notes / comments

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Saturday, September 08, 2007
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DIPLOMACY 101
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“Don’t get mad, get even.” (American folk wisdom)
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“Just the facts, ma’am.” (Jack Webb)
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“He who loses temper, has wrong on his side.” (Chinese saying)
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If, god forbid, you happen to be one of those rare Armenians who starts foaming at the mouth whenever Turks are mentioned, I have one or two suggestions that you may find of some use.
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Never get emotionally involved in an argument because when the gut speaks louder than the brain, reason exits, unreason enters, and unreason might as well be synonymous with insanity.
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One of the fundamental principles of diplomacy that is common knowledge even among non-diplomats with a single-digit IQ is that, if you want something, anything, from someone, anyone, one way to get it is by pretending you neither want it nor need it. And the best way of not getting what you want is to make it clear that what you want is the most important thing you ever wanted in your life and that if your demands are not fully and unconditionally met, your life will no longer have any meaning.
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When engaged in negotiation, you either do so from a position of strength or weakness. If weakness, do not give in to the temptation of losing your equanimity or resorting to name-calling, if only because name-calling is easy and more often than not totally ineffective. History is on my side on this. After a century of name-calling, what have we accomplished? Number of victims: not a single resurrection. Reparations? Not a single red cent. Territorial claims? Not a single inch of dirt. On the other hand, if you think you are negotiating from a position of strength or moral superiority (because god and truth are on your side) no need to go down into the gutter if only because doing so may expose your claim of moral superiority as bogus.
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You may do whatever your little heart desires and minuscule brain dictates in the privacy of your own home and behind closed doors, but in public or on an open discussion forum on the internet, try to be cool, objective, and impartial; and if you can’t be cool, be silent. For there is more wisdom in silence than in empty verbiage.
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To the question, “Why is it that you don’t always practice what you preach?” I can only say, I am not a very good sharpshooter. I aim high when I write, but I don’t always hit the bull’s eye when I live. Isn’t that a common failing in all sermonizers, speechifiers, and, sometimes, scribblers?
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[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Friday, September 07, 2007
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MORE ON THE SAME SUBJECT
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If you think I have a mighty low opinion of our political leaders and their dupes, you are absolutely right. And if you want to know more on this subject, I suggest you have a talk with one of our leaders – assuming you can find one willing to come down from his high jackass. Once in my salad days I did exactly that and published the resulting give-and-take in one of our periodicals. That’s when the doodoo hit the ventilator. Since the leader of my interview was a Tashnak, one of his Ramgavar counterparts reacted by writing a vitriolic letter to the editor. My Tashnak responded by accusing the Ramgavar of being more Bolshevik than Stalin.
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To say a good Armenian is one who respects and trusts our leaders, amounts to saying to qualify as a good Armenian it is necessary to be a brain-dead dupe. What’s the difference between brain-dead and dead? And to think that they have the temerity to accuse me of harboring anti-Armenian sentiments.
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I am more interested in the Turk within us than the Turk within Turks. As for the Armenian within the Armenian: I do hope one of these days I shall have the privilege and good fortune of making his acquaintance.
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Speaking of politicians and jackasses, there is a well known and widely quoted exchange between a Republican presidential candidate (I forget his name) and a heckler that goes something like this:
HECKLER: My father was a Democrat, my grandfather was a Democrat, I am a Democrat.
CANDIDATE: If your father were a jackass, and your grandfather were a jackass, what would you be?
HECKLER: A Republican!
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[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Thursday, September 06, 2007
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TOWARDS A RAPPROCHEMENT
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Homo sapiens is a selfish and self-centered creature. Selfless specimens like Mother Teresa exist, but they are the exception rather than the rule, and you can count them on the fingers of one thumb. And speaking of thumbs: a small cut on our little finger matters more to us than the death of ten or a hundred thousand peasants in China. When the Turks count their victims, even two of them are two more than our two million. We may all believe in our statistics but we also know that one man’s believer is another’s infidel.
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Nothing could be more abysmally naïve than to say, their politicians lie but ours speak the truth and nothing but the truth. “A bourgeois is a bourgeois, regardless of nationality,” Lenin once said. So is a politician.
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If Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Mussolini continue to have their defenders and admirers today it’s because “even the gods cannot compete with human stupidity.”
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I trust our politicians and their version of the past as much as I trust theirs. And by extension, I trust an academic who enjoys political support as much as I trust a politician. Most politicians are either lawyers or operate like lawyers. They emphasize the strengths in their own case and expose and concentrate on the weaknesses of the opposition. Lawyers do it for money, politicians do it for power; and it is power and money that make the world go around, not love and truth. Love and truth may be favorite subjects for Sunday sermons but they don’t carry much weight beyond the sacristy, and sometimes not even as far as the sacristy. In politics as well as in may other lines of work (from organized religions to advertising and public relations) concepts like objectivity, honesty, and impartiality are not thought of as assets but as career-wrecking liabilities. I speak from experience.
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A wise man once said, “the lie on the lips becomes the lie in the soul” -- another way of saying, if in our formative years we are not brainwashed by vested interests, we end up brainwashing ourselves. Which is why, after being exposed to our own propaganda year in, year out and ad nauseam, I don’t mind giving the opposition a chance for the sake of breaking the monotony more than anything else. And if cooperation and harmony are ever established between them and us, it will be because of individuals who place their humanity above their nationality, individuals moreover who are fed up playing the role of dupes to their speechifiers and sermonizers with an ax to grind.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Wednesday, September 05, 2007
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PROBLEMS AND THEIR SOLUTIONS
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An Armenian is an Armenian
Another Armenian is another Armenian
And never the twain shall meet.
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Most of our problems (like the one stated abnove) are in the convolutions of our brain – assuming of course we have one, a daring assumption at best. On the day we express a willingness to engage in dialogue, as opposed to issuing dogmatic statements, a great many of our problems will collapse into a heap of dust and will be gone with the wind.
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Whenever I have a choice between blaming the world or myself, I choose myself. It is within my power to change myself. As for changing the world – let me begin by saying I have no desire to add megalomania to my long list of failings.
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The aim of the blame-game (or ascribing our failings to others) is to adopt a passive stance and do nothing, except perhaps to xxxxx and lament – two activities in which we excel.
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The most frequently unspoken Armenian sentiment: “Because you are wrong, you deserve to die.”
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Instead of saying “you are wrong,” we should say, “Obviously, I failed to explain myself.”
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Doubt is more civilized than certainty.
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I like today’s quotation by Erich Fromm in our paper: “Man’s main task in life is to give birth to himself.” Elsewhere a famous Hollywood actor is quoted as having said, “How do the bad people among us end up our leaders?” It can happen to all of us, I guess.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Tuesday, September 04, 2007
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ON SOLIDARITY
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It all began, or so we are told, with our impassable mountains, deep valleys, and long winters: a clear-cut case of landscape shaping the profile of a nation, or the unthinking ruling the thinking. Then came ruthless empire builders from the East – actually, also from the North, West, and South – who, as everyone knows by now, rule by dividing. What we are not told in this context is that the barbarians divided us because we allowed ourselves to be divided or, since we were already divided long before they appeared on the scene, we saw nothing unusual in staying that way.
I once heard an Armenian-American academic say that an Armenian queen bequeathed her kingdom (or is it queendom?) to her two sons by dividing it into two equal parts – good for family harmony, bad for the survival of the nation. Had the Ottoman sultans adopted this system, Turkey would have been wiped off the map by now. If the Ottoman Empire lasted 600 years (surely, a record in the history of mankind) it’s because the sultans adopted a system that would prevent all future wars of succession: they strangled with a silk cord all but one son (a silk cord because it was against the law spilling royal blood) – bad for the innocent victims of strangulation, good for the empire. The West being slightly ahead of the East in matters of civilized conduct solved this problem by establishing the principle of primogeniture whereby the eldest son inherits the throne.
Who divides us today? The only answer I can come up with is our DNA – another instance of the unthinking ruling the thinking, or the gut dictating to the brain.
I ask again, who divides us today? Consider the parable of the two Armenians and three churches on a desert island: who divided them? Surely, not the solitary palm tree on the beach, or the remains of a crab being washed by the blue waves of the ocean.
Our leadership and us: another instance of the unthinking ruling the thinking (if you will forgive the overstatement). If this is not a popular subject with our editors and ghazetajis, it may be because they are manipulated by our leadership as surely as we were under the sultans and commissars, and because subservience is in their DNA. They are as carefully selected, trained, tamed, and housebroken as the pet dogs of the wealthy.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Monday, September 03, 2007
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ON BIAS
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As children we are taught a set of rules. As adults we discover that others have been taught different sets of rules. Still others recognize no rules, or if they do, they are more readily disposed to break them with an easy conscience.
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More often than not the certainties that are instilled in us do not even qualify as lies or fallacies; they are no better than absurdities. Consider the certainties in the name of which we are willing to kill and die: I belong to a superior race; I am a member of the chosen race; my god is the only true god; the mud of my homeland is better than any other mud, including the mud on the other side of the mountain or river. But there are other absurdities that we are not even taught but which we take for granted, such as, I am the center of the world. There you have the source of all bias.
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If your certainties outnumber your doubts, you may more easily qualify as a barbarian than a civilized man.
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The relation between what we say and what we think is about the same as that which exists between who we are and what we pretend to be.
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If I am wrong, I will be the first beneficiary. If I were a believer, I would go down on my knees four times a day and say, “Please, Lord, prove me wrong so that I may live happily ever after.”
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[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Sunday, September 02, 2007
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SUSPICIOUS BUGGERS
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For a good number of years my Ramgavar relatives and friends thought I was a Tashnak, and my Tashnak friends kept their distance because they thought I had gone to the highest bidder. The first time my anti-partisan stance was questioned, I was outraged. Now, whenever an Armenian believes what I say, I immediately assume I am dealing with a brown-noser who wants his book reviewed or translated. Living among Armenians does that to you. It’s easier for an Armenian to understand Turks than fellow Armenians. I have never heard an Armenian say, “I don’t understand these Turks.” But every other Armenian is convinced anyone who disagrees with him has something of the renegade and the traitor in him – he is, in short, an enemy of the nation, perhaps even a Kemal-worshiping hireling of Ankara.
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The problem with Abel was that he trusted Cain; and the problem with Cain was that he was an anti-Semite, the first of the species, if you don’t count the serpent. About the real identity of the serpent, there are a number of theories. If you ask an anti-American Armenian from the Middle East or a crypto-Stalinist from the former Soviet Union, he will tell you the serpent was a CIA agent, perhaps even a McCarthyite.
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De Gaulle once complained that Frenchmen were difficult to govern because they produce 174 varieties of cheese. He should have counted his blessings. It’s a well-known fact that whenever two Armenians are stranded on a desert island, they build three churches, the third being the one they don’t go to.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Saturday, September 01, 2007
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IN PRAISE OF TOLERANCE
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Frequently spoken lies:
“I know better,”
“I am better,”
“I am right,”
“You are wrong,”
“I know it for a fact.”
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Man is prone to confuse fact with fiction. Case in point: for millions of years men believed the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, and when someone came along and dared to say otherwise, he was threatened with torture and death…all in the name of a god who is truth and love.
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A dogmatist is one who explains things he doesn’t understand.
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There is a realm somewhere in which everything that doesn’t make sense here makes perfect sense there. But so far man has failed to discover the location of that realm.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Friday, August 31, 2007
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JUNGLE
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Readers may be divided into several distinct categories:
Children who are spoiled brats and think they are smart enough to understand everything they read, including matter intended for adults.
Adults who are advanced cases of arrested development.
Self satisfied egocentric narcissists who are convinced (or have been brainwashed to believe) we live in the best of all possible worlds, we never had it so good, we are in good hands, god in his heaven above is on our side, and anyone who disagrees with them is an enemy of the nation who should be hanged from the nearest tree. (You would think the only way for an Armenian to subscribe to this Leibnizian school of thought is to expunge our past).
The smart-ass know-it-all garbage mouth bully who operates on the self-serving assumption that his brand of perverted patriotism justifies racism, violations of human rights, fascism, and massacre – if not literal than verbal. (This type is rare but because he suffers from chronic verbal diarrhea and loves the effusions of his own outpourings, he gives one the impression of being not a single nut but an entire unruly mob.)
And then there is the well-meaning but essentially timid reader who doesn’t want to get involved, adopts a passive stance and thus promotes and legitimizes the Ottomanized hooligans among us. We owe the jungle of our Internet discussion forums to him more than anyone else.
And if I speak with some degree of authority on these different types of reader it’s because at one time or another I have been all of them.
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[crusader1492]

Re: notes / comments

My own sources from Canada tell me that you are clinically insane.

And let me ask you a question...

Is this the seat you produce with your "intellectual" crap?

Hehe...It is rare that I come to this thread (why would i want to subject myself to Ara B's garbage.

I only do it when I see that you have posted...I know I'm in for a laugh.