notes / comments

[Virgil]

Re: notes / comments

If we are unique, that’s because every individual, tribe, nation, or for that matter, snowflake and grain of sand is unique.

Whether this uniqueness is an asset or a liability I will let you decide,

So, let me get this straight, you are comparing the "uniqueness" of a people to a snowflake and grain of sand (i.e. "every tribe is unique, so is the color blue"), which equates to saying, "so what if we are 'unique', snow flakes and a grain of sand are 'unique' too", but then are claiming that you "want [me] to decide" if it is a asset or liabilty when your initial statements has already made it a point to the reader that being unique should hold no importance to your life, thus, implying that it is not a asset? By your reasoning, being unique is either "useless" or a "liability, so, please, stop with the "holier than thou" presentation of your argument of attemping to give the reader a "choice".

You are a walking contradiction and a idiot. First of all, you yourself, as a "Canadian" are "unique", if anyone needs to listen to the "words of the ol'might Ara Baliozian", it is Ara Baliozian himself because he holds a Canadian citizenship, i.e. he is "unique".

Second of all, the idea of being "unique" is not a "mutually exclusive" trait that one can get shake off. Essentially, being unique is a quality every individual possesses. On a micro you speak a "unique" language, you partake in a "unique" culture, you have "unique" beleifs, and you most likly deficate in a "unique" manner when you go to the john to release yourself. Likewise, on the macro level, you have a "unque" citizenship, you pay taxes towards a "unque" government, you reside in a "unique" state, and essentially, your loyalties are to a "unique" entitty. Therefore, this idea that you can somehow distance yourself from being "unique" is a flawed concept. Being "unique" is not a button you can take on and off, it is who you are, for better of for worse, you are, who you are.

The reality is this, you are sitting in the comforts of your home, under the protection of a state, that most likely on the daily basis is engraining into to your psychology the idea of being "connected" to the state (i.e. you are a Canadian). And since you are not a Inuit, you must adhere to being Canadian. So, how is wanting to be Canadian any different then, let us I don't know say, being Armenian? Well, it is different in that the previous is a national identity, while the latter is, first, a ethnic identity, and second a new national identity, however, they are similar in that both are a "unique" identity.

Now, your claim that "uniqueness" is a liability will disarm the Armenian individual in the Diaspora because at the heart, if they take your advice and stop being Armenian for the sake of becoming a "world citizen" it only means then that they will rely on the national identity (i.e. being American, Canadian, and etc ... ) to dictate their "uniqueness", thus, your argument only bolsters assimilation, marginalization, and, again, it is a "idea" that destroy the power with a Armenian to create his or her own destiny.

The end game is this, because you can never wash away your Armenian "uniqueness" you will eventually finally realize who you are and try to back assimilate bringing all the foreign residue into the Armenian communities. And it is at this moment that extrapollated will destroy the inherit "uniqness" of the Armenian people. What you champion will only provide mass marketers and corporations more fresh meat to pawn their make shift identities to, you are indirectly supporting corporations. So you are at the heart taking the Armenian out of a "lions den" and putting him or her directly in the lions mouth.

provided you don’ adopt one of our ubiquitous dealers of chauvinist crapola as your guide.

Ha, "Chauvinist crapola" no, realist that has real ideas, ideas that for the most part that are not so much different to the ideas that have contributed to the development of the Canadian state, a state which you reside in, pay taxes to, and eventually will be buried in. I don't ask to be "anyone's guide", I only defend my interests and values, something alien to a walking vaginal like yourself that for all of his life has contributed to 0% of the development of the Armenian state and people, but instead has indirectly undermined the self determination of the Armenian people with ridiculous idealistic ideas in a age that is devoid of any idealism.

Speaking for myself, I will say that our uniqueness is not what concerns me. What concerns me is our problems and there is nothing – repeat, nothing -- unique about them.

The only problems Armenians face today are demotivation and incidently, demotivation that has its roots in views and opinions you preach. The idea that Armenians should just bend over and screw them. Instead of empowering your people, you are just taking away their political handgun by leading them into isolation with your talks of "identity" being somehow "not important".

The reality is this, you are a chicken xxxx individual that hides behind quotes and ideas of true intellectual giants. All you have done is just hide behind meaningless and empty ideas that have no actual value to anyone but you and your ego. You are not even the dirt underneath the nail of a Monte, Andranik, and Nejda. Your not even a Newton who acknowledges that his greatness can be attributed to giants (i.e. "I can only see so far, because I stand on the shoulders of giant") and furthermore, you are not even the entity that Plato refers to who will free his or her fellow man that is stuck in the cave watching shadows (i.e. Allegory of the Cave) because you are not brave enough to take risks nor are you brave enough to confront people for their wrong doings, all you do is analyze the shortcomings of other men for trying to change the world.

All you, the "Ara type" end up doing is contributing to the stagnation of the Armenian people and to the larger extent to the human race. The reality is that we are all different whether we choose to accept or not and the moment the world government realizes this and the moment you realize this, is the moment mankind can better themselves by seeking out a solution that will address this fundimental trait of the human condition.

Understand, Armenians failed to listen to your advice not so much so because they or some shadow entity wants to silence you, rather, they fail to listen to you because your ideas are a bit "behind on the times". The reality is that the "one world" ideology in which you preach died the moment the Soviet Union disintegrated, this is a fact most politicians in the western world adhere to. If man is man and their exists no difference then why did your fellow "human" Turks and Azeris try to annex land that for the most part, was no theirs and certainly, was already occupied by Armenians.

And I am a staunch socialist, however, the reality is this, the reality is that in the world where capitalism rule, where everyone is competeting with one another, you would be a fool to convince your people to be more "worldly" when in fact the world revolves around markets, competition, and is based on the "idea of scales", when one man eats, another man starves. Let us at least, at minimum, be the man that does not starve.

Corruption, incompetence, divisiveness, authoritarianism, prejudice, and intolerance are as old as mankind.

Yes and why do you think so? Because people have different opinions, feelings, and interests. Furthermore, the idea that "corruption" and "authoritarianism" is evil and wrong when in fact our civilization has stemmed from the barbarism of men that have been corrupt and authoritarians is just horse xxxx. Man will always be intolerant to one another because men are born different and develop differently as a they age. This is the price you pay for being different, however, it is a well payed investment. Difference is a normal part of nature, the abnormal is when individuals are the same, when two people, on opposite cornor of the world, are exact duplicates of each other. That is when the world stops being "amazing" and starts being mundane. I would rather have intolerance but a fresh sense of "difference" that has not been corrupted by mass marketing, cultural polution stemming from mass marketers, inter racial sludge, inter ethnic sludge, and etc. opposed to everyone coming off the corporate assembly line.

So is unawareness of them or self-deception. We either confront our shortcomings and make an honest effort to overcome them or we pretend there is nothing we can do because they are an integral part of the human condition.

First, there exists no shortcomings that is mutuall exclusive to the Armenian people that is not inherit in other people and certainly, not inherit in other states. The moment I will give up being "who I am" and, as you say, "overcome" the "shortcomings", is the day eastern and western states like China and United States stop forcing their people to adopt one race, one ethnicity, and one culture. You should ask the Tibeten people how they feel about the "overcoming" of the "shortcomings" imposed by the Chinese government onto to them via or the Armenians in Georgia that are not given eqaul treatment as Georgian citizens. The sad difference here is that while you have a oppurtunity to be who you are, the Armenians in Georgia do not, and essentially, you are pissing away this privalage because you have your head too far up your ass to see the picture clearly.

Again, speaking for myself, I am all for calling a spade a spade, a charlatan a phony and a wheeler-dealer not a man of vision or a noble specimen of humanity but a low-life and a bottom feeder.
#

And again, speaking for myself, I am calling you a phony, a coward, a failed writer, and, in total, your life's work is crap. It is useless to any Armenian, in any form, whether on the internet or in a book. There is no "phony wheeler-dealer" but yourself, Ara, this is reality. You live in the margins of your egos instead of the real world. I have tried to reason with you on many occasions, but on every level you are just useless. The ideas you promote will end up destroying the hard of work of other men that put themselves on the line versus you, that just sits there and writes, who for the most part, has spent 72 years of his life just talking out of his ass.

[Armenian]

Re: notes / comments

Virgil, dude, you're on a roll

Where do you get all this energy from? Damn, I thought I was bad...

But please lighten up, the powers that be here might not like the tone of your language. You can say all the things you said without the vulgarity. I would hate for you to get banned from here. Although I like you, do you know the real reason why I don't want to see you banned? You are the only one here that makes me look like a moderate

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Thursday, December 20, 2007
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NOTES / COMMENTS

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Just when I think I am done with Armenians and their problems, a new one comes up or an old one that demands a novel approach. Who gives a damn about Armenians and their problems, anyway? Not even Armenians, it seems. I dream of the day when I will exhaust the subject and start writing love stories, adventure yarns, and murder mysteries. I love murder mysteries. I have read hundreds of Simenons… We all have our cross to bear. The smaller the nation, the heavier the cross.
*
If you want to convince a civilized man to behave like a barbarian, you tell him barbarians are at the gate even if there is no one there, and if there is one, he is either the gatekeeper or a harmless pilgrim.
*
Whenever I feel depressed, I console myself by saying that even those who hate me read me. Writers have this is common with women: they want to be irresistible.
*
Since there are no final answers, not even in science, every assertion is open to debate, provided of course the rules imposed on us by reason, common sense, common decency, and grammar are followed. And no one will ever succeed in convincing me that reason, common sense and decency, and grammar are anti-Armenian.
*
When I wrote flattering commentaries, I was published. When I wrote critical commentaries, I was published too. But when I started getting at the truth, I was silenced. Truth was my undoing.
*
I write for readers with an open mind. Not even the Good Lord can reach brainless idiots or, for that matter, brainy bastards. Consider the influence of the New Testament on the likes of Stalin (a seminarian) and his countless dupes, among them some very smart Armenians, like Anastas (ditto).
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

ARMENIAN WISDOM
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Baruir Sevak: "It is better to be a good reader
than a bad writer."
***
Karekin Nejdeh: "When a man falls down and
doesn’t have the will to stand up, no amount of
help will be of any use to him. It is the same
with a nation that does nothing but complain,
lament, and beg."
***
Anonymous: "The worship of money is a terminal
disease."
***
Raffi: "The message of the world is clear: If you
don’t learn how to kill, you forfeit your right
to exist."
***
Gostan Zarian: "If a thought cannot be expressed
in a few words it cannot be worth expressing."
***
Shmavon Hovsepian: "A jury of tigers, crocodiles,
wolves, and hyenas is not qualified to condemn to
death a cat guilty of killing a mouse."
***
Hagop Baronian: "Avarice is an addiction whose
eyes are bigger than its belly."

[Armenian]

Re: notes / comments

Karekin Nejdeh: "When a man falls down and doesn’t have the will to stand up, no amount of help will be of any use to him. It is the same with a nation that does nothing but complain, lament, and beg."

The great Sparapet Garegin Njhteh was referring exactly to individuals like you

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Friday, December 21, 2007
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NAREGATSI
*********************************
He is one of those writers everyone praises but no one reads, except our academics who are unanimous in naming him our Dante and Shakespeare combined. But whereas every Italian and Englishman is brought up to learn a few lines from Dante and Shakespeare by heart, I have yet to meet the Armenian who can quote a single line from Naregatsi.
*
One reason Naregatsi is not a popular writer is that he cannot be said to be a cheerful fellow. His LAMENTATION is an endless catalogue of sins, failings, and vices. A typical passage reads: “I constantly have recourse to lies, / Never uttering the truth…/ I am diligent in malignant acts of ribaldry; / I am ever active in satanic inventions.”
*
In his INFERNO, Dante speaks of hell as if it were a real place. Naregatsi has a more modern, not to say, existential view on the subject. “Hell is me,” he seems to be saying. And if “hell is other people” (Sartre) it’s because there is a “me” in all of us. It follows, in the eyes of our holier-than-thou propagandists, Naregatsi is bad news. Because if we are as bad as Naregatsi tells us, then perhaps we deserved our fate. But Naregatsi does not write to promote self-loathing and despair. His final message is one of hope. Salvation is yours, he tells us, provided you plead guilty as charged and repent. Not exactly a condition that will be welcome by our charlatans who parade as paragons of virtue.
*
TWO FACTS
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Naregatsi wrote in krapar (classical Armenian) but he is now available in both ashkharapar (the spoken idiom) and English (in an excellent translation by Mischa Kudian).
*
Naregatsi lived a thousand years ago, long before we were Ottomanized and Sovietized.
*
NARCISSISM
*******************************
One way to define our holier-than-thou sanctimonious pricks and dealers in chauvinist crapola is to say, they are jackasses who believe, when they bray, they sound better than Pavarotti singing “Nessun dorma.”
#

[Virgil]

Re: notes / comments

One way to define our holier-than-thou sanctimonious pricks and dealers in chauvinist crapola is to say, they are jackasses who believe, when they bray, they sound better than Pavarotti singing “Nessun dorma.”

As opposed to who? The "ol might erudite", also known as Ara Baliozian that constantly talks in circles and criticizes the failures of others for trying? You are the "jackass" and "chauvinist crapola", not I, certainly, not others. Have you ever thought of evaluating your decisions in the context of the "bigger plot"? Certainly, if you are such a "wise sage" have the honestly to admit your views are flawed. I, as stubburn I may sound, have admintly stated numerous times that I am flawed as well, we are all, living in the comforts of foreign nation while our countrymen suffer under the economic and political pressures, but yet, at the end of the day, we have the odascity to claim "everyone is Armenian", you and me, the Armenian Diaspora, and my Shun because we can "speak Armenian" (Literally, my dog can understand commands in Armenain, judging by the asinine comments of some, that makes him 100% pure grade A Armenian? Ridiculous, xxxxing ridiculous, mart elek, phachachatz azgek dara)? Abosolutly not.

He is one of those writers everyone praises but no one reads, except our academics who are unanimous in naming him our Dante and Shakespeare combined. But whereas every Italian and Englishman is brought up to learn a few lines from Dante and Shakespeare by heart, I have yet to meet the Armenian who can quote a single line from Naregatsi.

And why do you think? What is the "sociological" and "philosophical" reason for this other then the fact that you have xxxos on the internet such as yourself claiming that ever "Jack Nahapetian" should consider themselves "human beings", first and foremost, as opposed to Armenians. So...hmm...here you are claiming that, "Armenians are not 'intune' with their identity", but yet, at the same time, you claim that being Armenian is no different then being a "grain of sand". Your a walking contradiction, I for one try my best to pick up Armenian texts, but the reality is this, the only time I speak Armenian is with my parents, my mom and my dad, in general, my family. There exists a unspoken rule, from the day I was born, that in the household we only speak Armenian, but the reality is that in most families this "unspoken rule" has been replaced, largly in part, due to the "great erudites" like yourself, that when taken at the whole, support assimilation.

The great Sparapet Garegin Njhteh was referring exactly to individuals like you

Seriously, Garegin Njhteh was the driving force behind national socialism almost a half century before the Third Reich. His views are opposite to those of the "great erudite", Ara. First of all, the very nationalists this xxxo insults are Andranik and Njhteh (Okhormi erantz, if they were not brave enough to pick up guns, this peice of xxxx, would be the descendent of some moselman vor era mora bernara yev kunara). He is a walking constradiction, a enigma wraped in a blanket of stupidity that claims he is "all knowing" when he has no life experiences to back anythign up besides the "quotes" of others.

The tragedy here is that his very education was administrated under the tutology of the Armenian church and people. Today, he has spit on the very same house of God (Our strong Armenian Apostolic Church), what good is the word of such a man? No good, if it was a idea that was written on paper, it would not even useful as a toilet paper because toilet paper, fundimentally, has a purpose, Ara and his ideas have no purpose other then to exist and in the process, feed his ego.

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Saturday, December 22, 2007
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MER HAIRENIK
TSHVAR, ANDER
***********************************
How much of what I say is right? As a prejudiced observer I cannot be a reliable judge. You tell me! But instead of asking whether I am right, say, How right are those I quote and paraphrase, beginning with the Biblical dictum (“A house divided against itself cannot stand”) and Toynbee’s (“Civilizations are not killed, they commit suicide”).
*
As masters of the blame-game, our denialists assert they had nothing to do with our misfortunes, which amounts to saying, they reject all responsibility in shaping our tragic destiny, thus implying their role in our history has been that of nonentities or absentee landlords.
*
Writing in the 5th century, Movses Khorenatsi speaks of our divided and corrupt leadership (see his LAMENTATION, not to be confused with Naregatsi’s, which was written in the 10th century). Writing in the 20th century we have two distinguished witnesses who support Khorenatsi’s verdict: Avedik Issahakian (“our brainless leaders”) and Zarian (“Our political parties have been of no political use to us. Their greatest enemy is free speech.”) In our own days, listen to what Kocharian and Levon Der Bedrossian are saying about each other.
*
If I repeat myself, it’s because I don’t have a phobia of repetition. If you do, I suggest you see a shrink. If you can’t afford one, stop reading me. Never say I speak of problems without suggesting any solutions. But if you reject my solution to your problem and continue to read me, I thank you. Have a nice day.
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

What kind of people are we? What kind of leadership is
this? Instead of compassion, mutual contempt.
Instead of
reason blind instinct. Instead of common sense,
fanaticism.

They speak of the cross and nail us to it again as
they
speak.

ANTRANIK ZAROUKIAN
(1912-1989)
Poet, novelist, critic, editor.

*******************************************

All our religious, political, and cultural
institutions
share a single aim, the survival of the nation. If
the nation perishes, neither Echmiadzin nor Antelias,
not
even God in his heaven, can be of any help to us.

SIMON VRATSIAN
(1882-1969)
Statesman. Last Prime Minister of the Republic of
Armenia
(1918-1920).
***********************************************

We Armenians are products of the tribal mentality of
Turks
and Kurds, and this tribal mentality remains
stubbornly
rooted even among our leaders and elites.

NIGOL AGHBALIAN
(1873-1947)
Statesman, literary scholar, educator.

************************************************** *

A familiar figure in our collective existence is the
prosperous and arrogant community leader who, by
obstructing the path of all those who wish to reform
and
improve our conditions, perpetuates a status quo whose
sole
aim is his own personal profit and aggrandizement.

LEVON PASHALIAN
(1868-1943)
Athor, editor.

**************************************************

The Armenian Diaspora is losing its character. Our
language, our literature, and our traditions are
degenerating. Even our religious leaders have
abandoned
their calling and turned into cunning wheeler-dealers.
Our
publications thrive on meaningless controversies.
I see charlatanism and cheap chauvinism everywhere
but not
a single trace of self-sacrifice
and dedication to principles and ideals. What's
happening
to us? Where are we heading?
Quo vadis, O Armenian people?

SHAVARSH MISSAKIAN
(1884-1957)
Author, editor, critic.

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

WORDS OF WISDOM
*************************************

Paul Valery: "Critics: The dirties cur can inflict a
mortal wound; all he needs is to be mad."

Chinese saying: "He who loses temper has wrong on his
side."

Overheard: "To get angry means to punish yourself for
someone else’s stupidity."

Leon-Paul Fargue: "One cannot argue unless one is in
agreement, and then only on points of detail."

Montherlant: "Why should I undergo stress and strain
simply to please men? The idea is repellent and would
incite me rather to cowardice."

Albert Memmi: "Every colonial nation carries the seeds
of fascist temptation in its bosom."

Jean Rostand: "There are some persons we could not cut
down to size without diminishing ourselves as well."

Thomas Hardy: "More life may tickle out of men through
fear than through a gaping wound."

Mirabeau on Talleyrand: "He would sell his soul for
money, and he would be right, for he would be
exchanging dung for gold."