Author: arabaliozian

Thursday, March 08, 2007
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SELF-DECEPTION
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A jury of his peers has found Vice-President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff guilty of lying to the authorities. Nothing new in that. Vice presidents lie, presidents lie, the press lies, everybody lies. We deceive not only others but also ourselves. All power (political as well as religious) is based on a big lie. Nothing can be more naïve than to divide mankind into two and say, “Their side lies, ours does not.”
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We all have a dominant idea that colors and orients our thinking. Mine is self-deception – or the infinite number of strategies we adopt in order to appear better than we are. The big lie in political leadership is that the men at the top know better what’s good for the people; and when they declare war and lose it, they blame it on others. Hitler blamed the loss of World War I on Jews, and the loss of World War II on his fellow Germans, because, he said, they had failed to live up to his vision. To this day Stalinists blame the collapse of the Soviet Union on dissidents like Solzhenitsyn. And we blame our genocide on the barbarism of the Turks, most of whom (very much like Sultan Abdulhamid II and Talaat) may have been part Armenian.
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In everything that is said, a great deal remains unsaid.
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A good answer is one that leads to at least two new questions.
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Alain: “To think is to say no.” (It follows; to say yes is to allow others to do your thinking for you.)
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Julien Green: “The oppressed console themselves by believing to be morally superior to their oppressors.”
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Henry de Montherlant: “In man, it is the butterfly that turns into a worm.”
#
Friday, March 09, 2007
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VARIATIONS ON A FAMILIAR THEME
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James Thurber: “You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.”
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Jean Cocteau: “There is an ape and a parrot in all of us.”
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A headline in our paper today reads: “Japan denies its wartime atrocities.”
Sounds familiar?
In the article that follows we are informed that during World War II, Korean and Chinese girls as young as 14 were kidnapped by Japanese soldiers to work as sex slaves or “comfort women.”
Rings a bell?
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My mother is fond of saying, “Even if guilt were made of the most expensive fur, no one would want to wear it.”
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Control the flow of information and you control knowledge. Control knowledge and you shape the human mind. Where there is censorship there will be dupes.
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In a totalitarian state people have as much freedom of thought as caged animals in a zoo, with one difference: the animals can see their iron bars.
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The less you know, the more easily you are hoodwinked, flimflammed, and bamboozled. The ideal dupe is a total ignoramus.
#
Saturday, March 10, 2007
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BENEFACTORS
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If I understand them correctly, they are the kind of people who feel more at home in the company of calculating machines and number rather than human beings and ideas.
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AS FOR BOSSES
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Given the choice between yes-men or conformists and people who think for themselves, they will invariably choose conformists. The ability to conform is a talent, like any other, and I don’t mind admitting, I have none of it.
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TURKS AND ARMENIANS
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“Armenians and Turks, Turks and Armenians,” I can imagine some readers thinking. “Man, am I getting tired of that sh**!” to which I can only say, “Welcome to the club.”
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A NEW BOOK
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IRENE NEMIROVSKY: HER LIFE AND WORK, by Jonathan Weiss (200 pages, Stanford University Press, 2007). An excellent biography of a remarkable French writer of Jewish descent who ended her short life in a German concentration camp during World War II. We are informed here that she disliked both Jews and Armenians: a writer after my own heart, not because I love haters but because I find self-satisfied people arrogant, obnoxious, stupid, and unworthy of Planet Earth.
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PEARLS BEFORE SWINE
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Jean Giroudoux: “Plagiarism is at the root of all literatures, except the first which is unknown.”
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Henri Michaux: “Anyone who does not contribute to my perfection: zero.”
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Sunday, March 04, 2007
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THE ART OF MAKING ENEMIES
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The only way to make Armenian and Turkish friends is to agree with them. Dare to disagree with them and you run the risk of insulting either Turkishness or Armenishness – two terms that as far as I know no one has ever bothered to define perhaps because they are indefinable — unless of course they mean everything that is good, moral, just, right, humane, civilized, and in general, positive in life. Which would make both nations paragons of virtue and role models to the rest of mankind. And now, imagine if you can, a world inhabited only by Turks and Armenians. It would be hell on earth for critics and dissidents, and heaven on earth for yes-men and brownnosers, who on occasion like to engage in cannibalism. My guess is, after centuries of cohabitation and intermarriage (or is it interfornication?), the pureblooded Turk or Armenian is a figment of our imagination. So must be, by extension, the concepts of Turkishness and Armenishness.
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The more you learn, the more aware you become of what you don’t know. Only the ignorant brag about their knowledge.
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Gaston de Levis: “Of all sentiments, pride is the most difficult to fake.”
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Barbey D’Aurevills: “It is that which we don’t understand that we try to explain.”
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Paul Léautaud: “I believe in dictionaries.”
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Monday, March 05, 2007
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FROM MY DIARY
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For two years a best seller in the Arab world, the YACOUBIAN BUILDING by Alaa Al Aswany is now available in English. In a glowing review of this novel in the SPECTATOR I read that the building of the title is named after Hagop Yacoubian, “an Egyptian millionaire and doyen of Cairo’s Armenian community.” The building itself is described as “a ten-storey block of apartments in Suleiman Basha Street.” I would like to hear from anyone who may know more about this fellow countryman.
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To policeman, lawyers, and judges, the word murder does not have the same meaning as it does to the victims’ family. Something similar could be said of our Turcocentric pundits and the word genocide. In their writing the word is depersonalized and despoiled of its original meaning. It is almost as if our pundits were collaborating with denialists by minimizing the seriousness of the charge.
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To be effectively brainwashed means to be totally unaware of the fact.
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Paul Valéry: “A painter should not paint what he sees, but what will be seen.” I think of Gertrude Stein in her old age looking like Picasso’s portrait of her in her younger days; and of Marlon Brando studying Renaissance paintings for expressions and body postures.
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Victor Hugo: “Some people have libraries the way eunuchs have harems.”
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Tuesday, March 06, 2007
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BETTE’S COMPLAINT,
AMONG OTHER THINGS
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When two readers insulted me, a third moved in for the kill by saying: “If one man calls you an ass, you may ignore him. But if two men call you an ass, buy a saddle.” And I couldn’t help thinking: Behold a self-satisfied ass and compulsive liar who pretends to enjoy universal popularity just because his mother loves him.
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A good slogan that speaks to the gut is a hundred times more effective that a thousand irrefutable arguments that speak to the brain.
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One of Philip Larkin’s lines reads, “groping back to bed after a piss.” Now, that’s what I call real poetry. As for “the eternal snows of Mount Ararat,” Turks can have it.
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In the same way that bad things happen to good people, bad people happen to good ideas. The nobler the idea or ideology or belief system, the more repulsive perverts it will attract – from Christianity and the Inquisition to Marxism and Stalin.
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Denis Diderot: “You may ask me to search for the truth, but not to find it.”
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Bette Davis in her old age as quoted in Penelope Mortimer’s memoirs: “I haven’t had a f*** in ten years.”
#
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
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ON ARMENIAN SELF-ESTEEM,
AMONG OTHER THINGS
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If he is a loudmouth imbecile and enjoys throwing his weight around, he must be an Armenian. Please note that I am talking about myself now, or rather, the way I am perceived by some of my readers who invariably ascribe my failings to my identity as an Armenian. The implication being, had I been a Patagonian or Hottentot, I would have none of these defects. So much for Armenian self-esteem…
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I once met a patriotic Armenian whose only source of wisdom was popular Turkish sayings. Which reminds me of Zarian’s observation, “even their filth is picked up from alien gutters.”
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In an undemocratic or pseudo-democratic state or community, the people are like fish in a tank: they think they are free because they can’t see the walls. Freedom, real freedom, is not to do this, that, or the other. Freedom means participation in power.
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Balzac: “There are two kinds of fools: speaking fools, and silent fools. The silent are more tolerable.”
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George Braque: “Truth exists. One can invent only lies.”

Thursday, March 01, 2007
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WHEN GOOD PEOPLE BEHAVE BADLY
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Some of my Turkish friends are outraged that their fellow countrymen stand accused of having committed unspeakable acts against innocent and unarmed civilians. To them I say, don’t take it so hard. Some of the most civilized people on earth – from Golden-Age Greeks (5th-century BC) and more recently to Germans – have been guilty of such acts. Most Turks may indeed be decent folk but that doesn’t and cannot alter the fact that raising and running an empire has at no time been an activity compatible with decency. Remember, even Mahatma Gandhi at one point called British rule in India “satanic,” and satanic is how the powerful appear to the powerless. As for the powerless themselves: on the day the British quit India, millions of innocent Hindus were massacred by Muslims, and vice versa. Which may suggest that if you give power to the powerless, they too will commit satanic acts; which is also why I have consistently maintained that if the Ottoman Empire had been an Armenian Empire, and the Turks had been a minority within that empire, the chances are we would have done to them what they did to us. Man is not only capable of behaving like a predatory beast in the jungle, but also doing so in the name of a loving, merciful, and compassionate god. Figure that one out if you can.
#
Friday, March 02, 2007
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FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
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Sometimes when one is right on one level one may be wrong on another. Life or reality is more accommodating to contradictions than logic and the human mind.
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When two versions of the past are in conflict, it is self-serving to believe the version that is more flattering to our ego.
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Another way to define a coward: “One who prefers propaganda to truth.”
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One of the easiest things in life is to confuse what we should think and feel with what we really think and feel.
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The world is full of disappointed people because they trusted their friends and mistrusted their enemies.
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There is such a thing as being too self-righteous to be right.
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To the oversensitive person, every encounter with reality can be a traumatic experience.
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Whenever I take myself too seriously someone is sure to call me an idiot.
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Valéry Larbaud: “Affairs begin in champagne and end in chamomile.”
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Eugene Goodheart: “The cure for loneliness is solitude.”
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Anatole France: “Without irony, the world would be like a forest without birds.”
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Saturday, March 03, 2007
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FRACTIONS
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For a long time I thought Armenians were incapable of committing certain acts because they were more civilized than Turks, Kurds, Arabs, Muslims in general, Gypsies, Jews, Japs, Greeks, Germans, Americans, Russians…in short, the rest of the world. I know now that we all swim in the same soup. We are what the world made us and the world is not a nice place inhabited by nice folk. And whenever I hear a Turk saying, when others speak about them they lie, and when they speak about themselves they speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, I know I am in the presence of someone who knows little about the world and even less about himself and his fellow men.
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In a court of law, when a witness is caught in a lie, his entire testimony becomes suspect even if there is evidence to suggest he speaks the truth. Which is why when someone makes an absurd assertion, as I did about Armenians when I was a dupe, forever after what he says is tainted the way a perjurious witness’s testimony is.
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It is a sure symptom of immaturity and insecurity to identify oneself with a group, be it a political party, a tribe, a nation, a race or religion. No one can speak for another or explain why he behaved as he did. When Freud, Adler, and Jung analyzed the human psyche, they began with their own: the first emphasized sex, the second power, and the third myths and archetypes. In other words, each saw only a fraction of the whole. Who was right and who wrong? They may have been right as far as the fraction goes, but wrong about the whole; thus proving that the human mind is better at dealing with fractions. But “a fraction of the truth,” is how propaganda is defined. The question we should ask at this point is: when one is wrong about oneself, can he be right about anyone else?
#

Sunday, February 25, 2007
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BARBARIANS WITHIN THE GATE
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To civilize a barbarian is easy. What’s hard is to civilize a barbarian who thinks he is better than you. I am willing to concede that our Turcocentric pundits may know more about Turks than I do, but I know something about us that they may not, namely, we are not all as civilized as we think we are and, which is worse, there are those among us who don’t seem to be favorably disposed towards civilization.
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DISAPPOINTMENT
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We are disappointed in people because we cannot be objective about them, which means that the source of disappointment is not them but us.
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HYENAS
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There is a type of reader who follows you from a safe distance hoping you will stumble, fall, and break your neck so that he can feast on your carcass,
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FIRST AND LAST IMPRESSIONS
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My first impression of Canada: I thought I had landed on an alien planet. I now feel that way when I visit an Armenian community center.
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ON THE ART OF WRITING
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I will tell you all I know about writing provided you promise to ignore and forget everything I say. What matters in writing is not following in someone else’s footsteps but in finding your own path.
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I LOVE BRAHMS
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After a visit and on his way out, Brahms would say, “I apologize to anyone I may have failed to insult.”
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ON COPS
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Charles-Louis Philippe: “It is practically impossible to speak to a policeman without seeming to lie to him.”
#
Monday, February 26, 2007
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EXPLAINING THE INCOMPREHENSIBLE
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For 600 years Armenians and Turks lived side by side in the same country, breathed the same air, ate the same food, and spoke the same language, with only one difference: Turks did these things as masters and Armenians as slaves. For 600 years Turks had their way with us, so much so that they think they can now convince us to believe the Genocide is a figment of our imagination.
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Turks cannot understand Armenians because they continue to think as masters and they expect Armenians to behave as slaves.
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Being subservient to Turks for 600 years! I cannot imagine a worse nightmare, except perhaps being subservient to Armenians for 6 minutes. That’s because it is one thing to be slaves to masters and another to be slaves to former slaves.
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Turks may begin to understand Armenians only if they imagine themselves to have been subservient to Armenians for 600 years, for which they may need an imagination of Shakespearian cast.
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As masters, Turks think it is not up to slaves to question their conduct or integrity. So that if the master rapes and murders one of his slaves and afterwards asserts the slave died of natural causes, the surviving slaves in his household have no choice but to corroborate his testimony. Not to do so would amount to mutiny and a capital offense. Hence, Hrant Dink’s execution.
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After the Will of Allah comes the will of the master. And the Will of Allah is to the master what the will of the master is to the slave.
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To convince Turks they are guilty of genocide is as hard as convincing a Stalinist (and our chic Bolsheviks) to believe Stalin was wrong and his innocent victims (all 25 million of them, give and take a million or two) were right; or to convince a jihadist to believe that he is on the wrong warpath.
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As far as the average Turk goes, the Ottoman Empire is not dead but very much alive – if only in his own heart; in the same way that in the heart of every good Christian Jesus not only lives but also saves.
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If you want to know more about masters and slaves, Hegel is your man. As far as I know Hegel did not write a single line about Turks and Armenians but he had a great deal to say about masters and slaves, and what he had to say is just about the best thing I have read about Turks and Armenians.
#
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
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ONCE MORE ON IDENTITY
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Identity is one of those concepts about which you can say anything you want and get away with it provided you preach to the converted. Speaking for myself, I see my identity as a burden, or the final stage of a succession of tragedies, degradation, lies, blunders, and above all, futile efforts to misrepresent them as triumphs of endurance, nobility, perseverance, strength, dedication to principles…in short, not defeats but moral victories. If true, we should be grateful to our enemies, because if it weren’t for them, we wouldn’t have become the paragons of virtue we pretend to be.
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The very same people who at the turn of the last century believed if we rise against the Turks we will be rewarded, now believe if we corner them into pleading guilty to the charge of genocide we will ditto. Even when some dreams turn into nightmares, daydreamers will continue to engage in self-deception.
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There are those who don’t like me.
I don’t understand them.
Others like me.
I understand them even less.
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He lived in fear of death all his life and as he was dying he thought living had been infinitely harder.
#
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
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THE DEMANDS OF PATRIOTISM
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It is an unfortunate fact that the demands made on all of us by patriotism are stronger than the demands of truth, perhaps because all state-sponsored educational systems emphasize god and country at the expense of objectivity and honesty.
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Once upon a time I too was infatuated with my own ignorance. So much so that, whenever I consider my past convictions, I feel like digging a hole and burying myself in it.
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Some of my Turkish friends are disappointed in me because I refuse to accept the fact that the Genocide is a figment of our collective imagination. Because I have been critical of our political leadership, these Turkish friends assume I am the kind of Turcophile who thinks, as admirable specimens of humanity, Turks can do no wrong and are therefore as white as the driven snow.
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I may question everything our side says but I have no reason whatever to question the testimony of such pro-Turkish historians as Lord Kinross, Bernard Lewis, and Arnold Toynbee (among many others) – and I don’t mean the young Toynbee who began his career as a bureaucrat in the belly of the British imperial machine, but the mature Toynbee who acquired Turkish friends, studied the Turkish language, and concluded that Armenian territorial demands at the turn of the last century had been totally unjustified. Even so he at no time questioned or doubted the reality of the Genocide and the ruthless brutality with which it was carried out.
#

Thursday, February 22, 2007
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WHITE TRASH I
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In an interview published in ESQUIRE James Watson, the DNA biologist, raises the following question: “Why do we have a government that’s run by rich trash?” His answer: “Because they’ve used their money to buy the presidency.”
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WHITE TRASH II
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We share this in common with Turks: we think to apologize is for weaklings and losers. I remember, during the Soviet era, whenever I dared to criticize the regime, I would receive many hostile phone calls and letters questioning my patriotism. When the Soviet Empire collapsed, none of these gentlemen wrote or called to say he had been wrong. And I will never forget the letter written by one of these chic Bolsheviks, a white-haired elder statesman with a heart condition, which was so offensive that I was too stunned to reply in kind; and for a change, luck was on my side, because shortly thereafter I read his obituary. Had I retaliated, I would have felt partly responsible for his unexpected demise.
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WHITE TRASH III
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We may have a better chance to come to terms with Turks on the day we show a willingness to listen to their side of the story. I say this in view of the fact that they have already gone as far as conceding that they will gladly plead guilty as charged provided we don’t escalate our demands. Probably a bogus condition, because they are smart enough to know that, since we are incapable of reaching a consensus on any issue, they can always rely on an extremist minority to reject all preconditions.
#
Friday, February 23, 2007
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LIONS AND APES
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Victor Hugo: “Imitate nothing and no one. A lion that copies another lion is an ape.”
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All brainwashed people behave like apes.
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I don’t mind admitting that I was brainwashed as surely and thoroughly as any Bolshevik or Nazi; and if you think you were not, it may be because they have done a better job on you. Either that or you are too infatuated with your fiction to relinquish it in exchange of something that will be less flattering to your ego or superego.
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My motto: Suspect everything that is flattering to your vanity.
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If you search for the negative in the positive, you will find it; and that may save you from making an ass of yourself in the future.
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Anything that removes or distances us from the reality principle is to be discarded. To put it differently: our choice is between reality and Alice’s Wonderland. And remember: reality can be more fantastic than any fantasy. Reality turns against us only if we ignore its inflexible laws.
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What makes us trust our political leaders is not love of truth but love of country. The degree of patriotism in a man is relative to the spread of the real estate he owns. There are entire continents today populated by rejects, heretics, exiles, and white trash. A reasonable man is one who places love of truth above love of real estate, that is to say, dirt.
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When it comes to politics and religion, every assertion is open to contradiction. When two sets of apes or brainwashed people maintain some contradictions are capital offenses, the result will be war and massacre.
#
Saturday, February 24, 2007
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REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS
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To achieve excellence is easy. What’s hard is discovering the specific endeavor in which you are destined to excel.
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Someday, somewhere everything will be explained, by which time we may no longer be in need of explanations.
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Readers are less interested to know how honest or wise you are and more interested to know how dishonest and foolish you have been. What’s the use of being positive in your assessment of yourself when others have an eye only for the negative?
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There was a time when I wrote nothing but fiction. I continue to write fiction today but only to expose it.
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To write against propaganda is to expose fiction.
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Our national prestige is a fiction of our collective imagination.
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Both dupes and charlatans live in a world of fiction where they imagine themselves to be not only honest and wise but also patriotic.
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There is more imagination in conspiracy theories than in science fiction.
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The Goncourt Brothers: “To believe in nothing is as bad as any religion.”
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Victor Hugo: “Crowds are good only for rioting. For a revolution you need people.”
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Raymond Queneau: “Humor tries to purge the idiotic from great and noble sentiments.”
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Raymond Aron: “Every belief system begins as a heresy.”
#

Sunday, February 18, 2007
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DEBUNKING MYTHS AND OTHER SCANDALS
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What could be more misleading, not to say arrogant, than for political leaders identifying themselves with the nation. They have more reason to identify themselves with the enemy, especially when they promise heaven and deliver hell.
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Slaughters don’t happen in a vacuum and slaughterhouses don’t exist in the middle of nowhere. Where there is a slaughterhouse there will also be shepherds leading the sheep to butchers.
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Political leaders add insult to injury when they have the temerity to say we should judge them by their intentions, even when their intentions were based on lies and illusions, the biggest lie being that they deserve our trust because they know better what’s good for us.
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Inside every whore there is a Cinderella whose prince failed to show up. That is a tragedy deserving our sympathy. But the tragedy becomes a farce when this very same whore, now an aged bordello madam, identifies herself as a virgin.
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The older I grow the more disappointments I accumulate. For a long time I believed experience combined with the wisdom of old age would make life less unbearable. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Almost every word I read these days, except “the” and “a,” has an unpleasant association.
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Speechifiers and sermonizers speak of certainties. My own certainties –assuming I have any – are buried beneath so many layers of doubts and questions that they might as well be beyond reach. Which is why I will never speechify or sermonize. I even find the prospect repellent.
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The best way to understand others is to examine one’s own heart, which is something self-assessed admirable specimens of humanity are incapable of doing.
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No one can be as ruthless and wrong as he who places his own narrow self-interests above the interests of his fellow men. Aberrations from massacres to verbal abuse stem from this egocentric view of life.
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One good thing about the verbal abuse of imbeciles is that they all sound alike, so that after reading the first line or even word I don’t feel the need to read the rest.
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Monday, February 19, 2007
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Because I don’t particularly care for loudmouth imbeciles who pretend to be smart, they say I don’t like Armenians.
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Good explanations are not final answers, only small steps in their general direction.
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To be dependent on the goodwill and understanding of another is to live in oppression.
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It is not that he has a low opinion of you; rather, he has a very high opinion of himself.
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Man doesn’t hate the truth, only those who speak it.
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I have yet to see a politician, even an honest one, who did not sound like a compulsive liar.
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Amiel: “One becomes a charlatan without knowing it.”
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Sainte-Beuve: “Celebrity might as well be synonymous with prostitution.”
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Lamartine: “Homeland: a structure that stands on the ashes of the dead.”
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Tuesday, February 20, 2007
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ON PROPAGANDA AND
RELATED ATROCITIES
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On the radio this morning: “Censorship: When the powerful tell the less powerful what to say.”
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Where there is power, there will also be propaganda.
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Do we practice censorship? If you ask this question to a dupe or charlatan, you will never get the right answer.
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It is the heights of naiveté to think that only the enemy engages in propaganda.
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Alice completely divorced herself from reality by following a rabbit into a hole. The difference between Alice and the propagandist who believes in his own propaganda is that the propagandist becomes a permanent resident of Wonderland.
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If we are alienated, it may be because our thought processes have been contaminated by propaganda.
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Propaganda alienates people by divorcing them from reality, which is also what happens to compulsive liars when they start believing in their own lies. This may explain the short-lived and disastrous regimes of Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin. As they became more and more dependent on their own lies, they further removed themselves from reality and its inflexible laws, one of them being, you cannot fool all the people, including yourself, all the time.
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Wednesday, February 21, 2007
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ON A QUINTESSENTIALLY
ARMENIAN ABERRATION
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We have all met the arrogant ignoramus who, just because he knows something about Armenians you don’t know, says with an air of self-satisfaction bordering on triumph: “And you call yourself an Armenian?” Asserting superiority even on flimsiest of grounds must be a quintessentially Armenian need. One reason why we have allowed the Genocide to become a collective addiction is that it allows us a sense of moral superiority. There is

Thursday, February 15, 2007
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DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES
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Maurice Barres: “…the magnificent self-assurance of imbeciles.”
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You can see the mountaintop from the valley, but the higher you climb and the closer you get to it, the less visible it becomes. After a while you may even be justified in suspecting it was a mirage. Something similar may happen to our ambitions.
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Childhood dreams have a tendency to become the nightmares of old age. Had I been a carpenter or bus driver I would have been more useful to my fellow men. Take it from me: if your ambition is to be a writer, I suggest you write to entertain. The masses want to be amused not to be reminded of their moral and intellectual bankruptcy.
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Tell a self-assessed smart man he is no better than a dupe and make an enemy for life.
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The author of a book, titled THE END OF DETROIT, on the radio this morning referred to recent development in the American auto industry as an “existential crisis.” There was a time when no self-respecting American pundit would have dared to use the word existential in a serious context. It took fifty years for the academics to catch up. What is the difference between a crisis and an existential crisis? Nothing. But the qualifier existential seems to lend the word crisis an authority it doesn’t have on its own.
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Don’t expect reality to catch up with you. It is you who must do the catching up.
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Marquis de Sade: “More often than not charity is a vice of pride rather than a virtue of the soul.”
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Friday, February 16, 2007
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SUMMING UP
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What can I tell you that you don’t already know or suspect but pretend otherwise? What can I add to what far better men than myself have already said?
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When asked if I dislike Armenians, I reply that I don’t know all of them. If I give the impression that I don’t particularly care for them it may be because I have never cared for dupes who pretend to be smart, or charlatans who will say and do anything for minimum wage (which happen to be two of my own youthful transgressions). When it comes to judging my fellow countrymen, I rely more on the judgment of our writers as opposed to pseudo-pundits, speechifiers, and sermonizers whose aim is not to speak the truth as they see it but to flatter their audience on whose goodwill and financial support they depend — and as everyone knows by now, brown-nosing pays and criticism leads to the poorhouse.
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When I speak of writers, I don’t mean poets who sang the eternal snows of Mount Ararat and the nobility of our “sun-flavored words,” but writers, who unlike me, lived among Armenians all their lives and wrote about and for them in Armenian. By contrast I live in the middle of nowhere, write in English, and I don’t go out of my way to meet them.
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When I read writers like Baronian, Odian, Massikian, Shahnour, and Zarian (especially the Zarian of the posthumously published diaries and notebooks) I cannot help thinking, yes, we have somehow managed to survive, but to what end? – besides lamenting our dead and bragging about our survival? (Do you see the shadow of a contradiction there somewhere?)
*
About our survival: Should we ascribe it to our courage, initiative, solidarity (what solidarity?) adaptability, obstinacy, intelligence (don’t make me laugh!) and other positive factors, or to Turkish inefficiency?
*
We live in a world where there are many more answers than questions, even if most of the answers are wrong. Consider the answers provided by religious and political leaders as a case in point. As for answers provided by science: even when the right answers are available, some people (like flat-earth theorists and astrology buffs) will prefer to believe in the wrong ones.
#
Saturday, February 17, 2007
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FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
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To speak of Genocide recognition as frequently, obsessively, and endlessly as we do is to imply that during more than two thousand years of history our most noteworthy achievement has been allowing ourselves to be butchered like sheep.
*
Claude Bernard: “No one has contributed more to science than frogs.”
*
In biographies of writers, the sentence that sooner or later pops up is “he read everything he could get his hands on.”
*
Major decisions are based on countless little ones that make the major ones inevitable.
*
If you plan to make an omelet, break eggs not windows and heads.
*
Alain: “It is said that the next generations will be harder to govern. I certainly hope so.”
*
Mathurin Regnier: “A wealthy villain is worth more than a poor gentleman.”
*
I question the validity of all my past beliefs and no doubt in the future I will question the validity of my present beliefs of which I have none.
*
Bertolt Brecht: “I don’t trust him. We are friends.”

Sunday, February 11, 2007
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THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM
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When it comes to our identity, the elephant in the room is the Genocide. Whenever Armenians are mention in the foreign press, it’s in connection with the elephant.
*
As a child I was told about our Golden Age in the 5th Century AD, but I was not given an opportunity to draw any sense of identity from it. When I read Dostoevsky at the age of thirteen, I immediately made contact with what it means to be Russian; for the duration I felt more like a Russian than Armenian. Something similar could be said about Philip Roth and Jewishness, Negro spirituals and Negritude, Thomas Mann and German identity.
*
At one time or another I have been fascinated and deeply touched by many cultures, but I am afraid I cannot say the same about Armenian culture notwithstanding the fact that I have written a great deal on the subject, including a textbook titled THE ARMENIANS: THEIR HISTORY AND CULTURE. Speaking of which, on reading the manuscript of this book, I remember my editor complaining: “I don’t get a sense of place.” He probably meant to say identity. In my defense I said that I was not writing a book about Armenia but about Armenians, some of whose most noteworthy achievements – from Byzantine governance to contemporary finance — had been made outside Armenia.
*
The question of Armenian identity came up to me while reading a collection of brief essays and memoirs on Jewish identity titled MATZO BALLS FOR BREAKFAST & OTHER MEMORIES OF GROWNG UP JEWISH by Alan King and Friends (New York, 2004). What does it mean to be Armenian? I regret to say I can’t come up with a clear answer. In Greece where I was born and raised, I knew I was not Greek. In Italy where I studied for five years I never came close to feeling Italian. In Canada where I have spent most of my life and where I also acquired Canadian citizenship (as opposed to being the offspring of stateless Nansen refugees) I know I am not a Canadian, which is neither here nor there because most Canadians don’t know it either. I ask again: What does it mean to be Armenian? What do I have in common with my fellow Armenians, except the awareness that I share a tragedy in our recent past? I grew up hating Turks, but I see that now not as a positive but a negative, something to get over with as opposed to something to be nursed and hoarded, which is what our Ottomanized Turcophile pundits encourage us to do. There is nothing Armenian about being victimized by an oppressive regime. Oppressed people — from American Indians to Untouchable Indians — are a dime a dozen. Massacres from the Golden Age of Greek history (5th Century BC) to the present, have been a constant in human history.
*
Perhaps being Armenian means, for me at least, to be open to all cultures and to reject all forms of tyranny and barbarism. And when I speak of barbarism I don’t mean the barbarism of our enemies, but the barbarism that is within all of us.
#
Monday, February 12, 2007
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ON FASCISM
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Georges Bernanos: “The strength and weakness of dictators is rooted in their pact with the despair of the people.”
*
Hitler relied on German defeat of World War I; Bush on 9/11; and our leadership on the Genocide. Hitler committed suicide; Bush is committing slow-motion political suicide; and our leadership…: why is it that whenever the subject of our leadership comes up, I feel an irresistible urge to go down on my knees and pray – pray not for them, but for the people…I almost said, for their victims.
*
Every day I make a list of my failings to remind myself that I have nothing to brag about.
*
He knows nothing but pretends to know better: portrait of an Armenian simpleton.
*
George Sand: “The way to the simple truth is through many complexities.”
#

Thursday, February 08, 2007
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CONFESSIONS OF AN ABOMINABLE NO MAN
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It is not enough to have all the right arguments on your side, you must also adapt them to the occasion; and if you are dealing from a position of weakness, you are expected to flatter your adversary into thinking he is right and to apologize for making a nuisance of yourself. If diplomacy, etiquette, and brown-nosing are not your forte, avoid criticizing those in power, and their flunkies, hirelings, supporters, friends, and relatives.
*
SPIRIT OF CONTRADICTION
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If you make an obvious assertion, such as “the sun rises in the east,” or “two plus two make four,” someone is sure to contradict you. Anyone who has ever written for Armenians is familiar with this phenomenon.
*
CAUSE FOR CELEBRATION
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Once in a while a reader who has engaged in Internet hooliganism writes to apologize. This is not something that happens every day or year. As a matter of fact, they are such rare occurrences that I am tempted to mark them on my calendar so that I may celebrate their anniversaries.
*
LINES TO REMEMBER
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Henry de Montherlant: “Some people acquire a sense of justice only after they have suffered an injustice.”
*
Raymond Queneau: “There is deception in all action, as there is error in all thought.”
*
Henri Bosco: “Great decisions are not made, they make themselves.”
#
Friday, February 09, 2007
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IRREFUTABLE ARGUMENTS
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Our partisans have three powerful arguments against their critics: (one) you are too young to know any better; (two) you are too old to be up to date with recent developments; and (three) you must be a member of the opposition.
*
UNDERSTANDING GOD
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God is too large a concept to fit into anyone’s pocket. If you think God is on your side, He is sure to abandon you.
*
ON FALLIBILITY
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Nothing can be as easy and natural as being wrong – wrong about God, wrong about oneself, wrong about the world, wrong about everything.
*
IQ
***************
Only idiots brag about how smart they are.
*
HEAVEN AND HELL
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Heaven is a place reserved only for those who have been through hell.
*
SAVING FACE
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If you are out to save face, the gutter is not the best place to do it from.
*
TURKISH PROVERB
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“Eshek khoshavnan ne annar?” (What does a jackass know about stewed raisins?)
*
LINES WORTH REMEMBERING
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Simone de Beauvoir: “If one lives long enough one sees all victories turn into defeats.”
*
Alphonse de Lamartine: “If you miss one person, the whole world seems empty.”
*
Jules Supervielle: “I am a perfectly honest man. I disgust myself completely.”
*
Francois de la Rochefoucauld: “We get so used to hiding our feelings from others that we end up hiding them from ourselves.”
#
Saturday, February 10, 2007
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AFTER MY OWN HEART
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Francois de la Rochefoucauld: “Sometimes one is as different from oneself as from others.”
*
Alain: “An error by Descartes is better than a truth by a pedant.”
*
Pierre Mendes France: “Democracy is a state of mind.”
*
George Bataille: “I believe truth has only one visage: that of a violent contradiction.”
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Gustave Le Bon: “Sooner or later a crime committed by all becomes a right.”
*
Alfred de Vigny: “Something of the student remains in all professors.”
*
Albert Camus: “If we fail to reconcile justice with liberty, we fail in all things.”
*
Flaubert: “We should get rid of all flags – they have been soiled with too much blood and merde.”
*
Paul Valéry: “I say this without any hesitation: a university degree is the mortal enemy of culture.”
#

Sunday, February 04, 2007
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REFLECTIONS
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An Armenian bears two crosses, and the heavier of the two is not his own.
*
If talk is cheap and if “he who speaks does not know,” when, O when shall I acquire the wisdom of silence?
*
My critical remarks may damage our prestige in the eyes of the world, I am reminded once in a while. To which I can only say, what prestige? Most people are not even aware of our existence or, if they are, they tend to confuse us with Romanians and Arameans. To the rest we might as well be an open book and a political cliché. If they flatter us it may be because we can be of some use to them. Which means their opinions of us is so low that they think they can manipulate us with phony sentiments. I don’t call that prestige, I call that an insult.
*
When does hatred of the enemy end and self-hatred begin? Muslims in the Middle East today hate one another more than they hate the West, and judging by the venom in our discussions forums, letters to the editor, and our recent history, how different are we?
*
Honorat de Bueil: “Nature is jealous of our prosperity. She allots a longer lifespan to thorns than to roses.”
#
Monday, February 05, 2007
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GUESSING GOD
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If God exists, He wants us to go about our business as though He didn’t. Gone are the days of the Old Testament when He micromanaged human affairs. No more Burning Bushes, Ave-Maria archangels, and prophets. His message to mankind seems to be: If you don’t make use of the brain I have given you, don’t bother me with your problems.
*
What if our ancestors were smarter than we are? Mention if you can a modern figure comparable to Confucius, Buddha, Socrates, and Jesus. What if the writers of the Old Testament were smart enough to know they were writing science fiction? What if a thousand years from now mankind will study the Old Testament the way we study books on Greek mythology today?
*
When speaking of God, it is wiser to ask questions than to answer them. Or, like Buddha, treat Him as though He did not exist.
*
“Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord in vain.” Buddha may be said to have been the only major religious leader who took this commandment so literally that Buddhism is the only major belief systems that is atheist.
#
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
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CANADIAN ENCOUNTERS
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The first time I said something remotely critical about an unimportant aspect of Canadian life, an elegantly dressed and attractive lady said: “If you don’t like it here, why don’t you go back where you came from?”
*
When I asked her if she had a favorite painter, a local artist replied: “Eengrass.” It took me a while to realize she had meant Ingres.
*
When after a long interval I met an old friend in the street and asked about his mother, whom I had met on several occasions, he replied: “We don’t know where she is. She ran away with a younger man and we haven’t heard from her since.”
*
A CANADIAN IN ITALY
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“How do you say pizza in Italian?”
*
PATRIOTS
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Our partisans don’t like my kind of writing. They think I insult Armenishness. And what’s even more absurd, they consider themselves competent judges, even though they have more skeletons in their closet than breathing specimens with brains in their living room. Only utter despair can lead a man to believe in his own lies.
*
I’VE BEEN READING
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Barby d’Aurevilly: “The crimes of the most advanced civilizations are greater than those committed by the most backward barbarians.”
*
Blaise Cendrars: “It is in the very things that they share that people differ the most from one another.”
*
Sartre: “Half victim, half accomplice, like the rest of mankind.”
*
Paul Valéry: “To believe that one understands is a very dangerous state of mind.”
*
Balzac: “All power is a permanent conspiracy.”
#
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
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QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
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Mention an unsolved mystery and someone is sure to spin a conspiracy theory.
*
Ask an unanswerable question and someone is sure to come up with the wrong answer.
*
People who hate fiction don’t see any contradiction in the fiction that is at the base of their belief system.
*
When it comes to understanding, man seems to operate on the verge of starvation: any answer, no matter how untenable and absurd, is better than none.
*
A priest once slapped me because I asked the wrong question. I no longer remember the question, but I remember the slap, which was no answer.
*
MEN AND WOMEN
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To women, men are the most universal sources of disappointment. Did you know that the Chinese word for husband is “go