notes and comments

[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

Thursday, November 5, 2009
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WHAT IF I AM WRONG?
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That would be too good to be true!
Because if I am wrong, it means our writers from Khorenatsi (5th century) to our own days have been wrong in accusing our political leadership of incompetence and corruption.
It means no foreign or domestic tyrant has ever been successful in dividing us.
It means our bishops and benefactors have at no time used to the power of God and capital (make it, Capital and god) to divide us.
It means when Raffi said “treason and betrayal are in our blood,” he was only voicing his deep-seated hatred of his fellow countrymen.
It means when Baronian said, “If you want to wine and dine every day, be a bishop,” he was writing under the influenced of cynical and atheist French intellectuals who were in vogue at the turn of the last century in Istanbul.
It means our revolutionaries were at no time taken in by the empty promises of the West and the Turks had no reason to exterminate us because, as “the most loyal subjects” of the Empire, they needed our help against foreign and domestic enemies who were unanimous in their desire to see the Empire dismembered and buried never to rise again.
It means our post-World War II repatriates were treated by the natives not as “white trash” but as “brothers.”
Finally it means when Gostan Zarian returned to the Homeland during Khrushchev's thaw, he was treated by his fellow writers as a literary giant rather than as an undesirable midget.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

Friday, November 6, 2009
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GREED
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When belief systems are bureaucratized, they become interchangeable.
The Vatican and the Kremlin: two opposing systems, same number of innocent victims.
Criticism becomes treason when it targets in Infallible.
Greed for power turns decent men into cannibals.
That is why the wise shun power and in doing so they become victims.
In a dog-eat-dog world, the wise defend their humanity and are devoured.
*
An Armenian writer's first and only commandment:
“Thou shalt not write a single word that may offend a future source of income.”
Nothing comes easier to an Armenian writer than to verbally abuse a fellow writer.
I once heard an 80-year old writer refer to Zarian as “boy” and to an empty suit as “baron.”
*
Americans were defeated in Vietnam, but as far as I know no American ever called it a “moral victory.”
Moral victories are for losers.
No one ever goes to war to prove the moral inferiority of his enemy.
*
Can God speak to man?
Of course He can.
God can do anything!
But can man understand God?
Of course he cannot.
If man understood God, there would be only one God as opposed to ten thousand of them.
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

Saturday, November 7, 2009
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MY FRIEND, THE RABBI
*************************************
I have been cheated so many times
by so many people
in so many different ways that,
theoretically speaking,
the only time I should feel comfortable
is when I do the cheating,
which I never do,
not because I am morally superior,
but because I have had so little practice
that I am liable to get caught and fry.
*
“Why do the wealthy cheat the poor?
Why would someone who has everything
cheat someone like me who has nothing?”
I said, and he explained:
“How do you think they got to be wealthy?”
*
If an Armenian can be a friend to the devil,
he can be a friend to the Turk.
But to another Armenian? -- that's different.
*
EMPTY SUITS
**********************
First, they exploit their workers,
then they overprice their product
and after they make their first billion
they hate paying taxes
and love parading as kings,
and then they realize
being an Armenian is a bloodsport.
I speak from experience.
I write for them
*
Kirk Douglas defines an actor
as “someone who loves rejection.”
Hollywood stars and Armenian writers:
who would have thought?
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[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

Sunday, November 8, 2009
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FOOLS
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They don't brag about their culture
and they have a Nobel-Prize winner.
We brag about ours,
and what have we got?
Ask an Armenian to name a contemporary Armenian writer
and he will give you a dirty “Who-gives-a-damn?” look.
Will Safire (may he rest in peace) once said
Germans have a tendency “to look the other way
when moral values are threatened.”
Ask an Armenian
what a moral value is
and the chances are he will give you
a “What-the-hell-is-that?” look.
Ask him what a human right is
and he will give you a hostile “Don't-waste-my-time” look.
Ask him if we are civilized, progressive, and smart
and he will reply
“Of course we are!” with a look that says
“How dare you ask such a dumb question?”
*
After centuries of life under sultans and commissars,
we might as well be blind
to moral, aesthetic, and democratic values.
*
No use blaming others.
The fault is in us or rather
in our mini-sultans and neo-commissars.
*
All nationalists lie
when they speak about themselves
and their enemies.
*
“For a fool he sure is smart!” I used to think,
until I realized he was not the fool,
I was.
#

[yerazhishda]

Re: elegy

Sunday, November 8, 2009
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FOOLS
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Ask an Armenian to name a contemporary Armenian writer
and he will give you a dirty “Who-gives-a-damn?” look.

I don't think this is true. Hakob Karapents was an inspiration to many, that is, if you consider him contemporary. Should I dare go as far as to say that he was last century's Raffi?

[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

Monday, November 9, 2009
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LIES
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If a man marries seven times
it only means one thing:
he is a poor judge of feminine flesh.
Likewise, if a nation has been subservient
to alien tyrants for a thousand years,
it only means one thing:
its unspoken motto is not
“freedom or death”
but “survival at all cost.”
*
Instead of raising our children
to brag about our survival,
we should teach them honesty.
And since we don't have an Armenian word for honesty,
we should invent one.
The alternative is rewriting history
and engaging in double-talk.
*
No one likes liars.
Even liars prefer to deal with honest men.
*
We are divided because both sides
are too busy covering up their lies
to be honest with themselves,
their counterparts, and the people.
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http://baliozian.blogspot.com/

[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

REPLIES
TO A STUDENT'S QUESTIONS
************************************************** ***************
Question: Do you believe what the Turks did to the Armenians in 1915 was genocide?
Answer: I do.
Q: Do you believe it was a deliberately adopted and systematically implemented policy by the Turkish government? Why?
A: No doubt about that. It was planned and executed in cold blood. The evidence -- the testimony of survivors, eyewitness accounts, historians who have studied the record, not all of them Armenian, some of them even Turkish -- is overwhelming. Besides, no nation in the history of mankind has ever fabricated a genocide and believed in it for nearly a century.
Q: Do you know or have you ever met a survivor?
A: I grew up in a ghetto near Athens, Greece, populated by several thousand survivors. Most of them were not educated or literate. They didn't like to reminisce. Besides, they were engaged in the serious business of surviving World War II, the German occupation, blockade by the Allies, the Greek Civil War... The poverty was appalling. The housing a disaster area -- as bad as the worst slums in South America and India.
Q: Some say the so-called deportations were flight from the violence – true or false?
A: My father was a teenager in 1915 and he was lucky in that a friend of the family, a Turkish cop, warned the family of the coming deportations. He was able to flee the violence but only with the shirt on his back. My mother was only a tiny baby who ended up in an orphanage in Lebanon run by Catholic nuns.
Q: Do you think the Armenian genocide has had any impact on the world?
A: I don't! There have been more genocides in the last century than at any other time in the history of mankind.
Q: In your opinion, what is the most important thing you have heard concerning the genocide?
A: The unimaginable cruelty of the sadistic criminals – and they were criminals – who carried out the deportations.
Q: Do you believe that the deportations and marches of Armenians in 1915 were deliberately designed by the Turkish government to lead to the death of the deportees, or do you believe that it was unintentional? If so, why?
A: It was deliberate and intentional – no doubt about that. The only explanation I have is that, the Turks were convinced they were fighting for their own survival against overwhelming enemies from without as well as from within.
Q: What do you think is the most important thing that people can learn from the Genocide?
A: Like all belief systems and ideologies, nationalism can also be abused. It was in the name of nationalism that our revolutionaries challenged the might of the Ottoman Empire, and it was in the name of nationalism that the Young Turks thought the only way to defend the integrity of their nation was to exterminate the Armenians.
Q: What are your impressions of people who say it wasn't really a genocide?
A: People can be brainwashed to believe anything. Luckily not everyone is vulnerable to being brainwashed. There is now a generation of Turkish intellectuals that no longer believe what their politicians dictate.
Q: Did your mother or anyone you know who went through the genocide ever mention concentration camps, mass burnings, starvation or massacres?
A: Both my father and mother were among the lucky ones who did not witness or experience these things – except near starvation and abominable poverty in an alien environment.
Q: What is the single most important thing you would tell someone who questions the reality of the Armenian genocide?
A: Only this: state propaganda cannot be a reliable source of information.
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

Wednesday, November 11, 2009
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DIARY
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With reasonable men, reason is enough.
With children, repetition has a better chance.
*
No one can be as dumb
as he who has been brainwashed to believe he is smart.
*
According to Northrop Frye, the foremost Canadian authority on the Scriptures, the aim of the Bible is to expand human consciousness.
*
Philosophers are more modest than prophets. They don't pretend to speak in the name of God. No one has ever declared a war or tortured a fellow human being in defense of Plato's or Schopenhauer's theories.
*
The day man invented God,
he let loose the equivalent of ten thousand atomic bombs.
Who thinks of God as a weapon of mass destruction?
And yet...(the saddest words in the English language, it has been said).
*
For writing as I do, once upon a time I would have been sliced into ribbons and fed to the dogs by the Pope's henchmen.
*
Believing in miracles is bad enough.
Believing that man is worthy of them is worse.
*
To punish the guilty, sometimes Canadians send them back to their homeland.
I can't imagine a worse punishment.
*
Are we worthy of our martyrs?
What about our heroes?
Do we have them?
*
Every house in which I have lived has been torn down by either war or real-estate developers. My alma mater is now a motel. Which is almost like saying, my childhood sweetheart is now a bordello madam.
*
I have been a source of disappointment to everyone I have met, including myself, and I cannot decide whether that's an asset or a liability.
*
Good Armenians?
One in a thousand --
and I belong with the 999.
*
Eduardo Galeano in his MIRRORS writes: “Those who knew Leonardo said he never embraced a woman. Yet from his hand was born the most famous portrait of all times. A woman.”
And:
“Queen Elizabeth of England and the Sun King of France ate with their hands. When Michel de Montaigne ate in a hurry, he bit his fingers.”
*
When an old Indian predicted a bad winter and was asked how he can tell, he replied: “White man make big wood pile.”
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

Thursday, November 12, 2009
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DIARY / 2
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“What Africa needs is precisely such transmutations of tribal loyalties to the larger loyalties of nationhood.”
I copy these lines from a magazine article for those of my readers who say we need solutions.
*
To be a dupe in our context means to be deceived by frauds who have deceived themselves to believe they are leaders of men.
*
Let us not confuse anti-Turkism with pro-Armenianism.
*
Martin Scorcese: “...thanks to a professor named Haig Manoogian I discovered that I could express everything I felt through film.”
*
Salman Rushdie: “My father was a great religious scholar, but he wasn't a believer.”
*
David Lynch on Maharishi Mahesh Yogi: “I owe him the discovery that the possibility for happiness dwells within us.”
A hundred years before Maharishi, Tolstoy based a belief system on a 2000-year old dictum: “The kingdom of God is within you.”
*
There is only one religion: the search for meaning.
*
There is a type of reader who reads not to learn but to settle scores; not to engage in dialogue but to insult; and an insult is as difficult to refute as a massacre, perhaps because it is verbal massacre.
*
Nothing human is beyond criticism, including the Word of God as heard, interpreted, written down, translated, read and understood by man.
*
According to Buddha: “That which is spoken, heard, and understood are three different things.”
*
What a scathing book review Buddha would write of the Bible and the Koran!
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[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

Friday, November 13, 2009
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DIARY / 3
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To understand Turks, all I have to do is examine my own heart.
To understand Turkish lies, all I have to do is consider our own.
*
Why should I trust the judgment or integrity of men who hire belly-slitting lawyers whenever their sensibilities are offended?
*
Northrop Frye on a common misconception of God: “...the ferocious old bugger up in the sky with the whiskers and the reactionary political views, who enjoys sending people to hell.”
*
When I hear or read the word Islam, the first four words that come to mind are: giaour, imam, fatwa, and jihad; and I loathe these words as much I loathe the words boss, bishop, benefactor, and commissar.
*
You cannot change that which you hate: that may explain my failure. Perhaps what we need is not critics but messiahs. Anyone interested in being crucified?
*
There is something in our partisans that doesn’t like disagreement, dissent, criticism, dialogue, democracy, free speech, human rights, honesty, straight talk, common sense….
*
The disagreement of a single honest man means much more to me than the agreement of a thousand fools and ten thousand dupes.
#