notes and comments

[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

March 2 2010
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...AMONG OTHER THINGS
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If a hundred million people believe in a lie, it doesn't follow that lie ceases to be a lie.
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On more than one occasion I have been given to understand that if my income is below minimum wage I am in no position to negotiate or to say anything but “Yes, sir!”
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Not all Turks are enemies, and not all Armenians are friends. Some Turks saved our lives by risking their own, and some Armenians betrayed us to the authorities.
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Think of me as someone who is doing his utmost to be an honest witness in the eyes of an honest jury that may or may not exist.
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Dividers don't like to speak of solidarity, or bankers of usury, or cannibals of vegetarianism, or pimps of castration.
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Anyone who trusts someone else's judgment more than his own is a potential dupe.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

March 3, 2010
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FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
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If you want to teach yourself how to lie and deceive, write your memoirs. Even better, if you are a nationalist or a patriot, write a history of your nation. I speak from experience: I have done both.
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To brag about the fact that we have oppressed no other nation is like a lizard asserting his moral superiority on the grounds that he has never killed and devoured a crocodile.
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Too many chiefs, no Indians: that's one way to explain our divisions.
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Memo to readers who like to compare me to Mencken: Please, take the trouble to learn how to spell his name.
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I am not a good or even a mediocre pianist, but I can brag about one thing: I have been murdering Mozart's and Beethoven's complete Sonatas and so far no cop has ever laid a glove on me.
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Disraeli claimed he had read PRIDE AND PREJUDICE eighteen times. May I confess that I have read it only three times.
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A critic once said of Gore Vidal: “He exudes despair and cynical misery and a grudge against society which is really based on his own lack of talent and creative joy.”
I am reminded of Churchill's World War II remark: “Some chicken! Some neck!”
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No complete bastard ever wrote a decent line. Believable lies, yes!
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[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

March 4, 2010
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ON A VARIETY OF UNRELATED THINGS
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When someone you love dies, death ceases to be just another word in the dictionary and becomes a special kind of hell designed especially for you by a diabolically cunning sadist who knows you better than you know yourself, and is thus in a position to tell what will hurt you the most. He doesn't just behead you with an ax. Instead, he cuts your throat with a rusty knife and watched you bleed to death in a garbage can.
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To say “Yes, sir!” to superiors has nothing to do with respect for authority and everything to do with cowardly subservience.
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As far as I know, no one has ever heard anyone saying that a nation with the ablest Oriental carpet dealers is in a better position to make a valuable contribution to world peace and progress.
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It is twice as hard to remain silent in two languages; and because most Armenians speak more than two languages, they suffer from chronic verbal diarrhea.
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Insanity could also be defined as a process in which emotions are allowed to define thoughts.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

March 5, 2010
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CONNECTIONS
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Whenever I read about oppression, I hear echoes, see parallels, make connections: Martin Luther King: “It is a strange and twisted logic to use the tragic results of segregation as an argument for its continuation.”
It is almost as strange and twisted as preaching Armenianism and practicing Ottomanism.
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I see connections where none exists: first genocide of the 20th century and none of the Three Wise Men was Armenian. But then, they also say everything is connected to everything else.
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Our version of democracy: Say what you like provided you believe what you are told by wiser men than yourself even when they happen to be damn fools.
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Some of my readers enjoy using me as a punching bad. After Turks, an Armenian's favorite target is another Armenian.
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Solidarity is a nation's greatest source of wealth and power.
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If you are defenseless, you will be exploited and oppressed by men who will pretend to be your brothers, protectors, and benefactors. But you will make a big mistake if you think the only way to liberate yourself is by exploiting and oppressing your brothers.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

March 6, 2010
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COMMENTS
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If freedom enlarges the usefulness of our faculties (according to Kant), millennial oppression narrows them down to such a degree that it is not at all unusual to see a fool parading as a genius.
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Dealing with fools is hard enough; infinitely harder is dealing with a fool who has been taken in by another fool.
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Assessing oneself as infallible may well be the surest symptom of terminal cretinism.
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The more unwavering a man’s commitment to his own self-interest, the more altruistic the principles he pretends to espouse.
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Politics is the second oldest profession and in many ways it resembles the first. Fascists agree but they think this does not apply to fascism.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

March 7, 2010
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WHAT I BELIEVE
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Just because we understand and explain some things, we think we can understand and explain everything. But so far, and after millennia of speculation by theologians, philosophers, and scientists, we have failed to answer the most important questions and we fool ourselves when we think some day we may at last grasp the meaning of life and the nature of God.
Because in our arrogance (hubris) we think it is within our abilities to do so, we are punished (nemesis) with intolerance, jihads, fatwas, papal encyclicals, ten thousands commandments, belief systems and as many heresies and contradictions that suggest even the wisest among us is no better than a damn fool.
I believe or I would like to believe God to be inaccessible, incomprehensible, and indifferent to both believers and nonbelievers alike. I suspect any Being or Power that can create the universe, only a fraction of which is visible to us, must be too busy creating other universes in an infinite number of dimensions only one of which is accessible to us.
What are the chances that after we die, the incomprehensible will be comprehensible? I would say 50/50. I would also add that after we die we may no longer care whether life makes sense or not.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

March 8, 2010
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REFLECTIONS
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Why is an Armenian another Armenian's Turk?
My only tentative answer is: Because his worldview is based on prejudice, propaganda, and lies.
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Sartre: “Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.”
Or silences them.
Remember Milton's celebrated words in defense of free speech: “Who kills a man, kills a reasonable creature. But he who destroys a good book kills reason itself.”
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I am beginning to see the truth in the old saying, sooner or later our blessings become curses, and everything that contributed to our good fortune, returns to destroy us.
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There are prodigal fathers as surely as there are prodigal sons.
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Propaganda is more dangerous than ignorance because it is identified as knowledge -- the kind that paralyzes the mind and moves crowds.
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The bigger the lie, the greater the number of its dupes.
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About the protocols: If history is on our side, why are we afraid of historians?
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Ever since Jesus said it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God, our benefactors have been building churches in the hope of bribing God, thus adding blasphemy to their previous list of sins.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

March 10, 2010
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POWER & GREED
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What I put into words is the obvious, which may or may not be perceived as such by others, who may or may not wish to jeopardize their position within the power structure. As for our press: it is too dependent on the goodwill of our bosses, bishops, and benefactors for its survival to print anything that may not be flattering to their colossal egos.
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The French have an untranslatable word for obnoxious, ignorant, brainwashed, narrow-minded, loud-mouth patriots: they call them “patriotards.” I call ours Panchoonies, Jack S. Avanakians, Turcocentric ghazetajis, and during the Soviet era, “chic Bolsheviks.”
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The only time they are willing to admit blunders is when they want to assert their humanity (“Nobody is perfect”), never their abysmal incompetence.
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I am resigned to the fact that I will never be popular with our brown-nosers and the source of the brown on their nose.
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In his POWER & GREED: A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD (London, 2002, page 189), Philippe Gigantes writes: “The Christian Armenians in the Caucasus regions of the Muslim Ottoman Empire favoured the Christian Russian Empire and were slaughtered by the Turks, the rulers of the Ottoman Empire. How many were slaughtered? The numbers are in dispute, varying between 500,000 and I.5 million.”
This passage has a footnote that reads:
“My father's uncle, Dr Nicholas Vassiliades, living in Constantinople (now Istanbul) and conscripted as a colonel in the Turkish army's medical corps, saw the massacre in Armenia. From the records of the Turkish army's medical corps, he placed the slaughtered at more than 1 million.”
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[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

March 11, 2010
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TOYNBEE
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One reason I love to read and reread Toynbee (sometimes more than twice) is that so much of what he says, and the authorities he quotes, are anti-authoritarian and apply not only to me personally but also to mankind in general, including – or should I say, especially – to Armenians.
Random examples follow:
Volney: “The source of man's calamities reside within him; he carries them in his heart.”
Saint Cyrian: “If the foreign enemy were to cease from troubling, would Roman really be able to live at peace with Roman?”
Rabbi Agus: “'Uniqueness' as an innate quality of being is exclusive in character, invidious in intent, invariably offensive.”
Walter Bagehot: “The very institutions which most aid at step number one are precisely those which most impede at step number two.” In Toynbee's own words: “Progress would not have been the rarity it is if the early food had not been the late poison.”
And I think of our own political parties whose step number one was love of freedom, and step number two fear or hatred of free speech.” Our own Garabents put it more succinctly when he said: “Once upon a time we fought and shed our blood for freedom. We are now afraid of free speech.” And to think that Garabents was a thoroughly pro-establishment writer beloved by all.
Another quality that makes Toynbee attractive to me personally is that he quotes the Bible (and he does so frequently – more frequently than any other historian I have read) not as a believer but as a non-believer. In his own words: “I believe that the answers to the questions that matter most to us can be found only beyond the reason's limits, if they can be found at all.” Please note that final “if.”
When asked why he had devoted thirty years of his life to the writing of his STUDY OF HISTORY, Toynbee is said to have replied with a single word: “Curiosity.”
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[arabaliozian]

Re: elegy

March 12, 2010
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BLUNT TALK
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“The United States was not the golden land of opportunity people thought it was. Blacks were oppressed. The poor were downtrodden. The press told lies. Truth existed nowhere. Everyone was motivated by money.” (THE SHOT, by Philip Kerr. New York, 2000, page 62).
Blunt talk.
That's what I like.
I wish we had more of it.
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People who are afraid of open spaces are said to suffer from agoraphobia, which combines two Greek words – agora (space) and phobia (fear). It seems to me, collectively, we suffer from alithophobia (fear of truth) and pragmatophobia (fear of reality). Which may well be why there are a great many people out there who don't believe us even when we speak the truth, probably because they think we suffer from psematolatria (the worship of lies).
Next time you hear or read one of our pundits or “patriotards” (baloney artists parading as community leaders), I urge you to keep these words in mind even if you can't find them in any dictionary for the simple reason that I just made them up.
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Please note that the Philip Kerr, the author of the above quotation, is not a historian, sociologist, or academic, but a writer of thrillers who was greatly influenced by Raymond Chandler, the only American writer I have enjoyed reading three times – see especially his FAREWELL, MY LOVELY. Like Chandler, Kerr has a brilliant sense of humor. At one point, for instance, his central character, who happens to be a professional assassin, says: “I'm the real careful type. Ava Gardner offered to suck my c*ock I'd probably ask what was in it for me.”
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The only other American writer I have read three time is Hemingway -- not his novels but his short story “The Killers.”
I don't mention LOLITA because Nabokov was less American and more Russian cosmopolitan.
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