notes / comments

[jgk3]

Re: notes / comments

Tuesday, December 11, 2007
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THE TRAGEDY OF OEDIPUS
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If Armenians and their endless petty little problems bore you, join the club. If I go on writing about them it’s not because I am overly fond of them or would like to solve their problems (no one can do that except themselves) but because I want to understand my fellow men. To be bored with Armenians means to be bored with mankind, and ultimately with oneself.
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We are a microcosm. If we are a failure as a nation, so is mankind. The history of mankind is a disaster area because the average man is a dupe at the mercy of megalomaniacal, self-satisfied frauds who will say and do anything in defense of their powers and privileges. The list of sultans, kings, presidents, popes, and chief executive officers who abused their positions of trust or preached virtue and practiced vice stretches to infinity.
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Athens executed Socrates, Florence exiled Dante, Russia excommunicated Tolstoy, India assassinated Gandhi. You may now draw your own conclusions.
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When charlatans and dupes conspire, they end up praising honesty and burying honest men.
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To say that God punishes men for their transgressions is to misrepresent reality. It is man that punishes himself. The real tragedy of Oedipus is not that he killed his father and had sex with his mother but that he thought by blinding himself he could avoid seeing reality.
#

I'm happy to have read what you posted. Thank you.

I wonder why an Armenian nationalist should see your words as self destructive... I see them as words of caution based on your personal experience. Why must nationalism continue to be associated with all the evils it has bred in the past? Why can't there be a new kind of nationalism that can still fight very strong for a common heartfelt cause, yet excuse itself from slandering others? If we could achieve this, we'll become like Norwegians, a very respectable nation of high standard.

Are we animals? Do we really have to yell and scream at each other to get our point across? Are we so vile as to have to propagate whatever negative we can see in our opposition, so that we can manipulate others to turn against them?

I myself am yelling in my mind. This seems to be what happens when I pay too much attention to a single aspect from the aggregate of human behavior. I guess on these forums, I see this single aspect, slander, more often. I won't let it get to me as it has in the past (which was probably one of the reasons I left for a while).

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

When we stop pointing our fingers every single chance we get, what will we become?

I wonder... is cool-headed nationalism a possibility for Armenians? We are not uneducated villagers anymore, we have access to universities all around the world. This should mean that we can speak at a higher level than an emotional cry or yell. Perhaps if we, as a nation, made proper use of our educational institutions, to enhance our industries and our stature in all sorts of fields, we'd achieve more than we ever have. Maybe then we can finally surpass the Diaspora's current national stature, historic slaves of Turks.

Am I a dreamer to imagine such a thing?

at the turn of the last century we had intellectuals but not academics. today we have academics but not intellectuals, and academics are as a rule pro-establishment hirelings. / ara

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Tuesday, December 11, 2007
************************************************
THE TRAGEDY OF OEDIPUS
*********************************************
If Armenians and their endless petty little problems bore you, join the club. If I go on writing about them it’s not because I am overly fond of them or would like to solve their problems (no one can do that except themselves) but because I want to understand my fellow men. To be bored with Armenians means to be bored with mankind, and ultimately with oneself.
*
We are a microcosm. If we are a failure as a nation, so is mankind. The history of mankind is a disaster area because the average man is a dupe at the mercy of megalomaniacal, self-satisfied frauds who will say and do anything in defense of their powers and privileges. The list of sultans, kings, presidents, popes, and chief executive officers who abused their positions of trust or preached virtue and practiced vice stretches to infinity.
*
Athens executed Socrates, Florence exiled Dante, Russia excommunicated Tolstoy, India assassinated Gandhi. You may now draw your own conclusions.
*
When charlatans and dupes conspire, they end up praising honesty and burying honest men.
*
To say that God punishes men for their transgressions is to misrepresent reality. It is man that punishes himself. The real tragedy of Oedipus is not that he killed his father and had sex with his mother but that he thought by blinding himself he could avoid seeing reality.
#

[jgk3]

Re: notes / comments

Sunday, December 09, 2007

We have become a bunch of whiners -- compliments of our nationalist historians and Turcocentric pundits who are masters of the blame game.

When we stop pointing our fingers every single chance we get, what will we become?

I wonder... is cool-headed nationalism a possibility for Armenians? We are not uneducated villagers anymore, we have access to universities all around the world. This should mean that we can speak at a higher level than an emotional cry or yell. Perhaps if we, as a nation, made proper use of our educational institutions, to enhance our industries and our stature in all sorts of fields, we'd achieve more than we ever have. Maybe then we can finally surpass the Diaspora's current national stature, historic slaves of Turks.

Am I a dreamer to imagine such a thing?

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Monday, December 10, 2007
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QUESTIONS / ANSWERS
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Q: Do you classify yourself as a good Armenian?
A: Frankly, I am so busy trying to be an honest man that I don’t even think about being an Armenian, let alone a good one.
Q: What do you say to readers who are outraged by what you write?
A: I say, Relax! We have survived centuries of oppression by brutal tyrants, countless wars, massacres, deportation, destitution, life in alien slums…we can survive the opinions of a minor scribbler who may well be, in your own estimation, a misguided fool.
Q: What it’s like writing for Armenians?
A: A butcher delivering a lecture to an audience of brain surgeons may be in a better position to answer that question.
Q: Do you think you have had any influence on our policy-makers?
A: Hell no! Even if I were a thousand times smarter and lived as long as Methuselah I doubt if I could change the mind of a single dupe who is brainwashed to believe he is too smart to be deceived.
Q: What’s the hardest thing about being honest?
A: Trying not to give in to the temptation of being dishonest and remembering all those instances in the past when I failed.
Q: Any projects?
A: Many.
Q: Such as?
A: A dictionary of Armenian misconceptions, which I will never write because it may well be as long as WAR AND PEACE and THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV combined.
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Sunday, December 09, 2007
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THE 11TH COMMANDMENT
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Organized religions are popular for the same reason that Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini were: people hate to think for themselves. Shaw once said that he has made a fortune and enjoys an international reputation as a clever man because he takes the trouble to think for himself once or twice a year.
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Everything that is popular is based on a misconception, which is also why astrology is popular too.
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Organized religions contradict one another – Christians and Muslims believe in an Almighty God; Buddhists don’t. That doesn’t mean one is right and the other wrong. That only means, if God exists, you must live your life as if He didn’t, because God will not do your thinking for you for the simple reason that He has given you a brain, which happens to be a valuable piece of equipment that is a miracle of design as mysterious and incomprehensible as the universe itself.
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The hardest thing about writing is convincing philistines that you are worth listening to.
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Because I refuse to be a fool among fools I am called all kinds of nasty names, including infidel and atheist.
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Once upon a time we trusted our destiny on dividers, sultans, commissars, and charlatans (both foreign and domestic) and when things started going wrong we blamed it on bloodthirsty neighbors, bad location, and the Almighty Himself, never on our brainless leaders and their dupes, namely ourselves.
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My favorite 11th commandment: Thou shalt be self-reliant.
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God does not sermonize or speechify; mullahs, priests, and charlatans do that.
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We have become a bunch of whiners -- compliments of our nationalist historians and Turcocentric pundits who are masters of the blame game.
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Thou shalt not ask God to do your thinking for you.
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Saturday, December 08, 2007
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DEFENDERS OF THE FAITH
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Propaganda is cunningly tailored to have (i) mass appeal, (ii) to be accessible to the average dupe, and (iii) to flatter his ego. By contrast, understanding reality or getting at the truth is an infinitely more demanding and sometimes even painful enterprise. Consider as a case in point the word survival as used by our propagandists. The nation survived, granted, but its best brains did not; neither did the best part of our own critical faculties. That is why when someone like Zarian, Shahnour, or Massikian tries to explain what really happened to us, we turn against him. That is also why I have trouble reaching Armenians who confuse ideology with theology, or politics with religion. Faith or a closed system of thought cannot be shaken by common sense and logic. Faith can only be replaced by another faith or closed system of thought. To put it differently, explanations work only with people with open minds. Hence the sorry spectacle of a sanctimonious prick or dealer in chauvinist crapola parading as a leader of men, defender of the faith, and savior of the nation.
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

i am all for revolutions! but not on revolutions that rely on foreign assistance. ours was a revolution of dupes who were taken in by the verbal commitments of the Great Powers.
our revolutionaries were dupes; and those who think of them as heroes are dupes of dupes. / ara

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Friday, December 07, 2007
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FROM THE NOTEBOOKS
OF A PESSIMIST
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The two most incompatible things in the world: dishonesty and sunlight.
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You ask me if I would be willing to die for my country. Allow me to introduce my answer by saying, the only reason my country has not yet killed me is that I have been beyond its reach.
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In an English literary magazine I read a book review by a historian that ends with the words: “How many policy-makers know their history well enough to learn from its lessons?” I should like to see such a sentence produced by one of our dime-a-dozen pundits who are masters of the blame-game.
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“I heard you have become a pessimist,” an old friend whom I have not seen for fifty years tells me. And I reflect that where illusions and lies are dominant, truth and reality will be anathema. When Krikor Zohrab predicted the Genocide, they said, “Zohrab effendi is exaggerating.” And because I question the honesty of our pundits and propagandists, I am thought of as a pessimist.
#

[Virgil]

Re: notes / comments

You being the most fanatical-ultra-nationalist here I am dumb founded that you are even bothering to talk to the most infamous self-hating pseudo-intellectual in the Armenian diaspora... Any way, to answer your question, the type this troubled individual represents was very happy and content living as "Christian Turks" in the Ottoman Empire. These filth primarily blame Armenian revolutionaries for the genocide. And it was due to these filth that the Turks were able to exterminate the Armenian presence from within Anatolia.

Well, let us see how he replies, essentially, he is stating that he thinks "revolution" was a "bad idea", but what would have been the alternative given the circumstances Armenians found themselves in, let him explain and we will go from there.