Author: arabaliozian

Thursday, June 29, 2006
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OBITER DICTA
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Charles Peguy (1873-1914), French author: “Out of ignorance and a sense of duty most decent people are liable to turn into criminals.”
Why should I be surprised when I hear a so-called self-assessed patriotic Armenian voice the opinions of a skinhead with the brains of a sardine and the voracious energy of a hungry shark?
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When hit-and-run critics hit, they invariably hit below the belt.
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To write a good sentence sometimes it is necessary to reject a dozen or more versions of it. Likewise, to subscribe to a good idea sometimes it is necessary to reject a few of them, beginning with the ones that were foisted on us when we could not yet think for ourselves.
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It is not only politics that makes strange bedfellows. Both Marxist and Catholic thinkers agree on their rejection of charity as a way to solve social problems. According to Jacques Maritain, one of the most respected Catholic philosophers of the 20th Century, “Charity is no substitute for justice withheld”; and according to Lenin, charity, by masking the contradictions of an unjust system, succeeds only in postponing the coming revolution.
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Speaking of skinheads and dupes: consider the unspeakable crimes committed in the name of Marx and the number of dupes or “useful idiots,” among them some of the most eminent thinkers of the West, who produced a vast amount of pro-Stalin verbiage worthy of skinheads.
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Friday, June 30, 2006
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Whenever I underestimate a fellow Armenian, I am seldom disappointed.
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Mine is a lose/lose situation. I am fighting our leaders and their dupes. It’s an uneven fight — not just two against one but a thousand against one. My only allies are the alienated and the assimilated most of whom no longer even care to identify themselves as Armenians because they have seen the light and consider themselves born-again human beings.
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Are the alienated a minority or a majority? That’s not a subject we like to discuss because the answer may reflect badly on us. When odars dislike us we can always dismiss them as pro-Turkish, which in our context might as well mean the lowest form of animal life. But how do we explain the alienated who may well be in the majority?
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What’s uppermost in the mind of the average Armenian? If we assume our press to be a reliable index, the answer is the Genocide and its recognition. Speaking for myself (and I don’t pretend to be a typical case) may I say that I am fed up with all the incessant talk of Turks and massacres, which so far have succeeded only in reinforcing our image as perennial losers and victims.
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One does not have to be a mind reader to know that what’s uppermost in the mind of the unemployed is finding a job. What’s uppermost in the mind of an Armenian who works in an alien environment is to return home and be with his family and friends. What’s uppermost in the minds of the old and the sick is proper medical care and living conditions. What’s uppermost in the mind of a student is to graduate and not to be forced into emigration. What’s uppermost in a young woman’s mind is not to be forced into prostitution in Saudi Arabia or babysitting in Bulgaria.
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These are not concerns that are addressed by our self-appointed pundits who prefer to ascribe all our problems on Turks and to pretend we have no other concerns than their failure to recognition the Genocide.
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Sunday, June 25, 2006
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A chicken and egg question: Is it dupes who create bad leaders or bad leaders who create dupes?
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Hitler was a horrible human being. He behaved decently only once in his life — when he committed suicide. If only he had done so at the beginning of his career rather than at the end. Even so, unlike some others, he at least made one good decision in his life.
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When it comes to the injuries inflicted on us by others, we have the memory of elephants; but when it comes to the injuries we inflict on others, we behave more like advanced cases of Alzheimer’s.
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Universal education has its drawbacks. After a semester of algebra, biology, chemistry, history of philosophy, a couple of novels by Dostoevsky, and a play by Shaw, I was convinced I knew everything I needed to know. This may explain why for every two writers today we may or may not have a reader, and the chances are that reader will assume he knows better.
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For every truth there are ten thousand lies because that truth pretends to be the whole truth, which is a lie.
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Monday, June 26, 2006
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Every ideology has its declared (as well as undeclared) agenda and propaganda line clearly discernible to others but not always to its adherents, especially not those who confuse ideology with theology.
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When assessing yourself it’s useful to remember the meaning of the first syllable of the verb “to assess.”
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To rely on your instinct in your judgments means to allow your human brain to become an instrument of your animal drives.
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When dealing with dinosaurs a crocodile skin is no defense.
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A charlatan is a dupe with a college education.
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If you wouldn’t argue with Genghis Khan, why would you even consider arguing with someone to the right of him?
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Jilly Cooper (b. 1937) British novelist and critic, in her review of THE HITE REPORT, on American women: “They certainly know how to rape the language. One girl said she was ‘devirginized’ at twenty-five, another found it hard to resist married men, ‘because all my friends are adulterizing.’ My favorite was the girl who described her private parts as ‘plain but with charisma’.”
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Tuesday, June 27, 2006
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Everything I say about Armenians is a confession. I invent nothing. When I observe a tendency or a contradiction in myself (such as, to brag or to wallow in self-pity, or to pretend to be better than I am by ignoring my shortcomings in the hope that others will not take notice of them) I make sure that these are results of my Armenian upbringing and education rather than personal failings.
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The trouble with fanatics is that once they get hold of an idea, they cease asking questions and entertaining doubts. As a former fanatic, whenever I subscribe to an idea I now consider its opposite and invariably I see some merit in it. When Marx said, “I am not a Marxist,” I suspect that’s what he was doing too. It is such a pity that his followers appropriated his assertions but rejected his doubts.
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On the day they reject the validity of doubts and the importance of dissent, empires begin to dig their own graves. You may now draw your own conclusions about nations and tribes or, for that matter, collections of tribes that pretend to be nations.
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Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), German philosopher and historian: “Real historical vision belongs to the domain of significances in which the crucial words are not ‘correct’ and ‘erroneous, but ‘deep’ and ‘shallow’.”
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Arnold J. Toynbee (1889-1975), British historian: “It is unlikely that a writer will not retract some of his previous propositions if he has reconsidered them genuinely.”
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John Constable (1776-1837), British painter: “No two days are alike, not even two hours; neither were there two leaves alike since the creation of the world.”
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Wednesday, June 28, 2006
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C.G. Jung (1875-1961), Swiss psychiatrist quoting an African chieftain’s definition of good and evil: “When I steal my enemy’s wives, it’s good. When he steals mine, it’s bad.” We echo this chieftain whenever we say, “Our propaganda line is right, my enemy’s propaganda line is crooked.”
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Marcel Proust (1871-1922), French author: “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” It could also be said that real understanding consists not in the reassertion of old arguments but in the acquisition of a new self.
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In disagreements very often the clash is not between two sets of ideas but between two incompatible selves.
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I suspect all explanations whose aim is to legitimize a propaganda line.
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The aim of propaganda is not to promote understanding but to advance a specific political agenda.
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One begins to understand history only after exposing the half-truths and lies of propaganda.
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Not to lose an argument should never be an a priori decision.
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The purpose of an argument is not to win it but to lose it and in losing it to enlarge our horizons.
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One does not reason in order to legitimize irrational conduct, and what could be more irrational than prejudice, hatred, and ultimately war and massacre?
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You may have noticed that when leaders promote war or revolution they do so on an assumption of ultimately victory, which history has proved to be a Big Lie 50% of the time.
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It is no exaggeration to say that wars are lost even when they are won.
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And very often all a war succeeds in doing is to lead to another war.
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Do politicians lie if they believe in their own lies? An irrelevant question, because an honest politician is as inconceivable as a truthful propaganda line.
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Thursday, June 22, 2006
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Once in a while I am compared to such famous writers as Camus, Mencken, and Vidal only to be told that I am a total mediocrity and a miserable failure.
I don’t mind admitting that no matter how hard I try I will never be as good a writer as Camus and Vidal, or Arlen and Saroyan. But I hope my detractors will agree with me when I say, if I were as good a writer as they are, I would be treated with such respect by my fellow Armenians that no one would dare to say anything remotely critical about me; and if anyone did, my fans would tear the poor bastard to shreds.
As a better writer, moreover, I would have been exposed to an entirely different set of experiences and thus would have acquired an entirely different perspective on my fellow Armenians. I might even have been misled into thinking that Armenians are indeed among the Chosen. That’s because, even the greatest of writers have an ego that is not immune to flattery.
If I write as I do it may be because I write not as a first-class giant in world literature but as a second-rate scribbler; and if God in His infinite wisdom made me who I am, namely a mediocrity and a failure, He must have done so for a purpose, and who am I to question His judgment?
Do I really believe I am a mediocrity? That is not a question that I would even consider replying because experience has taught me to assess oneself is to make an ass of oneself. Besides, trying to be honest in a dishonest world keeps me so busy that I consider it a waste of time to engage in endless speculations and controversies about intangibles with men who seem to be more interested in who I am and less in what I say, more on my status and less on the reality we confront.
However, I will say this in my favor: if readers who have read Camus, Vidal, Saroyan, Mencken, Arlen, and many other great writers take the trouble to read and assess me, then I must be going places.
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Friday, June 23, 2006
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FROM HOMER TO HITLER
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The Greeks had a word for everything, but I doubt if they had one for miscegenation, perhaps because even their gods fornicated with mortals. (How low can you get?)
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By inventing fornicating gods, the Greeks may have understood that if fornication with mortals was uppermost in their gods’ minds, why should we pretend to be any better?
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By proscribing fornication, Christianity invented a literary genre (fiction) whose central concern is fornication. But the Greeks were ahead of the rest of us there too – after all, is not adultery what propels the action in the ILIAD?
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To how many of our racists I could say, “Please, don’t waste your breath on me. I too have read MEIN KAMPF.”
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Saturday, June 24, 2006
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In the following definition from THE DEVIL’S DICTIONARY, Ambrose Bierce was not thinking of Armenians but he might as well have been: “RESPONSIBILITY: A detachable burden easily shifted to the shoulders of God, Fate, Fortune, Luck or one’s neighbor. In the days of astrology it was customary to unload it upon a star.”
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When asked what he knows now that he did not know on the first day of his presidency, Bush is said to have said something to the effect that he had learned to be more careful in his choice of words. It is to be noted that he did not say he learned to be more careful in his thinking or more objective in his judgment or more tolerant of opposing views and arguments, only more carefully with his vocabulary.
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Don’t tell me what you should think; tell me what you think. On second thought, don’t tell me what you think because when an Armenian says what he thinks, out pops an insult.
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By insulting another we also insult ourselves by exposing the absence of reason in our thinking, lack of manners in our conduct; and if we speak in the name of God and Country we also run the risk of exposing the moral bankruptcy of both.
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Sunday, June 18, 2006
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It’s not easy writing for an audience of laymen who think they are wiser than writers if only because, unlike writers, they deal with reality every day.
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Since we can never be sure to be right, let us at least make an effort not to be catastrophically wrong, as we have been in the past.
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Sometimes to be understood can be much more painful than to be misunderstood.
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Dissidents have been victimized not because they were wrong but because they were right.
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As things stand, I suspect we are a nation whose writers and poets outnumber their readers.
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Whenever I write “nation” I think “collection of tribes.”
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We have a rich literature but a destitute readership.
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Under Talaat and Stalin, our writers risked their lives. Today our academics are afraid to risk their income brackets. Result, an abundance of books on massacres and Turks.
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Monday, June 19, 2006
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Where everyone believes he is among the chosen, being unchosen becomes a privileged condition.
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Why should I be on the side of little men if their sole ambition in life is to be big men in order to oppress little men?
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Unlike some of my fellow Armenians, I will not pretend to know everything there is to know about Jews, but I can make the following assertion with some degree of certainty: even at their worst, they are not as bad as those who hate them.
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The more accurately I describe our tribal ways, the greater the number of readers who would like to cannibalize me in order to prove they are better Armenians.
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“If you gaze long into the abyss,” Nietzsche warns us, “the abyss will gaze back into you.” Elsewhere: “Nothing on earth consumes a man more quickly than the passion of resentment.” And: “No one is such a liar as the indignant man.”
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There is a price to be paid for writing too much about Turks and massacres. Or, writing about Turks is not the best way of de-Ottomanizing ourselves.
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More quotations from Nietzsche:
On benefactors: “This is the hardest of all: to be modest as a giver.”
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On bishops: “After coming in contact with a religious man, I feel the need to wash my hands.”
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Tuesday, June 20, 2006
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Once more I stand accused of plotting the ruin of the nation by promoting miscegenation – a word I have never used if only because it is closely associated with Nazis, members of the KKK, and racist bigots in general.
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The overwhelming majority of Armenians today are very probably of mixed parentage. If it were up to our racists, they should be classified as lesser Armenians or second-class citizens.
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What destroys a nation is not miscegenation but intolerance, racism, arrogance, prejudice, and ignorance.
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What defines a man is neither his race nor his nationality but how much he has contributed to the welfare of his fellow men regardless of race, color and creed.
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If miscegenation were such a bad thing why is it that some of our most ardent nationalists, from Abovian to Zarian, married odars? And how does one explain the fact that some of the most popular political leaders were either foreigners or the offspring of mixed marriages: Napoleon was not a Frenchman but a Corsican, Hitler was not a German but an Austrian, Stalin was not a Russian but a Georgian; closer to home, the Mamigonians were of Chinese descent and the Bagratunis identified themselves as Jews.
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Throughout world history, from Alexander the Great to our own, the ruling classes and elites (the very same individuals who promote nationalism) have practiced miscegenation as a matter of course. Neither the czars of Russia nor the kings of England were pureblooded Russian or English. The Greek royal family was not Greek but German.
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I have said this before and I will go on repeating it: I find all assertions of moral or racist superiority odious and I’d rather deal with a good Turk than a bad Armenian.
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Wednesday, June 21, 2006
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TALAAT AND I
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When told not all Armenians were guilty, Talaat is said to have replied: “After what we have done to them, if they are not guilty today, they will be guilty tomorrow,” or words to that effect.
For many years, whenever I was told not all Turks were guilty, I would think, “After what they have done to us, they are all guilty!”
Readers who insult me today may plead not guilty on grounds of ignorance, but the same cannot be said of those who were better at programming us to hate the Turks but not to love our fellow Armenians.
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THEN AND NOW
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When I was young I tried to change the world; in my old age I try to share my understanding and so far I have been as successful in the second enterprise as in the first.
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BENEFACTORS AND WRITERS
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Benefactors are more popular than writers because they share their money, and everyone is convinced he has more than his share of understanding but never enough of the green stuff. Between thirst for knowledge and greed for money, who among us will choose knowledge?
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KNOWLEDGE AND IGNORANCE
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What you think of yourself is only half the story. What others think of you is the other half. Knowledge based on only one half of the story is closer to ignorance.
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Thursday, June 15, 2006
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There was a time when I would get all kinds of calls urging me to translate or review this or that book. When the phone rings these days it’s either telemarketers or wrong number, and strange as it may seem, I prefer it that way.
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According to a Yiddish saying, there is a type of individual who is such a nobody that when he goes out of a room, it feels like someone came in.
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The first line of a poem titled “Credo” by Lucien Jacques (1898-1961): “I believe in man, that piece of filth.”
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After greed for money comes search for immortality. I once had a call from one of our national benefactors (who are outnumbered only by our self-appointed pundits who pretend to know everything there is to know about Turks and Armenians simply because their last name ends in –ian) asking me to ghost his memoirs. He offered to travel all the way to my place in the middle of nowhere and to spend as much time with me as it was necessary to complete the task. Shortly thereafter I read his obituary in one of our weeklies.
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When told by an American philanthropist that he was writing his memoirs, Truman Capote (it may have been Gore Vidal) is quoted as having said: “Are you using a typewriter or a calculating machine?”
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From THE DEVIL’S DICTIONARY by Ambrose Bierce:
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“BIRTH: The first and direst of all disasters.”
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“BRAIN: An apparatus with which we think that we think.”
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“CALAMITY: Misfortune to ourselves and good fortune to others.”
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CORSAIR: A politician of the seas.”
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“FAITH: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.”
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“PATRIOT: The dupe of statesmen and the tool of conquerors.”
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Friday, June 16, 2006
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THE USES AND ABUSES OF HISTORY
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The study of history attempts to answer two sets of questions: (one) what happened and (two) why. When one of them (the what) is emphasized at the expense of the other (the why), or vice versa, the result is bound to be more propaganda and less history.
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On the subject of the Genocide: we tend to emphasize the facts or what happened, and the Turks prefer to emphasize the why and view the facts as of secondary importance. As for the rest of the world, like us, they too stress the what, but a different kind from ours, namely, “what’s in it for us.” The result is not dialogue, compromise, and consensus, but monologues that never cross.
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There is another disadvantage in stressing the importance of what happened in the past; we neglect the present, or what’s happening today. When I see nineteen articles and commentaries on the Genocide (or “Red Massacre”) in a single issue of our weeklies and none about its “White” counterpart (assimilation in the Diaspora, exodus from the Homeland) I may be justified in suspecting there is a planned and deliberate effort on the part of our leadership and academics to manipulate, mislead, and deceive the masses into thinking we are in good hands and our past problems are more important than our present ones.
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We share this in common with dogs: we know our masters but not our masters’ master. We know what we think and feel, but not why we think and feel as we do, or what were all the factors that went into shaping our state of mind.
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Facts don’t exist in a vacuum. They are products of a long chain of conditions, circumstances and thought processes or convictions; and convictions, as we know, can be wrong, especially when they stress one aspect of reality and ignore others.
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Consider the following scenario: A house is on fire. The owner accuses his next-door neighbor of arson. They quarrel. Result: both houses burn down.
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If you think I am being too tough on our historians and their dupes, consider the following two definitions from Ambrose Bierce’s justly celebrated THE DEVIL’S DICTIONARY:
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“HISTORY: An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.”
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“IDIOT: A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling.”
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Saturday, June 17, 2006
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The need to ask questions can be irresistible, and the temptation to believe in answers, no matter how false, can be overwhelming.
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There are three ways of going wrong: when you don’t know, when you think you know, and when you think.
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A conformist does not think of himself as a conformist, that is to say, as someone who has been indoctrinated to believe that subservience is a commandment from above and not to obey it is a capital offense.
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I am single because I would never marry anyone willing to marry me. Consider my long list of liabilities: I am Armenian….
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We inherit our parents’ fears and acquire some new ones of our own. Which may explain why most of us view subservience to our mini-sultans and neo-commissars as ordained from above.
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You don’t have to be right to be influential. Logic and common sense are less popular than that which is false, accessible, and flattering.
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“Literature consists in making crap look like rose jam,” Jean Genet tells us. Since I have so far failed to acquire that magic skill, I have reconciled myself to being an unpopular failure.
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In Michael and Ellen Kaplan’s CHANCES ARE (New York, 2006) I read the following: “Once you know that daisies usually have an odd number of petals, you can get anyone to love you.”
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ON B.S.
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In his book, ON BULLSHIT (Princeton University Press, 2005), the American philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt echoes Descartes’ words on common sense when he writes, “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this.” If we don’t talk about it, he goes on, it may be because “most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize it and to avoid being taken in by it.” Further down: “The realm of advertising and public relations, and the nowadays closely related realm of politics, are replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they can serve among the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept.”
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Among the synonyms of bullshit, Frankfurt cites: “humbug, balderdash, claptrap, hokum, drivel, buncombe, imposture, and quackery.” For some reason he fails to include baloney and propaganda.
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In her book THE MIGHTY AND THE ALMIGHTY: REFLECTIONS ON AMERICA, GOD, AND WORLD AFFAIRS (New York, 2006), Madeleine Albright, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and, under Clinton, the first woman Secretary of State, writes that the central message of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism (“involved in most political upheavals today”) are “compassion and peace.” Leave it to the b.s. of sermonizers and speechifiers to pervert compassion to slaughter and peace to war.
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The Romans used to say, “Si vis pacem para bellum” (if you want peace, prepare for war”). But the Romans were decent enough not to involve the Almighty in their imperial ambitions and bloodthirsty disposition.
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George Orwell, himself an expert on b.s., went further when he coined the slogan, included in his science fiction novel, 1984, “PEACE IS WAR.”
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B.s. is not a favorite topic of discussion among us perhaps because we are such gargantuan consumers of it. Instead, we prefer to focus and emphasize Turkish b.s., thus implying we are devoid of it.
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Consider the content of our weekly one-hour TV programs: nothing but singing floozies and hoodlums, sermonizing bishops, and speechifying bosses (mostly about Comrade Panchoonie’s favorite subject: raising funds for this or that worthy cause). On the positive side, since the programs last only 45 minutes (60 minutes minus 15 minutes of commercials) the speeches and sermons are drastically edited.
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The Romans had another saying: “Ride si sapis” (if you are wise, laugh).
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Monday, June 12, 2006
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“Armenians survive by cannibalizing one another,” Zarian tells us; and I suspect they will go on cannibalizing until the day laboratory tests reveal they contain dangerous levels of carcinogens.
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A nation that relies on propaganda digs its own grave.
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To be a sermonizer or speechifier means to speak of immortality during the day and to work as a gravedigger under cover of darkness.
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I am beginning to identify men not as members of this or that race, color and creed, but as either dupes or deceivers.
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When tolerance allows deceivers to deceive and dupes to be duped, is it really tolerance or conspiracy?
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A dogmatist is a failure who has been successful only in suppressing his own doubts.
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Whenever you understand them better than they understand themselves, they say you don’t understand them.
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To be insecure, or in Saroyan’s expression, “without foundation” (dabansez in Turkish), means to be eager and willing to swallow the most absurd propaganda line provided it flatters the ego.
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We call wise the man who has acquired the skill to hide his foolishness.
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I would have gone away, if only they had ignored me. By insulting me they challenged me to reiterate my position and to make a more convincing case.
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We are taught to respect a man’s convictions or beliefs, provided he is sincere. But according to Harry G. Frankfurt in his book ON BULLSHIT: “Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial – notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.” Frankfurt is right: if sincerity were a reliable criterion, we would have to respect suicidal terrorists and fanatics.
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Tuesday, June 13, 2006
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If I have not said this before I will say it now: I have been wrong most of my life and the chances are I am wrong today. I am certainly wrong in thinking that what I write matters and that it may even make a difference.
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Illusions don’t die; they adapt and reappear under a different disguise. Once upon a time I thought I was the center of the world. Once upon a time I was also led to believe Armenians were God’s chosen people. The ancient Greeks would say that it is for this egocentric arrogance (hubris) that we were punished (Nemesis).
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Why do I go on writing? I wish I knew. My only tentative explanation: writing has become a habit and habits are easier to keep than to give up.
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In so far as I make assertions, I am very probably wrong. But in so far as I question the validity of the assertions in which I believed, I am very probably right.
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Title of a poem by Francis Jammes (1868-1938), French poet and mystic: “Priere pour aller au Paradis avec les anes” (Prayer for going to Heaven with the donkeys”).
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In Michel Houellebecq’s THE POSSIBILITY OF AN ISLAND (New York, 2005) I come across the following phrase: “…bullshit [is] the death of civilization.”
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Wednesday, June 14, 2006
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Learning or understanding something you didn’t understand before means changing your mind about one or more things. Even animals learn. Only corpses don’t change their minds. Show me a man who has not changed his mind during the last ten or twenty years and I will show you a living corpse.
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There is a type of imbecile who believes in his own assertions simply because he made them in the presence of witnesses.
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A good friend of mine once said to me, “The reason why you are not popular is that you don’t write about sex and violence.” It is true, nothing I write is marketable. If anything, it’s the exact opposite, and I consider that sufficient reason to persevere.
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Some very complex problems solve themselves; some easy problems resist all solutions; and some solutions create more problems. There are only three of the many perversities of life. Get used to them.
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If he is a perennial underdog but speaks with the arrogance of a top dog, he must be an Armenian.
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Some readers disagree with me because what I say does not apply to them. Perhaps I should subtitle everything I write, “If the shoe fits…”
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Thursday, June 08, 2006
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NATIONS, TRIBES, CLIQUES AND GANGS
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Nikol Aghbalian (1873-1947), Tashnak leader, scholar, and educator: “We Armenians are products of the tribal mentality of Turks and Kurds, and this tribal mentality remains stubbornly rooted even among our leaders and elites.”
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We tend to confuse tribalism with patriotism. In reality, they have contradictory meanings. When we place loyalty to the tribe or party above loyalty to the nation, we also divide, fragment, weaken, and thus make the nation more vulnerable to the enemy. It follows, to be loyal to the tribe or party (that is, a fraction of the nation) means to betray the nation; and because I have been saying this I have become an enemy of the people in the eyes of our partisans.
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What have we learned from history? Answer: to sermonize, to speechify, and to propagandize, that is to say, to misrepresent reality and to be accountable only to an abstraction like the people, the nation, or god. To be accountable only to a god whom we have created in our own image is to be accountable to none.
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I learn something new every day and I cannot help reflecting that I must be just about the luckiest man alive for managing to survive for so many years with so much ignorance.
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Nikol Aghbalian: “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.”
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Friday, June 09, 2006
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I first came across the expression “dysfunctional national psyche” in reference to the Nazis. But it seems to me it could equally apply to any society whose worldview or understanding of reality is based on propaganda.
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In your dealings with your fellow men, it may be useful to remember that whenever you are in a position to check what they say, they may speak the truth; otherwise the chances are they will lie.
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In politics, very often our choice is between a brainwashed majority that cannot think and a minority that cannot act.
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The only way to understand some people is to think of them as denizens of a parallel universe in which laws governing reality are so incomprehensible that betrayal is seen as patriotism, apostasy as conversion, darkness as light, and vices as virtues.
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I began questioning my interpretation of history on the day I realized that most of my misery was self-inflicted.
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A good writer is also a bad writer you feel the need to go on reading.
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Saturday, June 10, 2006
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TWO QUESTIONS
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To readers who complain that I repeat myself, I ask: Since no one is in a position to coerce you into reading me, why don’t you read a thousand other writers who don’t repeat themselves?
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Another question: Why should I agree with views that I held thirty years ago when I was a brainwashed dupe?
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If I have asked these questions before it may be because so far I have not received a satisfactory reply.
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It was said of communists that they were slaves of former slaves. It could be said of us that we are dupes of former dupes.
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There is no clearly marked yellow brick road leading to truth. Sometimes it is necessary to cross swamps. Truth can be a dirty business.
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ON FRIENDSHIP
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Antoine de Saint-Exupery: “Some people think getting to know someone is a waste of time. They prefer to buy things. But since there are no stores that sell friends, they no longer have any friends.”
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Jules Renard: “There are no friends, only moments of friendship.”
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Chamfort: “I gave up the friendship of two men because one of them never spoke of himself and the other never spoke of me.”
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Talleyrand: “Don’t speak evil of yourself. Your friends will do enough of that.”
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Sunday, June 04, 2006
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ELECTIVE AFFINITIES
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Canadian saying: If you hang around with sh**, don’t complain about the flies.”
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Propaganda has the power to transform a painful truth to a comforting lie. Expose the lie and make ten thousand enemies.
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History, especially our own, teaches us that God does not like to interfere in human affairs, and that we can no longer count on Him in a future conflict. Or, as the Yanks put it, you may praise the Lord all you want, provided you keep your powder dry.
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If all men are brothers and we are all His children, why would He choose only some of us? It makes no sense. That’s when propaganda comes in. It is no exaggeration to say that the aim of propaganda is to make sense out of nonsense by introducing a bigger nonsense; and this bigger nonsense is readily accepted because it flatters the collective ego.
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By refusing to flatter those who need to be flattered, I let them know they are more unchosen than chosen, and they may even be swimming in the same soup with those they despise. If you think politics makes strange bedfellows, try the truth.
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You may have noticed that people are more eager to correct you when you are right for the simple reason that they hate to be exposed.
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A fat slob once justified his hanging beer belly by saying: “A good workman always builds a shed over his best tool.”
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Canadian saying: “You can’t polish a turd.”
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Monday, June 05, 2006
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A CASE OF MUTUAL MISUNDERSTANDING
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Armenians don’t understand Turks because they don’t understand themselves. I speak from experience. For many years I did not understand not only my fellow Armenians but also myself. I confused what I had been taught (misleading platitudes, clichés, and slogans, that is to say propaganda) with reality. And now that I can tell the difference between a half-truth and a lie, I am misunderstood by self-assessed patriotic readers. This much said however, let me add that inability to understand others and oneself is not a peculiarly Armenian failing.
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What we (regardless of race, color, and creed) really mean when we speak of understanding is the kind of misunderstanding that supports a specific self-serving political agenda. And when we speak of being understood, what we really mean is being misunderstood in a manner that reinforces our image of ourselves. Like dog owners who say “Love me, love my dog,” even when the dog happens to be a drooling, crutch-sniffing ugly mutt with menacing fangs, we say, in effect, “Love me, love my failings, and if you can’t love them, pretend they don’t exist.”
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When it comes to misunderstanding others and themselves, Turks are no different. If Armenians accuse Turks of being guilty of genocide, Turks retaliate by accusing Armenians of inventing a genocide and believing it for a hundred years. (I wonder, does this have a parallel in human history?) They go further and accuse Armenians, if not of genocide (even they wouldn’t dare to go that far) than of committing indiscriminate massacres of innocent Turkish civilians. It follows, Armenians, unlike Turks, must be born liars motivated by raw hatred. It also explains why, as civilized, compassionate people, Turks are outraged whenever the world fails to understand them, or misunderstand them in a manner that supports their political agenda and reinforces their image of themselves.
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Armenians and Turks don’t hate one another, they hate reality.
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Tuesday, June 06, 2006
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Descartes tells us common sense must be just about the most widely and evenly distributed faculty because no one complains he hasn’t enough of it.
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It is common knowledge that what shapes human thought and action is not science or logic but the absurd and the irrational.
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Our religion teaches us not to judge our fellow men, but it also gives us the tools with which to divide mankind into believers and infidels, and sometimes even who lives and who dies.
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If you are dependent on the goodwill of another, you are only half a man. Subservience, even subservience to an ideology or religion, deprives a man of that which divides him from animals: his reason.
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For a number of years I made a living as an organist in a neighborhood Catholic church. The parish priest once complained to me, “You will be surprised how many people call me on Christmas Eve to ask what time is the midnight mass.”
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Let others say “Inshallah!” (God willing). We should teach ourselves to say, “God unwilling.”
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Wednesday, June 07, 2006
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THE WHITE AND THE BLACK
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If you want to understand the past, don’t listen to a politician, read a historian.
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If you want to read a historian, don’t read a historian who enjoys the support or agreement of politicians.
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The trouble with our ablest historians is that they enjoy the support of a political party with a specific agenda and propaganda line.
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If some people question our credibility it may be because we adopt the role of good guys and assign the role of bad guys to our adversaries, who, in retaliation, do the same. In other words we portray ourselves as white and our enemies as black. Life and common sense suggest that black and white distinctions may apply to Hollywood movies but seldom or never to reality, especially in cases where both sides portray the other as black and themselves as white.
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It is not my intention here to minimize the magnitude of a tragedy or to provide extenuating circumstances to killers, but to enhance our understanding of the past, of reality, and ultimately of ourselves.
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Thursday, June 01, 2006
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GET OUT THE SHOVEL
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John Stossel (American TV correspondent and author. Title of his latest book): MYTHS, LIES & DOWNRIGHT STUPIDITY: GET OUT THE SHOVEL – WHY EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS WRONG.
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The difference between dialogue and argument is this: dialogue moves towards consensus, argument polarizes.
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Armenian dialogue: an oxymoron.
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You have a better chance to learn from an argument if you lose it.
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When confronted with a statement he neither understands nor wants to understand, an Armenian will contradict it simply because he perceives it to be anti-Armenian, thus implying that only pro-Armenian statements are valid, only chauvinist Armenians are good Armenians, and only dupes are honest.
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There are two kinds of disagreement: honest and hostile. The first is a result of divergent experiences, the second a result of brainwashing – that is to say, disagreement in the name of this or that received idea, ideology, or religion, and the misconception that if I speak in the name of God or Country, I can’t be wrong. It follows, if I kill in the name of patriotism, it is not murder; and if I massacre in the name of Allah, why apologize?
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To get angry during an argument means to reason not with your brain but with your gut. Hence the old Chinese saying, “He who loses temper has wrong on his side.”
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If you begin an argument with the intention of winning it, you have already lost it if only because you have condemned yourself to learn nothing.
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An Armenian argument may be defined as one in which both sides lose not only the argument but also their dignity, assuming of course they had any to begin with, which is assuming a great deal.
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Friday, June 02, 2006
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In my first book, THE ARMENIANS: THEIR HISTORY AND CULTURE – A SHORT INTRODUCTION (Toronto, 1975), I included a chapter subtitled “National Characteristics,” in which I bragged about Armenians being adaptable, as if being adaptable were one of the cardinal virtues, as if adapting ourselves to authority no matter how brutal were a certificate of integrity, as if adapting ourselves to being subservient were a major achievement.
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Our revolutionaries challenged the might of the Ottoman Empire, true, but they did so not as self-reliant thinkers but as double dupes of the Great Powers and of their own megalomania. I say this because I refuse to spend the rest of my life adapting myself to their propaganda line and the lies of chauvinist charlatans who have adapted themselves into thinking they are our betters but who may well be our worst.
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The present is an extension of the past and history repeats itself. Today there are those who have adapted themselves to the lie that if things are left alone in the Homeland they will improve in one or two generations, as if anything has improved in the Diaspora during the last four generations, or for that matter, during the last thousand years. Which may suggest that we are so adaptable that we can even live with corruption, incompetence and degeneration and pretend they represent development and progress.
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We are adaptable? So is the mafia. So are parasites and viruses. So are collaborators with evil empires.
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WHAT IT TAKES
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To survive as an Armenian writer, you need, in addition to the genius of a Shakespeare, the skin of a crocodile, the cunning of a fox, and the taste buds of a dung beetle.
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Because I am critical of Armenians, some of my Turkish readers may think I am anti-Armenian, and some of my Armenian readers may suspect I am pro-Turkish. I am neither. Even when I discuss Turks or Armenians I do not write exclusively about them. I write about human beings regardless of nationality. I write about human beings even when they behave like swine. I know from personal experience that there is nothing easier for a human being than to behave like swine.
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I don’t expect anyone to believe me. Shaw is right: the trouble with liars is that they believe no one.
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The German head of state on the radio this morning: “A nation that doesn’t understand its past cannot have a future.” Do we understand our past? Not yet. We may begin to understand it only on the day we learn to answer such questions as, “Why is it that treason and betrayal are in our blood?” (Raffi); and “Why is it that Armenians survive by cannibalizing one another?” (Zarian).
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What about Turks? Do they understand their past? They might begin to understand it only on the day they realize that to massacre innocent civilians in the name of Allah is to confuse god with the devil.
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Sunday, May 28, 2006
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Of the many forms of cowardice, fear of free speech is the worst. I have said this before but it bears repeating.
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Some of the most devastating comments on Armenians, like the following, were made not by our critics and dissidents, but by darlings of the establishment, among them Hagop Garabents (Jack Karapetian): “Once upon a time we shed our blood for freedom. We are now afraid of free speech.”
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Whenever I speak of corruption in high places, some of our defenders of the establishment are eager to inform me that, very much like the rest of mankind, we have our share of rotten apples. What they don’t say is that, the only way to explain the longevity of our rotten apples is that they enjoy the tacit support of semi-rotten apples like themselves.
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When you are wrong, they make fun of you, but when you are right, they hate you.
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I wear the insults of my readers like a medal of honor. As for those who insult me anonymously: I don’t see any reason why I should take cowards, that is to say, men without honor, seriously.
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Monday, May 29, 2006
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QUOTATIONS FROM
JEAN-FRANCOIS REVEL (1924-2006)
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“Man has not yet acquired a taste for truth and freedom.”
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“In free countries, information is seldom designed to inform.”
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“Among the arts, the art of leadership is one of the least developed.”
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“Why is it that men feel the need to support a regime whose aim is their own destruction?”
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“I have met many remarkable personalities that were not famous, and many celebrities who were not in the least remarkable.”
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Tuesday, May 30, 2006
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Sidney Morgenbesser (b. 1921), American philosopher: “”To explain why a man slipped on a banana peel, we do not need a general theory of slipping.”
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Love of freedom was the only reason why we rose against the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the last century, or so I was brought up to believe. It never even occurred to me to ask, “Does that mean during the preceding 600 years we hated freedom?”
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Sometimes what remains unsaid can be much more revealing than what is said.
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There is a Rashomon-type witness in every historian. A thousand historians writing about the same occurrence will have a thousand, sometimes even a thousand and one, different versions of it. A dupe is one who believes only the version that is flattering to his ego.
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We rose against the Empire because we saw an opportunity; which means that our idealism was modified by a touch of opportunism.
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The Empire was disintegrating and may even have been a shadow of its former self, true. But in so far as we believed as rabbits we were strong enough to deal with a wounded tiger, we behaved like dupes of our own illusions or wishful thinking.
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We had the moral or verbal support of the Great Powers, also true. But in so far as we believed that their support would translate into military alliance, we behaved like dupes.
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Reality is not an extension of our ego. If we want to understand and learn from it, we will be better off to choose the version that is most injurious to our vanity or least favorable to our self-interest.
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To persist in thinking that which we thought a hundred years ago only means that we have learned nothing during the last hundred years.
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Wednesday, May 31, 2006
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Standing between a hungry carnivore and his kill can be as dangerous as standing between a civilized man and his source of income.
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I think it was Jean-Luc Godard who once remarked that the most complex philosophical system can be reduced to a cliché. Consider the following passage in Levi-Strauss: “Sartre deplores the ‘mythopoetic thinking’ of primitives which he contrasts with the ‘logico-empirical’ thinking that permits the construction, or even the use, of machines that can melt cities.” Or, “Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose” (the more things change the more they stay the same). Or again, can we really speak of progress if a primitive kills with arrows and civilized man with weapons of mass destruction.
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Benefactors operate on the assumption that they are helping people who are in need of their help. But what if, by helping the wrong people, they end up doing more harm than good? Hence their need to surround themselves with flunkies whose most important function is to remind them, as princes among men, they can do no wrong.
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Once upon a time when I could not yet think for myself, I never questioned my infallibility. Now, all my efforts are concentrated on avoiding being spectacularly wrong. Some day I hope to be right once or twice a year.
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