notes / comments

[Azad]

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"the reality of the Armenian genocide results from nothing more than the imagination of the Armenian people."
Anti Armenian Racist Bernard Lewis (joo)

[arabaliozian]

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Thursday, November 15, 2007
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BOOK REVIEW
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IDEAS: BRILLIANT THINKERS SPEAK THEIR MINDS. Edited by Bernie Lucht. Fredericton, N.B. 2005. 376 pages.
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In the 19th century, nationalism was thought to stand for freedom and independence, writes Bernard Lewis in one of the essays collected here. This in theory. In practice, “they [freedom and independence] have often proved to be mutually exclusive.” He goes on: “The ending of imperial domination and the establishment of independent national regimes all too often meant the replacement of foreign overlords by domestic tyrants, more adept and more intimate and less constrained in their tyranny.”
This may explain why under the sultans we enjoyed a Silver Age of literature, and under our own petty tyrants, its decline and death. I speak of literature not only because it happens to be close to my heart but also because free speech (without which literature is unthinkable) has always been a reliable index of a free and civilized society.
Further down Bernard Lewis writes: “In the old Ottoman Empire, when a new sultan succeeded to the throne, he was greeted by the crowds, which cheered him and shouted, “Sultan, don’t be proud, God is greater than you.” Compare that greeting with our own unspoken slogan: “Capital is greater than god.”
In another essay, titled “The Secular Messiahs” by George Steiner, we read: “In any struggle one begins to become like one’s opponent.” Hence the Ottomanism of our Turcocentric pundits. Or our own secular mini-, or rather, pseudo-messiahs who expect us to believe, on the day they convince the Turks to come clean, they will save the national honor and usher in a new Golden Age.
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For more details on 20th-century domestic tyrants, see TALK OF THE DEVIL: ENCOUNTERS WITH SEVEN DICTATORS, by Riccardo Orizio, translated from the Italian by Avril Bardoni (Prince Frederick, MD 2003, 280 pages). A good subtitle of this fascinating little book could have been “Studies in Sadism and Megalomania.”
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[arabaliozian]

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Wednesday, November 14, 2007
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HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE
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To kill the enemy without guilt, he must first be dehumanized and whenever possible demonized. This is what the Turks did to us during World War I; this is what the Germans did to the xxxs during World War II; this is what African-Americans do whenever they voice the slogan “White man is the devil”; this is what Sartre did when, speaking of the human condition, he delivered the dictum “Hell is other people”; and this is what we do today when we speak of Turks or, for that matter, fellow Armenians who disagree with us.
There is only one way to demonize another and that’s by projecting the evil that is within us.
To avoid facing reality by admitting the evil that is within him, man has invented the blame-game. If we can blame our misfortunes on others, we absolve ourselves of all responsibility and we are born again as exemplary human beings without blemish. That is why the Turks cannot acknowledge the genocide, and that is why our self-righteous dividers cannot compromise and reach a consensus even as they speechify on patriotism or nationalism and practice tribalism.
The blame-game allows us to ignore the evil that is within us by concentrating on the evil that is within the enemy, even when the enemy happens to be our brother. Hence Zarian’s dictum “Armenians survive by cannibalizing one another.”
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[arabaliozian]

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Tuesday, November 13, 2007
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THE ORIGIN OF ALL SINS
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5:45 AM
What if we never quite outgrow the infantile misconception that we are the center of the world? What if most of our problems and aberrations stem from our inability to realize that so is everyone else? What if belief systems, ideologies and their perversions, such as racism, nationalism, and fascism, enjoy ready and wide acceptance because they are extensions of this misconception? My God, my Country, my Leader, Mein Fuehrer, Heil Hitler!
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We sometimes forget that misconceptions are luxuries obtained at a very high price. Consider racism or the myth of the Chosen People or the Superior Race. By dehumanizing “inferior” races we dehumanize ourselves. Hence the spectacle of a superior race behaving like inferior swine. What if nationalism is nothing but collective narcissism? What if fascism and intolerance of criticism and dissent are based on the phoniest of all assumptions, namely that we are beyond criticism, that is to say, infallible, which is an attribute of God and of those who speak in His name even as they go about doing the devil’s work?
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6:30 AM
I read the following quotation of the day by W.R. Inge in our local paper: “The proper time to influence the character of a child is about a hundred years before he is born.” In other words, you cannot have a normal or a healthy child in a sick environment and an educational system with a perverted value system.
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10:20 AM
Writes Orhan Pamuk: “Living as I do in a country that honors its pashas, saints, and policemen at every opportunity but refuses to honor its writers…” (See OTHER COLORS: ESSAYS & A STORY [New York, 2007] page 237.) Armenian translation: Living as I do in an environment that honors its bosses, bishops, and benefactors at every opportunity but refuses to acknowledge even the existence of its writers unless they are murdered by the likes of Talaat and Stalin, or they are dead, buried, and permanently silenced…preferably in a previous century…
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[arabaliozian]

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Monday, November 12, 2007
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THE LIGHT OF REASON
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It has been observed that on recovering their sight, blind men take refuge in dark rooms. You may now draw your own conclusions.
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An Armenian poet and academic from Yerevan, during a visit to the U.S., made fun of our Turkish surnames. Later, he was exposed as a prominent member of a mafia dynasty. What does that prove, you may ask. Simply this: a man will cling to any flimsy idea to assert his superiority over his fellow men.
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To believe someone in authority means to allow him to recreate you in his own image.
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When a friendly forum moderator once asked me if he should delete an offensive comment dealing with my person, I said, “No. Free speech allows everyone the same right to make an ass of himself in public.”
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All political leaders have adversaries and the chances are what these adversaries say about them is more objective and therefore closer to the truth than what they and their partisans say about themselves.
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Insults have a longer lifespan that compliments perhaps because they are more solidly rooted in reality.
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"Our political parties have been of no political use to us.
Their greatest enemy is free speech"
Gostan Zarian

[zourna]

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"Zilli" sounds thoroughly familiar, but what about "Cheltiks"?

[arabaliozian]

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Sunday, November 11, 2007
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WORSE THAN A CRIME
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“It is worse than a crime, it is a blunder.” The French diplomat who delivered that line was not talking about our genocide but he might as well have been. It was a major crime on the part of the perpetrators, no doubt about that, but it was also and above all a colossal blunder on ours – a blunder in so far as we let it happen by making ourselves vulnerable to them, by freely choosing, as it were, the worst case scenario, and this notwithstanding the many warnings, previews, trial-runs, and rehearsals of 1894, 1895, 1896, and 1909. And what is even more incomprehensible to me is that to this day we ignore or cover up that aspect of the Crime perhaps because we care more about our image than about understanding reality, as if political leadership meant leading the people to hell and pretending it’s for their own good, or like shepherds, leading the sheep to the slaughterhouse after protecting them from wolves. Don’t think for a single moment that I am making unreasonable demands on our leadership. Neither am I asking for greatness or vision or prophetic insight. We don’t need learned scholars or eminent historians or charismatic leaders to point out where we went wrong. What we need are honest men with common sense willing to place the interests and welfare of the people above their contemptible little egos. This is not something that requires two or three generations, as our pro-establishment dupes like to say. This is a decision that can be taken in an instant. And speaking of two or three generations: once in a while I watch the Armenian hour on TV emanating from Toronto, mercifully only once a week. Most of it consists of videos of half-clad and heavily made-up girls dancing and gyrating provocatively in the manner of their best American counterparts. And I cannot help reflecting that if these zilli cheltiks can learn to mimic the worst that the West has to offer, why can’t our leaders learn to emulate the best or even the average?
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"Our political parties have been of no political use to us.
Their greatest enemy is free speech" Gostan Zarian

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Saturday, November 10, 2007
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THE NATURE OF NARRATIVE
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What we call reality is an infinite number of facts and factors some of which go back to the origin of the universe. A narrative, by contrast, is an artificial construct that consists of a carefully (even if unconsciously) selected number of facts and factors with a specific aim in mind, such as a plot, a thesis, or the truth, or rather a version of it. Even a so-called objective and impartial narrative is based on a very limited number of facts that are emphasized at the expense of others that are ignored or covered up or shunted aside as marginal or irrelevant. This may explain why there are as many versions of the past as there are historians. This may also explain why man cannot create a single worm but he has created ten thousand gods.
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For every belief system there will be another that contradicts it.
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For every truth there will be ten thousand doubters and twice as many liars.
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In politics, fiction is referred to as propaganda.
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If you have a receptive audience, it’s amazing the amount of b.s. you can dish out and get away with it.
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In a book titled ON BULLxxxx, a contemporary American philosopher asks: “Is the love of truth itself merely another example of bullxxxx?”
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MEMO TO OUR EDITORS
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In the Op-Ed page of our paper this morning a headline reads: “Press freedom is still just a dream in some countries.”
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[arabaliozian]

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Friday, November 09, 2007
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PAPER TIGERS AND DRAGON SLAYERS
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Our revolutionaries in their Ottoman phase may plead not guilty on grounds of inexperience, naïveté, the overconfidence of youth, or even insanity. But what is one to make of their present Turcocentric phase and after a century in which to ponder and reflect on their blunders?
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If I were to define our Turcocentric pundits, I would say they are paper tigers that like to identify themselves as dragon-slayers, or harmless aghbers who think Armenian history begins and ends in 1915, or Wizard-of-Oz types full of sound and fury signifying vochinch…
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The greatest concern of a man in power is to establish his legitimacy perhaps because he knows it to be a figment of his febrile megalomaniacal imagination.
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And speaking of megalomania: to quote the Bible is not the same as quoting God. Neither Moses nor the prophets were gods. They only spoke in His name. So did Mohammad. If God ever writes a book, there will be one and only one version of it. Because God neither rewrites nor edits, neither does he abridge or expand.
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Once in a while, to cut me down to size, our philistines like to remind me that I am not the only Armenian writer who has been rejected or ignored by his fellow Armenians. To which I can only say, “That is why I speak with the strength of many.”
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[arabaliozian]

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Thursday, November 08, 2007
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OUR PROBLEMS & THEIR SOLUTIONS
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You tell a self-assessed leader of men that he couldn’t even lead a mutt to the nearest fire hydrant, or a self-assessed genius that he doesn’t even qualify as an inbred moron, and you will not only fail to convince them but you will also acquire an enemy for life. I speak from experience.
We may not know or understand one another but there is one thing we can say with some degree of certainty and that is, we are not who we think we are and no matter how hard we try we will never be.
Identity, image, meaning, truth – these are poorly defined concepts that we assume to be certainties within our grasp. Hence the endless controversies, arguments, misunderstandings, conflicts, and ultimately, wars and massacres. From Diogenes in search of an honest man in broad daylight, to semanticists studying the meaning of words, and philosophers exploring the meaning of meaning: we swim in a sea of uncertainty and we expect to be believed even when we don’t believe.
The hardest part about solving a problem is not finding its solution but acknowledging its existence. A problem that is (a) clearly stated and (b) acknowledged is almost solved. These two conditions will never be met in an environment dominated by sermonizers and speechifiers who speak with a forked tongue, and ghazetajis whose central message is, we have no problems because there is nothing wrong with us. The problem, you will be informed, is not with us but with the Turks. Armenians who know better however will tell you the Turks are not our real problem; our real problem is the Turk within. The Turks divided and ruled us for six hundred years. Who divides us today if not the Turk within? If we have failed to solve our problems so far it may be because our speechifiers, sermonizers, and ghazetajis, have consistently refused to acknowledge its existence.
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