Author: arabaliozian

Saturday, December 24, 2005
***************************************
The most important question we should ask about our history is neither what happened nor why, but where did we go wrong. We already know what happened and why, or we think we do, because we have been told we do. There are probably hundreds, not to say thousands of textbooks, memoirs, articles in encyclopedias, monographs, studies, and essays on the subject. But as far as I know very few that tell us where we went wrong, so few in fact that most of us are convinced our conduct has been flawless and beyond criticism.
*
Where did we go wrong? The reason I consider this to be the most important question is that it may change the line of our destiny. But instead of asking where did we go wrong we ask where did they go wrong, thus implying our sole contribution to our history has been victims.
*
To ask where we went wrong also means asking what we are doing wrong. A hundred years ago we were at the mercy of Turkish brutality and foreign meddling and manipulation. What has really changed? Today we are victims of Turkish intransigence and economic and cultural factors beyond our control, or so we claim. Beyond our control also means our only option is to adopt a passive stance and contribute more victims. Which of course is dangerous nonsense.
*
There is a great deal we can do to combat and minimize these negative factors by demanding accountability from our leaders and promoting our culture. By promoting our culture I don’t mean supporting or helping our writers – a repellent concept in itself, as if writers were beggars in need of handouts. By promoting our culture I mean emphasizing the importance of ideas, practicing dialogue, and being receptive to dissent as opposed to dealing in chauvinist propaganda, practicing censorship, delivering speeches and sermons, and publishing commentaries and editorials replete with clichés, platitudes, and verbal crapola.
#
Sunday, December 25, 2005
**************************************
MYSTICISM AND LOGIC
*******************************
Speaking of the gravedigger, Hamlet says, “How absolute the knave is! We must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us.”
*
The language of mystics is an incomprehensible medium full of equivocations, paradoxes, and contradictions because its aim is to make us understand that god or truth resides in a realm of meanings beyond our reason, common sense, and logic. And because I first came across this idea in Zen Buddhism, I thought of Christianity as an inferior religion. It is not. All religions have produced mystics and all mystics speak the same language regardless of nationality. (For more on this subject, see Aldous Huxley’s PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY.)
*
Most failures in communication occur when one speaks the language of mystics and the other of logic.
*
Great writers like Tolstoy and Shaw make writing seem easy because they have the ability to simplify complexities, and when we read them, we see only the result, not the labor that preceded it, and the labor consists in making the invisible visible, and the incomprehensible accessible. Tolstoy was an atheist who believed in Christ, and Shaw was an agnostic who believed in the Holy Spirit.
*
If I were to reduce our problems to a single formula, I would have to say that we are good at thesis, better at antithesis, but lousy at synthesis.
*
To make of thesis and antithesis permanent stages (as opposed to one that is transitory) also means to arrest progress.
#
Monday, December 26, 2005
****************************************
Ignorance is bliss, they say, and knowledge is power. If knowledge is power it is also the power to understand, and to understand means above all to be able to see what’s on the other side of the hill. It was because he lacked the power to understand his own brother that Abel became Cain’s victim; and he did not understand his brother because he did not want to understand him. It never even occurred to him to ask: “What’s eating you, bro?”
*
Adam and Eve lived in bliss in the Garden until they ate the fruit from the tree of knowledge. What followed was shame, exile, hard labor, pain, and murder, that is to say, history.
*
For 600 years we lived in ignorance under the Turks. Then our revolutionaries ate the fruit from the tree of freedom, whereupon history fell on us like a thief in the night: deportation, starvation, massacre, civil war, destitution, envy, divisiveness, corruption, alienation, exodus.
*
How much of this we have understood? The answer must be, nothing, because we prefer to live in blissful ignorance.
#
Tuesday, December 27, 2005
***********************************
According to a news item on the radio this morning, Viagra doesn’t work with 30% of patients suffering from erectile dysfunction. I could not help reflecting that if they ever discover a Viagra-like pill that combats intolerance, it may not work with 90% of Armenians, and the chances are 99% of them will have no use for it because they don’t think of themselves as intolerant.
*
The first time someone called me a racist, I dismissed him as a politically correct fascist. A racist, I thought, is someone who lynches Negroes, massacres innocent women and children, or incinerates Jews in ovens. Since I had done none of these things, I could not qualify as a racist. I know better today.
*
I know now that whoever it was that called me a racist understood me better than I did. And now that I know better, I find it extremely difficult to be tolerant, and I suspect most people who sermonize and speechify against intolerance today are hypocrites whose favorite medium is double-talk.
*
If others are sometimes better judges of ourselves than we are it may be because objectivity is a rare virtue, especially among those who have been brainwashed at an early age to believe that they are good Christians and possess all those virtues unique to Christianity, among them love, compassion, and tolerance.
#
Wednesday, December 28, 2005
**************************************
THEM AND US
************************
They have fascist ideologues.
So have we. We even brag about our “tseghagrons,” or partisans who elevated race to the status of religion.
*
They massacred indiscriminately defenseless women and children. So did we. Ask any Tashnak who is remotely acquainted with the history of his party and he will tell you General Antranik was expelled from the Party because he massacred indiscriminately. To this day Azeris think of him the way Jews think of Hitler.
*
For everyone we massacred, they massacred ten. That’s because they outnumbered us ten to one.
*
What happens to a second-generation Armenian-American?
He behaves more like an American than an Armenian – assuming an authentic Armenian exists and we know his code of conduct.
*
What happened to a 24th-generation Ottoman-Armenian? Was he less Ottoman and more Armenian? Or was it the other way around?
*
Speaking for myself, I am neither a fascist nor a killer of innocent civilians; and I would resent it like hell if someone identified me with an Armenian in a leadership position. Which is a mistake we make when we identify the people with the regime. It is not the people who deny the Genocide, it is the regime. Likewise, it is not the people who adopted and implemented a genocidal policy but the leadership, which was not elected by the people and cannot be said to have represented them.
*
By identifying the people with the regime we succeed only in alienating the people, our best friends and greatest allies.
#

Thursday, December 22, 2005
************************************
Smart Armenians who have made it in the odar world are as a rule not as clannish as the rest of us. I was reminded of this fact last week when I introduced myself to a young doctor as a fellow countryman and I could not help observing that the expression on her face changed as if she had stepped on a pile of cow dung. And I imagined the following exchange with her mate later that evening:
Something wrong?
Nothing I can’t handle.
What happened?
Met a member of the tribe today.
What did he say?
Nothing much.
What did you say?
Ditto.
So what’s the problem?
I just don’t like the idea of running into them, that’s all; and they have a way of popping up when you least expect them.
Have you thought of changing your name?
More than once.
What’s stopping you?
My folks.
They are against it?
We haven’t discussed it but my guess is my dad won’t like it.
Daddy’s little girl doesn’t want to hurt the old man?
Well, if it wasn’t for him this little girl wouldn’t be where she is. Don’t you think he deserves a little consideration?
Then I guess you’ll have to grin and bear it.
*
I am told whenever she was introduced to a fellow Armenian, Krikor Zohrab’s daughter in New York (may the Good Lord have mercy on her soul) behaved as though she was about to be attacked by a rattlesnake.
*
I am also told Taniel Varoujan’s daughter lives all by herself in the middle of nowhere and as far away from her fellow Armenians as the State of New York will allow it.
#
Friday, December 23, 2005
************************************
Understanding is not a single faculty but many. It is an illusion to think that just because you understand one thing well, you are also equipped to understand many other things. To say that just because you understand the market place you also understand history, or politics, or literature amounts to saying that just because you understand Swahili you also understand Japanese, Hungarian, and Urdu.
*
There are even people who understand nothing and think they understand everything. I know such people exist because I was one of them. The older I grow the more I realize what a damn fool I have been most of my life.
*
If history is an endless catalogue of disasters, blunders, crimes, and miscalculations it may be because it is shaped by individuals who are not in the habit of questioning their perception of reality or understanding; and the only reason they enjoy popular support is that they simplify complex issues in order to make them more comprehensible to the majority.
*
Between a simple explanation and a complex one, the simple explanation will invariably be more popular, especially among yokels and fanatics.
*
Turks massacred us because they are evil, bloodthirsty, Asiatic barbarians. There is no other explanation. Anyone who says otherwise is a denialist. The irony here is that it is the very same Armenians who dehumanize Turks who expect them to behave like decent human beings by pleading guilty as charged.
#

Sunday, December 18, 2005
*************************************
Sometimes I repeat myself because I find it extremely difficult to ignore questions by new readers. Some recent questions follow.
*
Q: Why do you write the way you do? What is your real aim?
A: To understand and explain, not because understanding and explaining will make me a happier man but because I am tired of being deceived and manipulated by frauds whose number one concern is number one.
Q: Do you have anyone in particular in mind?
A: Almost everyone who is in a leadership position.
*
Q: Don’t you feel it is one of your duties as a writer to encourage the next generation of writers?
A: As things stand, what the nation needs more than writers is readers.
*
Q: Who is the most important Armenian writer today?
A: I can’t think of anyone. The ones I know write about the massacres, as if that were the most important issue we confront today.
Q: Isn’t it?
A: No!
Q: Why not? Is not defending our rights important?
A: They may want you to think they are defending our rights but in reality all they are doing is promoting miserabilism.
Q: If recognition of the Genocide is not an important issue today, what is?
A: Corruption, incompetence, exodus from the Homeland, assimilation in the Diaspora, divisiveness, which also means waste of resources and personnel, spineless academics who kow-tow to our bosses, bishops, and benefactors, charlatans who parade as pundits…
Q: That’s quite a list!
A: That’s quite a mess we are in.
#
Monday, December 19, 2005
***************************************
When enemies disagree, they agree on nothing. When friends disagree they agree at least on one thing: they agree to disagree. And where there is agreement on one thing, there will be hope for agreement on two or more things. Let us therefore be friends with the Turks. Even more important, let us begin by being friends with fellow Armenians who disagree with us.
*
All major historical events have two or more interpretations. This is true of World War I and World War II, as it is of the American, French, and Russian Revolutions. It all depends on which side of the fence you find yourself.
*
Whenever I take a walk with a friend I notice that he sees things that I don’t see. Four eyes are better than two, they say, and when it comes to understanding reality, dialogue is better than monologue. In a political environment where dissent is stifled, understanding is diminished, and the ability to deal with reality is impaired.
*
If we want to understand ourselves and the world in which we live, we must also try to understand the Turkish side of the story. And we must do this for purely selfish reason.
#
Tuesday, December 20, 2005
**************************************
ERROR MANAGEMENT
*******************************
On the radio today an interview with an Australian professor whose field is error management that consists in predicting, preventing, minimizing and compensating for errors. At one point, the good professor said mankind is divided into two categories: “people who have made mistakes and people who will make mistakes.” But like all rules, this one too has its exceptions, namely Armenian leaders.
*
Armenian leaders are such masters of assigning blame that they have no use for error management. Result? Since they could not predict, prevent, and minimize the damage of the “Red” massacres of 1915, they have been doing the same with the “White” massacres (exodus from the Homeland and assimilation in the Diaspora). The first massacres they blame on the Turks and the degenerate West, the second massacres on historic, social, economic, and cultural factors beyond their control.
*
What do they mean by “cultural factors”? The answer must be obvious to everyone except themselves: the vacuum of our own culture, because that’s what happens to a culture when the best and the brightest are systematically alienated, silenced, and starved.
*
Speaking of the blame game: perhaps the source of all our problems is our geography. As a landlocked country we have no use for ships and captains and for a tradition that says the captain goes down with the ship. Our captains survive and go on to sink other ships, and the more ships they sink the merrier.
#
Wednesday, December 21, 2005
****************************************
ON PROPAGANDA
*************************
No nation on earth is as good as its propaganda. Moreover, by emphasizing the positive and covering up or ignoring the negative, propaganda impairs our understanding of reality. Our revolutionaries in the Ottoman Empire were dupes of the West because they were dupes of their own propaganda.
*
ON CAPITALISTS
**************************
Raffi (Hagop Melik-Hagopian: 1835-1888): “They are the most corrupt and degenerate members of the community. Nothing good can come out of them. These people worship only money. They are men without a country. They belong to no nation on earth. Profit is their only homeland.”
*
K.C. Constantine in BOTTOM LINER BLUES (New York, 1993): “They got no nationality. Their only nationality is money.”
*
For more on this subject see the sections on Ken Lay (page 171) and Dennis Kozlowski (page 172) in Bernard Goldberg’s 100 PEOPLE WHO ARE SCREWING UP AMERICA (New York, 2005).
*
HISTORY AND REAL ESTATE
***************************************
Eric Hobshawn in ON HISTORY (London, 1997): “Denmark does not claim the large part of eastern England which was settled and ruled by Danes before the eleventh century, which continued to be known as the Danelaw and whose village names are still philologically Danish.”
#

Thursday, December 15, 2005
****************************************
There seems to be an unspoken law among us that
says, “If you disagree with me, you are my
enemy.” Result? We have three sets of enemies:
Turks, the corrupt West, and a fraction of our
fellow Armenians. Whoever first said “Mart bidi
chellank” (We will never acquire the status of
human beings) fully qualifies as one of our major
prophets.
*
To say or to imply “If you contradict me you are
my enemy,” is a fallacy based on another fallacy,
namely, “I know and understand all I need to know
and understand,” which happens to be the unspoken
assumption of all tyrants and fascist dictators.
It follows, all dissidents and critics are
enemies of the people and they don’t deserve to
live.
*
People who say they know and understand all they
need to know and understand, usually rely on
someone else’s knowledge and understanding, which
means that their knowledge is inadmissible
because based on hearsay.
*
Stalin relied on Marx and completely ignored
Marx’s statement “I am not a Marxist.” He also
ignored one of Marx’s central pillars of thought,
that of dialectic, which means dialogue, and
dialogue is possible only when contradiction (or
antithesis) is allowed to follow assertion (or
thesis). And because Stalin ignored that aspect
of the Marxist system, his empire collapsed and
the Soviets “mart cheghan.”
*
There are two approaches to our genocide: to
ascribe it (one) to pure evil, and (two) to
historic, social, and cultural conditions. When
Toynbee first wrote about the Genocide he
ascribed it to pure evil. But when he studied the
Turkish side of the story by making Turkish
friends and learning the Turkish language, he
realized the Genocide was an occurrence that
could be explained and understood. However, he at
no time said or implied that to explain is to
justify – which is where we tend to go wrong.
Whenever someone tries to explain the Genocide we
accuse him of being a denialist (among us, the
lowest form of animal life). And worse, we call
him an enemy, and in doing so we condemn
ourselves to have three sets of enemies, in other
words, to be perennial losers.
*
If we call the Turks Asiatic barbarians, what do
we call the Nazis? European barbarians? What do
we call Americans (in relation to their treatment
of natives and blacks)? American barbarians? What
do we call Stalin (a next door neighbor)? A
Caucasian barbarian? What do we call Mao,
compared to whom, Stalin was only an amateur
serial killer, (according to a recent
biography).
*
The list of crimes against humanity is endless
and they all begin in the convolutions of the
brain, and to call a fellow Armenian an enemy,
and worse, to silence him – as our “betters” do –
is the mother of all crimes against humanity.
#
Friday, December 16, 2005
**********************************
Whenever I express an honest opinion I make an
enemy, as if honesty were anti-Armenian.
*
Whether we like it or not, we are all in the
business of recycling a party line because none
of us knows the whole truth. We may know a
fraction of the truth but never the whole truth.
But a fraction of the truth is how propaganda is
defined.
*
I too recycle a party line, and more specifically
the party of Baronian, Voskanian, Zarian, and
Massikian; the party of Socrates and
Solzhenitsyn; the party of Toynbee and Pamuk, who
went on trial today not because he spoke the
truth – only the Good Lord knows the whole truth
– but because he expressed an honest opinion; and
it’s not that honesty is anti-Turkish, rather it
does not recognize any specific religion,
ideology, and power structure that speaks in the
name of god or truth.
*
I have said this before and it bears repeating:
god and truth have generated more victims than
the most diabolical big lies invented or imagined
by man.
#
Saturday, December 17, 2005
***********************************
EXCUSE MY FRENCH
**************************
E.M. Forster, the author of some of the very best books on England and India, in a letter to a friend: “Most Indians, like most English people, are shits.”
*
I was born and raised in a ghetto near Athens that looked like an oversized gypsy encampment. Greeks called us “Turkish gypsies” and treated us like shit.
*
At the age of twenty I came to Canada and tried to make a living working at minimum-wage jobs in factories and department stores. That’s when I discovered that even the best among them are capable of behaving like shit when dealing with white trash.
*
I lived in Italy for a number of years and I found it difficult to resist their charm. But whenever I use that word I am reminded of Albert Camus. “Charm,” Camus once said, “is shit.” When I think of Mussolini and his Fascists I cannot help agreeing with Camus.
*
There are two drawbacks in being an Armenian writer: you work for less than minimum wage and whenever you refuse to recycle someone’s party line you are treated like shit.
*
If some of my readers are to be believed – and I for one do not feel qualified to question their honesty — I am myself a first-class shit.
*
Perhaps the only difference between tyrants and the rest of us is that tyrants have the means to deal with the shits whereas all we can do is resort to name-calling.
#

Sunday, December 11, 2005
***********************************
CRIME STORIES
***************************
In thrillers, or mystery, suspense and crime novels the question is who is the murderer? In psychoanalysis, what is the complex? The question historians try to answer is, what happened and why? In philosophy, what is the meaning of life, or why things exist?
*
In his old age, Bertrand Russell used to read a crime novel a day (by judiciously skipping descriptive passages whose sole aim is to lend an air of authenticity to the plot and character, it can be done).
*
In his memoirs Sartre writes that he prefers reading crime novels to Wittgenstein, perhaps because the answers provided by even the ablest philosophers are never as certain as those to be found in crime fiction.
*
Propaganda has this in common with Hollywood movies and bad fiction in general: it divides characters into good and bad guys. It has been said that in a good play or work of fiction, as in life, the line between decent folk and villains is blurred.
*
In his efforts to explain the Armenian Genocide, Toynbee advanced the theory that the source of evil is in all of us and it is called original sin. Given the right or wrong combination of circumstances, we, all of us, are capable of behaving like Turks; or, as Puzant Granian once put it more bluntly, “There is a Turk in all of us.”
*
My fascination with crime fiction began with Edgar Alan Poe and Conan Doyle. Some of the most unforgettable titles in the genre that I have read and sometimes reread are:
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT by Dostoevsky,
THE KILLERS, by Hemingway,
DEAD YELLOW WOMEN by Dashiell Hammett,
FAREWELL MY LOVELY by Raymond Chandler,
A COFFIN FOR DIMITRIOS by Eric Ambler,
THE GOUFFE CASE by Joachim Maass,
NOCTURNE by Ed McBain,
POINT BLANK by Richard Stark, and
GRIEVANCE by K.C. Constantine.
#
Monday, December 12, 2005
***********************************
PARANOIA
*******************
Once more I have been accused of being a denialist. Under Stalin this type of baseless and irresponsible accusation landed countless innocent people into the Gulag.
*
I ceased being a proud Armenian on the day a proud Armenian insulted me in the name of Armenianism.
*
When Descartes said, “I think therefore I am,” he shifted human consciousness from god-centered (theocentric) to man-centered (humanist) and in doing so he ushered in the Age of Enlightenment. In the Middle or Dark Ages a statement like “I think therefore I am” would have been unthinkable. Medieval philosophy, or rather theology, explained everything by invoking the name of god. I think and I am because god created me with a brain. The sky is blue because blue is god’s favorite color. The earth is the center of the solar system, not to say the universe, because man is god’s favorite creature.
*
When one of our weeklies of 19 pages publishes 16 articles and commentaries on Turks (I am not counting the letters to the editor), an objective observer would have no choice but to conclude that Armenian consciousness in the 21st Century has become Turco-centric — a development that we owe to our massacrists (genocide scholars), hai-tahd peddlers, dime-a-dozen pundits and editorialists.
*
To have a Turco-centric consciousness means to have a consciousness that wallows in self-pity, hatred, and rage against an unjust world. It follows, in the same way that a paranoiac sees enemies lurking in every dark corner, a Turco-centric Armenian sees denialists everywhere and he does so with the unshakable conviction that he is discharging his patriotic duty.
#
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
************************************
XENOPHOBIA
**************************
“Xenophobia assassinates life,” writes Carlos Fuentes in his latest book, THIS I BELIEVE: AN A TO Z OF LIFE (New York, Random House, 331 pages, 2005). For us, the quintessential alien is the Turk. But as far as I can see, after 600 years of cohabitation, the only discernible difference between them and us is that we are not guilty of genocide.
*
What motivated the Turks to exterminate us was xenophobia, and they were afraid of us because they thought we (as opposed to a small and non-representative group of revolutionaries), together with Kurds, Greeks, Russians, and the Great Powers of the West, threatened the integrity of their homeland.
*
Fuentes goes on: “The lesson of our unfinished humanity is that when we exclude we are made poorer, and when we include we are made richer.”
*
If xenophobia is assassination, our xenophobia of Turks may be said to be a bloodless genocide.
*
We cannot exorcise the Turk within us by hating him or by refusing to acknowledge his existence. He is there and he has been there all along, and he will continue to be the dominant factor in our collective existence until we come to terms with the fact that the reason why we are not guilty of genocide is rooted not in moral superiority but in military inferiority.
#
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
****************************************
Faith is the greatest deceiver. To say “I believe therefore it’s true” has been the biggest and most dangerous lie ever invented by man.
*
Why did Toynbee change his mind? Why is it that after writing several books on the tyranny of the Turks and the Armenian massacres he became a Turcophile? Even so, it should be noted, repeated, and emphasized that he at no time went as far as denying the reality of the Genocide. On the contrary – very much on the contrary – he went on saying and repeating in nearly every other book he wrote that the Armenian Genocide and the Jewish Holocaust were the two greatest crimes of the 20th Century.
*
I like these lines from THIS I BELIEVE by Carlos Fuentes: “There are more idols than realities in this world of ours, and convictions have a tendency to be prisons.”
*
Perhaps Toynbee knew something we don’t know, one of which is that history is nothing but an endless catalogue of atrocities, truth is our common enemy, and politicians, regardless of race, color, creed, or tribe, speak with a forked tongue.
*
Toynbee probably agreed with Pascal when the latter said: “What a chimera then is man! What a novelty, what monsters! Chaotic, contradictory, prodigious, judging everything, mindless worm of the earth. Storehouse of truth, cesspool of uncertainty and error; glory and reject of the universe!”
*
Please note that I am not questioning the innocence of our victims. What I would like to question however is the motives of our politicians and the integrity of historians who recycle the party line, any party line. And whenever I think of our politicians I remember Gostan Zarian’s dictum: “Our political parties have been of no political use to us; their greatest enemy is free speech.” And they have every reason to be afraid of free speech because free speech may expose their blunders.
*
No man exposes his shortcomings as transparently and surely as the man who adopts a holier-than-thou stance.
#

Thursday, December 08, 2005
**************************************
In his latest book, THE DRAGONS OF EXPECTATION (London: Duckworth, 256 pages, 2005) Robert Conquest writes about a certain type of idealists or members of “an intellectually semi-educated class,” who become so engrossed in present evils which they can see that “their brains entirely fail to register the political evils – so much less easy to discern – of panaceas being peddled to replace them.” Thus it was that our revolutionaries in the Ottoman Empire, while clearly seeing the evil of oppression, chose not to recognize the probability of genocide.
*
It took courage to challenge the might of the Empire; it will take greater courage to admit it was a blunder.
*
Serial killers and crime lords are less dangerous to society than well-meaning and respectable political leaders who do not question their fundamental decency, logic, and infallibility.
*
Nobody is as smart as he thinks he is. I would have been a happier man had I assumed to be an idiot. Likewise, the world will be a better place if leaders assume to be fools.
#
Friday, December 09, 2005
**********************************
WRITERS
****************
There are writers that I love to read, and writers, like Dostoevsky and Simenon, that become obsessions.
*
SIMENON
**************
There are two things that fascinate me about Simenon: his profoundly human and universally accessible fictional characters, and the fact that he could write a book in a week. No one knows how many books he has written – some say 500, others 650 – because he wrote under several pseudonyms. His books may be divided into three distinct categories: detective stories (also known as “maigrets”), straight novels (also known as “simenons”), and autobiographical narratives and diaries, not all of which are available in English.
*
DOSTOEVSKY
************************
What I find fascinating about Dostoevsky’s fiction is the clash of contradictory characters and the ensuing fireworks. I began reading him as a teenager and by the time I was twenty I had read all his major works in Italian and Greek translations. Though I have tried to reread him in English I have never gone beyond page 3. I prefer to read studies of his life and work, of which there is a steady stream. Generally speaking, I find biographies of the major Russians (Pushkin, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgenev) more absorbing than their fiction.
*
MANN AND TOYNBEE
*********************************
Two other writers who became obsessions that lasted several years are Thomas Mann and Arnold J. Toynbee. What I value about them both is their thoroughly anti-establishment stance – though they were themselves products of the establishment. But this is true of all authentic thinkers, from Plato to Bertrand Russell.
*
ZARIAN
*****************
Among Armenians, the writer that has fascinated me the most is Gostan Zarian, but unlike the great Russians, so far he has had no biographer, which is a pity since his life on three continents and encounters with many major figures in world literature fully deserves several voluminous studies.
#
Saturday, December 10, 2005
***********************************
A VICIOUS CIRCLE
****************************
Q: Who suffers when politicians make a mistake?
A: The people.
Q: How do politicians react when told they made a mistake?
A: They silence critics, they brainwash the young, and they surround themselves with hirelings, yes-men, and brown-nosers.
Q: What happens when they do that?
A: The truth is buried, charlatanism is legitimized, and the press is prostituted.
Q: Who suffers when that happens?
A: The people.
#

Sunday, December 04, 2005
**************************************
If what I repeat is worth repeating then it isn’t repeating but reminding. For two thousand years Christians all over the world have been reciting the Lord’s Prayer. If the Good Lord needs reminding, how much more so poor mortals like us? Every day we beg Him not to lead us into temptation and that’s exactly what He does. Even so, we keep reminding Him as history keeps repeating itself ad nauseam…
*
Sometimes you are dead wrong not when you suspect you may be wrong but when the possibility of being wrong doesn’t even occur to you.
*
The most effective way to introduce democratic reforms in an authoritarian environment is by teaching our children to disagree in a civilized manner and our adults to disagree without violating someone’s fundamental human right of free speech. As long as we fail in these two enterprises, our fascists will continue to think they know better and they are fully qualified to lead us, without even suspecting for a single moment that a hundred years ago they led us straight to hell and, even as I write, history is repeating itself.
#
Monday, December 05, 2005
*************************************
QUESTIONS
**********************
By selecting and emphasizing certain aspects of reality and ignoring many others one may construct any number of theories. This may explain why philosophers, historians, theologians and even scientists have formulated many systems of belief and thought, none of which enjoys universal and unanimous support.
What are the choices open to a layman who is defenseless against the sophistries of his so-called “betters?”
What if the tree of knowledge has so far yielded nothing but poisoned fruit?
What if even the wisest among us is no better than a damn fool?
What if millions have killed and died for a belief system that has as much merit as the shadow of a non-existent black hat in a dark room?
*
A favorite political joke of mine goes something like this: A heckler at a rally interrupts the long-winded speech of a Republican presidential candidate by shouting: “My grandfather was a Democrat, my father was a Democrat, I am a Democrat!”
Whereupon the candidate demands to know: “Suppose your grandfather was a jackass and your father was a jackass, what would you be?”
“A Republican!” replies the heckler.
*
A final question: what if the most important decisions in our lives, decisions that are extensions of our identity or belief system, are based not on reason or free choice but accident of birth or geography?
#
Tuesday, December 06, 2005
***************************************
Sooner or later all blunders boomerang, and all blunders of policy or deed begin with blunders of thought.
*
When the free speech of a few is violated, the many swim in verbal crap.
*
Our propagandists like to speak of defeats that are moral victories, but not of victories that are moral defeats; and to those who think silencing dissent is a victory, may I remind them that it is also a moral catastrophe.
*
An infallible Armenian is also a self-assessed smart Armenian who knows many things except how to think for himself.
*
Where there is intolerance, there will be dissent; where there is dissent, there will be censorship; where there is censorship, there will be lies; where there are lies, there will be fear; and fear is not good policy.
#
Wednesday, December 07, 2005
**********************************
Sometimes I am tempted to affix the following message at the end of everything I write: “Please, do not insult the scribbler, he is doing his best.”
*
More often than not all Armenian arguments do is polarize the participants. On reconsideration I wish to amend my answers to all the counter-arguments and questions I have been asked so far to: “You may be right,” “I am not sure,” “I don’t know,” and “No comment.”
*
Since the Great Powers of the West have not apologized for their meddling in our affairs, in what way are they better than Turks are?
*
Because our dime-a-dozen pundits keep saying Turks are nasty folk, they are okay. But because I keep saying we are not perfect, I am guilty of both repeating myself and being wrong.
#

Thursday, December 01, 2005
**************************************
ON INTELLIGENT DESIGN
*******************************
If one takes into account earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, epidemics and many other natural disasters which insurance companies call “acts of god,” one may have to admit that the design is deeply flawed and the intelligence not equal to the challenge.
*
ON POLITICIANS
**************************
Paul Johnson, a noted conservative British intellectual, has published an essay in the SPECTATOR (August 20, 2005) titled “Wittgenstein and the fatal propensity of politicians to lie,” where he writes that lying has become a routine occurrence in British politics. What about Armenian politics? Shortly after the collapse of the USSR Sylva Kaputikian declared, “I am proud to have been a member of the Communist Party,” the very same party that murdered some of our ablest men and bankrupted (economically as well as morally) our homeland. And if you were to ask one of our average partisans or ideologues, don’t be surprised if you are informed that the leaders of his party never lie. This to me is another irrefutable proof of the fact that the design is seriously flawed.
*
ON DEMOCRACY
***********************
In the same issue of the SPECTATOR there is a letter to the editor in which I read the following lines: “Our democracy was not imposed from the top, it grew from beneath, well-rooted in our culture.” If democracy must grow from beneath, we have not yet begun, and even if we were to begin first thing tomorrow morning, we will have a long way to go. Our Big Brothers have nothing to worry about because the chances that they may run out of dupes are practically non-existent.
#
Friday, December 02, 2005
**************************************
Flattering egos is a profitable enterprise, unlike exposing prejudices, which doesn’t even pay minimum wage.
*
If by building a cathedral a benefactor thinks he will spend a minute less in purgatory he will build a cathedral. As for helping the poor and feeding the hungry, he will say what one of our brown-nosers once said to me: “There will always be poverty and hunger in the world and I doubt if it is in anyone’s power to abolish them.”
*
Mistakes are the best teachers. Cursed are those who never make them for they will never learn.
*
American literature welcomes writers from all four corners of the world – Nabokov (Russian), Bellow and Singer (two Jews and Nobel Prize winners), Saroyan… Something similar could be said of French literature – Zola (Italian), Cioran and Ionesco (Romanians), Beckett (Irish), Adamov and Lubin (Armenians). And I could make a long list of our own writers that we have silenced – among them Voskanian, Massikian, Shahnour, and Zarian. I have yet to meet an Armenian (and I include members of my own family as well as relatives) for whom the demise of Armenian literature rates as a fit subject for conversation.
#
Saturday, December 03, 2005
***************************************
Neither the victim’s nor the victimizer’s versions of the same story will agree with god’s version.
*
Some things we are destined to understand only at the hour of our death.
*
Decent Armenians do not parade their Armenianism. It is only the phonies who feel the need to cover their nakedness with the flag.
*
I like this thought by Jean Rostand: “In a future age we shall be just as astonished to find that we have had politicians as leaders as we are, today, to find that we once had barbers as surgeons.”
*
He who overestimates himself will underestimate the opposition.
*
It is useless to speak in an environment where fools have succeeded in convincing themselves to be wise.
#

Sunday, November 27, 2005
*********************************
After describing in some detail the rhythmic exuberance and melodic inventiveness of the final movement of a Mozart piano concerto, most of which I no longer remember, the announcer concluded: “This is what it means to be alive!” Sometimes the easiest explanation is also the most unforgettable.
*
According to the press release of a new publisher, he is willing to consider any manuscript that qualifies as “entertaining trash.”
*
I have been in the business long enough to know that nothing I write matters, and on the day I start taking myself seriously I will have to declare intellectual bankruptcy.
*
Reason tells me it makes no sense writing for Armenians. Even so, I go on. Don’t ask me why because I don’t know. Far better men than myself have fallen silent after five, ten, or at most twenty years, because they couldn’t take the insults of a vocal minority, the hostility of the establishment, and the apathy of the majority. I have been writing for thirty years now and even if nothing changes, my guess is, I will go on writing for another thirty (if I am lucky enough to live that long). So what if I have only two readers left, both of whom misunderstand and contradict every line I write?
#
Monday, November 28, 2005
***************************************
COMPASSION FATIGUE
*********************************
A young woman has written a commentary in our paper today the title of which is “Hello I’m a person, not some guy’s stereotype.” By yakking endlessly about massacres and Turks we have reduced ourselves to the status of a stereotype – a victim nation – and the world is full of them.
*
People judge us by our contributions to the welfare of mankind, or how useful we can be to them, and not by how much we have suffered. This is true of individuals as well as groups. I will never forget the young, cool blonde co-worker of mine, Carol by name, who cut me short once with the words, “Listen, I’ve got problems of my own.” Politicians in need of our votes may not say as much, but they sure as hell think it.
*
“I’ve got problems of my own!” A good explanation as to why Naregatsi may well be the most praised and least read Armenian writer.
*
If I have learned one sure thing in life it is this: Never challenge the power of someone you are not in a position to kill with impunity. This applies to Turks as well as Armenians because power is power regardless of nationality.
#
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
***************************************
I don’t trust a writer who belongs to a political party. I don’t trust political parties and politics. I trust politicians even less. I will go further and say that I see them as my natural enemies.
*
Being Armenian is an abnormal condition. Being an Armenian writer is compounding the felony.
*
It’s all right to be prejudiced as long as you have an open mind.
*
History teaches us that it is easier to learn from it than to change it.
*
All empires are warlike. There has never been a pacifist empire. A pacifist empire might as well be a contradiction in terms. A pacifist empire would cease being an empire before you can say Jack S. Avanakian. That’s because an empire is like an attractive wench. Everyone wants a piece of the action and if she doesn’t resist she becomes a woman with a past and no future, and in today’s parlance, history.
*
The justice of victims can be as ruthless as the justice of victimizers.
#
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
************************************
There came a moment in my life when I suddenly realized that all the knowledge I had acquired until then was worthless. It follows, all the knowledge that I have acquired since may also be worthless sometime in the future. If men in positions of power and authority experience such moments, they must pretend otherwise. The same applies to men of faith. And yet, somewhere in the scriptures we read: “If you think you are wise, behave like a fool so that you may be wise,” or words to that effect. I suspect men of faith interpret these lines in such a way as not to question or doubt their faith-based assumptions, knowledge and understanding. And that’s another problem with men of faith: not only they must not question their fundamental assumptions, but also their interpretations of scriptures. Not only the Pope must pretend he does not doubt his faith seven times every day (as an Italian adage has it) but also he must pretend he has at no time questioned his own infallibility. The same applies to bishops, mullahs, and televangelists. Hence orthodoxies and heresies; hence religious wars and massacres; and hence Voltaire’s dictum, “Since it was a religious war, there were no survivors;” and Bertrand Russell’s maxim: “The aim of philosophy is to introduce doubt in an environment of certainties.”
*
Speaking of certainties: in a fascist environment the press is exclusively anti-enemy, and if there is no enemy, it invents one. In a democratic environment the emphasis is on exposing corruption and incompetence in one’s own power structure. By publishing 19 anti-Turkish articles in a 16-page weekly and ignoring our own filth, our press fully qualifies as a crypto-fascist medium.
Censorship is another prominent feature of fascism and all its crypto- and neo- variants. If I have said this before, it bears repeating. For, according to Socrates, “to know is to remember.”
#

Thursday, November 24, 2005
***************************************
Our prejudices are born with us and they are all rooted in the illusion that we are the center of the universe, our god is the only true god, and our country is always right. We know of course that countries don’t think, politicians do, and politicians are always wrong because they are motivated not by love of truth but by greed of power, prestige, and popularity.
*
The only way to acquire a better understanding of the world is to master the difficult art of thinking against oneself. It is not enough to say, “I could be wrong.” We should say instead, “As long as we think in terms of us and them, we can’t be right.”
*
Until very recently most Americans believed Saddam was wrong and Bush right. If they are having second thoughts today it may be because their thinking follows not their prejudices but historic reality.
*
Twenty years ago I wrote a brief essay in which I summed up my convictions and I thought I had reached the end of the line and I had nothing further to say. But on waking up next morning I felt the urge to add a final note to emphasize one of the points made in my final essay. Twenty years later, on waking up this morning, once more I feel the need to underline and expand in the full knowledge that what I say will change nothing, and history will continue to be made by people who are convinced they are the center of the universe, their god is the only true god, and their country is always right.
#
Friday, November 25, 2005
***********************************
DIARY
*********************
“He was brainwashed and traumatized,” I heard someone say on the radio this morning. One could say that to be educated, or to feel and think as a member of a specific racial, religious, ethnic or tribal group means to be brainwashed and traumatized to some degree.
*
If to hate the many for the crimes of the few is racist, who among us can plead not guilty?
*
I have discovered a wonderful new American detective-story writer, K.C. Constantine (not his real name). His plots advance on dialogue which is fast, furious, often witty, and always profoundly human – Chekhov with a touch of Dostoevsky.
*
On the radio, Muti conducting Brahms’s 4th Symphony. In the first movement he emphasized not the charm but the monumental. I could not help thinking that this is what Brahms must have had in mind.
*
Whenever Mother sees me writing, she says “Are you the director of a bank?”
*
In Antranik Zaroukian’s NEW ARMENIA, NEW ARMENIANS, I read: “For six or seven centuries Armenia was only a dream in the heart of every Armenian. Dreams are nice if they lead you somewhere, nasty if they take you to a dead end…” He could have added, “…and nightmares when they come true.”
#
Saturday, November 26, 2005
**************************************
PARALLELS
*************************
In the paper this morning I read the following brief news item: “A 15-year old girl with a peanut allergy has died after being kissed by her boyfriend following his snack of peanut butter.”
*
Socrates is right: Ignorance is the source of all evil, and to know is to remember. Didn’t the boyfriend know about her allergy? If he knew, did he forget?
*
Ignorance may be the most innocent of all transgressions but in life it is sometimes the most severely punished.
*
What could be more natural for an oppressed people than to want to live in a free and independent homeland? What was it that made us forget the lessons of history? Why is it that before we decided to rise against the Empire we failed to ask the following questions? What did the West do during the Bulgarian and Greek massacres? How many innocent lives did their angry editorials, speeches, and pamphlets save? They didn’t even bother sending Lord Byron. He volunteered. And how many lives did he save? He couldn’t even save his own.
*
I see no difference between a regime that butchers writers and another that silences them. In both cases a unique perspective that may add to our understanding of the world is rejected and ignored.
##