notes and comments

[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

Wednesday, July 22, 2009
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A WORD OF WARNING
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One of the inevitable facts of life is that at one time or another we all become dependent on people who may know something we don't know. In a strange city, we depend on taxi drivers. When we experience chest pains, we check into the emergency and are examined by a cardiologist. When something goes wrong with the plumbing, we call a plumber. Where does an Armenian writer fit into this system? Nowhere. Who needs him? Nobody! What does he know that we don't know? Nothing!
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The function of a historian is not to reconstruct the past by quoting witnesses and relevant documents – that's not history but “ant industry” (Spengler) – but to explain why things happened as they did.
The function of literature is not to entertain the reader by writing love stories, or odes to the mother tongue, or sonnets to the eternal snows of Mt. Ararat, but to understand reality.
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When in the 19th century Raffi said Turkey was no place for Armenians, he was ignored. When Zohrab predicted the massacres, they said, “Zohrab effendi is exaggerating.” When Bakounts called communism “an infection,” he was betrayed to the authorities and purged. And when Zarian exposed the lies of the Kremlin, they called him a CIA agent.
Why am I saying these things? Simply to warn those of my readers who may harbor secret literary ambitions.
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To be an Armenian writer means not only to be dependent on the charity of swine but also to recycle the propaganda of philistines, fools, and liars. If, on the other hand, you decide to speak the truth as you see it, my advice is, first declare financial independence and grow the skin of a crocodile...and may the mercy of the Lord be with you. Amen.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

Thursday, July 23, 2009
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MONEY
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Whenever the subject of compensating writers for their work comes up, we are informed we can't afford it. Which of course is another one of our big lies. My first paying job at the age of 18 was as translator for a partisan daily in Athens, and I was paid handsomely.
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Near the end of his life, Granian, himself a prominent Tashnak and world traveler, once said to me: “We organize lavish banquets to celebrate anniversaries of total mediocrities, after which we have the audacity to say, there is no money...”
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In a commentary I once wrote, I made fun of anniversary banquets and I remember to have said something to the effect that, unlike our Jack S. Avanakians, neither Tolstoy nor G.B. Shaw celebrated their 40th or 50th anniversary of their debut as writers. This must have offended a recent celebrant who called a friend of mine to tell him I should stop persecuting him. As Cagney would say: “They can dish it out but they can't take it.”
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One of our philistines once wrote me an angry letter saying, “You are a writer. Behave like one, for heaven's sake. Stop talking about money. It's undignified. Imagine if you can Mozart or Beethoven talking about money.” In my reply I explained that I did not have to imagine anything, and that if he took the trouble to read Mozart's and Beethoven's letters, he would see that money is mentioned more frequently than any other subject.
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You may have noticed by now that like most people I prefer to speak of my minor victories and to ignore my major defeats. May I therefore assure you, gentle reader, that my major defeats far outnumber my insignificant victories, and if I don't speak of them it may be because if I did I would be even more depressing, gloomy, unbearable, and unreadable.
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One reason I don' mind exposing the negative aspects of our collective existence and ethos is that for everyone who writes as I do, there are dozens of apologists eager to explain and justify our ways on the grounds that everybody does it. There is some truth in that. There is no such thing as a stupid or incompetent nation, only stupid and incompetent leaders.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

Friday, July 24, 2009
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REALITY & ILLUSIONS
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Compared to Armenians, Canadians have very few problems, and yet they spend an inordinate amount of time discussing them in their media, unlike Armenians who spend even more time ignoring or covering them up.
I scan the latest issue of my Armenian weekly:
Navasartian games in California,
a new school building in Michigan,
a jubilee evening dedicated to one of our dime-a-dozen elder statesmen,
a headline with the word “basterma” in it,
articles about half-a-dozen minor celebrities
and their even more minor recent triumphs.
And now, consider the headlines in this morning's local paper:
Murder investigations and trials, burglaries,
a large variety of other crimes and misdemeanors,
waiting time in hospital emergency rooms,
several articles on greedy and incompetent administrators,
car accidents, politically incorrect civil servants,
corruption in high places,
the unemployment rate,
the sorry state of the economy, and so on.
If one were to judge Canadians and Armenians by the contents of their printed media, one would have to conclude that Canada is a morally bankrupt country on the verge of disintegration, and Armenians in their homeland and diaspora never had it so good because they are in the best of hands and everything that must be done is being done.
And if you believe that, I have no choice but to assume you also believe in Santa Claus and the theory that maintains the earth is as flat as a pancake.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

Saturday, July 25, 2009
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THINGS TO REMEMBER
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If it took brainwashing to convince you, it can't be true.
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One of the safest assumptions you can make is that, the most important things you were taught as a child were lies.
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At all times and everywhere, what we don't know far exceeds what we know, and this applies even to the wisest among us – from Socrates (“The only thing I know is that I don't know”) to Chekhov (“If I can't answer the most important questions, am I not fooling the reader?”).
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We should teach our children to doubt and to question rather than to accept our answers as established truths.
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The function of a truth is not to establish itself but to raise more questions.
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Some of the greatest crimes against humanity were committed in the name of established truths.
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When an established truth is contradicted by another established truth, the result will be two big lies. Case in point: American democracy versus Russian communism.
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At the root of all empires there is a big lie.
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And now, from the general and the abstract to the specific and the concrete:
If the most important function of the State is to reconcile conflicting interests, it follows, during most of our historic existence we have been a collection of stateless tribes at the mercy of fools who have done their utmost to brainwash us into believing they are smart.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

xxxISH SAYINGS
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"Two dogs can kill a lion."

"Henchmen are worse than their masters."

"When men quarrel, even God's anger does not frighten them."

"Bad men do well in this world, saints in the next."

"The one-eyed need sleep, too."

"We anger God with our sins, and men with our virtues."

"Where love is, no room is too small."

"It is easier to know ten countries than one man."

"The heaviest weight in the world is an empty pocket."

Eventually we must move into a metaphysical, unscientific, or purely imaginary realm that can be neither proved nor disproved, and that is the realm in which charlatans prosper.

[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

Hria sayings

[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

Sunday, July 26, 2009
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CIVILIZATION AND BARBARISM
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We are products of two contradictory fallacies: paternalism and tribalism, or the big lie that says our elders know better even when they divide us. Anyone who is brought up to believe that, will believe anything, including the illusion that we are smart.
*
Sooner or later all lies are exposed. This rule, too, like all rules, has its exception, namely, Armenian lies. Here are some more lies that have cost us much suffering and many lives but have since been exposed:
The Turks will not dare to massacre us because the Great Powers of the West are on our side and they will not allow it.
The Russians are our big brothers. If it weren't for them we would be annihilated by the Turks. (Result? 350,000 Armenian boys dead during World War II in defense of Stalin's regime. Number of Russians dead in defense of Armenia: zero.) To be noted: Armenians also died in defense of Hitler's regime. Their numbers, if published, is not known to me.
And the biggest lie of all: We are not Asiatic barbarians but civilized and westernized Christians. This, of course, in our own assessment of ourselves -- and when a fool assesses himself, he will go beyond smart, he will declare himself a genius.
*
And now, let us rise from theory to practice (as our Marxist brothers were fond of saying) or from abstractions and speculations to hard facts and the world of real things.
“In February of 1992, during the capture of the city of Khojali, Azerbaijan, by Armenian separatists, more than 1,000 people, mostly women and children, were murdered. Armenian troops subsequently invaded Shushi in 1992 and attacked more than 927 libraries and 22 museums. The result: 4,600,000 books lost, including ancient philosophical and musical treatises, as well as 40,000 rare books.”
The author of these lines is Fernando Baez, director of Venezuela's National Library, a world authority on the history of libraries, and a member of U.N. Committee investigating the destruction of libraries and museums.
For more on this subject, see: A UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF THE DESTRUCTION OF BOOKS: FROM ANCIENT SUMER TO MODERN IRAQ, by Fernando Baez. Translated by Alfred MacAdam (New York, 2008).
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[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

Monday, July 27, 2009
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CONFESSIONS OF AN OUTCAST
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As a child I was not warned not to believe everything I was told. My father was too busy trying to provide for his family in time of war and starvation to be of any help. I made an ideal dupe and it didn't take much to convince me I was both smart and morally superior; and by the time I began to suspect I was neither, it was too late.
The trouble with liars is that they are seldom satisfied with a single lie. When they get away with a small lie, they come back with bigger lies, and as Hitler (who ought to know) once said, the bigger the lie, the more readily it is accepted as the truth.
My resentment grew when I understood I had been deceived not for my own good – to instill in me the self-confidence I needed to face an unfriendly world in an alien environment – but for their own: to gain my gratitude and loyalty.
I once overheard a member of our self-appointed elite who makes frequent appearances in our weeklies – one of those pompous and arrogant empty suits who rise to the top because they are expert brown-nosers – refer to Armenians in general as “assh*les” and sh*its” in the presence of lesser mortals who reacted with a chuckle of admiration at his daring wit.
Like Moliere's “bourgeois gentilhomme” who didn't know he had been speaking prose (as opposed to verse) all his life, I had no choice but to conclude I had been an “assh*le” and a “sh*t” all my life and hadn't known it.
And the truth set me free.
I gave up recycling propaganda (of which I had already produced a vast amount), became an outcast and the target of verbal abuse by Armenians who hated me because they hated giving up their illusions even more.
In my efforts not to betray my country – or rather, the pathetic buffoons who pretended to be in charge of its destiny – I had betrayed myself and I would spend the rest of my life repenting that transgression.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

Tuesday, July 28, 2009
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CERTAINTIES & DOUBTS
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When I was young, brainwashed, and knew everything, I rejected any and all ideas that did not fit in my belief system. Now that I am old and I have a better appreciation of the depths of my own ignorance, my first reaction to a new idea is to welcome it.
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To say “I believe” is to think with the gut.
For everyone who thinks with his brain, there are two, sometimes even twenty-two, who think with their gut.
Likewise, for everyone who says “My country, right or wrong,” there will always be two, sometimes even twenty-two, who say “My country, right even when wrong!”
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Certainties may be comfortable but they come with an expensive price-tag.
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To believe in one's own arguments is to say, “This is the beginning and end of the story,” about a story that has neither beginning nor end.
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At the root of all wars and massacres there are men of faith whose certainties outnumber their doubts.
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Belief systems are worse than jails because they imprison the mind rather than the body.
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Where dogmas clash, armies are sure to follow.
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Teach yourself to say, “I don't know,” “I am not sure,” “I have my doubts,” and “Maybe.” You will have fewer regrets. Remember, we owe fools and fanatics to certainties.
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[Federate]

Re: elegy

And now, let us rise from theory to practice (as our Marxist brothers were fond of saying) or from abstractions and speculations to hard facts and the world of real things.
“In February of 1992, during the capture of the city of Khojali, Azerbaijan, by Armenian separatists, more than 1,000 people, mostly women and children, were murdered. Armenian troops subsequently invaded Shushi in 1992 and attacked more than 927 libraries and 22 museums. The result: 4,600,000 books lost, including ancient philosophical and musical treatises, as well as 40,000 rare books.”
The author of these lines is Fernando Baez, director of Venezuela's National Library, a world authority on the history of libraries, and a member of U.N. Committee investigating the destruction of libraries and museums.
For more on this subject, see: A UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF THE DESTRUCTION OF BOOKS: FROM ANCIENT SUMER TO MODERN IRAQ, by Fernando Baez. Translated by Alfred MacAdam (New York, 2008).
#

http://www.nkrusa.org/nk_conflict/khojaly.shtml

http://forum.hyeclub.com/showthread.php?t=6743&highlight=khojaly

http://hellektor.blogspot.com/2008/06/greatest-intergalactic-tragedy-in_02.html