arabaliozian

Saturday, November 17, 2012************************************ INTERVIEW (XV)******************************************* CONTRADICTIONS******************************** Q: What are some of your favorite contradictions or absurdities?A: Where to begin? Imams controlling women’s fashion. Popes getting involved in the bedrooms of the nation. Armenians who love their country but hate their fellow countrymen. Americans who are against abortion but for war. Academics with the mindset of Oriental carpet dealers. Men who pretend to belong to a superior race but who don’t even qualify as the scum of the earth.Q: How do you explain these contradictions?A: Only one possible explanation:Homo sapiens is full of sh*t .#Friday, November 16, 2012********************************* INTERVIEW (XVI)********************************* MYTHS******************************Q: Shall we discuss more of our fallacies, misconceptions, and contradictions?A: How many?Q: One or two.A: How about three or four?Q: Deal!A: We are few. We are survivors. We owe our survival to the generosity of our benefactors and the dedication of our clergy…Q: Not true?A: Lies!Q: Aren’t we few – compared to Turks?A: God did not create many Turks and few Armenians. We are not few. It is our assimilation rate that is high. And if Turks are many it’s because they are a mosaic of nations, like Americans. I once met a lady who spoke Armenian but identified herself as a Turk. She must have had an Armenian grandmother. There are thousands, perhaps even millions, like her in Turkey today. Turks are if not half-Armenian than half Greek, Albanian, Jewish, Assyrian, Arab, and so on. But then all nations are mosaics,Q: Including Armenians?A: Yes.Q: What do you say to Armenians who trace their ancestry all the way back to the Bagradunis and Mamikonians?A: I say there never was such a thing as a pure-blooded king, emperor, czar, or dictator. Once upon time they were all ambitious upstarts and bastards, very much like our own Byzantine emperors. Our Mamikonians were of Chinese descent, according to Khorenatsi; and our Bagratunis identified themselves as Jews. Pure blood is a myth created by charlatans and perpetuated by racists like Hitler who was not German but Austrian.Q: What about the generosity of our benefactors? Shouldn’t we be grateful to them? A: No, in so far as by supporting one side against another they legitimize and perpetuate divisions. The same applies to our political bosses and bishops. They might as well be foreign agents whose secret mission is to bankrupt the nation – morally as well as financially.A: Who profits by our divisions? Q: Those in power. We are dying the death of a thousand self-inflicted cuts. Hence the myth, we are survivors.#FROM MY NOTEBOOKS************************************** When an Armenian is goodhe is very good;but when he is badhe is horrid.*Between a proud Armenianand a humble human being,which would you choose?*Why is it that some very smart Armenians use their brains to speak and behave like inbred morons?*Our history is clear on one point: we love our writers provided they are dead and buried. As they used to say in the Old West: “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”*I understand subservience to Turks – they were ruthless and bloodthirsty buggers. I understand subservience to Russians – ditto. But subservience to Armenians? Does anyone have an answer?*If I were a schoolteacher I would begin every lesson with the words: “Remember to say I don’t know and I don’t understand at least once every day.”*I once heard a Kurd on the radio speaking about Kurdish identity and culture the same way that an Armenian does about Armenian identity and culture. As a matter of fact I thought he was an Armenian until the end when the announcer identified him as a Kurd.#

Sunday, November 11, 2012*************************************** INTERVIEW (XI)****************************** ON HISTORY AND HISTORIANS******************************************** Q: How do you define a good historian?A: A historian who is critical of his own tribe, nation, or civilization.Q: Do such historians exist?A: Of course. In the 20th century there are Spengler of THE DECLINE OF THE WEST and Toynbee of A STUDY OF HISTORY.Q: Don’t they have their own critics?A: They probably have more critics than all the others combined.Q: How do you explain that?A: The obvious answer is, it may be because they have more readers than the others.Q: What about us? Do we have historians we can trust?A: We do have some historians who have been critical of our rulers and institutions. Khorenatsi comes to mind, not so much his HISTORY but his LAMENTATION.Q: And more recently?A: Most of our historians today rely more on official documents and eyewitness accounts and less on their own narrative hoping thus to avoid charges of nationalism. Such historians ignore the fact that both documents and testimonies – legally called utterances – are also vulnerable to bias.Q: Whom do we believe?A: Let’s leave belief to imams and bishops. Trust would be a more accurate word.Q: Whom do we trust then?A: If as Armenians we were to trust more our own historians, we may have to confront Turks who very much like us trust their own and reject all others as deceivers.Q: Are we to infer from what you say that we should question the reality of our genocide?A: To question it, probably not. To modify it, maybe.Q: Modify it in what sense? How?A: Only in the sense that it may not have been murder one (cold-blooded and premeditated) but somewhere between murder two and manslaughter.Q: What do you believe?A: Let’s say I tend to support the version that will allow both sides to compromise and develop a consensus. I am afraid truth and justice are utopian concepts beyond the reach of the human race to which some of us may or may not belong.Q: So many “may”s and so many doubts.A: If there is one thing about which I can speak with a minimum degree of certainty is that certainties are the source of all evil. Show me a man who believes in his own certainties and I will show a charlatan in cahoots with the devil.# INTERVIEW (XII)****************************************ON THE IRRESISTIBLE CHARM OF ARMENIANS*********************************************** Q: “The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable.” Can you guess the source of this quotation?A: Oscar Wilde on the English aristocracy.Q: Wrong! Ara Baliozian on Armenians. What did you mean by that?A: I had in mind ghazetajis and their avid readers whose favorite subject is Turks.Q: “An ignoramus who is an expert on any given subject.”A: That sounds like me and I will not retract it. Every other day I have to deal with a reader whose sole ambition in life seems to be to assert his superior knowledge and understanding; but whose worldview has not changed since he was exposed to the platitudes of elementary schoolteachers and parish priests.Q: You don’t like Armenians very much, do you?A: I love the overwhelming majority of Armenians who are alienated, assimilated, and stay away from our community centers, churches, and interminable internecine conflicts;and I loathe people (regardless of nationality) who are convinced a good man is one who kisses ass – and kissing ass has been our destiny ever since we became subservient to foreign tyrants.Q: This ought to arouse our compassion rather than contempt.A: Have you seen Armenians at banquets? – the way they eat, sing and dance and the way they listen to the verbal garbage dished out by speechifiers who are out to sell them still another book on the massacres? But let a write make an objective observation and they cannibalize him. I am not complaining. I consider myself a lucky man. I have survived. Far better men than myself were butchered because they were betrayed to the authorities, and when they were not betrayed they were insulted, ignored, and starved. Any more questions?Q: …A: And now let us pray.# INTERVIEW (XIII)******************************************* CRITICS************************ Q: What’s your answer to those who say you repeat yourself?A: Stop reading me.Q: What about, you are consistently negative?A: It is our reality that is negative. I would be engaging in propaganda if I were to misrepresent it.Q: You write about Armenians but you are not an Armenian writer because you write in English.A: Armenian, English: these are only labels. Literature is not a national enterprise. Dostoevsky is unthinkable without Dickens. Gandhi was influenced by Ruskin and Thoreau (an English and an American writer respectively). Chekhov was influenced by Maupassant, and our own Zohrab by Chekhov. Naregatsi is unthinkable without the Bible. Plato and Marx shaped the literature of many nations.Q: You had an Armenian education. Why do you write in English?A: When I came to Canada I soon realized that no one was remotely interested in an Armenian writer, not even Armenians.Q: Zarian wrote in Armenian in America.A: That was during the Golden Age of Armenian-American literature. In my time we had already entered the Garbage Age. But even Zarian had trouble surviving in America. Not only did they refuse to publish him they also spread the rumor that he was a madman. He returned to Soviet Armenia where he was ignored and murdered – or so he believed until the day he died.Q: Speaking of Soviets: Why do you call some of your critics commissars?A: Because they issue guidelines. Individuals who would never dare to tell a bus driver or a plumber or a garbage collector how to go about their business take it upon themselves to tell me what and how to write. For every writer we are blessed with two or even twenty-two commissars. Mart bidi ch’ellank.Q: Why don’t you write more like Saroyan?A: Saroyan wrote what he thought and felt. So do I. Beyond that we share nothing in common. He was a great writer; I am a total and hopeless mediocrity. But tell me: what has Saroyan changed in our communities? Near the end of his life, when invited to visit an Armenian community center in Detroit, he said no thanks. Last time I was invited to an Armenian community center I promised to return in twenty-five years. You might say that’s another thing I share with Saroyan.Q: What’s that?A: An intolerance of shish-kebab and pilaf joints.Q: What’s your favorite food?A: Bread and olives.#INTERVIEW (XIV)***************************************** TURCOCENTRISM*********************************** Q: What is Turcocentrism?A: Turcocentrism consists in placing Turks at the center of our consciousness. For 600 years we had no choice in the matter. We have a choice today but we continue to think our central concern is to teach Turks the rules of civilized conduct even as we wallow in our own Ottomanism and Bolshevism.Q: Is there anything we can do about that?A: All problems have solutions and all solutions begin with an awareness of the problem. This is where our politicians and intellectuals have failed us. Intellectuals? Strike that. I should have said academics.Q: What is the difference?A: Academics are first and foremost careerists. They never say anything that may be against their own interests. As for politicians – or rather partisans and panchoonies – their most important project is to brainwash us into thinking we never had it so good because we are in the best of hands.Q: What is the difference between an academic and an intellectual?A: An intellectual is one who dedicates his life to ideas, that is to say, literature.Q: What is literature?A: The art of saying what must be said; the art of understanding and explaining reality. Literature is first and foremost criticism and criticism consists in exposing contradiction.Q: Such as?A: The rich and the poor. The capitalist and the proletarian. The 1% versus the 99%. Job creators versus bloodsuckers.Q: How do we reconcile these contradictions?A: Speaking for myself, I do not consider wealth or money as the source of all evil. The source of all evil is power. Which is why Marxism has also been defined as the capitalism of the state. This is also why the oppressed in communist countries are justified in saying once upon a time they were slaves, they are now slaves of former slaves.#

INTERVIEW (IX)*********************************** ON GENOCIDE RECOGNITION OR TURCOCENTRISM************************************** Q: If you were to condense your message in a single sentence, what would it be?A: We are not who we think we are, neither is the world what we think it is.Q: Isn’t ignorance of the self and the world a more or less universal condition?A: It is, yes, but as always there are degrees of ignorance. In our case it is more rather than less.Q: In what way our understanding of the world is different from anyone else’s? A: To begin with we rely too much on the propaganda of our speechifiers and sermonizers and less on our intellectuals. Case in point: Had we followed Raffi’s advice when he said the Ottoman Empire is no place for us because they have no respect for human life there, we would have avoided the Genocide.Q: How do we explain our exaggerated reliance on propaganda?A: Ignorance or innocence compounded by anti-intellectualism.Q: In what way are we different from Jews, among many others, who suffered similar fates?A: Jews are far ahead of us in their alliances. While Americans are ready to defend them against their enemies in the Middle East, they (Americans) have consistently refused even to acknowledge the reality of our genocide.Q: How do we overcome American anti-Armenianism?A: Not an easy question with an easy answer. All I know is that we are wasting valuable resources on genocide recognition. A genocide is like a city set on a hill; it cannot be hidden or covered up forever. We have many other serious and pressing problems in both the Homeland and the Diaspora. I grew up in a ghetto among survivors. They were less Turcocentric than Armenians in the United States and Canada today.I have every reason to suspect Turcocentrism – the fallacy that all our problems begin and end with Turks – is an illusion promoted by our ruling classes whose central concern is not to demand justice but to cover up their own corruption and incompetence.# INTERVIEW (X)************************************ TWO PROBLEMS**************************** Q: We all agree that we have problems –A: And that’s the only thing we agree on.Q: What we don’t agree on is their solutions even when the solutions make perfect sense. Divisions versus solidarity, for instance, or a free press versus a controlled press. Can you explain that?A: We are a tribal people. Our first loyalty is to the tribe or chief and not the nation which is an abstraction.Q: All nations, or even empires for that matter, begin as tribes and gradually evolve to nations. Why are we an exception to this rule?A: Some say it’s our geography – mountains and valleys, isolation during long winters, over forty more or less mutually incomprehensible dialects.Q: Do you buy that?A: No, I don’t. In the 19th century the Caucasian tribes to the north of us united under Shamyl the Avar and successfully resisted Russian expansion for several decades. But eventually they too were torn asunder by tribal loyalties, treason, and betrayal – a chapter of which is beautifully dramatized by Tolstoy in his novella and final work of fiction titled HADJI MURAD. Our Raffi may indeed be right. What makes Armenian solidarity an unattainable goal is less our geography and more our propensity for treason and betrayal.Q: Second problem, which may well be an extension of the first: a free press versus a controlled press. We all agree that a free press is more democratic and progressive than a controlled press, and yet –A: Ah! “And yet!” the two saddest words in the English language it has been said. The irony here is that our press enjoyed greater freedom in the Ottoman Empire. Baronian and Odian are unthinkable in today’s Armenian-American environment. Baruir Massikian, their only legitimate successor in the 20th-century Armenian diasporadied a thoroughly disappointed, bitter, and angry man. When a delegation of Armenian elders visited his deathbed and appealed to him to leave his considerable wealth – he was a successful lawyer in Egypt, and a bachelor– to the Armenian Educational Foundation, he said he’d much rather leave it to a Cairo bordello.#TO UNDERSTAND ANOTHER IS TO UNDERSTAND MYSELF********************************************** CHINA THROUGH CHINESE EYES************************************************ “How do you see the future of China?”“Fear, worry, deception, distress, collapse.”*“We will die slowly and miserably.”*“No hope for political reform. There will be bloodshed.”*“Idiots will cause more and more people to emigrate.”*“There are too many books to read, too many people to meet, too many fun things to do. China, stay away from me.”*“When the Chinese begin to reflect on their mistakes, then China’s ‘good future’ begins.”*“China’s future will be the opposite of the present.”**Sixty years of systematic brainwashing means that at least two generations of people will continue to suffer from spiritual pollution.”#From NEW STATESMAN (London, 19-25 October, 2012): an issue dedicated to China today.)#

Sunday, November 04, 2012******************************************** INTERVIEW (V): ************************* ON NATIONALISM************************************************ Q: In our first conversation you said you are against ideologies beginning with nationalism. What’s wrong with nationalism?A: To begin with, nationalism divides mankind into them and us, and to do so it invents lies.Q: Is it a lie to say Turks and Azeris are our enemies?A: It is, yes, and an obvious one at that if only because half of them may well be half Armenian; and I doubt very much if there exists a single pure-blooded Armenian today. I have met Armenians who assert they are direct descendants of the Mamikonians, Bagratunis, and Dikran the Great. Q: So have I? What’s wrong with that?A: But none of these gentlemen was Armenian. I suggest nationalists are products of a politically controlled educational system. I further suggest politics and education are mutually exclusive concepts. A politically controlled education may even be said to be the opposite of education because it perverts the meaning of the most important words – such as right and wrong, good and evil, justice and injustice.Q: You lost me there.A: Cases in point. We all know that killing is wrong and yet we are taught to believe killing the enemy in the name of God and Country is not only right but the sacred duty of all law-abiding citizens.Q: But when attacked, what are our options?A: We defend ourselves, of course. We don’t have to be brainwashed to do that. It comes naturally.Q: So you are saying in some cases killing is right?A: I am also saying to kill in self-defense is one thing, to be predisposed to kill another. Eliminate predisposition and you may eliminate half of all wars. Listen, we are not here to solve all of mankind’s problems. If we succeed in taking a single step in the right direction we may earn the right to say, mission accomplished.# INTERVIEW (VI)*************************************** METAPHYSICS************************************ Q: Is death an end or a new beginning?A: Neither.Q: It has to be one or the other.A: Man is a recycling contraption, very much like Planet Earth, the Solar System, the Milky Way, and the Cosmos. The Sun will incinerate our planet and we will end up in a Black Hole and emerge as another galaxy or planet which will evolve a new flora and fauna. Nothing will be added or subtracted. Everything will be recycled.Q: Are you saying metaphysics is physics?A: Exactly! And there are no theories and assumptions in what I am saying. I speak of observable and verifiable facts. If the cosmos were a book, our planetary system would be no better than a comma in it.Q: What is God’s place in your system?A: God is Unknown and Unknowable, and everyone who speaks in His name is either a charlatan or a compulsive liar.Q: What if he believes in what he says?A: In Sartre’s formula: “We may believe that we believe but we don’t believe.”Q: Are you an atheist?A: No! An agnostic. I know my limitations. I don’t claim to know that which I don’t know and have no way of knowing.Q: What about prophets and saints? Were they all charlatans?A: No. I prefer to think of them as men and women who have been misunderstood and misinterpreted in their own time, and overestimated by posterity.Q: What about Moses and his Ten Commandments? Charlatan? Liar?A: A politically ambitious leader and liberator or revolutionary. Also the most frequently ignored preacher. “Thou shalt not kill!” Do we really need a prophet to tell us that? And why is it that we have more killers today than at any other time in the history of mankind?Q: What about Jesus?A: I agree with Tolstoy, Gandhi, and the overwhelming majority of mankind including Muslims, Jews, and Buddhists: he was a great teacher but not the Son of God.# INTERVIEW (VII)**************************************** THE WRITING LIFE****************************** Q: You have been writing for Armenians now…for how many years?A: Thirty give and take a decade or two.Q: Tell us some of your challenges, experiences, problems, disappointments…A: Where to begin?Q: I remember once you called one of your critics an “inbred moron.”A: That was meant as a compliment. He deserved much worse descriptive terms; and he was not a critic but a kibitzer and a self-assessed expert on any give subject – a familiar type among us. I remember once when I mentioned Zarian, one of our so-called “experts” on Armenian literature thought I was speaking of Nairi Zarian: a notorious Bolshevik mediocrity. He had never heard of the other one.Q: Am I right in assuming critics are not your favorite readers?A: Critics I don’t mind. It is commissars that I can’t stand.Q: Define commissar.A: Anyone who assume to be in a better position to know what’s good for the community and the nation and based on that absurd assumption he proceeds to issue guidelines; or anyone who assume only an idiot would adopt Armenian literature as a career – since there is no money in it. As the offspring of Levantine “starving Armenians,” we have a natural tendency to overestimate the value of the profit motive. In the United States, for instance, Zarian himself was thought to be a CIA agent; and when he returned to Soviet Armenia, where he spent his final years, it was rumored that he had become a KGB agent. I have myself been accused of being not only in the pay of the CIA and the KGB but also of the Mossad and the Grey Wolves. Some of my readers may be loud-mouth idiots but they are idiots with a rich imagination.Q: If there is no money in literature, how do you survive?A: On my savings. For ten years I worked at a variety of jobs -- from factory hand to church organist. But my greatest asset is my lifestyle – bread and books, and the books I get free of charge from the public library.#INTERVIEW (VIII)************************************* WHO IS A GOOD ARMENIAN?****************************************** Q: You have been writing now for how many years?A: About thirty.Q: And you have published how many books?A: About thirty too.Q: How many commentaries?A: Let’s say about a thousand – glor hashiv.Q: And yet you have not yet achieved the status of a popular writer.A: Why stop there? In the eyes of some I don’t even qualify as a piece of sh*t.Q: How do you explain that?A: Explanations work only with reasonable men.Q: I like to think of myself as a reasonable person.A: Sorry, I didn’t have you in mind. What I meant to say is, I doubt if my explanation will make sense to the majority of our readers.Q: Let’s have it anyway – you never know…A: The trouble with us is that we were at no time de-Ottomanized or de-Stalinized in the way in which Germans were de-Nazified after World War II. As a result we continue to be at the mercy of individuals – be they leaders, speechifiers, sermonizers, schoolteachers and academics – who continue to think and operate with the old brain. One of our elder statesmen once confided to me that some of our most influential people in our communities are in fact Turks who speak Armenian fluently.Q: Was he serious?A: Dead serious. He even lowered his voice even though there was no one around.Q: Do you believe what he said?A: It makes no difference to me if a leader is a Turk or Armenian so long as he is a decent human being. When I deal with an Armenian I don’t ask myself if he is a good Armenian. What I ask myself is, is he an honest man? Can I trust him? Does he mean what he says? I have said this before and it bears repeating: I’d much rather deal with an honest Turk than a dishonest Armenian.#

I don’t write to entertain. I write to understand and explain reality, especially when reality is against us. Thursday, November 01, 2012******************************************** INTERVIEW (II)*********************************** Q: Is nationalism an ideology?A: One of the worst.Q: As bad as fascism?A: Nationalism and fascism might as well be as synonymous as job-provider and blood-sucker.Q: What have you got against Romney?A: He is a hollow man. He’ll say and do anything to be president. He is as greedy about money as he is about power. Such men are the least qualified to be leaders – I am now paraphrasing Plato. He says in one of his dialogues: The more power a man wants the least qualified he is to handle it.Q: Do you believe in good and bad nations or in just and unjust wars?A: I believe in neither nations nor wars. They are fictions created by propagandists. Like Homer’s ILIAD.Q: Was Homer a propagandist?A: One of the greatest. He wrote about a war fought in defense of a floozy’s honor.Q: What about World War II?A: World War II was a direct result of World War I and to portray the Allies as the good guys is to cover up what went on in the 19th century -- imperialism, racism, slavery, the ruthless exploitation of natives and workers in general. Gandhi was right when he described the British in India as “a satanic force" -- a reminder of the fact that it was the Devil who created the 1% in his own image.# INTERVIEW (III)*************************************** Q: Let’s speak of books, beginning with your favorite writers.A: Too many to list here and I doubt if I can readily remember all of them.Q: Let’s begin with your first favorite writer.A: Dostoevky.Q: Which one of his books you read first?A: THE GAMBLER.Q: After THE GMABLER?A: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD, THE IDIOT, THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV…I read everything I could lay my hands on.I read them all with the impetuous greed of a teenager.Q: Have you reread them recently?A: I have tried…without much success.Q: How come?A: I first read them in Italian and Greek. In English they sound…less authentic, alien, depersonalized…Q: What impressed you most about Dostoevsky?A: His penetration of the human psyche. He humanized even ax-murderers of defenceless old ladies and child-molesters not by diminishing their responsibility but by emphasizing the forces that drove them to commit these horrible crimes.Q: Speaking of child-molesters: Do yoou think Nabokov’s LOLITA is an autobiographical work?A: Yes, of course, but only in the sense that Nabokov experienced the same feelings and thoughts as his central character. And it is to be noted that it is not Humbert Humbert who seduces Lolita but the other war around. Most readers miss that detail as I did when I first read it. Humbert is not a child-molester; it is Lolita who is a seducer of adults. Another point that is often missed: It is Humbert Humbert who pays dearly for his crimes, not Lolita.Q: Have you reread the book recently?A: Yes, several times and each time with an enhanced awareness of its many secret and subtle complexities and allusions.#INTERVIEW (IV)*************************************** Q: I know what you think about Romney – A: Wrong word!Q: Which one?A: "Think." He is not worth thinking about.Q: Could you expand on that?A: The man is so desperate that he is now promising “change” or rather the “hope” for change. Sounds familiar? He figures if it worked for the opposition four years ago it may work for him. A clear-cut case of transparent plagiarism. And he is promising not only seventeen million jobs, but “good” jobs, beginning with his own of course.Q: What about his policy on taxes.A: It’s not “if” but “when” he raises them he will call them “fees” or he will explain by saying the figures of the previous administration were doctored or cooked (figures always are) and that to balance the budget more drastic measures are required.Q: What do you think – sorry, wrong word again – about Ryan?A: A devout Catholic who owes his intellectual development (make it paralysis) to Ayn Rand -- a notorious atheist charlatan. Q: Is there anything we Armenians can learn from Americans?A: Learn from them? We could teach them.Q: Teach them? What exactly?A: Until very recently (in my own lifetime, as a matter of fact) American politics was dominated by WASPs: Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt – they were all White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Not any more! We were in the same place from the beginning -- with our Mamikonians and Bagratunis (Chinese and Jews respectively). One way to describe our politics is to say that it is a farce titled not ABEL AND CAIN, but CAIN AND CAIN.#

Sunday, October 28, 2012 ******************************************** ON POLITICIANS ***************************** If you trust them, you deserve them. * ON HISTORIANS **************************** There are two kinds: those who deal in facts and those who deal in fiction; and of the two, those who deal in fiction are the most widely read and taught in schools. * WHAT WE SHARE ****************************** As children we have all been brainwashed, but as adults to remain brainwashed is a decision we make freely and on our own. * IF ************ If you speak the truth to fools and liars, they will all you a criminal guilty of a capital offense. Two familiar cases from the past: Socrates and Jesus. And if you say things like that don’t happen any more, I will have no choice but to remind you that persecution and injustice have been and continue to be routine occurrences in history. To be an Armenian among Turks during World War I; a Jew in Europe during World War II; a dissident in the USSR; a Sunni among Shias and vice versa; a Hindu among Muslims and vice versa after Partition in India; a Black man in America; and last but far from least, to be Armenian among Armenians. I rest my case. Nothing further Your Honor! # Monday, October 29, 2012 *************************************** IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER *************************************** Fools and dupes (but I repeat myself) outnumber those who can think for themselves a thousand to one. It is they (fools and dupes) who make wars possible, revolutions a necessity, and collateral damage (meaning the death of countless innocent civilians) an inevitable fact of life like tsunamis, volcanoes, and earthquakes. * If I speak about dupes and fools with some degree of authority it’s because I have been one most of my life and to some degree I continue to be one because I think I can reason with them and convince them being subservient to authority and believing in their lies is an aberration, a crime against humanity, and an insult to God; and when I speak of God I don’t mean the God of priests, imams, and rabbis, but as a point of reference, an abstraction like infinity and eternity, and an unknown and unknowable entity or power that has endowed us with a brain with which to think for ourselves as opposed to parroting the propaganda line of a sultan, king, emperor, and commissar – compulsive and habitual liars all and as such the source of all evil. * You want solutions to our problems? Begin by believing nothing you are told, including what you just read. # DEFINITIONS ***************************** Prejudice: infatuation with one’s own ignorance. * Wisdom: awareness of one’s own limitations. * Patriotism: collective narcissism. * Barbarism: a room without a single book in it. # INTERVIEW ************************** Q: How would you define a man? A: A man is he who views reality on its own terms as opposed through the filter of an organized religion or ideology. Q: What’s wrong with religions and ideologies? A: They are the source of all lies and violence – that is to say, evil. Q: Are you saying Christianity is evil? A: In so far it has justified, legitimized, and promoted intolerance, prejudice, persecution, war and massacre, yes. Q: I am a Christian and I have persecuted or killed no one. A: That’s because you have lived on the margins of history – a privileged position that allows you to assert moral superiority; and to assert moral superiority is almost to justify war and massacre, which amounts to saying, if the morally superior kills the morally inferior he does so in the name of God or justice. There is no greater liar than he who speaks in the name of God. Q: Do you believe in God? A: I believe in the Unknown and the Unknowable, the source of all good and evil. Historically speaking that’s what all men believed before the invention of gods, which happens to be an extremely recent development. Q: Am I right in assuming you don’t believe in progress? A: Technological progress, yes; moral progress, no! The last century has been the most morally degenerate century of mankind – more wars, massacres, and genocides than in all other centuries combined. * (To be continued.) #

Thursday, October 25, 2012 ****************************************** DEGREES OF AWARENESS ************************************* We may see many things but we cannot see everything and more often than not what we don’t see is what we should have seen. * If you want to know more about someone, ask his enemies. The same applies to nations. * Truth is nobody’s friends and everyone’s enemy. * When dissidents ascribe criminal conduct to the leadership alone, they lie. They lie in so far as they reduce the people to the status of automata programmed to behave with the same degree of awareness as ants, sheep, or a pack of wolves. * Even the most backward and primitive man cannot be said to be on the same level as a beast whose conduct is dictated by instinct alone. * Our dividers are as guilty as hell. No doubt about that. But so are their dupes, whose IQ operates on two levels: when it comes to judging their enemies, they behave as if they had 20/20 vision. But when it comes to examining their conscience, they become deaf, dumb and stupid. * A headline in my morning paper reads: “Women hold just 20% of world’s power.” I have every reason to suspect in our case it’s less than 0, 0001%. # ON THE ART OF WRITING ************************************ The less art the better. * Editing consists in deleting. If you provide the key, no need to describe the contents of a room. * Unless you are another Tolstoyevsky, be more like Chekhov. Stick to writing short stories. The shorter the better. * When asked about the tempo of a song, a French composer (may have been Gabriel Fauré) is quoted as having said: “If the singer is bad, the faster the better.” * So many mediocrities achieve celebrity these days that the challenge is to remain anonymous. * Don’t make the mistake of adopting a single pseudonym like Oshagan and Siamanto because your readers (assuming you have any) will forget you even when you are alive and kicking ass. * Leave preaching to preachers – they get paid for it. To be an Armenian writer in this day and age means to be an unemployed and unemployable misfit in a land devoid of all benefits and entitlements. * Never underestimate your readers’ ignorance and contempt for knowledge. I have met elder statesmen who in a sane environment would be classified as inbred morons. * Be prepared to be insulted and dismissed as a bullshitter by bullshitters like Romney and Ryan. * A nation needs dupes more than it needs dissidents. This is as true of Turks, Russians, and Yanks as it is of Armenians – especially Armenians. * And now let us pray! # Saturday, October 27, 2012 **************************************** BROTHERS ************************ The other day a gentle reader pointed out to me that Armenians who have were born, raised, and lived in alien environments for more than a century and a half could hardly qualify as Armenian. Some truth in that. * In America we have been Americanized in less than a century, in France Frenchified, in the Balkans Balkanized, in many other countries assimilated to the point of extinction, and last but not least, in the Ottoman Empire we were Ottomanized. (on occasion I am myself been called “Baliozoghlu” and identified as “a piece of shit” by my brothers in the Homeland). * Who is an authentic Armenian? Does he exist? Not an easy question to answer. If you say, surely Armenians born and raised in the shadow of Mt. Ararat may indeed qualify as authentic Armenians, may I be allowed to point out they too have been to some extent Russified, Sovietized, alienated, and dehumanized as thoroughly as the rest of us. * And now, let us rise from abstractions to facts (as our Marxist brothers used to say). Let us consider their authenticity in the light of historic reality. Whereas in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 our intellectuals were betrayed by a single Armenian, in the USSR two generations of our ablest men in all fields of human endeavor were betrayed and shot by our own Stalinist leadership – the very same characters, may I add, who are now in charge of our destiny as a nation. * When post-World War II Armenians immigrated to Armenia, they were called “aghber” (trash) by these very same authentic Armenians, and lived (very much like themselves) in constant fear of betrayal. * Which is why I feel justified in saying nothing can be as misleading as judging a man by his birthplace? A man should be judged not by his country of origin but, in the words of a wise American, by “the content of his character.” The rest is propaganda. #

Wednesday, October 24, 2012 ********************************** Sunday, October 21, 2012 **************************************** LITERATURE AND POLITICS ************************************** There are several giants in our literature; only midgets in politics. As for Byzantine emperors of Armenian descent one of whom achieved “Napoleonic” stature (according to Edward Gibbon in his DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE) they served exclusively Greek interests even when it meant adopting and implementing an anti-Armenian foreign policy. * And if you were to drop names like Gulbenkian, Saroyan, Mamoulian, Khachatourian and Mikoyan: I will say that all these gentlemen were born, raised, and operated in non-Armenian environments. * If so far this aspect of our collective existence has been carefully covered up it may be because we continue to be at the mercy of unprincipled and ruthless mediocrities whose greatest enemy is excellence. # A QUESTION IN THE SEARCH OF AN ANSWER ******************************************** What have we learned from our millennial history? To say or imply that our history, including our genocide (both “red” and “white”), is a result of conditions and forces beyond our control is nothing but a transparent effort to place ourselves outside history; to say in effect: we had nothing to do with our blunders and misfortunes. It was all someone else’s fault. * Who profits by this line of reasoning? Who else but our own leadership whose sole aim in life is to cover up the fact that far from being our "betters," they are our worst. * To say or imply that we have no control over our destiny as a nation is to advocate a passive stance, and worse, much worse: it is to say that the only way to survive in the kind of world we live in is to say “Yes, sir!” to those in power even when they happen to be the lowest scum on earth. Isn’t that what we did for 600 years in the Ottoman Empire and for more than 60 years in the Soviet Union – two of the worst criminal power structures in the history of mankind? * The real horror is not in men like Talaat and Stalin; the real horror is in the millions who trusted them. Zohrab, one of the smartest Armenians that ever lived, trusting his life into the hands of his future murderers. Mikoyan carrying out all orders faithfully always in fear of his own life, sleeping with a revolver under his pillow. * I ask again: What have we learned from history except to assume a passive stance not only to alien tyrants but also our own scumbags. # IF I WERE A DICTATOR ***************************************** If I were a dictator (which will never happen because I don’t have a single politically ambitious bone in my body) I would begin by saying the days of “1001 churches” in the same city are over as surely as horses and sabers in modern warfare. * I am all for a single community center (make it, shish-kebab and pilaf joint) instead of two, if only because our different religious, political and cultural factions would have a better chance to discover that they are not much different from one another and Armenian solidarity may not be as utopian a concept as it is generally thought to be by our dividers (make it, diggers of our collective grave). * Why two archbishops and two cathedrals in New York City if one will save us millions in salaries alone (one of these cathedrals, I am told by an insider, employs as many as 83 individuals). * A church is called "a house of God” and as far as I know God has at no time demanded that we provide Him with four of them (Anteliassagan, Etchmiadznagan, Catholic, and Protestant) in the same city . * Something similar could be said of our press. Instead of a dozen trashy weeklies, we could have a single professionally managed and edited publication. * Instead of a hundred charitable institutions we could have one supervised by a non-partisan and preferably odar auditing firm… * But why go on with this exercise in futility if none of these reforms will ever be implemented by our partisans and panchoonies? # THE RICH & THE SUPER-RICH ******************************************* OBAMA & ROMNEY ******************************** HONEST MEN & CROOKS **************************************** Honest men will employ only honest means to get rich. By contrast, crooks will employ both honest as well as dishonest means. That is why, Plato tells us, crooks will always be richer than honest men. # ON BEING POSITIVE ********************************** When not urged to be positive I am accused of being consistently negative. How do we define positive and negative? Is speaking the truth positive or negative? Is being objective negative? Is flattering the ego of contemptible men with money or power positive? Is saying “Yes, sir!” out of fear positive? These are not easy questions to answer for individuals whose collective existence has been at the mercy of bloodthirsty and ruthless tyrants for more than a thousand years. * When Zarian said “Our political parties have been of no political use to us,” was he being negative? When speaking of one of our national benefactors an archbishop once said to me: “The only reason he likes building schools and community centers is to see his name on walls,” was he being negative? * Our history, the history I was taught as a child and the history we teach our children today is more fiction than fact. As recently as yesterday when I said “Our greatest writers from Abovian to Zarian were shabbily treated and silenced by our own wheeler-dealers,” a reader pointed out to me that times have changed and we now have more freedom than at any other time in history. If true, the question we must ask is, what the hell happened to our literature? Why is it that we no longer have writers of Abovian’s and Zarian’s stature and character? Why is it that today even the Turks are ahead of us in literature? Have we finally come to realize that no one in his right mind would adopt Armenian literature as a career? A final question: Is exposing stupidity, ignorance, and filth positive or negative? #

Thursday, October 18, 2012*************************************** A CONTRADICTION**************************** “The Kingdom of God is within you.”*“Our Father Who art in Heaven.”#EITHER/OR*********************** Someday everything will make sense. Either that or we will be beyond caring.#HOW TO RECOGNIZE A CHARLATAN******************************************** Two ways:(One) A charlatan has more answers than questions; and he has answers even to questions that have no answer.(Two) If the facts are not on his side he will invent some that are.#ANOTHER EITHER/OR************************************** We either believe the testimony of our writers or our ruling classes whose every word is contaminated by propaganda, that is to say a Big Lie.#IF…**************** If you lose an argument it doesn’t necessarily mean you were wrong. It only means your opponent had a better lawyer.#SIZE MATTERS************************** Among sharks, a barracuda has a better chance to survive than a sardine.#Saturday, October 20, 2012************************************ SOLUTIONS**************************** Solutions don’t fall from heaven like manna. Solutions are hard work. But when we speak of solutions we think of the abracadabra variant whereby you deliver the right verbal formula and the problem vanishes like a puff of smoke. *For 1700 years our religion has been teaching us to love our enemies; and for 1500 years our writers, beginning with Khorenatsi and Yeghishe (two historians of the Golden Age) have been emphasizing the central role that solidarity plays in the life of a nation. I therefore feel justified in concluding that anyone who says “We don’t need critics, we need solutions!” should be classified as a habitual and compulsive liar who is out to deceive not only others but also and above all himself. *Solutions? As a nation we are like the proverbial peasant who seated on his jackass searches for his jackass. And if you say, you can’t teach love of Turks to Armenians who hate Armenians, all I can say is: “You can say that again, brother!”#ENEMIES*************************** The question we should ask is not “Why do they hate us?” but “What have we done to deserve so many of them?” *If might is right, it follows, absence of might is wrong, and if not a crime against humanity, an invitation to it.*Today I know something I didn’t know yesterday: It is not our enemies who divide us (in order to rule us); it is we who divide ourselves to be closer to the sultan and commissar, and in the Diaspora, to our bosses, bishops, and benefactors.There is only one way to make it in our environment: to be a brown-noser. *I will never forget the contempt and anger in the voice of one of our elder statesmen (who was also the hireling of a benefactor), when he said to me: “Just who the hell do you think you are?”*An old lady once said to me: “When I write to the President of the United States, I get a reply. But when I write to an Armenian, I am ignored.” It was this same old lady who, after reading one of my comments against the dangers of assimilation, asked me: “What’s wrong with assimilation?” I don’t remember my exact answer then, but my answer today would be: “For some Armenians, assimilation would be a step in the right direction.”#

Sunday, October 14, 2012 ************************************** OBSERVASTIONS *********************************** When everything works as planned something is bound to go wrong. * My conscience is clear only when I speak against my own interests. * We have many answers but not the Answer, and all our answers add up to no more than 1% of reality. * Our understanding of god is based on hearsay evidence. * Subservience and freedom are mutually exclusive concepts. * After Socrates and Jesus the world doesn’t need new ideas, only reminders. * Hell is an invention of bullies. * Capitalism: What’s mine is mine even if most of it I stole from you. * Where there are innocent victims there will also be a mafia. # Monday, October 15, 2012 ********************************************* MO YAN SPEAKS *********************************** Speaking of his fellow Chinese, Mo Yan (this year’s Nobel Prize winner in literature) says somewhere (I am quoting from memory): “Once upon a time they were innocent, then they became fanatics, after which they were afraid of their own shadows, finally they settled on being evil.” And I reflect on the celebrated words of Confucius: “When you see a good man, emulate him. When you see a bad man, examine your own heart.” * “Is democracy possible in Syria?” asks a pundit in my morning paper. His answer: “It seems improbable.” * Is democracy possible in Armenia? Next question: Is democracy possible in the Diaspora? What have we learned after a century of life in America? Our political and cultural institutions function as if all talk of human rights and free speech were utopian or anti-Armenian concepts. Sultanism is so ingrained in our collective existence that we see nothing questionable or suspect in being at the mercy of bosses, bishops, and benefactors who behave as if they had never heard of democracy. Mart bidi ch’ellank! # Wednesday, October 17, 2012 **************************************** J.S. BACH & THE BEATLES ************************************* In their own time the Beatles were more popular than Bach. They may still be for all I know. It is unbelievable to what extent most men live and die with total unawareness of their own possibilities. * LOSERS ************** My defeats outnumber my victories 99 to 1, perhaps even 999 to a fraction of 1. In that sense I represent my nation more faithfully than our great men most of whom, if not all, achieved their greatness by eliminating the competition. * KILLERS *********************** A serial killer is a serial killer even if a jury renders a verdict of not guilty. And if you say human justice may not be perfect but it works, may I remind you that for a good number of years, even decades, men like Mao, Stalin, and Hitler enjoyed the reputation of great statesmen and not as dangerous serial killers or psychopaths. In the eyes of his fellow countrymen even Genghis Khan is seen to this day as a titan among men. # Wednesday, October 17, 2012 ***************************************** Sunday, October 14, 2012 ************************************** OBSERVASTIONS *********************************** When everything works as planned something is bound to go wrong. * My conscience is clear only when I speak against my own interests. * We have many answers but not the Answer, and all our answers add up to no more than 1% of reality. * Our understanding of god is based on hearsay evidence. * Subservience and freedom are mutually exclusive concepts. * After Socrates and Jesus the world doesn’t need new ideas, only reminders. * Hell is an invention of bullies. * Capitalism: What’s mine is mine even if most of it I stole from you. * Where there are innocent victims there will also be a mafia. # Monday, October 15, 2012 ********************************************* MO YAN SPEAKS *********************************** Speaking of his fellow Chinese, Mo Yan (this year’s Nobel Prize winner in literature) says somewhere (I am quoting from memory): “Once upon a time they were innocent, then they became fanatics, after which they were afraid of their own shadows, finally they settled on being evil.” And I reflect on the celebrated words of Confucius: “When you see a good man, emulate him. When you see a bad man, examine your own heart.” * “Is democracy possible in Syria?” asks a pundit in my morning paper. His answer: “It seems improbable.” * Is democracy possible in Armenia? Next question: Is democracy possible in the Diaspora? What have we learned after a century of life in America? Our political and cultural institutions function as if all talk of human rights and free speech were utopian or anti-Armenian concepts. Sultanism is so ingrained in our collective existence that we see nothing questionable or suspect in being at the mercy of bosses, bishops, and benefactors who behave as if they had never heard of democracy. Mart bidi ch’ellank! # Wednesday, October 17, 2012 **************************************** J.S. BACH & THE BEATLES ************************************* In their own time the Beatles were more popular than Bach. They may still be for all I know. It is unbelievable to what extent most men live and die with total unawareness of their own possibilities. * LOSERS ************** My defeats outnumber my victories 99 to 1, perhaps even 999 to a fraction of 1. In that sense I represent my nation more faithfully than our great men most of whom, if not all, achieved their greatness by eliminating the competition. * KILLERS *********************** A serial killer is a serial killer even if a jury renders a verdict of not guilty. And if you say human justice may not be perfect but it works, may I remind you that for a good number of years, even decades, men like Mao, Stalin, and Hitler enjoyed the reputation of great statesmen and not as dangerous serial killers or psychopaths. In the eyes of his fellow countrymen even Genghis Khan is seen to this day as a titan among men. # Wednesday, October 17, 2012 ***************************************** LET US REASON TOGETHER ************************************** A Canadian prime minister (Jean Chretien) is quoted as having said: “I like to stand up to Americans. It’s popular.” We like to hate Turks. That’s popular too. But it’s wrong! What have we accomplished after a hundred years of hatred? We can’t even convince Americans to support our side. Hating is a waste of time, Hating nations is worse! We should hate not nations but murderers and liars regardless of nationality. There are honest Turks as surely as there are dishonest Armenians. It is wrong to confuse a nation with its regime. Regimes are ephemeral and transitory stages in a nation’s life. Neither should we confuse loyalty or subservience to a regime with patriotism. Hatred may take us from A to B but it is understand that can go all the way to XYZ. Hating is easy; understanding much harder. When it comes to politics or any other discipline for that matter, the easy answer is not always the right one. In the writings of our Turcocentric ghazetajis and readers who enjoy reading them I see nothing but militant malice. #

Thursday, October 11, 2012 ******************************** WHAT HAPPENED *************************** We should have seen it coming but we were blind. So was our leadership. And we all know what happens when the blind lead the blind… * When Raffi said, “The Ottoman Empire is no place for Armenians; they have no respect for human life there,” we said, what the hell does he know? * When Roupen Sevag’s German fiancée visiting him in Istanbul said: “I don’t like these Turks,” he said: “You don’t know them, I do. Deep down they are nice folk. You’ll change your mind after you get to know them.” He was one of the first to be butchered. * When on the eve of the Genocide Zohrab warned: “This time they will massacre indiscriminately,” they said “Zohrab effendi is exaggerating.” Some left, among them Siamanto, but they found life abroad so alien that they returned only to be slaughtered. * When Oshagan said “Homeland,” he meant Istanbul. * It happened gradually. It didn’t fall on us like a thief in the night. It began fourteen centuries ago when their Prophet dehumanized all non-Muslims by classifying them as infidels. * It happened six hundred years ago when we surrendered our fate into their hands and said in effect: Henceforth we will serve you faithfully and obediently. You want our daughters? You can have them. Our sons? You can have them too. * It happened when Protestant missionaries taught us to sing “Onward Christian soldiers,” which they (Turks) assumed to be some kind of war chant and that we were in cahoots with the infidel West and were planning an invasion. * It happened when the rumor spread that Turkish girls in the Balkans were being crucified. A myriad other factors contributed to the final catastrophe, but again the accumulation of details was so gradual and we were so blind that we pretended to notice nothing. * We thought if the Great Powers of the West are on our side we had nothing to fear. We behaved with the arrogance and stupidity of people who assume to be invulnerable. * I am reminded of this arrogance and stupidity again whenever we of the Diaspora are called “aghber” by our own Bolshevik brothers and sisters in the Homeland. * An English traveler at the turn of the last century in Armenia: “What magnificent landscapes. What wretched people!” * Mart bidi ch’ellank! # Saturday, October 13, 2012 **************************************** ON DISAGREEMENT ******************************* At the root of all disagreement there is an unspoken line that says: “You are not smart enough or good enough to contradict what I say.” And at the root of all megalomania there is self-deception. All authority is suspect. * THE MORE THINGS CHANGE… ************************************** Muslims today treat infidels with the same ferocity that Catholics treated heretics in the Middle Ages. * BULLIES ********************** They invent a god so that they can speak in his name. In other words, their belief system is rooted in their need to bully the weak and defenseless with a clear conscience. * PERVERTS ************************ Religions, theology, Holy Scriptures, popes, imams, rabbis: these things interest me only in so far as they reveal the workings of the human mind or rather the perversities of the human brain. As for the nature of god and the next world: not only do I not believe a word they say but I am also offended by their shameless audacity in treating me as if I were a helpless retard in need of their charlatanism. # DEATH WISH ***************************** Divisions exist because people consent to be divided; and people consent to be divided even when it means digging their own graves. Freud’s death wish may also be defined as a universal and unconscious desire to commit collective suicide… or self-inflicted genocide. * ON BEING NEGATIVE ****************************** Two questions: When Socrates said, “Ignorance is the source of all evil,” was he being positive or negative? When the Scriptures say, “Truth shall set you free,” thus implying we are slaves of lies: would you call that a positive or negative assertion? * ON MAFIAS ***************************** Judge a tree by its fruit, an idea by its history, an ideology by its lies, a religion by its mafia and a mafia by its number of innocent victims. #

Wednesday, October 10, 2012 ************************************** DESTINY *********************** Who is in charge of our destiny? Surely not the regime in Yerevan which is a puppet of the Kremlin; and surely not our political parties in the Diaspora that (in the words of a friend) cannot even lead a dog to the nearest hydrant or catch a cold in a flu epidemic. Perhaps the right question in this context is not who is in charge of our destiny but do we have one? * We are taught to brag about our genius for survival. What we are not told is that the greatest challenge isn't surviving our enemies but our own leadership. * I quoted a friend above. I should have said a former friend. My former friends outnumber my present friends a hundred to one. * Last week I made a new friend. This week he made it abundantly clear that I will make him very happy on the day I drop dead. Easy come, easy go. #

Thursday, October 4, 2012************************************** OPEN SECRETS**************************** On the day good Turks and good Armenians are allowed to form an alliance, all their differences will be resolved amicably and to their mutual advantage. *As for bad Turks and Armenians: all I can say about them is that they deserve one another. *Did I say good Turks and good Armenians? Make it, good half-Armenians and good half-Turks. Pure-blooded Armenians and Turks are a fiction of nationalist propaganda. They don’t exist. Very much like Americans, both Turks and Armenians have been thoroughly bastardized. Nothing wrong in that. On the contrary. Very much on the contrary! Bastardization promotes co-existence, peace, and prosperity. That’s an open secret. You want proof? Everybody wants to immigrate to America. Who in his right mind would want to move in the opposite direction?*Both good Turks and Armenians are today at the mercy of bad men who owe their position of eminence to big lies (the deification of Kemal) and fear (constant and endless talk of massacres). Nothing good can come from lies and fear. That’s another open secret.#Friday, October 05, 2012************************************* ECONOMICS 101****************************** Who understand economics? Not even economists. For every economist who says one thing there is another who says the opposite. Truman once said he would like to meet an economist with only one hand, because after each statement they make, they add “on the other hand.” *The favorite word of my professor of economics was “interdependence.” He used it in every other assertion he made. That’s because every factor in economics is dependent on another. *Corporations prosper only when the middle and lower classes can afford to buy their goods and services. The state is not a corporation whose priority is to balance books, show a profit, and to trim the fat by eliminating programs and decreasing spending. *Economics cannot be divorced from history. They are interdependent. FDR, like Obama, had to deal with depression and war. He increased the number of government programs. And it worked. Under Eisenhower (a Republican) the tax rate for the wealthy went up 91%. America survived as well as prospered. So did Europe with American help (the Marshall Plan). *Bush (II) was right when he said the wealthy don’t pay taxes because they have smart accountants who take advantage of loopholes and when they run out of them they hide their savings in offshore banks. (Does that ring a bell?)By contrast the middle and lower classes spend what they make and whenever money moves, a fraction of it goes to creating jobs and taxes. *Who understand economics? The answer is those who in the past confronted and were successful in solving the same problems that we confront today.#Saturday, October 06, 2012***************************************** WHAT’S IN A NAME?****************************** Iraklis (Greek), Hercules (English), Hercule (French), Ercole (Italian), Hergele (Turkish). Moral: One nation’s hero is another’s hoodlum.*In a book on Azerbaijan, I remember to have read once that General Antranik’s name is as well known to Azeris as Talaat is to us.*PRIDE AND PREJUDICE********************************* For everyone who brags “I am proud to have been a member of the Communist Party,” I should like to hear at least two who say “I am thoroughly ashamed to have been a member of a criminal gang.”* A FATE WORSE THAN DEATH**************************************** I once received the manuscript of a short story with a note that said: “Do you think I should encourage my son’s literary ambitions?” In my reply I said: "If your son is in need of encouragement, he cannot be a writer.” I had another hidden reason for saying that. Only a sadist would condemn an innocent boy to the fate of a perennial loser forever dependent on the charity of swine.#

Sunday, September 30, 2012************************************** 1001******************* We are a nation of a thousand and one Watergates and we are engaged in a collective and almost unanimous effort to cover them up in the name of patriotism. What follows is only one of them.*For a hundred years now we, Armenians of the Diaspora, have been demanding an apology from the Turks who not only have been stonewalling us but also calling us liars. Has anyone ever asked an apology from our former Bolsheviks in the Homeland who terrorized, oppressed, betrayed, exiled, and murdered fellow Armenians who refused to say “Yes, sir!” to the Kremlin? To add insult to injury, role models like Sylva Kaputikian openly declared to have been proud members of the Communist Party. And to think that these “authentic” Armenians call us, Armenians of the Diaspora, “trash.” If that’s what it takes to be an authentic or patriotic Armenian, I want no part of it. If that’s what living in the shadow of Mt Ararat does to Armenians, I say I will never set foot there. *So what if I will never qualify as a first-class citizen? So what if, in the words of a gentle reader from the Homeland, I am not better than “a piece of shit!” All I can say in my defense is that I have done my utmost to qualify as a human being. Can our patriotic brothers and sisters in the Homeland say as much? *To those who try to be authentic Armenians like the natives, I say: Get yourself another hobby because you will never make it. You will never rise above the status of “white niggers,” “trash,” and “shits.” Far better men than yourself have tried and failed miserably. For more on this subject read Zarian’s posthumously published NOTEBOOKS and DIARIES.#Monday, October 01, 2012************************************** IT TAKES ALL KINDS********************************** Patriotism and prostitution: in our environment they might as well be synonymous. I suspect the integrity of our patriots as I suspect the virginity of a bordello madam. *Speaking of madams: I remember to have read somewhere that the wealthiest woman in Turkey was a bordello madam by the name of Manoogian – an easy name to remember. *I once met an Armenian who knew everybody who was somebody in our communities. Privately he was full of venom about our “great” men; publicly he led an anonymous existence. What did he do for a living? I am not sure. But between the lines I gathered he was dependent on the charity of swine. *My father knew nobody and nobody was interested in what he thought. He too led an anonymous existence. His last job was that of a dishwasher in a Greek restaurant. *Once, when asked to deliver a speech, I said: “Writing is hard. Speaking is harder.” That’s when I did nothing but recycle chauvinist crapola in whatever I wrote. On another occasion when asked in the presence of an audience why I was not interested in encouraging the next generation of writes, I said: “We need readers, not writers.” You might say I belong to the haiku school of speechifying. *If I ever write another book – which I doubt I ever will – I have two tentative titles: “The Swan Song of a Jackass,” and “The Memoirs of an Anonymous Nobody.”#Wednesday, October 03, 2012************************************ BROTHERS********************************* A few years ago I lost several Armenian friends from Syria because I dared to disagree with them when they said Arabs are friendly people and they love Armenians.*Patriotism: not one of my favorite words perhaps because every Armenian has his own definition of the word whose aim is to divide the community into friends and enemies,The hidden source of this aberration Seems to be less political and more biological.*The world may be divided into friends and enemies and if you want to survive, you must kill. If you don’t kill you will be killed. Timing is of the essence. Do not procrastinate. Kill him as soon as you can. Kill him even if you don’t have a good enough reason to hate him. Kill him even if he is your brother.*I learn something every day, that’s how ignorant I am.#Wednesday, October 03, 2012******************************************* THE BEST REVENGE********************************** A French writer once said that if your wife runs away with a man, the best revenge is to let him keep her. You may call this turning the other cheek. I call it employing a lethal weapon with which to inflict maximum damage.*BIG LIES********************* No matter how big the lie, it will be believed by some. Kennedy was assassinated by the Mafia. Hitler was a Jew. Obama is a Muslim. The Russians are our big Brothers. The Serpent in the Garden of Eden was a CIA agent in disguise. There are superior and inferior races. God’s Chosen. Seventy-three virgins. Armenians are smart.*SHADES OF GRAY**************************** Our problems are as clear as black and white. If they seem more as shades of gray it’s because an entire class of academics, bureaucrats, hirelings, hangers-on, partisans and panchoonies have been brainwashed to believe their survival depends on convincing the 99% into thinking patriotism consists in being a dupe and thinking for oneself is pro-Turkish.#

Thursday, September 27, 2012 ***************************************** THEOLOGY *************************** If God exists, why does He go out of His way to make Himself inaccessible and incomprehensible? If Truth is One, what is it that drives us to invent ten thousand lies? If the Kingdom of God is within us, where is the Empire of the Devil? * “If I cannot answer the most important question, am I not fooling the reader?” Chekhov said. I suspect if we ever have the Answer – which may or may not happen in our lifetime – we will say, But of course! What else? I should have guessed. I had eyes but couldn’t see, ears but couldn’t hear, and a brain but couldn’t think. # Saturday, September 29, 2012 ********************************************* EASY QUESTIONS / OBVIOUS ANSWERS ********************************************* With religious leaders like popes, imams, and rabbis, who needs religion? With Scriptures like the Bible and the Koran that legitimize divisions, intolerance, the persecution of heretics, and the murder of infidels, who needs Scriptures? With monarchs like the Romanovs in Russia, the VIII Henrys in England, and the French Louis who came by the dozen, who needs kings? With bloodthirsty dictators like Hitler and Stalin, who needs dictators? * Speaking of blood: In the Ottoman Empire it was a capital offense to spill the blood of a present or future sultan, so they adopted a different method to eliminate the competition: they strangled all potential usurpers with a silk cord. (And they say Turks are dumb!) * With scary presidential candidates like Romney and Ryan who needs presidents? Gore Vidal may have been right when he said America will be better off without its politicians. To the question, who will run the country, he replied: “Swiss hotel managers.” With historians who cover up the criminal conduct and incompetence of the regime in power, who needs schoolteachers who recycle propaganda? * I am not just asking question: I am predicting the shape of things to come. Neither am I a prophet: I just use my common sense and the lessons of the past. # Saturday, September 29, 2012 *********************************** IN THE BELLY OF THE BEAST **************************************** Let’s cut the crap, shall we? Let’s leave rhetoric to our speechifiers infatuated with the sound of their own voice; and let’s leave pious sentiments to our sermonizers whose favorite mode of communication is to say the opposite of what they really think and feel. * I see Armenians as perennial losers and victims whose secret ambition in life is to victimize, and since they can’t victimize others, they victimize their own. As dupes they can’t stand anyone who refuses to be a dupe. As products of millennial oppression by bloodthirsty tyrants they see nothing morally questionable in brainwashing the weak, oppressing the defenseless, and in deceiving the ignorant and the naïve. That’s as far as their conception of patriotism goes. * I know what I am saying. I have been in the belly of the beast and I have dealt with some of our best and brightest. I am not here to flatter our collective colossal ego or to pretend to love you as a brother. Neither am I here to assert my superior brand of Armenianism, whatever the hell that may mean. I leave that to our bosses, bishops, benefactors and their dupes, flunkeys, and hirelings. * Whenever I am told to be kinder to my readers, I reply: A nation that managed to survive the Turk’s yataghan can survive the opinions of a minor scribbler who is here today and will be gone tomorrow. * Abraham Lincoln once said: “Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?” I have tried that method not once or twice but many times. It doesn’t work. I have had better luck with Turks. #

Sunday, September 23, 2012 *************************************** DECEPTION (IV) ************************ For 600 years we hated the Turks and we had every right to do so for what they did and kept doing to us, but we deceived them into thinking we loved them and we did such a good job of it that they named us their most loyal millet (ethnic minority). * For 60 years we also hated the “onion-head” Russians but again we pretended to love them by calling them our “big brothers.” We went further. Much further. We betrayed and surrendered our ablest men to their murderers. * And now that we have no one to deceive we deceive one another and we do such an excellent job of it that most Armenians in the Diaspora believe when native Armenians call them “aghber” they don’t mean “white trash,” but “brother.” * We have become such habitual and expert liars that we believe in our own lies. Now you know why our 1% divides the 99% and gets away with it. They say they divide us because they are men of principle and gentlemen do not compromise on principles. The fact is they divide us out of fear. Fear of what we might do to them when we uncover the truth. After all, far more civilized and progressive nations than us have beheaded, executed, and assassinated their kings. The only reason we have done nothing of the kind so far is that we have been duped into thinking our leaders are not our enemies but our heroes and saviors. * Armenians of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your dividers and gravediggers.. # Monday, September 24, 2012 ************************************* CHEZOKS ********************** One of our elder statesmen (may God have mercy on his soul, if there is a God and he had a soul) once wrote a book in which he blamed all our problems on chezoks (non-partisan Armenians). “They are neither hot nor cold,” said he. “They are neither for nor against anything. They don’t care. They are useless, aimless, and purposeless. They exist but they do not live… they are a dead weight…” and so on and so forth. You may have noticed that when our speechifiers get going, nothing can stopping them. Zarian knew what he was talking about when he said “An Armenian’s tongue is sharper than a Turk’s yataghan.” * In my review of the book I said something to the effect that our dividers were the real source of all our problems, not chezoks. In his angry telephone call our statesman said, among other things: “I thought you were on our side.” “I am on nobody’s side,” was my answer, “if only because I have done no harm.” * My father was a chezok not because he didn’t care but because he lost everything twice and I mean that literally: first time in 1915 during World War I in Turkey, second time in 1941 during World War II in Greece. As a result he spent all his time trying to make a living and provide for his family in alien and hostile environments. He died in his fifties and he looked ninety. He may not have been a great Armenian but he was an honest man. I wish I could say the same of our Ottomanized, Levantinized, Americanized, and Sovietized fellow countrymen who parade as first-class Armenians and expect the rest of us to look up to them as role models. # Tuesday, September 25, 2012 ******************************************** BROTHERS ************************ There are truth-seekers and there are propagandists. The aim of propagandists is power. The aim of truth-seekers is exposing lies. * Propaganda has produced such monsters as the Nazi who believed to belong to a superior race; the Jew who believed to be God’s Chosen; the English sahib who saw himself as a civilizing agent; the child-molesting Catholic priest; and closer to home, the Armenian patriot with “Ararat in his heart” who views a fraction of his fellow Armenians as “white trash.” In America propaganda has produced the KKK and legitimized racism; in Russia the Big Brother (in the Orwellian sense of the words) and the commissar. By contrast truth-seekers have been solitary underdogs and victims of propagandists. Gandhi in India, Martin Luther King in America (both assassinated), Solzhenitsyn in Russia, Socrates in 5th-century BC Greece and Jesus in 1st-century Palestine. * How to identify a propagandist? Easy! A propagandist is a member of an organized group with a clearly defined agenda which pretends to be on the side of truth but on closer inspection reveals itself to be Big Lie. If you are a member of such a group, look out brother, you may well be on your way to the Devil. * I read the following quotation in my morning paper today: “He who knows others is wise. He who knows himself is enlightened.” Lao Tzu. # Wednesday, September 26, 2012 ********************************************* WHY I WRITE THE WAY I WRITE ******************************************** Do you really want to know why I write the way I write? I will tell you. I write the way I write in defense of all Armenians who were insulted and abused in the name of this or that brand of patriotism of which there are as many as there are Armenians. * A Bolshevik’s patriotism, for instance, means not only love of homeland but also loyalty to the memory of Stalin. A nationalist’s patriotism bears all the earmarks of racism and fascism. * I write in defense of all writers who were betrayed, silenced, exiled, butchered, or shot. I write to remind our Turcocentric ghazetajis and their dupes that it is wrong to gauge an Armenian’s patriotism by the degree of hatred he harbors against Turks. I write to say that I have nothing but contempt for the kind of Armenian who after perpetuating our problems tells me, “We need solutions, not critics.” My message to them is: “If you really need solutions, hang yourself!” * I have no illusions about myself and my fellow Armenians. I am fully aware of the fact that I have as much influence on Armenian affairs as a grain of sand on the Saharan desert. But I write to set the record straight. #

Saturday, September 22, 2012 **************************************** OBSERVATIONS *********************** After telling us the Bible is the word of God and “a house divided against itself cannot stand,” they divide a house that is already divided between believers and non-believers. * You say it’s impossible and I say doing what must be done creates its own energy and cunning. * Even as they blabber endlessly about Turks and massacres they tell me I am being negative. * Romney’s problem: a big mouth and a bigger foot. # Saturday, September 22, 2012 *************************************** ON POSTERITY & RELATED ATROCITIES ************************************ Posterity? I am not sure about posterity. You and I may well be our only posterity. * Depression? I have been depressed most of my life and I consider it an integral part of the human condition. Unlike most Americans I don’t think happiness or well-being to be a patriotic duty. I have never been near a shrink, nor taken a single pill. Only the occasional drink. * Homeland? I can’t imagine anyone not loving its mountains and rivers, lakes, valleys, and forests. Neither can I imagine anyone not hating the former KGB agents and commissars who are now in charge of it. Call it treason if you like. I call it rejection of all crypto-fascist propaganda. I call it refusal to be the dupe of thieving charlatans, and in that I am with the majority – namely all those who have voted with their feet and live abroad or they define homeland as anywhere on earth where they are allowed to work and provide for their families. # Saturday, September 22, 2012 *************************************** ON STUPIDITY ********************** Be aware of stupidity for it is the source of all evil. * The problem with hatred is that it tends to metastasize. Hatred of the enemy turns brother against brother. * More often than not our choice is not between good and evil but between the lesser of two evils. * Details are important especially the ones you miss or refuse to see. * “In the name of Allah the Compassionate, the Merciful, Owner of the Day of Judgment.” I quote from memory. I paraphrase. If wrong ascribe it to Alzheimer’s, not to blasphemy. * It is hatred of the infidel that turns Shia against Sunni and Assad against his ownpeople. * From the lyrics of a popular Armenian song: “An Armenian loves to eat (oudel) and he eats to hate (adel).” * He who is blinded by hatred believes he has 20/20 vision and God is on his side. * “I am not here to bring peace but a sword. If you don’t have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one.” If you can’t guess who said that, I suggest you read the Scriptures. * And now let us pray! “Our Father Who art in Heaven…” #

Sunday, September 16, 2012************************************ SUNDAY SERMON***************************** Empires are not born but made, and what makes them is vision, without which, the Bible tells us, “the people perish.” *We have perished not because the land allotted to us was stony, the climate harsh, and our neighbors bloodthirsty,but because our leadership was without vision. *Empires have risen from the most unlikely places – even from deserts and islands. I am not an imperialist. I say these things to point out the fact that our nationalist historians are first and foremost propagandists whose sole aim in life is to mislead us into thinking we have nothing to worry about because our “betters” are noble and selfless specimens of humanity as opposed to being the scum of the earth. *You don’t believe me? Listen to Zarian: “Our political parties have been of no political use to us. Their greatest enemy is free speech.” And even more to the point: “Armenians survive by cannibalizing one another.” *Like empires, cannibals are not born but made and what makes them are leaders who place their own powers and privileges above the interests of the community and the nation.#Monday, September 17, 2012****************************************** A READER WRITES****************************** “You repeat yourself. You write too much. You have too many opinions. You are on too many forums.” *That’s because I have about a dozen readers half of whom either believe nothing I say or do not trust my judgment even when I say the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.To the rest I am old news because I say nothing that is new or original; I simply repeat, quote, or paraphrase better men than myself (to which charge I plead guilty as charged). *It follows I may or may not have one reader who may profit from what I say. My ambition in life is to have at least two readers before I die. On the day that happens I may consider making myself more useful in some other line of work, such as planting potatoes or bird-watching.#Tuesday, September 18, 2012************************************ WRONG QUESTIONS****************************** Do I have more enemies than friends? Wrong question. The right question is: Am I saying what must be said? *Do our fanatics outnumber our moderates? What about our dupes? Do they outnumber those who can think for themselves? Corrupt, incompetent or dishonest leaders: do they outnumber the honest ones? Do our dividers outnumber those who are of the opposite disposition? *If the alienated and assimilated outnumber those who “have Ararat in their hearts,” who is to blame? Speaking as an alienated Armenian who stays away from community centers, churches, and political parties: I hate all propagandists regardless of nationality so much so that I’d much rather deal with an honest Turk than a dishonest Armenian. I will go further and say I consider all honest men my brothers and all charlatans and crooks as my enemies. *Do our brainwashed dupes outnumber those who refuse to surrender their hearts and minds to partisans and panchoonies? To ask the right questions is the beginning of all wisdom.#Wednesday, September 19, 2012**************************************** ON BEING WRONG****************************** So what if I am wrong? Far better men than myself have been wrong. Think of Zohrab who saved Talaat’s life by risking his own. Think of our revolutionaries who on the eve of the Genocide challenged the Turks to massacre us. Think of Charents who allowed himself to be brainwashed by the Bolsheviks. Consider the case of Sylva Gaboudikyan of “Forget your mother” fame, who after the collapse of the Soviet Union declared “I am proud to have been a member of the Communist Party!” *If I am wrong I can be corrected. And I have been, many times. I am corrected even when I am right. When was the last time anyone dared to correct any one of our bosses, bishops, and benefactors? *You have nothing to fear from someone willing to admit his fallibility, and everything to fear from someone who speaks in the name of God, Country, and the eternal snows of Mt. Ararat.#

Saturday, September 15, 2012 ***************************************** ON IDEOLOGIES & RELIGIONS ******************************************* Sooner or later all ideologies and religions develop a power structure; and where power enters murder is sure to follow – not to say war and massacre. * Religions may benefit individuals here and there, now and then but societies, never! * Religions have been and continue to be as dangerous as biological and nuclear weapons. * Freedom of religion means license to brainwash. # Friday, September 14, 2012 ****************************************** FROM MY NOTEBOOKS ************************************ There are two ways of being popular in an environment dominated by charlatans and dupes: by inventing new lies and by recycling old ones. * I don’t write for dupes. I write for readers who almost think as I do. * Who takes Armenian writers seriously? Not even Armenian writers. Speaking for myself, I have nothing but contempt for writers who write about many things – from the Middle Ages to massacres – but carefully avoid our present problems. * If everybody loved to play the same instrument we wouldn’t have an orchestra. * An Armenian reader may agree with me on one or two points, but three points? – that would be like a minor miracle. # Saturday, September 15, 2012 ************************************* GUILTY AS CHARGED ******************************** Benefactors write checks, build schools and community centers; bishops sermonized in the name God; bosses speechify in the name of Country and Mount Ararat; and after leading a more or less comfortable life they die in bed. By contrast, successive generations of our writers have been reduced to the status of beggars, silenced, exiled, and murdered. Why? Simply because they refused to engage in deception and to mislead the community into thinking they never had it so good because they are in the best of hands. And because I write as I do I have been called a Turk, an enemy of the people, and a shit. * When in his eighties Zarian died in Yerevan after sustaining injuries in a fall, he was sure he had been pushed and murdered by agents of the State. * When Baruir Massikian, a brilliant playwright, short story write and essayist, who was also a successful lawyer, was visited in his deathbed by a delegation of Panchoonies parading as concerned community leaders asked him to leave his wealth to the Armenian Educational Foundation, he said he’d much rather leave it to whores in a Cairo bordello. * You may see me as a pessimist and a dealer in gloom and doom. I see myself as an honest witness who refuses to commit perjury. If that’s a crime, I am more than willing to plead guilty as charged, #

Wednesday, September 12, 2012 ******************************************* IF ************** What do you gain if in your effort to be positive you cover up the negative? * What do you gain if you replace greed for money (capitalism) with greed for power (communism) if the number of victims (the poor and the powerless) remains constant? * History does not repeat itself; it’s human nature that stays the same. * Propaganda makes a critic’s job easy by telling him where the bodies are buried. * First nation to adopt Christianity in the 4th century; first nation to adopt atheism in the 20th. * A man’s wisdom may also be judged by the number of fools he counts as his enemies. #

Thursday, September 06, 2012 ******************************************* THE TRUTH ************************** For ever opinion, theory, ideology, and belief system there is another that contradicts it. Communism versus capitalism. Theism versus atheism. Imperialism versus nationalism. Which is right? *We tend to think in terms of generalities, abstractions, and carefully selected facts – and that’s where we go wrong: in our selection of evidence. *What are the arguments for imperialism? For 600 years the Middle East lived in relative harmony. But after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire there followed a long series of internecine wars with no end in sight. Something similar happened after the collapse of the Soviet Union. *What are the arguments against nationalism? Divisions tend to generate more divisions and internecine conflicts can be as bloody as imperialist wars (Syria being a present-day case in point). *What is the difference between communism and capitalism? As the old joke has it: Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it’s the other way around. Or, as they used to say in Poland: “Once upon a time we were slaves. We are now slaves of former slaves.” *The truth is, there is no Truth, only Big lies and dupes. # Friday, September 07, 2012 *************************************** RECAPITULATING ******************************* The reason why I like to make the truth as unpalatable as I can is that only then our dupes may decide to emerge from the cesspool in which they have been swimming. *Very early in my career as a writer I realized the only way to survive in this business is to kiss ass and say it smells like roses. *I know now why as a child I was lied to about Armenians: the truth is too unspeakable. *As an adult I was promised minimum wage (actually less) provided I wrote and translated what I was told by mediocrities that operated on the assumption it is a writer’s duty to emphasize the positive and cover up the negative, that is to say, to lie and deceive. *When I finally decided to speak the truth, I was silenced and became an enemy of the people. On more than one occasion I have been accused of being a hireling of foreign powers including the regime in Ankara. *We are so addicted to lies that anything that does not flatter our collective ego is rejected as enemy action. *May the Lord have mercy on our soul – if there is a Lord and we have a soul # Saturday, September 08, 2012 ************************************** CHAUVINIST SLOGANS ***************************** Chauvinists are not born but made, and what makes them is systematic indoctrination at a vulnerable age. *What is the difference between an Armenian and a Turkish chauvinist? Only the identity of their brainwashers. In all other respects they might as well be Siamese. *Where there is chauvinism there will be deportations, wars and massacres. *“All men by nature desire to know” Aristotle tells us.He should have added, except chauvinists who prefer to wallow in their own cliches ignorance. *A chauvinist’s most important ideas revolve around slogans and recycled propaganda and his favorite two words are “Yes, sir!”*“My country, right or wrong!” “My love of my country is good. My enemy’s love for his country is bad.” “If you don’t have Ararat in your heart you are no better than a piece of sh*t," (or so I was informed the other day by one of my gentle readers). “Forget your mother but do not forget your mother tongue.”And to think that there are actually self-assessed smart people who take this kind of nonsense seriously.*The Jesuits --masters of indoctrination--had a slogan of their own: “Give me a child and I will raise him to believe anything!” And so it is. *To speak truth to stupid is to dig your own grave. #

Sunday, September 02, 2012 *********************************** SEMANTICS *********************** Freedom to a bully means the freedom to bully the weak and defenseless. Freedom to a racist means the freedom to view a fraction of his fellow men as inferior and himself as superior. To a capitalist it means the freedom to exploit. To a tyrant it means the freedom to oppress, enslave, and when necessary, to slaughter. * Until very recently, in my own lifetime as a matter of fact, “Anglo-Saxon democracy” in the Southern States freedom meant classifying “Jews, Catholics, and niggers” as alien, hostile, and undesirable minorities, that is to say, the scum of the earth. * It is not enough to say what must be said; you must also be careful to say it to the right person. In that sense, all our writers have been preaching to the deaf, dumb, and stupid. * Freedom is not the only word open to abuse however. All important words – truth, justice, equality, objectivity… among many others – can be easily perverted to mean the opposite of what they really mean. To a nationalist historian, objectivity means to cover up the negative and to emphasize the positive, and if there are no positives, to invent them. * To subscribe to an ideology or belief system means to abdicate one’s common sense and reason, and to accept a Big Lie as the Truth. Patriotism in our context means love of one’s country and hatred of one’s fellow countrymen beginning with those who dare to disagree with us. * And speaking of Catholics: An Irish priest to a little schoolgirl: “Tell me, daughter, what do you want to be when you grow up?” “A prostitute.” “What’s that you said?” “I said a prostitute, Father.” “Thank God for that. I thought you said a Protestant.” # Monday, September 03, 2012 **************************************** SEMANTICS (II) ***************************** Speaking of words and their meanings: When we speak of nationalism what we really mean is tribalism. In our context freedom means only the freedom to choose a foreign master. Patriotism means loyalty to a gang of partisans and “mi kich pogh” panchoonies. And what is our anti-Americanism if not disguised pro-Bolshevism? * When an Armenian says to another Armenian “I disagree with you,” what he really means is my brainwashers disagree with your brainwashers. Or, it is not we who disagree but our bosses and bishops. Which may suggest, even our disagreements are not our own; or to paraphrase Zarian, even our trash has not been picked up from our own backyard. * I know I am on the right path when what I think today stands in direct contradiction to what I was brought up to believe yesterday. * Zohrab is right: Subservience corrupts everything it touches, including the noblest virtues. When near in the end of his life Charents dared to speak of solidarity he was careful to hide his message in a poem so cunningly that only his most loyal friends could locate it, and – you guessed it – it was one of them who betrayed him to the authorities. # Tuesday, September 04, 2012 ****************************************** PROPAGANDA AND DISSENT ************************************** Don’t think of me as someone who knows better. Think of me as someone who provides a perspective that contradicts a propaganda line. * How to recognize a propaganda line? Easy! A propaganda line emanates from a power structure and all power structures rely on a class of individuals who make a more or less comfortable living by misleading the people: schoolteachers, priests, sermonizers, speechifiers, and the press. Another peculiarity of propaganda is that there will invariably be another propaganda line that contradicts it; and by contradiction I mean not only abstractions but facts. (Genocide? What genocide? It never happened. It’s a fiction of our imagination.) * All power structures have the means to silence dissent. By contrast dissent is powerless as well as solitary and unprofitable. Consider the case of our own dissenters. Most if not all of them were silenced, starved, ostracized, betrayed to the authorities or murdered in cold blood. * The Romans had a legal principle that said the surest way of identifying the guilty party is by asking “Who benefits by the crime?” Dissent is not and cannot be a crime (though more often than not it is treated as a capital offense) because there are no beneficiaries, only losers – namely, the dupes of propaganda and the dissenters themselves. * In America today there are two propaganda lines that contradict each other, and there are dissenters who say it is not politicians that control events but corporations. * In our own Homeland and Diaspora there is a propaganda line that says we never had it so good because we are in the best of hands, and there are dissenters who say our power structures are rotten and we are experiencing not one but two self-inflicted genocides: assimilation in the Diaspora and exodus in the Homeland. * Who is right and who wrong? Up to you to decide. And there you have another difference between propaganda and dissent: dissent gives you a choice. Propaganda does not. # Wednesday, September 05, 2012 ******************************************** BENEFUCKTORS ****************** I don't trust the judgment of the powerful and the rich. The greater the wealth, the emptier the suit. In an environment where benefactors are kings, only brown-nosers prosper. #

Thursday, August 30, 2012 ************************************* BULLIES *********************** In any given group victims outnumber their bullies; and yet, bullies are allowed the freedom to victimize. * It took slaves and workers long centuries to unite against their masters and exploiters only to develop their own set of bullies – more tyrannical, more ruthless, more bloodthirsty. * Why did it take women thousands of years to assert their rights? Even as I write these lines today most women spend more time, money and energy to make themselves more desirable to their oppressors than to develop the kind of solidarity that will give them the strength to assert equality with men. * And finally, consider the 99% versus the 1%. In an enlightened society the 1% would probably be in jail; and yet, they are allowed the freedom to sermonize and speechify in the name of God and Country, or freedom and prosperity. * One may be justified in suspecting that what motivates most men and women is not common sense and decency or even self-interest but cowardice, greed, and ignorance. # Friday, August 31, 2012 ************************************* DECEPTION ************************ Don’t believe everything you are told. Believe even less everything you read. The aim of human communication is deception. This is not a personal prejudice but a universal truth. It has been said and repeated by far better men than myself, among them Socrates who went further and said people (including the 1%) use words with total unawareness of their meaning. * Turks don’t view the Genocide as a tragedy or a crime against humanity but as a military victory to celebrate and brag about among themselves. (“We taught them a lesson they’ll never forget!”) * Armenians don’t view treason and betrayal as a capital offense but as a necessary means for survival. To some degree we are all perverts and liars, and to say otherwise is the height of self-deception. * You think I enjoy being the bearer of bad tidings? I think of myself as an objective observer and an interpreter of reality. As for the world at large: the consensus seems to be: Let bygones be bygones. Concentrate on the future. What’s done is done and cannot be undone. * Asvadz medz eh! Not an original slogan, granted. But what’s the use of originality if it can fix nothing? # Saturday, September 01, 2012 ***************************************** CONFESSIONS OF A MEGALOMANIAC *************************************************** A megalomaniac with an inferiority complex. That’s me. I write for Armenians who hate to read because they know better. Armenians who brag about their highly developed instinct for survival even as they dig the nation’s grave. Whoever said “At the beginning was the word, at the end garbage,” sure knew what he was talking about. * Neither Khorenatsi nor Naregatsi, neither Raffi nor Zarian were successful in toppling the thick impenetrable wall that stands between our men of contemplation and our men of action – writers and politicians. * “Our political parties have been of no political use to us; their greatest enemy is free speech”(Zarian). * The average Armenian dupe is convinced nothing and no one can fool him, not even the combined cunning of seven Genoese (the smartest Italians, it has been said) seven Greeks, and seven Jews. And yet he is taken in by partisan slogans whose sole aim is to divide the nation. * To divide and rule. That’s enemy action. It follows, as night follows day, and as sunset follows sunrise, our partisan patriots are our enemies. Now then, go ahead and contradict that. #

Thursday, August 30, 2012 ************************************* BULLIES *********************** In any given group victims outnumber their bullies; and yet, bullies are allowed the freedom to victimize. * It took slaves and workers long centuries to unite against their masters and exploiters only to develop their own set of bullies – more tyrannical, more ruthless, more bloodthirsty. * Why did it take women thousands of years to assert their rights? Even as I write these lines today most women spend more time, money and energy to make themselves more desirable to their oppressors than to develop the kind of solidarity that will give them the strength to assert equality with men. * And finally, consider the 99% versus the 1%. In an enlightened society the 1% would probably be in jail; and yet, they are allowed the freedom to sermonize and speechify in the name of God and Country, or freedom and prosperity. * One may be justified in suspecting that what motivates most men and women is not common sense and decency or even self-interest but cowardice, greed, and ignorance. # Friday, August 31, 2012 ************************************* DECEPTION ************************ Don’t believe everything you are told. Believe even less everything you read. The aim of human communication is deception. This is not a personal prejudice but a universal truth. It has been said and repeated by far better men than myself, among them Socrates who went further and said people (including the 1%) use words with total unawareness of their meaning. * Turks don’t view the Genocide as a tragedy or a crime against humanity but as a military victory to celebrate and brag about among themselves. (“We taught them a lesson they’ll never forget!”) * Armenians don’t view treason and betrayal as a capital offense but as a necessary means for survival. To some degree we are all perverts and liars, and to say otherwise is the height of self-deception. * You think I enjoy being the bearer of bad tidings? I think of myself as an objective observer and an interpreter of reality. As for the world at large: the consensus seems to be: Let bygones be bygones. Concentrate on the future. What’s done is done and cannot be undone. * Asvadz medz eh! Not an original slogan, granted. But what’s the use of originality if it can fix nothing? # Saturday, September 01, 2012 ***************************************** CONFESSIONS OF A MEGALOMANIAC *************************************************** A megalomaniac with an inferiority complex. That’s me. I write for Armenians who hate to read because they know better. Armenians who brag about their highly developed instinct for survival even as they dig the nation’s grave. Whoever said “At the beginning was the word, at the end garbage,” sure knew what he was talking about. * Neither Khorenatsi nor Naregatsi, neither Raffi nor Zarian were successful in toppling the thick impenetrable wall that stands between our men of contemplation and our men of action – writers and politicians. * “Our political parties have been of no political use to us; their greatest enemy is free speech”(Zarian). * The average Armenian dupe is convinced nothing and no one can fool him, not even the combined cunning of seven Genoese (the smartest Italians, it has been said) seven Greeks, and seven Jews. And yet he is taken in by partisan slogans whose sole aim is to divide the nation. * To divide and rule. That’s enemy action. It follows, as night follows day, and as sunset follows sunrise, our partisan patriots are our enemies. Now then, go ahead and contradict that. #

Sunday, August 26, 2012******************************************* CONFESSIONS OF AN EX-MORON************************************************ One of the worst things that can happen to a man is to be dependent on the charity of swine. If you have never been there, consider yourself the luckiest man on earth.*There is more hatred than love in what I write, or so I am told. To which I say, surely I can’t be the only game in town. There must be many others more favorably disposed towards our “betters.” Let them be the good cops to my bad cop.*For 600 years we were dependent on the charity of swine. We were even grateful and loyal to them. Even after they legally abducted, converted, and brainwashed our boys to kill and die in their imperialist wars; even after they raped our daughters and used them as concubines and whores, our gratitude and loyalty never wavered. On the eve of the Genocide they called us their “most loyal ethnic minority.” What did that get us, may I ask? So you still think if I am kinder to our swine they will have a better chance to see the light and change their ways?*If our “betters” go about their business with the shameless arrogance of bloodthirsty oppressors it may because they know something we don’t know, namely: if they control the educational system and the press they can convince even the dumbest people on earth to think they are the smartest. I speak from experience. Even as I went about committing some of my worst blunders, I did so with the awareness that as the offspring of the smartest nation on earth I could do no wrong.#Monday, August 27, 2012************************************** FROM MY NOTEBOOKS***************************************As soon as I am tempted to take myself seriously one of my patriotic readers takes it upon himself to remind me that no one gives a damn about what I think or say. I am grateful to these readers. One of the worst things that can happen to an Armenian writer is to think that like the rest of mankind he deserves to live.*Even the smartest Armenian will speak like an idiot if he has been brainwashed as a child.*Love is like alcohol: after intoxication, hangover; after blissful harmony, ulcer; after heaven, hell.#Tuesday, August 28, 2012********************************** CHARLATANS*********************To see the invisible and to understand the incomprehensible: we all share that ambition, but somewhere along the line some of us give up and pretend to be satisfied with answers fabricated by charlatans – popes, imams, rabbis who, unable to convince one another, brainwash defenseless children in the name of education.*We have the rare gift of saying a great many things except that which must be said. *The brainwashed cannot speak for themselves.*Fascism cannot be defeated with arguments. It took a world war to defeat fascism and even then it was only a temporary victory. There are more fascist regimes today than there are democracies, and there are fascists even in democracies. They may not call themselves fascists but they are as fascist as the fascists under Mussolini who was said to be “always right” (“Mussolini ha sempre ragione”)very much like popes, imams, and rabbis.#Wednesday, August 29, 2012************************************** RATS****************** We now know something we didn’t know until last night: When “Mrs. 1%” fell sick “Mr. 1%” took good care of her. It follows, the 1% know how to take care of their own and make it look like they do this out of Christian charity and compassion.*Fascism may also be defined as the encounter of useful idiots with moral morons.*I have every reason to suspect communists of all nations now pray for a Republican victory because then the chances of a Russian-style revolution in America may be greatly improved.*Writes David Brooks in THE NEW YORK TIMES: “Romney attended Harvard, studying business, law, classics and philosophy, though intellectually his first love was always tax avoidance.”*One of my favorite cases of mixed metaphors goes something like this: “Mr. Speaker, I smell a rat; I see him forming in the air and darkening the sky; but I’ll nip him in the bud.”#