notes / comments

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Thursday, August 17, 2006
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Armenians may be perennial losers, Saroyan says somewhere, but they are inextinguishable. After which he challenges the world to exterminate us, clearly implying that it can’t be done.
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What is it that makes of us perennial losers and why would anyone want to exterminate us? If Saroyan had the answers to these questions he kept them to himself, probably because he didn’t want to risk his popularity among his fellow Armenians, who idolized him together with Mikoyan and Gulbenkian.
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Since Saroyan could not read Armenian, he was probably unaware of the fact that our status as perennial losers has been a central theme of our literature from Khorenatsi and Yeghishe in the 5th Century to Zarian, Shahnour, and Massikian in the 20th.
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Had Saroyan known that only 7% of Gulbenkian’s money is earmarked for Armenians and Mikoyan played a key role in the Stalinist purges in Armenia during which our ablest men were systematically and ruthlessly exterminated, he could have said to the world, “No need to go out of your way to exterminate Armenians. Left to their own devices they will be glad to do it themselves.”
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[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Friday, August 18, 2006
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ZEN MOMENTS
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D.T. Suzuki, the author of a best-selling INTRODUCTION TO ZEN BUDDHISM, was having lunch in a restaurant when he was approached by another patron who interrupted his own lunch to ask for an explanation in layman’s terms of what exactly was Zen. After a brief moment of reflection, Suzuki replied, “Eat.”
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To the question by a journalist as to why he had devoted decades of his life writing his STUDY OF HISTORY in twelve thick volumes, Toynbee replied, “Curiosity.”
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When a factory owner once said to Karl Marx, “If I understand your economic theories correctly, all you want is our money.” Marx replied, “That’s right.”
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In addition to being one of the greatest composers of all time, J.S. Bach was also a celebrated virtuoso organist. Once when asked by an admirer what it takes to master such a demanding instrument, Bach replied, “You just press the keys.”
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These laconic replies leave a great deal unsaid (reminiscent of “Shut up! he explained”) but to the perceptive mind they speak volumes. Consider Suzuki’s “Eat,” as a case in point. In reality we never just eat. We also think, reminisce, plan, worry, imagine… Zen consists in doing what you are doing at any given moment and nothing else. This may sound easy but it is not. It is, as a matter of fact, as difficult as understanding, let alone, loving the enemy. And understanding the enemy is difficult because by understanding him we may begin to perceive the evil within us.
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[ARK]

Re: notes / comments

Thursday, August 17, 2006
****************************************
Armenians may be perennial losers, Saroyan says somewhere, but they are inextinguishable. After which he challenges the world to exterminate us, clearly implying that it can’t be done.
*
What is it that makes of us perennial losers and why would anyone want to exterminate us? If Saroyan had the answers to these questions he kept them to himself, probably because he didn’t want to risk his popularity among his fellow Armenians, who idolized him together with Mikoyan and Gulbenkian.
*
Since Saroyan could not read Armenian, he was probably unaware of the fact that our status as perennial losers has been a central theme of our literature from Khorenatsi and Yeghishe in the 5th Century to Zarian, Shahnour, and Massikian in the 20th.
*
Had Saroyan known that only 7% of Gulbenkian’s money is earmarked for Armenians and Mikoyan played a key role in the Stalinist purges in Armenia during which our ablest men were systematically and ruthlessly exterminated, he could have said to the world, “No need to go out of your way to exterminate Armenians. Left to their own devices they will be glad to do it themselves.”
#

That’s interesting! Could you tell me what your source is ., if these sayings of Saroyan were gathered in a book or in an article?
Thanks in advance.

Ps: Are you sure he could not write in Armenian?, I have a tape of him speaking Armenian pretty well.
Continue sending your some(not all of them!) interesting posts, but only if you could tell us the sources or if they belong to you?
And if there were some positive remarks(on us) besides, it'd be good.

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Saturday, August 19, 2006
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OF TRIBES, NATIONS, AND EMPIRES
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Once upon a time there were 42 (or is it 56) tribes in the Caucasus. If most of them have not survived it’s because, unlike us, they didn’t have what it takes, or so I was told as a child. Which meant that we were, if not the master race of the Caucasus, then something in that neighborhood. Now that I am no longer a child I know that these 42 or 56 tribes did not perish. They survive in us.
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Tribes, nations, and empires share this in common: they need constant foreign transfusions to survive because if left on their own they would end by moronizing themselves.
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Armenians come in all sizes and shapes. In the ghetto where I was born and raised there were Armenians who looked like Mongols, Tartars, Negroes, Germans, and so on, but they all spoke Armenian and identified themselves as Armenian because in a tribal or ethnic environment most people tend to identify themselves with the dominant minority, the way we did in the Byzantine Empire, and after that in the Ottoman and Soviet Empires, and the way we do today in America.
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In the Byzantine Empire, for example, some of the most powerful imperial dynasties and their military leaders were Armenian or part Armenian, but their foreign policy was consistently anti-Armenian.
Smart Armenians know that the only way to get ahead in the kind of world we live in is to serve the interests of those in power even if they happen to be our mortal enemies. Grub first, then ethics.
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One of our elder statesmen once told me that some of the key players in our organizations are not Armenians but Turks. I didn’t believe him. All I can say today is that after six centuries of cohabitation it’s not easy to tell a Turk from an Armenian.
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Race, color, creed – these are poorly defined terms that according to scientists and historians are nothing but figments of our imagination.
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What could be more Russian than Russian literature? And yet, if you take a closer look, you may discover that some of the greatest and most influential Russian writers were not Russians. Pushkin was a Negro, Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn Ukrainians, Pasternak and Brodsky (two Nobel Prize winners) xxxs. Something similar could be said of all literatures. Most French writers are not French but xxxs (Montaigne, Barthes), Italian (Zola), Irish (Beckett), Rumanian (Ionesco), Armenian (Adamov).
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How many Armenian writers are Armenian? I don’t know and I don’t care to know because what I admire in a writer is not his race, color, or creed, but his work, his ideas, his worldview, his style, his humanity, none of which recognizes any man-made boundaries.
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[jgk3]

Re: notes / comments

Pushkin was a Negro

Forgive my ignorance on these writers as I know nothing about them. I was startled however by this statement... A famous russian writer who's a negro?
So I ran a search and discovered that he had negro lineage, but his portraits clearly showed many "white" features. Perhaps the label "Negro" assigned to him was done to make his image appear more exotic in the Russian scene? In any case, as you said, race, colour and creed do not matter, it's what you have to offer that counts. Hopefully one day I'll come across some of his litterature.

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

That’s interesting! Could you tell me what your source is ., if these sayings of Saroyan were gathered in a book or in an article?
Thanks in advance.

Ps: Are you sure he could not write in Armenian?, I have a tape of him speaking Armenian pretty well.
Continue sending your some(not all of them!) interesting posts, but only if you could tell us the sources or if they belong to you?
And if there were some positive remarks(on us) besides, it'd be good.

if you google Saroyan, you will come across many (most of them positive) quotations. Saroyan was an American dissident, but an Armenian who loved Armenians but hated his own children..../ara

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Sunday, August 20, 2006
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Some of my very best friends (no poetic license intended) have become my worst enemies (ditto) because they disagreed with something I said. So much for Armenian friendship, tolerance, dialogue, and Ottomanism….
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One can speak of facts and nothing but facts and one can lie; all one has to do is ignore other equally valid and important facts.
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Since I was brainwashed to believe I was smart, I thought I was being smart even when I behaved like an idiot. That’s what propaganda does to innocent and defenseless minds.
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Readers, who have programmed themselves to disagree with you, will contradict you even when they agree with you. It is almost as if they preferred to disagree with themselves rather than agree with a mortal enemy.
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When it comes to writing about Turks, the challenge for an Armenian is to be readable by Turks without running the risk of being dismissed as another unforgiving victim with a score to settle.
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Anyone can persevere if he thinks he has even a remote chance to win. The trick is persevering when you know you will lose.
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Monday, August 21, 2006
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THE FIRE NEXT TIME
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Since they couldn’t save us from the massacres, they now want to make up for it by convincing the world that we were massacred. First they bite more than they can chew and now they expect us to chew on an imaginary carrot…as the massacre continues.
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There is a tendency in all of us to pretend to know more than we do, except when we run the risk of testifying against ourselves. And yet, it is in our efforts to avoid confessing that we confess.
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If you are going to plead “Not guilty,” make sure not to sweat bullets. The body language of bad liars invariably contradicts their words.
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Propaganda is the body language of nations.
Even as they assert Armenians victimized them, they go about victimizing Kurds and anyone else who dares to deviate from their propaganda line.
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To be born again sometimes consists in replacing one racket with another. I am personally acquainted with an academic who taught atheism in Yerevan, but after the collapse of the USSR he came to America, saw the light, and is now making a comfortable living as a minister praising the Lord from Whom all blessings flow.
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The more you sermonize, speechify, and editorialize the less you act. Action and palaver are mutually exclusive. I speak from experience. Palaver is my racket.
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The Chinese say of the 36 (or is it 63) ways to fight, running away is the best; and we say of the 36 or 63 ways to solve a problem, procrastination is the best. That’s because Father Time is the universal problem solver and God is an Armenian.
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A headline in today’s paper reads: “Arab leaders discuss rebuilding Lebanon.” Either they are jumping the gun or they have so much money that they don’t know what to do with it…a clear-cut case of the triumph of hope over experience, or the triumph of illusion over reality, or the triumph of garbage over the Word, or that which is said to have been at the beginning of all things.
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Tuesday, August 22, 2006
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ON FUNDAMENTALISTS,
FANATICS, AND RIFFRAFF
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When it comes to ideologies, religions, and metaphysical systems in general, a truly civilized and tolerant person does not say, “I am right,” but “I could be wrong.”
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Dogmatism and intolerance promote the kind of mindset that says, “My belief system is the only true one and all others are heresies”; or “My values and ideas are positive and the values and ideas of those who disagree with me are negative and should be anathematized.”
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Muslim fundamentalism is the central theme of Oriana Fallaci’s LA FORZA DELLA RAGIONE (The Force of Reason), now available in English (New York, Rizzoli, 2006). Far more dangerous than Muslim terrorism, Fallaci writes here, is Muslim immigration because “Muslims breed like rats.” She quotes the Orientalist Turcophile Bernard Lewis to the effect that in less than a hundred years “Europe will be numerically dominated by Muslims.” Further down she argues that there is not and cannot be such a thing as a moderate Muslim because all Muslims believe in the suras of the Koran, five of which clearly state that infidel dogs don’t deserve to live. The real ambition of all Muslims, she explains, is to dominate Europe, which is not a recent development but a policy that has a millennial history.
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Fallaci is fair enough to also point out that fundamentalism is not an exclusively Muslim aberration and that all closed systems of thought (like Mussolini’s Fascism, Hitler’s National Socialism or Nazism, and Stalin’s Bolshevism) spawn fundamentalist riffraff who adopt an ideology or religion only to legitimize their murderous instincts and bloodthirsty disposition.
*
When Marx said he was not himself a Marxist, he meant to say that he was not a killer but a thinker whose theories attempted to explain a fraction of reality that had been misinterpreted or neglected by his predecessors. By contrast, Stalin’s commissars were not thinkers but killers in search of a belief system that would allow them to murder with a clear conscience. Something similar could be said of our own phony patriots and partisans who pretend to be on a mission from God and armed with that conviction they feel authorized to silence or insult anyone who dares to contradict them. But as Fallaci says and repeats like a mantra, “Their insults are my medals.”
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Wednesday, August 23, 2006
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OF CABBAGES AND KINGS
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It is said of Augustus II, The Strong, king of Poland (1670-1733) that his illegitimate children numbered exactly 354 and some of his many daughters became his mistresses who also had affairs with their half-brothers. Since he ruled by divine right and with the approval of the Church, my guess is, his conduct did not attract media attention, his approval rate didn’t go south, and no one dared to whisper the word impeachment in his presence. If you consider the abuse leveled at Clinton and Woody Allen, you may have to conclude that the masses and the media today have higher moral standards than the Good Lord and his representatives on earth.
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What do we know about our own kings and “betters” in general? How many Armenians know that Calouste Gulbenkian believed fornicating with young girls would prolong his life?
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I remember to have read somewhere that old age has three consolations: power, wealth, and fame – provided of course one is not saddled with impotence, Alzheimer’s, and scandal. Tolstoy had more fame than anyone else, except perhaps Napoleon and Elvis, but he had a very miserable old age. In his eighties he ran away from home and died in the middle of nowhere in the house of a total stranger.
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We expose ourselves as dupes and unreliable witnesses when we expect people to believe that our leaders don’t make mistakes, they don’t lie, mislead and propagandize, lust for power is a vice alien to them, and butter wouldn’t melt in their mouth or anywhere else.
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[axel]

Re: notes / comments

Muslim fundamentalism is the central theme of Oriana Fallaci’s LA FORZA DELLA RAGIONE (The Force of Reason), now available in English (New York, Rizzoli, 2006). Far more dangerous than Muslim terrorism, Fallaci writes here, is Muslim immigration because “Muslims breed like rats.” She quotes the Orientalist Turcophile Bernard Lewis to the effect that in less than a hundred years “Europe will be numerically dominated by Muslims.” Further down she argues that there is not and cannot be such a thing as a moderate Muslim because all Muslims believe in the suras of the Koran, five of which clearly state that infidel dogs don’t deserve to live. The real ambition of all Muslims, she explains, is to dominate Europe, which is not a recent development but a policy that has a millennial history.
*
Fallaci is fair enough to also point out that fundamentalism is not an exclusively Muslim aberration and that all closed systems of thought (like Mussolini’s Fascism, Hitler’s National Socialism or Nazism, and Stalin’s Bolshevism) spawn fundamentalist riffraff who adopt an ideology or religion only to legitimize their murderous instincts and bloodthirsty disposition.
*
When Marx said he was not himself a Marxist, he meant to say that he was not a killer but a thinker whose theories attempted to explain a fraction of reality that had been misinterpreted or neglected by his predecessors. By contrast, Stalin’s commissars were not thinkers but killers in search of a belief system that would allow them to murder with a clear conscience. Something similar could be said of our own phony patriots and partisans who pretend to be on a mission from God and armed with that conviction they feel authorized to silence or insult anyone who dares to contradict them. But as Fallaci says and repeats like a mantra, “Their insults are my medals.”

Quoting "italian" journalist Oriana Fellatio tells us much about who you actually belong with (for those naive or ignorant enough not to have figured already).
(http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3?id=11611)

I wonder how you make a living off your sh*tty "writings" whose format (short paragraphs not exceeding a few lines) and content is very well tailored, one has to credit you for that, to the gullible audience of forums in search of easily digestible "prêt-à-penser" (ready-to-think texts). Quoting a few authors (not Oriana Fellatio, she obviously doesn't fall in that category) most people here have not read gives you the aura of an intellectual and thus some authority to infuse your rehashed globalist propaganda into the minds of naive and incult readers (alas the majority). Repetition is key here. One must recognize you are quite faithful to the fundamental principle that a lie repeated a hundred times is more efficient than a truth stated once (one of Dr Goebbels' favorites)

One exercise your readers should attempt is to try to sum up your thoughts by identifying the few recurring themes. Strangely enough, the latter fully coincide with the agenda of the "cosmopolites".

I am not sure I already asked the question. Are you sponsored by Soros' OSI (www.osi.am) or is there some kind of neo-c*nt fund that supports your "work"?

[Armenian]

Re: notes / comments

I wonder how you make a living off your sh*tty "writings" whose format (short paragraphs not exceeding a few lines) and content is very well tailored, one has to credit you for that, to the gullible audience of forums in search of easily digestible "prêt-à-penser" (ready-to-think texts). Quoting a few authors (not Oriana Fellatio, she obviously doesn't fall in that category) most people here have not read gives you the aura of an intellectual and thus some authority to infuse your rehashed globalist propaganda into the minds of naive and incult readers (alas the majority).... I am not sure I already asked the question. Are you sponsored by Soros' OSI (www.osi.am) or is there some kind of neo-c*nt fund that supports your "work"?

Or... He is just an ignorant, disgruntled, self-hating individual unwittingly doing the work of our enemies. I only post in the 'comic' thread so others can see that not all Armenians are brain-dead.

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Friday, August 25, 2006
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TWO SCHOOLS OF CRITICISM
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The two most popular schools of Armenian criticism are (one) censorship by editors, and (two) verbal abuse by faceless and anonymous bullies.
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Editors exercise censorship because they have no choice but to follow a policy set by their publisher, whose aim is to maximize the number of subscribers and advertisers. If one or more readers or advertisers take a dislike at a writer or disagree with his views, that writer becomes persona non grata, that is, bad for business, and a publisher’s business, like America’s, is business. Gone are the good old days in Istanbul when an idealistic editor like Krikor Zohrab (1861-1915), who was also a highly respected author, statesman, lawyer, and a contemporary of Sultan Abdulhamid II and Talaat, who could say: “A newspaper is not a chameleon. It should not change its colors to please readers. It is bound to make enemies. I would measure the moral success of a newspaper by its willingness to make enemies.”
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As for faceless and anonymous bullies who are active mainly in discussion forums on the internet: the reason why they refuse to identify themselves is that they are afraid by other anonymous and faceless bullies who may do to them what they do to others, which may be interpreted as an awareness of the fact that what they are doing is worse than wrong, it is also cowardly. There is only one kind of coward who willingly admits to being one, namely, a coward who is also a self-satisfied fool. Next time these bullies think of verbally abusing someone anonymously, I suggest they ask themselves the following question: Why should anyone take seriously the words of a coward and a fool who is not embarrassed to admit to being both?
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Am I wasting my time on riffraff, as some of my friends like to remind me? Let me quote Zohrab again: “So-called important and unusual events leave me cold. I prefer to unmask the hidden meaning of every-day occurrences which tend to be ignored by the majority.”
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