massacres

[arabaliozian]

Thursday, December 11, 2008
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AMBITIONS
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When it comes to others, we like to speak the truth. We may even consider it our duty. But when it comes to ourselves, we become pathological liars. This mode of perception is developed so gradually that it escapes notice.
*
“You should write more like Saroyan,” I am told once in a while. But Saroyan wrote like Saroyan because had he written like Melville or Mark Twain he would have been a failure.
*
Chekhov thought the only way to be taken seriously as an author was by writing a novel in the manner of Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky. He tried very hard and never made it. But he became the greatest short story writer in world literature – with the possible exception of Guy de Maupassant, who also wanted to write a novel in the manner of Balzac and Flaubert, and he came close only by linking half a dozen of his short stories.
*
Speaking of short stories, below a short list of my favorite American short stories:
“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce;
“Kneel to the Rising Sun” by Erskine Caldwell;
“The Killers" by Ernest Hemingway;
“The Princess with the Golden Hair” by Edmund Wilson;
“For Esme – with Love and Squalor” by J.D. Salinger.
I notice immediately that the most remarkable thing about these stories is their uniqueness in style, character, plot, and atmosphere.
*
Trying to write like someone else is the surest way to fail; and if failure is your goal, you might as well fail your own way.
*
Once upon a time, when I went into this business, I did so with the aim of saving the nation. All my efforts are now concentrated on saving my soul. The paradox here is that I thought I was being modest in my initial ambition because I promised myself to be kind to everyone, including those who were rude to me. Not any more. The other day when a reader said something to the effect that after reading me he feels like committing suicide, I told him in his case that would indeed be an excellent idea.
#
Friday, December 12, 2008
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THE TROUBLE WITH MASSACRES
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The trouble with massacres is that the overwhelming majority of victims are almost always the most innocent and defenseless.
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If I survived World War II and the Civil War in Greece, it was by pure luck. I cannot be proud of that. But I am proud of the fact that I have survived countless Armenian verbal massacres.
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No one has ever voted for me because I have never run for office, neither do I plan to do so. When I speak, I speak only for myself. If wrong, I can be exposed or corrected. My question is: Where is the harm in talking to people who never listen?
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A brainwashed person loses not only his power to think for himself, but also an important fraction of his other faculties, among them hearing and vision; and by hearing and vision I mean that which is clearly audible and visible to the rest of mankind.
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Has any one of our writers in the USSR ever victimized a single commissar? Has any one of our poets in the Diaspora ever silenced or starved a single boss, bishop, and benefactor, or for that matter, a single editor and moderator? Why then am I branded a dangerous offender by these gentlemen?
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If an Armenian cannot tell the difference between a victimizer and his victim, can he declare himself to be an Armenian, or for that matter, a human being?
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If brainwashing were declared a crime against humanity, as it should be, which one of our speechifiers, sermonizers, and ghazetajis would escape hanging?
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They speak of unity but after they divide us from the rest of mankind they divide us from our brothers and sisters; and they do these things in the name of God and patriotism.
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Hell is a creation of men who deserve to go there.
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With a little effort I could be more understanding and compassionate in my criticism, if only these things were not confused with symptoms of timidity and cowardice.
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What would be the value of a writer if he were to join a choir and sing in unison with the others? And yet, this is what's expected of me.
#
Saturday, December 13, 2008
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RANDOM THOUGHTS
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If you read historians with the mindset of a lawyer, you will find enough evidence to accuse even the most civilized nations with some of the most unspeakable crimes against humanity.
*
In all organized religions, reason is a liability and credulity an asset. The same applies to all ideologies and superstitions.
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I have never brainwashed a child, or speechified in the name of patriotism or sermonized in the name of God. And yet, those who do these things look down on me as an undesirable intruder and an enemy of the people.
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Nobody deserves to be told the truth because nobody is equal to the challenge of facing reality. This is why at all times and everywhere propagandists have been more prosperous, popular, and powerful than thinkers, who more often than not have been treated like common criminals.
*
Driving defensively means to assume not all drivers on the highway are sober. Leading competently means to assume not all political leaders are sane.
#

[yerazhishda]

Re: massacres

*
Speaking of short stories, below a short list of my favorite American short stories:
“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce;
“Kneel to the Rising Sun” by Erskine Caldwell;
“The Killers" by Ernest Hemingway;
“The Princess with the Golden Hair” by Edmund Wilson;
“For Esme – with Love and Squalor” by J.D. Salinger.
I notice immediately that the most remarkable thing about these stories is their uniqueness in style, character, plot, and atmosphere.

No Faulkner? Where are your senses, ara? "A Rose for Emily" and "Barn Burning" are classics.

[arabaliozian]

Re: massacres

No Faulkner? Where are your senses, ara? "A Rose for Emily" and "Barn Burning" are classics.

i am allergic to Faulkner.

[arabaliozian]

Re: massacres

Sunday, December 14, 2008
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SUMMING UP (II)
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Free speech is a fundamental human right not only for men who know and understand everything and are therefore seldom or never wrong, but also for poor mortals whose knowledge and understanding are limited and whose opinions are more often than not more wrong than right.
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A man with a heavy burden of guilt is safer to deal with than a man who is innocent by reason of insanity or absence of conscience.
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A Turk who can tell right from wrong is morally superior to an Armenian who violates someone's human right in the name of patriotism.
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To say, because I know better and am therefore better qualified to silence you, is at the root of all massacres. To put it differently: All crimes against humanity begin with the violation of a single individual's human rights.
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I have yet to meet a patriotic Armenian with more certainties than doubts who did not harbor fascist sentiments.
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The brainless are more easily brainwashed to believe, even when they behave like swine, they are fully qualified to assert moral superiority.
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To those who say I have been silenced because I am an irrelevant mediocrity of no interest to the general reader, I say: Not all of us are endowed with superior intellects or able to discriminate what is and is not relevant.
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Nothing comes easier to a self-assessed genius than to look down on his fellow men as misguided fools in need of his political, intellectual, and moral guidance.
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Like all nations we too have our share of misguided fools and criminal minds who operate on the assumption they are leaders of men.
#
Monday, December 15, 2008
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THE POSITIVE IN THE NEGATIVE
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Aristotle: “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
*
At the turn of the last century, the Great Powers of the West were on our side and against our enemies. But no one ever bothered to ask them if they would be willing to sacrifice the life of a single soldier to save a hundred, a thousand, or even a million Armenian lives. Had they asked, they wold have been surprised at the answer.
*
It is not true that I receive only hostile or negative assessments of my work. To be fair to my readers, I also receive friendly or positive ones. Two reasons why I don't mention them is that (one) I may provoke my enemies to accuse me of self-promotion, and (two) I may make my friendly readers vulnerable to verbal abuse.
*
Saroyan was a “positive” write because he wrote for an American audience. If I write like Scrooge it may be because I write for an Armenian audience. Different strokes for different folks. On the positive side: in America we enjoy not only freedom of speech but also freedom of choice when it comes to reading matter. If you are the kind of reader who is big on positive stuff, by all means, feel free to bury your head in the sand until the next catastrophe, which, if lucky, you may not live long enough to experience or witness.
*
Some of our most brilliant humorists (Baronian, Odian, Massikian) were also the most negative.
*
My negative readers are positive in the sense that they are my main source of inspiration. Without them I would dry up and wither away.
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There are visible catastrophes, and there are invisible ones, as when you witness the collapse of your belief system.
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When a reader insults me, I know I have hit paydirt; and I would like to thank him for letting me stay in his consciousness rent-free.
#
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
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OF CABBAGES AND KINGS
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After gloating over the collapse of Communism, Americans are now witnessing the collapse of Capitalism and the triumph of the Welfare State not only for the poor but also for the rich; and when the rich apply for welfare, they speak in billions; and unless they get their way, they threaten the collapse of the economic structure.
Capitalists don't beg; they blackmail.
*
Instead of speaking of cabbages and kings, let's speak of truth and lies; and if truth is beyond our reach, let's expose liars.
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It is in failure that the lies of an ideology are exposed.
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If you live by the sword, or if you use nationalism or patriotism as a sword, the writing on the wall will be the same.
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In a commentary today I read that President Bush has supported and invited to the White House dissidents from “China, Burma, Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela.” Are you thinking what I am thinking?
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George Will in ONE MAN'S AMERICA (New York, Random House, 2008): “The use of genocide as a plaything for political posturing is contemptible” (page 197). I urge all our Turcocentric ghazetajis, dime-a-dozen self-appointed pundits, and baloney artists to think of this line next time they use the word genocide. Further down George Will speaks of the “trivialization of a huge tragedy” that has become “fodder for semi-intellectual wisecracks...” and, I would add, an occasion for self-righteous riffraff to assert moral superiority. Elsewhere he speaks of “the beguiling simplicity of pure stupidity.”
*
Where mediocrities enter, men of vision are blinded.
#

Wednesday, December 17, 2008
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WORDS
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Rudyard Kipling: “Words are, of course, the post powerful drugs used by mankind.”
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The defeated and deported Azeri who lives in a tent or ghetto is my brother. He is as guilty as the overwhelming majority of Armenians at the turn of the last century in the Ottoman Empire – Armenians like my mother (who was a baby) and father (not yet a teenager) who had no political ambitions or, for that matter, awareness. Next time you speak of war, think of the children.
*
There is Russian roulette, and there is Armenian roulette. In Armenian roulette there are no empty chambers.
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If you insult me and I insult you back, who wins?
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By writing I hope to change the world. I know this to be an illusion on my part but I go on writing. Notwithstanding the fact that so far I have failed to change the mind of a single fanatic, hoodlum, partisan or fascist, I go on writing in the hope that some day I may hit on the right combination of words and ideas that may connect.
I know this to be another illusion but I go on writing in the hope that the invisible forces of history and the universe will combine to create the kind of fertile soil in which ideas may germinate into action. If this is another illusion, so be it!
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: massacres

Thursday, December 18, 2008
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WORDS (II)
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A man once went up to a French writer (may have been Valéry) and said: “I have a great idea for a book.” The writer interrupted him by saying, “Books are written with words, not ideas.”
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Marx had all the ideas, but Casanova knew the right words.
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You want to know why I write one-liners? To write a book, one must first learn to write a good line. Only then one may learn to write two lines....
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When Moliere's “bourgeois gentilhomme” delivers the celebrated line, “You mean to tell me I spoke prose all my life and didn't know it?” Moliere's teacher could have replied: “Just because you speak prose, it doesn't mean you can also write it.”
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It is easy to have all the answers if you ask the wrong questions.
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In his recently published biography of V.S. Naipaul, Patrick French quotes him as having said: “I am enraged by the way Indians don't wish to understand their history, I am enraged.” Naipaul's book on India is titled A WOUNDED CIVILIZATION. The first Armenian novel in ashkharapar or the spoken idiom is by Khachatur Abovian (1805-1848) and it's titled THE WOUNDS OF ARMENIA. And to think that Abovian wrote his novel nearly a century before the real wound.
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The worst thing that can happen to a wounded nation is to be obsessed with its wound,
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A nation with a wounded soul will have a traumatized understanding and view anyone who says otherwise as an enemy of the nation.
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What is Naipaul's rage to India? What is an ant's rage to an elephant?
#
Friday, December 19, 2008
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TWO WRITERS
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Adrienne Rich: “Lying is done with words and also silence.”
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In his “Reply to historians who are against senators voting for legislation against anti-Armenian denialists” (LE POINT, November 27, 2008), the French philosopher, Bernard-Henri Levy, writes that these historians expect us to believe that such a law, if passed, would terrorize historians' freedom of expression. “Who's kidding whom?” he writes. “It is not anti-denialist laws that terrorize historians, it is denialists who terrorize them.” To the question, “Why the necessity of a French law about a crime in which France is not implicated,” Levy writes: “I am not sure about that. We know for a fact that at least in two instances in 1919, in Marash and Hedjin in Cilicia, when the French army stood by and did nothing to protect the victims.” Where there is a crime against humanity, he goes on, all of mankind is implicated. “We cannot therefore justify ourselves by saying, we are not guilty of a crime, we only allowed others to commit it.”
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In his introduction to L'OLOCAUSTO ARMENO (The Armenian Holocaust), Alberto Rosselli informs the reader that the bibliography on the subject is “vastissima” (very vast). In addition to Armenian sources, “which are obviously numerosissimi (very numerous), there are sources in French, American, Portuguese, Italian, Greek, Bulgarian, English, and Russian.” In addition there are eyewitness accounts of diplomats from as many countries, including Germany, “at a time when Germany was an ally of the Ottoman Empire.” Among the Turkish sources he mentions Taner Akcam and Orhan Pamuk. He also discusses the recent work of the German historian, Hilmar Kaiser. The book is divided into chapters devoted to the history of Armenia, the Armenian Church, the Hamidian massacres, the regime of the Young Turks, and Armenia today. In addition the reader will find here a chronology of the Ottoman Empire and a bibliography of books in Italian, English, and French.
After reading this book, I doubt very much if there will be a single Italian who will doubt the reality of the Genocide and the self-inflicted blindness of denialists.
Rosselli is a prolific historian and journalist who has authored books on Canada, the United States, the Ottoman Empire, the Soviet Union, Germany, Turkey, and Africa.
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Groucho Marx: “The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made.”
#
Saturday, December 20, 2008
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A CIVILIZED ARMENIAN
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Reading Evelyn Waugh's DIARY – over 800 pages of boring gossip and venomous assessments.
On Edmund Wilson: “An insignificant Yank.”
On President Truman: “A wholly comic man.”
On Aldous Huxley: “I find his scientific imagery very flat and ugly.”
On Alberto Moravia: “A wop highbrow.”
In a December 1944 entry in Yugoslavia, he speaks of an encounter with “a toothless Armenian named Major Karmel...: he is quick-witted, funny, fond of wine and cigars, and with the adaptability of his race quickly dropped his original line-regiment heartiness and became human and civilized...”
A month later: “Illiterate Montenegrin Armenian called and was given clothes.”
There is more talk of food and booze here than books and literature. And this: “It is impudent and exorbitant to demand truth from the lower classes.”
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BERNIE MADOFF
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A xxxish friend recently made fun of Armenian monks brawling in a church. Today I sent him the following e-mail: “I'd much rather see monks beating one another to a pulp in a church than a swindler like Bernie Madoff sucking the blood of his fellow xxxs – and I am not implying here we don't have our share of mini-Madoffians.”
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GUTLESS YES-MEN
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A nation without dissidents is a gutless nation afraid of words and ideas. And those who support such a nation in the name of patriotism are misguided fools who believe ideas and intellectuals are irrelevant luxuries, perhaps even hostile elements.
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: massacres

Sunday, December 21, 2008
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RECAP
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Some people don't feel the need to listen to a sermon or read a book on ethics in order to do the right thing, but they are invariably and consistently outnumbered by those who are convinced they are doing the right thing even when they behave like swine. Like all nations, we too have our share of black sheep. For a long time that's how I justified the existence of our riffraff. Not any more. I no longer feel the need to be their advocate. On the contrary, I consider it my duty to call a spade a spade. I realize of course that mine is not exactly a pleasant task or a profitable undertaking, but someone has to perform it, and if not I, who? Our Turcocentric ghazetajis are too busy delivering lectures on ethics to Turks; and our fundraisers know that the best way to appeal to the generosity of their victims is by flattering the hell out of them.
We all know that during the Soviet era our brothers and sisters in the Homeland had to cheat in order to survive. And who among us will dare to suggest that long centuries of subservience have had no influence in shaping our character as yes-men and brown-nosers? And who is naïve enough to say that this character trait of ours is not fully exploited by our leaders who take full advantage of it by making untenable dogmatic assertions that are as absurd as the claims of denialists. So what if in the process they alienate anyone who dares to think for himself? So what if they decimate the nation? Who says one must wear a shalvar and wield a yataghan in order to qualify as a Turk?
#
Monday, December 22, 2008
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ENEMIES
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Fascist regimes label anyone who refuses to be brainwashed an enemy to cover up the fact that they are the real enemies.
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There was a time when both Tashnak and Ramgavar weeklies published my critical commentaries on the assumption that I was being critical only of the opposition. When after more than ten years they finally realized I was being critical of both sides, they stopped publishing me. That's when I was labeled an enemy.
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An enemy of the nation: what does that really mean? What do we mean when we speak of the nation, or Homeland, or Armenia? Do we mean the real estate (mountains, rivers, and valleys?), or the culture (literature, music, and the arts?). I dare anyone to quote a single line from my books and commentaries that is critical of our real estate or music, architecture, and writers from Khorenatsi to Naregatsi, and from Abovian to Zarian..
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Am I critical of the people? Yes, but only of the fraction that has been brainwashed and sees nothing wrong in it. Consider the case of Charents who allowed himself to be brainwashed by the Kremlin. When somewhere along the line he realized what had been done to him, he wrote to his muse:

“You were like a sister to me,
Truthful, pure and bright;
But I spat on your face.
I betrayed you one night
With a cold mistress,
Who sang to me dreams of iron,
And took me into a world without love.”
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Bakounts went further and compared ideologies and regimes to temporary ailments, here today, gone tomorrow; and I quote: “They are just passing phenomena, a period when history is suffering from the flu, so to speak, a temporary ailment, after which, all the dead cities will rise again from the ashes, as long as there are still people in this world like Hovnatan March [the central character of his story], who will burst into tears whenever they hear the word Armenia, and who embrace this ideal as an alcoholic would grab his last bottle of brandy.”
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I suggest the Armenia of Charents and Bakounts, or for that matter, the Armenia of Abovian, Raffi and Zarian, is not the same entity as that of our partisan propagandists and dividers, who silence anyone who dares to think for himself.
#
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
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JUSTICE
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In a commentary by an American academic I read today that there has been progress on all fronts in China except the judicial system. Lawyers who defend unpopular causes or dissidents are sometimes arrested, jailed, beaten, and tortured.
Armenia's abuses of power escape international notice because no one much cares what happens there, not even Armenians. Human rights is not exactly a topic we like to discuss even in the Diaspora. As far as I know none of our pundits has ever written a single commentary on free speech. To most of them, and especially to our Turcocentric ghazetajis, the freedom to write about massacres in the Ottoman Empire is the alpha and omega of free speech. And speaking of lawyers: a friend of mine, who happens to be a critic of the regime, tells me he is not allowed to enter Armenia and no lawyer wants to take his case.
#

[TomServo]

Re: massacres

i am allergic to Faulkner.

Explain?

Are you the Armenian Harold Bloom?

[arabaliozian]

lines

Wednesday, December 31, 2008
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MY ANSWER
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Once in a while a gentle reader takes it upon himself to remind me that what I say doesn't apply to everyone because it is based on self-analysis, and that it is wrong to project my own conflicts and contradictions onto the nation.
I have at no time denied the fact that my analysis of our complexes is based on self-analysis. In my formative years and for a good fraction of my adult life I was a typical Armenian with all the prejudices, preconceptions, and fallacies that I now enjoy tearing to shreds. Neither have I ever denied that I was a devout believer of every single lie that was foisted on me by our “betters.” It is only very recently that I became aware of our reality as opposed to the fiction in which I lived. To put it differently: I was taught to be a narcissist, and after many years of slumber in a fool's paradise, I woke up one day with the realization that I was neither smart nor honest.
If you tell me what a nation needs to achieve greatness is confidence in its own ability to confront and overcome challenges, and that at this point in our history what we need is not my kind of negativism that demoralizes us and turn us into defeatists like myself; I say, that is your perception of what I do based on your status as a dupe, and that to promote liberation from the lies of our propagandists is far from being negative or defeatist. It is, in point of fact, quintessentially positive and invigorating. I further maintain to be enslaved by comfortable lies is as bad as being enslaved by Turks. But to see this clearly you must first extricate your head from the sand in which you have it buried.
#
Thursday, January 1, 2009
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LEARNING FROM GENGHIS KHAN
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The first words on the back cover of Conn Iggulden's historical novel, GENGHIS: LORDS OF THE BOW, are: “After uniting warring clans...”
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Once upon a time all empire were a single clan. Their career as empire began when one clan persuaded another to join forces on the grounds that two clans together are less vulnerable to aggression from other clans.
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Clans are bad enough. Warring clans might as well be an open invitation to conquerors.
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God did not create more Mongols, Chinese, Russians or Americans. If we are few today it's because some of us saw the writing on the wall and switched loyalties.
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Let the fool enjoy his folly so that he may be wise, even if wisdom comes at the hour of his death.
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When Indians burned widows, did any one of them ever bother to raise the question: “Why don't we ask the widows if they like to be burned?” Civilizations should be judged by the manner they treat the weak and defenseless.
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If you want to understand Armenians, don't read their nationalist historians; read instead a history of Armenian literature. The only reason we don't burn writers the way Indians burn widows is that we prefer to ignore them, which amounts to burying them alive.
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Because I refuse to share their obsession with massacres and money, they call me negative. One way to be positive in their eyes is to adopt “Yes, sir!” as a mantra.
#
Friday, January 2, 2009
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DIVIDING LINES
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Speaking of his mother, Edward Gorey says in an interview: “She had a stroke when she was about eighty and her entire character changed. All her hypocritical love for humanity vanished.” (ASCENDING PECULIARITY: EDWARD GOREY ON EDWARD GOREY. Interviews by Karen Wilkin, page 95.)
This type of dividing line in one's life happens to all of us; and when readers disagree with me violently, I cannot help thinking that their disagreement has not yet reached the line that divides propaganda from reality.
When did I change my mind about my fellow Armenians? In my case it was not so much a line but the last straw that broke the camel's back.
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As children we should be taught to reflect that every conviction and dogma in our belief system may well be wrong and there may be more merit in their contradictions. That, it seems to me, should be the underlying principle in all educational systems.
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In her review of LEFT IN DARK TIMES by Bernard-Henri Levy, Claire Berlinski mentions a Turkish friend of hers who “like most Turks” has been brought up to believe “the Armenians had it coming.” (NATIONAL REVIEW, December 15, 2008, page 32.)
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A true sign of insanity, it has been said, is the belief that everyone else is crazy. In my view, another sure symptom of insanity is the belief that the world is run by intelligent men who place the interests of their people and mankind in general above their own and anyone who says otherwise must be nuts.
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In a recent issue of the ARMENIAN REPORTER (December 20), there is a remarkable letter to the editor by Ara Sarafian outlining in some detail the present situation of Armeno-Turkish relations, which clearly implies that when it comes to the Genocide issue, our Turcocentric ghazetajis may be doing more harm than good. I urge Ara Sarafian to post this letter on Armenian discussion forums on the Internet.
#
Saturday, January 3, 2009
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ON APOLOGIES
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As a rule governments don't like apologizing for past crimes but they may change their mind when under pressure from their own people, or so we are told in THE POLITICS OF OFFICIAL APOLOGIES by Melissa Nobles, where we also learn: “The Armenians are not going to get an apology any time soon, in spite of a worldwide public campaign, from the Turkish government for the atrocities committed during World War I because most Turks are not prepared to accept that their government bore responsibility.”
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The best interview in THE PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEWS, volume I (New York, 2006) is the one with Dorothy Parker, a relatively minor writer; the most boring is the one with T.S. Eliot – a pezzo novanta. Unlike Eliot who speaks only about himself and his work, Dorothy Parker speaks of many things and is never long-winded.
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Armenians who vilify Turks and Turks who vilify Armenians don't think of themselves as racists because they assume the whole world knows what bloodthirsty savages Turks are and what nasty, disloyal scum Armenians are. But the whole world knows nothing of the kind and cares even less. To most of the world Turks and Armenians might as well be Hutus and Tutsis. As an Armenian, the only thing I know about Hutus and Tutsis is that they are tribes in Africa. The average Canadian doesn't even know where Armenia is. To him we might as well be Romanians or Arameans.
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: massacres

Explain?

Are you the Armenian Harold Bloom?

Me? no!
i don't think Harold Bloom is a single writer, but an army of scholars. / ara