notes / comments

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Thursday, October 04, 2007
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MORE ON PATRIOTISM
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Our problem, which is also the world’s problem, is not the underworld but the overworld, i.e. the men at the top. When the underworld stages a massacre, like Al’s St. Valentine’s Day, its victims may or may not number a dozen. But when states commit massacres, its victims may number in the millions.
“What we need is solutions,” the average dupe is brought up to say, thus implying these solutions don’t yet exist, and they need to be discovered by a visionary, another messiah, who will appear among us out of nowhere and be our savior. This, needless to add, is a rumor created and publicized by our propagandists who are so used to playing the blame-game that it doesn’t even occur to them that they are our problem and the only solution is getting rid of them. Either that or to convince them to get out of their box by learning to think not as leaders of men (or mini-sultans and neo-commissars) but as servants of the people.
What do the people want? This is a question they don’t even bother asking perhaps because they already know the answer, which is strength through consensus, and peace and prosperity.
People who preach patriotism pretend to be ignorant of misguided patriotism, the kind that dehumanizes the enemy and ultimately legitimizes hatred and serial killers on a massive scale.
Some philosophers and creators of closed systems of thought like Saint Thomas Aquinas and Karl Marx may speak of just and unjust wars and revolutions. But as Toynbee points out somewhere in his monumental STUDY OF HISTORY, just wars have a way of becoming indistinguishable from their counterparts, because once put into motion they create their own rules and forget those formulated by the likes of Aquinas. As for revolutions, they succeed only in replacing one set of rascals with another.
Patriotism and wars may save the hide of a tyrant or increase the size of his dominions, but they are not the solution; and if they are, they have not solved any one of our problems.
This much said let me add that there is nothing wrong with patriotism in itself as long as it is a sentiment between you and your homeland. But when it is politicized and organized, it is invariably coupled with militarism, and the ultimate aim of all militarism is slaughter. And slaughter is slaughter. To say if my enemy slaughters my family it’s bad, but if I slaughter his it’s good, is the kind of moronic primitivism that rightfully belongs to the jungle.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Wednesday, October 03, 2007
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ON PATRIOTISM AND RELATED
ABERRATIONS AND ATROCITIES
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Patriots of all nations share three things in common:
(one) hatred of the enemy; (two) intolerance of dissent; and (three) a genetic predisposition to confuse indoctrination with education.
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When ideology enters a controversy, reason flies out the window.
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Patriots are the ideal dupes of tyrants.
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Whenever I step out of the box, I am called an enemy.
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In a patriotic environment anyone who refuses to be brainwashed is called a traitor.
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You know all you need to know? What if your need of flattery exceeds your desire for knowledge?
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There is collective wisdom and there is collective stupidity. You may now guess which is more popular.
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I should like to see our patriotic speechifiers discharge their empty verbiage on an odar audience instead of preaching to the choir.
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All ideologies generate their own jihadists.
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Never call a moron an imbecile; he may take it as a compliment and spend the rest of his life trying to live up to it. I have seen it happen.
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If straight talk offends you, blame your ego, not me.
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Our enemies speak in the name of the devil even when they speak in the name of god.
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A headline in today’s paper reads: “Study says half of fraud victims relied on trusting relationship.”
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Delivering patriotic speeches is like offering free drinks to alcoholics.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Tuesday, October 02, 2007
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WHAT I BELIEVE
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I believe in Socrates who said, “Of the gods we know nothing.”
I believe in Tolstoy who said you don’t have to believe in god to be a good Christian.
I believe in Gandhi who said god is truth, and truth is not a commodity that can be acquired, but an endless journey fraught with doubt, uncertainty, anxiety, agony, and despair.
I believe in Karl Barth who said heaven, hell, and immortality don’t have equivalents in the real world as we perceive it with our senses but are only metaphors,(*) in the same way that when Christ said “the kingdom of god is within you,” he was saying god and his kingdom are only dimensions within our psyche.
I believe in Sartre’s dictum “We believe that we believe but we don’t believe.” Which may explain Mother Teresa’s “dark night of the soul” that was not just an isolated episode, as described by Santa Teresa of Avila in her autobiography,(**) but lasted most of her life.
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WHAT I DON’T BELIEVE
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I don’t believe in a god that is swayed one way or another by human desires and prayers. A god, who allows a brute to rape and murder a defenseless child when he can put a stop to it, is not a god who takes sides or gets involved in human affairs. To say therefore that god is on our side is to blaspheme.
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TWO PRAYERS
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Be on my side. Teach me to think against myself.
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Bernard Berenson: “Give us this day our daily idea and forgive us all those we thought yesterday.”
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FOOTNOTES
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(*) In Karl Barth’s own words: “Resurrection means not the continuation of life, but life’s completion. The Christian hope is the conquest of death, not flight into the Beyond.”
(**)For more details, see “A Glimpse of the Underworld,” in THE BOOK OF MY LIFE by Teresa of Avila, translated by Mirabai Starr (Boston, 2007, page 251).
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[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Sunday, September 30, 2007
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“THE ART OF DIALOGUE”
BY JACK S. AVANAKIAN
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You begin by establishing your infallibility.
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The best way to avoid criticism and contradiction is to brag as forcefully as you can about how much you know. The more forcefully and aggressively you brag, the more invulnerable you make yourself. After all, who in his right mind would want to tangle with a foul-mouthed ignoramus?
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I once met an Armenian who asserted no one knew as much about Armenian history and culture as he did. When asked where he had studied these subjects, he replied, “In Zimbabwe.” (May have been Timbuktu or some other remote corner of the Dark Continent – please, don’t ask me to quote verbatim the utterances of an idiot). After that no one dared to question his expertise and infallibility. It worked. See what I mean?
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As children we are brought up on stories, myths, fables, legends, and fairy tales, and eventually become addicts of fiction. This may explain why as adults we develop a violent allergic reaction to facts. Hence our preference of propaganda and illusions, and our intolerance of straight talk.
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The Brits have a favorite slogan: “We have neither friends nor enemies, only interests.” An original and practical, even if cynical, approach to diplomacy? Not quite. I read the following in Polybius (2nd century BC): “Kings look on no man as a natural friend or foe, but ever measure friendship and enmities solely by the standard of expediency.”
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There are no new ideas and Hemingway is right: “Why plagiarize if you can steal?” And speaking of garbage-mouth braggarts and diplomacy: We brag about Mikoyan’s skill and cunning as a diplomat even though he engineered the Stalinist purges in Armenia that in its ruthless efficiency and number of victims has been rivaled only by Talaat’s purges of Armenian intellectuals in 1915). We brag about Byzantine emperors of Armenian descent even when they adopted an anti-Armenian foreign policy. We brag about our heroic revolutionaries who took over the Ottoman Bank in Istanbul at the turn of the last century even when this publicity stunt resulted in the massacre of several thousand innocent civilians.
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Where did our leaders, diplomats, and nationalist historians study their subjects, you may wonder. Since I don’t know everything there is to know about Armenian history and culture, I can only guess: it was either at the Saddam Hussein University in Basra or the Ayatollah Khomeini Center of Higher Learning in Qum. It may also have been somewhere in Libya, Namibia, or Botswana. Go ahead, I dare you to make a damn fool of yourself by questioning my infallibility!
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Monday, October 01, 2007
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TWO SAINTS AND
TWO THOUSAND RASCALS
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There are a number of good reasons why I prefer to emphasize the negative, one of them being, the positive has been repeated and instilled in us for so long that we have lost all awareness of our failings. So that we see more merit in pride, arrogance, and prejudice than in humility, objectivity, and tolerance.
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In the Prologue of her autobiography, Santa Teresa of Avila tells us it is at the request of her superiors that she is undertaking to write a book about her spiritual experiences. She goes on to say, she wished she had been asked instead “to make a detailed list of all the things I have done wrong in my life,” and “I would be so much more comfortable disclosing my imperfections.” All this in the first brief paragraph of her preamble. She goes on to describe herself as “wicked” and “incorrigible.”
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“Wicked” and “incorrigible”: Naregatsi’s LAMENTATIONS may be said to consist in endless variations on this theme. By acknowledging Naregatsi as our Shakespeare, we also express a tacit admiration for the “method in his madness.”
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I don’t expect our bosses, bishops, benefactors, charlatans, and commissars to behave like saints; neither do I want them to behave like rascals. If we want to improve things we can’t begin by saying we are God’s chosen and he has created us in his image, we are therefore models of perfection and the envy of the world. Another reason I emphasize the negative is that no matter how hard I try I don’t see any positives. If you do, ask yourself: Why is it that the world, including some Armenians, and our literature in general (and not just Naregatsi) does not agree with me?
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The mark of a good quotation is this: once heard or read it is not forgotten. One such quotation is by Santa Teresa of Avila, which I remember to have read twenty or thirty years ago: “Never submit your intelligence to someone who doesn’t have much of it himself.” Hence my inability to say “Yes, sir!” to our dupes, morons, and rascals.
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Re: notes / comments

Communism was defeated by capitalism, and fascism by democracy but both communists and fascists continue to have their share of dupes

Believe it or not, even democrats still have their own.

http://forum.armenianclub.com/showthread.php?t=9195

Hadn't had the opportunity to see a picture of yours until recently.

I must say you look very much like the quintessential democrat.

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

GOTT MIT UNS
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Propaganda may also be defined as whatever you were told as a child or at any other stage in your life when you were not yet capable to think for yourself. I am not suggesting everything you were told as a child is a lie, unless of course you define a lie as a fraction of the truth or a carefully edited version of the facts.
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The aim of propaganda is to create dupes.
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Anyone who thinks propaganda is positive and anything that contradicts it is negative lives in a parallel universe in the company of invisible creatures who are on his side. Remember the Nazi slogan GOTT MIT UNS (God with us).
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Propaganda cannot be contradicted because it is an extension of a closed system of thought. It can only be defeated by another closed system, but sometimes not even then. Communism was defeated by capitalism, and fascism by democracy but both communists and fascists continue to have their share of dupes today who are convinced their defeat is only a temporary setback.
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I’d rather be wrong than recycle propaganda. If I am wrong I can be contradicted, corrected, and exposed. But a fascist cannot be corrected in a fascist environment, or a communist in a communist environment, or a denialist in a denialist environment, and in the eyes of some we are all denialists, subversives, and infidels.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Friday, September 28, 2007
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COMING TO TERMS WITH REALITY
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Did Khorenatsi and Naregatsi have their critics? If they had readers, they had critics, and their critics had their critics who had their own critics… In our reality it’s critics all the way down. Nothing and no one stands on terra firma. Only the blind and the mute have no critics.
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When propaganda meets truth, truth is bound to lose. Propaganda has one advantage over truth: it flatters the ego. It tells Pepe le Pew, “You smell like roses,” and there is an el Pepe in all of us.
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I can save nothing and no one. Those who are on my side were already there long before they read a single line by me. Those who are against me will be against me even after they begin to agree with me. That’s because their pea-sized brain is no match for their inflated Goodyear-blimp sized ego.
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“Nutritious ain’t delicious.” I speak of carrots and broccoli, propaganda of Big Macs with fries.
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Somewhere C.G. Jung explains that our subconscious is more visible to others than to ourselves. Propaganda speaks to the ego and its assets; criticism focuses on the subconscious and its liabilities. Not exactly a formula that may lead to popularity and success.
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[zourna]

Re: notes / comments

Any reflections on death, Life after death at this stage of your life?
I'm not ridiculing just so you know.
It seems that it's out of a simpleton's league to put unscrupulous thoughts into words beyond the compass of criticism, mockery... Instead I'll stick around rousing questions and "casting aspersions" in the hope of ascertaining some of my doubts.
Hope you don't mind my stay here.

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Thursday, September 27, 2007
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EXPLAINING THE INEXPLICABLE
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For a long time I thought being Armenian allowed me to know all there is to know about Armenians, Turks, and the Genocide. I even wrote several books and reviewed hundreds more based on that false assumption. I know now that it is almost impossible for a victim to be objective about his victimizer. It is true, Turks behaved like racists when they punished the many for the crimes of a few. No doubt about that. But then, at the turn of the last century and even during World War II, which nation was not racist? Or which civilized and progressive nation today does not have racists among its people who in time of war may assume leadership positions and implement racist policies towards its minorities? I am not justifying, only explaining.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

ARA HOME PAGE click on:

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http://baliozian.blogspot.com/

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