries lacked self-reliance. And what could be more cowardly than heroes and revolutionaries who are afraid of free speech?
*
If you make a study of censorship and its victims (from Socrates to Solzhenitsyn) you may notice that its aim is to silence not charlatans and liars but men of integrity and truth. My final question is: Do you really believe some day in forty or fifty years our charlatans and parasites will see the light and usher in another Golden Age?
#
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
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CONFESSIONS AND ADMISSIONS
********************************************
Somewhere along the line I decided that I knew not only everything I needed to know but also what others needed to know, and ever since then my life has been a concatenation of blunders, among them my decision to be not just a writer but an Armenian writer. I know now that the certainty of being right is the greatest source of error.
*
Socrates spent his entire life proving that we use words without knowing their meaning. When asked what he would do first were he called upon to rule a nation, Confucius is said to have replied, “To correct language.” In our own days, semanticists tell us we don’t even know how to use such simple and common words as “to be.” For example, one should not say “I am not good at math,” but “I didn’t receive good grades in math.”
*
What is history? What else but the clash of two sets of charlatans and their dupes?
*
Not being a historian I must rely on the testimony of historians, and when these historians contradict one another, common sense tells me to rely on historians who are in a better position to be objective and impartial. This automatically excludes all nationalist, tribal, and partisan historians.
*
In his efforts to silence me, one of our flunkeys with “leadership qualities” (if you can imagine such an absurdity), once said to me: “Do you really think you are the only writer who has been unfairly treated?” To which I replied: “Of course not. That’s why I speak with the strength of many.”
*
Since dialogue is anti-Armenian, it follows it is a waste of time to reason with a man you can silence.
#
##

Thursday, September 21, 2006
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FROM MY DIARY
**************************
“Not so loud, please!” Verdi once said to an organ grinder who had planted himself beneath his window; and forever after the organ grinder sported a sign that said, “Student of Verdi.”
*
Frances Mayes dedicates her latest book, A YEAR IN THE WORLD: JOURNEYS OF A PASSIONATE TRAVELLER (New York, 2006), “To the forgotten new yellow panties and bra left drying on the rim of the hotel bathtub.”
*
A Chinese GI’s complaint to his sergeant: “Sarge, they keep calling me Sneeze but my name ain’t sneeze. My name is Hep Chou.”
*
In so far as criticism shows what can be done as opposed to what’s being done, it is always constructive.
*
Can a dupe really speak of self-interest if his views are not his but someone else’s?
*
You cannot reason with tyrants because they value their power above reason. Likewise, you cannot reason with men of faith because they value their religion above everything else, including their own survival.
*
Since most Christians are Christian because they were born in a Christian country, and most Muslims are Muslim because they were born in a Muslim country, it follows, what determines a man’s choice of religion is geography rather than the merits of their belief system. It also follows, most believers, like most patriots, are dupes of an unthinking factor, namely real estate. Which also means, to say my religion or my country is better than yours amounts to saying my mud is better than your mud.
#
Friday, September 22, 2006
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Faith and fundamentalism, fundamentalism and fanaticism, fanaticism and collective insanity: not always easy to tell where one ends and the other begins.
*
There is a beautiful English expression which is easily translated into Armenian but as far as I know it is seldom or never used by us: “Throw out the rascals!” – meaning, “Vote against the incumbents,” as if our incumbents were morally superior to American incumbents. In this connection perhaps I should add that until very recently we in the Diaspora couldn’t even identify our incumbents.
*
On the Internet it is not always easy to tell if those who attack you anonymously are children or adult retards. Perhaps I should have a warning label on everything I write that says: “What follows may not be suitable for young audiences. Parental guidance is advised.”
*
To generalize about Muslims may not be politically correct, but that should not prevent us from speaking of their mistreatment of women and their megalomaniacal imperial illusions based on the fact that, since they had an empire in the Middle Ages, they can have another in the near future, provided they follow the Guidance, which says, infidels have the same status in the eyes of Allah as dogs.
*
Speaking of collective illusions and ambitions: in what way is our claim on historic Armenia any different?
*
And speaking of generalizations: Let others think of us as a nation of cunning rug merchants. We see ourselves as heroes and martyrs; and heroes and martyrs don’t learn from their mistakes because they don’t make them.
*
My favorite epitaph: “Here lies someone who tried to screw his fellow man as little as possible” (Camilo Jose Cela).
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Saturday, September 23, 2006
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We brag about our facility with languages; and yet, Karzai speaks better English than Kocharian; some of our ablest translators are re-translators; most Armenians born and raised in America cannot speak their mother tongue, and most of those who speak it can’t read it.
*
To love man means to hate exploiters, crooks, propagandists, dupes, charlatans, moral morons, tyrants, brown-nosers, flunkeys, hirelings, know-it-all smart-asses, liars, rapists, child molesters, thieves, killers…Perhaps to love man means to hate mankind.
*
By the time you subtract the PR, spin, doubletalk, and propaganda factors, what’s left from the palaver of a politician may very well be not just nonsense but dangerous nonsense, the kind that starts wars and massacres.
*
We may not cut out tongues and burn heretics at the stake, but that does not prevent us from making it clear that’s what we would like to do if we could get away with it.
#

Sunday, September 17, 2006
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Whenever I am reminded by concerned friends that writing for Armenians is a waste of time (as if I didn’t know) the best explanation I can come up with is that America is a big country with big problems, and Armenia is a small country with bigger problems. Americans, moreover, believe in democracy. By contrast, our own attitude towards democracy is closer to that of Muslim fundamentalists, who will attack the Pope for quoting a medieval Byzantine emperor but will believe everything their mullahs tell them, even when they promise to be rewarded with a harem of virgins if they kill as many infidel dogs in the name of Allah as they can. Which is why the average letter to the editor by an average odar citizen in our local daily paper makes more sense to me than the long-winded and monomaniacal commentaries of our self-appointed pundits in our weeklies.
*
Being committed to democratic values means appreciating the importance free speech. One of our self-inflicted tragedies is that the overwhelming majority of our press and media in general, very much like our educational institutions, are in the hands of political parties, about which Gostan Zarian has said: “They have been of no political use to us, their greatest enemy is free speech.”
*
Where educational institutions are run by ideologues, the result will be an overabundance of dupes and a scarcity of individuals who can think for themselves. My guess is, for every thousand Armenians there may or may not be one dissident but even that one will be too many for our commissars. And if you think I am being too hard on our partisans, consider that for every ten million Soviets there was one dissident but even that one was too many for Stalinists; and for every one hundred million Muslims today there may or may not be one or more dissidents, but they are too intimidated to raise their voices and be counted.
*
Where the dominant ideas are rooted in ideology and theology, the result will be not truth but propaganda, and the dissidents will be treated not as critics with a valid perspective but heretics and blasphemers whose tongues should be cut out.
*
We prefer monologue to dialogue, speeches and sermons to an exchange of views, and propaganda to truth. The average Armenian today thinks tolerance consists in being tolerant only of people who parrot his sentiments and thoughts. As for the others, they might as well be that lowest form of animal life, pro-Turkish denialists. But free speech means to respect even the free speech of Turkish denialists. Try to explain that to our fundamentalists in whose view the Genocide is not history but theology.
#
Monday, September 18, 2006
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CONFESSIONS OF AN INFIDEL DOG
************************************************
Once upon a time in the good old days when everything I wrote was printed in Armenian weeklies on the continent and in the Middle East, whenever I came across a positive remark about us, I would quote it in a review or an article, and needless to add, I would do the same with every negative remark about Turks. Much later I learned that this was exactly the method employed by anti-American propagandists in the USSR. If I remember correctly, it was Mike Wallace who exposed this fact during an interview with the editor who handled Pravda’s (may have been Izvestia’s) anti-American department. Asked to identify her sources, the young female editor showed him the latest issue of the NEW YORK TIMES. All she did, it became apparent, was to select and edit the negative news items — things like murders, rapes, strikes, riots, demonstrations, homelessness, corruption in high places, and so on. Result: the average comrade in the street was convinced he lived in a Soviet paradise, while Americans were condemned to burn in their own hell, and serve those blood-sucking capitalist bastards right. Like Moliere’s bourgeois who spoke prose (as opposed to verse) and didn’t know it, I was a practicing propagandist and didn’t know it. With one difference: unlike the young Russian editor in her tiny cubicle, I wasn’t paid for my work. I did what I did because I loved Armenia and hated Turks.
*
There are many things in life about which no one tells you anything. Case in point: no one ever bothered to tell me that the secret of living a comfortable life is to be a flatterer, not a critic, and that there is more money in kissing ass than in kicking it.
*
Some years ago, after Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa on Salman Rushdie, many publishers and bookstores around the world, including America, refused to have anything to do with his SATANIC VERSES. More recently, American newspapers were afraid to reprint the Mohammed cartoons in the name of political correctness. And the Pope of Rome, because he dared to quote the testimony of a medieval Byzantine emperor about Muslim militarism, has now been effectively neutralized and gagged. The message of jihadists is clear: “We set no value on human rights and the free speech of infidel dogs. Step out of line and we will riot, burn, and kill.” (Today’s victim: a young Catholic nun if Africa.) As for anti-jihadist moderates: I sympathize with their silence because I have learned the hard way that you cannot reason with fanatics who speak in the name of God and Country.
#
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
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To engage in dialogue means to be open to reason. To refuse to engage in dialogue means to condemn oneself to extinction. Case in point: When at the turn of the last century our revolutionaries refused to engage in dialogue with Armenians within the administration of the Ottoman Empire, they condemned the people to extinction. For more on this subject, see Pars Tuglaci, THE ROLE OF THE DADIAN FAMILY IN OTTOMAN, SOCIAL, ECONOMIC, AND POLITICAL LIFE (Istanbul, 1993).
*
And because Muslim fundamentalists today refuse to engage in dialogue with the West, they are moving in a direction that will make a showdown inevitable. As their genocidal threats towards Israel persist and their acts of terrorism and anti-Western riots increase in frequency and severity, the West will have no choice by to say to all Islamic states: “Recognize the universal validity of such democratic principles as freedom of speech, freedom of worship, and respect for fundamental human rights, or face annihilation.”
*
We too are moving towards a showdown and our adversary is not “social and political conditions beyond our control,” but our tribalism and contempt for democratic values and dialogue. We may pretend to be part of the Christian West, but as Nikol Aghbalian has pointed out, we are more like Kurds and Turks, thoroughly tribal. Our nationalism is a sham because tribalism means loyalty to the tribe, and the tribe is not the nation.
*
It is to be noted that Nikol Aghbalian (1873-1947) was neither a dissident nor a critic, but a political leader, an educator, and a literary scholar.
*
Aghbalian on democracy: “When man does not submit himself to the rule of law, he will have to submit himself to the rule of men, that is to say, cliques and gangs.”
*
Aghbalian on tribalism: “We Armenians are products of the tribal mentality of Turks and Kurds, and this tribal mentality remains stubbornly embedded even in our leaders and elites.”
#
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
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IF I WERE BUSH
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I would begin by democratizing friendly regimes, like the Saudis, even if it means twisting their arms and threatening them with annihilation; after which I would convince them to use their own money and personnel (of which they have more than enough) to democratize the rest of the Middle East. But after writing for Armenians for a good number of years, I have learned the hard way that if an idea makes sense, it will be universally rejected.
*
VOLTAIRE’S FRENCHMEN
*************************************
Voltaire used to divide his fellow countrymen into two distinct groups: “the enemies of reason and merit, the fanatics, the stupid, the intolerant, the persecutors and the calumniators,” and the others. And now, allow me to introduce that rarest of all beings, a concerned Armenian who was also a friend of reason, and as such would have enjoyed Voltaire’s full approval.
*
ARTIN DADIAN
****************************
He was a prominent Ottoman diplomat who in 1896 headed a commission appointed by the Sultan to resolve the conflict between the Empire and the Armenian revolutionaries. The following is a quotation from one of his letters to the Tashnak party: “I suggest that today we have nothing but patience and tolerance. First, Europe shows complete indifference and says there is no Armenian question as far as they are concerned. Second, the threat of complete annihilation of the Armenian nation has not yet entirely passed, and third, the people are tired of revolutionary deeds and are ready to patch up their differences with the government in order to remain safe from further terrible events such as have almost wiped out our people from the face of the earth. Fourth, various organizations are fighting different causes, each in their own way, and in the middle of all this stands one pitiful Artin Dadian, who on the one hand begs the Sultan for mercy by telling him that this would be the best thing for his empire, and on the other hand fights base individuals who in order to attain their selfish aims are even willing to sell their nation.” (See Pars Tuglaci, THE ROLE OF THE DADIAN FAMILY IN OTTOMAN, SOCIAL, ECONOMIC, AND POLITICAL LIFE [Istanbul, 1993]).
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Thursday, September 14, 2006
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The blunders of youth are the heaviest burden of old age.
*
Those who speak of “social and political conditions beyond our control,” do so to justify their past failures and present inadequacies.
*
After 600 years of life in the Ottoman Empire, subservience comes naturally to us, and subservience means loyalty to the master even if he happens to be an alien tyrant; and to be loyal to an alien master means to betray your own people. Hence Raffi’s dictum: “Treason and betrayal are in our blood.”
*
You can hide your thoughts all you like, you can even say the opposite of what you feel, but you cannot hide your body language and style. In life, as in the boxing ring, you can run away but you can’t hide.
*
I don’t trust people who make a comfortable living because they will do and say anything in defense of their comfort.
*
Leaders are the curse of mankind. This is a rule with very few exceptions.
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Friday, September 15, 2006
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THERE IS NO BUSINESS
LIKE SHOA BUSINESS
*********************************************************
There are Turkish charlatans as surely as there are Armenian charlatans, and they are the ones who have reduced the Tragedy of our genocide to a game of political football, each side blaming the other and adopting a morally superior stance. “When the rich fight,” Sartre says somewhere, “it is the poor who die.” Likewise, when political wheeler-dealers argue, truth is sacrificed on the altar of propaganda. As for the cries of the victims, past, present, and future: no matter how hard I try I cannot take seriously the crocodile tears of our self-assessed dime-a-dozen pundits who blabber endlessly and ad nauseam about genocide. I grew up among survivors and I don’t remember any one of them uttering the word “tseghasbanoutiun” (genocide) or wasting a single moment trying to prove that it happened.
*
Capital, Marx said, dehumanizes not only the worker but also the capitalist, society as whole, and human relationships. Constant and endless talk of Turkish denials dehumanizes not only Turks and us, but also our relations with the rest of mankind, including our fellow Armenians. Anyone who does not share our view of Turks as bloodthirsty barbarians is labeled a denialist.
*
A victim will see the world only in terms of victims and victimizers, or those who are committed to the Cause and denialists. Because I speak of tolerance, respect for fundamental human rights, and a more objective assessment of the past, I have been called a pro-Turkish denialist. Armenian dehumanization of Armenian has already become a routine occurrence with us. I see it every day in Armenian discussion forums on the Internet, which are less discussion forums and more arenas of mutual verbal abuse.
*
There are decent Armenians as there are decent Turks, and they don’t need the arguments of propagandists to be convinced of what happened. Such arguments convince only dupes and children of all ages who have not yet acquired the ability to think for themselves.
*
I remember the late Puzant Granian (himself a survivor) saying, “At the rate we are going, we will be known to the rest of the world only as a nation that has contributed a million and a half victims to Turkish massacres. Our millennial history and countless other achievements will be ignored, forgotten, and buried.” But endless talk of genocide buries not only our other achievements but also our present problems, some of which (assimilation in the Diaspora and exodus from the Homeland) are of genocidal dimensions. Our monomaniacal obsession with Turkish denialists has made of us denialists of two “white genocides” and all talk of “social and political conditions beyond our control” is as convincing to a decent observer as the arguments of Turkish denialist charlatans.
#
Saturday, September 16, 2006
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All slaughters begin with the slaughter of common sense and decency. Hence, the post-World War II slogan, “We are all assassins.”
*
The ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA (Chicago, 1979) on Talaat Pasha (or, as the BRITANNICA spells it, Talat Pasa): “A man of swift and penetrating intelligence and integrity…an idealist, forceful but never fanatical or vengeful.”
*
Genocides are perpetrated not by serial killers or criminals but by law-abiding, patriotic citizens with leadership qualities and superior intellects, whose sole aim in life is to defend and protect the nation and its interests against all enemies foreign and domestic.
*
Nothing comes more easily to a mediocrity, a charlatan, and a moral moron than to convince himself he is a patriot with superior brains and leadership qualities.
*
An Armenian pundit: Anyone who reads TIME or NEWSWEEK and one of our weeklies.
#