notes and comments

[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

Sunday, November 22, 2009
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ON INDEPENDENCE
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Simon Rodriguez is a 19th-century South-American writer and educator who could have had Armenians in mind when he wrote: “We are independent but not free. Something must be done for these poor people, who have become less free than before. Before, they had a shepherd king who did not eat them until they were dead. Now the first to show up eats them alive.”
On education: “Teach children to be curious so they learn to obey their own minds rather than obeying authorities the way the narrow-minded do, or obeying custom the way the stupid do. He who knows nothing, anyone can fool. He who has nothing, anyone can buy.”
*
ON JUSTICE
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We should speak about the Genocide less to demand justice and more to remind ourselves where we live. Justice is a noble goal but it is not always attainable.
*
YANKS
***********************
You want to know why Americans refuse to recognize the Genocide? Read their history and their treatment of Blacks, Indians, and Latinos; or listen to their music; or watch their gangster movies in which the criminals are the heroes.
*
PIERRE BOULEZ SPEAKS
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On funerals: “It's depressing to revive a part of your life that's dead. I am not one who goes to funerals for enjoyment.”
On patriotism: “I heard too many of Petain's disgusting speeches during the Occupation to give patriotism a single thought.”
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

Monday, November 23, 2009
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ON KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING
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The worst thing that can happen to a nation is for its brainless(*) to assume they are the brains of the people.
*
First they assumed to be smart – which was a serious blunder.
Then they assumed to know better – another serious blunder.
And now they spend most of their time and energy covering up both blunders – which is the greatest blunder of all, because it keeps them so busy that they don't have the time to identify and focus on our real problems.
*
The solution is obvious:
the first step is to admit they are not as smart as they think they are. But even if they were, that doesn't mean they are without limitations. Even the wisest men on earth don't know and understand everything.
*
To be smart or to know better does not mean to understand reality. No one can truly say he understands all of reality. The very best we can do is understand a small fraction of it.
*
When asked why things exist, all scientists and philosophers can say is, existence “is just one of those things,” which translated into dollars and cents means “we don't have a clue.” Which also means, to know a great many things does not mean to know the most important things. Or, to be the best Oriental carpet dealer in the world does not mean to know how to lead a dog to the nearest fire hydrant or to catch a cold in a flu epidemic.
#
================================================== =======
(*) Avedik Issahakian's characterization of our leadership.

[Anoush]

Re: elegy

p.s. on Talaat:
i have read somewhere that he was also part-armenian.

Not true. Talaat Pasha was all Jewish. However I heard that Abdul Hamid II had a bit of Armenian blood. I know the fact that quite unfortunately there has been a few unworthy to be called Armenians and traitors. It's very unfortunate because those who were they did a good deal of harm to us, but I believe you'll find even worse traitors in every nationality on the globe.

[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

Tuesday, November 24, 2009
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GEOGRAPHY
************************************************** ****
To those who blame our misfortunes not on our rotten leadership but on geography, consider the following passage from Eduardo Galeano's MIRRORS, which may best be described as history stripped of all propaganda. After decapitating everyone who had taken part in the Boxer rebellion in China at the turn of the last century, we read, “Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Austria, Russia, Japan, and the United States...sliced up China as if it were a pizza, and each took ports, lands, and cities that the phantasmal Chinese dynasty bestowed upon them as concessions for periods of up to ninety-nine years.”
Closer to home, consider the case of the natives in America, Mexico, and Canada who were too busy slaughtering one another to present a united front to the handful of white men who ended up slaughtering them. Now then, tell me, what part did their geography play in their defeat and subjection?
*
Elsewhere, Galeano identified Heinrich Goering, father of the Nazi Hermann, as “one of the perpetrators of the first genocide of the 20th century.” The victims are identified as the Hereros of Namibia. The order for their annihilation, we are told, was issued and carried out in 1904. And, “Of every four Hereros, three were killed, by cannon fire or the desert sun.”
If you don't know who the Hereros are and where Namibia is, no matter. Very probably, my guess is, the Hereros, like so many Canadians I have met, don't know either who the Armenians are and where Armenia is.
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

Not true. Talaat Pasha was all Jewish. However I heard that Abdul Hamid II had a bit of Armenian blood. I know the fact that quite unfortunately there has been a few unworthy to be called Armenians and traitors. It's very unfortunate because those who were they did a good deal of harm to us, but I believe you'll find even worse traitors in every nationality on the globe.

Talaat was 100% xxxish only in the eyes of 100% armenian anti-semites.
he was also part gypsy, greek, turkish, albanian, and kurdish...among other bloodlines.

[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

p.s. as for sultan abdulhamid ii:
his mama was armenian.

[Anoush]

Re: elegy

Talaat was 100% xxxish only in the eyes of 100% armenian anti-semites.
he was also part gypsy, greek, turkish, albanian, and kurdish...among other bloodlines.

Well if he was a mixture of all that then he was a real mutt as far as his bloodline was; however he was taught by Doenme Zionists from what I read and he was from Selonika.

[Diranakir]

Re: elegy

Tuesday, November 24, 2009
**********************************
GEOGRAPHY
************************************************** ****
To those who blame our misfortunes not on our rotten leadership but on geography, consider the following passage from Eduardo Galeano's MIRRORS, which may best be described as history stripped of all propaganda. After decapitating everyone who had taken part in the Boxer rebellion in China at the turn of the last century, we read, “Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Austria, Russia, Japan, and the United States...sliced up China as if it were a pizza, and each took ports, lands, and cities that the phantasmal Chinese dynasty bestowed upon them as concessions for periods of up to ninety-nine years.”
Closer to home, consider the case of the natives in America, Mexico, and Canada who were too busy slaughtering one another to present a united front to the handful of white men who ended up slaughtering them. Now then, tell me, what part did their geography play in their defeat and subjection?
*
Elsewhere, Galeano identified Heinrich Goering, father of the Nazi Hermann, as “one of the perpetrators of the first genocide of the 20th century.” The victims are identified as the Hereros of Namibia. The order for their annihilation, we are told, was issued and carried out in 1904. And, “Of every four Hereros, three were killed, by cannon fire or the desert sun.”
If you don't know who the Hereros are and where Namibia is, no matter. Very probably, my guess is, the Hereros, like so many Canadians I have met, don't know either who the Armenians are and where Armenia is.
#

==============================================


OF APPLES AND ORANGES

1. To those who blame our misfortunes on a leadership that did everything in its power to defend the Armenian people from extinction over a period of several generations despite their being a vulnerable and dispersed minority wedged among several of the most ruthless empires in history, dismissing the geopolitical realities of their situation is a facile prelude to vapid moralizing that sheds no light on anything. The question is not of geography as some abstract force that acts everywhere with homogeneous effect, but of the actual place where a given people live. Give me a break with the talk of the Boxer rebellion, as if China and Armenia can in any way be compared. And the question needs to be repeated, because it was not acknowledged: are the Kurds today acting with any greater sophistication and prowess than the Armenian revolutionaries of the 19th century? And if not, is it because their leaders are "rotten", or because the state they are trying to liberate themselves from and in whose eastern sector they are the majority is capable of far more violence than even they, with their well known history, can countenance or deploy?


2. On the Herero Genocide, rightly called the first genocide of the 20th century and one that probably laid the practical groundwork for the Armenian Genocide: Had the Hereros lived for centuries in an intricate subjugation to the German colonists as the Armenians had in relation to the Ottomans? They had not. That kind of dependency and conditioned existence was not there, nor all the attendant long-term forms of colonial exploitation. Can anyone in good conscience seriously propose that if the Hereros had been led by a less "rotten" leadership they would have survived the inconceivably brutal death machine unleashed against them by the German colonialists?

3. It has to be admitted, the "rotten leaders" model certainly makes historic analysis very simple: you can easily tell who the "rotten" leaders are; theirs are the movements that are brutally crushed. Does that make the victors brilliant?

[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

Wednesday, November 25, 2009
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MORE FROM GALEANO
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Armenians are not mentioned in the index of Eduardo Galeano's MIRRORS but are discussed on page 300, where we read:
“The Ottoman Empire was falling to pieces and the Armenians paid the price. While the First World War thundered on, government-sponsored butchery did away with half of the Armenians in Turkey:
homes ransacked and burned,
columns of people fleeing without clothes, water, or anything else,
women raped in town squares in broad daylight,
mutilated bodies floating on the rivers.
Whoever escaped thirst or hunger or cold died by the knife or the bullet. Or the gallows. Or by smoke: in the Syrian desert, Armenians driven out of Turkey were forced into caves and suffocated with smoke, in what foreshadowed the Nazi gas chambers to come.
“Twenty years later, Hitler and his advisers were planning the invasion of Poland. Weighing the pros and cons, Hitler realized there would be protests, diplomatic outrage, loud complaints, but he was certain the noise would not last. And to prove his point, he asked:
“Who remembers the Armenians?”
*
Galeano is identified as “one of Latin America's most distinguished writers [whose] work has been translated into twenty-eight languages."
I have every reason to suspect if MIRRORS is ever translated into Turkish, this passage quoted above will be omitted. But if it isn't and the translator is an Armenian, he will be accused of insulting Turkish honor, arrested, tried, found guilty, and condemned to ninety-nine years in prison.
Lord have mercy on honest witnesses for they shall never be forgiven by crooks.
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

==============================================


OF APPLES AND ORANGES

1. To those who blame our misfortunes on a leadership that did everything in its power to defend the Armenian people from extinction over a period of several generations despite their being a vulnerable and dispersed minority wedged among several of the most ruthless empires in history, dismissing the geopolitical realities of their situation is a facile prelude to vapid moralizing that sheds no light on anything. The question is not of geography as some abstract force that acts everywhere with homogeneous effect, but of the actual place where a given people live. Give me a break with the talk of the Boxer rebellion, as if China and Armenia can in any way be compared. And the question needs to be repeated, because it was not acknowledged: are the Kurds today acting with any greater sophistication and prowess than the Armenian revolutionaries of the 19th century? And if not, is it because their leaders are "rotten", or because the state they are trying to liberate themselves from and in whose eastern sector they are the majority is capable of far more violence than even they, with their well known history, can countenance or deploy?


2. On the Herero Genocide, rightly called the first genocide of the 20th century and one that probably laid the practical groundwork for the Armenian Genocide: Had the Hereros lived for centuries in an intricate subjugation to the German colonists as the Armenians had in relation to the Ottomans? They had not. That kind of dependency and conditioned existence was not there, nor all the attendant long-term forms of colonial exploitation. Can anyone in good conscience seriously propose that if the Hereros had been led by a less "rotten" leadership they would have survived the inconceivably brutal death machine unleashed against them by the German colonialists?

3. It has to be admitted, the "rotten leaders" model certainly makes historic analysis very simple: you can easily tell who the "rotten" leaders are; theirs are the movements that are brutally crushed. Does that make the victors brilliant?

vulnerable?
who made us so?
you are slicing our history like baloney and choosing the slice that will support your thesis.