Author: arabaliozian

Sunday, August 06, 2006
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Being on the side of the victim and against his victimizer is easy. What’s hard is to determine who’s who. Israel today is surrounded by two hundred million hostile Arabs and many more anti-Semites around the world who would like to see it bite the dust. If you add to that their status as perennial victims throughout their millennial existence, you may have to admit that the line between victim and victimizer is blurred.
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Something similar may be said about Turks and us. In 1915 Turks saw themselves as victims and Armenians, together with Russians, Greeks, Kurds, Brits, and Australians, among others, as their victimizers.
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In my efforts to explain the Genocide am I justifying it? No. What I am doing is trying to understand it without resorting to the crude clichés and simplistic slogans of our nationalist historians and propagandists.
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Speaking of nationalist historians: another factor that complicates matters is that in a political context victims are almost always double victims, as we were in 1915 and as Palestinians are today – namely, victims of their enemies as well as victims of their misguided, non-representative (in our case) or theocratic and fascist leadership (in the case of Palestinians and Muslims in general). To say otherwise is to imply that mullahs and our own tribal leaders are objective observers, impartial judges, and competent statesmen, to which I can only say, “Give me a break!” and “Nothing further, your honor.”
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And now a question: what would happen to a nationalist historian if, like Toynbee, he were to adopt a more objective and impartial stance? The answer is: he would no longer be a nationalist historian, which means he would cease to enjoy the support of our bosses, bishops, and benefactors, his books would no longer be sold in community centers and churches, he would be thought of as a traitor to the cause, and he would thus acquire the status of an outsider, an internal exile, a persona non grata, a pariah, and a pro-Turkish revisionist. He would no longer be an Armenian but a non-person and an abominable no man. I know what I am saying: I have been there. I still am.
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Monday, August 07, 2006
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It has been said, “Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.”
Corollary I: The smaller the stakes, the more vicious the arguments.”
Corollary II: When nonentities disagree on nothing, the result is bound to be verbal massacre.
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In our controversies we are like Oscar Wilde’s foxhunters: “The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable.”
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“Why do you always find fault with us?” a reader demands to know. “Why are you afraid to criticize odars?” Odars interest me only in so far as they make visible that which we pretend not to see in us. And before I undertake the daunting task of collecting the garbage on Main Street, I like to clean up the mess in my own backyard.
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Let others preach hatred of the Turk; I prefer to get busy recognizing the Turk within me.
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The answer to conventional wisdom is not unconventional stupidity.
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It is in their efforts to appear deep that the shallow expose their lack of depth.
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Even the most ruthless dictator depends on the subservience of the majority, provided of course the majority remains unaware of this.
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My experience with Levantines is that, they think they are ahead of you if they are better at making money. Nothing runs deeper than the contempt of the merchant for the poet. One of our national benefactors is quoted as having said to one of our poets: “I hire and fire people like you every day.”
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Tuesday, August 08, 2006
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DIALOGUE, ARMENIAN STYLE
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When an Armenian disagrees with you he is not satisfied with a simple counterargument; he also feels the need to let you know that he wouldn’t mind tearing off a piece of flesh from your body. Hence, Zarian’s dictum, “Armenians survive by cannibalizing one another.”
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Let others brag about Armenians being the first nation to convert to Christianity. I prefer to deal with facts even when – especially when – they happen to be against us. Because then and only then may we learn to deal with reality as opposed to voicing chauvinist crapola and recycling such nonsense as “it may take two or three generations for our problems to be solved” — and this after centuries of subservience to ruthless tyrants, massacres, dispersion, exile, life in alien slums, and ongoing “white” genocide (assimilation in the Diaspora and exodus from the Homeland).
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Armenians excel in a certain and rare type of counterargument whose true intent is not to contradict but to be a carcinogenic agent.
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All pro-Palestinian arguments recycle mullah propaganda whose most irrefutable tenet is the reward of 78 virgins.
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I trust our televangelists more than their mullahs if only because even the most crooked televangelist – and there have been quite a few of them – has never dared to go as far promising a single virgin to sex-starved teenagers.
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A self-ASSessed Armenian genius will voice the argument of a certified mongoloid moron and see nothing inconsistent in it.
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Wednesday, August 09, 2006
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To be infatuated with one’s knowledge is as bad as to be infatuated with one’s ignorance. That’s because all knowledge is limited but ignorance is without limits, so that at all times and everywhere our ignorance far exceeds our knowledge.
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The real god (if there is one) and our conception of him are two different beings that may not even be remotely connected with each other. I would go further and say that one may well be a contradiction of the other in so far as the unknown and unknowable may be said to be a contradiction of a figment of our imagination. When Nietzsche said, “god is dead,” he was referring to the figment rather than to the unknowable, about which no man is qualified to speak.
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Victims are not the most objective judges of their victimizers.
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Turks believe what their historians tell them because they hate the stigma of being identified as bloodthirsty Asiatic savages. Armenians believe what their own historians tell them because they hate to be identified as perennially divided and inept tribal dupes who allowed themselves to be manipulated by the double-talk of foreign politicians. In their efforts to appear better than they are, both Turks and Armenians lie to their own people and are believed because the uneducated and half-educated masses are no match for the cunning and sophistication of the bourgeoisie.
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Even in countries where capitalism has buried communism and democracy has buried fascism there are people who miss the good old days when they could slaughter dissidents with impunity. I happen to be aware of their existence because some of them are my most faithful readers. Are they bloodthirsty savages or dupes? I will let you decide.
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Thursday, August 03, 2006
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We like to bend reality in our favor, but reality being much older and more “cunning” (Hegel) than us, has its own ideas. Had he lived long enough to witness Stalinism, Marx would have been the most disappointed man on earth. It is said of Elias Canetti that he was disappointed to realize that his book, CROWDS AND POWER, failed to prevent a single war. And think of Napoleon spending his last years in exile in a rat-infested villa on the island of St. Helena in the middle of the Atlantic and at the mercy of a sadistic English governor. And then there is Einstein: when told he had helped invent the atom bomb, he is quoted as having said, “If only I had known, I should have become a plumber.”
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We like to portray ourselves as innocent victims of Turkish atrocities, but in our relations with one another our first priority seems to be to verbally abuse, humiliate and insult anyone who dares to disagree with us, and we do this without any sense of guilt or doubt as if we were on a mission from god. I shiver to think what may happen to the rest of the world on the day and by some satanic miracle we become an imperial power.
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To be able to smile once a day is worth a small fortune.
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The decency of a people can be judged by the way they treat their pets and poets.
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The encounter of the ruthless with the inept: our history in a nutshell.
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Friday, August 04, 2006
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Is friendship between Armenians and Turks possible? I am not sure. Some day in the distant future we may be able to bury the hatchet, but I suspect we will never forget where we buried it.
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To say all our misfortunes are due to our geography is to imply that Armenia is a good place to die.
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Never argue with a man whose most powerful argument is his bad breath.
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The certainty of being right is what’s wrong with most people. All crimes against humanity begin with the conviction on the part of the perpetrators that they are right and their victims wrong.
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As a rule, fanatics who say God is on their side are not in the habit of wasting any time worrying whether or not they are on His.
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The more ignorant they are, the more patriotic they pretend to be, as if to say, “We may know less, but we love the flag more.”
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A small group of thoughtful, committed men can change the world; but an even smaller group of thoughtless fanatics can destroy it.
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Dying is easy. Writing for Armenians is hard.
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There is more truth in the advertisements of our partisan weeklies than in their commentaries and editorials, and I have never even been remotely tempted to buy anything they advertise.
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As children we are brought up to trust our fellow Armenians and to suspect odars. As adults we learn to trust crooked odars more than honest Armenians.
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Saturday, August 05, 2006
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Nothing gives me more pleasure than to be contradicted by someone who makes sense – I may learn something. And nothing annoys me more than to be contradicted by someone who recycles the kind of nonsense I was taught as a child.
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Unanimity is easily achieved among moral morons and mental midgets.
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“Speak softly and carry a big stick.” Armenian translation: Scream at the top of your lungs and carry a toothpick.
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Hating is easy – any child can hate. What’s difficult is understanding.
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We begin to think only on the day we learn to think against ourselves.
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Our partisan weeklies print 99% anti-Turkish propaganda and 1% nonsense and they tell me I am consistently negative. In their eyes all talk of Turks, massacres, hatred and intolerance is positive, understanding and truth negative.
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I chose Armenian literature for the same reason that some people choose suicide.
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Because the dead cannot speak, our “betters” say, “We did what’s best for the people.”
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Never trust the judgment of a nation whose perennial best sellers are cookbooks.
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Monday, July 31, 2006
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My intention is not to promote friendship between Turks and Armenians – I am neither a miracle worker nor a megalomaniac. My daydream, which is 99% illusion and 1% hope, is to promote friendship between Armenian and Armenian. But so far all I have succeeded in doing is provoking contempt, ridicule, sarcasm, intolerance, and insults.
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“If you describe someone’s conduct,” Sartre tells us, “you expose him to himself – he becomes visible to himself.” Unless of course he is blind and deaf.
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Speaking of dumb and deaf: we have been so catastrophically wrong so often that our aim should no longer be doing the right thing but avoiding apocalyptic blunders.
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Whenever I refer to ourselves as perennial losers, I am reminded of our victory in Karabagh. Consider the Israelis who have won five wars against the Arabs, and so far all they have succeeded in doing is planting the seeds of future conflicts.
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Since they bowed their heads and resigned to their status as underdogs for several millennia, the Jews find it difficult to understand why Palestinians don’t follow their example. Like the Jews, we too bowed our heads to a long line of conquerors. It doesn’t necessarily follow that the Azeris will do likewise. Now then, go ahead and brag about our victory in Karabagh.
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Projection is a misleading tool of understanding because it fails to take into consideration the uniqueness or otherness of others.
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Life advances on an infinite number of lines some of which are invisible to the eye of our awareness. To say “I never had it so good” is to make yourself vulnerable to the sudden and unpredictable blows of fate; or as the old saying has it: “When the house is finished, death enters.”
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Tuesday, August 01, 2006
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It is incorrect to say that Einstein proved Newton wrong, or Jung exposed Freud’s fallacies. Newton and Freud explained one fraction of reality, Einstein and Jung another. To understand all of reality is to read the mind of god, which amount to saying to be gods. It will never happen.
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André Gide: “If you want to understand something you must begin by loving it, after which you must distance yourself from it. This applies to countries, to people, and to oneself.” The trouble with most people is that they find it very difficult to distance themselves from what they love or from what they believe, that is to say, themselves.
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“Some people,” writes Paul Valéry, “kill themselves because they don’t know when to let go of their umbrella.” Or, because they are too obstinate in their refusal to distance themselves from an insignificant object, they allow themselves to be run over by a bus.
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If you believe what your government tells you, it may be because it flatters your ego even if in the process it makes of you a certified dupe.
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The first and most important priority of all power structures is to maintain and whenever possible to increase their power. Everything they say, and even more important, everything they don’t say or everything they cover up, is adjusted to that project and nothing else. What they say may be true, but what they avoid saying may be even more true. There is only one way to avoid being a dupe, or being systematically moronized, and that is by not believing anything that someone in power tells you; and when a layman, who is not a member of an organization, tells you something, ask him where he heard it from.
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What I said above applies not only to political but also to religious leaders. I once met a smart Armenian “khaliji” (rug merchant — I use the Turkish word because that’s how he liked to identify himself) who dismissed the Pope as “a biscuit eater” but who was convinced that his bishop was a saint.
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Speaking of smart khalijis and saintly bishops: according to Darwin, it is the most highly developed organisms that are least adaptable. This may explain why it is the elites of nations or our “betters” that eventually lead the nation to destruction, and they do this because they are so infatuated with their own privileges, lies and half-truths that they refuse to adapt themselves to new truths or reality. Their gods are not gods but idols; and they lead their subjects to the slaughterhouse because they refuse to let go of their umbrella.
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And now, let us go down on our knees and pray: “Our Father Who art in Heaven, give us humility and strength – the humility to admit that as wretched human beings we cannot read Your mind, and the strength to value Your most precious gift to us, our life, above that of a lousy umbrella.”
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Wednesday, August 02, 2006
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Honest Armenians don’t brag. They know better. Like all human beings we no doubt have our share of good qualities; but my guess is, the negatives in us far outnumber the positives, and this is especially true of our sermonizers and speechifiers who parade as role models and leaders. The only thing these charlatans have succeeded in doing so far is to teach us to brag, and to brag even about what others have done to us, such as being the first nation to experience genocide in the 20th Century.
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When we discuss writers like Baronian, Odian, and Massikian, we treat them as humorists and not as objective observers and competent analysts of our character and ethos. As for writers widely recognized as nationalists and patriots: it is in their correspondence with close friends and diaries, only a small of which has been published so far, that they reveal their true sentiments and thoughts about their fellow Armenians – see above all Varoujan’s correspondence and Zarian’s notebooks, both published posthumously in Yerevan.
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The only place Armenians are portrayed as loveable characters are in Saroyan’s fiction. In biographies of Saroyan even Saroyan himself emerges as a nasty piece of business who hated his own children. As for his relatives and friends: none of them may be remotely described as Saroyanesque.
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If you want to meet real unSaroyanized Armenians, ignore their holier-than-thou pundits, folk dances, and cuisine; visit instead any Armenian discussion forum on the Internet.
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Balzac: “Customs and traditions are a nation’s hypocrisy.”
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Baudelaire: “Life is a disease. This is a widely known secret.”
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Thursday, July 27, 2006
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WHAT I KNOW ABOUT FASCISTS
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Under fascism to call a spade a spade and to suggest that two plus two make four may be construed as dissent, that is to say, a capital offense.
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Under fascism the only way to play it safe is to say what they want to hear and to pretend they know better what’s good for you even if they know nothing about you and they care even less.
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Fascists will identify you as an enemy not because you are wrong and they are right, but because you dared to disagree with them.
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Under fascism if you refuse to be systematically moronized you will be called an enemy of the people by enemies of the nation.
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Fascists preach patriotism, practice the destruction of the nation, after which they blame the rest of mankind.
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And now a question: knowing what I know about fascists, if you had a choice between living in a fascist Armenia and a democratic Turkey, where would you live?
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I am willing to concede that people like me improve nothing. But sometimes I am tempted to believe that they may make a tiny — even if tiny to the point of being invisible — contribution towards preventing things from getting worse.
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Friday, July 28, 2006
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If I were to name the three most incomprehensible things in the world they would be (one) why things exist; (two) why propaganda works; and (three) why do we obstinately refuse to see any inconsistency in preaching Armenianism and practicing Ottomanism.
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A systematically moronized generation will moronized the next generation with a clear conscience and total unawareness of what it is doing.
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Russian proverb: “Right is on the side of those who have more rights.”
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Extremism: a frequently used word these days and to me one of the most annoying, not only for what it stands, which is repulsive enough, but also for what it looks like – excrementalism.
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“Consciousness cannot go through the same state twice,” Bergson tells us. It follows, whe I say “I haven’t changed my mind” I also admit that I am not in the habit of allowing my consciousness to make a contribution to my thinking, which is a contradiction because objective judgment and logic are operations of the conscious mind.
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“Loving a human being amounts to killing all others,” Camus writes in his NOTEBOOKS. Patriotism may not amount to killing or hating all other nations, but it may make us less receptive to their humanity.
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An Armenian who dares to think for himself will make many enemies and very few friends. The same could be said of Turks and in general of all people who view tolerance as a state of mind that may lead to treason.
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Saturday, July 29, 2006
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Saroyan once said that he felt sorry for the Turks. For a long time I couldn’t understand that. But I do now. Saroyan could have added that he felt sorrier for his fellow Armenians for their lack of awareness, for what they have become, and for the way they treat one another.
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A Turk once said to me, “What about the innocent Turks massacred by the Armenians?” In my reply I said that I have always been on the side of victims and against victimizers regardless of race, color, and creed.
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I feel sorry for the Palestinians today, but I feel sorrier for the Jews. If the Palestinian have known oppression for fifty years, the Jews have known it for five thousand years. When I speak of Palestinians I don’t have in mind their “freedom fighters” or “terrorists,” but the innocent civilians who are double victims – victims of Israelis as well as their incompetent and corrupt leadership; and I have every reason to believe that Palestinians will be better off in a democratic Israel than in their own theocracy.
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In Chekhov’s NOTEBOOKS we read: “Love, friendship, respect do not unite people as much as common hatred for something.” That indeed is the true tragedy of all defeated and massacred people – the emphasis on hatred in their collective existence and the absence of friendship, respect, and ultimately common sense and decency.
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Elsewhere, Chekhov writes: “It is better to be the victim than the executioner.” There you have another reason why Saroyan felt sorry for the Turks.
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It has been said that only the very wise and the very stupid don’t change. No matter how hard I try I see very little wisdom in our past blunders and present conduct. You may now draw your own conclusions.
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I am not a man of faith and I have every reason to suspect that organized religions have done more harm than good. And yet (the two saddest words in the English language, it has been said), and yet, sometimes I feel an irresistible urge to go down on my knees and pray: “Our Father, Who art in Heaven…”
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Thursday, July 20, 2006
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Dante is to Italians what Shakespeare is to the English, Cervantes to the Spaniards, and Goethe to the Germans, and like these writers he has had more than his share of biographers, the latest being Barbara Reynolds, who writes that in his INFERNO this celebrated Florentine portrayed his fellow Florentines “as thieves, usurers, sycophants and sodomites.” As far as I know, no Armenian writer has ever dared to say as much about his fellow Armenians. It is true that near the end of his life Zarian called them “cannibals” but then he was speaking only metaphorically.
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Nina Berberova (1901-1993) was a prolific Russian writer of Armenian descent who like all wise Armenians (Henri Troyat comes to mind, also Arthur Adamov, and Shahan Shahnour in his Armen Lubin phase) kept a safe distance between herself and her fellow Armenians. The only time she discusses her Armenian ancestors is in her autobiography, THE ITALICS ARE MINE (available in English) where we learn that Goncharov modeled his most famous fictional character, Oblomov, on her great-grandfather. Many of her books (short stories, novels, essays, biographies) are available in a number of languages and continue to be translated today, the latest being MOURA: THE DANGEROUS LIFE OF THE BARONESS BUDBERG, a shadowy character who became notorious as a spy and as the mistress of, among others, Maxim Gorky and H.G. Wells.
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I am willing to plead guilty to the charge that sometimes I tend to underestimate my fellow men, but only in the sense that I don’t underestimate them enough.
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Those who violate someone’s freedom of speech do so on the grounds that they know best what’s good for the people, which is what all criminal regimes say.
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Some of my Armenian critics belong to a school of thought that says, “If I cannot slaughter you, I shall do my utmost to massacre your self-esteem” – all in the name of Armenianism of course, that is to say, Ottomanism.
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Friday, July 21, 2006
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Many years ago I remember to have read an old Mohammedan prayer that goes something like this: “O God, if I worship Thee in fear of Hell, burn me in Hell; or if I worship Thee in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise.” Is it conceivable that as a non-practicing Catholic I know more Mohammedan prayers than the mullahs who promise 73 virgins to sex-starved gullible teenagers?
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It is true that some of the most important questions will forever remain beyond our reach, but we must keep raising them all the same lest we come to terms with falsehoods.
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Born-again fanatics remind me of the Jewish proverb that says: “Men occasionally find a new truth, but never an old button” – the implication being that sometimes an old button may be worth more than any number of new truths.
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On more than one occasion I have been verbally abused by born-again readers. To them and to all ayatollahs and mullahs I would like to quote the following passage from Pascal: “The worship of truth without charity is idolatry.”
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“From good books I learn how to write; from bad books I learn how not to write,” I once read in an interview with a writer. One of our elder statesmen once said to me: “The problem with us is that we don’t have role models.” But where there are no positive role models, there will be negative ones, and from them we can learn how not to behave. In other words, if you are disposed to learn, you will learn; but if you are of the opposite disposition, you are destined to remain an ignoramus.
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Saturday, July 22, 2006
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ON OUR HISTORY, CULTURE, AND IDENTITY
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If you want to understand the history of your people and the cultural forces that went into shaping your identity, forget everything you were taught as a child. I would say this not only to Armenian boys and girls but also to boys and girls of all nations.
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Individuals may learn to be honest and objective, but not nations, perhaps because there is more fiction than fact in the concepts of nationality and nationhood.
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Almost everyone who identifies himself as an Armenian today or, for that matter, as a Greek, Turk, Russian, Jew, or Palestinian, comes with a political and ideological baggage that is incompatible with objectivity. Take away objectivity from history and the result is bound to be propaganda.
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The history of Armenia and the history of the Armenian people, moreover, are not one and the same. Until the Communist takeover the two centers of Armenian cultural life were Istanbul and Tiflis, not Yerevan, which was only a small single-factory town of no importance.
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Even more to the point: Armenians played a much more prominent role in the Byzantine Empire than in Armenia, and more often than not they adopted an anti-Armenian foreign policy; that is to say, they were more loyal to the Greek Empire than to the Armenian nation. This pattern of conduct followed within the Ottoman Empire and more recently within the USSR.
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Sunday, July 16, 2006
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Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924), French composer on the ideal tempo for a song: “If the singer is bad – very fast.”
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If the subject is propaganda, reduce a complex issue to a cliché or slogan: Turks are bad, Armenians good. We are smart, progressive, civilized, everybody else is corrupt, backward, dishonest. We do the right thing, none of our enemies and their partisans are equipped to discriminate right from wrong. We touch the top, they scrape the bottom. God is on our side, the devil is on theirs. Heaven is our destination, hell is theirs.
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What if some of our most cherished certainties are based on a transparent misrepresentation of reality, in the same way that some of the worst crimes against humanity are committed in the name of a god we only pretend to know and understand, but about whom “we know nothing” (Socrates)?
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Contradictions and differences of opinion are useful only in a dialogue. Anywhere else they only paralyze the mind and poison the soul.
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The stated reason is seldom the real reason. If the stated reason is altruistic, search for the unstated selfish reason.
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When two men speaking in the name of god contradict each other, it only means that either one or both are charlatans, liars, and blasphemers with illusions of grandeur.
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Monday, July 17, 2006
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SPEAKING WITH A FORKED TONGUE
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The chances are, the opposite of what we say contains more truth than what we say.
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Our Father (but no one else’s) who art in heaven, Halvajian be thy name. Give us this day our pilaf and shish-kebab (and stones to our enemies). Forgive us our trespasses on condition that you don’t expect us to forgive the bastards who trespassed against us. Lead us not into temptation but deliver us straight to the devil, because he makes fewer demands on us.
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FREEDOM OR DEATH
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Freedom for us, death to everyone else, including our dupes.
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Behind every heroic slogan, search for the cowards who formulated it. Or, as the Turks are fond of saying, “Among ten men nine are sure to be women.” The Chinese have a similar saying: “Those who make idols don’t believe in them.
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SHADES OF GRAY
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Chekhov: “There are no good people and no bad people in my plays, only people.”
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Ronald Harwood explaining why his characters are shades of gray rather than black and white: “If you color your characters in one or the other, you are dealing in propaganda.”
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SPEAKING OF PROPAGANDA
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In her recently published biography of Magda Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, Anja Klabunde quotes her as having said: “Joseph is the greatest loudmouth phony that has ever lived on German soil.”
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Tuesday, July 18, 2006
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If I were a man of faith I would keep it a secret lest I offend others of a different persuasion. No one likes to be thought of as an infidel, a heretic, a blasphemer, or a deviationist on his way to the devil.
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Nietzsche says somewhere “those who speak with a loud voice cannot have subtle thoughts.” Something similar could be said of men of faith.
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There is no conceivable reason why god and good manners should be mutually exclusive. If you discard good manners in the name of god, what’s to stop anyone from using god as a license to kill?
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People who value life over death may be relied on to do what’s best in their own interest. But the same cannot be said of men of faith who believe they will be better off dead than alive.
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All undemocratic ideologies and power structures value conformism, obedience, and subservience above freedom and creativity. All totalitarian regimes tacitly subscribe to the Orwellian slogan “Slavery is Freedom.”
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If what we believe shapes our character, it would be no exaggeration to say that very often faith creates hoodlums, vandals, and killers.
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Wednesday, July 19, 2006
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Somewhere Plekhanov observes, “Bourgeois scientists make sure that their theories are not dangerous to God and to Capital.” He should have added: “Communist scientists make sure that their theories do not in any way question the infallibility of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. Closer to home: our pundits and academics today make sure that nothing they say may be remotely critical of our bosses, bishops, and benefactors on whose goodwill they depend for their survival and prosperity. Hence, the proliferation of massacre books in which all the blame is heaped on others.
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Every power structure generates its own gods and bourgeoisie whose number one concern is number one.
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Leadership, it has been said, consists in the ability to see “the other side of the hill.” My question is: if our leaders could not foresee the Genocide, what the hell can they foresee?
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An honest man will never say, “If you want to be right, you must think as I do.” It is the mighty of this world that impose their ideas on others because they sense instinctively that they are wrong and only intimidation will persuade others to agree with them.
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I read today that when slavery was legal, blacks owned black slaves, and whites owned white slaves. In other words, slavery was integrated.
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Once upon a time when I was a loudmouth smart-ass know-it-all I couldn’t understand those who took a sudden dislike at me. Now I don’t understand those who liked me.
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Thursday, July 13, 2006
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DON’T SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER
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Almost all catastrophic blunders begin by exaggerating the importance of a blade of grass and ignoring the prairie. And such exaggerations come naturally to us because we live with ourselves 24/7 and think we harbor more complexities than the rest of mankind.
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It is no exaggeration to say that World War I (which prepared the ground for World War II) began because a nobody assassinated another nobody in the middle of nowhere during a non-event. Why was this assassination so important? I suspect only a handful of specialized historians may have an answer, which may succeed only in exposing the absurdity of human conduct.
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The happiest years of my life were when I knew nothing and understood even less. This may explain why most people prefer ignorance to knowledge; and if you dare to share your knowledge with them, they resent you; they may even hate you because they feel more comfortable in a world of clichés and platitudes. Clichés such as “first nation to convert to Christianity,” which is immediately and invariably followed by another first – “first nation to experience genocide in the 20th century.” Even clichés that open old wounds are welcome because they shift the burden of responsibility and guilt on others.
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The other day I received an e-mail from a gentle reader that said, among other things, “How dare you think of yourself as a writer?” As a matter of fact, whenever I think of myself as a writer, I can’t write. The responsibility paralyzes me. Don’t think of me as a writer but as a fellow human being who for a few minutes every day likes to share his thoughts with a handful of readers who are absolutely free to ignore him.
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Friday, July 14, 2006
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Can you imagine anything more tedious and unreadable than a work of fiction whose central character and narrator is a small-town clergyman? I would have answered that question with a resounding no, until I read Marilynne Robinson’s GILEAD; and when I finished reading it I felt as though I had lost a good friend. So I decided to reread it.
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Another book I have been rereading is Samuel Beckett’s WAITING FOR GODOT, whose central two characters, wonderfully named Estragon and Vladimir, while waiting for someone whose arrival is perpetually postponed, spend their time verbally abusing each other, their final insult being “Critic!” Sounds familiar?
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Luis Bunuel: “I am neither a believer nor an atheist, but the exact opposite.”
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Nothing comes easier to an Armenian than to overestimate himself. If he is cunning, he will think of himself as intelligent. If he is intelligent, he will think he is wise. If he is talented, he will brag about his genius. Saroyan bragged about the fact that his initials were the same as Shakespeare’s. And then there is the type of Armenian who prides himself on his superior brand of Armenianism but who writes with the concentrated venom of a Turkish viper.
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Saturday, July 15, 2006
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ON CORRUPTION
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To be a writer does not mean to know and understanding everything or, for that matter, to be infallible. I don’t mind admitting that compared to what there is to know, what I know is no more than a drop in the ocean, and that there are a great many things that I don’t understand and I will never understand. On the subject of my deficiencies I could also add that I have experienced very little and done even less. But I can say one thing in my favor: I have at no time knowingly supported the corrupt or anyone who has abused his power by violating someone’s fundamental human right.
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Whenever I speak of corruption, I am immediately, not to say automatically (that is to say, unthinkingly) informed by some readers that there is corruption everywhere, meaning, I might as well shut up and mind my own business. To these gentlemen I would like to ask: If, as you say, there is corruption everywhere, what exactly have you done to expose it? What are you doing to combat it? If you have done nothing, on whose side are you? Don’t you think it is the duty of all decent men to expose corruption and combat those who profit from it? If you have done nothing, why do you find it necessary to obstruct the path of those who, unlike you, refuse to come to terms with it? What makes you think the rest of mankind should accept you as a role model by adopting a passive stance? Doesn’t it ever occur to you that by explaining corruption and in the process justifying it, you may also be perpetuating and legitimizing it? Don’t you think to ignore the cry of victims means to be on the side of victimizers? And worse, much worse. Don’t you think by coming to terms with the corrupt of this world and by accepting it as if it were an inevitably fact of life, like death and taxes, you dishonor the memory of countless decent men throughout history who opposed corruption and abuses of power, and by doing so they risked their own lives?
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If you tell me I take myself too seriously and that even if I were to scream at the top of my lungs for the next hundred years nothing will change and that if anything has changed during the last twenty or thirty years that I have been writing it has been for the worse, then I will reply by saying, at least I have harmed no one but myself. But if, and I say if, by what I have written I have made one or two individuals here and there, now and then, uncomfortable even if it means for a fraction of a second, then I don’t think it has all been for nothing.
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Sunday, July 09, 2006
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The first and most important rule in etiquette: never say what you really think. Sometimes it is even advisable to say the exact opposite, especially in your dealings with superiors or anyone in a position to retaliate.
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Because I say what I think, I have made more enemies than friends and even my friends don’t like me. But I plead extenuating circumstances: I am a writer, an admission that in the eyes of our philistines amounts to an insanity plea. That’s the way it is with philistines: if you expose their dishonesty they will label you as insane.
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“I have learned a great deal from my critics,” one of our notorious philistines once told me; what he neglected to add is, when was the last time this miracle had taken place.
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I don’t remember any one of our bosses, bishops, benefactors and their dupes saying they have learned something from Baronian or Odian, or for that matter, Yeghishe and Khorenatsi. That’s because these gentlemen proceed on the assumption that they know everything they need to know, and since they can read the mind of God, they don’t need a scribbler’s two cents’ worth. And they say they have learned from their critics because it is good PR, it denotes an open mind, even if it is the exact opposite.
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By learning all about PR and etiquette you may master the art of hypocrisy and doubletalk, two necessary ingredients for going places.
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Beware of the defenseless; they may be your most dangerous adversaries.
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There is nothing in this world as good as the love of a good woman, except perhaps the love of a bad one.
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Monday, July 10, 2006
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THE SOVIET EXPERIENCE
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Like all conquerors in the history of mankind, what the Soviets did was to expose our tribalism in both the Homeland and the Diaspora by adopting divide-and-rule tactics.
In the Diaspora, Tashnaks opposed the regime and in doing so they identified the people (the victims) with the commissars (their victimizers) and ignored the majority of the people who were too busy trying to survive to have the luxury of political awareness.
The Ramgavars supported the regime because they saw the conquerors not as oppressors but as defenders against the bloodthirsty monster next door.
Others confused the regime with the ideology and the ideology with theology. In their eyes Lenin and Stalin were messianic figures and defenders not only of the Homeland but also of all exploited workers around the world. Communism was a religion for whose sake they were willing to betray the heretics to the authorities even if the heretics happened to be friends and brothers. That’s bad enough, but what is infinitely worse is that even after the collapse of the regime, even after the show trials of the 1930s, even after the starvation of millions, the successive waves of purges and the Gulag, some of these “defenders of the faith” refused to give up their religion and openly declared to have been proud members of the Party. Were they “useful idiots” or cunning operators willing to sell their souls to a ruthless gang of criminals in exchange of thirty pieces of silver? Were they sleepwalkers who refused to wake up because waking up meant facing the reality of their betrayal?
In all fairness, I should also mention the fact that there were decent and selfless Armenians who refused to join the chorus of dupes even if it meant persecution, exile, and death, but as always in our environments, they were ignored.
It is not my intention here to open old wounds but to ask: What have we learned from the Soviet experience? The answer is, nothing! We continue to be at the mercy of crypto-Stalinist and neo-fascist charlatans who believe they know better what’s good for the people and armed with that article of faith they violate the fundamental human rights of free speech of anyone who dares to disagree with them.
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Tuesday, July 11, 2006
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IN PRAISE OF FREE SPEECH
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If I knew what you know and vice versa, perhaps some of our disagreements would take a step towards reconciliation. And if I knew what everybody else knows and has experienced, and vice versa, we would all have a better chance of reaching a consensus. Which is why free speech matters. Which is also why those who violate anyone’s free speech promote ignorance and legitimize internecine conflicts without end. It is this and nothing else that has made of us perennial losers and victims.
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Where there is no free speech, there will be fear of knowledge and a favorite target of vilification. Under the Nazis it was the Jews; under the Soviets bourgeois nationalist reactionaries, in the Muslim world today it’s “infidel crusaders,” and under our own “genocide fascists” it’s Turks.
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Unlike charlatans, an honest man will never say, “My free speech is more important than yours,” which amounts to saying “What I know is more important than what you know.” Where people are allowed to assess themselves, even an inbred moron with a negative IQ will assess himself as a genius. I have seen it happen.
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In the Middle Ages the Catholic Church said, “What we know is more important than what everybody else knows, including scientists.” Result: a thousand years of Dark Ages during which Muslims were ahead of the West in all fields of knowledge. If it were up to our partisans and pundits, we would never emerge from our own Dark Ages.
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When our partisans and pundits expect me to believe that Turks are the most important subject of discussion, I feel justified in suspecting there is something rotten in their state of mind (if you will forgive the overstatement) and that these gentlemen (ditto) are hiding something from me, and that something may well be fear of being exposed as charlatans.
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To say that Turks should be our favorite subject of discussion is to imply that what was done to us nearly a century ago is more important than what’s being done today; and the past (which we cannot change) is more important than our present and future (which we can change). But change is what all authoritarian rulers and fascists dread most. Because change may erode their petty little powers and privileges which may not even amount to thirty pieces of silver.
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Germans lost World War II because they believed what Jews know (among them Einstein) can’t be as important as what Germans know. It never pays to underestimate the value of someone else’s knowledge. Had Germans been more tolerant, I would probably be writing these lines in German now.
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When we choose not to know that which we ought to know, when that is we value ignorance over knowledge, we choose death — if not of the body than of the spirit.
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Wednesday, July 12, 2006
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ON THE REALITY PRINCIPLE
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What’s positive and what’s negative in life? This question interests me because sometimes I am urged to be more positive on the grounds that I am consistently negative.
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An environment in which illusions, fallacies, misconceptions, lies, wishful thinking and, by extension, propaganda are dominant, he who speak of facts or the reality principle will be perceived as negative. And because I stick to facts, readers who are too cowardly or brainwashed to cross a specific propaganda line label me as negative.
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Once upon a time I too had many illusions and I appreciate the ease and comfort they provide; I also know how hard it is to give them up. But give them up we must because challenging the reality principle may end in tragedy.
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What could be more positive than the idea of a free, independent, and historic Armenia as proclaimed by our revolutionaries a hundred years ago? And yet, it resulted in wholesale massacres that came close to destroying the nation.
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Behind every tragedy there is an illusion; a tragedy may even be defined as the reassertion of the reality principle. Oedipus blinded himself because he acted on the false assumption that the old man he was killing could not be his father, and the old lady he was marrying could not be his mother. King Lear deluded himself into thinking that he could count on the gratitude of his offspring. Hamlet thought his mother could never marry a man guilty of fratricide. The Trojans deluded themselves into thinking that they should not question the integrity of Greeks bearing gifts. I think it was Einstein who once observed that sometimes we pay most for things we get for nothing.
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Consider the mess in Iraq today: Bush went to war there under the misconception that as the head of the mightiest empire in the history of mankind, he could win an easy victory. And then to his surprise, the reality principle kicked in.
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Consider our century-old campaign on the Genocide recognition issue: my guess is we have invested more money on it than we will ever recover in reparations. Am I being positive or negative? You decide.
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Finally, may I confess that I continue to labor under the illusion that I can reason with my fellow Armenians notwithstanding the fact that two thousand years of history prove the contrary.
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Thursday, July 06, 2006
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Behind every story there is another story, and inside every person there is a labyrinth of conflicting reasons and unconscious drives most of which are destined to remain beyond his awareness even after decades of psychoanalysis. Never say therefore “I know and understand everything I need to know and understand,” because to say so is to admit you have reached a dead end and you might as well be more dead than alive.
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Understanding and self-interest move in two different dimensions and whenever self-interest contaminates understanding both are bound to suffer.
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If you ever find yourself questioning the importance of objectivity in human affairs, consider that women are better judges of women than men because they can afford being more objective on the subject.
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Most Armenians, except perhaps Armenian-Americans, have lived and worked in more than two countries and speak more than two languages. This allows them to assume to be better informed. I will never forget the Armenian who fully qualified as an inbred moron with a negative IQ and fluent in seven languages (or so he claimed) who once bragged being more “erudite” than everyone around. If I have mentioned this Armenian before it may be because I see myself in him – myself as a young whippersnapping windbag all sound, fury, and unmitigated b.s. signifying nothing, very much like our sermonizers, speechifiers, and pundits.
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Friday, July 07, 2006
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If national consciousness or solidarity is what makes a nation, all so-called ideological divisions serve only to legitimize tribalism and to implement the divide-and-rule tactics of the enemy. It follows, the ultimate aim of all our tribal leaders and enemies is one and the same: the destruction of the nation, or genocide by other means.
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Our partisan pundits have spent nearly a century trying to convince the Turks to plead guilty, all the while pretending their own conduct has been beyond criticism, which is as big a lie as Turkish denial.
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The life of a murderer as that of a liar is dominated by fear of exposure.
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You cannot correct an error whose existence you refuse to acknowledge.
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The wrong path may lead to the mirage of an oasis but not to the Promised Land.
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What Oscar Wilde said of fox hunting, one could say of our ideologues and pundits: “The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable.”
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When you undertake the task of exposing liars, it is always advisable to begin with your own lies.
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The more you rely on luck the sooner you will run out of it.
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Saturday, July 08, 2006
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INTERVIEW
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QUESTION: IN YOUR NOTES AND COMMENTS OF YESTERDAY YOU SAID SOMETHING TO THE EFFECT THAT OUR LEADERS ARE GUILTY OF GENOCIDE BY OTHER MEANS. WHAT DID YOU MEAN BY THAT?
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ANSWER: There is genocide by massacre, and there is genocide by means of actions and policies that contribute to the destruction of the nation.
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Q: SUCH AS?
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A: Introducing divisions on ideological or religious grounds, for instance.
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Q: BUT SUCH DIVISIONS EXIST EVERYWHERE, DO THEY NOT?
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A: They do, yes, but with one important difference. In a democratic environment there are mechanisms designed to reconcile opposing views by means of dialogue and compromise. The majority has its way, provided of course it operates within the law. Throughout our millennial history we have at no time experienced democratic rule.
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Q: IS NOT OUR HOMELAND A DEMOCRACY TODAY?
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A: In theory, maybe. But in practice it’s part oligarchy and part kleptocracy whose aim is not to serve the interests of the people but to perpetuate the prosperity and survival of the priviligentsia.
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Q: AND IN THE DIASPORA?
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A: Our political parties and their bosses in the Diaspora operate like authoritarian rulers intolerant of dissent, which means no dialogue, no compromise, and no consensus. Result: perpetual tribalism, unending conflicts and divisions, and monologues that never cross.
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Q: BUT DON’T THESE POLITICAL PARTIES REALIZE THAT BY CONTRIBUTING TO THE DESTRUCTION OF THE NATION THEY ARE COMMITTING SUICIDE?
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A: That’s a question that should be addressed to our bosses.
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Q: DO YOU HAVE AN EXPLANATION?
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A: Where there are no democratic checks and balances, leaders invariably end up digging their own graves. Empires, nations, and tribes that die by suicide are routine occurrences in world history. The only way to explain that is to say that unlike ideas and by extension ideologies that may evolve and adapt in an infinite number of directions, provided they move in an abstract dimension, the option of power, or men of power, are limited to only two: to increase their power, and if they can’t do that, to cling to it for as long as they can even if it means acting in direct contradiction of the very same ideology that allowed them to assume power by popular support.
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Saturday, July 01, 2006
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Cormac McCarthy, in BLOOD MERIDIAN (New York, 1985): “Do you know what happens with people who cannot govern themselves? Others come in to govern for them.”
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In whatever I read these days I see references to Armenians even when Armenians are not mentioned.
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In a textbook on history: “A state controlled system of education aims at indoctrination as much as pragmatic instruction.”
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Once, many years ago, when I published an interview with a prominent Tashnak intellectual, a Ramgavar intellectual wrote an angry letter to the editor saying everything the Tashnak said was a big lie. The Tashnak replied by saying everything the Ramgavar said was a bigger lie.
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The choice we confront today is between dead-end contradictions and creative dialectic. You may now guess what we can look forward to.
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Heine’s definition of aristocrats: “Asses who talk about horses.” Something similar could be said of Armenian partisan intellectuals when they speak about one another.
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To those who seem to have all the answers, Martin Heidegger has this piece of advice: “Try to reach the point from which the question can one day be asked.”
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Sunday, July 02, 2006
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A wrong answer that makes us feel good will always be more popular than a right answer that makes us feel bad.
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There are two radically different ways of viewing our genocide: (a) as an unpredictable occurrence, or act of God (or the devil, depending on your credo) like, say, a volcanic eruption, a tsunami, or cancer; and (b) as an inevitable but foreseeable result of actions freely and deliberately undertaken by us, similar to those of a chain smoker who operates on the irrational assumption that he is invulnerable because God, or Right, or justice happens to be on his side. The first school of thought implies that we were innocent victims of satanic forces beyond our control, and the second, that all our actions were symptomatic (see below for a definition) because driven by death wish whose reality we denied or refused to acknowledge.
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Examples of actions driven by death wish: tribal divisions, defeat, unconditional surrender, centuries of subservience, followed by a naive trust in the verbal support of the West, badly executed and catastrophically timed acts of isolated revolt against a ruthless empire fighting for its own survival.
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My primary aim here is not to expose our blunders or to cover up the criminal conduct of the perpetrators, but to emphasize the fact that we have been and continue to be a far greater threat to our own survival than our worst enemies.
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Freud’s definition of symptomatic acts: “Acts which people perform automatically, unconsciously in a moment of distraction; and to which they would like to deny any significance.”
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Monday, July 03, 2006
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THE WISDOM OF PROVERBS
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It is not at all unusual for a smart man to behave like a fool. That’s because to pretend to know is easy; to preach easier; but to do the right thing something entirely different.
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We know, for instance, that “unanimity is the best fortress,” but throughout our millennial history we have allowed tribal leaders (kings, princelings, nakharars, and similar riffraff) to divide us; and they have divided us for one and only one reason, to satisfy their lust for power (“too many chiefs, not a single Indian”). Which amounts to saying, we were taken in by their empty verbiage.
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We know that what tribalism does to a nation, nationalism does to mankind. We also know that preachers of nationalism are no better than mongrels (if not literally than morally) who speak with a forked tongue. We also know that “a maker of idols is never an idolater.” And yet, we have shed our blood in the name of nationalism and we continue looking up to speechifiers who go on preaching it to us.
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It is an established fact that most of our nationalist leaders survived the Genocide to write their memoirs, some of which run to more than a thousand pages. We are told, “behind an able man there are always other able men.” Likewise, behind a fool there are always other brown-nosing fools. And when their blunders are exposed, they write memoirs to explain why it was not they who were wrong but the rest of mankind; and as always, they find their share of dupes who are more than willing to be taken in by their regurgitated propaganda.
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To those who say, “We did not shed our blood for nationalism, but freedom. Our slogan was not ‘Armenia, Armenia ueber alles!” but “Freedom or Death!” Yes, of course, no doubt about that, it goes without saying, I believe you. And what did we do after gaining our freedom, may I ask? We became the slaves of the Kremlin. We refused to convert to Islam to save our lives only to embrace atheism to advance our careers. And why? The answer must be obvious: after centuries of subservience to foreign tyrants, subservience has become part of our character, and “character is destiny” — or, “habits are cobwebs at first, cables at last.”
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We know that tyrants oppress and liars deceive. The questions to be asked at this point are: Does it make any difference if the tyrant or liar is an odar or one of us? In what way are we better off in the knowledge that the enemy is not on the other side of the wall but among us?
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Tuesday, July 04, 2006
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Of all blunders, confusing ideology with theology is the most dangerous.
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Generalizations about fellow human beings belong to the realm of propaganda and as such should be dismissed as lies.
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A religious leader who says “believers are good and infidels bad,” and a political leader who says “we are among the chosen and our enemies the scum of the earth,” should be tarred, feathered, and driven out of every city, town, and village on the face of the earth. Then and only then we may have peace.
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One of the most hilarious scenes in American literature takes place in the first chapter of Cormac McCarthy’s BLOOD MERIDIAN (New York, 1985). A total stranger interrupts a sermon in a tent in the middle of nowhere and calls the preacher an impostor, a fraud, a usurper, a fugitive from justice wanted in four states, a child molester, and a man who has been caught “having congress with a goat.” “Hang the turd!” a member of the congregation yells. “Shoot the son of a bitch!” says another. Later, in a saloon, the stranger is seen drinking. When asked, “How did you come to have the goods on that no-account?” he replies: “I never laid eyes on the man before today. Never even heard of him.”
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Wednesday, July 05, 2006
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According to a recent best-selling book by an American sociologist, crowds behave more wisely than individuals. If true, how does one explain the fact that throughout history war-makers and propaganda have been more popular than peacemakers and objectivity? How does one explain the fact that in the name of such slogans as “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” “Workers of the World Unite,” “Deutschland, Deutschland ueber alles,” and “Allahu akhbar,” crowds have been moved to commit some of the worst crimes against humanity? Closer to home: consider the fate of best-selling books that no one remembers after a year or two.
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My most popular book (sold over ten thousand copies), THE ARMENIANS: THEIR HISTORY AND CULTURE, is also my least honest book not because it contains lies – it doesn’t: every assertion in it is footnoted – but because it emphasizes the positive and ignores or covers up the negative. Which may suggest that crowds value bias and flattery over honesty and truth.
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A wise man – it may have been G.B. Shaw – once said there is only one way to end wars and that’s by shooting the war-makers. And yet, consider the fate of war-makers like Alexander the Great and Napoleon (who died natural deaths) and that of peacemakers like Jesus Christ (crucified) and Mahatma Gandhi (assassinated).
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