Author: arabaliozian

Thursday, April 13, 2006
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No one in his right mind now questions the fact that the attacks of 9/11 were planned and executed by Al Qaeda terrorists. Many books have already been written on the subject. But increasingly now books are also being written about the failures of the Bush administration to prevent it. In one of them, titled FOG FACTS: SEARCHING FOR TRUTH IN THE LAND OF SPIN by Larry Beinhart (New York, 2005) I read: “The standard excuse for having ignored the warnings is that such attacks were unimaginable.”
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Was our Genocide unimaginable? Not if you consider the warnings that preceded it in 1894, 1895, 1896, and 1909.
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For every ten or even a hundred books on the Genocide we need at least one that will document the failures of our own leadership. If so far our academics have ignored that aspect of the Genocide it may be because our leadership does not relish the idea of being investigated, in the same way that no one within the Bush administration wanted an investigation, because, writes Larry Beinhart, “the kindest thing that could be said about them was that they had been asleep at the wheel.”
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Four days ago, not far from here, eight members of a motorcycle gang were massacred by fellow members. At the funeral of one of them, the rabbi is quoted as having said this in his eulogy: “He was the sort of guy who could manage to get reservations at a restaurant when nobody else could.” My first thought: Is that something to brag about? My second thought: I will be more than happy if in my eulogy (assuming there will be one) a priest says: “He was the sort of guy who would never eat in a restaurant that required reservat

Thursday, April 13, 2006
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No one in his right mind now questions the fact that the attacks of 9/11 were planned and executed by Al Qaeda terrorists. Many books have already been written on the subject. But increasingly now books are also being written about the failures of the Bush administration to prevent it. In one of them, titled FOG FACTS: SEARCHING FOR TRUTH IN THE LAND OF SPIN by Larry Beinhart (New York, 2005) I read: “The standard excuse for having ignored the warnings (of the 9/11 holocaust) is that such attacks were unimaginable.”
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Was our Genocide unimaginable? Not if you consider the massacres that preceded it in 1894, 1895, 1896, and 1909.
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For every ten or even a hundred books on the Genocide we need at least one that will document the failures of our own leadership. If so far our academics have ignored that aspect of the Genocide it may be because our leadership does not relish the idea of being investigated, in the same way that no one within the Bush administration wanted an investigation, because, writes Larry Beinhart, “the kindest thing that could be said about them was that they had been asleep at the wheel.”
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Four days ago, not far from here, eight members of a motorcycle gang were massacred by fellow members. At the funeral of one of them, the rabbi is quoted as having said this in his eulogy: “He was the sort of guy who could manage to get reservations at a restaurant when nobody else could.” My first thought: Is that something to brag about? My second thought: I will be more than happy if in my eulogy (assuming there will be one) a priest says: “He was the sort of guy who would never eat in a restaurant that required reservations.”
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Friday, April 14, 2006
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WHY I WRITE THE WAY I WRITE
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I write as I do because if you don’t know what went wrong, you can’t fix what’s going on.
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CARCINOGENIC AGENTS
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It is a well-known fact that many illnesses have psychosomatic origins. Norman Mailer may have been justified is describing a certain type of nasty characters as “cancer.” I remember to have read somewhere that no inmate of an insane asylum has ever died of cancer. After writing for Armenians for more than three decades I am tempted to ascribe my present cancer-free state to a miracle, and I don’t believe in miracles.
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STATISTICS
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Victims of tuberculosis, terror, treason, neglect, starvation, and miscellaneous carcinogenic agents, the average lifespan of Armenian writers has been about 31. The average lifespan of bosses, bishops, and benefactors, about 89. I have a theory about that….
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POLLYANNA’S GLAD GAME
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When teenagers insult me, I think, “They read me because I am accessible.” When adults insult me, I think, “I must have exposed a raw nerve.” When a moderator silences me, I think, “He is a yellow-belly fascist afraid of free speech.” When I meet a wall of silence, I think, “They are afraid to make asses of themselves by contradicting the obvious,” even as I suspect the cause may well be apathy.
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IN PRAISE OF SLUMS
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One good thing about being a slum-dweller is that you will never have a lawyer as a neighbor.
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Saturday, April 15, 2006
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A TURKISH EDITOR
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Whenever Armenians are discussed in odar circles these days it is in connection with the Genocide. Take away the Genocide and the chances are we will be reduced to the status of an anonymous displaced minority on its way to extinction. On the radio an interview with someone identified as “a Turkish editor in France.” The subject, you guessed it — the Genocide. “The only way to solve our differences is by engaging in dialogue,” the Turkish editor says, and goes on: “I understand Armenians…their feelings, their frustrations. I am myself an Armenian….”
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THE GREAT ONES
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There are only passing references to the Genocide in Antranik Zaroukian’s gossipy and compulsively readable last book, THE GREAT ONES…AND THE OTHERS (Beirut, 1992), a memoir of such contemporaries as Oshagan, Zarian, Shant, Aghbalian, Chobanian, and Shavarsh Missakian. In the chapter on Oshagan, Zaroukian quotes an Armenian hotel owner in Aleppo saying, Oshagan can stay in his hotel for as long as he likes free of charge, because “Oshagan is a great man, and that’s the least I can for him.” Zaroukian comments: “Mihran effendi [the owner] was an illiterate man, and for him anyone who had written a book was a great man. One day, after being informed that I had published a critical article about His Holiness Ardavast, he reprimanded me with the words, “That will not do, my boy – criticizing His Holiness…the man has written three books.”
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THE OTHERS
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I look around in search of a “great one” today and I only see pundits and academics who write as if they were interchangeable units. And what do they write about? Turkish barbarism.
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CONFESSIONS
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I point out contradictions in others because I have observed the same contradiction in myself. In that sense my criticism is also a confession. But perhaps all criticism is. I ask our forum moderators and editors, whose favorite subject is Turkish barbarism: “What is the difference between silencing a writer and cutting his tongue out?”
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Sunday, April 09, 2006
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THE WISDOM OF NASREDIN HOJA
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Nasredin Hoja was fixing his roof when a passerby asks him to come down. When Nasredin Hoja climbs down, the man identifies himself as a beggar and says, “Give me some money.” “Come on up to the roof with me,” Nasredin tells the man; and when they both go up to the roof the beggar says, “Where is my money?” To which the Hoja replies: “I have no money for you.”
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I am afraid something similar may happen to us on the day the Turks admit the reality of the Genocide: they may ask us to climb to the roof with them. As for allowing us to annex historic Armenia: I doubt if the regime in Yerevan will want to assume the additional responsibility of depopulating it.
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To those who disagree with me, let me recount another Hoja story. When a dying man asks Nasredin to teach him a prayer that will ease his passage to the next world, the Hoja says, “Say, God help me and Devil help me.” “That’s crazy!” the dying man says. “Not so, my dear fellow,” replies the Hoja. “You are in no position to reject anyone’s help.” Translated into idiomatic English: “Beggars can’t be choosers.” And when it comes to wisdom, who among us will dare to say he is not a beggar?
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Monday, April 10, 2006
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We speak of books only when they are written and published. What about books that are never written because the author is convinced they will be rejected by editors, or suppressed by censors, or ignored by an intolerant, hidebound, brainwashed, or philistine public?
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In an environment where even written books are ignored, why should anyone bother to mention unwritten ones?
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We may not have a contemporary literature but we do have publishers whose function appears to be to see that only politically correct trash gets into print. We also have well-paid editors by the dozen whose number one priority is to be on good terms with bosses, bishops, and benefactors not because they know better but because they have God and capital (make it Capital and god) on their side.
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Unlike Hitler and Stalin we don’t build concentration camps, but we have become experts on how to alienate, isolate, and silence. I speak as an inmate.
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We tend to confuse our spirit of contradiction with intelligence or erudition. As a child I had an overdeveloped spirit of contradiction and an underdeveloped brain. Any moron can contradict, that doesn’t make him a genius, only a nuisance.
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Tuesday, April 11, 2006
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Very often in life that which is most obvious is ignored. Or, in Cocteau’s own words: “Nothing is more easily ignored than the essential.” The following Nasredin Hoja story illustrates this brilliantly.
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In his youth the Hoja amassed a vast fortune by dealing in contraband. Everyone knew this but no one could figure out what he was smuggling, not even the border guards who would search him and his mule thoroughly. Years later when one of the guards met the Hoja and wanted to know what was it that he used to smuggle, the Hoja replied: “Mules.”
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When it comes to the Genocide, the question that gets ignored is this: Why is it that after 600 years of coexistence the Turks suddenly decided to exterminate their most loyal subjects? The answer I was brought up to believe is, “Because they are bloodthirsty Asiatic barbarians.” Why did these barbarians, after managing an empire that lasted much longer than most empires (including our own under Dikran the Great) suddenly decide to act against their own interests? If we say “mass hysteria,” we give the Turks an out by allowing them to plead not guilty by reason of insanity.
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Speaking of insanity: what could be more insane than to surrender our destiny into the hands of barbarians and to serve them loyally for 600 years?
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Why did the Turks try to exterminate us? The short answer is, we don’t know. Not even the Turks know. That’s because none of us is equipped to understand and explain the incomprehensible, and a great deal about human conduct remains incomprehensible.
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Speaking for myself, I can’t even explain the crimes committed in my own neighborhood by people I know. Also, I can’t always explain why I behaved as I did. I can only repeat Toynbee’s explanation in reference to the Genocide: given the right (or wrong) combination of circumstances we are all capable of committing unspeakable acts.
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I may not be sure about many things, but I am sure of this: there will come a time, and the sooner the better, when both Turks and Armenians will do what’s best for themselves by deciding to coexist in peace, and this time not as masters and subjects but as equals. However, this time may never come if we think of them as bloodthirsty Asiatic barbarians.
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Allow me to conclude with another Nasredin Hoja story. A man once found a mirror. He picked it up, took a close look at it, didn’t like what he saw, and reasoning that if it was discarded by its original owner it must be useless, he threw it away. Isn’t that what we do too whenever we don’t like what we read about ourselves?
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Wednesday, April 12, 2006
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TOPICS FOR FUTURE SERMONS
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Faith becomes a liability when, instead of enhancing our understanding, tolerance, and compassion, it legitimizes our need to judge, condemn, and assert moral superiority.
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Stress the negative in yourself and you may succeed in enhancing your credibility. Speak well of yourself and run the risk of projecting the image of a self-satisfied jackass.
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We either advance towards the truth even if it means a fraction of an inch in our lifetime or we sink deeper into lies.
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When it comes to politicians, vote for the lesser of two evils, adopt a wait-and-see attitude, and prepare yourself to be disappointed.
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If you want to understand a country, read its dissidents and critics, not its propaganda. Read its propaganda only if you want to gauge the magnitude of its illusions.
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I may not be a candidate for literary immortality but I think I have a chance of getting there someday because even those who hate me read me (judging by the number of nasty e-mails I get) and I’d rather be read and hated than loved and ignored.
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Thursday, April 06, 2006
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There is an unspoken Armenian theory (to which I subscribed for many years) that says: “The angrier you get, the more you raise your voice in outrage, the closer to the truth you are.” It took me many years to see the wisdom in the old Chinese proverb: “He who loses temper has wrong on his side.”
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In NEWSEEK magazine today an American politician running for office is quoted as having said: “It’s hard to have a debate when you have to debate a bunch of morons!” I can’t imagine an Armenian saying that about fellow Armenians, can you?
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Since not all of nature is comprehensible to us, we tend to call phenomena that we can’t explain miracles, Aldous Huxley writes in one of his essays after witnessing a “miracle” (a weeping statue) in an Armenian church in Beirut. As a child I remember someone telling me that Jesus did not change water to wine, which would amount to legitimizing alcoholism. He just had water added to the remaining wine and the guests were by then too drunk to notice the difference in taste. And in our paper today I read that according to an Israeli scientist Jesus did not walk on water but on a patch of ice. If you are interested in this subject I suggest you read Thomas Mann’s THE TABLES OF THE LAW where many other Biblical miracles are explained scientifically.
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If I had a say in the matter, I would make tolerance (beginning with tolerance of Turks and their side of the story) the most important subject for study in our schools. One benefit of tolerance: it may lower the barriers that divide us thus enhancing our chances of survival as a nation.
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The very same people who have been blabbering endlessly about massacres demand that I change my tune and say something new.
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Friday, April 07, 2006
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On more than one occasion I have been told to Armenianize my surname. To what end? To cover up 600 years of Ottoman subjection? Can it be done? I think of Malcolm X who changed his name but was murdered by his own kind anyway. Besides, the root of my surname is not Ottoman but Venetian. “Bailo” in Venetian dialect means ambassador. Among other words that the Turks borrowed from the Venetians are “piazza” and “maranga” (carpenter).
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Was one of my ancestors an ambassador? I don’t know and I care even less. Unlike some of my fellow Armenians who trace their ancestry all the way back to Vartan Mamikonian (of Chinese descent) or the Bagratunis (Jewish), on a good day I can trace mine all the way back to my father, who was born in Sivrihisar, a town famous only as the birthplace of Nasreddin Hodja – a detail that I discovered only very recently on the Internet.
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Some of my readers may not be aware of the fact that for several centuries Venice and Constantinople were in constant touch as allies, competitors, and more often as rivals.
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When Sultan Mehmet II (1429-1481) wanted his portrait painted, he asked the Doge of Venice to send him a good painter. The Doge chose Gentile Bellini. The Sultan approved Bellini’s portrait and he commissioned him to paint the head of John the Baptist, who it seems is venerated as a prophet by the Muslims. When the work was done the Sultan had one minor objection. The neck of the prophet was too long, he said, and explained that when a man is beheaded the muscles in the neck contract and the neck shrinks. When Bellini seemed unconvinced, the Sultan had one of his slaves beheaded in Bellini’s presence to prove his point. Bellini was so horrified and scared that something similar might happen to him if he displeased His Majesty that he hastened his return to Venice under cover of darkness.
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It is to be noted that some of these superpatriots who urge me to change my name are so proud of their own that they write under assumed names that are anything but Armenian. As Zarian says somewhere, “even their filth has not been picked up from our own streets but from alien gutters.”
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Saturday, April 08, 2006
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Whenever told he repeats himself, Saroyan would recount the story of the cellist who played the same note over and over again. When asked why he did that, he would reply, “Other cellists play different notes because they are looking for the right one. I have found it.”
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To the untrained ear all Bach’s fugues (and he wrote hundreds of them) sound alike. One could also say that all of literature, from THE ILIAD and THE SONG OF SONGS to MADAME BOVARY, ANNA KARENINA, and LOLITA, is about women.
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A few years ago when a Holocaust denier by the name of Zundel was jailed in Canada, one of our elder statesmen wrote me an angry letter saying it was wrong to jail a decent man for exercising his fundamental human right of free speech. And now, he and his kind are doing exactly the same thing when they refuse to listen to the Turkish side of the story on the grounds that the Turks are denialists.
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To verbally abuse someone on the Internet from a safe distance and anonymously is to compound insolence with cowardice. The question to be asked at this point is: What kind of idiot would make himself vulnerable to these charges? If I have said this before, it bears repeating.
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Sunday, April 02, 2006
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The last century has claimed more victims than any other century in the history of mankind; or man uses technological progress not as a blessing but as a curse.
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Literature may influence isolated readers here and there, now and then, but not the majority and definitely not those who shape history.
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If God allowed His only child to be crucified, why should He be more considerate towards the rest of us?
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In my next life I hope to have beautiful faces as sources of inspiration instead of ugly Armenians.
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I get two kinds of reports from visitors to the Homeland: (one) Yerevan is another Florence; and (two) the men at the top are bloodsuckers. The only way to explain this contradiction is by saying that, when it comes to politics, some people might as well be color-blind and tone-deaf. Their “we are in good hands,” translates as “we are in deep doodoo.”
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We may be as good as Turks on the day Turks start emigrating to Armenia.
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Monday, April 03, 2006
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Some readers write to me only to point out a mistake in spelling or grammar. That’s their way of asserting superiority. They seem to be blissfully unaware of the facts that (one) a need to assert superiority is the surest symptom of inferiority, and (two) to write is to confess.
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Most people are not particularly fond of the English and the French. But there are Anglophiles and Francophiles and they are the ones who write the books. Likewise, there are Armenophiles and Turcophiles, and when they write they don’t do so under oath.
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In one of our partisan weeklies today I read a commentary about the Ottomanization of the Armenian psyche. I call this development a clear-cut case of an idea whose time has come.
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Faith is a rare gift, granted, but only if it is not misunderstood, and it almost always is.
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In John Mortimer’s delightful little book, WHERE THERE’S A WILL, I read the following: when advised by a Victorian doctor that masturbation leads to blindness, a bright child is alleged to have asked, “Can I just do it until I’m short-sighted?”
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Tuesday, April 04, 2006
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REV. MORGAN
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Montaigne: “None but fools are certain and resolute.”
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Our town is blessed with a retired Anglican minister by the name of Rev. Morgan who contributes a weekly column on religious themes to the local daily. He is a white-haired, elegant, and friendly gentleman in his eighties whom I meet at least once or twice a week during my walks. We exchange greetings and the occasional comment on the weather. Judging by the range of quotations in his commentaries, Rev. Morgan is well read and has mastered the art of using his common sense and logic. And yet, he is the perennial target of abusive letters to the editor by right-wing fundamentalist fanatics.
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It never fails: speak of tolerance and love and you will be hounded by narrow-minded and intolerant haters who pretend to know better.
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To know better is not necessarily to know. We owe wars, revolutions and massacres to people who pretend to know better and who seem to be unaware of the possibility that what they don’t know may exceed what they know.
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An angry reader once said to me, “Your kind of wisdom is available to anyone with a library card.” Which may suggest that some people prefer to rely on their own charlatanism rather than on Plato’s philosophy.
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Wednesday, April 05, 2006
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Some Armenians born and raised in Turkey tell me I don’t or I can’t understand Turks as well as they do. I may not be personally acquainted with Turks but I know Armenians who have no respect for human rights. I know Armenians who operate on the assumption that violating my free speech is their patriotic duty. I know Armenians who make no effort to understand what they read, which also means they prefer to rely on their own ignorance than on someone else’s knowledge and understanding. And I understand these Armenians because I was one of them myself. So much so that when I first read about Toynbee’s pro-Turkish sentiments I was so outraged that I wrote a critique of his work titled THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE AND THE WEST.
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In short, I know Ottomanized Armenians and if you know Ottomanized Armenians you don’t need to be personally acquainted with Turks to understand them.
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And speaking of understanding: the aim of understanding is not to promote intolerance but its exact opposite. If your understanding leads you to more intolerance, and intolerance not only of Turks but also of fellow Armenians who don’t parrot your sentiments and thoughts, you should begin suspecting that perhaps what you have in your possession is not understanding but something more akin to misunderstanding.
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More on understanding: There is human understanding, which is limited, and there is divine understanding, which is without limit – and I evoke the concept of god here only as a point of reference, the way mathematicians use the concept of infinity in their equations. It follows, none of us can claim to know and understand everything, and to understand not only others but also ourselves.
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More about Armenians born and raised in Turkey: not all of them think alike. I count among my friends several Armenians from Istanbul who think of Turks not as bloodthirsty Asiatic barbarians but as fellow human beings as good or as bad as the rest of us. Does that mean they are lesser Armenians or second-class citizens? Ottomanized Armenians may think so. I don’t!
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Sunday, March 19, 2006
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We are outraged whenever Turks accuse us of massacring them. I am not. I even welcome this development because, for a change, I begin to see myself not as the offspring of perennial victims but as a human being. To paraphrase Shakespeare in THE MERCHANT OF VENICE, “I am an Armenian. Hath not an Armenian eyes? Hath not an Armenian hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? If they massacre us, shall we not massacre them?”
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Once upon a time I believed in our moral superiority. I know better today, and whenever I hear someone making such claims, I add hypocrisy to his list of failings.
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In his POLITICAL PARANOIA: THE PSYCHOPOLITICS OF HATRED, co-author Robert Robins says all stories of “good against evil” are just that, stories, and as such are viewed with some degree of justified skepticism.
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Again, let me add, repeat, and emphasize, I am not questioning the reality of the Genocide and Turkish responsibility, only our claim of moral superiority. Whenever we portray Turks as bloodthirsty Asiatic barbarians and ourselves as the first Christian nation and the cradle of civilization, who believes us? Surely not the Germans, or Americans, or Russians, or Muslims, or Hindus, whose innocent victims number in the millions too.
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I say these things for two reasons: to enhance our credibility in the eyes of the world; and to tear ourselves away from the comfortable reality to which we have become accustomed and which may make us vulnerable to the charge of racism.
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Monday, March 20, 2006
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There is a natural tendency in all of us to divide people into friends and enemies, or good and evil, and judgments into true or false. But reality is more complex, and more often than not it can be simultaneously good and evil as well as true and false.
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When someone tells me, “I don’t like Armenians,” my first impulse is not to accuse him of being an enemy but to ask myself, “Are we likeable?”
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Nobody is perfect. We all have our share of failings. Whenever I mention one of them, however, I am told it is not a specifically Armenian failing but a human, therefore, a universal failing. Which raises the question: What is our view of humanity? Turks we call Asiatic barbarians, and the West a bunch of double-talking degenerates.
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If we are like everybody else, we must also have our share of barbarians and
degenerates who pretend to be civilized. Don’t get me wrong. If I am disappointed, it is not in my fellow Armenians but in myself for overestimating them and for failing to see them as they are – human beings with their share of contradictions, wounds, and complexes.
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We like to say that we have massacred no one, but we forget to add, only in our version of the story. And if we are like everyone else, our version of the story, like everyone else’s, must be full of holes.
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Am I saying we are as bad as Turks? No, I am saying not all Turks are “as bad as Turks,” and not all Armenians are morally superior. Collective moral superiority, or any other kind of superiority, is a myth created by the likes of Hitler. Which amounts to saying it is not just a lie but a Big Lie, and thus the source of some of the worst blunders and crimes against humanity.
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Tuesday, March 21, 2006
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Alain: “There is no doubt whatever that on certain occasions Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon behaved like fools. It has been my aim in life to avoid emulating them.”
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The credibility of historians, even the best among them, has been questioned by fellow historians since the beginning of historiography. Herodotus, “the father of historians,” has also been called “the father of lies.” More recently, Arnold J. Toynbee, one of the greatest historians of the 20th Century, has been dismissed as “a prophet of mumbo jumbo.” And consider the case of Edward Gibbon (1737-1794): in his universally acclaimed DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE, he portrays Romans as the good guys and Christians as the villains. To say that Armenian historians are more trustworthy than Herodotus, Gibbon, and Toynbee is to certify our status as perennial dupes.
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Again, my intension here is not to question the reality of the Genocide but our version of its context, or rather our treatment or cover up of its context.
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If Turks disagree with us, and now with themselves (as the Orhan Pamuk episode
suggests), it may be because the Armenian side stresses the facts, and the Turkish side stresses the context; and the context, to put it in a nutshell, was the very real threat of annihilation not only of the Ottoman Empire, which was moribund, but also that of the Turkish nation.
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In the Turkish version of the story, the slaughter of Armenians was a case of self-defense or justifiable homicide. Armenians were not alone in threatening their survival, of course. There were others. Many others. But they were beyond Turkish reach. We weren’t. And that was our misfortune. It is true, Turkish conduct was savage to the point of being irrational. But who has ever been able to reason with a man who is convinced his own existence is in peril?
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Did we act reasonably when we drove the Azeris (most of them innocent civilians) from Karabagh? Is Israeli conduct towards Palestinians consistently reasonable? Even many Jews say it is not.
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Speaking not as a historian but as a human being, I view the Genocide not as a clash between good and evil but a result of two enormous miscalculations or blunders: (one) that of our revolutionaries or freedom fighters (in our version of the story, terrorists in theirs) in thinking that with such mighty allies as the Russians and the Great Powers of the West, we couldn’t lose; and (two) that of the Turks in assuming that unarmed Armenian civilians were a real threat to their survival.
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Alain: “I have at no time believed that it is possible to create a new philosophy. What I have been doing instead is re-creating the best of what has already been said. But is this not also creating in the best sense of the word?”
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Wednesday, March 22, 2006
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Judging by the number of books that tell you how to solve problems, there must be two or more solutions for every problem. But judging by the number of people who don’t read books, the nation must be lousy with people drowning in unresolved problems. You may now guess what happens to such a nation when it goes out of its way to solve the problems of other nations.
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And now, from the sublime to the ridiculous: I am an Armenian. As if that weren’t enough, I also write for Armenians. Two jumbo-sized problems right there. Which may explain why so far I haven’t been able to solve a single problem. Which may also explain why I have a grudging admiration for our Turcocentric pundits who have been successful in convincing their readers that on the day Turks repent three golden apples will fall from heaven and we shall live happily ever after.
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As we wait for that day, here is a piece of advice you may wish to keep in mind: Never marry a woman whose three previous husbands committed suicide.
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Thursday, March 16, 2006
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We brag as naturally and thoughtlessly as a canary sings. But whereas canaries have no credibility problem, we do.
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In a letter from the Publisher of a new Armenian magazine I read the following: “We are one of the few people of the ancient world that have survived to modern times with a language, culture, and memory of our history.”
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Whenever I read assertions of this type I am seized by an irresistible urge to footnote the text if only for the sake of accuracy and honesty; also in order to inform readers that we are not all braggarts or dupes of braggarts.
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We have survived to modern times? What if most of us, among them the best, did not survive?
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With a language? What if most of us neither read nor speak the language?
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Culture? I see more culture in yoghurt than in an Armenian community center. An odar friend, who is more interested in our literature than most Armenians, tells me: “I have yet to meet an Armenian who has read a single book by Raffi or Zarian.”
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Memory of history? What’s there to remember? Military defeats and moral victories followed by centuries of oppression, subservience, lamentation, betrayal, collaboration with the enemy, massacres, dispersion, internecine conflicts, and more lamentation….
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Friday, March 17, 2006
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Things change, people change, life changes, and I am no longer what I used to be. Once upon a time I too was a cliché-spouting, loudmouth chauvinist propagandist. Then I met a Jewish boy from, of all places, Azerbaijan, and bragged about Armenians being the smartest people on the face of the earth. To prove it I went into the old routine of making a list of our celebrities:
“Anastas Mikoyan,” I said.
“Karl Marx,” said he.
“Aram Khachaturian,” I said.
“Mendelssohn, Mahler, Schoenberg, Aaron Copland,” he countered.
“William Saroyan,” I said next.
“Shalom Alecheim,” he said.
“Alecheim Shalom,” I replied.
“I meant the writer,” he said.
“Never heard of him,” I said.
“FIDDLER ON THE ROOF,” he said.
“He wrote that?”
“Who else?”
“Akim Tamiroff,” I said next.
“Who is he?” he wanted to know.
“One of the greatest actors in the world,” I explained.
“Charlie Chaplin,” he said.
“Beat Calouste Gulbenkian if you can, the wealthiest man that has ever lived,” I said.
After a few moments of reflection, he said:
“Jesus Christ, Freud, Einstein.”
And that was the last time I ever bragged about our celebrities.
#
Saturday, March 18, 2006
******************************************
Historian David Irving six years ago in a British courtroom: “More women died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz.”
Found guilty in an Austrian court of law, Irving is now having second thoughts on the subject. If only he had taught himself to put aside his personal prejudices and to say, “I don’t know,” or “I am not sure,” or even “I have studied many documents but not all of

them.”
*
And consider Toynbee who, after an interview with Hitler in the 1930s, stated: “I am now

convinced Herr Hitler wants peace.”
*
According to a French historian, Louis XIV never said, “I am the State.” On the contrary,

on his deathbed, his final words were, “I go, but the State remains.” What if this was a

case of deathbed conversion?
*
According to a Biblical scholar, Jesus was in his fifties when he was crucified.
*
One can prove anything by quoting historians who are notorious for their inability to get

their sh** together. Something similar could be said of political and religious leaders: One can legitimize all crimes by quoting them.
*
Marx called some nations “unhistorical,” because they contributed nothing to world progress. We owe our status as a “historical” nation to the fact that we have contributed many things, but mostly victims.
*
We must teach our children to listen to the other side of the story, and by that I don’t just mean the Turkish side, but also the Armenian moderate, non-partisan, and anti-partisan side.
*
To those who question the validity of my assertions, I can only say that everything I write is based on the published works of our writers and my own experience. I may not have God and capital on my side (or is it Capital and god) but I do have that which is God-given, namely logic and common sense.
#

Sunday, March 12, 2006
*********************************************
Speaking of Lord Byron’s involvement in the Greek war of liberation, John Mortimer writes: “He had found, like many of those who have struggled for great liberal and liberating causes and beliefs, that the difficulty isn’t so much fighting the enemy as stopping your friends murdering each other.”
*
“If we have free speech,” Milton tells us, “truth will look after itself.” It follows, where there is censorship, there must also be lies.
*
Somewhere in his MANDATE FOR ARMENIA (Kent, Ohio, 1966) James Gidney writes that the mandate was rejected because the prevalent view in Washington was that Turks and Armenians were two Middle-East tribes that had hated each other for centuries and to get involved in such an environment would amount to looking for trouble. In other words, Armenians and Turks were seen as variants of today’s Sunnis and Shias in Iraq. Which brings to mind the adage that the only thing we learn from history is that we can’t learn from history.
*
Recycling propaganda enhances our prestige (in our own eyes) as it lowers our IQ (in the eyes of others) in addition to certifying our status as perennial dupes.
*
I have said this before and it bears repeating: the victims were innocent. But not all Armenians were. One does not have to read Turkish historians or Turcophile apologists to know this but our own pre-Genocide writers like Baronian and Odian (both available in English) whose works make it abundantly clear that the Armenian communities in the Ottoman Empire were at the mercy of loudmouth charlatans who spoke with a forked tongue, very much like our Turcocentric dime-a-dozen pundits today.
#
Monday, March 13, 2006
***************************************
QUESTIONS / ANSWERS
*********************************
WHY DO YOU CONSISTENTLY STRESS THE NEGATIVE AND IGNORE THE POSITIVE?
Because my job as a critic is to expose contradictions. A typical example of contradiction is saying one thing and doing the exact opposite.
*
READING YOU ONE WOULD CONCLUDE THAT ALL ARMENIANS ARE SOVIETIZED OR OTTOMANIZED CHARLATANS.
The written word is not a perfect medium of communication. Even the word of God has been misunderstood and misinterpreted by learned theologians throughout the centuries. What I have been saying is that the nation is at the mercy of Ottomanized or Sovietized charlatans. I have at no time said, suggested, or implied that we are all of us charlatans.
*
WHY IS IT THAT I DON’T RECOGNIZE MYSELF IN YOUR WRITINGS?
The obvious answer to that question is that what I write does not apply to you.
*
I DON’TCARE WHAT YOU SAY, I AM AND I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN A PROUD ARMENIAN.
Can you really be proud of our countless victims, or the present regime in Yerevan, or the assimilation rate in the Diaspora, and the emigration rate in the Homeland? I say about pride what Camus once said about charm – that it is “sh**.”
*
ARE YOU SUGGESTING WE SHOULD ALL HANG OUR HEADS AND SPEND THE REST OF OUR LIVES BEING ASHAMED OF OURSELVES?
No, because that would amount to accepting our present situation as a permanent condition ordained by God or some other immovable or irresistible force. I want my fellow Armenians to share my outrage, to say enough is enough. I want decent Armenians to spend less time saying, Yes, sir! I have at no time denied the fact that there are many decent Armenians. For all I know they may even be in the majority, in the same way that the majority of Germans under Hitler, or Russians under Stalin, or Italians under Mussolini, or Muslims today are decent folk. But they are not the ones who run things, set policy, make headlines, and shape the destiny of the nation.
*
I HAVE NEVER SAID YES, SIR! TO ANYONE. ON THE OTHER HAND, HOW DO I GO ABOUT SAYING NO, SIR!?
You can begin by sending an e-mail to the editors of our Turcocentric weeklies and saying there is more to life than Turks and massacres, which shouldn’t cost you a penny or more than a minute of your time. I am reminded of the great American reformer, Saul Alinsky, who once said that to demand and introduce social change doesn’t have to be hard work; sometimes it can even be fun.
##
Tuesday, March 14, 2006
**************************************
Kieslowski: “We are ashamed of being weak, hence our solitude.”
*
If only one among a hundred writers is silenced on political or religious grounds, the worth of the other ninety nine is diminished if only because it reduces their status to that of conformists and yes-men.
*
Malcolm Muggeridge: “Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream.”
*
Roger Martin du Gard: “Our whole damned civilization has got to go before we can bring any decency into the world.”
Something similar could be said of our entire culture of lamentation and Turcocentrism.
*
Nietzsche: “I may be a bad German, but in any event I am a good European.” And I say, what’s the use of being a good Armenian if it also means being a bad man?
*
I once met a prominent Armenian poet, educator, and author of several textbooks who called the Nobel Prize a Zionist conspiracy. Next he said his former students now living in America number in the thousand. Which may explain the popularity of the Zionist conspiracy theory among Armenians.
#
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
**************************************
My childhood ambition was to excel in a specific field so that I would enjoy the respect of my fellow men, make a living, and provide for my family. It was my misfortune to choose literature, and Armenian literature at that – a field in which the better you get the more you are abused. But by the time I discovered that however, it was too late, I had reached a point of no return. I now do my utmost to earn as much contempt as I can, and I am glad to report I am doing just fine, even if the better I get, the worst my prospects get.
*
Whenever an odar editor rejected my work, I would ask myself, “What am I doing wrong?” Whenever an Armenian editor rejected my work, I would ask, “What am I doing right?” Odar editors wanted more sex and action; Armenian editors, more lies. Odar editors wanted to entertain their audience; Armenian editors wanted to brainwash theirs.
*
Paul Valery: “My first word was NO; it will also be my last.”
*
Nothing unites dishonest men more readily than the appearance in their midst of an honest man.
*
Perhaps I was lucky enough to have a father who was educated enough to read newspapers but not arrogant enough to propagandize or speechify. If anything, he was a collateral damage of speechifiers and sermonizers.
*
I propose the following epitaph for our sermonizers and speechifiers: “Here lies a charlatan the size of whose ego exceeded only by the length of his forked tongue.”
#

Friday, March 10, 2006
**************************************************
Whatever I know, which is not much, has come from books. My knowledge of the real world is so limited that it might as well be non-existent; and whenever I have ventured outside in search of knowledge, I have returned to my books bloodied and defeated. But am I alone in this? Consider our revolutionaries at the turn of the last century. As long as they became intoxicated with Western ideas, they did no harm. But when they decided to act on them in the real world, their dreams turned into a nightmare. And consider what’s happening in Iraq today….
*
Socrates understood many things but he failed to understand one of the most important things, namely the fact that some day his conversations with fellow Athenians would be seen as a capital offense.
*
In a letter to the editor and speaking about “the authority of the scriptures,” a fundamentalist speaks of “the very foundation of facts that have withstood centuries of brutal attacks.” Astrology too has “withstood centuries of brutal attacks.” So what?
#
Saturday, March 11, 2006
***************************************
OTTOMANIZED ARMENIANS
***********************************
Some Armenians have been so thoroughly Ottomanized that their only source of wisdom seems to be Turkish sayings; and judging by the number of Armenian sayings and writers they quote, they have not heard or read a single one. Talaat and Stalin exterminated two generations of our ablest writers. These Armenians went further: they buried and forgot these writers ever existed.
*
GOSTAN ZARIAN
ON SOVIETIZED ARMENIANS
*****************************************************
In his TRAVELLER AND HIS ROAD and speaking of Sovietized Armenians who recycled Bolshevik propaganda to him, Zarian writes: “They are spitting on Raffi. They are spitting on Aharonian. They are spitting on Derian. And that with the borrowed, consumptive spittle of Muscovite ‘masters.’ Even their filth is second hand. Even their words have not been picked up from our streets. Danger, danger, danger!”
*
OUR PRESENT SITUATION
***********************************
If our situation is shituation today it may be because we are at the mercy of Sovietized bloodsuckers and Ottomanized charlatans whose Turcocentric view of life and understanding of their fellow men begins and ends with massacres. “You either massacre or are massacred,” they seem to be saying. “And if you can’t massacre your enemy with fire and sword, choose a more defenseless victim and massacre him with words.” And who could be more defenseless than Armenian writers? If they are no longer spitting on Raffi, Aharonian, and Derian, it may be because they don’t even know who these writers are.
*
AM I REPEATING MYSELF?
****************************************
If I am, it is because our Ottomanized and Sovietized brothers repeat themselves too by recycling filth that has not even picked up from our own streets but from alien gutters.
### [/B]

Sunday, February 26, 2006
************************************
The many ways those in power have to control our thoughts and emotions, especially the emotions of the thoughtless.
*
Most of his life, Gide writes in his World War II diaries, his efforts have been concentrated on understanding “the other,” that is to say, the enemy. It is such a pity that the world is run not by men like Gide but by the likes of Hitler and his dupes.
*
Armenian problems? What problems? Since we haven’t been able to solve them so far we must assume them to be an integral part of the human condition, like death and taxes.
*
Patriotism allows us to do nothing and to feel good about it.
*
Patriotism also allows us to think that if our heart is in the right place, we can’t go wrong. But what if the heart is controlled by a dysfunctional psyche?
*
An honest man is a charlatan’s worst nightmare.
*
That which we learn from books may not even register on our consciousness. But that which we learn from experience we can’t forget.
*
If your understanding focuses on yourself and ignores the other, your understanding of yourself as well as reality is bound to suffer because you are only a tiny fraction of a far larger reality, and tiny to the point of being invisible. And what is patriotism if not an extension of the self?
#
Monday, February 27, 2006
***************************************
In a tribal environment the myth of “pure blood” is taken seriously. It is different with the ruling classes and elites in general where mixed marriages are the norm rather than the exception.
*
After centuries of intermarriage a Turk is more difficult to define than an American. Something similar could be said of an Armenian. In the ghetto where I was born and raised there were Armenians who looked like Mongols, Germans, and Negroes but they all identified themselves as Armenian because (a) Armenians were the dominant tribe, (b) to identify themselves as anything else would have been against their own interests, and (c) because the offspring of mixed marriages were looked down at as mongrels.
*
There are harmless idiots and then there are dangerous idiots. A dangerous idiot is one who believes what his political and religious leaders tell him.
*
I understand idiots because I was one most of my life. Perhaps I still am for thinking that common sense and decency are transferable.
*
I was born again as a human being on the day I said to myself, “I am an Armenian, therefore I am an idiot.”
*
There exists an American school of thought that says, if you repeat to yourself “Today I like myself more than yesterday. Tomorrow I will like myself even more,” you will cease being a lousy bastard.
*
There is also an Armenian school of thought that says, if you repeat to yourself every day, “I am smart,” or “I am smarter today than I was yesterday,” you will cease being an idiot.
*
If two idiots meet and one says to the other “You are smart,” and the other replies, “You too are smart,” they will part with the conviction that, unlike most of their fellow men, they are not idiots.
#
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
*************************************
There is more to America than cowboys and Indians. There is also more to Armenians than the massacres. And yet, our press, our educational system, our editorialists, pundits, and academics conspire to reduce our identity, to distort our worldview, and to narrow our horizons when they emphasize the dark side of our recent past. They go further and cover up our failures and shortcomings, of which we have more than our share, because, they tell us, they come under the general heading of “dirty linen.”
*
Anyone who dares to discuss our problems is told to shut up unless he can solve them, or rather make them disappear as if by magic with a single verbal formula like abracadabra.
*
We are more, much more than misunderstood victims if only because we are human beings, or rather, it is within our powers to be born again as human beings.
*
We have a small army of lawyers, PR men, lobbyists, propagandists, and fund-raisers who are fully equipped to handle our grievances. We don’t have to brainwash our children to think and behave as their unpaid hirelings or crusaders.
*
In a commentary in our local paper today I read: “A smart country is a country brimming with ideas, a country open to pioneering minds, a country not fearful of intellectual fertility, experimentation and daring – a thinking country.”
*
Even more to the point: “We need to be careful in our use of language, avoid reductionist marketing strategies, and celebrate the fully broad nature of smartness. Otherwise we will miss the Mozarts and Platos in our midst. And that would not be a smart thing to do.” Where, O where is the Armenian pundit capable of producing such a paragraph?
#
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
***************************************
Renan: “A good policy consists not in opposing what is inevitable but in being of use to it and in making use of it.”
We have been better at “being of use to it,” than “in making use of it,” alas!
*
Robin Hood did not steal from the rich, he simply returned to the poor that which had been stolen from them.
*
Gide in 1941, after the German occupation: “For years now, France has hardly given us any reason to be proud. The France of today has ceased to be France.” By France I assume he meant the leadership and its dupes.
*
Genocide is a plant whose seed is prejudice, and prejudice comes to us disguised as love of God and Country.
*
As the offspring of perennial underdogs and victims I refuse to assert moral superiority because to do so would mean adding hypocrisy to my previous list of vices.
*
If someone I don’t trust were to agree with me, I would disagree with myself.
*
Andrea De Carlo: “He tells me to follow my instinct. But what if I have two of them?”
*
ON WRITING (THREE PARAPHRASES)
*********************************************
If the first sentence comes from the gut, the rest is bound to follow. (Hemingway)
*
Before you sit down to write you must stand up and live. (Thoreau)
*
Force yourself to be brief and miracles may happen. (Chekhov)
#

Thursday, February 23, 2006
**************************************
Gide: “Faith moves mountains; yes, mountains of
absurdities.”
*
Misunderstanding is a constant theme in Gide’s
final diary entries.
“When an intelligent man makes an effort not to
understand, he naturally succeeds much more
cleverly than a fool.”
But I have also discovered that, when it comes to
misunderstanding, fools can be surprisingly
creative.
*
After seeing Olivier’s production of KING LEAR
Gide goes at some length to explain why he thinks
this to be Shakespeare’s worst play. Odd that he
does not mention Tolstoy, whom he admired, and
who also hated this play about which he wrote a
long essay as if he were trying to settle an old
score with a rival.
*
Communism has been defined as state capitalism,
and capitalism as socialism for the rich. Private
enterprise promotes greed, and government
programs legitimize waste. All systems are
designed by elites to favor elites.
As for revolutions: they only replace one set of
rascals with another. Which is why, during the
final years of his life,
Arthur Koestler (one of the most politically
astute writers of the 20th century) refused to
discuss politics.
*
Zarian observes somewhere that we are on the
verge of extinction not because we have been
victimized by ruthless tyrants, but because we
have lost our bearings, we have assimilated the
values of our oppressors, and we have betrayed
all those among us who have attempted to define
what is and is not Armenian.
#

Friday, February 24, 2006
***********************************
David Irving is now willing to concede that
millions of Jews died during World War II, but he
refuses to use the word Holocaust describing it
as a concept that “became cleverly marketed, like
Tylenol.” In view of his past blunders and
dishonesty, I find his semantic sensitivity
fraudulent.
*
Indifference is sometimes confused with strength.
It seems to me it is more akin to moral
feebleness.
*
The very same extremists who mounted violent
demonstrations against cartoons of the Prophet
are now demolishing holy shrines and beheading
teachers in front of the class for refusing to
teach only religion and riot.
*
Whenever I mention the many crimes committed by
organized religions I am reminded that atheism
too has produced its share of criminals, such as
Stalin. But I maintain that, unlike Marxism,
which is an ideology, Stalinism became a religion
and a highly organized one at that. Let me quote
Nikita Khruschev on Stalin: “It is impermissible
and foreign to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism to
elevate one person, to transform him into a
superman possessing supernatural characteristics
akin to those of a god.”
*
Mohammed is only a prophet and a messenger; and
yet, he is treated as a god in whose name all
kinds of unspeakable crimes are committed every
day. This is clearly seen by the overwhelming
majority of mankind except the criminals.
*
Because I have consistently refused to confuse
ideology with theology some of my partisan
friends think of me as a heretic and an enemy of
the people.
#

Saturday, February 25, 2006
************************************
In some people the instinct to assert
intellectual superiority is stronger than the
need to learn and understand.
*
Gide quotes Leon Bloy as saying: “One must puke
on others!” How about that for French refinement,
etiquette, and elegance?
*
At the turn of the last century Baronian made
savage fun of our leadership but history advanced
as if he had not written a single line.
*
Before I blame anyone, I blame myself – a
quintessentially unArmenian trait that. Before we
blame ourselves, we prefer to blame the rest of
the world, not just Turks and Kurds but also
Bolsheviks, the West, and the Good Lord Himself.
We never bother to ask what have we done to
deserve so many enemies?
*
A contemporary Baronian is unthinkable perhaps
because after the Genocide, and unlike the Jews
(who have produced some brilliant satirists and
comedians) we prefer to lament crocodile tears
rather than have a good laugh at ourselves – at
our vanity, at our illusions, at our propaganda,
and ultimately at our lies.