history

[Haykakan]

Re: history

The monument to the suposedly massacred turcks is such a xxxxin slap in the face. Here you are standing on land populated by thousands of armenians befor the genocide and they erect a monument for the fallen turcks instead. This same government claims to be making progress with armenians, give me a xxxxin break god damn liars.

[bell-the-cat]

Re: history

Historic cities of Armenia (latsd kga).


THE VIDEO: http://merojax.ucoz.net/load/1-1-0-1759

Unf***ing believable they got away with praying inside the Church of the Apostles at Kars. Maybe that's why its mullah has become a rude, camera-banning, old bigot.

And is that "Charents house" identification actually believed?

[Haykakan]

Re: history

Historic cities of Armenia (latsd kga).


THE VIDEO: http://merojax.ucoz.net/load/1-1-0-1759

[yerazhishda]

Re: history

What is literature? In the preface of a history of French Literature I read the following: “Literature is not just something that writers produce. Oral literature preceded written literature and it has always coexisted with it. Conversation, unless it is purely utilitarian, is also a form of literature.”
What happens when two Armenians disagree? The answer must be, they produce anti-literature.

How is this so? If two Armenians disagree, that creates for a more interesting literature, not some sort of "anti-literature". In fact, disagreement (i.e. conflict) is a central tenet of literature worldwide, regardless of national origin.

[arabaliozian]

Re: history

Sunday, February 8, 2009
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REACTIONARIES
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We sometimes forget that our revolutionaries, as well as dictators like Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, began their political careers as dissidents; but the only important lesson they appear to have learned is that, if it is easier to silence dissent, engaging in dialogue is a waste of time.
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Even as they dig us deeper into the hole, they speechify about the light at the end of the tunnel.
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On Armenian TV, a schoolmarm was delivering a report to a silent audience. At one point when she mentioned someone's contribution of a thousand dollars to the school, the audience woke up with a thunderous applause.
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To think someone else's thought is not thinking. To think, to really think, means to explore the not-yet-thought.
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The brainwashed cannot think; they can only think they are thinking.
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Understanding is a solitary endeavor. Prejudice is gang-driven.
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What is literature? In the preface of a history of French Literature I read the following: “Literature is not just something that writers produce. Oral literature preceded written literature and it has always coexisted with it. Conversation, unless it is purely utilitarian, is also a form of literature.”
What happens when two Armenians disagree? The answer must be, they produce anti-literature.
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Monday, February 9, 2009
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ONE-LINERS
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Flattering the scum of the earth does not qualify as love of one's fellow men.
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Mahatma Gandhi was not awarded the Nobel Peace Prize but Arafat was.
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My brilliant career: from a young man to watch to an old junkyard pit bull to be avoided.
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If like me, you were brought up on a steady diet of propaganda, you should have more questions than answers.
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Barbarians may be civilized. It is much more difficult with riffraff.
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To top dogs, words like democracy and human rights are just words that hardly register on their consciousness. To underdogs like me they may well be a matter of life and death.
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Etienne de Silhouette (1709-1767): French politician and financier under Louis XV who balanced the budget by taxing the privileged classes and the rich. His enemies gave his name to linear designs as a symbolic reference to the condition to which his victims (those he taxed) were reduced by the time he was through with them.
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No one believes anyone who assesses himself, and only gullible fools believe in gypsy fortune-tellers. To those who say, sometimes gypsies can be right, I say, they may well be, but an Armenian who brags never is.
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Tuesday, February 10, 2009
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ON SAROYAN
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In Athens, I read him in Greek, in Venice in Italian, and in Canada in English. He sounded good in all of them.
The three books that I enjoyed most:
HERE COMES, THERE GOES, YOU KNOW WHO,
PAPA YOU'RE CRAZY,
MAMA I LOVE YOU.
Not his best works, granted. What I loved about them was their spontaneity. It was this quality that encouraged many to become writers – most of them, like Kerouac and his followers, mediocrities.
I saw Saroyan only once in the 1950 in a schoolyard in Kokinia, a suburb of Athens. He spoke very briefly, with a booming voice, in Armenian, to an audience of about a hundred fellow countrymen. His two children were with him. Afterwards people went up to him, shook his hand, and exchanged a few words. I was too intimidated to follow their example.
About twenty years later, I wrote him a letter asking for an interview. A few years passed before I heard from him. He apologized for the delay, agreed to the interview, complained about a recent interview with an Armenian poet (who was later murdered in Moscow), mentioned Zarian (he knew him but couldn't figure him out, he said). To my astonishment he also said he reads everything I write, and wanted to know if I have written any fiction. In reply I sent him some of my published fiction but I never heard from him again. Someone who knew Saroyan well once said to me: “Saroyan is interested only in Saroyan.”
In the memoirs of his son Aram, and wife, Carol Matthau (referred to as “Carol Saroyan Saroyan” in Truman Capote's last and unfinished nonfiction fiction, ANSWERED PRAYERS, because she married him twice) Saroyan appears as a wholly unSaroyanesque character.
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Being Armenian looks easy only in Saroyan’s fiction. In reality it is such a demanding enterprise that most Armenians give up the effort and assimilate, and I for one do not blame them.
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The most amusing line that I remember from Carol Matthau's memoirs: “As Armenians like to say, when I say la, understand lalabloo.”
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Wednesday, February 11, 2009
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MAXIMS AND REFLECTIONS
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If Naregatsi, Raffi, Baronian, Odian, and Zarian, among many others, failed, what are our chances of success? Next to nil! We may, however, succeed if the “angularity of time” is in our favor. Life is unpredictable, the future uncertain, and the world as dangerous a place as the mouth of a volcano. Who would have thought that American capitalism would one day degenerate to socialism for the rich? Who would have imagined that three multi-millionaire chief executive officers, hostile to unions, would come to Washington in their private jets, united, begging for taxpayers' money?
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We are much more transparent than we think we are, and we expose ourselves more not by what we say but by what we avoid saying.
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Why should anyone care what a marginal scribbler thinks or says? -- unless of course he exposes a wound, at which point he becomes a nuisance, a menace, a disturber of the peace, and an enemy of the people.
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There are those who read me for the sheer pleasure of sending me abusive e-mails, and they are my best sources of stimulation.
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Why fight an adversary who is his own worst enemy? Why kill a man who is hanging himself?
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You start winning when you no longer care whether you win or lose.
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It is only when you try to change the status quo that you acquire a better understanding of the powerful forces that hold it together.
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[arabaliozian]

comments

Thursday, February 5, 2009
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NOTES AND COMMENTS
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You cannot solve a problem whose existence you refuse to acknowledge.
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Armenians are not litigious by nature – they learn it from their leaders.
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Fascists don't believe in dialogue and compromise, only in consensus and unanimity. Even when there are ninety-nine voices saying yes, and only one saying no, they feel the need to silence the sole dissenting voice.
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To know a great deal about Turks and next to nothing about Armenians, except their status as victims: that, it seems, is the mission of our Turcocentric ghazetajis.
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The reason why I am consistently negative is that my life and work may be divided into three distinct periods:
(one) past -- naïve and sentimental;
(two) present -- old and cynical;
(three) future – unprintable and unmentionable.
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“After all, we are Armenians!” – meaning , anything we say or do must be accepted and forgiven, including that which would be normally unacceptable and unforgivable. Some Armenians use Armenianism the way cold-blooded killers use the plea of insanity.
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There are as many versions of the past as there are ideologies, religions, nations, tribes, and schools of thought, all of whom assert to have a monopoly on truth. To say therefore that our own version of the past is true but the French, Russian, Patagonian, or, for that matter, Turkish versions of their own past is false, is to bury our heads in the sand.
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Friday, February 6, 2009
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ON EASTERN MYSTICISM
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What can we learn from schools of Eastern mysticism? Or rather, what has the East learned from its own mystics? To those who say the ideas of Eastern mystics have universal validity even if they have been corrupted by their religious and political leadership, I say, the same could be said of Christianity and its mystics.
Gandhi, a Hindu, learned a great deal from the Bhagavat Gita and other Hindu scriptures. But he also learned from Tolstoy (a Russian), Ruskin (an Englishman), and Thoreau (an American).
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If history teaches us anything it is that no matter how noble an idea or ideology, sooner or later it will be corrupted and perverted by an authoritarian elite whose greatest concern will not be the welfare of the masses but its own powers and privileges.
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What can we learn from mystics of both East and West? Only this: the mystical experience is not transferable and all efforts to express it in words are destined to fail. For more on this subject see Aldous Huxley's THE PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY, and Arthur Koestler's THE LOTUS AND THE ROBOT. Also of interest, the writings of Krishnamurti, an Indian mystic, who said, “If you follow someone else, you are on the wrong path,” or words to that effect. This is true of individuals as well as nations. Our greatest exponent of this particular idea is Gostan Zarian. See his TRAVELLER AND HIS ROAD and BANCOOP AND THE BONES OF THE MAMMOTH, both available in English.
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Arthur Koestler on Zen Buddhism: “Inarticulateness is not a monopoly of Zen; but it is the only school which made a philosophy out of it, whose exponents burst into verbal diarrhea to prove constipation.”
Elsewhere: “Zen always held a fascination for a category of people in whom brutishness combines with pseudomysticism, from Samurai to Kamikaze to Beatnik.”
Koestler is much better on Indian mysticism and its countless aberrations, including Gandhi's.
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Finally, here are two of my favorite Buddhist sayings: “Look not for refuge to anyone beside yourself”; and “Foolish friends are worse than wise enemies.”
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Saturday, February 7, 2009
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DIARY
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It is written “You can't cook pilaf with words.” It is also written “Soft words can break bones.”
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Once upon a time a man went all over the world in search of buried treasure only to discover on his return home that it was buried in his own backyard.
Moral: It's a waste of time searching wisdom in what you don't know.
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To be the slave of former slaves is not freedom.
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In a recent edition of the PETIT LAROUSSE ILLUSTRÉ (the most widely used French-language reference work) there is an entry on Talaat Pasha wherein we read about what an Armenian did to him as opposed to what he did to the Armenians. As a matter of fact, there is only one Armenian mentioned and that is in the final line, which reads: “He was assassinated by an Armenian.” The innocent reader is left with the impression that some bloodthirsty crazed Armenian victimized an innocent Turkish statesman.
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In all fairness to LAROUSSE: in its entry on ARMENIA we read: “1915: The Young Turks committed genocide (1,500,000 victims).”
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DIKRAN THE GREAT is identified as a Parthian. Armenian emperors of Byzantium are not identified as Armenian; neither are such Armenian writers as Adamov and Troyat.
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Pierre Gaxotte: “There is no such thing as History, there are only historians.”
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[arabaliozian]

Re: history

Thursday, January 29, 2009
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THE BLAME-GAME
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What makes the blame-game irresistible to charlatans like Governor Blogojevich of Illinois is that it allows them to portray themselves as morally superior even when irresponsible, corrupt, greedy, and guilty as hell. One important difference between Blogojevich and our own wheeler-dealers is that no one died as a result of the Governor's misconduct. Even more important: Americans have a justice system and a legal maneuver known as impeachment. Do we even have a word for it? And if we do, when was the last time anyone heard it? Which may explain why very soon Illinois will be rid of Blogojevich but we will continue to be at the mercy not of one Blogojevich but a whole gang of them.
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When our speechifiers and sermonizers speak of unity, they remind me of wolves who would like to see sheep gathered in a single enclosure as opposed to being scattered all over the forest.
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The comments of our Turcocentric ghazetajis sometimes read like memoranda to a non-existent foreign office staffed by invisible bureaucrats anxiously waiting for their input and advice.
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At one time or another I have been accused of all those things that I have exposed and ridiculed, including fascism, racism, Antisemitism, anti-intellectualism, and intolerance. I don’t mind pleading guilty to the charge of intolerance: I am indeed intolerant of stupidity and ignorance parading as knowledge and wisdom. I am also intolerant of greed, double-talk, tribalism, chauvinism, yes-men, Ottomanism, Stalinism, cowardice, treason, and arrogance. If by being tolerant of these things I will be a better Armenian, I say, No thanks! I’d much rather be an honest human being.
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Friday, January 30, 2009
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THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME
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With unemployment soaring everywhere, many Armenians may decide to return to the Homeland, get organized, and throw the rascals out. Wishful thinking on my part? I am not sure. Such a movement has already started in France and Russia, and I expect any day now America may follow.
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I am so used to being insulted by readers that I feel ill at ease when one of them is kind to me. And when I insult a reader I expect him to say it comes with the territory and to forget about it, as opposed to holding a grudge for ninety-nine years. But I guess that too comes with the territory – that is, unforgiving Armenians with the memory of elephants and the venom of seven Turkish vipers.
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Anti-intellectualism has been a constant in our history because it allows hoodlums the luxury of looking down on their betters and assuming a morally superior stance on the grounds that God and Country are on their side.
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They rise in defense of God and Country. As for me, I rise only in defense of that most uncommon of all human faculties: common sense.
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Everything I write is an answer to a specific question, objection, or criticism. And yet, some of my readers complain that I ignore them. I suspect what these readers want is not answers but attention, flattery, propaganda, and lies. To them I say: It’s been a pleasure disappointing you.
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Saturday, January 31, 2009
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BIG LIES
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Dupes and fools are the backbone of a nation because they are willing to kill and die in the name of a Big Lie.
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Between a Turkish friend and an Armenian enemy I would choose a Turkish friend. Who in his right mind wouldn't? Many Armenians alive today owe their life to Turkish friends, and many victims of the Genocide, including some of our most beloved writers and poets, owe their death to Armenian traitors.
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We know the family trees of royal dynasties but not of the masses, to which most of us belong. And the leaders, elites, and top dogs of all nations are, like Obama, mutts.
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Turks call themselves Turks because they have been brainwashed to believe they are Turks by men who were not themselves Turks. We are all products of mixed marriages.
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The Byzantine Empire was Greek but some of its greatest emperors and generals were of Armenian descent. The so-called Ottoman Empire that succeeded it was as much Greco-Armenian as Turkish. Most of our own kings and generals were imported talent.
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At the turn of the last century, the kings and queens of Europe were related to Queen Victoria and to one another; that did not prevent them from fighting a world war that was meant to end all wars (another Big Lie) but resulted in the bloodiest war in the history of mankind.
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Germany's most dangerous enemies were neither the Russians nor the French but the Nazis (from “national socialism”), in the same way that Russia's greatest enemies were the Bolsheviks, whose supreme leader was a Georgian, whose belief system was based on the theories of a German xxx.
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World history is full of Big Lies like that one and the Biggest of them all is that political leaders are selfless servants of the people and their number one priority is not number one but the welfare of their subjects.
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[arabaliozian]

Sunday, January 18, 2009
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AGAINST DOGMATISM
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A doctor in Australia speaking of people in isolated villages: “You must always have a translator with you because when they don't understand a question, they say yes.”
It is the same with underdogs everywhere. They think it is safer to say “yes, sir!” even when they are told to drop their pants and bend over.
We said yes to Christianity; we said yes to atheism under the Soviets; and in the Ottoman Empire some of us said yes to Islam. We said yes to capitalism in the Diaspora and yes to communism in the Homeland. And today we say yes to our bosses, bishops, benefactors, and their assorted gangs of neo-commissars and "mi kich pogh" panchoonies.
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A famous Armenian soprano speaking of a Gomidas love song during a radio interview:
“Armenians are shy.”
“You mean coy.”
“No, shy.”
“You are not shy!”
We like to think, since most odars, not to say Armenians, are ignorant, we can say anything we want about Armenians and get away with it; and it comes as a shock when we are contradicted.
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“To know is to remember,” Socrates used to say. It follows, to remind is to teach.
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No matter what you say, there will be those who disagree with you. Remember, there are still flat-earth theorists and dupes who think Hitler and Stalin were messianic figures.
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There are honest disagreements and there are Armenian disagreements. If throughout our millennial history consensus has been with us an unattainable Utopian goal, it’s because our disagreements are seldom honest disagreements.
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Honest men with honest disagreements may agree to disagree and thus develop a consensus -- which means working together, as opposed to thinking alike.
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Monday, January 19, 2009
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FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
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“I don't like making enemies,” a writer tells me. And I cannot help thinking that the only way to avoid making enemies in our environment is by joining them, if only with your silence.
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When I was young I trusted and respected my elders. But with old age comes mistrust and suspicion. So much so that whenever I run into an honest man these days I feel like a born-again human being.
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Gone are the good old days when a commissar could permanently silence a dissident with a memo or a phone call with three monosyllables: “Shut him up!” Their only weapon now is verbal abuse. But the trouble with insults is that there are only a limited number of them and only a limited number of times they can be repeated. It has happened to me more than once that after repeatedly and almost daily abusing me for a year or two or even more, they have given up and fallen silent.
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Obama's greatest achievement so far is that he survived the insults of his adversaries and is now willing to have them as advisers, and this not in the name of a belief system but common sense.
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I am not surprised to read the following headline in one of our weeklies:
THOSE WHO WERE NOT AFRAID OF SOVIET INJUSTICE ARE NOW AFRAID OF ARMENIAN JUSTICE.
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When an Armenian asks you a question, you can be sure of one thing: he knows the answer.
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Tuesday, January 20, 2009
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ENEMIES
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Emile Littré : “Man is a most unstable compound, and earth a decidedly inferior planet.”
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When it comes to religion and politics, the prevalent attitude among leaders towards the masses is: the less they know and understand the better – because then they can be more easily manipulated and misled. As a result, we know more about the dark side of our enemies than they do; and we know less about ourselves than we should. It follows, anyone who dares to say all men are more or less the same, or Turks are our if not brothers than half-brothers is promptly labeled a traitor.
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Our enemy, our real enemy, is not the Turk but knowledge, understanding, and objective judgment. Socrates was guilty of exposing the ignorance of his “betters.” Galileo knew something that the scriptures did not. Solzhenitsyn did not think the men in the Kremlin were morally or intellectually superior, he was therefore guilty of objective judgment. As for writers like Zabel Yessayan, Charents, and Bakounts, among others: they were too smart to be taken in by Bolshevik propaganda – though smart in this context does not mean a higher IQ but the ability to use one's common sense and to think for oneself.
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Napoleon once said, “A man with ideas is my enemy.” Which may suggest that rulers prefer to rule over the brainless. In their eyes, to expose the lies of their propaganda might as well be a crime against humanity.
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The Turks have a saying: “Chok ghareshterma, bokhou chekar.” Freely translated:
“Don't get involved (or mix it up too much), you may expose the sh**.”
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Those who have dared to confront tyrants have always been a tiny minority, and tiny enough to be almost invisible to the naked eye.
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Wednesday, January 21, 2009
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HISTORY
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We have advanced from one form of oppression to another accompanied by long-winded sermons and speeches in the name of God and Country. Who speaks in the name of the people? Who dares to see a cause-and-effect connection between our corruption, incompetence, divisiveness or lack of vision and our status as perennial victims? All we contribute to our narrative is lies. Consider our press: most of it is about Turkish criminal conduct and our minor celebrities. Our problems – from massacres to earthquakes – fall on us without warning like thieves in the night. “Mart bidi ch'ellank.”
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We like to think, since we are not guilty of genocide, we are not fascists. But to silence dissent or to be deaf to dissenting voices is if not fascism than it is saying yes to fascism.
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There is an idiot in all of us, including the most wise. Likewise, there is a killer in all of us, compliments of our crocodilian ancestors. This may explain why sometimes intelligent men are deceived by fools, and decent men are misled by criminal psychopaths; and here, I could make a long list of famous men who supported Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin.
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