Government

[hagopn]

Re: Government

Let me also ask Sim what "cultures and languages" did the Urartuans attack and subdue? Do we have records of these languages? (We do not)

[hagopn]

Re: Government

But I would be interested to read the debate between the Armenian and Turk. Wait, you said "Armenian's reliance on now-obsolete Soviet-era publications," versus a Turk's reliance on obsolete and revisionist "western" Turcophile scholarship? But, wait again, Soviet era scholarship was actually biased in favor of Urartu has having been anything except an Armenian dynasty. Suggestions had been made that even the Nakh/Vainakh was the inheritors of the "Caucasoid Urartuan language." The Soviet era was a total mess of conflicting interesting during which, ironically, the Armenian academic tended to be ultra-conservative in his opinions and didn't ever dare not toe the Soviet line. Are you kidding me? Armenian history was relegated a mere 4 pages of pseudohistory to the grade school levels, and the University level was completely in sync with the Turcophilia of the west.

I have been debating Turks on this issue in various Yahoo groups, and quite frankly they have impressed me little, even the non-fascist ones. There is in fact little added to the debate by current scholarship except on the Armenian side. The tremendous amount evidence to suggest cultural continuity yielded unexpected results, and, even though there is no "crystallized paradigm" as of yet, the notion of a distinct Urartuan culture to that of Armenian is a dead horse.

[hagopn]

Re: Government

Dear Mr. Ax Grinder, I have respect for Lang, but cannot accept "guesses" with no evidence as the basis for theories.

Urartuan as expressed in cuneiform is undertermined on whether or not it was the same language as the vernacular. There is the lack of input by Armenian scholars and lack of comparative studies with Armenian historically. These are still up for debate, and things are changing.

There is no evidence of an Urartuan culture as distinct from the Armenian. There is plenty of evidence to suggest they were the same continuous culture.

[bell-the-cat]

Re: Government

(Please, there is no evidence of Urartuan "language" to differentiate it from Armenian. It's nonsense. With all due respect to David Lang, his uneducated guesstimations about "some Urartuan elements that we think were still be referred to", which is the only real basis for the assumption of "Urartuan remnants" past the 6th century b.c. in any source today, is based on nothing. The fact is that there is only evidence of cultural and political continuity. Close examination reveals that the Yervanduni were part and parcel of the "Urartuan" political scene long before their ascension to the throne)

The preening, pontificating, ever-anonymous Hagopn again thinks he can attack a named individual. What qualifications has this anonymous person got that makes him think he can cast aside the academic opinions of ALL legitimate scholars of Urartu? If Hagopn is anyone of standing he should give us his name so his opinions can maybe be given some credence. If he is a nobody, he should shut up and stop his offensive ill-founded attacks.

Urartian as expressed in their cuneiform inscriptions, is not Armenian, though there are several hundred individual words in Urartian that are believed to have passed from it into Armenian. Urartu was an empire that attacked and occupied its immediate neighbours and attempted to impose a homogenious Urartian culture on them, building identikit Urartian temples and fortifications and palaces in all the captured territories. The actions of Urartu probably did much to consolidate the native peoples, establishing the conditions that, post-Urartu , led to those peoples eventually becoming Armenians. However only simplistic and ignorant popularists go around calling Urartians Armenians: there were no Armenians when there were Urartians.

I once had the sad experience of witnessing an otherwise intelligent Armenian being rather cruely embarrassed by a Turkish archaeologist thanks to that Armenian's reliance on now-obsolete Soviet-era publications. The study of Urartu has advanced far beyond the era of the 1950 and 1960s and these old works and the opinions in them should not be relied upon.

Do you think Italians go around obsessing about the ethnicity and statehood and govening methods of the Etruscans?

[Haykakan]

Re: Government

"What can be done to mitigate these circumstances?"
This is the question we need to address. We cannot much control what external forces will or will not do but what we can do is instill some sort of unity and a feeling of belonging to a people-to a nation. We need to make the diasporan think of Hayastan as his/her hairenik, we need to make the hayastantsi show some faith to the leaders that are good and to keep hope alive. We need to act in situations where we will make a difference like perhaps in Syria by taking up arms and working with that government. We need to make a difference somewhere so that we are not just another grain of sand in the hourglass of time. I do not believe we can counter external forces without having a strong united nation and building such a nation via education and investment needs to be our main goal in my opinion.

[hagopn]

Re: Government

I agree with the core of your message, but the subtleties of the "confederate character" I speak of I have so far been unsuccessful on fully conveying partly due to my failure in memory of many details. I truly appreciate your attention and patience. I may sound like a repeating loop at this point, but the instances where Armenian solidarity was successfully sold to a critical enough number need to be studied very closely. An axiom is that lack of success in any endeavor indicates lack of knowledge of the subject. We have others implementing change in our psyche with rapidity, but, as William Saroyan even noticed (actually he was very perceptive, much more than we give him credit), "see if we don't laugh at the great ideas of the world." Armenians are dissidents, confederates, perhaps as a genetic trait, perhaps inherited, perhaps a combination - as I am a believer in genetic behavioral memory (something that is being accepted in science increasingly so), and to control (for lack of a better "necessary evil" term) such a population, you have to find the right recipe. Artrsuni argued that there are universal values that we all naturally share, but there are also idiosyncrasies that we to acknowledge that might prove fatal if left unexamined, unaccounted for and unchecked/not leveraged, depending on your perspective. I brought Melik Frangyul of Agulis as an example, as a parallel to Ter Petrosyan. David Beg was successful to a large degree, but key players, key members of the nobility such as Frangyul were never in the fold and preferred Ottoman rule. Very little has been asked as to why. Today we just act bitterly when we read anti-nationalist rhetoric run rampant, such as that espoused by Ter Petrossyan, and automatically make the accusations of treason. Be that as it may, there is a reason and source for the treasonous behavior that needs to be examined and mitigated. Personal narcissism is easy to use. External forces are easy to blame. All have a part to play. What can be done to mitigate these circumstances?

[Haykakan]

Re: Government

Hagopn i think you keep making my point for me and i do not see a whole lot that we disagree on anymore. The industrious and creative nature of our people has been and continues to be our strength but our aversion to authority is and has been our weakness as a state. You stress the culture over the state and perhaps you are right there but i can tell you that the culture won't last too long wo a state. Look at how different a Yerevantsi is from a Amerikahaye from a Bakvi haye from a Lebanantsi....these differences intensify over time. I hope you do not bring up the hrias as a example because the last thing i want is for us to be like them. I believe we must make a state that Armenians would want to live in and bring our people together. I do not care what form of leadership we have so long as it improves the lives of our people and is motivated to keep doing that. The biggest issue facing us is lack sovereignty which stems from our inability to defend ourselves at the present time and as long as we cannot defend ourselves we have no business calling ourselves independent. The ability to defend its people is the primary function of a government and unless it does just that it cannot be considered independent. We are no where near being able to defend ourselves thus we are no where near being independent and we will not be there in our life time(unfortunately) but we need to install the desire for it in our children so that they will strive for it like some of us have. Many people here are delusional about what todays Armenia can and cannot do and such delusions are dangerous because the worst thing you can do is overestimate your own strength.

[hagopn]

Re: Government

I don't agree that Russian and US are prosperous because they are liberal economies.. They simply have enough clout to control resources and even artificially impose their currency in strategic global trade of important commodities, as it is in the case of the USA, to artificially maintain an inflated value for their economy. The USA is a service economy that is not self-sustaining but is mostly now artificially sustained through such practices. Russia's sheer size and wealth of natural resources is what is giving it the push it has, but it too is not very developed and has little manufacturing outpout. Evne Turkey has more consumer product output, of course as a second class economy whose gross profits are largely foreign, German, American, Scandinavian, etc. with a few domestic conglomerates dominating most domestic agro and industry output. Armenia, save for its surprisingly developed (considering the conditions) IT sector, is just like Turkey at a smaller scale.

Also, the current Armenian state is nothing like its predecessors, and ironically the very reason that ARmenians are unable to prosper and choose to leave is precisely because it is completely out of character for Armenians to have to deal with Kurdish style sheikhs and despots with Armenian names. It reminds me of Sero Khanzatian's character of Melik Yegan, unfortunately not a fictional one, whose ghost is everywhere, totally unlike past rulers. Ter Petrossyan reminded me of Melik Frangyul with a mix of Djevdet Bey. It is a tightly run oligarchy by incompetent and anachronistic oligarchs, a setting that is by design in my opinion. As I said, statesmanship is something neither the KGB nor the CIA and their controllers wanted for Armenians. if some choose to call stating the obvious "conspiracism" then so be it! Of course in comparison a larger economy like the USA or the Russian would be more attractive because there actually still are opportunities for economic gain because of the sheer size of the markets. Empires also have learned to strangle and drain talent out of their target nations for their own gain. Ashurbanipal's and Tiglath-Pileser III's old methodologies have been expanded upon tremendously.

In the past, however, Armenia was the South Africa of mining, the Germany of industry, and Ukraine of agriculture and so on. It was a very prosperous and populous state. Even under Arab partial control (Arabs never managed to control it, not even close to completely, but they did massacre and cripple the old nobility quite a bit, not as much as the Byzantines, however) during the Bagratuni/Khatchen era, Ani was a center of industry, metallurgy, weapons manufacturing, Dvin was a textile centers, and so on. Look at remnants such as Agulis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuxar%C4%B1_%C6%8Fylis that the Tatars destroyed later on. There were hundreds upon hudreds of industrially productive towns such as this throughout our history. Karin was a cosmopolitan center of learning, a city with international flare that even had a Islamic school of thought and philosophy, a proto-Sufi community (an import from from Nippur, a surviving Sumerian city still around in that era, remarkable!), that was quite active. I wish I could remember more details.

It is really unfair to use today's Armenia - a strangled and landlocked province (of course, by design) - as an example of Armenian statehood. Armenian statehood in its actual form with enough territory and resources was Ani, perhaps Sis/Cilicia, and Armenia certainly had historically attracted immigrants in droves just like these modern large economies. Just read on Ani, Karin (Erzurum), Dvin, Van of the 8th to the 11th centuries. Even the Van of the Ottoman time was majority Armenian and still surprised the hell out of anyone visiting it on its prosperous and burgeoning market, somewhere the Kurd peasants had hopes of selling their produce, a center of light industry, artisanship and - in the rural sense - a center of finance and gold and silver exchange. There was also a very well developed goldsmiths/je-weler's (<- never mind, LOL) guild still active in Van up to the genocide, and the India Ocean traders were still relying on manufacturing in Van and other Armenian provinces for their product. A german author, I wish I could recall author and title, mentioned that "global carpet production and trade was at a standstill at the aftermath of the genocide." Armenians still had influence on these traditional trades.

Government of empires come and go. Strong cultures were staying and minding their own businesses, but you are right. In this day and age of rapid assimilation technologies, Armenians have to, as Hakob says in the other thread, either strengthen their state and concentrate their efforts to take advantage of this global village or perish.

Maybe as a temporary measure, say more than one individual, we need a competent and nationalist military dictatorship.

[Haykakan]

Re: Government

I am a big fan of history and the lessons it teaches but again it seems history is saying that a loose union like the one you keep praising has been and continues to be unsustainable. The aversions of Armenians to central rule is very much true but look at where we are all going-to USA to Russia to EU ..why would they do that? Because of opportunity of course. The centralized governments are able to outcompete the more loos unions and provide better opportunities. Centralization does not have to be a bad thing in my opinion - it all depends on the motives of the people in whose hands power is centralized in. The problem i see with loose federations is that they are always being overrun by more centralized and organized unions. I agree with you that this is "complicated affair that involves many ambitious players" but my opinion is that this will always be the case and instead worrying about the form of government i would rather construct a system of motivations which channels these "ambitious players" into doing their best for the country vs just for themselves. A system designed on channeling motivation towards the best interest of the nation in my opinion is the missing link to success not the form of government. This system of motivation can exist in any form of government from dictatorship to democracy and honestly it will not matter much which system wins out so long as the interest of the nation is put forth via this system of motives.

[hagopn]

Re: Government

Urartu is an example of a centralization effort by the Van dynasty, Aramian, who, after many "loose federations" and the fight against Assyrian incursions (and Akkadians before them, as remembered on the stele left by Sargon I and his grandson Naram-Sin) and so on, the Armenians were consolidated under a tentative central monarchy, which, as we know, was always a tenuous affair, and it proved it self to be. (Please, there is no evidence of Urartuan "language" to differentiate it from Armenian. It's nonsense. With all due respect to David Lang, his uneducated guesstimations about "some Urartuan elements that we think were still be referred to", which is the only real basis for the assumption of "Urartuan remnants" past the 6th century b.c. in any source today, is based on nothing. The fact is that there is only evidence of cultural and political continuity. Close examination reveals that the Yervanduni were part and parcel of the "Urartuan" political scene long before their ascension to the throne)