notes / comments

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Sunday, April 30, 2006
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It is said that if you have mastered the art of learning, a single letter of the alphabet will teach you more than a thousand classics.
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There is only one way to get even with detractors and that’s by using them as sources of inspiration.
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An Armenian was presented with a Japanese samurai sword so sharp that it would slice an apple by simply touching it, as if by magic. The Armenian returned the gift with the words: “Thanks, but I have no use for it. My tongue is sharper.”
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I have understood the nature of radical evil not by observing it in others but by analyzing it in myself.
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Two of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century were Heidegger and Sartre – the first supported Hitler, the second Mao.
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Wisdom is not a commodity that you look for and, if you are lucky, you find. Wisdom is something that you never find.
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Searching for wisdom is like peeling an onion. After you have peeled off all the layers of prejudice, ignorance, stupidity, evil, and fear, you end up with nothing.
#

Monday, May 01, 2006
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Some of our most fundamental assumptions and certainties have been foisted on us at a time when we could not yet think for ourselves. There you have the source of most conflicts.
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We all want the same thing, to be happy; and we all behave as though the only way to be happy is by making others miserable.
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All our problems stem from the fact that narrow tribal interests are placed above national interests; and all international problems stem from the fact that national interests are placed above the interests of mankind. Result? War and massacre.
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Killing a patriotic act? That’s like saying rape is an act of compassion.
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Cruelty parading as wit – that’s how Freud defined humor. If true, humor must be one of the most civilized ways of disarming aggression.
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TODAY’S QUOTATIONS
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On Karajan (a German of Greek descent): “…despite being narcissistic, nasty and Nazi, he was a superb conductor.”
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Saint-Beuve: “Speaking the truth is the best revenge.”
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Vassily Grossman (Russian writer): “We are not people. We are xxxx.”
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Lenin: “The capitalist is so greedy that he will buy even the rope with which we will hang him.”
#
Tuesday, May 02, 2006
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One reason vegetarians in the animal kingdom are perennial victims of carnivores is that they develop a consensus only to run away.
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A career criminal in today’s paper: “I find the outside more scary than being inside.” He ought to know. The outside is at the mercy of people like him. Need I add that some of the worst serial child molesters have been Catholic priests, and some of the most dangerous serial killers have been statesmen?
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Benefactors share their money, writers their ideas. As a community, or a collection of tribes, we respect both money and ideas in equal measure, and the idea we respect most is that money is infinitely more important than ideas.
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What do we know about benefactors? Only how much they give. They are an extension of their capital. I once heard a benefactor deliver a short cliché-ridden speech in which he emphasized the importance of identity and culture. The same benefactor to a poet: “Desert people like Arabs may need poets. We don’t!” And to a writer: “I hire and fire people like you.”
#
Wednesday, May 03, 2006
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Turgenev to Dostoevsky: “Russia’s only contribution to civilization has been the samovar and the knout – and even they were invented by somebody else.” Elsewhere ( I think in SMOKE), one of his characters says, if Russia were to disappear tomorrow, no one would miss it – and to think that he was talking about the Russia of Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky…. But Turgenev being Turgenev, I am interested in anything he has to say, even when what he says is against my own convictions. Because I for one would miss Russia, and if not Russia than Russian literature, including Turgenev’s intensely Russian novels, especially FATHERS AND SONS.
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Speaking of Pushkin: Reading him in English, including Nabokov’s English, is like viewing a cadaver. It has been a mystery to me why so many Russian writers worship him. Today I read a few of his lines in a Greek translation and I saw the light and felt the magic – the cadaver came to life, and what life! So much so that I am now planning to teach myself Russian.
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Joe Queenan: “A good percentage of the British population are vulgar dimwits who care about nothing but shopping, alcohol, football and Posh Spice’s navel.”
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Armenian writers don’t dare to speak freely about their fellow Armenians except in private conversations, correspondence and diaries. As a result the average Armenian continues to cling to such clichés as first nation this and first nation that….
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Thursday, May 04, 2006
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If you believe in something because you want to believe in it, or because it is to your advantage, or because it enhances your image and flatters your vanity, you will be closer to the truth if you believe the exact opposite.
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There is only one way to see through lies and propaganda and that’s by learning to think against yourself.
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At an early age I sensed that working for a living meant doing what others tell you to do even when these others happen to be idiots motivated by greed; and since I could not hide my feelings, I was constantly being fired, laid off, demoted, and forced to resign. As a result, I never made more than minimum wage.
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Society moronizes you because it divides men into employers and employees, or masters and slaves (Hegel), or capitalists and workers (Marx).
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Society tells you to gain the whole world even if it means losing your soul.
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You are never at your best when you do what is expected of you, because to conform to someone else’s wishes means to sacrifice part of your freedom, your self, and your deepest impulses.
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Three things to remember: (i) perennial victims are easy to manipulate; (ii) where there are victims there will also be manipulators; (iii) manipulators do not manipulate against their own interests.
#
Friday, May 05, 2006
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MORALITY: IN THEORY AND PRACTICE
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In theory, the aim of morality is to establish what’s right and wrong, or what’s good and evil. In practice, it’s to misrepresent wrong as right, and evil as good.
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Until very recently, to justify their racism, Americans invoked god. Children were educated to believe god is a racist, and racism was not a prejudice but one of god’s commandments. And if you think this type of perversion of morality was peculiar only to Southern hillbillies, consider the fact that at one point in his career, Mahatma Gandhi, that apostle of love, truth, and non-violence, called the British “satanic.” It probably never occurred to him that on the day the British quit India, his own people would engage in satanic wholesale massacres – Hindus slaughtering Muslims, and Muslims slaughtering Hindus by the million.
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I was myself brought up to believe that Turks massacred Armenians because all Turks are bloodthirsty, Mongoloid, subhuman barbarians; and I said as much in my first book, and was outraged when a Canadian critic called me a “racist” in his review of the book.
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One of the most important undertakings of a state is to demonize the enemy. Children are brought up to believe the enemy eats babies for breakfast. To suggest otherwise, saying that the enemy is a human being like us, is seen as an act of treason.
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Which is why arguing with a brainwashed Armenian can be as difficult as arguing with a brainwashed Turk. To paraphrase Lenin, a brainwashed person is a brainwashed person regardless of nationality. Which is also why only perverts use morality to assert moral superiority.
#
Saturday, May 06, 2006
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TURKEY’S JOYCE
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James Joyce called himself “Shame’s Voice” because he exposed what his fellow countrymen tried to ignore, cover up, or pretend it does not exist, namely, Irish intolerance. In his own words, “Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.” Our own Joyce, Gostan Zarian, echoed this very same sentiment when he said, “Armenians survive by cannibalizing one another.”
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It is not at all unusual for a murderer to begin by pleading not guilty. If the evidence against him is solid, he may plead self-defense. When more evidence to the contrary is presented by the prosecution, he may plead murder two, or justified homicide, or manslaughter. The same applies to perpetrators of genocide, with one difference. No nation in the history of mankind has ever invented a genocide, and having done so, believed in it for a hundred years.
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Orhan Pamuk: Turkey’s Shame’s Voice.
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Sunday, May 07, 2006
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As a boy my ambition was to be a writer, but my idea of a writer then was as different from what I do today as a virgin is from a bordello madam.
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I don’t mind admitting that I have been a source of disappointment to a great many people. But I have been a source of greater disappointment to myself.
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The slaughter of millions of innocent civilians is a serious matter that should not be forgotten. But it is equally wrong to make of it a collective obsession if only because our credibility is not enhanced if we project the image of monomaniacs.
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Choose yourself as god’s chosen and run the risk of being slaughtered by someone who decides to choose himself to be chosen by a superior god.
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“I know better” is an enemy of “I could be wrong.”
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The Internet is the quintessential democratic medium. It allows imbeciles and hooligans as much space as Nobel-Prize winners.
#
Monday, May 08, 2006
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WHAT I HAVE BEEN SAYING
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We are a people like any other people, and most of our problems have been self-inflicted. Because I have been saying this I have become an outcast. Nothing new in that. All in a day’s work. Thus it was in the past and thus shall it be in the future.
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To those who object and say, “In what way was the Earthquake self-inflicted?” May I remind them of the maxim that is common knowledge among architects and contractors around the world: “Earthquakes don’t kill people, buildings do.”
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And I remember, shortly after the Earthquake, when asked why the construction of buildings in Armenia, a well-know earthquake zone, was not closely supervised, a Moscow official with an Armenian last name stated on the evening TV news: “We don’t consider that our responsibility.”
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My mother is fond of quoting an Armenian saying that goes something like this: “Even if responsibility of blunders were made of very expensive fur, no one would want to wear it.”
#
Tuesday, May 09, 2006
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REVOLUTIONARIES
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Somewhere in Dostoevsky’s THE POSSESSED (sometimes also translated as THE DEVILS) a character says that when the revolution is fully achieved, “Cicero will have his tongue cut out, Copernicus will have his eyes put out, and Shakespeare will be stoned.”
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Like politicians everywhere, revolutionaries too speak with a forked tongue: what they say is not always what they mean, and it is not at all unusual for them to say the exact opposite of what they mean. So that when they speak of freedom, they may mean the freedom to kill, when they speak of equality, they may mean suppressing excellence, and when they speak of fraternity they may have fratricide in mind.
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If revolution were a religion, Cain and Torquemada would be two of its major role models and saints. In the eyes of some “useful idiots,” Stalin and Mao continue to be revolutionary saints.
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“Wrong words are hard to take back,” reads a headline in our paper today. So are wrong actions and policies, but they can be easily justified by revisionists, and there is a revisionist as well as a useful idiot in all of us.
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There is also a bourgeois. Like the revolutionary, the bourgeois may cling to ideas that have lost their validity, and both the bourgeois and the revolutionary may qualify as dupes or useful idiots of ideas that are eminently corruptible to the point of becoming their own contradictions.
#
Wednesday, May 10, 2006
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ON THE RADIO
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People from all walks of life were being asked about their phobias. Some said death and dying, others old age and illness. An author said writer’s block. On the whole predictable stuff except for the woman who said: “I am fifty years old and I’m afraid I’ll never have sex again.”
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MY FAVORITE PUNCH LINE
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When an old Indian predicted a bad winter, they wanted to know how he could tell, and he replied: “White man makes big wood pile.”
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SPEAKING FROM EXPERIENCE
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Experience may teach us to avoid mistakes that we have made, but not all mistakes, of which there are an infinite number.
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Thursday, May 11, 2006
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MARIA IORDANIDOU
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Ever since I read Lesley’s Blanch’s SABRES OF PARADISE – one of the very few books that I have read three times (the other two being Thomas Mann’s MAGIC MOUNTAIN and Arnold J. Toynbee’s STUDY OF HISTORY(volume xii): RECONSIDERATION), I read everything I can lay my hands on about the Caucasus. Which is why, the only reason I read Maria Iordanidou (an unfamiliar name to me until last week) is that the title of one of her books is HOLIDAYS IN THE CAUCASUS. Immediately after I also read another book by her titled LIKE CRAZY BIRDS.
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Maria Iordanidou may not be a giant in world literature, but unlike most giants, she is incapable of writing a single boring or unreadable line. She writes about her life in Istanbul at the turn of the last century, an extended stay in the Caucasus during World War I and the Russian Revolution, her residence in Alexandria, and final move to Athens on the eve of World War II.
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In A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN, Virginia Woolf writes that since women can’t express themselves fully and authentically, they cannot take a rightful place in a literary tradition which has been shaped by men. Reading Maria Iordanidou is discovering the obvious fact that liberation consists in being oneself, and if one is honest, one’s authenticity and originality will shrine through every sentence one writes.
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Maria Iordanidou doesn’t write as a writer but as a human being. As a result, her humanity speaks louder than any literary tradition you care to mention. And though she writes about Turks, Armenians, Russians, Arabs, and Greeks, she judges no one. Which may suggest that most of our judgments about people are based on hearsay evidence.
#
Friday, May 12, 2006
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When Canadian writers speak of survival they mean surviving the influence of the United States. There is even a popular brief history of Canadian literature titled SURVIVAL. When Armenian writers speak of survival they mean it literally -- surviving first the sultans and commissars, and after them our own mini-sultans and neo-commissars.
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In his DECLINE OF THE WEST, Spengler tells us only “awake” people make history, the rest exist in subhistory. James Joyce said that history was a nightmare from which he was trying to awake. Whenever we make the Genocide our central concern we betray our unspoken wish to relive the history (or nightmare) that was inflicted on us.
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By saying and repeating that half of Turkey is probably half Armenian, I hope to reduce by half our hatred of Turks. An absurd hope, because we are capable of hating our fellow Armenians as intensely as we hate Turks. I speak from experience, both as provider and consumer of hatred. As for those holier-than-thou phonies who say they hate no one, they only want justice: I challenge them to explain Gostan Zarian’s dictum, “Armenians survive by cannibalizing one another.”
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There is an unspoken principle in our post-Genocide literature which goes something like this: “Criticize everyone, including fellow writers, but leave possible sources of income, such as bosses, bishops, and benefactors, alone.” Case in point: In his OLD DREAMS, NEW REALITIES (Beirut, 1982), Antranik Zaroukian analyzes mercilessly the motives of a totally harmless 83-year-old Armenian priest in Moscow who does his utmost to be of assistance to him, but says nothing remotely critical about the Catholicos who allowed Etchmiadzin to be run by KGB agents.
#
Saturday, May 13, 2006
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THE NATIVES ARE RESTLESS
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Vassilis Vassilikos: “There is Midas, whose touch turned everything to gold, and there is anti-Midas, whose touch turned everything to crap.”
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If I knew what I know today, I would have chosen to write for a more tolerant bunch, like the Taliban of Afghanistan or the Sunnis in Iraq.
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After being exposed to the venom of my readers, I can’t help thinking: If they can be so nasty towards a harmless scribbler, what are they capable of doing to a defenseless Turk? -- (in their selfless search for justice, of course).
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Being honest in a dishonest environment is nothing short of a heroic act. Perhaps one of our greatest misfortunes is that we have produced many more martyrs than heroes, and one party’s hero is another’s…anti-Midas.
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Somewhere Antranik Zaroukian writes that an Armenian hates tyranny but he considers it a privilege to serve a tyrant.
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To the hooligans who insult me I will only say, once upon a time I too was young and foolish and said things that I now regret.
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Sunday, May 14, 2006
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OF xxxxROACHES
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One xxxxroach is enough to spoil all the food in a four-star restaurant. Likewise, one garbage-mouth hooligan is enough to alienate and silence all the moderates in a discussion forum.
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OF ACADEMICS
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Our academics tend to be liberal in odar politics and conservative in our own. I knew an Armenian-American academic who once refused to accept an invitation to the White House during the Reagan administration, or so he claimed but, as the editor of an Armenian literary periodical, he was thoroughly pro-establishment; perhaps because, for an academic, to be remotely critical of our establishment would amount to biting the posterior that lays the golden egg. During the Soviet era, I remember, another one of our academics visited Armenia, after which he published his impressions in which he verbally chastised only the waiters of the hotel where he stayed. It seems they were too slow for His Excellency.
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OF SUBSERVIENCE
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Antranik Zaroukian is right: Armenians may hate tyranny but they consider it a privilege (or good business) to serve tyrants. The xxxeler of a murderous African tyrant once made headlines in our weeklies simply because he happened to be an Armenian.
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OF HISTORY AND SUBHISTORY
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To use past tragedies (as our academics do) in order to avoid facing present problems is not learning from history but condemning ourselves to continue existing in subhistory.
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OF BANKS
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Anonymous: “What does a bank do? It gives you an umbrella on a sunny day and takes it back when it pours.”
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Monday, May 15, 2006
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MORE ON ACADEMICS
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An Armenian-American academic once justified his pro-establishment stance to me by saying he had a family to support. If our academics cannot teach courage, truth, and honesty to the next generation, in what way are they better than Soviet academics who pretended to believe all dissidents were psychopaths in need of medical treatment, or Nazi academics who subscribed to the idea that all xxxs were subhuman, or Turkish academics today who have allowed themselves to be brainwashed to believe that their politicians don’t lie and the Genocide is a figment created and promoted by their enemies?
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To the academics who say, “I have at no time classified anyone as subhuman, neither have I justified the exile or execution of a single human being,” I say: You have not done these things not because you are a compassionate or fair-minded man but because the laws of the land won’t allow it. The question you should ask yourself is: “If I were an academic in a fascist environment, on whose side would I choose to be?”
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In his book, OLD DREAMS, NEW REALITIES (Beirut, 1982) Antranik Zaroukian has this to say on Anastas Mikoyan: “What has this man contributed to the welfare of his fellow Armenians? The short answer to this short question is, nothing!” As a matter of fact, it is less than nothing, because Mikoyan was the architect of Stalin’s purges in Armenia in the 1930s during which some of our ablest men were shot or sent to the Gulag. And Mikoyan did these things not because he was evil or full of hate, but because he had a family to support.
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To those who tell me I see only the dark side of our collective existence, I say, where the dark side is ignored or covered up, someone should take it upon himself to speak of it.
#
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
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DECONSTRUCTION
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The first and most important aim of leadership is to convince the people they are in good hands.
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The more backward the people, the more easily they are convinced (make it, brainwashed).
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For thousands of years kings claimed to rule by divine right. Which meant, to question their judgment was to offend god – a crime punishable by death.
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Stalin did not believe in god. He didn’t have to. He made himself one.
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If we call the Middle Ages the Dark Ages, we should call the 20th Century the Darker Ages.
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Are we in good hands? Have we ever been in good hands? Has mankind ever been in good hands?
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What if everything we know is based on hearsay? What if on the day we learn to think for ourselves our present belief system would collapse like a house of cards?
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Our “betters” tell us we are better and we believe them. But are we? What if the Turks refuse to plead guilty to the charge of genocide because they have been brought up to believe (very much like us) that as morally superior people they are incapable of committing crimes against humanity?
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We curse Talaat and brag about Mikoyan because at a time when we couldn’t think for ourselves we heard someone say Talaat was a hateful murderer and Mikoyan an able diplomat.
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At the cost of repeating myself: What if we are a people like any other people, including Turks? They had sultans, we have mini-sultans.
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There is nothing new in what I am saying, which is based on a technique of cultural analysis called deconstruction originated by Jacques Derrida, a French philosopher who died two years ago.
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Deconstruction tells us, what we know – or think we know – is an extension of who we are and where we are coming from, and what we call thinking consists in confusing reality with illusion and truth with half-lies and propaganda.
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We call inevitable that which could have been easily prevented if we had been less prone to confuse fact with fiction. Which means that, our version of history would be radically altered if we did not think of our leaders as our “betters.”
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What if the only reason you don’t like what I say is that what I say does not flatter our collective ego?
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It has been said of Derrida that, “if one measure of success is the number of skins under which one manages to get, then Derrida was a certifiable genius” (Julia Keller).
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If I believe in deconstruction, why don’t I begin by deconstructing my own theories? My hope is that someone else will do exactly that, provided of course he does not take us back to the Dark or Darker Ages.
#
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
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MEMOIRS OF AN IDIOT
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Once upon a time I was an idiot whose sole ambition in life was to be admired for his superior wisdom. If some of my gentle readers are to be believed, I haven’t change.
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WRITERS
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I know many more writers who have given up writing than writers who continue to write. If I continue to write, am I a utopian daydreamer or an obstinate idiot?
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NATIONALISM AND PATRIOTISM
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The evil of nationalism consists in justifying murder in the name of patriotism; and the evil of patriotism consists in allowing itself to be easily exploited and misled by nationalism.
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KNOWLEDGE AND IGNORANCE
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The more you know, the more vulnerable you make yourself to the ignorance of others.
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OF COMPLEXES
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It is not at all unusual to meet a person with an inferiority complex who has nothing to feel inferior about, and a person with a superiority complex who fully qualifies as the scum of the earth.
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DEFINITIONS
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An opportunist is one who will fight injustice only if he is himself a victim, which also means that he will support any power structure that leaves him alone.
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A conformist is one who applies labels on others but never on himself, and he thinks as he does because those whose judgment he respects think the same way, which he assumes to be the only right way.
#

[Armenian]

Re: notes / comments

There is a lot of nonesense in this thread. But the commentary below takes the cake.

Baron Baliozian, if anything, Armenians are not racist enough. In my humble opinion, we are "Otaramol." Also, hating turks does not qualify as being racist. Armenians hate Turks as a matter of honor, revenge, logic and survival instincs. And if Greeks called Armenians "Turkish Gypsies," then heck yeah, I would hate Greeks as well.

Also, this is no time to be "critical" of Armenians. Your beloved Diaspora is dying in front of your eyes, yet you seem content just writing self-hating jibberish. Our fledgling Republic is under constant Turkic threat, yet you are oblivious and careless. At the very least, engage in constructive criticism. Its easy to complain and that's what Armenians, like you, do best.

Wise men like you, we can do without.

Whenever I raise the subject of Armenians and racism I am invariably attacked by our racists as anti-Armenian and even pro-Turkish - because anything remotely critical of Armenians is thought of as pro-Turkish in our environment.

Are Armenians racists?

Let me begin by asking: Am I a racist? I was brought up as a racist. I hated all Turks. I hated Greeks too (because they called us "Turkish gypsies"). I thought of the offspring of mixed marriages as bastards. I thought of the West as morally inferior and of Americans as a bastardized nation.

Because Shahan Shahnour's grandfather was Greek, his patriotism and Armenianism were questioned again and again by our pure-blooded partisans, he was even physically assaulted, and his character vilified with such intensity in our press that he eventually assumed a new name (Armen Lubin) and gave up writing in Armenian.

I have relatives in the U.S. (and I don't mean Alabama or Mississipi) who believe Blacks are inferior and all interracial couples degenerates. Once a good friend of mine, whose mother is an Azeri, was called a "Turkish xxxxx" by one of our dedicated partisans.

Are we racists? Let the evidence speak for itself. Are we justified in being racists? No, because our racism alienates friends, and we have friends everywhere - among Americans, Greeks, Kurds, xxxs, and even Turks (half of whom may well be half-Armenian).

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Thursday, May 18, 2006
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READING BETWEEN THE LINES
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On the last page of Kafka’s THE TRIAL (1925) the central character, identified only with the initial K., is executed for no reason at all. After reading it, Anna Akhmatova is reported to have said, “He was writing about us.” Kafka has been called a prophet of the Holocaust and Stalin’s Terror. As far as I know, no one has ever suggested that he may have been a historian of our genocide, which preceded both the Holocaust and the Terror.
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To be a dissident means to be against intolerance regardless of nationality. In that sense, Orhan Pamuk is neither anti-Turkish nor pro-Armenian, but anti-intolerance in its Turkish as well as Armenian manifestations.
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I doubt if there is a single Armenian or Turk today who would readily admit to being intolerant. That’s another thing we share in common with them: unawareness.
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Friday, May 19, 2006
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CRITICS
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When a controversial 63-year old judge in Quebec by the name of Andree Ruffo was forced to resign, she made the following declaration to the press: “If you study anthropology, history or sociology, it’s clear that when someone arrives who disturbs things and who is different, you have to drive them (sic) away. If you look at what I’ve been criticized for, it’s that I haven’t fallen in line, that I haven’t been kind and that I haven’t been able to change.”
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I did not choose to be a critic. It was reality that thrust the role on me. At one time or another I have wanted to be many things – from a garbage collector to a concert pianist – except a critic. To this day I approach my task with some degree of reluctance and distaste.
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I was brought up as a good Catholic. I was trained to kiss hands. I must have kissed the hands of hundreds of priests, bishops, and one cardinal. On the day I decided to kiss no more hands or any other part of the male anatomy I was born against as a human being and became an enemy of all forms of subservience.
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Saturday, May 20, 2006
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THE TRIUMPH OF MEDIOCRITY
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The best an Armenian writer in the Diaspora can hope for himself, writes Antranik Zaroukian in his OLD DREAMS, NEW REALITIES (Beirut, 1982) is to be an elementary schoolteacher, provided of course he engages in some serious brown-nosing – I am now paraphrasing and abridging several paragraphs. But again he is smart enough to put the blame only on flunkeys and the leave the philistines at the top alone. Reading between the lines, one gets the impression that Zaroukian and the philistines responsible for creating this situation are member of the same society of mutual admiration.
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Zaroukian also fails to note that he may well be the last Armenian writer of the Diaspora, and that nowadays it is the academics that do the brown-nosing by ignoring our present reality and concentrating their labors on medievalism and massacrism.
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To those who say, I repeat myself, I have two questions: If reality repeats itself, why shouldn’t I? and, Who is more guilty – those who cry “Fire! Fire!!” or the arsonist?
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I read the following in the NEW YORK TIMES today: “The suppression of dissent, while troubling anywhere, is unforgivable to people who work at newspapers.”
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Perhaps I should also add that we believe and practice dissent all the time, not to say obsessively, but dissent directed only at Turks.
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If the Turks are the bad guys, we must be the good ones, and as Hollywood teaches us, good guys are beyond criticism.
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

There is a lot of nonesense in this thread. But the commentary below takes the cake.

Baron Baliozian, if anything, Armenians are not racist enough. In my humble opinion, we are "Otaramol." Also, hating turks does not qualify as being racist. Armenians hate Turks as a matter of honor, revenge, logic and survival instincs. And if Greeks called Armenians "Turkish Gypsies," then heck yeah, I would hate Greeks as well.

Also, this is no time to be "critical" of Armenians. Your beloved Diaspora is dying in front of your eyes, yet you seem content just writing self-hating jibberish. Our fledgling Republic is under constant Turkic threat, yet you are oblivious and careless. At the very least, engage in constructive criticism. Its easy to complain and that's what Armenians, like you, do best.

Wise men like you, we can do without.

dear gentle reader and anonymous friend:
why anonymous?
are you afraid of your own identity?
you remind me of an e-mail i received once:
"I am proud of being an armenian."
signed "anonymous"

ask yourself this question?
why is it that in russia armenians were called "cowardly"?

ask yourself another question:
what if all our misfortunes are results of internecine conflicts and divisions, compounded by fear of free speech and cowardice? / ara

[Armenian]

Re: notes / comments

dear gentle reader and anonymous friend:

why anonymous? are you afraid of your own identity? you remind me of an e-mail i received once: "I am proud of being an armenian." signed "anonymous" ask yourself this question? why is it that in russia armenians were called "cowardly"? ask yourself another question: what if all our misfortunes are results of internecine conflicts and divisions, compounded by fear of free speech and cowardice?/ara

Dear friend, this comment of yours just proved that you are indeed going senile.

Your age, nor your penmenship, will get unconditional respect from me. I have other standards when it comes to assesing talent and respecting individuals. Keep writing your self-hating fairytales. I am certain your seed will not pass on as Armenians.

A sad day in the diaspora indeed, when we have intellectuals like you.

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Monday, May 22, 2006
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After identifying himself as a competent judge of character, one of my gentle readers takes it upon himself to inform me that I am a self-hating Armenian devoid of all talent.
If I have learned anything from life is that nothing can be as misleading as assessing oneself. I speak from experience. I don’t mind admitting that, once upon a time when I was young and foolish, I too assessed myself as a good judge of character and trusted in the objectivity and accuracy of my assessments until the day I met a loud-mouth inbred moron who had assessed himself as a genius.
I am more than willing to concede that I have no talent whatever, and that all my notes and comments are those of a very ordinary person who uses only his common sense. Does that mean what I say is without merit? Does that also mean only those with special talents have a right to testify or voice their opinions? If so, who among us will come forward and declare himself qualified to separate the sheep from the goats?
As for being a self-hating Armenian: if I hate anything it’s being at the mercy of self-assessed leaders (be they bosses, bishops, benefactors, or academics) who feel authorized to tell who is and is not qualified to exercise his fundamental human right of free speech.
And to suggest that only self-hating Armenians criticize their fellow Armenians is to imply that Armenians, being the Chosen People, are beyond criticism. In the words of a wise Englishman, “If you believe that, you’ll believe anything!” – including your own assessment of yourself as a connoisseur of character and talent.
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