arabaliozian Posted May 2, 2009 Author Report Share Posted May 2, 2009 Thursday, April 30, 2009 ******************************************** ON INTELLECTUALS ************************************** Intellectuals are a nuisance to the rich and parasites to the poor. But their real enemies are neither the poor nor the rich but intellectuals. * ON TURCOCENTRISM ********************************** The unspoken message of our Turcocentric ghazetajis seems to be, the keys to the Gates of Heaven will be ours only after we do to them what they did to us. These ghazetajis are the true offspring of our revolutionaries in the Ottoman Empire who promised heaven and delivered hell. * ENEMIES ********************** We are our greatest enemies. I can prove this by saying I have done more harm to myself than all my enemies combined. * CRITICS ************************ Socrates and Jesus had them, and as everyone knows by now, saints have been the most consistently and universally abused people on earth. * ON AUTHORITY ********************** Respect for authority is the source of all evil. * ON REVOLUTION ********************************** Revolutions are less about justice or the distribution of wealth, and more about the distribution of power, and power will be abused regardless of who is at the top. For the slave, it makes no difference if his master is Turk or Armenian. # Friday, May 1, 2009 ******************************************** SIGNS ************************************** Everything is as it should be. I never had it so good. The surest warnings of an impending catastrophe. * You say I always see the dark side of things. I say someone has to. Paranoiacs have enemies too. And who said pessimists are always wrong? * You cannot hide your ignorance. It is your most transparent possession. * When an Armenian defeats another Armenian, it is the nation that loses. * A lie is like a deadly virus. Left unattended it will poison and kill its promoter as well as his dupes, families as well as communities, tribes as well as nations, empires as well as civilizations. * In democracies, dissidents like Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell were (and still are) universally respected, sometimes even Nobelized. We all know what happened to dissidents in the USSR. I venture to suggest, we Armenians (judging by the number of writers we have betrayed, silenced, starved and driven to suicide) are more like Stalinists than the British. # Friday, May 1, 2009 ******************************************** FROM MY NOTEBOOKS ************************************** We all make mistakes, especially the infallible. * The brainwashed never question their infallibility. * The brainwashed cannot speak for themselves, neither can they think, they can only follow orders, or, like monkeys, dance to the tune of an invisible organ-grinder. * The 5th century AD was our Golden Age, the 20th century our Stone Age. * When the old fight, it is the young who die. When the rich fight, it is the poor who die. If it were up to the old and the rich to do the dying, we would have no more wars. * Where there is an Armenian church there will also be a wealthy merchant with a guilty conscience. # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
arabaliozian Posted May 6, 2009 Author Report Share Posted May 6, 2009 Sunday, May 3, 2009 *********************************** WHAT IS LITERATURE? ********************************************** There is no consensus on the subject. Some say the function of literature is to understand reality. Others, to introduce or enhance moral standards. To educate, explain, and instruct. To fight corruption and injustice. To expose prejudices. To see beauty and eternity in a blade of grass. Dissidents believe the function of literature is to question authority. Those in authority disagree: they say writers should behave like a chorus singing hymns to their infallibility, greatness, integrity, vision, and glory. It has also been said what literature does is to make "sh*t look like rose jam" (Jean Genet). Speaking for myself, I believe the first and most important function of literature is not to bore the reader. And speaking of sh*t and rose jam: I am reminded of Saroyan defending his one-dimensional depiction of Armenian characters in his fiction by saying he had only “stylized” them -- probably meaning that he had done to Armenians what Leonardo had done to Mona Lisa, or what Balthus had done to his street scenes: that is to say, introduced something that is not present in reality. * Monday, May 4, 2009 **************************************** AMERICANS AND GENOCIDE ************************************* Hugo Chavez: “Columbus was the commander of an invasion that resulted in the greatest genocide the world has ever known.” Now you know why American presidents promise but they hesitate to deliver. All the Turks have to do is tell them, “Armenians are our Indians.” * A WOMAN ON WOMEN *********************************** Colette on feminists: “I would put them all in a harem.” * CIORAN ON THE FRENCH ************************************** “They prefer an elegant lie to a clumsily expressed truth.” * ON SACRED COWS ********************************* The only thing they are good for is shish kebab. # Tuesday, May 5, 2009 ***************************************** NOTES AND COMMENTS ************************************* To understand how easy it is to be wrong, all I have to do is review my past, and I don't mean my distant past. I mean yesterday. * There is more to being Armenian than hating Turks and lamenting our martyrs. Looking backward is useful only if we learn from our blunders. What have we learned so far? Life isn't fair? Big fish eat small fish? Politicians speak with a forked tongue? But then, are we fair to one another? Are our big fish vegetarian? Are our politicians honest? Don't make me laugh. * Truth may well be beyond our reach, but honesty is not. # Wednesday, May 6, 2009 ***************************************** THE INSULTED AND THE INJURED ************************************************** One of the most astonishing things about human nature, Dostoevsky tells us, is that it can get used to anything. For a thousand years we were ruled by tribal kings, princes, and nakharars. For six hundred years we were the obedient subjects of sultans and more recently of ruthless commissars. Today we find ourselves at the mercy of empty suits and bearded charlatans who rule by delivering empty verbiage and whose role models are not statesmen or men of faith but “crocodiles” (Chekhov). And whenever someone takes it upon himself to point this out, he is either starved or silenced permanently. And here I could make a long list of names from Abovian (who committed suicide) to Zarian (who for all practical purposes was buried alive). Have I said this before? Why shouldn't I say it again, if what I and many others before me have said has so far failed to register on our collective consciousness? “I can't write novels like Dostoevsky,” Oshagan is quoted as having said, “because we Armenians don't have Dostoevskian characters.” But what is the history of our nation with all its unspeakable betrayals, degradations, and suffering if not a character straight out of Dostoevsky? # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
arabaliozian Posted May 9, 2009 Author Report Share Posted May 9, 2009 Thursday, May 7, 2009 ***************************************** WHAT I KNOW ABOUT OUR RULING CLASSES ************************************************** We may not have an aristocracy or an elite, but we have always had a ruling class or classes, even if more often than not they were not our real rulers but “their” puppets – and by “their” I mean our masters and oppressors, that is to say, the enemy. We have always had dissidents too, even in our Golden Age (5th century AD), even if their word didn't carry much weight, and whenever not silenced by the likes of Talaat and Stalin, they were alienated by our “puppets” and ignored by the people. Consider our situation today: our ruling classes have the power and the money. They control our churches, community centers, schools, and the press. They run bureaucracies. They subsidize the publication of textbooks which legitimize and promote their own version of the past that is as objective and honest as any state-sponsored version of the past taught in, say, Turkish or even American educational institutions. What has been the contribution of our dissidents in our context? The same as that of the people – only victims. There is an American political saying, “Let the best man win.” In our case the chances are the winner will be “the best man” only for the enemy and the worst for the rest of us. This may explain why our dissidents, very much like the people, have been and continue to be perennial losers. # Friday, May 8, 2009 ***************************************** WHAT IF I AM WRONG? ************************************************** A question that comes up again and again is: “What would you have done in their place?” One way to answer that question is by saying I am more worried about what I should be doing in my place: Should I join them in covering up their blunders and make a comfortable living, as most of my former friends and academics are doing? Or state honestly what I think, even if it means living in solitary confinement in my self-imposed gulag? QUESTION: What if you are wrong? ANSWER: There is always that possibility, of course. To say otherwise would be a declaration of infallibility, which, by the way, is what they imply when they blame all our misfortunes on others. Besides, I'd much rather be wrong as an honest man than right as a rascal. But assuming I am wrong: What's the harm done? I can always be corrected, insulted, silenced...and I have been -- insulted and silenced more often than corrected. But when the leadership is wrong the result may well be either a “red” or a “white” massacre, that is, alienation and assimilation in the Diaspora and exodus from the Homeland. # Saturday, May 9, 2009 ***************************************** GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER ************************************************** Sex was a taboo subject in the Ottoman Empire but the Sultan could have as many as a thousand houris in his hourihouse. As for our own mini-sultans: after leading the nation to defeat, oppression, and massacre, they dare to speechify and sermonize on patriotism to the rest of us. * How do I know my version of the story to be the only true one? I don't. But unless proven otherwise, I shall continue to assert what I understand to be an honest and objective assessment of our situation. * Am I saying anyone who disagrees with me is dishonest? No! He could also be an ignoramus. * Another word for lamentation for the sake of lamentation is self-pity, and the aim of self-pity is to invite others to pity us. If you don't believe me, listen to Zohrab: “One should confront the misfortunes of life not with despair and dejection but in the same way that one confronts the sudden arrival of an unwelcome guest – with a smiling face. We Armenians should sing and laugh more often in order to develop that degree of emotional health and intellectual balance without which we can achieve very little in this world. A nation that is given to lamentation will never amount to anything.” * And here is Zohrab again on propaganda: “My code of ethics: between the real and the imaginary, choose the real; between truth and falsehood, choose truth, at all times, everywhere.” # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
arabaliozian Posted May 13, 2009 Author Report Share Posted May 13, 2009 Sunday, May 10, 2009 ***************************************** EXPLANATIONS ************************************************** There is a type of liar who after lying repeatedly ends up believing in his own lies. That's one way to explain the popularity of sermonizers and speechifiers. * Avedik Issahakian: “A wealthy man is nothing but a thief who has not yet been caught.” Perhaps because he does his thieving in a land whose legislators are themselves thieves. * Puzant Granian: “We have many national benefactors but not a single national writer.” That may be because benefactors prefer lies and flattery – that is to say, speechifiers, sermonizers, and brown-nosers. * Writers like Siamanto and Totovents could not stand life in America and returned to Istanbul under Talaat and to Yerevan under Stalin respectively only to be arrested and slaughtered, probably because they found the prospect of being dependent on the charity of swine worse than death. * The overwhelming majority of our writers agree in telling us that if we want to get at the roots of our misfortunes we must look within and that the blame-game is a Big Lie. Which means, our Turcocentric ghazetajis are no better than cretins whose sole aim in life is to moronize the people -- not a particularly demanding enterprise when dealing with a nation that has been brutalized by millennial oppression by some of the most ruthless and bloodthirsty regimes in the history of the world. # Monday, May 11, 2009 ***************************************** OF CABBAGES AND KINGS ************************************************** We should treat Turks as friends if only because it is easier to negotiate with friends than with enemies. If so far we have failed to do that it may be because we cannot even treat our brothers as friends. When was the last time an Armenian trusted another Armenian? * According to Lobo Antunes, a celebrated contemporary Portuguese writer, the only way to write is “to imagine yourself naked, smelling of formaldehyde, flat on your back in a marble tub, waiting for them to cut open your ribs with a huge pair of scissors.” A man after my own heart. I too believe to write any other way is to recycle propaganda. * If you play poker with a king and you win his kingdom, don't be surprised if he says, “Off with his head!” * I envy the rich for being in a position to deliver the line, “Talk to my lawyer!” * And speaking of the rich: It is said of one of our national benefactors that whenever someone approached him directly with a request for financial support, he would say, “Talk to my people.” * Self-deception is escape from reality, and those who deceive themselves might as well be open invitations to deceivers. # Tuesday, May 12, 2009 ***************************************** MART BIDI CH'ELLANK ************************************************** Do you want to understand Turks? Think of an Armenian with power. * The ideal dupe is someone who has been brought up to believe he is smart, he is progressive, and he is beyond criticism. Whereas a really smart person is more like Socrates who knew more than anyone else but who pretended to know nothing. * If I repeat myself it may be because I hope to have better luck with the next generation. Call me an optimist. In this line of work you have to be a little crazy to carry on. * What is the difference between literature and trash? The trash gets printed. * Our brainwashed dupes today are more pro-establishment than our bosses, bishops, and benefactors, in the same way that our oligarchs in the Homeland are more capitalist than Wall Street. # Wednesday, May 13, 2009 ***************************************** MART BIDI CH'ELLANK / II ************************************************** Our struggle, our real struggle, is not against men but against an abstraction that is lighter than a feather but weighs on us like a mountain: our history. Millennial oppression has so thoroughly dehumanized us that we can no longer act, we can only react blindly, and whenever we react blindly we do so not only against our own interests but also against reason itself. Consider our genocide as a case in point: we didn't have to predict it in order to take evasive action. All we had to do is listen to the countless warnings of foreign observers, missionaries, and our own insiders within the Ottoman administration. And consider what's happening today: our literature, our religion, and reason itself are unanimous in warning us that the only way to divide a house is by tearing it down. And yet...(the two saddest words in the English language, it has been said) we continue to waste millions by constructing two schools, two houses of worship, and two community centers when one would be not only sufficient but also the right thing to do. We all know what happens to the blind leading the blind, let alone to the blind, deaf, and dumb leading the blind, deaf, and dumb who have somehow managed to convince themselves that not only they are smarter than anyone else but also that God Almighty Himself is on their side. # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
arabaliozian Posted May 16, 2009 Author Report Share Posted May 16, 2009 Thursday, May 14, 2009 ***************************************** MART BIDI CH'ELLANK / III ************************************************** To say, “We don't need critics, we need solutions,” is another way of saying, we don't give a damn about our literature and its central message. To self-assessed enlightened readers who like to say, “Why should I waste my time with second-raters when I can read Plato, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky?” I say, our writers may indeed be second-raters compared to the three gentlemen mentioned above, but they have come up with first-rate solutions. * Naregatsi's solution paraphrased: “If you want to understand the source of your problems, look within, examine your conscience, analyze yourself.” It follows, the blame-game of our Turcocentric ghazetajis and speechifiers is a sham if only because after a century of verbiage and venom, it has failed to resurrect a single victim or annex a single square inch of soil. But even if some day in the near or distant future we are successful in getting an apology, a billion dollars, and our historic lands, problems like corruption and incompetence in high places, and such iniquities as destitution, prostitution, alienation, and assimilation will not go away. * The solution of writers from Yeghishé (5th century AD) to Charents (20th century) paraphrased: “Where dividers enter, death follows.” * If I repeat myself it may be because sometimes with the deaf I don't have a choice. If on the other hand, you say “Naregatsi, Yeghishé, and Charents are dead men and their solutions are as defunct as they are. We need new thinking, we need creative brains.” I say, if by new solutions you mean verbal formulas like abracadabra, you will never find them. And if by creative thinking you mean a messiah, you are barking up the wrong tree because no one in his right mind will volunteer to be crucified by brainless dupes. # Friday, May 15, 2009 ******************************* OUTSIDERS ************************************************** What has been the influence of Armenian literature on Armenian history? That's an easy question with an obvious answer: Nothing, zero, nada, nil, vochinch. What has been the influence of Socrates on Greek history? Same answer. Socrates influenced only other philosophers and no one else. After Socrates, Greek history went into a steady decline never to recover its former glory. What has been the influence of Christianity on the West? The destruction of classical cultures, the introduction of dogmatism, intolerance, the Dark Ages, twenty centuries of internecine wars and slaughter, the Crusades, persecution of heretics, the Inquisition, and more recently, televangelists and a child-molesting clergy – that is to say, moral bankruptcy. Christianity may have influenced artists like Michelangelo, thinkers like St. Thomas Aquinas, composers like J.S. Bach, and poets like Dante, but not kings, politicians, and in general those in charge of human affairs, who went about their business as if Christ had never been born. What am I driving at? Oh! nothing much. Only this: men are swine who have no use for common sense and decency. Keep that in mind and you will have no more unanswered questions. Why do I go on writing? Habit. Also to let our charlatans know that there is at least one Armenian who refuses to be their dupe, whatever the hell that's worth...probably no more than a second's insomnia. # Saturday, May 16, 2009 ******************************* A LITANY OF LIES ************************************************** “Because we were a small Christian island in a vast Muslim sea” -- I am now paraphrasing our party line -- “we were set upon and victimized by a wide assortment of imperialist barbarians on the warpath.” In other words, we are without blame. It's the fault of our geography and religious faith. Rubbish! To begin with, in the Middle Ages, Armenians were the most highly paid mercenaries in the region. Some of the most ruthless emperors and generals in the Byzantine Empire were of Armenian descent. We were at no time an “island” since Georgia to the north was also Christian. Furthermore, throughout our historic existence, we have served our masters, be they Christian, pagan, atheist, Muslim, fascist, and Bolshevik, with greater zeal than we have defended our own interests. Or, as Raffi puts it: “Whenever we have been invaded by Persian, Greek, Arab, Seljuk, or Mongol armies, these armies have advanced under the leadership of an Armenian. Armenians have always fought side by side with the enemy against their own people.” Elsewhere, “Where Armenian blood flows, look for an Armenian hatchet.” Why these distortions and lies? Because everybody does it. Americans and Turks may not speak the same language but they share the same grammar – that of power. Where would America be today without its systematic extermination of the natives and the cheap labor of slaves who died by the million while being transported from Africa? Here is how Nigoghos Sarafian sums up our past: “Our history is a litany of lamentation, anxiety, horror, and massacre. Also deception and abysmal naiveté mixed with the smoke of incense and the sound of sacred chants.” # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
arabaliozian Posted May 20, 2009 Author Report Share Posted May 20, 2009 Sunday, May 17, 2009 ******************************* UNTITLED ************************************************** Einstein didn't believe in God and when he said so publicly he received death threats. This may lead one to suspect that love of God can make a killer out of a law-abiding citizen. * I was brought up as a devout Catholic and when I first met an atheist I was sure he wasn't what he pretended to be because if he were he would be a dangerous madman, which he wasn't. * Both Napoleon and Dostoevsky thought belief in God is necessary for the people because if God didn't exist “everything would be permissible” (Dostoevsky) and “the poor would butcher the rich” (Napoleon), which of course is nonsense because Napoleon ruled with the help of a mighty police force, and what sent Dostoevsky to Siberia for five years was not God but the Czar. * God must exist because something (in this case the universe) cannot come out of nothing. But that doesn't answer the question whether or not God cares to get involved in human affairs, because so far He has behaved like an absentee landlord. What kind of loving Father would allow the rape and murder of an innocent child? * We are told we cannot understand God because His mind works in mysterious ways. If so, then there isn't much we can do except to say “of the gods we know nothing” (Socrates) and go about our business as if He didn't give a damn. * Some of my readers may not be aware of the fact that there can be such a thing as an atheist religion. Buddhism, for instance, as popular in the East as Christianity in the West, is an atheist religion. I also suspect there are many Christians out there who are not aware of the fact that a good Christian can also be an atheist (Tolstoy was one). # Monday, May 18, 2009 ******************************* OPPRESSORS ************************************************** We have survived our oppressors only at the cost of becoming our own oppressors. * “The Kingdom of God is within you,” we are told by the Scriptures. So is the kingdom of knowledge, according to Socrates, and by knowledge he did not mean such things as the capital of Egypt or the distance between Sparta and Troy (which is information) but the ability to tell right from wrong. * “Let us reason together,” we are also told by the Scriptures. But so far we have consistently preferred to “unreason” against one another. What am I driving at? Nothing much. Only this: the blame-game is for idiots. * Because I like to quote Socrates and the Scriptures (“A house divided against itself cannot stand,” “Where there is no vision the people perish”) I am told I hate myself. If true, I suppose something similar could be said of Socrates and Jesus. In his APOLOGIA, Plato tells us Socrates almost challenged, not to say provoked, the Athenian jury to condemn him to death. And Jesus knew what Judas was up to but did nothing to stop him. Does that mean their executioners were not idiots? # Tuesday, May 19, 2009 ******************************* DEMOCRACY ************************************************** On the radio, three professors of philosophy arguing about democracy. Where philosophers disagree, lawyers enter; and where lawyers enter, big money casts the deciding vote. Hence boom-and-bust capitalism in America, and kleptocracy in Armenia. * Spengler on democracy: “A small number of superior heads, whose names are very likely not the best known, settle everything, while below them are the great mass of second-rate politicians selected through a provincially-conceived franchise to keep alive the illusion of popular self-determination.” * I once asked the son of our local mayor if he plans to go into politics. “It's not up to me,” he replied. “It's up to the people on King Street.” (Our King Street is the equivalent of Wall Street in New York.) * Since I can't hang them, I write about them. * If you have enough money for bread and books, making more of it is a waste of time. * To be a man of faith means to reject all evidence to the contrary regardless of its merits. * In our belief systems we resemble parrots, and in our defense of these belief systems, we behave more like cannibals. # Wednesday, May 20, 2009 ******************************* CONSENSUS ************************************************** We will promote ourselves from tribalism to nationalism, and from nationalism to multiculturalism – because whether we like it or not we not only live in a multicultural world but we are ourselves multicultural – on the day our “betters” adopt the mantra “the principle of solidarity is not negotiable,” which translated into dollars and cents means, consensus is more important than dead-end discord and strife, and consensus does not mean agreement on all points but only agreement to advance in the same direction. * I have never met an anti-Semite who was not as bad as his distorted image of Jews. * I am more than suspicious of all claims of moral superiority, especially of the self-assessed kind, which is always symptomatic of moral inferiority. * My question is: Why is it that some Armenians who have been fully aware of corrupt practices in the Homeland from day one are heard from only when they are personally stung by them? Don't they know that by keeping silent they actively legitimize the very same system whose victims they now claim to be? What about the countless other victims, who cannot afford lawyers, are in no position to make headlines, and whose sole alternatives are either emigration or prostitution? # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
arabaliozian Posted May 23, 2009 Author Report Share Posted May 23, 2009 Thursday, May 21, 2009 ******************************* IDIOTS ************************************************** On child-molesting priests, the official defense of the Catholic Church goes something like this: Sexual molestation of defenseless children is not a crime but a sin that required repentance followed by forgiveness and renewal. The degradation and damage to the child is not taken into consideration because less relevant or real than the sin of the priest. Leave it to theologians and lawyers to explain and justify criminal conduct. * When we speak of the blunders and crimes of the Vatican, one of the first instances that comes to mind is the persecution of Galileo Galilei. It took centuries for the Vatican to admit error. It may take many more centuries for the Church to realize that covering up the “sins” of the clergy was even a bigger crime because it amounted to issuing a license for abuse. * The world will be a better place on the day theologians concentrate their efforts in exposing the shortcomings of their own belief systems as opposed to asserting moral and intellectual superiority with arguments that convince no one but themselves and their dupes. * If the Pope doubts his faith seven times every day, as Italians are fond of saying, let him say so if only because in matters of faith doubt is more civilized than certainty. * And if God is infallible, why did He create an imperfect world in which man's inhumanity to man is a constant and war and massacre are routine occurrences? To those who say wars and massacres are men's doing, not God's, because God has given men free will that allows them to choose between good and evil; I say, the free will argument may apply to the victimizer, not the victim. Given the choice, who would freely choose to be the victim of self-righteous idiots? # Friday, May 22, 2009 ******************************* WHAT I BELIEVE ************************************************** I believe God is not who we think He is, and when we speak in His name, we lie. I believe with Socrates that “of the gods we know nothing.” I believe with Gandhi that God is Truth provided we agree that none of us knows the truth or is in a position to grasp all of Reality, only a fraction of it. I believe the Bible is not “the word of God,” but a search for truth, which is endless. I believe with Tolstoy that “the Kingdom of God” is within us and to look for it in heaven or anywhere else is a waste of time. I believe to speak of God as if He were not the Unknown and the Unknowable is to try to make comprehensible that which is incomprehensible by bringing it down to our own level. I believe when Popes, Imams, and capitalists speak in the name of their conception of God it is impossible to tell to what extent they identify God with their own power and I believe power corrupts everything it touches. I also believe with Socrates, Christ, and Tolstoy that poverty is the surest proof of honesty. # Saturday, May 23, 2009 ******************************* MAYBE ************************************************** If no one in a position of power speaks as I do, it may be because I have nothing to defend but my fundamental human right of free speech. * If you think I am the bearer of bad tidings, it may be because you prefer your illusions to my reality, which may well be another illusion. * During the Soviet era, I remember, one of our elder statesmen wrote me an angry letter in which he said, “How dare you criticize the Homeland. Saroyan never did. You think you are better than Saroyan?” To which I could only say: “Far better men than Saroyan have been critical of the Soviets, including a good number of Soviets.” That may have been good enough to shut him up for a while but not to convince him, because shortly before he died he sent me a venomous missile. * We are not what we think we are. Our identity revolves around this fact and the way we fail to come to terms with it. Which amounts to saying, our identity is as intangible as the shadow of a black hat as reflected in an invisible mirror in a dark room. * To believe a nation's own version of its past amounts to believing a criminal's plea of not guilty. * If a ruthless serial killer were to write his memoirs, you can be sure of one thing: he would portray himself as a victim rather than a victimizer. # http://baliozian.blogspot.com/ Quote Link to post Share on other sites
arabaliozian Posted May 27, 2009 Author Report Share Posted May 27, 2009 Sunday, May 24, 2009 ******************************* A LIE EXPOSED ************************************************** We have been exposed to the lie that we are smart for such a long time and so often that we now believe it to be a self-evident truth. It isn't! Some of us may be smart in the marketplace, but when it comes to such far more important matters as defending our fundamental human rights, we might as well be just about the dumbest people on earth. * Our leaders are to us what the Pope is to Catholics – infallible. This is what our nationalist historians tell us and this is what, as Orthodox dupes, we believe. * If theology is a branch of science fiction, Armenian history is pure fiction. * For six hundred years we were at the mercy of Turks. The unspoken message of our Turcocentric ghazetajis today is, we still are.... * Since I don't have any political ambitions, I refuse to say “Yes, sir!” to idiots. # Monday, May 25, 2009 ******************************* FREE PRESS ************************************************** We don't have a free press. We never had one. But that's not the real scandal. The real scandal is that no one seems to care. No one seems to know that a community without a free press is a blind and deaf community. And I am not talking about the Homeland now. I am talking about the Diaspora. Once, when an editor exposed the corrupt practices of one of our political parties, he was nearly beaten to death. The perpetrators were never caught. Which may suggest that, when it comes to silencing critics, we go about it with professional efficiency and know-how. We expect this sort of thing to happen in the Homeland where a free press is an anomaly. But not in the Diaspora, and definitely not in a democratic environment. How do they get away with it? Easy! The very same people who are in the business of silencing dissent also keep telling us we are smart, we are progressive, we are civilized, we are freedom-loving, when in reality, we are nothing of the kind. “You speak of corruption,” a friend, himself a writer, once said to me. “Do you have any evidence?” That's when he harbored political ambitions. Shortly thereafter he called again to say that his latest commentary had been censored and he was planning to take legal action. Did he? I don't know. But I do know that he quit writing. About a month ago I watched a televised speech by an official from the Homeland (a former member of the Party) in which I heard a great deal of palaver about the importance of preserving our mother tongue, the bane of mixed marriages, the primacy of Etchmiadzin and so on and so forth. But not a single word on human rights. Judging by the prolonged applause, no one seemed to have noticed that. Smart, civilized, progressive, freedom-loving? Don't make me laugh! # Tuesday, May 26, 2009 ******************************* PROFILES IN COURAGE ************************************************** Readers who know little or nothing about Armenian literature call me brave for writing as I do. I am nothing of the kind. Raffi (1835-1888) was brave when he said, “There is more profit in defending the interests of wolves against sheep than the other way around,” and, “The fiercest enemies of critics are those who serve tyrants.” A notorious Kurdish assassin was hired to have him silenced permanently. Zarian (1885-1969) was brave for exposing the moral bankruptcy of the Soviet regime long before Solzhenitsyn did, returned to Yerevan, where, some say, he was murdered. Bakounts (1899-1937) was brave when he described the regime as a “disease,” was arrested, jailed, tortured, and shot. Shahnour (1904-1974) was brave when he said, “An Armenian's indifference for the collective good of the people is a thick, impenetrable shield which dulls and neutralizes his soul. What insufferable rottenness, especially when he is educated.” Aramais Sahakian (b. 1936) was brave when he said “Let us learn to be human by observing animals.” And I could go on and on... Compared to them I am no better than a scarecrow whose words carry as much weight as an ant's fart. As for those who insult me on the Internet, they are no better than faceless, gutless, anonymous scum. # Wednesday, May 27, 2009 ***************************************** WHAT I DON'T BELIEVE ************************************ After saying and repeating “All men are created equal,” Americans look down at the rest of mankind, including the majority of their fellow Americans because they happen to belong to a different race or nationality. If Americans can deceive themselves, why can't we? If all nationalist historians place the demands of propaganda above objectivity, why should we be the only exceptions? Why shouldn't we say and repeat, in our failings we are like everyone else, but in every other respect we are unique, that is to say, superior? Why shouldn't we brag about our small and ephemeral empire under Dikran the Great and call our military defeats moral victories? If reality is against us, why shouldn't we invent a lie and repeat it until it acquires the sheen of a self-evident truth? If we are dupes, why can't we brainwash ourselves into believing we are just about the smartest people on earth and it takes seven Jews to fool an Armenian? As for our writers who tell us a different story, who cares what a few malcontents think? * I don't believe in small or harmless lies because they may lead to big and dangerous lies. The American belief in their own invincible military might led to the disaster in Vietnam. And their belief in their superior brand of democracy may lead to more tragedies in the Middle East, Afghanistan and elsewhere. * I think of a childhood friend who believed in cigarette commercials, became a chain-smoker, and is now dying of terminal cancer. * A headline in one of our weeklies today reads: “Armenian police vow to end attacks on journalists.” To which I can only say, “If you believe that, you will believe anything!” # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
arabaliozian Posted May 30, 2009 Author Report Share Posted May 30, 2009 Thursday, May 28, 2009 ***************************************** ALAS! ************************************ You want to be a benefactor? Making a million or a billion is the easy part. What's hard is the realization that all they want is your money, and when they look at you they don't see a face but a dollar sign. You want to be a boss or bishop? Nothing to it. You start by saying “Yes, sir!” to the idiots who are ahead of you and the chances are you will have no trouble filling vacancies all the way to the top. You want to be a writer? You have two options: (one) to write what they want to read, and (two) to write what you think. If you choose the first option, they may do you the favor of printing you; if the second, you may be free to live in the gulag of your choice. * Literature: a field of human endeavor in which even the Turks are ahead of us. * Journalism: ditto, alas! * In a letter to the editor in our local paper today I read the following: “The general public, poorly educated for the most part and in many cases barely literate, is bamboozled by the media and lulled by game shows and sports extravaganzas.” Replace “games” and “sports” with “atrocities” and “massacres” and you will have a fairly honest and objective assessment of our situation, alas! # Friday, May 29, 2009 ***************************************** ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM AND PRO-MESSIANISM ************************************ On more than one occasion I have been attacked and insulted by readers on the grounds that so far I have failed to come up with the right verbal formula that will save the nation, as if such a formula ever existed in some yet undiscovered dimension and it was up to me to fetch it. Illusions, like fools, come in all sizes and shapes. There are still Russians today who believe in Stalin's propaganda line and call Solzhenitsyn a traitor, as there are Germans who are for Hitler and against Thomas Mann, who exposed Hitler's charlatanism. Fascism is not dead in Italy, neither is Maoism in China. The ancients may not have known much about balanced diets but they knew that one way to kill a man was to condemn him to eat the same food for forty days. Hence the spectacle of dupes who after being fed the same propaganda line for a generation become living cadavers. I have yet to meet the Armenian dupe or Turcocentric ghazetaji who was not brain-dead. Perhaps our anti-intellectualism is nothing but an extension of our pro-messianism. And the problem with pro-messianism is that it completely ignores the fact that messiahs don't solve problems, they compound them by making unreasonable demands on us poor mortals – such as loving our enemies. The only Armenian I know who dared to speak of sympathy for the Turks was Saroyan. As for our sermonizers whose job it is to preach the message of our Savior: the less said about them better. # Saturday, May 30, 2009 ***************************************** VARIATIONS ON ABRACADABRA ************************************ At the end of his career as teacher and philosopher, Plato had every right to believe that he had been successful in solving most of mankind's problems, one of them being that rulers should also be philosophers. We know now that power and wisdom are mutually exclusive concepts and mankind prefers to be ruled not by philosophers but by philomorons. When Marx toiled on his magnum opus in a London library writing against exploitation, did it ever occur to him that some day his ideas would be exploited by bloodthirsty barbarians who would victimize millions of innocent human beings? And to think that he was fully aware of the fact that for nearly two millennia mankind had exploited even the Word of God by reducing it to “opium" thus legitimizing the rule of the Devil. What are ideas if not variations on abracadabra? We like to say if it weren't for good men, mankind would be in a far worse shape. Maybe so. But what kind of consolation is that for the hungry, the sick, the dying, and the dead? Illusions are for the living and the favorite occupation of the living is to spin illusions. There you have it, a history of human thought in a single sentence. # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
arabaliozian Posted June 3, 2009 Author Report Share Posted June 3, 2009 Sunday, May 31, 2009 ***************************************** FUNNY BUSINESS ************************************ Almost every other day our local paper prints a letter critical of its editorial policy. By contrast, our weeklies pretend not to have a policy, or if they do, it has only two criteria: truth and excellence. I dare you not to see any humor in this. * At one time or another I have offended Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, dupes, fanatics, nationalists, communists, capitalists, racists, propagandists, lawyers, and chief executive officers, and by my rough estimate, several billion people. Why should I be surprised if so far I have failed to acquire the status of a best-selling author? * If I repeat myself it may be because no one minds repeating “I love you” to the person s/he loves. Why should you mind if I say and repeat, I hate charlatans, bloodsuckers, and idiots who parade as leaders of men? -- unless of course you are one of them. * I don't write about labels, I write about human beings and if most of them are Armenian it may be because I know them and myself better than I know the rest of mankind. I have at no time hidden the fact that in my formative years I was as big a dupe of our propaganda as those I now ridicule. You might say therefore that I attack and expose not just fools but also my former self. * Truth sets you free only in theory. In practice it destroys an important fraction of your self. That is why it is ruthlessly shunned by most. * Plot for a play: two characters agree to achieve perfection by exposing each other's failings, and they end up destroying themselves. # Monday, June 1, 2009 ***************************************** EDUCATION BY INDOCTRINATION **************************************** Education by indoctrination should be a criminal offense. The only reason it isn't is that everybody does it and no one seems to mind. * There is in all of us an infantile need to believe in lies and when no one deceives us, we deceive ourselves. * As a child he was taught to speak the truth, and when the Turkish police came and wanted to know where was his uncle's hiding place, he said “In the well,” and he took them there. * When God asked Cain where was his brother Abel (as if He didn't know), Cain replied, “Am I then my brother's keeper?” * We are told violence in movies begets violence in life. What about intolerance in organized religions and ideologies? How many violent movies did Cain see? Was Genghis Khan influenced by John Wayne, and Napoleon by Brando? * The Republicans (most of them White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) are now calling the Hispanic Supreme Court nominee a “racist.” They forget that for more than a hundred years Supreme Court Justices (most of them WASPs) legitimized slavery and racism in America. These WASPs! – they sure know how to take care of their own. That may well be the secret of their success. You may now guess what is the secret of our failure. * Question to our Turcocentric ghazetajis: “Does it ever occur to you that you may be barking up the wrong tree?” # Tuesday, June 2, 2009 ***************************************** SUCCESS **************************************** Give a man the best education money can buy and a position of great responsibility and end up with an assh*le who thinks he deserves a fat bonus just for pulling his dick. * Some readers disagree with me not because they find my arguments defective but because they think I stand between them and their chances to achieve success. * There is a saying in Hollywood: “Success is relative, the closer the relative, the greater the success.” * If we think what we are told to think, are we (brain)dead or alive? And if we are alive, is our life worth living? * When I hear someone use the word “culture” I immediately assume he means his particular brand of barbarism. * We say Naregatsi is our Dante and Shakespeare combined, but whereas Italian and English children can quote lines from Dante and Shakespeare, I have yet to hear a single Armenian boy or girl, or adult for that matter, quote a single solitary line by Naregatsi. * We brag about our culture but we prefer to speak about massacres, as if being massacred were a great achievement. * When your whole life is a big blunder, you hate like hell anyone who dares to suggest you may have made a mistake. # Wednesday, June 3, 2009 ***************************************** DIPLOMACY 101 **************************************** The Turks know better what happened if only because they know both sides of the story, unlike us who know only our side. They have a better grasp of world history too if only because they ran an empire for six hundred years. Which means they speak a language that is accessible to other empires. All they have to say to the Americans is, “Armenians are our Indians,” and all Americans have to do is think: “What if in time of war when our very existence may well be in peril our ethnic minorities behave like the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World War I?” Which may also explain why the Soviets opposed all talk of Genocide recognition. When our first foreign minister visited Ankara and mentioned the Genocide, the Turks said, “This man hates us. We can't negotiate with him.” Our president agreed and immediately replaced him. He understood that you can't call a man a murderer and a barbarian and expect him to behave like a civilized human being. Were the Turks murderers and barbarians? Yes, of course. No doubt about that. Even the murder of a single innocent human being is an act of barbarism. But that's in civilian parlance which has nothing to do with the semantics of diplomacy. If the Turks behaved like bloodthirsty barbarians, so did the rest of mankind before, during, and after our Tragedy. We cannot educate, reform, and persuade mankind into behaving like the civilizations they pretend to be. We can only deal with them in such a way as to defend and protect our interests. So far we have failed to do so perhaps because we are not as smart as we pretend to be. # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
arabaliozian Posted June 6, 2009 Author Report Share Posted June 6, 2009 Thursday, June 4, 2009 ***************************************** ON PROPAGANDA AND RELATED ATROCITIES ***************************************************************** Propagandists and their dupes are less like victimizers and victims and more like co-conspirators. * For every temptation to believe in a flattering lie there is a counter-urge to confront the truth no matter how unpleasant. * To suppress a truth does not mean to obliterate it. * If in crime it's cherchez la femme, in all verbal communication it's cherchez the unsaid or the covered up -- there it is, step one of deconstruction 101. * I don't understand everything and I don't want to understand everything because I already understand enough; I also understand that there isn't one hell of a lot I can do with what I understand except to become more aware of my own powerlessness. * Our history makes one point very clear: in time of trouble, when we need them most, our political parties were nowhere to be seen. But in time of peace they are all over the place -- in schools, churches, community centers, and the media, speechifying, sermonizing, editorializing, organizing demonstrations, lobbying, and, above all, rewriting history in their efforts to cover up their blunders and inability to face facts and to come to grips with reality. # Friday, June 5, 2009 ***************************************** FAITH AND IMAGINATION **************************************** Since the ancients could not understand the solar system, in their wisdom, they invented or imagined one they could understand. All systems of thought, all organized religions and ideologies, are efforts to reduce a complex and incomprehensible reality to our own level even if it means perverting it in the process. Hence the celebrated dictum: “Man cannot create a single worm, yet he has created ten thousand gods” -- and, one could add, for every god, ten thousand lies. * The human brain is a miracle more complex than a thousand computers combined. Its urge to understand and explain is as irresistible as the urge to procreate, and to procreate at all cost, even if it means procreating charlatans and dupes willing to kill and die in the name of a lie. * God orders Abraham to butcher his son Isaac to prove his loyalty to Him. I challenge anyone to imagine a worst case of abuse of power. * Is it possible to be honest and to speak of God or in His name? Even when Mother Teresa, that most exemplary of saints, lost her faith, she did not dare to say so openly when she was alive. # Saturday, June 6, 2009 ***************************************** STATUS QUO **************************************** Solutions to problems are unwelcome where exposing past blunders is not an option. Our leadership seems to be saying, “We will consider the viability of your solutions provided you do not question our infallibility.” They ignore the obvious fact that had they been infallible we would have no problems. * “What would you have done in their place?” is one of those loaded questions that is raised again and again. If you say, “I would have done things differently,” they will say, “So you think you are smarter? Easy to say, harder to prove.” What I prefer to say instead is: “Very probably I would have done what they did, with one difference: I wouldn't spend the rest of my life blaming others and pretending I am infallible even as I go about committing the same blunder over and over again.” * Our central problem today is a leadership that is incapable of doing what must be done because doing so would expose the past blunders of incompetent narcissists and their dupes who are infatuated with their own image. * What blunder am I talking about? That of dividing our greatest source of power and refusing to learn the lessons of history. * It takes two to tango. We have the leadership we deserve. Our tragedy, our real tragedy is centuries of hopeless subservience and the acquisition of layers upon layers of habits that spring from it, namely, our respect for authority even when this authority mimics Ottomanism and Sovietism. * Man's original sin is not tasting the fruit from the tree of knowledge but saying “Yes, sir!” not only to God (as Abraham did when ordered to cut his son's throat) but also to any impostor who speaks in His name. # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
arabaliozian Posted June 10, 2009 Author Report Share Posted June 10, 2009 Sunday, June 7, 2009 ***************************************** LESSONS **************************************** In his Anatolian impressions, Lord Kinross (the future biographer of Kemal) mentions meeting some elderly Turks who bragged about teaching us (Armenians) a lesson during World War I that we would never forget. One could say, it is now their turn to learn they can't get away with murder – though if it were up to me, I would be reluctant to teach them anything if only because people who cling to their ignorance will have to learn the hard way, and the longer it takes the harder the lesson is bound to be. But then, consider the absurdity of our own situation. We are trying to teach the Turks a lesson that the mighty of this world have consistently refused to learn (hence their unpopularity, gradual disintegration and inevitable downfall) even as we go about refusing to learn a more obvious lesson, namely that a house divided against itself cannot stand (hence our status as perennial losers). # Monday, June 8, 2009 ***************************************** ON A NUMBER OF THINGS **************************************** Intolerance is almost always a byproduct of a misguided idealism or a phony orthodoxy. But I am beginning to suspect that's not our problem. Our problem, our real problem, is mediocrity and its twin, opportunism. * We have a thousand voices supporting Genocide recognition but not a single whisper in defense of free speech. * Man thrives on good food, good sex, and bad ideas. * We speak like parrots, drink like fish, eat like pigs, fight like dragons, live in asphalt jungles, and we call ourselves civilized human beings. * If a better world is ever discovered in the universe, we will do to it what we did to America and its Indians. * Human nature continues to elude me. No matter how hard I try I cannot understand why millions of people are fascinated by individuals who hit a ball with a modified stick. # Tuesday, June 9, 2009 ***************************************** WITH MALICE TOWARD SOME, WITH CHARITY FOR ALL **************************************** My explanations are mine and no one else's. They apply only to my own brand of ignorance. If you agree with me, it may be because we share the same area of darkness. If you disagree with me, it may be because you are already in possession of your own explanations. In which case I can only warn you not to be taken in by flat-earth theories. Don't let appearances deceive you. The most obvious explanation may also be the most misleading. Remember, it is not the sun that revolves around the earth even if the Holy Scriptures (the Word of God) and the Pope of Rome said so and repeated for more than a thousand years. And if I repeat myself, it may be because I cannot reconcile myself to the fact that those who pretend to be wiser are no better than damn fools whose number one concern is not the welfare of the people but their infallibility, which is nothing but a mirage, an illusion, a figment of their imagination, and a Big Lie. We have been and continue to be at the mercy of bunglers who would rather preside over the destruction of the nation than give up even an invisible fraction of their powers and privileges. # Wednesday, June 10, 2009 ***************************************** THE SCUM OF THE EARTH **************************************** If you lose a friend on account of political differences, it maybe because he wasn't a good friend to begin with. I speak from experience. I have lost several friends because in their view I was on the wrong side of a political issue and their side happened to be infallible. To them I say, “Good riddance!” * It is a mistake to identify patriotism with a specific regime. I have nothing against patriotism provided it is willing to expose the swine at the top. As for the kind of patriotism that sings of the eternal snows of Mt. Ararat, I can only say, “Nothing further, your Honor.” * Believers in one God (Christians, Muslims, Jews) should develop a consensus if they want to be believed. * I consider fascination with royalty a branch of zoology. The first and only thing I think when Prince Charles is mentioned is that he doesn't squeeze his own toothpaste on his toothbrush. The queen? She reminds of an aunt. As for the princesses: I am reminded of an old friend who when asked to name his favorite actor, he mentioned several familiar names. When asked to name his favorite actress, he said, “All of them!” * Stendhal: “All my life I have always seen what I imagined rather than reality.” There is an element of wishful thinking in all thinking. Propagandists know this and do their utmost to exploit it, and the more successful they are, the greater the distance between us and reality. # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
arabaliozian Posted June 13, 2009 Author Report Share Posted June 13, 2009 Thursday, June 11, 2009 ***************************************** ORIGINAL SIN **************************************** We begin by saying yes to our parents, then to our schoolteachers and parish priest (or rabbi or mullah) after which we consider it our duty to say yes sir! to empty suits and bearded fornicators. And now think of the millions of innocent victims who perished just because some loud-mouth damn fool spoke in the name of a non-existent being or a misguided ideology or a phony orthodoxy. And if you think this sort of aberration belongs to the past, think again. I have seen it happen in my own lifetime and I see it happen again and again whenever I read the headlines in newspapers or watch the news on television. And why? Because we all think my speechifier or sermonizer knows better, his god is a better god, his ideas are better ideas...all of which combined makes us morally superior and we can do no wrong and anyone who says otherwise is a liar who deserves to be silenced and sometimes silenced permanently. The very same people who taught us to believe tasting the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge was the Original Sin have brainwashed us to believe to gorge ourselves on the fruit from the Tree of Ignorance is our patriotic duty. If you have a better explanation, I am all ears. # Friday, June 11, 2009 ***************************************** IT WAS WORSE THAN A CRIME, IT WAS A BLUNDER **************************************** There is a tendency in all of us to avoid confrontation especially when the opposition is more powerful. We call it playing it safe or being cautious. And yet, we look up to those rare heroic individuals who stand up for what is right even if it means losing their freedom and sometimes even their life. Think of Socrates versus the Athenian establishment, think of Jesus, Galileo, Gandhi, and Solzhenitsyn. And now, let us consider the case of our revolutionaries in the Ottoman Empire. The reason they rose against the Empire was that they believed the Great Powers of the West to be on their side and with such allies they could not lose. But lost they did and it was not they who paid a heavy price but the people. Socrates and the others mentioned above relied on no one but themselves and suffered the consequences. Most of our revolutionaries survived to publish long-winded memoirs, to rewrite history, and to cover up their blunder. I don't find that heroic but cowardly and contemptible. We all make mistakes, of course, but some of us are honest enough to admit them, sometimes even to apologize. # Saturday, June 12, 2009 ***************************************** WHEN THE BLIND LEAD THE BLIND **************************************** Baudelaire on the idea of superiority: “a satanic idea, if ever there was one.” I have said many nasty things about self-assessed moral superiority, but I have never gone as far as calling it satanic. It takes the daring of a genius to see things as they are. The rest of us might as well be blind to reality. * Give a nobody authority or make him feel superior and he will speak in the name of god or historic necessity or greater wisdom and go on the warpath against infidels or inferiors or anyone else who stands between him and more power. Megalomania is a hungry monster that is never satiated. Even the popes of Rome, whose job was to preach love of the enemy, went to war. But then, where would authority be without dupes? To believe in someone else and to ignore “the kingdom of god” which is within us, might as well be the source of all crimes against humanity. * Flaubert: “To be stupid, selfish and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.” # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
arabaliozian Posted June 17, 2009 Author Report Share Posted June 17, 2009 Sunday, June 13, 2009 ***************************************** ON KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING ****************************************************** Socrates: “Know thyself.” The Koran: “He who knows himself, knows God.” The Bible: “The Kingdom of God is within you.” Three synonymous statement. Three different ways of saying the same thing. * “The Kingdom of God is within you,” and “Our Father Who art in heaven”: I see a contradiction here. Which may suggest that the Bible cannot be the word of God. God does not contradict Himself. Neither does He speak with a forked tongue. Men do. * Men contradict one another because they don't understand; they can only hope to move in the direction of greater understanding. * I do not have a quarrel with God, only with men who speak in His name after which they legitimize crimes against humanity. * God does not issue licenses authorizing men to speak in His name. Licenses are issued by men to other men against other men. * Faith can be an asset as well as a liability. It is an asset when it leads to a greater understand and compassion for our fellow men. It is a liability when it makes us self-righteous, dogmatic and intolerant. * Diogenes Laertius: “When Thales was asked what was difficult, he said 'to know one's self.' And what was easy, 'To advise another.'” To advise another: in modern parlance, to sermonize and speechify. * Sartre: “We believe that we believe, but we don't believe.” * If I bore you, I apologize. If I challenge you, I consider my mission accomplished. # Monday, June 14, 2009 ***************************************** ODDS AND ENDS ****************************************************** If I am for honesty it is not because I love truth (which I will never know) but because I hate all those who deceived me when I was young, gullible, and could not yet think for myself. * Am I a failure if so far the world has failed to provide me with a friendly audience? * A good speechifier knows what the people want to hear and he doesn't mind submitting his intelligence to the rabble. * Sometimes our first impressions are more accurate because they are based one a wider and therefore more balanced set of data. Afterwards we can be easily swayed by words. * To attack and insult someone from a position of self-assessed infallibility is to openly declare oneself to be unteachable, unreasonable, and unspeakable. * Long live fools and fanatics! If it weren't for them, I would run out of inspiration. * We like to say there are always two sides to every story after which we readily give in to the temptation of believing our side. # Tuesday, June 15, 2009 ***************************************** ETCETERA ****************************************************** The temptation to contradict is one that no Armenian can resist. It is a mental aberration and a pathological condition that only a radical shift in our educational system may cure. To begin with, we should teach our children that far from being smart, we may well be the dumbest people on earth. One reason: for more than a thousand years we have been the slaves of some of the most backward and brutal people on earth, Stalin's USSR being the latest. How can I forget the fact that during the Soviet era I would receive letters and phone calls from Armenian-Americans (I called them chic Bolsheviks) trying to convince me that the Russians were our Big Brothers (literally rather than in the Orwellian sense of these words), Solzhenitsyn was a traitor, the Nobel Prize committee a Jewish conspiracy, Paradjanov a syphilitic black marketeer and pederast, and Zarian a hireling of the CIA. I have myself been accused of being an agent of every secret organization on the planet, including the KGB, the CIA, the Mossad, and the Gray Wolves, whoever the hell they are. * In our environment, fanaticism, ignorance, stupidity, and malice speak louder than their counterparts. As for actions: they speak louder than words only when they are directed against defenseless fellow Armenians, the more defenseless the better. * If that's what I think about Armenians, why do I bother writing for them? I go on writing for them because I refuse to believe that only brown-nosers and propagandists qualify as writers, and because I believe no one is beyond redemption. I speak from experience. Once upon a time I too shared all their prejudices, blind spots, and arrogance. If I can see the light, so can anyone else. If this is an illusion, may I never lose it. * Michel Sardou: “God? I believe him when I need him. Like the rest of mankind. And if he fails to respond, I appeal to another.” # Wednesday, June 16, 2009 ***************************************** OUR FAVORITE MANTRA ****************************************************** A reader writes: “They massacred us because they hated us.” That's racist talk and that's nonsense. Not all Turks hated us. Some even risked their lives to save some of us, in the same way that today some of them are willing to risk their freedom to support our cause. No doubt Talaat and his gang of cut-throats were racist, but then, who wasn't? Even Americans of “all men are created equal” fame were racists. They didn't massacre all their minorities, true, only some of them. They were smarter than Turks. They divided and exploited them mercilessly. Where would America be today without its cheap labor? Empires are raised by brute force but maintained by divide-and-rule manipulation. We are better at dividing ourselves – or rather, allowing others to divide us -- than dividing our enemies. This may explain why almost all talk of Armenians by Armenians ends with the mantra, “Mart bidi ch'ellank.” And because I explain and expand on this mantra, I am silenced. We want flattery, not criticism no matter how objective and honest. But flattery does not solve problems, it covers them up. Flattery does not build character, honesty does. # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
arabaliozian Posted June 20, 2009 Author Report Share Posted June 20, 2009 Thursday, June 17, 2009 ***************************************** WHEN THE RICH FIGHT IT IS THE POOR WHO DIE ****************************************************** When the fat cats on Wall Street made a mess of the world economy, they gave themselves a fat bonus, as the poor lost their jobs, their savings, and their pensions. Worse was to follow. The top dogs in Washington bailed out the fat cats with the money of the very same victims who had been skinned alive. It's always the same story. * To identify a people – any people – with the regime – any regime – amounts to identifying the victim with his victimizer. * We either parrot the words of cunning manipulators or we learn to think for ourselves. * If you think slavery in a democratic America was a mistake that has been corrected, consider the legitimacy of the Vietnam and Iraq wars. All men are created equal? If true both Bush Jr. and Chaney would be among the dead now. Closer to home: after leading the people to genocide our own “best and brightest” blame it on the rest of mankind, as if mankind had suddenly changed the rules of the game on us; and what is even more unbelievable, they are believed. Speaking for myself: I have trouble deciding which is more reprehensible: the massacres or the cold-blooded and calculated deception. * A smart Armenian is one who says, “I don't want to be like my people. I want to learn from my mistakes.” * In our case, “Know thine enemy” and “Know thyself” might as well be synonymous statements. * In this morning's paper I read: “...much of the world remained an unwelcome place for many...” You may now guess who the “many” are and who are responsible for driving them out. * To paraphrase Saroyan: “Empires may rise and fall but bloodsuckers hang in forever.” # Friday, June 18, 2009 ***************************************** THE WAGES OF SIN ****************************************************** Hannah Arendt: “If we do not know our own history, we are doomed to live it as though it were our fate.” * At the beginning we were divided by deep valleys, high mountains, and long winters. What divides us today? Nothing but habit. Habit compounded by ignorance. Habit so deeply entrenched that it might as well be in our DNA. If two Armenians on a desert island don't build three churches (the third being the one they stay aware from) they will feel as though they had a monkey on their back. * One reason solidarity has eluded us so far is that we pretend to be ignorant of the consequences of tribalism. It is not easy to convince a tribal people to become a nation by submitting their will to a centralized authority. But the alternative – that is, allowing geography or habit to shape our destiny – is infinitely harder. We know now that the alternative has been defeat by a smaller but better organized tribe, followed by centuries of degrading subservience, mass deportations, and massacres (both “red” and “white” -- that is, alienation and assimilation). Knowing this we continue to stay divided and to waste valuable energy, resources, and emotional investment on genocide recognition, a cause that so far, and after almost a century, has failed to resurrect a single victim or to annex a single square inch of historic Armenia. * It is said of masochists that if they fail to find a sadist, they become their own sadist. That, it seems, is the alternative we have chosen – to wallow in self-pity and to beg others to support our cause, as if others supported us when we needed them most. As if others support anyone that is not in their own interest. * There are two kinds of failings or sins: those we commit knowingly and the others. But sooner or later we are punished for both. And the wages of sin is death. # Saturday, June 19, 2009 ***************************************** QUESTIONS IN SEARCH OF AN ANSWER ****************************************************** Chekhov: “If I cannot answer the most important questions, am I not fooling the reader?” Why do things exist? What is the meaning of life? Why did Socrates say, “The only thing I know is that I don't know”? If “a house divided against itself cannot stand,” are our dividers with us or against us? If our house collapses, who must be held responsible? If not our dividers, who? Who benefits from our divisions? What is the meaning of our genocide? If the Turks are bloodthirsty barbarians, why is it that it took us six hundred years to figure that out? How smart are we if we believe in the propaganda of our dividers? Why is it that for every Armenian who says one thing there will be another who will say the exact opposite? Why is it that a fully grown adult feels the need to repeat what he was taught as a child by his schoolteachers and parish priest? Why is it that “the cradle of civilization” has become the grave of common sense and decency? Why did Zarian say “Armenians survive by cannibalizing one another?” Why is it that we have many poets but not a single philosopher? Why is it that Armenian stories end with the words “Three golden apples fell from heaven”? Is that why we suffer from an advanced case of collective concussion? # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
arabaliozian Posted June 24, 2009 Author Report Share Posted June 24, 2009 Sunday, June 20, 2009 ***************************************** TOURIST PRIDE ****************************************************** “I am proud of my Armenian identity,” I am reminded by readers once in a while by way of questioning my own loyalty to the Homeland. We live in a world where everyone is brainwashed to be proud of his ethnic identity, even when we vote with our feet and choose to live on foreign soil and consider our homeland as “a nice place to visit.” * JERMAG CHART ************************************ Only the naïve and the blind believe because the Turks are not massacring us today we are not being exterminated. Who is doing the extermination? To put it differently: Who is at the source of our alienation? Who else but Turks, of course! What else is Armenianism if not Turcocentrism? Michael Arlen (Kouyoumdjian) saw this clearly when he warned his son to stay away from Armenians because “they dwell too much on Armenian problems...distant repellent events...They are sweet people, but you can't let them too close. They end up boring you to death.” * ROOSTERS ***************************** The nice thing about our brand of politics is that when we do something right, no matter how insignificant, we behave like roosters who believe if it weren't for their vocalizing the sun wouldn't rise. But when we do something wrong, no matter how catastrophic, we blame it on others. A win-win situation if there ever was one. # Monday, June 21, 2009 ***************************************** X ****************************************************** Supporting a corrupt regime has nothing to do with patriotism and everything to do with treason, betrayal, and cowardice. And the problem with political corruption is that as a rule it gets worse rather than better. It gets worse until it becomes unbearable. Which is what's happening in Iran today. And which is bound to happen in our own homeland sooner or later. And if our brothers and sisters in the Homeland never rise against the regime, we shall have no choice but to conclude that subservience has become such an integral part of our character as a nation that we no longer even take notice of it. * If I am for revolution in Iran, why am I against our revolutionaries in the Ottoman Empire? Two reasons: (one) they had a Plan B only for themselves, and (two) they relied on others. If you are David confronting Goliath, you'd better make damn sure (one) you are one of God's Chosen; (two) you are technologically more advanced than your adversary; and (three) you have developed the necessary skill to use your new equipment. * The American, French, and Russian revolutions succeeded because the revolutionaries had the support of the majority. The majority of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, in addition to being a very tiny minority, lacked political awareness. I know because my father was one of them, and most of the Armenians in the ghetto where I grew up were refugees, spoke Turkish among themselves, and were illiterates who signed their name with an X. # Tuesday, June 22, 2009 ***************************************** FROM MY NOTEBOOKS ****************************************************** It's an old trick familiar to all religious leaders: whenever they want to do the devil's work, they speak in the name of god. * It took a world war to prove Hitler wrong; and it took the collapse of the Soviet Empire to prove Stalin wrong. It is the fate of an immovable object to meet an irresistible force. * “There is corruption everywhere.” That's the kind of talk the corrupt love to hear; and they will call anyone who repeats that line a true patriot. * A suicidal man should not brag about surviving still another attempted suicide. * If it can happen to someone else, it can happen to me. Even if I am god's chosen, I am not the only one. * Every Armenian should carry a sign with the warning: "Contradict me and make an enemy for life!" * Two Armenians were having a quiet conversation. It can happen. # Wednesday, June 23, 2009 ***************************************** WHAT ABOUT US? ****************************************************** “There is a lot that we don't know,” a friend tells me speaking of our past. And whose fault is that, may I ask? Ours or theirs for failing to share what they know? We will never know everything. Nobody ever does. Does that mean we should withhold judgment or submit our intelligence to those who may not have enough of it themselves? Who benefits from our ignorance? * Most of my readers don't like me. That's because I hold a mirror up to them and they don't like what they see. They blame the mirror and they blame me for holding it up to them. They never blame themselves. That's the beauty of the blame-game. It allows you to paint yourself all white and the opposition all black. * A regime with enemies will have enemies even among its own people. A regime that speaks of exterminating the enemy will invariably start by killing its own people. Isn't that what's happening in Iran today? And what about us? # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
arabaliozian Posted June 27, 2009 Author Report Share Posted June 27, 2009 Thursday, June 24, 2009 ***************************************** MEMOIRS ****************************************************** Because I was born in Greece to Armenian parents in a multicultural ghetto of refugees from the Ottoman Empire whose common medium was Turkish, I learned three languages without any effort on my part. I never asked anyone about the meaning of words or their definitions: I just knew. Something similar happens in the realm of ideas dealing with religion, ethics, and justice. I accepted them as facts rather than as prejudices, misconceptions, assumptions, fallacies, theories, or hypotheses. As a result, ideas that I encountered later in life – ideas like atheism, agnosticism, the brotherhood of all men, democracy, and passive resistance – appeared at first as alien, sometimes even as incomprehensible. Which is why intolerance comes naturally to all of us. It is tolerance that must be taught and learned, and more often than not, it is neither taught nor learned. * In my twenties I tried to teach myself Japanese and Zulu, among other languages. Today I remember only one word in Zulu -- “kitab” (book), and I remember it because it is the same word in Turkish. * And now allow me to tell you my favorite Nasreddin Hodja story: It is said that in his youth the Hodja made a fortune as a smuggler. Everyone knew this but but no one knew what was it that he was smuggling, not even the border guards who would search him and his donkey thoroughly every time he crossed the border, which he did frequently. Many years later when one of the border guards met the Hodja and asked him what was was it that he was smuggling, the Hodja replied, “Donkeys.” * Speaking of smugglers: When an American customs officer asked Oscar Wilde if he had anything to declare, Wilde is said to have replied: “Only my genius” -- no doubt one of the most dangerous commodities known to man. # Friday, June 25, 2009 ***************************************** ACADEMICS ****************************************************** If the overwhelming majority of our academics stay away from Armenian studies, it may be because they have no desire to submit their intelligence to someone who may not have enough of its himself – namely, bosses, bishops, benefactors and their flunkies. As for the very few who get involved in Armenian studies, they invariably end up recycling the propaganda line that says, we did nothing wrong and the rest of the world did nothing right. To say otherwise would amount to biting the hand that feeds them. If history is the propaganda of the victor, these academic charlatans seem to be saying, we will make ours the consolation of the loser. * What have we learned from history? Only this: power means above all the power to cover up blunders and to misrepresent defeats as moral victories. * Because 2500 years ago Herodotus introduced his HISTORIES with the warning that he intends to speak of the great deeds and achievements of both "Greeks and barbarians," he was torn to shreds by Greek critics (among them Plutarch) as a lover of barbarians. * “If you are nice to them, they will be nice to you.” This is a rule that works with gentlemen but not with bastards -- and the world is full of them – and I don't mean gentlemen. And the trouble with bastards is that you can never be nice enough to them. Lower your pants and they will resent you for not bending over. * Three things to remember: (one) a fruitful failure is better than a sterile success; (two) “Thou shalt not” does not always work; and (three) Sooner or later a prejudice will bite your ass. * What I write may best be described as a digression in a footnote of a book that I will never write. # Saturday, June 26, 2009 ***************************************** INTELLECTUALS AND ACADEMICS ****************************************************** An intellectual is someone who dedicates his life to ideas. An academic is someone who dedicates his life to his career. Once upon a time we had intellectuals but no academics. Today we have no intellectuals but over a thousand academics. Which may explain why in literature even the Turks are ahead of us. * Likewise we have many nationalist historians but not a single historian. A nationalism historian is one who places the interests of the nation above the interests of mankind. In other words, he makes of history a branch of political propaganda. * In the following two quotations, a 19th-century German philosopher and a 20th-century British historian reflect on historians. Arthur Schopenhauer: “Clio, the muse of history, is as thoroughly infected with lies as a street Если Вы видите это сообщение, значит кто то пытался Вас оскорбить. Просьба сообщить нам об этом http://forum.hayastan.com/index.php?act=report&t=34878 with syphilis.” A.J.P. Taylor: “Human blunders, usually, do more to shape history than human wickedness.” * There is an old saying: “Historia magistra vitae” (The past is our great teacher). There is another, even older, saying: “Omnis homo mendax” (All men are liars). * I have two kinds of hostile readers: those who say they don't understand me, and those who understand me too well. As for the brainwashed: they are like parrots, disposed to understand only other parrots. # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
arabaliozian Posted June 30, 2009 Author Report Share Posted June 30, 2009 Sunday, June 27, 2009 ***************************************** BARE-FACED BIG LIES ****************************************************** “God's chosen people.” “Superior race.” “The Cradle of Civilization.” Do you know who popularized the idea of Armenia being the cradle of civilization? A hard-up odar alcoholic academic who got himself a fat check from an Armenian foundation and hoped to get another. “God's chosen people”? Chosen for what, may I ask? To be scattered, insulted, abused, and periodically slaughtered by, among others, the self-assessed “superior race” of Aryans? * Flattery, especially self-flattery, needs no proof. And if you tell a dumb person he is smart, he will not ask you to prove it. “It is written”? All that means is that some megalomaniacal idiot confused his illusions with the voice of God. It happens all the time. The inspired loud-mouth charismatic charlatan is a routine occurrence in history and its latest manifestation is the televangelist in the “Land of Liberty,” where one of the bloodiest civil wars in the history of mankind was fought in defense of slavery. * What I find incomprehensible is not that some readers disagree with what I say but that they don't disagree with the state and direction of our collective existence. They are eager to question the words of a scribbler but not the actions and policies of those who are in charge of our communities and the nation. Figure that one out, if you can. # Monday, June 29, 2009 ***************************************** ONE DAMN THING AFTER ANOTHER ****************************************************** In their efforts to advance a new thesis, some odar academics – those we like to quote – have made such extravagant claims on our behalf that even some Armenian scholars (among them Sirarpie der Nersessian) have rejected them as unjustified, unverified, and erroneous. * Our bruised egos are so hungry for flattery that sometimes we take a disguised insult as a compliment. Case in point: “It takes seven Jews to fool an Armenian.” Translated into ordinary parlance, this simply means: “If you think Jews are bad, I've got news for you: Armenians are seven times worse!” * There is a big difference between being God's children and being the dupes of charlatans who speak in the name of God. * If history is “an unending dialogue between the present and the past” (E.H. Carr, WHAT IS HISTORY?), what has been our contribution to this dialogue beside victims? * Everything that I say today stands in direct contradiction to an early conviction which was instilled in me by individuals with a narrow and dogmatic agenda that distorted reality and perverted my judgment. * We like to brag about our genius for survival. The irony here is that those who did the actual surviving did not brag about it. I know because I grew up surrounded by them. * The sad truth is, those who do the most harm to their fellow men are the least aware of it. * If there is a god, he must be a thirsty one. # Tuesday, June 30, 2009 ***************************************** REFLECTIONS ****************************************************** Man is at his most creative in his invention of lies. * The biggest lies are half-truths. * If you speak against those who speak in the name of God, they will accuse you of speaking in the name of the Devil. * To be brainwashed means not to question the honesty and wisdom of your abusers. * A nationalist historian writes about his nation and its enemies. A historian writes about the past and the conflicting interests of nations. * Nothing offends me more than being insulted by a fool who has been brainwashed to believe he is smart. * If you don't have an agenda, everyone with an agenda will be against you. * Self-esteem is not a reliable index of worth, in the same way that dogmatism is not an index of certainty. * It is a universally shared human weakness to prefer flattery to criticism, but it is a dangerous addiction to prefer lies to truth. * To those who accuse me of having a very low opinion of my fellow Armenians, I can only say, nobody really gives a damn what I or anyone else thinks. What matters, what really matters, is whether or not I can tell the difference between fact and fiction. # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
arabaliozian Posted July 4, 2009 Author Report Share Posted July 4, 2009 Wednesday, July 1, 2009 ***************************************** ARMENIANS SPEAK WITH A FORKED TONGUE ****************************************************** I don't believe everything I am told. Neither do I believe everything I read in the papers, especially if it's favorable to someone; in which case what I want to know is: How much is he being paid for saying these things? People lie. People lie all the time, not only because they don't know the truth or if they know it, it happens to be against them, but because they feel more comfortable when they lie. * We all lie when it comes to our problems, and the greatest liar is he who says, “We need solutions.” Because that's the last thing we want. Have you ever met a bishop willing to resign his position or vacate his cathedral for the sake of solidarity? Have you ever met a national benefactor willing to utter a single word against the worship of money? Have you ever met a boss who was not a loud-mouth megalomaniacal narcissist all sound and fury signifying nothing? * I doubt if there is a single Armenian today who does not know what our problems and their solutions are. Even a child knows where divisions are the problems, solidarity is the solution. Where worship of money is the problem, respect for ideas is the solution. * Our greatest intellectual of recent times was no doubt Gostan Zarian, whose life and work prove that we have no use for intellectuals and their ideas. What we need is a messianic figure willing to be crucified. But even then there is no guarantee that will be the end of our problems. Remember the brief life and career of another messiah who was accused of blasphemy by his own people and continues to be rejected by them even today, after they have had two thousand years to reconsider their position on the subject. # Thursday, July 2, 2009 ***************************************** PLATO, OSHAGAN, AND ZARIAN ****************************************************** Everything I write is a paraphrase. I am as original as a cook who combines ingredients available in all supermarkets. If the result is edible or if what I say make sense, I am satisfied. I leave originality to my betters. * Plato was a great philosopher, and according to some, the greatest. A 20th-century English philosopher (may have been Whitehead) once said that all of Western philosophy is nothing but footnotes to Plato. Was Plato an original thinker? We know that most of his DIALOGUES are based on the conversations of his teacher, Socrates. As for Socrates, very probably most of his ideas came from predecessors, who, like himself, never wrote a single line. To say otherwise is to imply that for almost a thousand years Greeks did not think, speak, discuss, and contradict one another. * According to the Oshagans (pere et fils) Zarian was a plagiarist. What was their intention in saying that? To warn the nation not to be taken in by a charlatan or to establish themselves as the alpha males of 20th-century Armenian literature? If Zarian was a charlatan, what about the bosses, bishops, and benefactors whose support they (the Oshagans) enjoyed? * An academic by the name of Stern (I forget his first name) once wrote a detailed study with copious footnotes and a bibliography, in which (unlike the Oshagans) he proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that everything Sartre wrote can be traced to an illustrious predecessor. Result? Who speaks of Stern today? * If you want originality, read the Oshagans (whose works are being translated into English, I am told). But if you want to understand what's happening to us today, read Zarian. # Friday, July 3, 2009 ***************************************** ON ARMENIANS ****************************************************** There is a brown-noser and a bastard in all of us – the brown-noser is reserved for odars, the bastard for our fellow Armenians. Somewhere between the two there is a human being, but he is well-hidden. * We will think twice before contradicting an odar, but we will contradict, insult, and crap on a fellow Armenian as if it were our patriotic duty. * An Armenian is never as smart as he thinks he is. But that's not his real problem. His real problem is that he is incapable of imagining how unspeakably stupid he can be. * Nikol Aghbalian is right, we are a tribal people; or, in the words of Gostan Zarian, our concept of nation begins and ends with our mountain, our valley, our village, our church, and our chickens. * Dissatisfied with what you have just read? Your refund is in the mail. # Saturday, July 4, 2009 ***************************************** UNTITLED ****************************************************** Criticizing odars is a waste of time. They have critics of their own. They don't need our 2 cents. They might even tell you to go back where you came from. I speak from experience. If by criticizing others we try to cover up our own problems on the grounds that nobody is perfect, we delude ourselves. * We may not know all there is to know about our past. Nobody does. But we should know one things for certain even if it may be hard for some of us to admit it. We should know that what we were told in our formative years, what we read in our papers today, and what our speechifiers and sermonizers tell us, is irrelevant nonsense. We should know that the dark pages in our history are not tragedies but blunders, and only when we see them as such may we arrest our downward spiral and be born again as a nation. # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Kars Posted July 4, 2009 Report Share Posted July 4, 2009 A conversation between sheriff's deputy and an inmate, through cell's bars (this is not fantasy - first-hand story of someone I know very well): SHERIFF: "Are you Mexican? Here for wife-beating, again?" INMATE: "No. I'm Armenian." SHERIFF: "O! What is it, then? Fraud?" Quote Link to post Share on other sites
arabaliozian Posted July 8, 2009 Author Report Share Posted July 8, 2009 Sunday, July 5, 2009 ***************************************** JACKASSES ****************************************************** I learned to read in time of war when books were luxuries beyond our means. We had only one in the house – a dilapidated elementary school anthology with black and white drawings. The story on page one was not so much a story as an exchange of insults: A street urchin to a donkey driver: “Good morning, mother of jackasses.” “Good morning, my son.” * An exile is someone who lives in an alien country. A double exile is an exile whose homeland is ruled by aliens, and no one can be as alien as one's fellow countrymen. * You cannot speak of freedom to a slave who cannot see or feel the weight of his chains. * A fool who fools another fool thinks of himself as smart. * Don't think of me as a writer or as an Armenian. Think of me as a fellow human being who writes not for readers but for his younger self when he was brainwashed, manipulated, and abused by bastards with an agenda. * A few years ago I wrote a series of short stories whose central character was named Jack S. Avanakian – an Armenian-American variation on Odian's Panchoonie. Once when asked by an interviewer what I was working on, I replied I was planning to write an autobiography titled “The Swan-Song of a Jackass.” “Why a jackass?” “Because only an obstinate jackass would go on writing for thirty years for even more obstinate jackasses." # Monday, July 6, 2009 ***************************************** BAD HABITS ****************************************************** It was only in old age that I learned to assume responsibility for my actions. Until then one of my favorite mantras was, “As a result of political, social, and cultural conditions beyond our control...” which translated into dollars and cents simply means, “not my fault.” The longer we postpone kicking a bad habit, the harder it gets doing what must be done. * A dishonest leadership will spawn a dishonest educational system and dishonest citizens. It is widely known that during the Soviet era everyone engaged in petty larceny. They had no other option if they wanted to survive. There are over a thousand Armenians in California jails today. You may now guess their country of origin. Habits are easier to keep than to give up. * In the Ottoman Empire we were Ottomanized; in America Americanized; in the Middle East Levantinized; in the USSR sodomized – meant to say Sovietized – not that it makes a difference. It was inevitable. It was as a result of political, social, and cultural conditions, blah, blah, blah! * At the turn of the last century our political leaders were idealistic intellectuals, daydreaming poets and revolutionaries inexperienced in the ways of international diplomacy. They tried to transplant progressive Western ideas into an essentially Asiatic environment. Today our leaders are shrewd, down-to-earth, practical businessmen and cynical bureaucrats whose defining feature is contempt for ideas. National benefactors are our kings and heroes now. As for our vodanavorjis and mdavoragans: they are no better than contemptible beggars and brown-nosing academics. * Who in his right mind would choose a corrupt, incompetent, and undemocratic leadership over freely elected honest administrators whose first and most important priority is the welfare of the people? Next question: When was the last time in our millennial history when we the people were given a choice? Bad habits are easier to keep than to give up. * Let us now pray! # Tuesday, July 7, 2009 ***************************************** ON OUR CELEBRITIES ****************************************************** As a child I was brought up to brag about Gulbenkian, Saroyan, Mikoyan, Mamoulian and our Byzantine emperors. As an adult I discovered that Mikoyan was so fearful of Stalin's secret police that he slept with a revolver under his pillow planning to kill himself if they came to arrest him in the middle of the night. And when Stalin ordered the purge of “enemies of the people” in Armenia, Mikoyan went about it with the thoroughness of Talaat, with one difference: whereas in Talaat's holocaust Zarian, Oshagan, and Zabel Yessayan survived, by the time Mikoyan was through his purge there were no survivors except for a handful of yes-men like himself. * It is common knowledge that only 7% of Gulbenkian's vast fortune is earmarked for Armenians. I will not speak of his private life because it is not fit for human consumption. * At no time did Rouben Mamoulian extend a helping hand to Armenian actors, and in this he was not different from his Jewish bosses who were against hiring actors that looked remotely Jewish. * Saroyan's fictional characters are typical Armenians only in the sense that Tevye the Milkman (of FIDDLER ON THE ROOF fame) is a typical Jew. Saroyan “stylized” (his word) Armenians to make them more palatable and harmless to his American audience. But according to his most recent biographer, near the end of his life he was suspicious of all Armenians, including his own children. * As for our Byzantine emperors: their foreign policy was consistently anti-Armenian. * Raffi once said that “treason and betrayal are in our blood.” What he failed to add is that this is especially true in our “best and brightest.” Celebrity is an impure concept. To admire some Armenians simply because they achieved fame and fortune in foreign countries and to ignore the achievements of many others, among them Naregatsi, Abovian, Raffi, Baronian, Odian, and Zarian, is to choose the wrong role models for our children and, in doing so, to corrupt our values and to undermine the integrity of the nation. # Wednesday, July 8, 2009 ***************************************** GRAPHIC PORN ****************************************************** Finally a book by a distinguished scholar (see below) in which the work of nationalist historians is described as “graphic porn.” * One reason the Balkans are a vipers' nest of internecine conflicts is that each ethnic group has its own version of the past wherein it represent itself as innocent victim and its neighbors as “guilty bastards.” To combat this trend, a group of multi-ethnic enlightened historians has decided to produce textbooks that are objective, honest, and fair to all sides, and whenever there are two contradictory versions of the same event, to give both sides of the story. One of these historians, Nenad Seber by name (a British citizen of mixed parentage) is quoted as having said: “Turkish history says the Ottoman Empire was incredibly enlightened, a heaven of religious tolerance, a golden age for the Balkans. According to Greek history books, it was 5 centuries of rape, slavery and butchery. We've moved away from all that. In our Ottoman Empire workbook, for example, we've got a Turkish historian talking openly about the Armenian massacres.” For more on this subject, see Justin Marozzi's THE WAY OF HERODOTUS: TRAVELS WITH THE MAN WHO INVENTED HISTORY (Philadelphia, PA, 2008). # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
arabaliozian Posted July 11, 2009 Author Report Share Posted July 11, 2009 Thursday, July 9, 2009 ***************************************** MISERABILISM ****************************************************** Whenever I say tribal divisions have been at the root of all our defeats and miseries, someone is sure to raise his voice and say: “What chance did we have against much more powerful enemies like the Romans, Arabs, Tatars, Mongols, Turks, and Russians, among others. But I maintain we were defeated not because we were small and our enemies big, but because we could not shed our tribalism, which is as true today as it was then. There is no limit to what a nation, any nation, no matter how small, can achieve if it stands united. As a case in point, consider Vietnam versus France and the United States, the mightiest empire in the history of mankind. America lost the war not only because Vietnam's resistance was heroic, obstinate and single-minded but also because America was divided – successive Administrations were for the war but an important fraction of the people was against it. Which is another benefit of solidarity: it tends to divide the opposition. Closer to home: in his magisterial 12-volume STUDY OF HISTORY, Toynbee speaks of Urartu versus the Assyrian Empire, one of the mightiest empires of its time. Though repeatedly attacked by the formidable military machine of Assyria, Urartu stood its ground and never lost its independence. And why? I will let you answer that question. What's done is done and cannot be undone. We cannot change the past, only our perception of it. If I write about past blunders and failings it is not to rub salt on our collective wound but to expose present blunders and failings, which we refuse to acknowledge because we have become so subservient to authority, any authority, including our own, that we believe what we are told, even when what we are told is a bare-faced lie. We go further: instead of analyzing our present condition objectively and honestly, we speak endlessly about someone else's criminal conduct. To what end? To remind us of our status as victims and to assert moral superiority? Speaking for myself: I do not feel morally superior to anyone, and I am fed up to the point of disgust with our status as perennial victims. And if you, gentle reader, do not feel as I do, I can only say, to each his own. I for one have no intention of standing between you and your miserabilism. # Friday, July 10, 2009 ***************************************** “I BELIEVE IN AMERICA” ****************************************************** Remember the opening line of THE GODFATHER? The screen is dark. The voice is that of an undertaker. His name is Buonasera (“good night” in Italian). His daughter has been raped and beaten by two hoodlums and since he cannot get justice in the courts, he begs for justice from Don Corleon (“heart of a lion”). * I once had a friend who also believed in America. He was a chain-smoker. He breakfasted on bacon and eggs with buttered toast. He was a chic Bolshevik (a middle-class Armenian-American who hated Tashnaks, supported the Soviet system, and believed the Russians to be our Big Brothers), until he had a heart attack, open-heart surgery, and the Soviet Union collapsed. * What do we really know about what goes on within us or around us? What do we really know about our past? How many of us are interested in reading historians as opposed to ghazetajis and dispensers of “graphic porn”? The Garden of Eden. The Cradle of Civilization. The Battle of Avarair. Is anyone out there really interested to know that the Battle of Avarair is Mamigonian propaganda? It never happened. * We live in darkness. What we don't know far exceeds what we know. And it is this area of darkness that is exploited by advertisers, ideologues, propagandists, sermonizers, speechifiers, and fund-raisers. To say “I believe in America” also means “I believe in American lies.” * Why am I saying these things? What am I driving at? What is the moral of the story? Only this: “Don't be a fool!” # Saturday, July 11, 2009 ***************************************** THE ENEMY WITHIN ****************************************************** After publishing an interview with a Tashnak leader, in which he reminisced about his predecessors and the way they had shaped his character and worldview, a Ramgavar leader wrote a letter to the editor in which he exposed Tashnak leaders as phonies and myself as a dupe. More recently, in Gourgen Mahari's memoirs, I read about an encounter with General Antranik in which he is quoted as having said that Tashnak leaders deserve the hangman's noose. It is common knowledge that the heroes of one nation are more often than not unknown nonentities to its enemies. The French Revolution spawned two sets of historians, Royalists and Republicans. Even when these two factions agree on what happened, they disagree violently on its reasons, motives, and consequences. In my edition of the SOVIET-ARMENIAN ENCYCLOPEDIA the most frequently quoted authorities in the bibliographies on a large variety of subjects are Marx, Engels, and Lenin. What I am trying to say here is that anyone who subscribes to a belief system is a dupe or a pathological liar to those who subscribe to a different belief system; and this is true not only of nations and their enemies but also of groups within the same nation or, for that matter, religion or ideology. Stalinists and Trotskyists, Catholics and Protestants, Sunnis and Shias. The irony here is that there is more intolerance and hostility within the same religion and ideology than between alien belief systems. Whom to believe? My answer is to dismiss all of them as pathological liars inebriated with their own self-righteousness. There are of course many honest men who are also believers. I have nothing against them, except the suspicion that their critical faculties may not be fully developed. To those who say it is not skeptics and critics who build cathedrals and raise empires. J.S. Bach was neither a critic nor a skeptic. I have no use for empire builders. As for Bach: I worship him to such a degree that I have dedicated a good fraction of my life to the study of his works; and as far as I know, no one has ever been victimized, deceived, or exploited in his name. # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
arabaliozian Posted July 16, 2009 Author Report Share Posted July 16, 2009 Sunday, July 12, 2009 ***************************************** THE POWER AND THE GLORY ****************************************************** One way to explain our status as perennial underdogs is to say that our ruling classes have spent more time, energy, and resources fighting among themselves and collaborating with our oppressors than serving the interests of the people. The reason why I think as i do is that I have an instinctive loathing of all power -- be it the power of emperors, kings, sultans, popes, ayatollahs, bosses, commissars, and revolutionaries, especially failed revolutionaries who end up doing more harm than good, after which they waste the rest of their allotted time on earth rewriting history, brainwashing the people, and portraying themselves as heroes and our victims as martyrs. And what is even more outrageous, they are believed by some. And whenever a dissenter comes along – and our literature has been one of dissent – and explains things to us honestly and objectively, we either silence him or ignore him, sometimes we even betray him to the authorities, the very same authorities that have dehumanized us. “Mart bidi ch'ellank / esh bidi menank.” * If I knew how to pray, I would go down on my knees and say: “O Lord, I implore you from the depths of my heart, help me to see that so far everything I have said, written, and thought has been wrong, and that our leaders have been men of vision and humble servants of the people, and all our dissidents have been no better than the scum of the earth. For thine is the power and the glory. Amen.” # Monday, July 13, 2009 ***************************************** A SIMPLE APOLOGY ****************************************************** Allow me to introduce myself: “A.B., Armenian scribbler.” Which in our environment stands for less than nobody. And worse. In the words of one of our national benefactors, speaking to an elderly writer and teacher who had dared to contradict him: “I hire and fire people like you every day.” And yet, every statement I make is carefully analyzed by some readers as if a single wrong word in the wrong place would mean the total collapse of their inner world and the disintegration of the Homeland. And what is it exactly that I have been saying? Simply this: I don't believe everything I am told by our sermonizers, speechifiers, and fund-raisers who operate on the assumption that the more they flatter us the more generous will our contribution be to their cause. If I have been wrong, what has been my greatest mistake? Only this: to think that if my aim is to understand what's happening to us, I prefer to learn from our writers, most of whom worked for minimum wage or even nothing, unlike our bosses, bishops, and benefactors, who as far as I know have at no time been dependent on the charity of swine. And now, may I share with you some of the things that I have learned: From Movses Khorenatsi I have learned that our decline as a nation began in the 5th century A.D. (see his LAMENTATION). From Yeghishé I have learned that in a divided nation, both the dividers and their dupes are destined to bite the dust. From Naregatsi I have learned that it is a waste of time blaming others for our misfortunes and blunders. We should instead examine our conscience. From Baronian and Odian I have learned that our religious and political leaders are not our “betters” but our worst. From Zohrab I have learned that a free press is a key ingredient in every healthy community. From Zarian I have learned that cannibalism and Christianity are mutually exclusive concepts. To those who say my selection of writers is biased and reflects my preconceptions and prejudices, and that there are many others who have been more positive in their assessment of our past; I say, yes, I agree. From Hagop Oshagan I have learned that a writer with a family to support will say anything to please those on whose goodwill he depends for his survival. And the sad truth is, such writers have always outnumbered the dissidents. If I am a pessimist, it may be because so is our literature, but not to worry: for everyone who thinks as I do, there are hundreds perhaps even thousands who produce the kind of verbiage whose sole intent is to flatter our bruised egos and to convince us into believing we are in good hands and we never had it so good. “Mi kich pogh oughargetsek.” * When asked by a friend to respond to some of his critics, Orson Welles is quoted as having said: “Cannot imagine what you expect me to write...beyond simple apology for having been born.” # Tuesday, July 14, 2009 ***************************************** PROJECTIONS & CONJECTURES ****************************************************** Armenians bore the hell out of me – their stiff-necked dogmatism, their addiction to brag, their pathological preference for comfortable lies and their phobia of painful truths; their endless internecine conflicts, their deep insecurities which find expression in loud-mouth (borodakhos) arrogance... Relax! I am not talking about you, gentle reader. I am talking about myself when young. I have no doubt whatever in my mind that, unlike me, you are a noble specimen of humanity and butter wouldn't melt in your mouth, or anywhere else for that matter. * A nation that has been lied to consistently will be inclined to believe only liars. * You cannot speak in praise of capitalism in a communist country and vice versa. It is a risky business discussing democracy with fascists; and nothing can be as hard as trying to reason with dupes of propaganda. What could be more subversive than a lecture on atheism in a cathedral, or a speech on human rights in an Armenian community center? * I don't study history in order to enhance my self-esteem. I study history to understand my fellow men and myself. Anyone who studies history for any other purpose is doomed to understand nothing. * Armenianism is an “ism” like any other ism. It should be carefully analyzed and not adopted as a belief system. * More blood has been shed in the name of patriotism than any other ideology or religion. If patriotism means loyalty to one's nation and disloyalty to the rest of mankind, I want no part of it. “My country, right or wrong!” should also stand for “My country, rich or poor,” and “My country, in peace or war.” A true patriot living in self-imposed exile is an oxymoron (with emphasis on the last two syllables); and a warlike patriot who is unwilling to kill and die speaks with a forked tongue. # Wednesday, July 15, 2009 ***************************************** OF CABBAGES & KINGS ****************************************************** As an underdog, I identify myself with underdogs of all nations and I loathe all murderers and rapists even when they call themselves Alexander the Great and Suleiman the Magnificent. How “Great” was our own Dikran to his victims? * Once upon a time I had an insatiable curiosity about Armenians. I read and reviewed books – sometimes as many as three at a time – in which Armenians were mentioned. Not any more. I have had enough of their subservience to authority, that is to say, to bearded cassocks, empty suits, and fat-bellied slobs. * It is not “white man who speaks with a forked tongue,” but power. For centuries the average dupe believed kings ruled in the name of God. And when the Czars (Russian for Caesars) were replaced by commissars, things got from bad to worse. * The historic evidence seems to suggest that when men rule, it is more likely that they do so in the name of the Devil. * How do you convince the average Armenian who has been brought up to believe he is smarter than the smartest “hria” that his political IQ hovers somewhere between +1 and 0? * Orson Welles: “Magic is directed almost entirely to men. Women hate it – it irritates them. They don't like to be fooled. And men do.” # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
arabaliozian Posted July 18, 2009 Author Report Share Posted July 18, 2009 Thursday, July 16, 2009 ***************************************** AND NOW FOR SOMETHING DIFFERENT ****************************************************** Shortly after Henry Fonda asked for a divorce from his wife, she killed herself by slitting her throat with a razor – not my favorite method of vacating the premises. He once explained his multiple marriages by saying: “If I made penetration, a proposal was the next step.” * Joan Crawford on Otto Preminger: “Otto is a dear man, sort of a Jewish Nazi, but I love him.” * Lee Marvin to Marlon Brando: “I'm thinking of changing my name. To Marlow Brandy.” Brando: “I think I'll change my name, too. To Lee Moron.” * A critic to Charlie Chaplin: “You never have any interesting camera angles.” Chaplin: “I don't need interesting camera angles – I am interesting.” * Ernest Borgnine begins his autobiography by quoting a chestnut vendor's sign that said: “I don't want to set the world on fire, I just want to keep my nuts warm.” He adopted that as his “philosophy,” he writes. In his old age he once sat on the knees of a Wal-Mart Santa Claus and said: “I would like a blonde,” and the Santa replied: “So would I.” Unlike his movie image, Borgnine comes across as a harmless and lovable fellow. He has something nice to say about everybody, except Shelley Winters, which is understandable. * Orson Welles on Anthony Asquith: “My God, he was polite. I saw him, all alone on the stage once, trip over an electric cable, turn around, and say 'I beg your pardon' to it.” # Friday, July 17, 2009 ***************************************** THE TROUBLE WITH HONESTY ****************************************************** The trouble with being honest is that you will never know how many people will get hurt. But that's all right as long as you are one of them. * It happens to me more or less regularly: I try to solve a problem but I am not sure if I can. I go ahead anyway on the grounds that doing something is better than doing nothing, and trying is better than giving up – and by the time I am through, I have created more problems for myself. Moral: The most important thing to know about digging a hole is to know when to stop. * A Turkish friend once said to me: “Why is it that you and I agree on everything except the Genocide?” The only answer I could come up with was: “Probably because we have been brainwashed by two different sets of propagandists.” * Speaking of disagreements: Have you ever noticed that whenever you successfully demolish a bureaucrat's arguments, he says, “Let me check with my supervisor.” And when he comes back, he does so with a decision that is invariably against you. I have lost more arguments against invisible and non-existent supervisors than anyone else. * German saying: “A dog knows his master, but not his master's master.” * Nothing comes more naturally to victims of a great injustice than to inflict minor injustices on their friends. * One of the most incomprehensible things about human beings is their willingness to subject themselves to the verbiage of speechifiers and sermonizers. # Saturday, July 18, 2009 ***************************************** THERE IS NO BUSINESS LIKE... WRITING FOR ARMENIANS ****************************************************** Do you really know how I feel when I write? I feel like a nun promoting virginity to an audience of bordello madams and pimps. * In their efforts to make me see the light, my critics succeed only in reinforcing my convictions. I probably have a similar effect on them. But then, my aim is not to change anyone's mind -- I am not a miracle worker – but to let our Jack S. Avanakians know that they can't fool all the people all the time. * I know they read me because they correct me. As for those who insult me, I don't take them seriously. Anyone who takes a dislike at me will insult me without reading me, and even when he reads me, he will make no effort to understand what he reads. On the contrary: he will go out of his way to misunderstand me. * Do you know why I never run out of things to say? Because I use my enemies as my muses. # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
arabaliozian Posted July 22, 2009 Author Report Share Posted July 22, 2009 Sunday, July 19, 2009 ***************************************** WHO IS A GOOD ARMENIAN? ****************************************************** A good Armenian is first and foremost a good human being. In that sense, a good Turk is a better Armenian than a bad Armenian. A good human being, even if he is a Turk, contributes to a pool of goodness without which evil would triumph. * Who is a bad Armenian? A bad Armenian is one who says “Yes, sir!” to his superiors on the grounds that they know better. * Some of the worst crimes against humanity were committed by men who obeyed the laws of the land and believed everything they were told by men who were convinced God or truth to be on their side. And they believed that because they could not tell the difference between God and the Devil, or between truth and lies. * Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt not believe sermonizers and speechifiers who pretend to know better but whose superior knowledge is nothing but a vipers' nest of lies, superstitions, and prejudices. * To me, the quintessential bad Armenian is he who not only divides the nation but pretends to do so not to satisfy his ambition but to save the nation. Now then, name a single Armenian who has done less dividing and more uniting. * If our dividers are bad, what about those who support them in the name of patriotism? Are they good or bad Armenians? They can't be good. That much we can say. But are they really bad? Hard to say. At best they are misguided dupes. At worst, they are fools who have not yet learned to think for themselves. Or, as the German saying has it: “They are like dogs who know their master, but not their master's master.” # Monday, July 20, 2009 ***************************************** JERKS ****************************************************** The world is full of them, and you will find them in the most unexpected places. If you don't believe me, listen to far better men than myself: Arnold J. Toynbee: “Private intellectual enterprise, unlike private economic enterprise, lives by co-operation not by competition.” One of our white-haired elder statesmen (may the Good Lord have mercy on his soul) once warned me that our academics form mafias and if you are not a member, they treat you like an unwanted interloper trying to muscle in their territory. We have a genocide mafia; we have a pro-Oshagan mafia...speaking of which: once many years ago, I tried to organize a pro-Zarian mafia, sinner that I am (as 19th-century Russian novelists liked to say); but I was successful in recruiting only one member, who turned out to be a quisling and defected to the Oshagan side. I felt betrayed then, but I am grateful to him now. The world can do better with one less jerkoff. * Toynbee again: “I am convinced that irreverence, where irreverence is due, is one of the cardinal virtues.” In other words, when our “betters” behave like our worst, it is our patriotic duty to treat them with contempt rather than respect. * Toynbee: “It is always easier, both intellectually and morally, to debit one's ills to the account of some outside agency than to ascribe the responsibility to oneself.” Or, it is easier and more convenient to play the blame-game than to examine our conscience. Naregatsi's LAMENTATION may be said to be an extended dramatization of this idea. When an eminent 20th-century British historian agrees with an 11th-century Armenian mystic who has been compared to Dante and Shakespeare, it is as sure a thing as money in the bank. * What follows is my real favorite: Toynbee: “In the life which Man has made for himself on Earth, his institutions, in contrast to his personal relations, are the veritable slums, and the taint of moral obliquity is still more distressing in the least ignoble of these social tenements of the Human Spirit – for instance, in the churches and the academies – than in such unquestionably malignant institutions as Slavery and War.” Chekhov once said, “There is no fool like an academic fool.” And according to an Armenian proverb: “If a beard were a sign of wisdom, goats would be philosophers.” To put it differently: Don't believe everything you are told even if the teller is a bishop or a professor – especially an Armenian bishops and an Armenian professor. # Tuesday, July 21, 2009 ***************************************** REVIEWING THE SITUATION ****************************************************** Optimism is unjustified when it ignores or covers up the seriousness of a problem on the erroneous assumption that what needs to be done it being done because we are in good hands. Pessimism is also unjustified if it leads to defeatism, despair, and and paralysis. * What are some of the problems we face today? In the Homeland, an unemployment rate so high that it results in mass exodus, prostitution, and brain-drain. In the Diaspora, divisions that deplete valuable resources by duplicating facilities and services (schools, churches, libraries, fund-raising bureaucracies, and so on), and a high rate of alienation and assimilation (also known as “jermag chart” = white massacre). Another serious problem that we face in both the Homeland and the Diaspora is the fallacy that patriotism consists in supporting not so much the Homeland as its leadership no matter how corrupt and incompetent. * A historic instance of optimism run riot is that of our dominant state of mind at the turn of the last century in the Ottoman Empire. Had our revolutionaries been pessimists and operated on the assumption that things could go not just wrong but catastrophically wrong, the outcome would have been less tragic. * Perhaps the function of a writer is to introduce pessimism in an environment ruled by optimists and vice versa; and in that sense, to stimulate not popularity but disapproval, disagreement, ridicule, rejection, and insults, all of which, may I add, are, to me at any rate, more congenial than the consent of brainwashed dupes and inbred morons. # Wednesday, July 22, 2009 ***************************************** A WORD OF WARNING ****************************************************** One of the inevitable facts of life is that at one time or another we all become dependent on people who may know something we don't know. In a strange city, we depend on taxi drivers. When we experience chest pains, we check into the emergency and are examined by a cardiologist. When something goes wrong with the plumbing, we call a plumber. Where does an Armenian writer fit into this system? Nowhere. Who needs him? Nobody! What does he know that we don't know? Nothing! * The function of a historian is not to reconstruct the past by quoting witnesses and relevant documents – that's not history but “ant industry” (Spengler) – but to explain why things happened as they did. The function of literature is not to entertain the reader by writing love stories, or odes to the mother tongue, or sonnets to the eternal snows of Mt. Ararat, but to understand reality. * When in the 19th century Raffi said Turkey was no place for Armenians, he was ignored. When Zohrab predicted the massacres, they said, “Zohrab effendi is exaggerating.” When Bakounts called communism “an infection,” he was betrayed to the authorities and purged. And when Zarian exposed the lies of the Kremlin, they called him a CIA agent. Why am I saying these things? Simply to warn those of my readers who may harbor secret literary ambitions. * To be an Armenian writer means not only to be dependent on the charity of swine but also to recycle the propaganda of philistines, fools, and liars. If, on the other hand, you decide to speak the truth as you see it, my advice is, first declare financial independence and grow the skin of a crocodile...and may the mercy of the Lord be with you. Amen. # Quote Link to post Share on other sites
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