Author: arabaliozian

Sunday, September 11, 2005
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CONTRADICTIONS
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If we are smart, why do we treat one another like idiots? On more than one occasion I have myself been treated like an idiot by idiots.
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If we are civilized, why do we behave like barbarians?
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Am I a failure if I cannot educate the uneducated, teach tolerance to fanatics, and civilize barbarians? And if I am a failure, how successful have we been collectively in civilizing the barbarians who oppressed and massacred us? What if it was the barbarians who, as our lords and masters, were more successful in recreating us in their own image? What if these so-called barbarians are now ahead of us today?
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Smartass is not smart, and smart is not intelligent; and hurling verbal abuse at Turks or at fellow Armenians (our two national sports) doesn’t even qualify as smartass.
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It is a universally shared human weakness to prefer flattery to criticism, but it is a dangerous addiction to prefer lies to truth.
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Monday, September 12, 2005
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Millions of Armenians believe Turks are guilty of genocide, and millions of Turks believe Armenians are liars, traitors, and killers of innocent Turks. I am not questioning anyone’s credibility here. What I am trying to do is point out the ease with which millions can be brainwashed.
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Human nature continues to elude me. No matter how hard I try I cannot understand why millions of people are fascinated by individuals who hit a ball with a modified stick.
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When I was young, ambitious, and hungry for knowledge, I wanted to master all the sciences, arts, letters and languages of the world. I know now that human knowledge is as vast as the ocean and all I can master is one drop of it.
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Every Armenian should carry a sign with the warning: “Contradict me and make an enemy for life!”
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As a child I was taught obedience but I was not warned against kissing ass.
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Tuesday, September 13, 2005
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The morally superior does not feel the need to assert moral superiority.
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Asserting moral superiority is the surest symptom of moral inferiority.
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What separates the civilized from the barbarian is degree of awareness. To share one’s understanding means to share one’s awareness.
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The barbarian is convinced he knows everything he needs to know even when the idea of civilization is beyond his compass.
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It is not easy convincing barbarians that they are barbarians.
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The barbarian does not feel the need to ask questions because he already has all the answers.
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A religious or philosophical system has nothing to do with reality and everything to do with its power to shape our perception of reality.
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Faith may also be defined as an advanced and refined form of cobra fascination in which common sense, reason, even the instinct of self-preservation are paralyzed and perverted. How else to explain the fascination of Western intellectuals with totalitarian communism and Stalin? Or terrorists who kill and commit suicide in the name of Allah?
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All men of faith will agree with me provided I agree with them that their own faith is an exception to this general rule.
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Americans are suspicious of philosophers but they are more than willing to tolerate the sophistries and perversions of lawyers and politicians. They seem to be unaware of the fact that if it’s not philosophy (love of wisdom) it is bound to be philomoronism.
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BOOK REVIEW
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By Ara Baliozian
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THE FACES OF COURAGE: ARMENIAN WORLD WAR II, KOREA, AND VIETNAM HEROES. By Richard N. Demirjian. Introduction by Art Sarkisian. Illustrated. 656 pages. Ararat Heritage Publishing Company (P.O.Box 396, Moraga, CA 94556-0396). 2003. $36.95.
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This mammoth compilation based on extensive interviews may come as a surprise to readers whose image of Armenians is that of passive victims of Turkish atrocities during World War I, but not to historians like Toynbee. Speaking of Urartu (ancient Armenia) we read the following in his STUDY OF HISTORY: “Militarily, Urartu was the most effective as well as the most resolute, of all Assyria’s opponents in the last millenium B.C.” Further down: “The Assyrian Empire never succeeded in conquering the rival Empire of Urartu.”
Armenians have played key roles in the military careers of the Byzantine, Ottoman (as Janissaries), and Soviet Empires. According to Steven Runciman, “The Armenians provided many of Byzantium’s most vigorous rulers,” among them Basil I, “a Napoleonic figure” (Oswald Spengler).
In the Middle Ages, the most highly paid and feared mercenaries were Armenians. In Art Sarkisian’s introduction we read, “out of more than 400,000 Soviet Armenians who served during the war, 250,000 were killed, an appalling death-toll for what was then a republic of less than two million inhabitants.” And, “62 Soviet Armenians were promoted and bestowed the ranks of field marshals, admirals and major generals. More than one hundred Armenians servicemen were awarded Heroes of the Soviet Union (equivalent of the U.S. Congressional Medal of Honor), and two of these received the honor twice.”
Very few of the names in FACES OF COURAGE will be familiar to the average reader. Of the nearly fifty names, I recognized only those of Edward Alexander (diplomat and author), Anne Avakian Bishop (journalist), Vahe “Buck” Kartalian (actor), Carl Mahakian (film and sound editor, producer, and book collector), Moorad Mooradian and Joe Vosbikian (both regular contributors to the ARMENIAN REPORTER), and Barry Zorthian (whose multi-faceted contributions and activities in politics, international affairs, and the media are too numerous to list here). They all tell their own stories, invariably absorbing, sometimes harrowing, and always admirable.
If I were to sum up this volume I would say that it is a heroic enterprise about remarkable heroes that will dispel once and for all the image of Armenians as victims.
Himself a commanding officer of the 334th Military Intelligence Detachment, Richard Demirjian is the author of several other reference works, among them ARMENIAN-AMERICAN/CANADIAN WHO’S WHO OF OUTSTANDING ATHLETES, COACHES, AND SPORTS PERSONALITIES, 1906-1989, and TRIUMPH AND GLORY – ARMENIAN WORLD WAR II HEROES.
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Thursday, September 08, 2005
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“Never trust someone who goes out of his way to be nice to you – he is after something,” an older friend once warned me. I dismissed his warning as that of a cynic and forgot all about it. A big mistake on my part.
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When at the turn of the last century the Great Powers expressed concern about our condition within the Empire and took our side against the oppressors, we did not question their motives. A big mistake on our part for which millions of innocent civilians paid dearly.
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When you shake hands with a brown-noser, count your fingers and immediately after wash your hands with soap and water. If his nose is brown, the rest of him can’t be white.
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When in his initial phase as a writer Zarian said some very nice things about the Armenia voki [ethos], he was believed, respected, published, and achieved some degree of popularity. But when he realized he had been wrong and was not afraid to say so, he was dismissed by his contemporaries as a loudmouth egomaniac and acquired the status of a non-person.
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All religions have produced their share of prophets, martyrs, and saints – that doesn’t make them the only true religion. All political leaders and parties have had their share of partisans — that doesn’t make them superior to any other political party.
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Political leaders know that all they have to do to acquire followers is to utter such clichés as “You are the brains of the people,” or “You have leadership qualities,” or “You belong to a superior race,” or “You are the Chosen people.” Of course, it takes some degree of cunning combined with some kind of ruthless stupidity to voice such nonsense and believe in it, and when it comes to stupidity, it has been said, “even the gods cannot compete with men.”
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“If you want our support, you must learn to kiss ass,” is the unspoken message in some of the criticism leveled against me. I was there once and I have no desire to revisit the place. All I want to do now is to echo Zarian’s warning, “Danger, danger, danger!”
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Friday, September 09, 2005
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A BRIEF HISTORY
OF THE ARMENIAN NATION
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If you live by the sword, you will die by the sword. If you don’t live by the sword, you will die on the cross.
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Two Armenians were having a quiet conversation. It could happen.
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Advice to a young Armenian writer:
Don’t write; but if you write, don’t publish; but if you publish, be prepared to perish.
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Being an Armenian is hard work. I wouldn’t apply for the job even if they promised a fat salary, the very best in fringe benefits, and a sky-is-the-limit expense account.
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I could have been a far better writer if I had had critics instead of riffraff hurling insults at me. But alas, it looks like I am destined to remain a minor, negligible, and forgettable scribbler.
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Self-esteem is not a reliable index of worth, in the same way that dogmatism is not an index of certainty.
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There is a natural tendency in the brainwashed to resent anyone who refuses to be brainwashed.
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Saturday, September 10, 2005
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PUNDITS
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A pundit who is very critical of Turks, Jews, and the West in general but never of his fellow Armenians is no better than a one-eyed Jack who sees evil only in others, never in himself. When I once met one of these pundits face to face I asked him if he had any political ambitions, and he replied, yes, he thought he could be useful to the regime in Yerevan. When I dismissed our leadership as a bunch of opportunists and crooks, he said he was willing to concede that, very much like the rest of mankind, we were not perfect. But why stress the imperfections of others and cover up our own? I demanded to know. Because, he explained, at this stage in our history, we needed help and encouragement, not opposition and obstruction. Since he was not a lawyer, he did not know or pretended not to know that if you help a crook you become an accessory.
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In an encounter with another one of our pundits, I was told that our only solution was to get rid of all our politicians and to replace them with our own religious leaders. When I said that would be like trying to extinguish a fire by pouring gasoline over it, he changed the subject.
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The trouble with some of our pundits is that they seem to be totally unaware of the fact that all our major writers, from Khorenatsi in the 5th century to Massikian in our own days have been very critical of our political as well as religious leaders; and I suspect one reason they don’t read our writers is that they think, as intellectual giants, they have no use for the input of midgets. I should also add that some of them might read English, French, German, Russian, and sometimes even Turkish fluently, but not Armenian.
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Sunday, September 04, 2005
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Tyrants who slaughter writers, and editors who silence them, belong to the same species of swine and it makes no difference whether they are Turks, Germans, Russians, or, for that matter, Armenians.
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I am an Armenian and you are an Armenian. Now then, can you give me a single reason why I should trust you? Because, for the life of me, I can’t think of a single reason why you should trust me.
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In a dishonest environment all assessments of the past will be dismissed as 20/20 vision, of the future as alarmist, and of the present as based on misinformation. Which simply means, to be pro-status quo or pro-establishment is to be infallible, and to be anti-status-quo or anti-establishment means being consistently wrong.
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During the Ottoman phase of our existence, those who predicted the massacres were dismissed as alarmist, and during the Soviet era those who said Stalin was a ruthless tyrant were labeled as unpatriotic. Which means, it would be far more accurate to say that to be pro-establishment is to be consistently wrong, perhaps because our men at the top and their hirelings happen to be moral morons, political nonentities, and intellectual midgets — that is to say, swine.
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Monday, September 05, 2005
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Hitler was dead wrong. Amnesia does not always follow extermination. Everyone remembers the dodo bird. That of course is no consolation to the dodo, or for that matter to the dinosaurs.
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And speaking of dinosaurs: god is less of an ecologist and more of a terrorist. He has exterminated countless species and killed millions of innocent civilians by means of floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, volcanoes, and miscellaneous other natural disasters and “acts of god.”
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Under fascist as well as democratic regimes the masses are educated enough to be brainwashed. Hence the old adage, “A little learning is a dangerous thing.”
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The authentic critic begins by thinking against himself. Those who can think only against others are not critics but propagandists, commissars, and fanatics.
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One man’s sacred cow is another’s shish kebab.
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Tuesday, September 06, 2005
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There are two kinds of ideas: those that bind and those that liberate. You may now guess which are more popular.
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The dupes of priests, mullahs, gurus, and witch doctors will always outnumber those who have mastered the difficult art of thinking for themselves.
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To think for oneself also means to think against oneself.
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There are those who cling to old ideas the way a drowning man is said to cling to anything, including a venomous serpent.
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My parents survived the Turks. I am now busy trying to survive my fellow Armenians.
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“You learn to grow up,” I remember to have read somewhere, “on the day you have a good laugh at yourself.” But to laugh at oneself is as difficult as to think against oneself.
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To understand reality begins with the realization that we are not the center of creation and that planet Earth is only a speck of dust in the universe, and man is only a speck of dust on earth. Now then, can you calculate the dimensions of your problems, the problems of your tribe, and problems of the human race?
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Religions have tried to teach love and tolerance and they have failed. But they have succeeded, and succeeded brilliantly, in teaching hatred and intolerance. Figure that one out if you can.
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Alphonse de Lamartine (1790-1869), French poet: “Hatred and egoism have only one homeland. Brotherhood has none.”
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Wednesday, September 07, 2005
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The problem with being a famous writer is that you think twice before saying anything that may detract from your popularity. But a writer who places his fame and fortune above honesty is no better than an expensive whore. Which is why I feel justified in bragging about my status as a slum-dwelling failure.
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Somewhere Zarian differentiates refugees from exiles. An exile is an exile by choice, he writes. By contrast, a refugee is driven by necessity. Dante, Byron, and Thomas Mann were exiles. As the offspring of refugees from the Ottoman Empire, I fully qualify as a double refugee – compliments of our enemies and my brothers.
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An Armenian writer has as much of a future in an Armenian environment as a sardine in a pool of ravenous barracudas.
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An eye for an eye is a legal principle that can be enforced only between equals. When a tyrant deals with a dissident or a scribbler with a boss, bishops, benefactor and his flunkies, it’s more like an eyebrow for both eyes, ears, limbs, lungs, liver, heart, and a few other vital organs thrown in for good measure.
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Thursday, September 01, 2005
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ELEGY
A sea of tears
Will not raise
A single dead
And a thousand years of hatred
Will not reform
A single Turk
And yet
We continue to lament our dead
And to hate the Turk.
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Anyone who has loved and hated knows that love and hatred are quintessentially misleading emotions.
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To be brainwashed means to be unable to move beyond propaganda.
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When we criticize another we assume we don’t have his faults.
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A fanatic is one who is incapable of detecting contradictions within himself, and whenever these contradictions are pointed out to him, he becomes deaf, dumb, and blind.
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To speak from the gutter means to threaten those who dare to contradict you that they too may be dragged down there.
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GOOD OLD DAYS
When he was alive Homer was not a best seller; neither did he submit his works to an editor.
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Denis Donikian: “The most pedestrian ideas come to us under the banner of tolerance. Likewise, the most rabid intolerance is promoted in the name of love.”
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Friday, September 02, 2005
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Whenever as a boy I learned to appreciate a new symphony by Beethoven I thought I had overcome another barrier separating me from civilization. Then, one day, I woke up and found myself surrounded by barbarians.
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It’s not easy being right in an Armenian environment because the sources of most of our contradictions are conflicting self -interests compounded by oversized egos and undersized brains.
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If you behave in an undiplomatic manner in a diplomatic environment, you will be recalled and fired by your superiors. And if you behave like a barbarian in a civilized environment you will be ignored because some civilized people may not share your taste for the gutter. You may now be in a better position to understand why I choose to ignore some of my critics (if you will forgive the overstatement).
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It is not enough being right; one must be right in a right way.
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Where everyone claims to be right, some are bound to be wrong; and where everyone asserts infallibility, everyone is wrong.
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Saturday, September 03, 2005
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Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), political philosopher: “The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative on the day after the Revolution.” This may explain why (according to Hagop Garabents) our revolutionaries were willing to shed their blood for freedom a hundred years ago but they are now afraid of free speech.
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I may know what I want today, but for the life of me I don’t understand why I wanted what I wanted yesterday, and I have no idea what I will want tomorrow.
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There is an old American saying: “Every shut eye ain’t asleep.” Likewise, just because he ain’t buried it don’t mean he ain’t dead.
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Anyone can forgive the forgivable. The trick is forgiving the unforgivable.
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I am willing to trust a good Armenian and a good Turk, and what I trust in them is not their Armenian or Turkish identity but their goodness, which recognizes no geographic boundaries.
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Sunday, August 28, 2005
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If you read a scholarly essay or book on human nature that begins with the words, “Experiments with laboratory rats have shown that…” you can be sure you are in good hands.
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Armenians enjoy reading about Turks because they love to hate.
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The nation that hates together stays together.
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A man is not necessarily good if he lacks the means to do evil.
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I’d rather be wrong as a human being than right as a dupe.
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Free speech does not say “Shut-up because I know better,” or “because I am somebody and you are nobody!”
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There are many known cures for dandruff, the guillotine is not one of them.
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I write in the name of all those writers who were silenced or slaughtered by tyrants.
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A woman may be a mystery to men, among them Freud, but to other women she is a cliché. Which may suggest that mysteries too, like so much else in life, are in the eye of the beholder.
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“Too much reading will ruin him,” a parish priest kept warning my parents, and he was right because to him success meant being a bishop.
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Freedom of the press does not mean the printing of agreeable lies but of disagreeable truths.
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Poverty, real poverty is not life in the slums and dinners of macaroni and cheese, but the degradation one must suffer in order to obtain these luxuries.
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If wisdom were a religion, fools and dupes could not be converted, which means there wouldn’t be enough converts even for a single congregation.
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Monday, August 29, 2005
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All our controversies amount to bickering while the barn is burning.
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Armenians love to see their names in the paper. Which is why our weeklies drop names as profusely as a flock of pigeons on ex-lax.
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The assertion “I am better than you” convinces no one. And yet, more often than not, that’s exactly what our so-called pundits do: they assert moral superiority. “Behold the Turk, the lowest scum on earth; and “Behold the Armenian, the noblest specimen of humanity!”
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Lately there has been some talk about Armenian pimps and prostitutes from the Homeland operating in foreign countries. It is true that we in the diaspora don’t have that problem but not because we are morally superior but because we are not driven by unemployment, destitution, hunger, and a power structure so corrupt that it feels no responsibility towards its citizens.
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A recent best seller in the United States is titled ON BULLSHIT. (*) We learn here that most of what politicians, salesmen, advertisers, and academics say or write fully qualifies as bullshit. Nothing new in that. Most of Plato’s dialogues say as much. If one were to write a history of bullshit, it would probably be the longest book in the world.
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(*) ON BULLSHIT by Harry G. Frankfurt. See also, YOUR CALL IS IMPORTANT TO US: THE TRUTH ABOUT BULLSHIT by Laura Penny; and DEEPER INTO BULLSHIT by G.A. Cohen. It is to be noted that both Frankfurt and Cohen are noted contemporary philosophers.
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Tuesday, August 30, 2005
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When I thought of myself as a good Armenian, I was no better than a bad Turk; and I know now that it was my own assessment of myself as a good Armenian that allowed me to behave like a bad Turk – minus the fez, shalvar, mustache, and yataghan.
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At all times and everywhere our ignorance far exceeds our knowledge, and we have a tendency to overestimate the value of what we know and underestimate the value of what we don’t know.
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Only fools assess themselves as smart, and only swine represent themselves as noble specimens of humanity.
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All that talk about 20/20 vision is nonsense, humbug, and b.s. I don’t demand infallibility from our leaders; but I have every right to expect honesty. No matter how you slice it, a military defeat is not a moral victory, and not all tragedies are acts of god.
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On a radio program on children’s poetry this morning, I overheard the following quotation: “There is some shit / I will not eat!” That’s what I call good poetry – rhythm, music, and words that once heard are never forgotten.
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Wednesday, August 31, 2005
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Censorship promotes mediocrity and when the mediocre are in charge, excellence becomes their greatest enemy.
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A Simenon characters remarks: “It’s a tough job to be a human being.” It’s tougher being an Armenian, and what makes it tougher is fellow Armenians.
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When the dishonest fail to convert or brainwash the honest, they silence them.
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Denis Donikian: “There are those among us today who have only one ear that hears only one voice: their own.”
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The most unbearable prospect for an Armenians is to be proven wrong, as if his infallibility were such a universally acknowledged fact that no sane person who dare to question it. And we have infallible men because we have infallible institutions.
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When two infallible men contradict each other, eiher one or both of them are bound to be wrong.
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Intolerance means violating free speech. Violating free speech means killing ideas; and where ideas are killed, people will be massacred; and there is no such thing as the massacre of only the guilty. It is not in the nature of those who commit massacres to discriminate the innocent from the guilty.
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Thursday, August 25, 2005
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One of my problems is my total inability to communicate with teenage hooligans or, for that matter, adults, or even seniors who happen to be clear-cut cases of arrested development.
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An Armenian editor from New York recently visited the editorial office of another Armenian paper in Paris and was given such an unfriendly reception that it bordered on the hostile. I know now why we have no use for critics and dissidents: we don’t need them because every Armenian is another’s critic and dissident. What we need now is peacemakers, negotiators, compromisers, harmonizers, and coordinators.
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We said “Yes, sir!” to sultans and Stalin for almost 700 years; and we now compensate by saying “No, sir!” – but only to our fellow Armenians.
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I once met a Turkish student who spoke Armenian fluently but identified herself as a Turk. She probably thought she would get more respect that way.
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An Armenian will criticize a writer for repeating himself and a speechifier, sermonizer, or propagandist for not repeating himself.
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There seems to be an unspoken theory among us that says, you can tell how good an Armenian is by how much he hates Turks.
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When confronted with the issue of hating Turks, an Armenian will rationalize it by saying, “I don’t hate them; I just want them to acknowledge the Genocide.” Which raises the following questions: What if being dependent on Turkish justice is almost like being a subject of the Ottoman Empire? What if by rationalizing our hatred of Turks we also rationalize our intolerance of fellow Armenians? What if our hatred pollutes our relations with our fellow men? What if Gandhi was right when he said, “Hatred harms the hater more than those he hates”?
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And if you were to ask me: “What about you? Don’t you hate anybody?” My answer would be, “Of course I do! I was born and raised as an Armenian.”
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Friday, August 26, 2005
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Armenian proverb: “Better the slave of a wise man than the master of a fool.”
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Denis Donikian: “Dissent is not so much a form of political opposition as a defense of values that we all share.”
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We have no use for human rights because our own rights were violated by a long line of tyrants. We have no use for civilized conduct either because we were ruled by barbarians. You may now guess the identity of our role models.
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The very same people who have made Turkish barbarism their central concern see nothing inconsistent in adopting their methods, and the only reason they don’t massacre is that it is against the law. But the moment the law is relaxed in their favor, as it happened in the Soviet era, they will not hesitate to be their brothers’ executioners.
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Whenever a fellow Armenian calls me a brother I start wondering who is Cain and who is Abel.
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There is a Cain and Abel in all of us, but we prefer to parade as Abels and to assign the role of Cain to anyone who dares to disagree with us. We thus view dissent and criticism as activities peculiar to the Cains of this world even as we ourselves violate their fundamental human right of free speech.
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Saturday, August 27, 2005
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“You are a dishonest man, a bad writer, and a worse Armenian,” a reader, himself a poet, informs me. To which I can only say: “I am sure the nation will be eternally grateful to you if you reject me as a role model.”
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Jewish saying: “Fools who hide their ignorance are wiser than the wise who parade their knowledge.”
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Denis Donikian: “If you want to solve our problems, share your money not your ideas.”
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Armenian proverb: “Neither candle not incense can open a path to heaven.”
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All politicians are atheists, including those who believe in god.
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Some people are so outrageously wrong that they don’t have to be corrected; sooner or later life, facts, the reality principle will speak to them much louder than any logical argument or appeal to common sense.
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Sunday, August 21, 2005
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It is not anti-Armenian to suggest that if Turks are human beings they deserve our understanding.
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Because I speak for understanding, tolerance, and dialogue, I am accused of denying the Genocide. I see no connection there, but I see a connection between being perennial losers and perennial ignoramuses.
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I am against hatred not because I love murderers and rapists but because hatred limits our ability to function at our full potential.
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Freedom of speech does not mean my freedom is more important than yours is because I am right and you are wrong. It means the freedom to be wrong, that is to say, to be fallible, that is to say, to be human.
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Armenians are a misunderstood, unappreciated, and ignored people, and ignored not only by odars but also by Armenians.
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Authoritarianism, intolerance, and charlatanism: I see them as three different facets of the same aberration.
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Any idea that remotely resembles what I thought twenty years ago as a dupe is repellent to me today, as it may well be twenty years hence to our dupes today.
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As long as there are Armenians who are not Armenophiles and Turks who are not Turcophiles, we may hope for reconciliation, coexistence, and peace.
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Monday, August 22, 2005
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I am for dissent and against propaganda regardless of race, color, and creed. Between a Turkish dissident and an Armenian propagandist I will be on the side of the dissident; and I refuse to believe that agreement with a dissident Turk and disagreement with an Armenian propagandist is a capital offense.
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The sentence, “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do,” could also be rephrased as, “Forgive them, Father, for they have been brainwashed.”
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The only way to agree with a propagandist is to allow him to brainwash you.
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Where benefactors play a central role, there will be rule by flunkies and brown-nosers parading as intellectuals and statesmen. When asked to name the greatest influences in his life, one of these so-called statesmen-intellectuals is quoted as having named one of our national benefactors.
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After subsidizing the construction of a museum dedicated to Armenian history and culture, one of our benefactors is said to have offered his old desk as an exhibit. What a book one could write on the megalomania of our benefactors!
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Until she died a couple of years ago, the wealthiest woman in Turkey is said to have been a bordello madam by the name of Manoogian. At her death even our weeklies in the diaspora published long obituaries.
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Tuesday, August 23, 2005
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There are two kinds of people, those who say, “Let us reason together” and mean it, and the others. It is to the “others” that we owe all wars and massacres.
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As long as I have the agreement of moderates on both sides, why should I care about the others? To put it more bluntly: as long as I have the agreement of reasonable men, why should I give a damn about the disagreement of jackasses?
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My greatest ambition in life: to make my readers smile even when I write about sad things.
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More often than not I do nothing but paraphrase our writers (see my DICTIONARY OF ARMENIAN QUOTATIONS). Our jackasses are not aware of this fact because they don’t read Armenian writers. Their ignorance thus allows them to parade as good Armenians even as they voice views that are neither good nor Armenian.
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The Turks say, “We are not guilty of slaughtering Armenians,” and our political parties say, “We are not guilty of leading the nation to the slaughterhouse.” Nothing new in that. All significant historic events have their defenders and critics. Napoleon is a hero to some, a villain to many others. The American, French, and Russian Revolutions have their apologists as well as critics. Notwithstanding their countless victims, Stalin and Hitler have their defenders. Even Hiroshima has been Rashomonized.
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Like all moderates, I believe silencing or exterminating the opposition is not the only legitimate way of settling differences.
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Wednesday, August 24,2005
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Speaking as a layman, I say if our political parties and their pundits have so far failed to convince me, they have also failed to convince many others. The reason of our high alienation and assimilation rate (or “white massacre”) must be sought in this failure rather than in “historic, social, cultural, and environmental factors beyond our control.”
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If you are like myself a man of limited knowledge and understanding, you will have many adversaries among those who know and understand everything.
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Preaching to the converted is one of the most popular and profitable commercial enterprises in the world.
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After meeting a nice Turk and a nasty Armenian you are bound to question many other assumptions.
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Armenian writers survive only by writing for an odar audience. The culturally starved Armenian will only starve them.
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Thursday, August 11, 2005
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In some cultures military defeat is worse than death; in others it is moral victory.
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The only time some Armenians think they are discharging their patriotic duty is when they are at each other’s throat.
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There is a type of tourist who goes to Florence for the pizza.
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I have observed that anonymous critics tend to be more aggressive.
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Success is as difficult to handle as failure.
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I analyze myself to understand others; and I analyze others to understand myself.
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An honest man is a charlatan’s worst nightmare.
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To how many of my fellow Armenians I could say:
Recover your humanity, you have nothing to lose but your Ottomanism.
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It’s not easy dealing with Armenians, but it helps if you are deaf to their insults and blind to their defects.
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Friday, August 12, 2005
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An in-depth study of contemporary Armenian literature in the Diaspora would be the shortest book in the world and it would say: Armenians in the Diaspora spend more money on pilaf and shish kebab than on books.
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Authoritarian environments offer no incentive for growth because questioning and doubting dogmatic assertions are not allowed.
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Take away Turks and the ego of some of our self-assessed, self-appointed, and self-satisfied pundits will collapse like a perforated balloon.
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Like Armenians, Turks too come in all sizes and shapes and some Turks have been so thoroughly brainwashed that only the ghost of Ataturk can reach them.
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A dogmatist is one who has been conditioned never to disagree with himself.
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Unlike fools, the smart know their limitations.
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The surest index of the future is not the promises of politicians or the rhetoric of charlatans but reality as assessed by objective historians.
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Dealing with filth is an inevitable part of life and it makes no difference what you do for a living. Understand this and many incomprehensible things about the human condition became less unbearable.
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Saturday, August 13, 2005
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Like most Armenians I was raised with a forest of prejudices. Which is why I am not surprised when teenage readers hurl insults at me as if I were a pro-Turkish traitor.
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Armenians of the Diaspora like to say that it will take two or even three generations for Armenians in the Homeland to be thoroughly de-Sovietized as if they themselves were in no need of being de-Ottomanized.
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We divide foreign historians into Armenophiles and Turcophiles. We don’t have a category for objective historians because we assume Armenophiles to be more objective than Turcophiles. No doubt Turks make a similar assumption about Turcophiles.
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A Turkish reader writes: “We will never apologize!” Thus implying that even if they do they will not mean it. Which amounts to saying that they will never accept the so-called values of the so-called civilized West, which has been the source of more evil than all the other continents combined. The irony here is that Armenians and Turks agree on viewing the West as thoroughly corrupt and hypocritical.
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The German government may have apologized to the Jews but many Germans as well as anti-Semites of all nations and tribes, including, alas, Armenians, think the Holocaust is a gigantic hoax.
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Sunday, August 07, 2005
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BEFORE AND AFTER
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Because by the age of fourteen I had read the 19th-century Russians, I thought I knew all I needed to know about human nature. I thought, like all Armenians, I was smart, sensitive, good, tolerant, blameless, and so on. Whenever evidence to the contrary presented itself, I thought I should make allowances for a people that have experienced an extensive array of misfortunes imposed on them by conditions, circumstances, and forces beyond their control.
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My initial intentions might as well have been utopian. I was going to be kind with the uncivil and reasonable with the preposterous. I was not going to make any enemies. I went further: I propagandized with the propagandists, and I kissed posteriors with the brown-nosers. I compromised, or so I thought, in the hope that eventually common sense and decency would prevail.
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I ignored the lessons of history because I operated in a dream world. I confused wishful thinking with hope, betrayal with concession, reality with Hollywood movies.
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Disagreement and criticism I understand, insults and threats I don’t. One must be deaf, dumb, and asinine not to see that by insulting and threatening anonymously one exposes oneself as a coward and a bully.
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I am not an elitist. I don’t feel the need to be for underdogs simply because I have always been one of them. As the offspring of Ottoman refugees I was born and raised in a Greek ghetto that looked like a gypsy encampment. Greeks used to call us “Turkish gypsies.” Southern rednecks would have called us white trash.
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My prose is not academic or scholarly. It makes no demands on the average reader. And yet, some smart (self-assessed, of course) readers pretend to misunderstand me perhaps because they understand me too well but are too craven to see themselves as they really are.
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Monday, August 08, 2005
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Whenever as a boy I would make outrageous assertions, adults would smile at me, and I would think they were smiling at my brilliance. I know now that their smile had nothing to do with admiration and everything to do with sarcasm tinged with pity. “No use explaining things to him,” it said. “Obviously he is not open to reason.”
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The question I ask myself today is “Who taught and encouraged me to make wild assertions thinking they were brilliant?” The only answer is: I must have been emulating my elders – schoolteachers, parish priests, partisans, panchoonies, charlatans…all of whom dealt in certainties and considered doubt as unpatriotic or unchristian.
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There are positive and negative role models. With one or two exceptions mine have been negative.
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The Romans were wrong when they fed Christians to lions, but they were right when they punished the parents for the misdeeds of the child.
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Bolsheviks under Stalin, Fascists under Mussolini, Nazis under Hitler, Americans under McCarthy: sometimes entire nations experience insanity as surely as individuals.
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Tuesday, August 09, 2005
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If you believe in the evidence of your own eyes and use your common sense, you shall have to conclude that the earth is flat, and the sun and the moon are about the same size. It is this type of “logic” that leads some Armenians to believe that the West is corrupt, the Turks Asiatic barbarians and bloodthirsty savages, and Armenians the only truly civilized, smart, progressive, and Christian people.
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To understand only one side of a story that may have more than one side is to misunderstand it.
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Some of my readers have been generous in sharing their Ottoman venom. I look forward to the day when they will be equally generous in sharing their Armenian wisdom – assuming of course they can tell the difference between one and the other, which is assuming a great deal.
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Civics is not a subject we like to talk about. I had an Armenian education and I don’t remember anyone mentioning it. I was taught all about authority and obedience but not about fundamental human rights. I was taught about power but not about abuses of power. I was taught to sing songs about freedom but I was told nothing about free speech.
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Wednesday, August 10, 2005
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ENVY
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Whenever as a boy I heard rumors to the effect that Jews support Jews but Armenians do not always support Armenians, I dismissed them as exaggerations made by disgruntled failures. I know better now.
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An Armenian-American composer once told me: “I no longer expect Armenian support. I will be grateful if I don’t get Armenian hostility.”
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Nothing comes more naturally to an Armenian than to say, “If he is Armenian, he is bound to be a mediocrity.”
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Speaking of Arshile Gorky, one of our elder statesmen once told me: “When he was alive, no Armenian every bought a single painting of his.”
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In his ISLAND AND A MAN, Zarian ascribes this Armenian peculiarity to envy. And true enough, most of his contemporaries either ignored or denigrated him.
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Did Sultan Abdulhamid II’s mother (who was Armenian) say anything in support of her fellow Armenians to him? Or was she the type who rationalized her silence by saying she did not want to get involved in politics?
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“I don’t want to get involved in politics,” one of our eminent editors (may the good Lord have mercy on his soul) once told me when I raised questions central to our ethos and survival as a nation. He preferred to publish stories about grandmothers and Armenian celebrities who had made it in the odar world – Armenians like Arshile Gorky, Michael Arlen Sr. (who warned his son to stay away from Armenians) and Michael Arlen Jr. (who concludes his PASSAGE TO ARARAT by saying there is no such thing as Armenian culture).
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Sunday, May 29, 2005
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When an expert writes a book for laymen, he doesn’t write everything he knows, only that which will be accessible to the average reader; and as everyone knows by now, for every expert there will be another who will contradict him.
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I was born and raised in Greece. I have lived and dealt with Greeks and I have read a great deal about them. What do I know about Greeks and their history and culture? I know that there are more than a thousand books on the subject and if I were to read all of them I would discover something new in each one.
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I have lived in Canada for many years. What do I know about Canadians and Canadian history and culture? What do I know about the small city where I live? The truth is, I don’t even know the names of my next-door neighbors.
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What does the average Armenian layman know about Turks or, for that matter, Armenians? But then, what an Armenian knows is one thing and what he pretends to know another. In mathematical terms, if what he knows equals to zero or even minus one, what he pretends to know will be closer or equal to infinity.
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We are a nation of ignoramuses parading as experts on any given subject.
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Reality has been compared to a vast mosaic, puzzle, or Oriental carpet. What we know is only a tiny fraction of it. Sometimes an expert will discern a pattern but it will be only a guess, which will be contradicted by another expert.
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Entire books (incomprehensible to laymen) have been written about “the meaning of meaning” and about why 2+2=4. And no philosopher so far has been successful in answering (to the satisfaction of all philosophers) the question, “why things exist.”
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Perhaps the true meaning of knowing is, the greater the area of knowledge, the greater the area of ignorance. Or, to understand more consists in the awareness that what we don’t understand far outweighs what we understand and may never understand.
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Monday, May 30, 2005
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When an Armenian wants to validate his ideas, the chances are he will quote his grandmother rather than a boss, bishop, or benefactor. Perhaps what we need today, and what we have always needed in the past, is to be ruled by a committee of grandmothers.
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How to stop bullying in schools: this has become a hot topic in both Canada and the United States recently. There has been a spate of studies, hearings and recommendations. I wonder why is it that so far bullies have been allowed a free hand. The only answer I can come up with is that capitalism and militarism legitimize and promote bullies, who are seen as future captains of industry, generals, and men with leadership qualities.
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Because I was brought up with anti-Turkish prejudices, I make up for it by being against all prejudices, including, and above all, pro-Armenian prejudices.
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When I speak of Ottomanized Armenians or Ottomanization in general, it is not because I am prejudiced against Ottomanism (whose abuses may not be worse than the abuses of many others -isms, beginning with nationalism, imperialism, Stalinism, Nazism, fascism, anti-Semitism, and so on…). Rather, I am against Armenians who preach Armenianism but practice Ottomanism and are totally unaware of the contradiction.
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I committed some of my most unforgivable blunders when I was sure I was right.
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Since there is no humor in the Bible and some of the most brilliant comedians today are Jewish, one must conclude that one of the preconditions of acquiring a sense of humor is five thousand years of persecution. As for common sense and decency: that may take a little longer.
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Whenever I say something that makes sense, I make another enemy.
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Once upon a time we thought the world was on our side. We now think it’s against us. Some day when we grow up we may discover to our astonishment that nobody gives a damn.
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Am I wrong? Probably. Since I have no political ambitions, I don’t mind admitting that I don’t know much and I understand even less.
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Tuesday, May 31, 2005
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ON CRITERIA
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You can tell a man’s character by the criteria he uses to judge other men.
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A rule without exceptions:
Only the scum of the earth assert moral superiority.
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Even the smartest Armenian is not qualified to judge the dumbest Armenian, probably because it is the dumbest Armenian who assesses himself as the smartest. And because a really smart Armenian knows that he may be smart in one, two, or three fields, but he might as well be a complete ignoramus in a thousand others.
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Only a mentally challenged kibitzer suffering from verbal diarrhea will assess himself as a competent judge of men, and only a moral moron will judge his fellow men by the number of their university degrees. According to Franklin D. Roosevelt (or one of his speechwriters): “A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car, but if he has a university education he may steal the whole railroad.”
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Mario Puzo, who ought to know what he is talking about: “A lawyer with a briefcase can steal more than a thousand men with guns.”
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I remember to have read somewhere that more university graduates become criminals every year than policemen, janitors, or garbage collectors.
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There are good men and bad men. Likewise, there are good Armenians and bad Armenians as there are good and bad Turks. If it had been up to good Armenians and Turks there would have been no massacres. And if some day Turks and Armenians learn to coexist to their mutual benefit it will be because of the good men on both sides. Because if it were up to the bad, history would repeat itself; and history tends to repeat itself because bad people are more ruthless in their pursuit of evil aims. One reason: good people use only good means to rise to the top, whereas bad people use both good and bad means.
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Good men know that all massacres are alike in the sense that the victims are invariably innocent and defenseless women, children, and old men. Only bad men say, “When we massacre our enemies, it’s good. When they massacre us, it’s bad.”
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Wednesday, June 01, 2005
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Since 1922 Armenians have killed more Turks than Turks have killed Armenians. At the going rate we may have a good chance of getting even in about two million years, give and take a millennium or two.
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In this context it is also worth mentioning that since 1922 Armenians have killed many more Armenians than they have killed Turks. At the going rate, and if you add up the assimilated (or victims of our self-inflicted “white massacre”) we may be extinct long before we settle our score with the Turks.
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It is not unusual to meet the proud Armenian who thinks he has a license to behave like a bad Turk.
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To those of my readers who get all worked up whenever they disagree with me, I say, “Relax, take it easy, you have nothing to worry about. I am only a slum-dwelling failure on my way to oblivion.”
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I am not complaining. There are advantages to being a failure. You don’t have to put up with agents, accountants, lawyers, editors, and psychiatrists. I see only one advantage in being a success: you get a better class of critics.
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Whenever I run out of things to say, I read my critics. Nothing stimulates me more than unspeakable perversity coupled with loudmouth arrogance.
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If historians criticize one another of misunderstanding or misinterpreting the past it may be because, as more or less reasonable men, they cannot grasp the fact that, the absurd and the irrational play a more important role in human affairs than reason, common sense and decency.
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Deep Throat is a Jew. One more reason why I love Jews. Haldeman and Ehrlichman were loyal to the boss. One more reason why I loathe bosses and fascists.
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