reflections

[arabaliozian]

Thursday, March 20, 2008
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A SHIP WITHOUT A CAPTAIN
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By emphasizing some details and ignoring others, one can speak the truth and lie at the same time. Likewise, by combining the letter of one law with the spirit of another, one can pretend to serve justice even when committing unspeakable crimes against humanity.
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“Why don’t you leave us alone and busy yourself educating your Turkish brethren,” writes a gentle reader. I speak in defense of my brothers, all my brothers, regardless of race, color, and creed. To the fools who tell me to shut up, I dedicate the following lines by Walt Whitman: “Whoever walks a furlong without sympathy / Walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud.”
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It’s astonishing the amount of crap people will take before they decide enough is enough.
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The best I can hope to achieve is embarrass the bastards. Is it worth it? I am not sure. It keeps me busy thinking I carry on a tradition that goes back many centuries: that of calling a spade a spade and a baloney artist a jackass.
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Again and again I am reminded that honey is more effective than vinegar. Yes, by all means. Let’s try the honeyed approach with the Turks for a change, not only because it is more civilized or effective but also because we have wasted vast amounts of vinegar without any tangible results.
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Speaking of Whitman: when Lincoln was assassinated, he wrote one of his most celebrated poems titled “O Captain! My Captain!” which begins with the line, “O Captain! My Captain! our fearful trip is done,” and ends with the words: “…on the deck my Captain lies, / Fallen cold and dead.”
And I reflect that, at the end of “our fearful trip” what lay “fallen cold and dead” was not our captain (did we have one?) but the nation, which happens to be one of those minor details that have been covered up by our nationalist historians.
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Friday, March 21, 2008
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METAMORPHOSIS
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The American conservative pundit, William F. Buckley, who died recently, is quoted as having said that Africans will be ready to run their own affairs “when they stop eating each other.” On reading this line, I immediately remembered the old saying, “One Armenian eats one chicken, two Armenians eat two chickens, three Armenians eat each other”; and Zarian’s dictum, “Armenians survive by cannibalizing each other.”
If Africans learn to run their own affairs before we do, no doubt it will be because their former masters and role models were European, unlike ours who were Asiatic.
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To preach is to confess, because preachers tend to practice the opposite of what they preach.
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Power seems to radically alter the DNA of most people, which may explain why Armenians with power behave as though they belonged to a different species.
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I once had the following brief exchange with one of our notorious Turcocentric pundits who has succeeded in elevating Turcocentrism to a pathological monomania:
“You complain too much,” said he.
“Isn’t that what you do too?”
“Who asked you?”
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No Armenian will ever praise with the same intensity as he reviles.
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“I am a tolerant man…”
“Live and let live, that’s my philosophy.”
“I love my fellow Armenians, regardless of their political and religious affiliations.”
To describe oneself is to deceive oneself.
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The ego is an extension of the gut.
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Saturday, March 22, 2008
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ADVICE TO A YOUNG WRITER
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Work hard. Write every day. Concentrate. Rewrite. Delete more and expand less. Avoid writing at night when your critical faculties are down. But if you are an Armenian, find yourself another line of work.
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I am not rejected because I am misunderstood. I am rejected because I understand and what I understand is not flattering to our vanity.
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If you voice opinions that I held twenty or thirty years ago, I will not agree with you because agreeing with you would amount to deleting two or three decades from my life.
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One problem with brown-nosers is that after spending a lifetime osculating derrieres, they are outraged when the same treatment is denied to them.
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If you can reconcile belief in God with belief in the honesty of multimillionaire televangelists, you may claim to understand America.
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Cioran: “Shakespeare: the meeting of a rose with an axe.”
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Paul Morand: “Unpopular people fascinate me.”
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Anonymous: “Contentment is better than wealth.”
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[arabaliozian]

Re: reflections

Sunday, March 23, 2008
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RESURRECTION
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We began our career as a nation as Homo sapiens and eventually evolved (some would say degenerated) into Homo Ottomanicus, Sovieticus, and Americanus, among others subspecies. Our only hope now is to resurrect the Homo sapiens that lies buried deep in our subconscious.
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In whatever I write my guide is neither nationalism nor patriotism but common sense and decency. More people have died in the name of patriotism than any other word, except perhaps the word God. In our cultural and environmental context moreover, the word patriotism has been abused so ruthlessly that it might as well be synonymous with treason.
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During the Soviet era, I remember, some of the most venomous letters and phone calls I received were from chic Bolsheviks – wealthy Armenian-Americans who supported the regime in the name of patriotism.
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The average Armenian is endowed with phenomenal powers of persuasion, but as a rule, these powers work only on himself and his like-minded dupes.
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In our dealings with Turks, we might as well resign ourselves to the fact that we will never get 100%. But even if we do, it will amount to less than 1% since we cannot resurrect a single victim.
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The role model of all bullies is God who does not threaten with personal injury but with eternal hellfire.
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Armenians are united by little except mutual contempt.
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Monday, March 24, 2008
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MYTHS
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If you believe what your political leaders tell you, you can’t be very smart. “A man who believes in honest politicians,” is as good a definition of dumb as any you care to mention.
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Armenians believe to be smart for the same reason that ancient Greeks (one of the smartest and most civilized and progressive people in the history of mankind) believed in their gods. Even after Socrates told them “Of the gods we know nothing,” they went on building magnificent temples to Zeus, the alpha male of their zoo of fornicating gods.
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The first time I heard someone say Armenians are not smart (he was not an odar but an Armenian-American academic whose judgment and integrity I had no reason to question) my initial reaction was not disbelief but outrage and derision. And even today, many years later, I find it difficult to say Armenians are dumb. If I don’t mind saying it now it may be because I have come to terms with my own limitations, prejudices, and blind spots. Needless to add, what I just said does not apply to those of my fellow Armenians who happen to be without limitations, prejudices, and blind spots.
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Tuesday, March 25, 2008
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WHAT DO POLITICIANS WANT?
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It is said of Hitler that he had two favorite subjects: the loyalty of dogs and war.
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What do politicians want? Power, and power is like money, they can never have enough of it. Politicians need loyal subjects as much as capitalists need workers; and a loyal subject is one who says “Yes, sir!” even when what he is told makes little or no sense.
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Patriotism is defined as love of God and Country, and love of God and Country has nothing to do with defending the blunders of politicians. And yet, in the minds of naïve dupes, love of God and Country is often equated with loyalty to a regime.
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After being subservient to a long line of sultans and commissars, some Armenians see nothing wrong in being subservient to their own leaders. But subservience is subservience and it means “submitting one’s intelligence to someone who may not have enough of it himself” (Santa Teresa of Avila).
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Left to their own devices, people are not disposed to hate their fellow men simply because they live on the other side of a river or mountain, unless of course their political leaders convince them otherwise; and if there is one thing politicians are good at, is promoting and legitimizing prejudice, hatred, and ultimately war in the name of God and Country.
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Armenians and Turks share a common enemy: their political leadership.
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Wednesday, March 26, 2008
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CRITERIA
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Like most people, I judge a nation not by the number of its speechifiers, sermonizers, and propagandists, or for that matter by the number of its millionaires, multimillionaires, billionaires, and wheeler-dealers; I judge a nation by the number of tongues it cuts out or writers it silences.
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If one hundred or even a thousand dupes say one thing and a man who has acquired the skill to think for himself says another, who will have more credibility in your eyes?
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Can a collection of barbarian tribes ever hope to achieve the status of a civilized nation on the grounds that sixteen centuries ago it converted to Christianity or a century ago it experienced genocide?
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[arabaliozian]

Re: reflections

Thursday, March 27, 2008
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ON PROPAGANDA
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There is no such thing as an original propaganda line. All propaganda is derivative. All propaganda is not only a lie, but also a big lie, and not just a big lie but also a plagiarized lie. If propaganda works it’s because it flatters the ego, and vanity, it has been said, is an omnivorous as well as a ravenous monster. To the humiliated and degraded, propaganda says, “You are God’s chosen people.” To the scum of the earth, it says, “You belong to a superior race.” To the dumb, it says, “You are smart, and maybe even smarter than anyone else!” (“It takes seven xxxs to fool an Armenian”). That may explain why our bosses, bishops, and benefactors are more popular than our intellectuals. In their effort to understand and explain reality, intellectuals are more interested in exposing contradictions than in flattering egos – contradictions that exist between the lies of propaganda and reality; contradictions between what our speechifiers and sermonizers tell us (“we are progressive, civilized, and smart”) and the popular phrase “mart bidi ch’ellank!”
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Friday, March 28, 2008
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AS I SEE IT
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“To serve is to rule.” All other forms of rule lead to oppression.
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In the eyes of our leadership, our greatest enemies are neither the Turks nor the Azeris, but the Armenian who thinks for himself.
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Nothing could be more naïve than to think if you read only Armenian sources, you can form a more or less balanced view of our history, culture, and identity, on the grounds that no one knows and understands Armenians better than an Armenian. My own impression is that when Armenian scholars write or speak publicly about Armenians, they stress only half of what they know and cover up or ignore the other half. But then, this is true not only of Armenians but also of all nations. Americans are known for their pragmatism and energy, Russians for their capacity to suffer, the French for their love of argument, the English for their cool, and the Italians for their excessive love of la dolce vita and bella figura. No nation is known for its love of truth.
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Freud once said that the aim of analysis is to replace hysterical misery with common unhappiness. If what I say depresses you, it may be because I deal with reality, and our reality is not exactly an invitation to joy.
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The saying “It takes seven xxxs to fool an Armenian,” is to me less a compliment and more an insult, because its hidden message is a warning to all those who contemplate dealing with an Armenian in the marketplace to keep their eyes open or even to count their fingers after shaking hands with an Armenian.
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Speaking of identity: whenever I identify myself as an Armenian to a fellow Armenian, I immediately sense a note of caution in his body language, as if I were about to make unreasonable demands on him and force him to say, “Sorry, what you are asking me to do is against the law.”
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Saturday, March 29, 2008
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THE ROOT OF OUR PROBLEMS
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Our ghazetajis, sermonizers, and speechifiers have combined to create an atmosphere in which even the hint of dissent is equated with anti-Armenianism.
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In the eyes of some readers I seem to have developed a quality peculiarly unattractive in an Armenian, namely, an obstinate, perhaps even an obsessive, need to see not the best but the worst in us.
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Whenever I am urged to be more positive in my approach to our affairs, I immediately raise the question: To what extent our weakness for the positive has contributed to our status as victims? Consider our genocide as a case in point. To what extent the optimism of our revolutionaries and their blind faith in the verbal commitments of the Great Powers were contributing factors to the final catastrophe? To what extent our blind faith in the Kremlin contributed to our Soviet nightmare? To what extent our own chauvinist crapola (“we are smart, we are progressive, we are civilized”) contributes to our arrogance, dogmatism, intolerance, authoritarianism, divisiveness, fragmentation, and ultimately to our self-inflicted “white massacre”? It seems to me what we need is not a more positive approach to our affairs but the exact opposite.
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Naregatsi, our Dante and Shakespeare combined, did not see the best but the worst in himself, and by extension, in his fellow men. I suspect our need for optimism, far from being a solution, is at the very root of our problems.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: reflections

Sunday, March 30, 2008
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DZOUR NESDINK, SHIDAG KHOSSINK
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We like to say that Israel and the U.S. are denialist states because they don’t want to offend a friendly nation in the Middle East, which happens to be a hornet’s nest of hostile tribes that threaten their vital economic interests or survival. What we don’t say is that nations that are on our side may also have unspoken political motives, which have little or nothing to do with what’s right and wrong. What we also hate to admit is that which even a major pro-Armenian historian like Toynbee has said, namely that we were wrong to make territorial claims on Turkey, because if every nation did that, the world would become an unrecognized place and many nations (including Israel and the U.S.) would lose their right to exist. It’s all politics? So what else is new? Was there ever a Golden Age in the history of mankind when nations behaved against their own interests or for purely idealistic reasons? What about our own political parties? If any one of them is righteous, upright, and honorable, why is it that so far it has failed to convince the other parties?
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Monday, March 31, 2008
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SHOUTS AND WHISPERS
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How does one humanize the dehumanized, especially if they are in denial of their condition?
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Armenian problems and their solutions: they have as long a history as Armenian literature. Perhaps I write to save myself and no one else. If I succeed, I may be an example to others. If I fail – and so far I have, like so many of my predecessors – I may be remembered by a handful of readers as a mental masturbator. But then, no one said being an Armenian writer was a win/win proposition.
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We are brought up to believe speaking of Turkish criminal conduct is a patriotic duty, but exposing our own violations of human rights is treason.
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Zola wrote only one “J’accuse.” Our Turcocentric ghazetajis write nothing else.
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Freedom means participation in power. The only freedom we have enjoyed since independence is to respond to Panchoonie’s S.O.S. of “mi kich pogh” in the Diaspora, and in the Homeland, to emigrate and riot.
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Because the shouts of my predecessors have dwindled to inaudible whispers, I am accused of being shrill.
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Tuesday, April 01, 2008
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IF THE SHOE FITS
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Since we can’t settle our score with the Turks, we call each other nasty names, preferably from a safe distance and anonymously.
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Politicians and lawyers share a tendency to make their side look all white and the opposition all black, which may explain why they are the least trusted people on earth. So much so that if you say, a lawyer or a politician told me the sun rises in the east, no one will believe you.
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To know how to read is not the same as knowing what deserves to be read.
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To be a commissar in a democracy or a nationalist in America is almost as bad as being a vegetarian among Armenians – meant to say, cannibals.
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Nothing can be more arrogant than to speak in the name of God, and since arrogance is an attribute of the devil, to speak in the name of God is almost as bad as speaking in the name of the devil.
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To believe means to believe only one side of the story even when you know there is another side. We believed historic Armenia to be ours. We believed the Great powers were on our side. We believed the Ottoman Empire was about to collapse and disappear. It is now time that we believe our believers less and our dissidents more.
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Armenians who believe in Mount Ararat and Vartan Mamikonian will believe anything.
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Wednesday, April 02, 2008
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NOTES & COMMENTS
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If you want to understand our past and the manner in which it has shaped our character and identity, read our writers, not our ghazetajis. What you get from our ghazetajis, especially the Turcocentric variant, is not history but political pornography whose aim is not to understand and explain but to propagandize and dehumanize.
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On more than one occasion I have been described as “controversial.” I reject the label. I maintain what’s controversial is our reality as it is perceived by our sermonizers and speechifiers.
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Sometimes the very same people we trust most deceive us; which could be rephrased as, because we trust them without reservation, they deceive us.
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If you don’t understand the lines, don’t try to read between them, because if you do, you may see things that are not there.
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A question to our editors and Turcocentric ghazetajis: If a member of your family is molested or raped, do you feel the need to speak of molesters and rapists every time you open your mouth? Why do you discuss Turks whenever you put pen to paper? Doesn’t the nation deserve the same degree of consideration as members of your own family?
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[arabaliozian]

Re: reflections

Thursday, April 03, 2008
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FROM THE MEMOIRS OF HERCULES
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“Of all my labors, the hardest was separating an Armenian from his prejudices. After trying seven times and failing, I moved to less demanding undertakings, like moving mountains, draining seas, and capping volcanoes.”
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FROM A RECENT BIOGRAPHY OF ELGAR
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King Edward VII “was one of the more cultivated royals of recent centuries, displaying definite evidence of brain activity.”
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MEMO
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To the editor who suggested I write longer pieces if I want to be published in his weekly: “As a child I was exposed to countless longwinded sermons and speeches against sin and for patriotism. As an adult, whenever I begin to read a commentary, I seldom last beyond the first paragraph.”
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MEMO II
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To a reader who verbally abuses me from a safe distance and anonymously: “You don’t even have the courage and honesty to admit your cowardice, and you expect me to take what you say seriously?”
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DEFINITION
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Patriotism: “Love of God and Country, not to be confused with love of lies and propaganda.”
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Friday, April 04, 2008
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OF CABBAGES AND KINGS
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A headline in the SPECTATOR (London, March 2008) reads: “If God proved he existed, I still wouldn’t believe in him.” It seems to me, whenever bad things happen to good people, or the innocent are victimized, or evil triumphs, God (if he exists) is trying to prove to us that he doesn’t exist, or we can’t count on his existence, and that we should conduct our affairs as if he didn’t exist, and that our petitions and prayers will fall on deaf ears.
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To readers who are afraid that my kind of criticism in an open forum on the Internet may damage our image as a nation, I say: The Tourian assassination in 1933, and more recently, the terrorism of our so-called “freedom fighters,” and the riots of March 1 have done infinitely more harm to our image than all our past, present, and future critics combined if only because none of them so far has made a single headline in the international press. Compared to our kings who parade naked on Main Street, the voiceof our critics is more like the whisper of the kid in the crowd who says they have no clothes on.
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Saturday, April 05, 2008
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REFLECTIONS
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We survived 600 years under the sultans. We will be lucky if we survive that long under our own Ottomanized bosses and Stalinized commissars.
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One can become an addict of lies and propaganda as surely as to nicotine and opium.
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A true assertion, like a great work of art, paralyzes our critical faculties.
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In the same way that authority allows one to behave in an irresponsible manner, a high degree of intelligence allows one to blabber like an idiot.
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You don’t have to go out of your way to make enemies in our environment. All you have to do is state clearly and honestly what you think.
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One reason we are a failure as a nation is that we refuse to discuss our failings, and when someone dares to mention them, we make him feel as though he were insulting Mount Ararat, shish-kebab, and pilaf.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: reflections

Sunday, April 06, 2008
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DECEPTION
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Nothing fascinates a man more than a woman, provided she is unattainable or she belongs to another man.
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The war described in the ILIAD by Homer was all about the abduction of a floozy.
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It is the ambition of every man to be taken seriously. The more ridiculous the man, the greater the ambition. Consider some of the most feared and influential names of the 20th century: Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Franco – the scum of the earth
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René Descartes on his critics: “Two or three flies,” whose books are good only as “toilet paper.”
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One should not behave like a fanatic even in one’s opposition to fanaticism.
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If the Pope is right (and he is never wrong, or so he wants us to believe) shall we then assume all other non-Catholic religious leaders to be usurpers and frauds?
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The aim of nationalist historians is to unite the nation in its hatred of the enemy.
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The reason why the 11the Commandment is not “Thou shalt not take anyone seriously,” is that Moses wanted to be taken seriously.
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According to Freud, Moses was an Egyptian because Moses is an Egyptian name and monotheism an Egyptian concept (see his MOSES AND MONOTHEISM). And according to many Hebrew scholars and rabbis, Freud, like Marx, was an anti-Semite, and Christ was a heretic and a blasphemer.
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Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying there are no honest men. What I am saying is that honest men are as marginalized as criminals.
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Wittgenstein: “The hardest thing in life is not deceiving oneself.”
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Monday, April 07, 2008
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WITTGENSTEIN, MARX, JESUS, & HITLER
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Wittgenstein was one of the most influential philosophers of the last century; and yet he advised his fellow philosophers to give up philosophy. On meeting the greatest literary critic of his time, he is quoted as having said, “Leavis, give up criticism.” Had he been an Armenian, I suspect he would have advised his fellow Armenians to give up Armenianism and be born-again as human beings, on the grounds that their so-called Armenianism is nothing but disguised Ottomanism.
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If Jesus and Marx had known the way future generations would abuse their teachings, they would have kept silent and we wouldn’t even know they ever existed.
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It is to be noted that Wittgenstein and Hitler were contemporaries and as boys went to the same school, but neither ever mentioned the other.
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There is nothing wrong in thinking you have all the answers as long as you are prepared to face the fact that all of them may well be wrong.
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An Armenian today nurses more wounds inflicted on him by his fellow Armenians than by Turks.
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Tuesday, April 08, 2008
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HOW DO WE SURVIVE AS A NATION?
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For the unemployed and the poor, questions of national identity might as well be irrelevant. What matters to them more than anything else is a good job. They want to work and provide for their families, and who can blame them? Entire continents today are populated by people who left their homeland and now live a more or less comfortable life in America and Australia. According to recent statistics, most of Europe is now populated by non-Europeans.
How do we survive as a nation?
By creating decent jobs in the Homeland would be one answer. By asking fewer dumb questions whose obvious answers we pretend not to know would be another.
And speaking of dumb questions, here is another one for you: what does the average Armenian-American philistine know about Armenian history and culture beside massacres, shish kebab and pilaf? How do we convince such an Armenian that our music, literature, and art are expressions of our identity and to ignore them is to promote assimilation?
How do we survive as a nation?
By behaving as a nation as opposed to a collection of unruly tribes led by bloodsuckers and gravediggers whose number one concern is number one.
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Samuel Johnson: “The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.”
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Unawareness of one’s failings is an infinitely more dangerous condition than Alzheimer’s.
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Whenever an angry reader unloads his inner filth on me, I can’t help thinking I must have hit paydirt.
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Where there is an honest man, there will also be holier-than-thou idiots who will call him an idiot.
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Wednesday, April 09, 2008
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COME AGAIN?
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In the March 29 issue of the ARMENIAN REPORTER (page A9) and in a commentary titled “Reflections on the state of contemporary Armenian politics” by Yeprem Mehranian, I read the following random paragraph: “The elemental principles of recursive thinking necessitate that in order to explore the depths of social processes of change we allow the past and the present to reciprocate, and then to use results of this interaction to guide us closer toward the point of comprehending reality.”
I don’t know about you, but speaking for myself, I consider inflicting this kind of prose on an unsuspecting public fully qualifies as a clear-cut case of man’s inhumanity to man. If Armenian readers don’t rise in self-defense against this type of verbal abuse, it may be because they come from a long line of victims and they are more or less reconciled to their status as perennial underdogs.
In the same issue of the REPORTER and on page B5 there is a photo of a man seated at the organ with both hands on the lowest of three manuals. The caption reads: “Maestro Mekanejian tunes the cathedral’s organ in preparation for Holy Week.” Maestro Mekanejian is doing nothing of the kind. What Maestro Mekanejian is doing is practicing. The tuning of an organ is done in a separate room where the pipes are housed.
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Julius Caesar: “In writing, one should avoid an unfamiliar word as a ship avoids a reef.”
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