Author: arabaliozian

Thursday, August 16, 2007
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HOW TO BE A BETTER ARMENIAN
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If you think you are a better Armenian, think of it only as a possibility rather than a certainty. Most of our problems would be solved if we were to adopt a less dogmatic stance.
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The very best way to prove your superiority as an Armenian is by being more tolerant of your fellow men, including Armenians.
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Whenever you disagree with a fellow Armenian, remind yourself that Armenians have disagreed with one another since time immemorial and the chances are they will continue to do so as long as they exist.
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If you think those who disagree with you are lesser men, perhaps even Turks in disguise, consider the possibility that what you think of them, they think of you.
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Above all, never use the Genocide as a license with which to verbally assault and abuse others, be they Armenians or Turks. In this connection, Saroyan may indeed be right: we should speak of Turks and massacres not with self-righteous outrage but with sorrow, and sorrow for both the victims as well as their victimizers. Why victimizers? Because they are either human beings like us (in which case they must bear a heavy burden on their conscience) or animals (in which case, they have shed all traces of that most valuable of all human attributes: their humanity).
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Friday, August 17, 2007
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THE SIMPLICITIES OF THE SIMPLE-MINDED
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The simple-minded simplify, and when they speak of patriotism or the homeland, they ignore the fact that they are not speaking of a single entity but of several and sometimes mutually exclusive concepts. Consider the word homeland, as a case in point: does it refer to (a) the real estate (mountains, lakes, rivers, valleys), (b) the regime, (c) the people, (d) the culture? If the regime is corrupt, do we support it or oppose it? If the people have adopted a passive stance (as a result of centuries of subservience to ruthless alien tyrants) do we accept their subservience as an inevitable fact of life or do we expose it as a symptom of Pavlovian conditioning? If such alien excrescences as American materialism, Ottoman authoritarianism, and Soviet contempt for fundamental human rights have contaminated our culture and traditional values, do we pretend our identity and values have not been perverted? I remember one of our patriotic dupes saying: “Even if 1% of the money we send there finds its way to those who need it, we have done some good.” But what if the 99% that goes into the wrong pockets reinforces and prolongs a regime of kleptocrats and bloodsuckers? What if by helping 1% of the population we prolong the misery of the 99%?
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Saturday, August 18, 2007
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ON BEING A PROUD ARMENIAN
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What’s wrong with being a humble Armenian? To each his own, of course. Speaking for myself, I prefer humility to pride.
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If you had a choice between dealing with a proud Frenchman or Russian or Greek, and a humble one, which would you choose?
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When does pride end and arrogance begin? I don’t know. I hope you do, because arrogance or hubris is universally acknowledged not as an asset but as a liability.
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Is god proud of the fact that he created the universe? As a matter of fact, he is so humble that even the Pope of Rome doubts his existence seven times every day, or so Italians are fond of saying.
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When an Armenian identifies himself as a proud Armenian, how much of it is reality speaking and how much illusion? We all have illusions, of course – most of them about ourselves. But the older we grow, the more illusions we shed. Perhaps absence of illusions would be another definition of wisdom.
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Speaking of god and the universe, I read the following quotation by Christopher Morley in today’s paper: “My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated but not signed.”
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Sunday, August 05, 2007
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PROSPECTS AND PROJECTIONS
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We are a dysfunctional nation, make it, collection of tribes, ruled by mutually hostile gangs, who have brainwashed us to believe we are la crème de la crème, and the rest of the world the scum of the earth; and by the rest of the world I include anyone who has ever said anything remotely critical about us, from Yeghishe and Khorenatsi (5th century) to Zarian and Massikian (20th century).
Do we have a future?
I am not sure.
If we do, will it be more of the same?
Probably.
What are the chances that we will see the light?
Miracles happen.
You see no light at the end of the tunnel?
In our case, a light at the end of the tunnel would mean an oncoming train.
In other words, no future?
Not quite. I believe in Gandhi’s dictum that no one is beyond redemption.
Do you really believe that?
No, I don’t.
Why are you saying it then?
Sounds positive…and all that crap.
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Monday, August 06, 2007
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FAMOUS LAST WORDS
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“Most people are bastards, and everything is bullshit.”* These are the last words of George Black, a member of the Canadian financial elite, who is said to have committed suicide. From now on whenever I enter an Armenian discussion forum on the Internet…Strike that! Forget I made the connection. Unfair to my fellow countrymen.
Goethe’s famous last words: “More light!” What did he mean by that? Some think he wanted his servant to open the curtains of his bedroom window. Others think by “light” he meant reason or some such elevated metaphysical concept. If the second, it sounds so damn pretentious. I prefer Black’s last words. No ambivalence there. Down to earth. To the point. My style – rude, negative, nasty.
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FOOTNOTE
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Tom Bower, CONRAD & LADY BLACK: DANCING ON THE EDGE (London, 2006) page 20.
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Tuesday, August 07, 2007
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QUESTIONS / ANSWERS
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Why do you bother writing for idiots who insult you?
Smart readers don’t need my two cents’ worth. They may even be ahead of me in the sense that they keep silent because they have resigned themselves to the fact that ours is a hopeless case and no amount of reasoning will change anyone’s mind. Either that or they don’t give a damn one way or the other. But there is another and more personal reason why I persevere: I too was an idiot when I was young and pretended to know better when all I did was recycle a propaganda line. But one can’t stay young forever. Sooner or later – and I hope, with my help, sooner rather than later — our idiots will have to outgrow their present stage and confront reality.
How do you know they are not old enough?
I don’t judge people by their chronological age. I judge them by their mental age. You see, the danger in propaganda is not that it misleads people but that it makes them stupid.
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Wednesday, August 08, 2007
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CRAP AS NEWS
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We read the following in IT’S NOT NEWS, IT’S FARK: HOW MASS MEDIA TRIES TO PASS OFF CRAP AS NEWS by Drew Curtis (Gotham Books, 278 pages, 2007): “Everyone claims to want real news, but no one really does.” That may be because people prefer fiction to fact, and illusion to reality.
Our Armenian-American press today is controlled by political parties and big money, that is to say, it is thoroughly pro-establishment. Who speaks for the underdog? No one, perhaps because almost every other institution is busy collecting money for a noble cause. Every other day I get a letter printed on fancy stationery and fancier letterhead that ends with Comrade Panchoonie’s favorite punch line: “Mi kich pogh oughargetsek” (Send us a little money). My guess is, for every underdog we have two fat top dogs in the charity business.
Next time you read a headline that says so many thousand or even million dollars were collected for a good cause in the Homeland, try to find out, if you can, how much of it ended in deep pockets and how much went to charity. We collect money for myriad causes, except one: investigative reporting. And why? Because we prefer crap to news.
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Thursday, August 02, 2007
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DEAD MAN WALKING
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A man is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Because he happens to be an Armenian, he thinks along the following lines: ‘Why should I believe what doctors say? They always see the negative and completely ignore the positive. There is nothing wrong with me. Every organ in my body is in great shape. So what if my pancreas is not perfect. Blood pressure normal, 20/20 vision, no cavities, strong heart, intestine in working order, brain good, liver ditto. To hell with my pancreas. Why should I believe what a lousy doctor says? Even when you trust them, there is no way you can verify what they say….’
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As it was to be expected, my selection of Raffi quotations did not please everyone, especially the philistines grown fat on a steady diet of chauvinist crapola. Too negative, they said. So who is perfect, they demanded to know. One could probably make an equally long list of quotations from Raffi that stress the positive. As for the story with the man with terminal cancer who refuses to come to terms with reality: our reality is that we have survived for more than two thousand years and we are still going strong.
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Maybe so. But what if most of us did not survive? Even more to the point: what if our best and brightest did not survive? So that we now find ourselves at the mercy of charlatans and rascals whose number one concern is number one and to hell with the nation. And what if these charlatans and rascals may not even be Armenians (according to one of our elder statesmen) but Turks parading, sermonizing, and speechifying in fluent Armenian?
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Turks parading as Armenians in our midst? I don’t believe it. What I believe in is Ottomanized Armenians whose value system has been thoroughly perverted by six centuries of subservience. To me, an Ottomanized Armenian might as well be a dead man walking.
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Turks parading as Armenians? No way. Armenians parading as Turks, that’s different. Maybe Pamuk and Akcam are Armenians. Call it wishful thinking. Has anyone ever made a study of their ancestry? And speaking of Nobel Prize winning novelists and dissident historians: where are ours? What has happened to our creative impetus, intellectual integrity, objectivity, and courage? Where are our intellectuals? Do we have them? Is there anyone who may be remotely compare to Raffi, Baronian, Odian, Zohrab, Zarian, and Massikian? – writers who dared to speak their minds unafraid of repercussions. Writers who placed their integrity above their popularity and personal welfare. What if, in Massikian’s words, Armenian literature is no better than a cemetery?
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Friday, August 03, 2007
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YOUNG TURKS, NAZIS,
BOLSHEVIKS, AND NEOCONS
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If a critic stresses the negative and ignores the positive, it means he is a prejudiced and hostile witness whose testimony should be stricken from the record. If you think this is a fair statement, think again, because this type of sophistry runs the risk of explaining and justifying some of the worst villains in the history of mankind.
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HITLER
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A German neighbor once said to me: “People forget the good things Hitler did for Germany. There was widespread unemployment, poverty and hunger everywhere. He created jobs. He cared for the people.” As Goebbels would say: “Ah, Gott in Himmelreich!”
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STALIN
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If a Bolshevik were to read THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO today – assuming of course he knows how to read, which is assuming a great deal – he would say this about Solzhenitsyn: “He is too one-sided, prejudiced, and negative to be trustworthy. All he does is speak of concentration camps and completely ignores the rest of the Soviet Union and the fact that the people never had it so good.”
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TALAAT
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The following is a quotation from the 1979 edition of the ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA entry on Talaat Pasha (or as the BRITANNICA spells it, Talat Pasa): “A man of swift and penetrating intelligence and integrity…an idealist, forceful but never fanatical or vengeful.”
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MCCARTHY
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According to such neocon American pundits and best-selling authors as Ann Coulter, Senator Joseph McCarthy was not a charlatan, a pathological liar, an alcoholic, and a paranoiac, who did more harm than good, but an authentic patriot and a role model. In her own words: “Soviet spies in government were not a figment of the right-wing conspiracy. McCarthy was not tilting at windmills. He was tilting at an authentic communist conspiracy that had been laughed off by the Democratic Party.” And speaking of neocon superpatriots: if you ever criticize any aspect of life in the United States in their presence, you will be told in no uncertain terms, “Love it or leave it.”
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Saturday, August 04, 2007
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ON THE NEED TO ASSERT SUPERIORITY
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They tell me I hate Armenians, the implication being that they love them. But I see very little love, or even tolerance, in what they say.
They pretend to know more about Armenians than I do, which may indeed be true, for I have never asserted to know everything there is to know about Armenians.
They pretend to understand Armenians better than I do too, which may also be true, for I have never asserted that my understanding is without limits.
They speak of literature and ideas but they show very little appreciation or understanding of both, perhaps because they think the only good ideas are those with which they are in complete agreement. But ideas that are not part of a long dialogue – that is, assertion (or thesis), contradiction (antithesis) and synthesis – are not ideas but dogmas, that is, dead ends like Stalinism, fascism, American neo-conservatism, and our own Turcocentrism.
These superior-type Armenians seem to have missed several fundamental principles about human nature, namely, the morally superior do not feel the need to assert moral superiority, and that the harder one tries to hide one’s inferiority, the more transparent one becomes.
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Sunday, July 29, 2007
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A PROBLEM AND ITS SOLUTION
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Everything I write is a confession. When I speak of Ottomanized Armenians I speak of myself. When I speak of Turcocentric ghazetajis I speak of myself too. For more than two decades I reviewed only books (sometimes as many as three a week) that had something positive to say about Armenians or something negative to say about Turks; and needless to add, most of the lines I quoted dealt with atrocities, massacres, and genocide. Half of my first book, THE ARMENIANS: THEIR HISTORY AND CULTURE – A SHORT INTRODUCTION (Toronto, 1975), was not about Armenians but about Turks. It took me more than twenty years to start de-Ottomanizing myself – a painful process and a work in progress.
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My critics tell me I write about problems but I don’t provide solutions. Here is a solution for this particular problem: the establishment of research centers and educational programs for both adults and children that will liberate us from our Ottoman chains and allow us to recover our humanity. We should teach our children civics – the meaning of democracy and human rights. Before we try to civilize “barbarians,” we should try to civilize ourselves. Something we will never succeed in doing as long as we allow our ghazetajis to run amok in our press, blogs, and Internet forums.
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What to do in the meantime? Easy. No sweat. Send an email to our editors and moderators and keep sending it until you get a reply, an explanation, a promise, or a change in editorial policy. Miracles happen. I don’t believe in them but statistics suggest that if they happened two thousand years ago, they may happen again.
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What to say in your email to our editors? Make it short, sweet, and to the point.
Sample #1:
“Dear Sir” or even better, “Your Excellency: When I read an Armenian weekly, I prefer to read more about Armenians and less about Turks. I do hope you don’t consider my request extravagant, unArmenian or unpatriotic.”
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Sample #2:
“Since you write more about Turks than Armenians I suggest you call yourself THE TURKISH REPORTER, or THE TURKISH OBSERVER, or THE TURKISH WEEKLY, or THE ISTANBUL COURIER.”
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Sample #3:
“Is your readership going up or down? If down, it may be because there is too much prejudice and hate in it. Please consider a radical change in your editorial policy. Thank you.”
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Monday, July 30, 2007
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ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE
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With their customary Ottoman tact, some of my gentle readers do not hesitate to call me, among other things, a mediocrity, a failure, and a traitor. Why would they, why would anyone for that matter, take the words of a mediocrity and a failure seriously enough to lure them into the gutter? If I recycle the ideas of our writers, does that mean the central ideas of our literature are products of mediocrities and failures? Two of our most revered historians of the 5th century, Khorenatsi and Yeghishe, lamented our divisions. And yet, we stand divided to this day. What has changed? If 600 years if Ottoman subservience, a series of massacres, and a genocide have taught us nothing, what are our chances of acquiring wisdom or being receptive to ideas – as opposed to the lies of propaganda? If we are a failure as a nation, who is to blame, our political leadership or our literature? Who are our real traitors – our dividers or our writers who promoted solidarity?
On a more personal level: I may be a mediocrity and a failure in the eyes of some, but it seems to me, I have every right to consider myself as one of the luckiest and most privileged Armenian writers that has ever lived. Think of the fate of some of our greatest writers in the last two centuries: if they did not die in their early twenties or thirties of tuberculosis, they were permanently silenced by the likes of Talaat and Stalin, both of whom enjoyed the support and cooperation of our dupes. The very few who survived, like Zarian and Massikian, were neglected, ignored, and eventually silenced. So much so that, in his deathbed in Yerevan, Zarian was convinced he had been the victim of an attempted assassination (he had had a bad fall; he said he was pushed); and Massikian, a successful lawyer in Egypt, when asked in his deathbed by community leaders to bequeath his considerable wealth to Armenian educational institutions, replied by saying, in his view the inmates of a Cairo bordello would be more deserving recipients of his generosity.
Who are the successful Armenian writers? Only those who wrote for odars – Arlen, Saroyan, Troyat, Berberova. The truth of the matter is, we, or rather our political leaders, have no use for writers. Brown-nosers, yes. Writers, no! In what way are we different from “bloodthirsty Asiatic barbarians” who have forced into exile their only Nobel Prize winner? And as our mafias in the Homeland prosper, our writers are forced into exile too. And what happens to them in the Diaspora? Can anyone on this forum name a single one of them? And when our self-assessed superpatriots speak of nationalism, they are too ignorant to see that what they really mean is tribalism.
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In our local paper this morning I read a list of the four factors that go into the making of an opinion: the media, the double-talk of politicians, the lessons of history, and one’s personal value system. Which makes me wonder: what happens to a community whose press, schools, historians, and value system are shaped and controlled by the double-talk of politicians? Answer: critics are called traitors and politicians are looked up as statesmen of vision who fully deserve our unswerving subservience. The Sultan is not dead. He lives!
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Barry Sonnenfeld: “Some people see the glass half empty. Some see it half-full. I see half a glass of poison.”
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Tuesday, July 31, 2007
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QUOTATIONS FROM RAFFI
(HAGOP MELIK-HAGOPIAN: 1835-1888)
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ON OUR LEADERSHIP
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“We don’t have an aristocracy. We have no elites and leaders. What we have are merchants and clergymen. Merchants are trash. As for the clergy: they have always been against individual freedom.”
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ON FREEDOM
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“Where there is oppression there will also be cowardice, ignorance, and sloth. A man needs freedom to discover the benefits of freedom.”
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CHERCHEZ L’ARMENIEN
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“Where Armenian blood flaws, look for an Armenian hatchet.”
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ON LIES
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“Self-deception is a one-eyed monster that sees only the positive and ignores the negative.”
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ON TREASON
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“Our past is filled with countless instances of betrayal and treachery. Whenever we have been invaded by Persian, Greek, Arab, Seljuk, or Mongol armies, these armies have advanced under the command of an Armenian. Armenians have always fought side by side with the enemy against their own people.”
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PORTRAIT OF AN ARMENIAN
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“Mutual intolerance, divisiveness, envy, betrayal, and a thousand other vices have built permanent nests in our hearts.”
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ENEMIES
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“An Armenian’s worst enemies are not odars but Armenians.”
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MORE ON LEADERSHIP
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“Those who are responsible for our safety are themselves a gang of criminals.”
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Wednesday, August 01, 2007
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MORE ON RAFFI
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One reason I quoted Raffi yesterday is that I recognized myself in what he says. If you think you are better, obviously Raffi’s observations do not apply to you. But I would invite you to consider the remote possibility that you may only think or believe you are better because, in Raffi’s words, you have a highly developed sense of self-deception; or as Sartre says somewhere speaking of belief systems: “We may believe that we believe, but we don’t believe.” People don’t judge us by what we say we believe, especially if we say or imply we are better than they. On the contrary. People tend to be suspicious of self-satisfied holier-than-thou phonies.
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Another reason I quoted Raffi is that I wanted to point out the fact that my ideas are not mine. They are to be found in our writers; the rest belong to world literature. I have consistently denied being an original writer. It has been said that there are only a limited number of ideas and all of them are to be found in the Bible or Plato. Everything else consists in deviations, expansions, and footnotes.
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Paul Valéry once asked Einstein if he carried a notebook in which to jot down ideas as they occurred to him when he was not at his desk. Einstein explained that ideas didn’t come to him frequently enough to adopt that method of annotation and that he would consider himself very lucky if an idea came to him once every twenty or thirty years.
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Finally, if Raffi’s remarks came to you as a shock, it may be because our ghazetajis and academics have conspired to hide the truth from us by harping constantly on Turks, massacres, and atrocities thus hoping to distract us from our real problems. If the Kingdom of God is within us, so are the fires of hell.
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Thursday, July 26, 2007
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KILLERS
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Hitler: “How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don’t think.”
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Overheard: “There are two kinds of people: those who want to kill you, and those who want to save you. It’s as simple as that.” It’s not as simple as that. It’s worse. The overwhelming majority does not care if you live or die, and indifference is worse than hate.
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When was the last time you heard any one of our leaders say “the buck stops here,” or words to that effect? When Germany lost World War II Hitler put the blame on the German people, but he was also decent enough to kill himself.
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To agree with a politician or a political party is to agree with a propaganda line. To recycle a propaganda line is another form of subservience.
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We are an angry people. I sense this anger and its deep roots by some of the comments I read on the Internet. Our leaders are fully aware of this anger and they do their utmost to channel it in the direction of Turks. If it weren’t for Turks, I suspect Armenians would rise against their own leaders and slaughter them, or one another.
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If some day the United States agrees with us that the Genocide is not a figment of our imagination, deep inside somewhere they will continue to sympathize with Turks. That’s the way it is with empires – they speak the same language because they are products of similar experiences, policies, and actions. Violence is their common medium – violence and plunder, oppression, discrimination, exploitation, war, conquest, massacre, and genocide. The Turks are fully aware of this fact. Hence, their brazen denials.
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How many times we have been told that once upon a time we too had an empire under Dikran the Great? Who has ever wanted to know the number of his victims? Who has even bothered to raise the question?
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We are brought up to brag about the fact that some of the greatest Byzantine emperors were Armenians. Does anyone know or care to know the number of their victims? How many Armenians know what Basil II Bulgaroktonous (“Bulgar Slayer”) did to earn that sobriquet? Ancient history? Maybe. Some things may change, but human nature doesn’t. And if you think a contemporary Armenian emperor or superpower would be more humane on the grounds that Armenians are a morally superior breed with a unique DNA, you run the risk of justifying the Turkish contention that we are a nation of self-deluded dupes prone to believe figments of our own imagination.
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Friday, July 27, 2007
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PARALLEL UNIVERSES
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Belief systems and ideologies (or religions and political parties) allow us to live in a parallel universe in which, very much like the coyote in the Road Runner cartoons, we have the sensation of standing still in midair over the abyss because we don’t yet realize we are falling.
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To commit oneself to an idea does not make that idea infallible. To voice an opinion does not make that opinion valid. If ideas and opinions are not constantly revised, they tend to close the mind instead of opening it.
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Both Turks and Armenians believe truth to be on their side, which makes them morally superior. But what is moral superiority if not the exercise of mutual tolerance, understanding, compassion, mercy, and ultimately love for our fellow men regardless of race, color, and creed. And what could be more contradictory than to use truth as a means to justify and legitimize prejudice and hatred, that is to say, lies.
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There are many theories that explain why Nixon prolonged the war in Vietnam (that resulted in the death of two million Cambodians), why Bush went to war in Iraq, and why the Young Turks committed genocide. The obvious answer is: Nixon, Bush, and the Young Turks did what they did because they had the power. Power is like money: it allows you to do things that if you were poor you wouldn’t even dare to dream of doing. Which leads me to ask: how much of our so-called moral superiority is a direct result of military inferiority? Next question: do you really believe we wouldn’t behave like Nixon, Bush, and Co. if we had the power to do so? If you do, it maybe because you live in a parallel universe.
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Saturday, July 28, 2007
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ONCE MORE WITH FEELING
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Our Turcocentric ghazetajis (gutter journalists) believe they are defending our cause, they are on our side, they have our national interest at heart. What they fail to see is that on a different much deeper level they may also be promoting victimhood, prejudice, and hatred, which may lower us to the level of those we hate. Don’t get me wrong. As a child I too was brought up to hate Turks. I was taught to hate them because I had two million reasons to do so – and to hate the perpetrators as much their offspring for their refusal to accept any responsibility in the matter. But I am no longer a child and my reason tells me this hatred is wrong because it belongs to my gut and not to my brain. My reason tells me hatred harms me more than it does Turks. It harms me because it closes my mind, it perpetuates my status as a victim, and it makes me dependent on the goodwill of the victimizer. And when our ghazetajis say they don’t hate Turks, they only want justice, then all I can say is that they are far better men than I am. When I was a child no one ever mentioned the word justice in reference to Turks, or for that matter such words as revisionism, denialist, closure. I suspect these words didn’t even exist then neither in Armenian nor in English. Leave it to academics to come up with politically correct euphemisms and to our ghazetajis to exploit them in order to appear better than they are.
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Sunday, July 22, 2007
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WHY I DISCUSS OUR PROBLEMS
ON ODAR FORUMS
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Because all men are brothers and we Armenians are members of the same family known as mankind.
Because I am a human being first and an Armenian second, and if my understanding of our problems, and by extension of the human condition, is right, then I prefer to share it with all of mankind as opposed to a small fraction of it.
Because I know what it means to be a human being. As for being an Armenian: there are probably as many definitions of it as there are Armenians.
Because our problems are universal in so far as all nations, including the mightiest empires, have experienced divisions and defeats.
Because at all times and everywhere underdogs outnumber top dogs and entire continents today are populated by present and former refugees and victims of intolerance, persecution, poverty, starvation, war and massacre; and because every human being alive today has experienced hatred, injustice, and discrimination.
Because there is some degree of corruption and incompetence in all power structures for the simple reason that power corrupts both the powerful and the weak, and very often the weak more than the powerful.
Because I want our editors and moderators to know that their power goes only as far as their own diminutive backyards and their efforts to violate my fundamental human right of free speech are destined to be self-defeating and to boomerang.
Finally, I discuss our problems whenever and wherever I am given the opportunity to do so because not to do so would amount to covering them up and I reject that option as cowardly; I also believe a bigger audience enhances the probability of being corrected when wrong.
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Monday, July 23, 2007
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BITCHES, PIMPS, AND MORONS
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“A war against terrorism such as we have seen is an oxymoron undertaken by morons,” writes Gerry Spence in BLOODTHIRSTY BITCHES AND PIOUS PIMPS OF POWER (New York, 2006), which in my view is one of the very best books ever written about the conservative movement in America today with particular emphasis on such “talking heads” as Nancy Grace (may she rest in peace), Jerry Falwell (ditto), Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly, and Pat Robertson. Elsewhere Spence quotes the following words by Rosa Parks: “People, not governments, bring change.” Further down: “A revolution begins not with guns but with a revolution of thought. A revolution of thought begins with a revolution of knowledge. A revolution of knowledge requires that people be fully informed. But here again we face a nearly impossible obstacle: the media that informs the people is also owned by the corporate King.”
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Only a thoroughly brainwashed Armenian will assert our own leadership has been and continues to be less dogmatic, more tolerant of dissent, and less moronic. Which is why I feel justified in asserting: unless we thoroughly de-Ottomanize and de-Stalinize ourselves, mart bidi ch’ellank.
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Tuesday, July 24, 2007
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LIES IN POLITICS
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In Robert Dallek’s NIXON AND KISSINGER: PARTNERS IN POWER (New York, 2007) we are told that, as a translator in Germany after World War II, Kissinger learned the following lesson from camp survivors: “Impulses to dwell on past horrors would produce sorrow and self-pity, which were forms of ‘weakness’ that were ‘synonymous with death’” (page 39). Elsewhere Dallek quotes William Safire to the effect that both Nixon and Kissinger were “convinced that consistent lying can be the right thing for the country” (page 615). We are also informed here that they lied not only to the people but also to each other as well as to themselves – by believing in their own ‘image’, which, like all images, bears little relation to reality. This may suggest that in politics, and by extension history, the truth is constantly hidden from us and by the time it is revealed – if at all – it is too late because by then the damage is done and no one on earth has the power to unring the bell or resurrect the dead. As for those who say, perhaps even believe, that all politicians lie except ours: I envy their innocence but I have nothing but contempt for their loyalty, because loyalty to men, when it overrides loyalty to truth, is essentially a fascist concept.
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Wednesday, July 25, 2007
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ON FORGIVENESS
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Bishop Desmond Tutu in NO FUTURE WITHOUT FORGIVENESS (New York, 1999, page 23): “If the victim could forgive only when the culprit confessed, then the victim would be locked into victimhood.”
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Martin Luther King in a sermon delivered in 1957: “Forgiveness does not mean ignoring what has been done or putting a false label on an evil act. It means, rather, that the evil act no longer remains as a barrier to the relationship.”
*
It is not my intention here to advocate forgiving the Turks because I am not in the habit of advocating utopian daydreams. What I am doing is revealing two unfamiliar (to me) aspects of forgiveness that may well be in our self-interest.
*
GENERAL ANTRANIK ON NATIONALISM
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“I am not a nationalist. I am on the side of underdogs of all nations.”
*
WHAT I KNOW ABOUT OUR GHAZETAJIS*
*************************************************
What neocons are to the Bush administration, our Turcocentric ghazetajis are to the Armenian nation: they speak hate and war (strike that! I meant to say justice) but when the time comes, they will let others to the fighting for them.
*
FOOTNOTE
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*ghazetaji: what paparazzi are to photojournalism, ghazetajis are to journalism.
#

Sunday, July 15, 2007
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PAPER TIGERS
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Writers tend to take themselves seriously; and the more mediocre they are the more seriously they take themselves. It follows, if you tell a hopeless mediocrity he is not another Shakespeare, you are liable to make an enemy for life.
*
It may matter to writers what they write but to the vast majority who read him or to the millions who don’t, it makes absolutely no difference. Something similar could be said about our controversies. Since the majority is silent, each side may think it is on his side when in fact the world is too busy with far more important matters to give a damn one way or the other.
*
Of the one million Armenians in America (Canada and the U.S. combined) my guess is only less than 1% read our weeklies and most of the 1% read only to see their names in the paper. Now then, go ahead and take yourself seriously.
*
When friends ask me if I am working on a new project, I tell them I have given up writing. I don’t consider writing for the Internet writing. But if it is writing, it is more like writing on water.
#
Monday, July 16, 2007
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MAFIA-DEMOCRACIES
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Many great writers were misunderstood and neglected because they were ahead of their time. That’s not my problem. Nothing I say is difficult to understand, or original, or new. My ideas are not mine but the common currency of literature, including our own. They have been around for centuries, even millennia. My great liability is that I write about our problems and no one gives a damn about us, not even us. The only thing we seem to care about is Turks and their stonewalling and indifference – an indifference that we understand very well because we share it.
*
In his most recent book, TO THE CASTLE AND BACK (New York, 2007), Vaclav Havel calls the present political and economic structures of former Soviet countries “Mafia-democracies.” Now, why didn’t I think of that? Mafia-democracies! That’s like saying the law of the jungle.
#
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
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AN ARMENIAN CREDO
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I believe in one God who may or may not be on my side.
I believe as a human being I can be wrong, and I have been wrong more than once.
I believe it is also conceivable that like most human beings I have been wrong more often than right.
I also believe as an Armenian it is my patriotic duty to do my utmost to learn from my mistakes. Whether I have been or shall be successful in this endeavor is not up to me to decide but up to more impartial and objective observers.
#
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
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AD HOMINEM
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At no time have I been remotely tempted to silence fellow Armenians who hold views opposite to mine, not because I am tolerant by nature or morally superior to anyone, but because I never had the power to do so. Which is why I suspect all power. If I don’t trust myself with power, I see no reason why I should trust anyone else, least of all the scum of the earth parading as la crème de la crème.
#[/B]

Thursday, July 12, 2007
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DEATH IN VENICE
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What do I, a bookworm, know and understand about the real world? Next to nothing. This truth hit me again when I visited Venice recently and returned home a thoroughly disappointed man. The Venice I remember was a respectable old lady. She is now a bordello madam. Even Venetians are getting the hell out of there. In my time the population was 350,000; it’s now only 50,000. Everywhere you see boarded up windows and doors. My alma mater, Collegio Armeno Moorat-Raphael, is now a hotel. San Lazzaro, the island of the Mekhitarist order, has become a museum. Not a single seminarian or monk to be seen anywhere. Don’t get me wrong. In appearance Venice is the same – the bridges, the canals, the architecture, the narrow alleys, the gondolas, the vaporetti (water busses)…they are still there. What’s no longer there is the spirit of place, the soul of the city. Compared to the Venice of fifty years ago, the Venice of today is as lifeless as an embalmed cadaver. This is something I had not and could not have foreseen.
What do I know and understand about the workings of reality? But then, what did “the best and the brightest” under Kennedy know, or the neo-cons under Bush, or closer to home, our revolutionaries in the Ottoman Empire know when they plunged the nation into conflicts that resulted in the needless death of countless innocent civilians? And what do our Turcocentric pundits know today?
What is history if not a long catalogue of blunders committed by arrogant, self-righteous, ignorant frauds that divide mankind into friends and enemies and implement a policy of kill or get killed?
#
Friday, July 13, 2007
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NAPOLEON AND GANDHI
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They fascinate me because they pulled the rug from under potentates, that is to say, bloodsucking mediocrities parading as leaders of men and representatives of God on earth. The means they employed were different but the end result was the same.
*
Only moronized people idolize leaders. Like all rules, this one too has its exceptions – Lincoln and FDR come to mind. But they too sat on a throne of blood. As for Napoleon and Gandhi: I see them less as leaders and more as destroyers of emperors, kings, princes, maharajas and similar riffraff.
*
I am not in the business of solving problems but in exposing those who stand to lose the most if our problems are ever solved.
*
Paul Tillich: “Life could not continue without throwing the past into the past, liberating the present from the burden.”
#
Saturday, July 14, 2007
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DEFINITIONS
*****************************
Politics: the art of manipulating the masses by means of lies.
*
Literature: sharing perceptions.
*
Chauvinist: a fanatic with 20/20 vision for his enemy’s failings and total blindness for his own.
*
Turcocentrism: a school of thought that says our most important concerns, hence our welfare, inner balance, and identity, revolve around Turks.
*
Which reminds me of a friend who, after urging me to change my last name, delivered the following comment: “As long as you bear a Turkish surname, you admit to having been branded by them.” And I thought: If only it were that easy to erase six centuries of subservience and all traces of Ottomanism by acquiring a new name!
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Sunday, July 08, 2007
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TRUTH AND PROPAGANDA
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According to Marcus Aurelius, “Our life is what our thoughts make it.”
This may have been true two thousand years ago when the people were not exposed to mass media. Our lives today are shaped less by ideas and more by propaganda. Literature is praised but propaganda believed. Who reads books today? But everyone reads newspapers, watches TV, and listens to the radio. Many more Germans were shaped by MEIN KAMPF than by THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN. Many more Russians were taken in by Stalin than shaped by the ideas of Solzhenitsyn, or for that matter, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. It is an undeniable fact of modern life that we are, all of us, at the mercy of spin doctors, public relations men, advertisers, sermonizers, speechifiers, and phony pundits who expect us to believe they speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. In the words of a contemporary American philosopher: “We live at a time when many quite cultivated individuals consider truth to be unworthy of any particular respect.”
For more on this subject see Harry G. Frankfurt’s (the philosopher quoted above) two most recent books: “ON BULLSHIT (New York, 2005), and ON TRUTH (New York, 2006).
#
Monday, July 09, 2007
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OBSERVATIONS
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If there is one lesson that history keeps drumming into us is that we will be better off if we consider all politicians, regardless of race, color, and creed, guilty until proven innocent beyond a shadow of a doubt.
*
If Turcophile is a pejorative term, why should Armenophile be any different? To an objective and impartial outsider, who knows little and cares even less about Turks and Armenians, both labels may suggest prejudice and as such of questionable validity.
*
Where there is an oversized ego there will be an undersized brain. I have said this before and I will say it again because an undersized brain also means an even more undersized memory; and, in the words of Socrates, favored by my Italian teacher of algebra, “to know is to remember.”
*
Like most people, I operate on the assumption that I am right. But I also know that to be right in one’s own eyes is easy. What’s hard to the point of being impossible is to convince oneself and others that, since truth is beyond our reach, we all of us engage in some form of charlatanism when we speak. As the old Chinese adage has it: “He who speaks does not know.” And according to a contemporary American philosopher: “Is love of truth itself merely another example of bullshit?” (Harry G. Frankfurt, ON TRUTH, page 14).
#
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
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MEMO TO OUR TURCOCENTRIC PUNDITS
AND THEIR READERS
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If talk of Turks, massacres, and atrocities will make you a better person, more understanding and compassionate, by all means, go ahead, knock yourself out, make a career of it. But if it will make you more vengeful and prone to hate not only your enemy but also your fellow countrymen simply because they do not share your hatred (I have seen this happen), then I suggest it may be in your interest as well as that of your “cause” to leave the field to others better equipped to deal with it.
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Wednesday, July 11, 2007
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WHAT IS ARMENIANISM?
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Observe an Armenian who has lived in the United States for sixty years and you may notice that he is more American than Armenian. Now consider what happened to us after six hundred years of life in the Ottoman Empire, and you may begin to understand why Turks prefer to call us as “Christian Turks.”
*
One way to classify an Armenian-American is to say that after being Ottomanized he has been Americanized. That doesn’t mean Americanization expunged Ottomanization. Identity is not a single-layer cake.
*
Armenianism: what is it exactly? I don’t know. But I do know that everything our propagandists tell us is wishful thinking and lies. We are not what we pretend to be. Nobody is!
#[/B][/B]

Thursday, July 05, 2007
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AN INSIGHTFUL COMMENT
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In what follows I will try to abridge and paraphrase the comments of a reader who, for reasons of his own, prefers to remain anonymous.
“One way to explain the difference between the dignified silence of our forefathers who witnessed the massacres and experienced the deportations, and the verbal diarrhea of the present generation is to say that the first were victims of historic conditions and forces beyond their control and understanding, and the second victims of political rhetoric.”
*
A CASE OF PROJECTION
***********************************
When some of my Armenian critics, who belong to the trashcan or verbal-abuse school of criticism, attribute to me words and ideas that are not mine, I have every reason to suspect they are projecting their own secret thoughts, which until then they did not dare to admit even to themselves.
*
WRITERS AND PUNDITS
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Writers may be divided into those who write about many different things, and those who write about the same thing in different ways. There are also those who think just because they have conventional wisdom and the establishment on their side, they must be infallible and anyone who disagrees with them must be traitors, renegades, and enemies of the nation. It never even occurs to them that they may be victims of political rhetoric or propaganda, that is to say, verbal pollution.
#
Friday, July 06, 2007
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BASTARDS
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“Literature needs freedom to thrive,” says an Armenian character in Elif Shafak’s THE BASTARD OF ISTANBUL, and goes on: “We didn’t have much of that to expand and enlarge Armenian literature, did we?”
This fictional character and Elif Shafak seem to be unaware of the fact that we had a vibrant literature and far better writers under the Sultan, Talaat, and Stalin than we do today when we enjoy more freedom and financial prosperity than at any other time in our history. That’s because, in the words of Hagop Garabents (also Jack Karapetian), “Once upon a time we shed our blood for freedom. We are now afraid of free speech.”
Please note that, unlike Gostan Zarian (“Our political parties have been of no political use to us: their greatest enemy is free speech”) Garabents was neither a dissident nor a critic. On the contrary, he was on excellent terms with our bosses, bishops, and benefactors.
Instead of literature we now have anti-Turkish propaganda (the bastard of Armenian literature…or is it an abortion?).
We have been traumatized, yes, certainly, no one denies that. But after making that assertion, the question we should ask ourselves is: Do we make an obsession of the trauma or do we seek a way out of the darkness that has paralyzed our creative impetus?
#
Saturday, July 07, 2007
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THE ARMENO-TURKISH COMPLEX
**********************************************
In Elif Shafak’s THE BASTARD OF ISTANBUL I read the following lines delivered by an Armenian-American: “Some among the Armenians in the diaspora would never want the Turks to recognize the genocide. If they do so, they’ll pull the rug out from under our feet and take the strongest bond that unites us. Just like the Turks have been in the habit of denying their wrongdoing, the Armenians have been in the habit of savoring the cocoon of victimhood. Apparently, there are some old habits that need to be changed on both sides.”
*
Conventional wisdom becomes unconventional folly bordering on mass hysteria when it turns into intolerance of criticism and dissent.
*
Every propaganda line, regardless of its absurdity, will have a series of facts and reasons that support it.
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