Author: arabaliozian

Sunday, September 23, 2007
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WHY ANGELS FLY
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G.K. Chesterton: “The reason angels fly is that they take themselves lightly.”
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WARNINGS
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Perhaps henceforth I should post the following two warnings at the head of everything I write.
TO MY FRIENDS: No need to read this. I say nothing you don’t already know.
TO MY ENEMIES: You may not enjoy what follows – I may be on target.
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THE CHEERFUL THOUGHTS OF
A BRIGHT-EYED AND BUSHY TAILED ARMENIAN
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It is the fate of some writers, very much like some composers and painters, not to be appreciated or understood by their contemporaries because they are ahead of their time. I can’t be one of them because I only recycle the LAMENTATIONS of Khorenatsi and Naregatsi – two medieval writers who wrote fifteen and ten centuries ago respectively.
Several friendly readers have told me they will love me only after I drop dead. Which raises the question: of the approximately one thousand dead Armenian writers (give and take a hundred or two) how many are loved or even read today? I remember an Armenian telling me: “If I can read first-class Greeks, Russians, and Germans, why should I waste my time with our second-raters? I challenge you to name a single Armenian who is as good as Plato, Dostoevsky, and Hesse!”
And speaking of Naregatsi: I once had a talk with Mischa Kudian (may the blessings of the Lord be upon him) — remember Kudian? He translated Naregatsi, among many other Armenian writers. He was one of the most disappointed Armenians I have ever met. Afterwards I remember to have thought: “I will never be like that. He is too negative about his fellow Armenians. He sees only the worst in them. I will be more positive. I will be more bright-eyed and bushy-tailed…”
I am now told I am consistently negative, and I am told this by the very same Armenians whose favorite subjects are Turks, massacres, and denialists. Human beings are bundles of contradictions, we are told. Nothing new in that. Contradictions in themselves are not dangerous. Unawareness of them is. Unawareness allows a man to behave like swine and parade as a paragon of virtue. Hence the spectacle of garbage-mouth nonentities and control-freak simpletons pretending to be superpatriots with leadership qualities fully authorized to tell better men than themselves what to think.
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IT IS NOT WRITTEN!
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Jimmy Carr: “Cats have nine lives. Which makes them ideal for experimentation.” If God created us for purely experimental reasons, He also gave us a free will with which to disagree with Him.
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DEMOCRACY
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You say you are right because you have the majority on your side? How do you know? Did you take a vote? How come I wasn’t told?
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Monday, September 24, 2007
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JOKES
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G.B. Shaw: “If you want to tell a person the truth, make him laugh or he’ll kill you.”
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George Orwell: “The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.”
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Jews make great comedians. They love to laugh at themselves. We don’t! Perhaps because we are a joke.
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“Why did Hitler kill himself? He got his gas bill.”
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Woody Allen: “I’m very proud of this pocket watch. My grandfather, on his deathbed, sold me this watch.”
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Jimmy Carr: “Mother always said, `If you haven’t got anything nice to say, then f*** off!'”
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Terry Pratchett: “Build a man a fire and he’ll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life.”
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Groucho Marx: “These are my principles. If you don’t like them, I have others.”
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Woody Allen: “My grandmother left me nothing. She was too busy being raped by Cossacks.”
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Denis Leary: “I’d kill for a Nobel Peace Price.”
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“Does the tailor Rabinowitch live here?”
“No.”
“Who are you?”
“Rabinowitch.”
“And aren’t you a tailor?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Then why did you say you didn’t live here?”
“You call this living?”
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Rowan Atkinson: “Never before have I encountered such corrupt and foul-mouthed perversity. Have you considered a career in the church?”
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Noel Coward: “You live and learn. Then you die and forget it all.”
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Wanna read more jokes? See ONLY JOKING: WHAT’S SO FUNNY ABOUT MAKING PEOPLE LAUGH? By Jimmy Carr and Lucy Greeves (New York, 2006). Not a single Armenian mentioned in it.
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Tuesday, September 25, 2007
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THE ART OF OBJECTIVITY
AMONG OTHER THINGS
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If after making an assertion you are not haunted by its contradiction, it means you have decided to act as your own attorney, and as is well known in the legal profession, you have a fool for a client.
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All the misfortunes of mankind may be ascribed to the fact that bad men outnumber good ones and they know how to organize themselves and impose their will on others.
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In George Orwell’s ANIMAL FARM, the favorite slogan of the pigs (who represent Stalinists) is “four legs good, two legs bad.” The aim of all slogans is to legitimize prejudice and to organize hatred, and hatred not only of the enemy but also of fellow countrymen who dare to question their infallibility.
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There are good men in all nations, but they are so few that it would be a serious blunder to alienate even one of them.
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What’s the difference between an idiot and a dupe? An idiot believes in his own lies; a dupe believes in someone else’s. But that’s semantics. In reality, an idiot will also qualify as a dupe and vice versa. And there is this peculiarity about dupes and idiots: they will never admit to being dupes and idiots.
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I have spent enough time among Greeks, Italians, Canadians, Americans, and Armenians to know the kind of vicious idiot nationalism can create.
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Duke of Wellington: “The real test of a general is to know when to retreat and dare to do it.” This is exactly what our heroic revolutionaries did at the outset of the Genocide. They made a strategic retreat and lived long enough to write their multi-volume memoirs in which to recount in great detail their deeds of valor. As they are fond of saying in Latin America: Long Live the Revolution!
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I once heard an Armenian define free speech thus (I abridge and paraphrase as is my wont): “Free speech is what I say it is. If you disagree, shut the f*** up!”
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We all share the same daydream: to be loved for who we pretend to be.
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Wednesday, September 26, 2007
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ON MORAL SUPERIORITY
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Remember the case of Zohrab’s Kurdish assassin? If you don’t, allow me to refresh your memory. Shortly before he died, it seems, this Kurd experienced a crisis of conscience, confessed his crime, and provided details as to time, place, and manner, all of which was duly published in the ARMENIAN REVIEW, a Tashnak organ emanating from Boston. We know that this Kurd was acting on orders from Talaat, in the same manner that two decades later and acting on orders of Stalin, our commissars in Yerevan murdered an entire generation of our ablest intellectuals. Now, my question is: Has any one of them come forward, identified himself as a killer, and expressed regret for his actions? My guess is – correct me if I am wrong – these commissars and their offspring are now busy sucking the blood of the people in the Homeland, and in the Diaspora, they are parading as superpatriots and delivering speeches on self-sacrifice and dedication to principles to the rest of us renegades.
I once met such a specimen. He had transparent blue eyes, an open face, and a sincere look. Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth or anywhere else for that matter. He spoke at some length of corrupt practices and related atrocities, but added, such things were totally alien to him and he was as appalled by them as any man of integrity. I believed him. I wanted to believe him. Which once more confirms my status as an incurable dupe. Later, I heard from two different sources that this blue-eyed, moon-faced, and Oscar-caliber performed was one of the most corrupt operators in all of Armenia.
There are many forms of denial. When a fool pretends to be smart, or when a crook pretends to be honest, or when a charlatan pretends to be a role model, or when a total ignoramus pretends to have all the answers, is he not a denialist too?
Casting aspersions? No, of course not!
Asking questions? Yes, certainly.
Present company suspected? No comment.
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Thursday, September 20, 2007
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ON WRITING AND READING
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Well-adjusted readers see humor in my writings; others see gloom and doom, even treason and betrayal. The only way to explain these contradictory reactions is to say that because I speak of reality, readers project their perception of their own reality onto me. Briefly stated, they read between the lines, which also means they don’t read me, they read themselves.
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Notwithstanding the verbal abuse leveled against my person, I intent to go on writing because it is not unreasonable to hope that just because someone speaks like a fool today, he will continue to think like a fool tomorrow. Foolishness, like youth and inexperience, are not permanent conditions but transitory stages.
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Speaking of minor local historians, the equivalent of our present-day Turcocentric pundits, Polybius comments: “We cannot obtain a comprehensive view from writers of mere episodes. For indeed some idea of a whole may be got from a part, but an accurate knowledge and clear comprehension cannot. Wherefore we must conclude that episodical history contributes exceedingly little to the knowledge and grasp of universal history.” O how I wish Armenians read historians, real historians, as opposed to monomaniacal ghazetajis “of mere episodes.”
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A ghazetaji writes what everybody knows – that’s his way of flattering his readers into thinking they know and understand all they need to know and understand because they are just about the smartest people on earth. To a traumatized ego, flattery is manna.
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Friday, September 21, 2007
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PHENOMENA
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For 1500 years our writers failed to penetrate the thick skulls of our Neanderthal leaders and their assorted dupes, hirelings, and brown-nosers. And yet, I go on as if there were a glimmer of hope that this shituation (sic) is about to change. Call me an optimist, though I have also been called a pessimist.
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I repeat myself only in the eyes of those who read me daily, faithfully, and religiously. But being of modest disposition, I operate on the assumption that most of my readers read me once or at most twice a year, and by the time they read me for the second time, they have completely forgotten what they read the first time. In that sense, I do not repeat, I remind.
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An Armenian who has a score to settle with Turks, will also have a score to settle with his fellow Armenians; and if some day he succeeds in settling all his scores, he will have an unsettled score with himself. If memory serves, it was Nietzsche who said, “In time of peace the warlike man fights with himself.”
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There are so many books on how to succeed that I can see a time when being a failure will be more interesting, unusual, and fashionable.
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With every new enemy, I also acquire a new source of inspiration. In that sense I owe more to my hostile readers than to my friendly ones who seldom or never comment on my things perhaps because they no longer read me – and why should they if I express thoughts, which are also theirs?
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I have had several friends who after a minor political disagreement became enemies, and not just garden-variety enemies, but Armenian enemies, i.e. enemies unto death. Which only means that they were never friends, only potential enemies. But then that’s what an Armenian can ever be at his very best – never a friend, only a potential enemy. In defense of Armenians, may I add that, if we are to believe President Truman (“You want a friend? Get a dog!”) this is not an exclusively Armenian phenomenon.
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Saturday, September 22, 2007
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CALLING A SPADE A SPADE
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That’s what I have been doing; and if you say anyone can do that, I suggest you think twice before quitting your day job. Far better men than myself have been arrested or assassinated for doing exactly that. That’s because if you call a spade a spade, the chances are sooner or later you will end insulting men with egos the size of Goliath, Godzilla, and King Kong combined.
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POLITICS AND HISTORY
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Political leaders will invariably favor a version of history in which their blunders are covered up. It follows; a historian that enjoys the support of a power structure has allowed his objectivity to be contaminated by propaganda.
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TO BRAG OR NOT TO BRAG
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Our survival is a positive if we were destined to perish. It is a negative if we were meant to be an empire or a force to be reckoned with.
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STAGES
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Life advances through many stages, and the truth of one stage becomes the lie of another. We either move forward to the next stage or come to terms with a lie, which also means silencing anyone who dares to call a spade a spade.
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ON VERBAL ABUSE
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Verbal abuse may intimidate some and stimulate others. So far it has stimulated me. As for our Goliaths, Godzillas, and King Kongs: they are only paper tigers.
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Sunday, September 16, 2007
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UNDER FIRE
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The law of the jungle says if you are alone, you will be vulnerable to predators. There is a biological (i.e. primitive and unconscious) component in patriotism: we identify with God and Country to be less vulnerable. It follows, anyone who questions the legitimacy of our faith and patriotism (like yours truly) is an enemy that deserves to be verbally abused, chastised, and whenever possible, silenced. This type of reasoning ignores the fact that if I dissent it may be because, instead of uniting us, God and Country have done the exact opposite – they have divided us not only from the rest of mankind but also from one another. Common sense and history (i.e. reality and facts) are on my side here. A religion or ideology that preaches solidarity and brotherhood but practices division and fragmentation ends up legitimizing prejudice, hatred, war, and massacre, in other words, the law of the jungle. The only thing God and Country have done for us so far is to allow the ephemeral feeling or illusion of being less vulnerable. Now then, how fair are some of my patriotic readers when they estimate the value of my person and work somewhere below their “spittle,” “vomit,” and “sh**”? And the following in reference to my person: “This mother-f***ing Turcophile son-of-a-bitch should not be permitted to post his garbage on this forum and must be kicked out forthwith!” No doubt the sentiments of an ardent patriot who may inspire patriotism in others.
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Monday, September 17, 2007
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ON OUR COLLECTIVE IQ
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In a letter to the editor in this morning’s paper I read the following: “…by funding more than one public system we are wasting our valuable dollars on bureaucracies.”
In another letter, a reader comments on the promises of politicians: “This is just garbage and we all know it. It is time to make politicians responsible for their words and actions.”
In still another letter a reader comments on the “shallow dogmatism and irrational rhetoric” of his fellow Canadians.
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It is not at all unusual for a fool to assess himself as smart, and the distance from smart to very smart, and from very smart to smartest might as well be invisible to the naked eye. But if I were to rate our collective political IQ, I would place it somewhere between Latvians and Albanians. Why Albanians? Because they too think they are just about the smartest people on earth. For more on this subject see Paul Theroux’s THE PILLARS OF HERCULES, one of the very best books ever written about countries on the Mediterranean coast. According to Theroux, Albanians think as they do because they were brainwashed by their own leadership. Does that ring a bell?
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If I write in this vein it’s not because I am anti-Armenian but because I have seen the light of objectivity and impartiality. The question we should ask but we never do is: to what extent our status as perennial victims may be said to be an extension of our collective single-digit IQ? And if you say we have been victimized because we are only sardines in a pool of sharks, I say biology may be destiny in the animal kingdom but not in Homo sapiens, and that our size and vulnerability is a direct result of our political moronism and nothing else. I could prove this with almost mathematical precision by quoting our own writers from Yeghishe (5th century) to Zarian (20th century)(*) but I won’t even try because I know an Armenian cannot convince another Armenian of anything, and if an odar were to try, he would be promptly dismissed as a Turcophile which in our lexicon means the lowest form of animal life.
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FOOTNOTE
(*)See my DICTIONARY OF ARMENIAN QUOTATIONS, which contains relevant passages from the two writers mentioned above as well as many other Armenian and odar observers.
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Tuesday, September 18, 2007
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DARKNESS AT HIGH NOON
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Polybius: “Knowledge of the past is the readiest means men can have of correcting their conduct.”
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Knowledge of the past or understanding history does not mean who did what to whom, where, when, and number of victims – that’s journalism not history – but where did we go wrong?
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Why is it that he who has seen the light of faith becomes blind to the light of reason? Why is it that when it comes to belief systems, one man’s light is another’s darkness? If two men have seen the light and they disagree with one another, it may be because one of them or both cannot tell the difference between light and darkness.
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I write as I do because I cannot stomach the spectacle of a poltroon who, after learning one or two things, sits on his fat ass with the conviction that he knows everything he needs to know, when in fact all he knows are a handful of newspaper headlines and a couple of slogans that flatter his ego.
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On the subject of the Genocide, we speak like jihadists who have seen the light of truth, and the truth is: they are bloodthirsty Asiatic barbarians. If it took us six hundred years to reach that “obvious” and “self-evident” truth, it may be because either they are consummate dissemblers or we are not as smart as we think we are.
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Between a lie that flatters his ego and a truth that exposes his limitations, a man will invariably choose the lie, and he will compound the felony by calling it the light of truth. I am reminded of a passage in the Bible that goes something like this (I quote from memory and I paraphrase): “If you think you are smart, be a fool so that you may be really smart.” And I say, amen to that!
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Wednesday, September 19, 2007
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MARK MY WORDS
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Dissent is unpatriotic only in an environment where propaganda is truth.
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Never make the mistake of thinking that your status as underdog or victim bestows on you any kind of superiority. If power corrupts, so does weakness. If money is the root of all evil, so is the lack of it.
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Where there are Armenians there will be disagreements, not the kind that are only stages in a dialogue that move towards consensus, but dead-end disagreements that are nothing but dogmatic assertions in a closed system of thought, and closed systems of thought are favored by closed minds.
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If I ever regain my childhood faith in God, one of my first prayers (repeated thereafter daily) will be: “Dear Lord, give me a critic who has not undergone a frontal lobotomy or is in no need of professional help.”
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Memo to a pompous ass:
If tomorrow we vanish from the face of the earth, my guess is we will make fewer headlines than Britney Spears’ haircut or O.J.’s most recent shenanigan.
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Thursday, September 13, 2007
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“YOU REPEAT YOURSELF!”
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Who doesn’t?
First nation this, first nation that, “Mi kich pogh oughargetsek” (Send us a little money)…At least when I repeat myself I don’t send you a bill.
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I repeat myself? When was the last time you heard one of our sermonizers or speechifiers speak in favor of sin or Turks. Why single me out? Because I refuse to flatter your ego? Is that how you classify your fellow men and their ideas? Only brown-nosers are welcome because they speak the truth? Everyone else is either an enemy or a liar?
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Our speechifiers and sermonizers never give up telling us we are right because god and truth are on our side. Isn’t that what their mullahs do too? What if both them and us are brainwashed by identical sets of charlatans who speak with a forked tongue?
I am not casting aspersions. I am only asking questions.
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Friday, September 14, 2007
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MICE THAT ROAR
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A good example of an irrefutable argument, Armenian style: What I say is right not because it is right but because I say so, and if you dare not to take my word for it, you deserve to die.
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There is a Pope of Rome in all of us. We assume to be infallible when we argue, and we argue as if what we say not only matters but it may also change the course of history.
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I have yet to hear an Armenian say, “After reading Naregatsi, Raffi, or Zarian, I changed my mind about my fellow Armenians.” If our greatest intellects cannot change anyone’s mind, what can we hope to achieve, except perhaps to expose ourselves as pompous asses.
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There is this about a pompous ass: no need to deflate him. Leave him alone and he will inflate himself until he self-destructs.
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When Shakespeare coined the phrase “full of sound and fury signifying nothing,” I have no doubt whatever he had an Armenian discussion forum in mind. How do I know this? The way you know everything: I feel it in my gut.
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My take on the human condition in general and ours in particular: crooks feel more at home in a crooked world and they will do their utmost to keep it that way.
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Saturday, September 15, 2007
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THEORIES
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A foreign traveler (I forget his name – may have been Lynch) once said that there are two distinct types of Armenians: the honest, hard-working peasant born and raised on Armenian soil, and the Levantine merchant whose number one concern is the bottom line. This traveler did not live long enough to observe the evolution of the naïve peasant into a murderous commissar infinitely more ruthless than the most cynical Oriental carpet dealer of the Diaspora.
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I had nothing to do with World War I that reduced my parents into penniless orphans and refugees. Neither did I have anything to do with World War II during which I spent my childhood in a ghetto as a “Turkish gypsy.” But after that every major source of misery has been my own doing. I say this to point out two morals: (one) no one gets away with anything, and (two) we are our own worst enemies. Consider the two first stories in Genesis: Eve tempts Adam, and Cain kills Abel.
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There are a number of theories explaining why we survived where many others perished. One of them maintains the reason we survived is that we are not biodegradable. Is that good or bad? It depends. If you ask an ecologist he will say being non-biodegradable is not good for the environment. You may now draw your own conclusions.
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Sunday, September 09, 2007
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THE RAT AND THE PITBULL
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Once upon a time there was a pitbull, a rat, and a little mouse sharing the same junkyard. These three didn’t particularly care for each other but they coexisted in relative peace for many years until the rat fell seriously ill and was diagnosed with terminal old age. Whereupon the pitbull decided to put him out of his misery by delivering the coup de grace. When the rat realized what was about to happen, he fought like a demon. It was at this point that the little mouse committed the serious strategic blunder of siding with the pitbull. And when the pitbull, for reasons of his own, left the field of honor, the badly mauled rat fell on the little mouse and tore him to shreds. Ever since then historians of this occurrence have been divided into two, the pro-mouse faction asserting the rat had behaved like a rat and in total contravention of the Marquis de Queensberry rules. It is to be noted that most of these pro-mouse historians happen to be direct descendants of the pitbull.
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Monday, September 10, 2007
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MAN THE QUADRUPED
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Ask a specialist in any field, from astronomy to zoology, and from ethics to politics, and he will tell you the average layman is a total ignoramus about his subject. What he may not volunteer to admit as readily is that he is himself a total ignoramus about countless other subjects. In that sense we are all ignoramuses at the mercy of other ignoramuses who pretend to be infallible. Shaw was right when he said, “all professions are conspiracies against the laity.” Long before Shaw, Socrates spent a good part of his life exposing the ignorance of charlatans whose sole expertise consisted in pretending to know better. For every political leader or pundit who says one thing, there will be another who will say the opposite. Who is right and who wrong? Marx was right when he spoke of the machinery of capitalist exploitation. But he was wrong when he failed to see that his own theories would be mercilessly manipulated, perverted, and exploited by gangs of operators even more ruthless than the most ruthless of capitalists. After a lengthy interview with Hitler in the 1930s, Toynbee declared to the press: “I am now convinced Herr Hitler wants peace.” If a power-mad loudmouth demagogue can deceive one of the greatest political pundits and historians of all time, who will protect us from deceivers? A dog, it has been said, knows his master but not his master’s master. My question is, in what way are we different from dogs?
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Tuesday, September 11, 2007
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ON POPULARITY
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Marquis of Halifax: “Popularity is a crime from the moment it is sought.”
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If those who promote hatred (sorry, I should have said justice)… if those who promote hatred are more popular than those who speak of understanding, it may be because hatred appeals to the gut, understanding to the brain, and in all primitive societies the gut rules the brain.
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Anyone who disagrees with us is either an ignoramus or a liar is an argument that succeeds only in undermining our own credibility.
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There is something Ottoman in our anti-Turkishness. Surprised? I don’t see why. It took less than sixty years for the Russians to Sovietize us and for the Yanks to Americanize us…
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More often than not the sentence “I know it for a fact” is followed by fiction.
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It is not at all unusual to deceive oneself all one’s life and remain totally unaware of the deception.
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I may be wrong on specific points but you are wrong on the most important things if you don’t allow me the freedom to be wrong on the assumption that you support a position, or an ideology, or a religion that happens to be infallible.
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Wednesday, September 12, 2007
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PERSPECTIVES
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When I first read a thick volume on the history of Christianity in which Armenians were not even mentioned in a footnote, I began to have second thoughts about what is remembered, what is thought of as relevant, and what is worth mentioning.
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To those of my readers who take me to task for being consistently nasty and deliberately malicious, I say it is all a charade, and that in reality and deep inside somewhere I am much worse, and that even when I feel good and at peace with the world, a more accurate description of my disposition would be like that of a scorpion surrounded by a ring of fire.
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I once met an Armenian who said he loved his fellow Armenians but every other word he uttered dripped with the concentrated venom of ten Turkish vipers.
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If memory serves, it was Baronian who once declared: “I love mankind but I hate people.”
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A buried head in the sand is not a defense but an invitation.
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Thursday, September 06, 2007
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TOWARDS A RAPPROCHEMENT
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Homo sapiens is a selfish and self-centered creature. Selfless specimens like Mother Teresa exist, but they are the exception rather than the rule, and you can count them on the fingers of one thumb. And speaking of thumbs: a small cut on our little finger matters more to us than the death of ten or a hundred thousand peasants in China. When the Turks count their victims, even two of them are two more than our two million. We may all believe in our statistics but we also know that one man’s believer is another’s infidel.
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Nothing could be more abysmally naïve than to say, their politicians lie but ours speak the truth and nothing but the truth. “A bourgeois is a bourgeois, regardless of nationality,” Lenin once said. So is a politician.
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If Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Mussolini continue to have their defenders and admirers today it’s because “even the gods cannot compete with human stupidity.”
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I trust our politicians and their version of the past as much as I trust theirs. And by extension, I trust an academic who enjoys political support as much as I trust a politician. Most politicians are either lawyers or operate like lawyers. They emphasize the strengths in their own case and expose and concentrate on the weaknesses of the opposition. Lawyers do it for money, politicians do it for power; and it is power and money that make the world go around, not love and truth. Love and truth may be favorite subjects for Sunday sermons but they don’t carry much weight beyond the confines of the sacristy, and sometimes not even as far as the sacristy. In politics as well as in may other lines of work (from organized religions to advertising and public relations) concepts like objectivity, honesty, and impartiality are not thought of as assets but as career-wrecking liabilities. I speak from experience.
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A wise man once said, “the lie on the lips becomes the lie in the soul” — another way of saying, if in our formative years we are not brainwashed by vested interests, we end up brainwashing ourselves. Which is why, after being exposed to our own propaganda year in, year out and ad nauseam, I don’t mind giving the opposition a chance for the sake of breaking the monotony more than anything else. And if cooperation and harmony are ever established between them and us, it will be because of individuals who place their humanity above their nationality, individuals moreover who are fed up playing the role of dupes to speechifiers and sermonizers with an ax to grind.
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Friday, September 07, 2007
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MORE ON THE SAME SUBJECT
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If you think I have a mighty low opinion of our political leaders and their dupes, you are absolutely right. And if you want to know more on this subject, I suggest you have a talk with one of our leaders – assuming you can find one willing to come down from his high jackass. Once in my salad days I did exactly that and published the resulting palaver in one of our periodicals. That’s when the doodoo hit the ventilator. Since the leader of my interview was a Tashnak, one of his Ramgavar counterparts reacted by writing a vitriolic letter to the editor exposing the Tashnak as a phony and a liar. My Tashnak responded by accusing the Ramgavar of being more Bolshevik than Stalin.
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To say a good Armenian is one who respects and trusts our leaders, amounts to saying to qualify as a good Armenian it is necessary to be a brain-dead dupe. What’s the difference between brain-dead and dead? And to think that they have the temerity to accuse me of harboring anti-Armenian sentiments.
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I am more interested in the Turk within us than in the Turk within Turks. As for the Armenian within the Armenian: I do hope one of these days I shall have the privilege and good fortune of making his acquaintance.
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Speaking of politicians and jackasses, there is a well known and widely quoted exchange between a Republican presidential candidate (I forget his name) and a heckler that goes something like this:
HECKLER: My father was a Democrat, my grandfather was a Democrat, I am a Democrat.
CANDIDATE: If your father were a jackass, and your grandfather were a jackass, what would you be?
HECKLER: A Republican!
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Saturday, September 08, 2007
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DIPLOMACY 101
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“Don’t get mad, get even.” (American folk wisdom)
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“Just the facts, ma’am.” (Jack Webb)
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“He who loses temper, has wrong on his side.” (Chinese saying)
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If, god forbid, you happen to be one of those rare Armenians who starts foaming at the mouth whenever Turks are mentioned, I have one or two suggestions that you may find of some use.
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Never get emotionally involved in an argument because when the gut speaks louder than the brain, reason exits, unreason enters, and unreason might as well be synonymous with insanity.
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One of the fundamental principles of diplomacy that is common knowledge even among non-diplomats with a single-digit IQ is that, if you want something, anything, from someone, anyone, one way to get it is by pretending you neither want it nor need it. And the best way of not getting what you want is to make it clear that what you want is the most important thing you ever wanted in your life and that if your demands are not fully and unconditionally met, your life will no longer have any meaning.
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When engaged in negotiation, you either do so from a position of strength or weakness. If weakness, do not give in to the temptation of losing your equanimity or resorting to name-calling, if only because name-calling is easy and more often than not totally ineffective. History is on my side on this. After a century of name-calling, what have we accomplished? Number of victims: not a single resurrection. Reparations? Not a single red cent. Territorial claims? Not a single inch of dirt. On the other hand, if you think you are negotiating from a position of strength or moral superiority (because god and truth are on your side) no need to go down into the gutter if only because doing so may expose your claim of moral superiority as bogus.
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You may do whatever your little heart desires and minuscule brain dictates in the privacy of your own home and behind closed doors, but in public or on an open discussion forum on the internet, try to be cool, objective, and impartial; and if you can’t be cool, be silent. For there is more wisdom in silence than in empty verbiage.
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To the question, “Why is it that you don’t always practice what you preach?” I can only say, I am not a very good sharpshooter. I aim high when I write, but I don’t always hit the bull’s eye when I live. Isn’t that a common failing in all sermonizers, speechifiers, and, sometimes, scribblers?
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Thursday, August 30, 2007
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TRUST ME!
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Beethoven may have been killed by his own doctor, according to a Viennese pathologist. Had this discovery been made in the 1930s, the doctor would have been identified as a Jew. And if you were to ask an anti-Semite today, he would tell you the killer-doctor must have been a Jew – no doubt about that. Why a Jew? Why not? For two thousand years they have not only suspected but asserted and continue to do so today that our Lord Jesus Christ was a phony and a blasphemer. Who is right? Jews or Christians? We are told for most of her life Mother Teresa doubted the existence of god and the divinity of Christ. But when she was alive she sang a different tune. If you can’t trust Mother Teresa, whom can you trust?
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Trust me. I know better. I am more sincerely committed to the Cause, whatever that may be, than anyone you care to mention. Do not criticize me because I am beyond criticism. That indeed is the subtext in everything we say; and notwithstanding the fact that most people don’t give a damn about what we think or say we think (not always the same thing), we continue to beg for their trust and to assert our superiority, even when we know we deserve neither. Who has ever been beyond criticism? Socrates, Jesus, Gandhi? Not only they had their share of critics but also mortal enemies, and this not among hostile foreigners but among their fellow countrymen. Socrates was condemned to death by Athenians, Gandhi was assassinated not by a Muslim but by a fellow Hindu, as for Jesus: according to the eminent contemporary theologian, Mel Gibson…
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Friday, August 31, 2007
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JUNGLE
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Readers may be divided into several distinct categories:
Children who are spoiled brats and think they are smart enough to understand everything they read, including matter intended for adults.
Adults who are advanced cases of arrested development.
Self satisfied egocentric narcissists who are convinced (or have been brainwashed to believe) we live in the best of all possible worlds, we never had it so good, we are in good hands, god in his heaven above is on our side, and anyone who disagrees with them is an enemy of the nation who should be hanged from the nearest tree. (You would think the only way for an Armenian to subscribe to this Leibnizian school of thought is to expunge our past).
The smart-ass know-it-all garbage mouth bully who operates on the self-serving assumption that his brand of perverted patriotism justifies racism, violations of human rights, fascism, and massacre – if not literal than verbal. (This type is rare but because he suffers from chronic verbal diarrhea and loves the effusions of his own outpourings, he gives one the impression of being not a single nut but an entire unruly mob.)
And then there is the well-meaning but essentially timid reader who doesn’t want to get involved, adopts a passive stance and thus promotes and legitimizes the Ottomanized hooligans among us. We owe the jungle of our Internet discussion forums to him more than anyone else.
And if I speak with some degree of authority on these different types of reader it’s because at one time or another I have been all of them.
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Saturday, September 01, 2007
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IN PRAISE OF TOLERANCE
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Frequently spoken lies:
“I know better,”
“I am better,”
“I am right,”
“You are wrong,”
“I know it for a fact.”
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Man is prone to confuse fact with fiction. Case in point: for millions of years men believed the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, and when someone came along and dared to say otherwise, he was threatened with torture and death…all in the name of a god who is truth and love.
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A dogmatist is one who explains things he doesn’t understand.
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There is a realm somewhere in which everything that doesn’t make sense here makes perfect sense there. But so far man has failed to discover the location of that realm.
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Sunday, August 26, 2007
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ANTI-SEMITISM AND US
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Anti-Semites are everywhere, including Armenians, and yes, including Jews. Once in a while we are reminded that Talaat was part Jewish, the implication being that it is the Jew in him that must be held responsible for the Genocide (a theory that would be more than welcome to the perps). My own sources tell me Talaat was part Armenian. So was the Red Sultan. What does that prove? Only one thing, that all men are brothers, like Cain and Abel. They may preach brotherhood but they prefer to practice Cain-Abelism, sometimes even cannibalism; and what is cannibalism if not another form of assimilation and recycling? It is wrong to assign guilt to races and nations because it may alienate potential allies, supporters, and friends, who come in all sizes and shapes, also races, colors and creeds – including Jews, Turks, and fantastic as this may seem, Armenians.
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Monday, August 27, 2007
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A RULE WITHOUT EXCEPTIONS
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The louder they speechify on patriotism the phonier they are. All rules have exceptions, except this one. You want proof? I’ll give you two: Adolf (Deutschland ueber alles) Hitler, Iosif (Patriotic War) Stalin, and King Kong.
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CURSES
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Do you want to curse an Armenian and you can’t come up with a good one that does justice to the situation? How about this? “May your son (or daughter) be a writer,” or “May s/he be educated enough to think for herself/himself.” Or “May s/he rate honesty as the queen of virtues and the king of assets!” These may not sound like curses, but take my word for it, they are the kind of beauties you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy.
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HAVE YOU HEARD THIS ONE?
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A guy gets splattered by a passing bird, looks up and says, “For the rich you sing.”
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SPEAKING OF DUMPING
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The easiest way to assert superiority is to dump on your betters. Only one drawback: it never works; it may even backfire.
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Tuesday, August 28, 2007
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HITLER AND I
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“Hitler was a Jew,” a reader writes; “his passport says so.” Maybe so am I. On more than one occasion I have stated that on a good day I can trace my ancestry all the way back to my father. I am told some Armenians are so eager to identify themselves as pure-blooded Armenians that they trace their ancestry all the way back to the Mamikonians (of Chinese descent) and Bagratunis (Jewish). No one chooses his nationality. You and I could just as easily have been born on the other side of the mountain or river. Not that I give a damn one way or the other. Races, colors, creeds, nations and tribes – I consider them all bad news. Identify yourself with one of them and you inherit nothing but grief, feuds, and enemies, some among your own kind. If you were to try settling scores with all of them, you would either end up as a serial killer or a victim – the quintessential “esh nahadag” (jackass martyr). In that sense, national identity is not an asset but a liability, a burden, and a curse. The pure-blooded Armenian is as much a myth as the pure-blooded Turk, Greek, American, or Gypsy. Anyone who says otherwise is out to manipulate you to do his dirty work for him – just like the neocons in Washington today. And speaking of jackasses and our own Jack S. Avanakians who speechify and editorialize on nationalism and unsettled scores: I read the following apposite quotation from Konrad Lorentz in our paper this morning: “The long sought missing link between animals and really humane beings is ourselves.” A final note on Hitler’s passport: I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out to be a fake, just like Lord Byron’s pen in the museum of San Lazzaro.
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Wednesday, August 29, 2007
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THE SECRET OF MY POPULARITY
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Peter de Vries: “Everybody hates me because I’m so universally liked.”
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“If you think you can do better, why don’t you get involved in community affairs?” I am told once in a while.
Because in an authoritarian environment yes-man have a better chance to be influential than critics. Stalin did not invite Solzhenitsyn to the Kremlin; he bundled him off to the Gulag.
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Deep down somewhere we all want to know what’s wrong with us. We may not like it when we are told, we may even hate those who take it upon themselves to tell us, but we want to know because our ego is our most valuable possession.
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Nothing can be as menacing to those who live in a world of illusions than talk of reality.
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We pretend to be against denialists but we engage in denialism when it comes to our failings, of which we have our share. To say otherwise is to speak as an idiot.
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An idiot holding forth on patriotism or any other noble-sounding ism is still an idiot.
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Thursday, August 23, 2007
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QUESTIONS / ANSWERS
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You don’t always reply to your critics. Why not?
I don’t always read them.
Why don’t you?
One reason, they are unreadable.
What’s another?
A diarrhea of words and a constipation of ideas – to put it as elegantly as I can.
That’s what they say about your stuff…or words to that effect.
They don’t mean it. If they meant it they wouldn’t read me. I think they read me because they find me irresistible. And they find me irresistible because I speak about them.
They say the only reason they read and criticize you is that they don’t want young readers to be taken in by your anti-Armenian tirades.
What have I done to deserve such dedicated and selfless specimens of humanity?
You don’t believe them?
I have every reason to suspect they don’t believe it themselves.
Some say you are motivated by bitterness, rage, and disappointment because you have been neglected and ignored by your fellow Armenians.
Nothing new in that. It has been the fate of our writers to be ignored and neglected, sometimes even silenced, starved, and betrayed by their fellow Armenians.
Betrayed? What do you mean betrayed?
I mean betrayed to the enemy. Both Talaat’s and Stalin’s victims, two generations of our ablest writers, were betrayed by their fellow Armenians.
There are those who say you flatter yourself if you think you qualify as a writer.
In the eyes of commissars of culture no writer ever does; and judging by the number of readers who keep telling me what and how to write, we have become a nation whose commissars outnumber its writers. I said nation. Strike that. Make it, collection of tribes.
Any concluding remarks or advice for your critics?
Critics: I wish I had them.
What would you call them?
Kibitzers would be a euphemism.
Okay, any final words?
Whenever they feel the urge to read and comment on my things, they should slice a watermelon.
Slice a watermelon? — why?
They tell me it’s a good substitute for slaughter, and slaughter is never too far from an Armenian’s mind.
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Friday, August 24, 2007
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SELF-ANALYSIS
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We don’t know who we are. We may know what others think of us. We may even know what we think of ourselves. But that doesn’t even cover the tip of the iceberg – only a fraction of its shadow. Freud, Jung, Adler & Co. may disagree on many things, but they are unanimous on this point. We are full of contradictions. There is a Jekyll and Hyde in all of us. We rule over a kingdom that is terra incognita.
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I can tell how good an Armenian is by the frequency with which he uses the words “Yes, sir!” If an Armenian disagrees with me on one thing, such as the placement of commas or semicolons, he is bound to disagree with me on many other things. An Armenian who disagrees with me might as well be a Turk, and the only good Turk is a dead Turk. If you dare to disagree with me on this point, I shall have no choice but to accuse you of insulting the nation.
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In life, questions outnumber answers. Case in point: If they are bloodthirsty savages, why did they wait for 600 years to slaughter us?
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In a commentary in our local daily today I read: “Even superpowers need friends.” Judging by the number of our internecine squabbles and tsunamis in a teacup, we behave as though we were invincible giants among gutless midgets. Heroes among zeroes. A Hercules among yellow-bellies! Hercules — Iraklis in Greek, Hergele in Turkish — hergele (with a lower case “h”) also means an oversized hoodlum in Turkish. Transplant a hero and you get a zero. Another symptom of the Jekyll/Hyde syndrome.
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The shortest list in the world? Wars we have won.
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Saturday, August 25, 2007
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FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
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If I were to say I am better than you, not only you wouldn’t believe me, you would also be justified to dismiss me as a self-satisfied ass. Remember that next time you think of performing your first-nation-this and first-nation-that routine to an odar.
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We fought a war against the Persians and their elephants in defense of our faith? That’s 1500 years ago. Since then we have learned to adapt and compromise. Under the Soviets we were the first nation to convert to atheism. How about that? Another first for us!
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Armenianism and objectivity seem to be mutually exclusive concepts. Whenever I make an honest effort to deliver an objective assessment, I am assailed by a chorus of screaming Apaches on the warpath, followed by a contingent of yataghan-brandishing Janissaries.
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May I remind those who use the word philosophy as if it were synonymous with mental masturbation, that the alternative to philosophy is philo-inbred-moronism.
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What’s the use of having two or three answers to every question if they are all wrong or so full of holes that they convince no one?
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I am accused of being consistently negative. Once upon a time I knew many stories that ended with “three apples fell from heaven,” and “they lived happily ever after,” but I have forgotten them all. My repertoire now consists of only one or two Nasredin Hoja stories that I have already told more than once. The best I can do today is this: Shortly before he died at the age of 91, Sibelius said: “All the doctors who wanted to forbid me to smoke and to drink are dead.”
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Sunday, August 19, 2007
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OREOS
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Some of my readers think if a writer does not parrot their views, his license to use a pen should be revoked. The only reason it isn’t, there is no agency authorized to do so. To which I say, thank god for that! Let them miss the good old days under Stalin when to express a dissenting view meant a bullet in the neck. And to think that these readers classify themselves as good Armenians. They may think like fascist butchers but they assess themselves as dedicated patriots. The other day I was accused of calling one of my readers a racist. Did I? I am not sure. One should never call a fool a racist. I know what I am saying because I had an Armenian education and I was brought up as a fool and a racist. I even wrote a racist book – my opus one – and when a Canadian critic called me a racist in his review I was so taken aback that I dismissed the charge as perverse. Can a victim of racism be a racist? As the offspring of perennial victims, is it not my human right to despise and even hate victimizers? But if I hate my victimizers, in what way am I different from them? If I think of Turks the way Turks thought of us, am I not like some of my readers who would gladly see me silenced permanently if possible? If the only reason I don’t exterminate Turks today is that I don’t have the power to do so, am I not an oreo – Armenian on the outside, Turk on the inside?
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Monday, August 20, 2007
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MEMO: FOR THE SUGGESTION BOX
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We do the right thing when we mourn our victims. But we do the wrong thing when we mourn only our victims. We should mourn for all victims, including Turkish victims.
Mourn for the enemy? No other civilized nation does that, why should we?
That’s no excuse. Let’s be as daring and progressive as we were in the 4th century. We did not wait then for the rest of the world to civilize itself. We showed them the way. It was the rest of the world that followed our example by converting to Christianity, a religion that speaks of God as our Father. Which means we, all of mankind, including infidels, are brothers and sisters. There are no infidels in the eyes of the Lord, only prodigal sons who sooner or later are destined to return to the fold.
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Tuesday, August 21, 2007
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ELEMENTARY, MY DEAR WATSON
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Moderates have a far better chance to develop a consensus than their counterparts. If consensus has so far eluded us it’s because we have been at the mercy of tribal bottom-feeders and incurable dunderheads who, even as they speechify on survival, plot our downfall. This much said, I don’t expect our bottom-feeding dunderheads to acknowledge this fundamental and self-evident fact.
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Cui bono? – Who benefits? The old question asked by Roman lawyers is as good today as it was two thousand years ago. If the speaker is the beneficiary of what he says, the chances are excellent that he is either a liar or a dupe.
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War is hell? So is peace. You want proof? Visit an Armenian discussion forum on the Internet.
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Wednesday, August 22, 2007
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QUESTIONS I ASK MYSELF
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Whenever an Armenian feels like slaying dragons, he visits an Armenian discussion forum on the Internet and verbally assaults anyone who disagrees with him, and makes it sound as if an Armenian disagreeing with a fellow Armenian were an outrageous scandal and an unheard of thing rather than business as usual.
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Why do dogs fight?
For the same reason that Armenians do.
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Why do Armenians fight?
That’s a question for our Armenologists.
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How come dog fighting is against the law but war is not?
That’s a question for our pundits.
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It has been said that an Armenian will extend a helping hand when you are down, and when you are up he will send you right back into the gutter with a kick. True or false?
True. I have met both kinds. There are no statistics but I would guess the kickers outnumber their counterparts.
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Why is it that some Armenians get more worked up about a scribbler’s opinions than about what’s being done to them by frauds parading as men of god and statesmen of vision?
Because they have either assessed themselves as men of god or statesmen of vision. Either that or they are the offspring of bishops or former commissars.
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