notes / comments

[Anoush]

Re: notes / comments

Friday, July 13, 2007
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NAPOLEON AND GANDHI
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They fascinate me because they pulled the rug from under potentates, that is to say, bloodsucking mediocrities parading as leaders of men and representatives of God on earth. The means they employed were different but the end result was the same.
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Only moronized people idolize leaders. Like all rules, this one too has its exceptions – Lincoln and FDR come to mind. But they too sat on a throne of blood. As for Napoleon and Gandhi: I see them less as leaders and more as destroyers of emperors, kings, princes, maharajas and similar riffraff.
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I am not in the business of solving problems but in exposing those who stand to lose the most if our problems are ever solved.
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Paul Tillich: “Life could not continue without throwing the past into the past, liberating the present from the burden.”
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Ara

Let me expand a bit your thoughts on the above third paragraph the way I understand it and add some of my own.

Extreme nationalists who are precoccupied by trying to solve our problems who go to extreme lengths for them by Btw; creating new parties, fighting against the existing parties in power, party leaders who draw masses to spew hate on an opposing party, fighting other opposing parties fiercely.

Then suddenly one day they are awakened to see that all or most of our major problems have vanished. Then at that particular point and time they simply wouldn't know what to do with themselves and their time. They will then be and feel in complete and huge emptiness and at a loss with themselves as there will be nothing more to fight about.

But isn't it part of life and living for a man to think, have and behold different and opposing idealisms with other men? Whether they are different ethics, mores, inner thoughts or simply seeing matters in a different perspective. Then at that particular moment isn't it the nature of men to fight for his thoughts and idealisms and to see them to win against an opposing one or a party? Then at that point in time a man will want to draw masses of people who practically think alike to win over the other. Especially when the opposing party would be a dangerous one for his nation or country, so he thinks.

Let me add that there is no man and no party that rules who will ever be fault free. Surely it is known that small men and small thoughts create small mistakes and but grand individuals or leaders will make huge mistakes; because it's inevitable. The greater the task, the bigger the mistake.

Now about Mr. Paul Tillich's writings. It's true that human psychologists stress for this to be; but it is in the human nature from time to time to think about the past. Though not dwelling but to learn from past mistakes.

When it comes to a nationality however; it would certainly be extremely unjust in a worse sense for that nationality and the vast murders of that nationality's anscestors for the coming generations to simply forget and let bygones be bygones. Especially when we are amidst denialists who go to extremes in paying mega dollars to government officials to erase such a huge and a horrendous crime against humanity.

Anoush

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Saturday, July 14, 2007
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DEFINITIONS
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Politics: the art of manipulating the masses by means of lies.
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Literature: sharing perceptions.
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Chauvinist: a fanatic with 20/20 vision for his enemy’s failings and total blindness for his own.
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Turcocentrism: a school of thought that says our most important concerns, hence our welfare, inner balance, and identity, revolve around Turks.
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Which reminds me of a friend who, after urging me to change my last name, delivered the following comment: “As long as you bear a Turkish surname, you admit to having been branded by them.” And I thought: If only it were that easy to erase six centuries of subservience and all traces of Ottomanism by acquiring a new name!
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[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Friday, July 13, 2007
*********************************************
NAPOLEON AND GANDHI
**************************************
They fascinate me because they pulled the rug from under potentates, that is to say, bloodsucking mediocrities parading as leaders of men and representatives of God on earth. The means they employed were different but the end result was the same.
*
Only moronized people idolize leaders. Like all rules, this one too has its exceptions – Lincoln and FDR come to mind. But they too sat on a throne of blood. As for Napoleon and Gandhi: I see them less as leaders and more as destroyers of emperors, kings, princes, maharajas and similar riffraff.
*
I am not in the business of solving problems but in exposing those who stand to lose the most if our problems are ever solved.
*
Paul Tillich: “Life could not continue without throwing the past into the past, liberating the present from the burden.”
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Wednesday, July 11, 2007
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WHAT IS ARMENIANISM?
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Observe an Armenian who has lived in the United States for sixty years and you may notice that he is more American than Armenian. Now consider what happened to us after six hundred years of life in the Ottoman Empire, and you may begin to understand why Turks prefer to call us as “Christian Turks.”
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One way to classify an Armenian-American is to say that after being Ottomanized he has been Americanized. That doesn’t mean Americanization expunged Ottomanization. Identity is not a single-layer cake.
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Armenianism: what is it exactly? I don’t know. But I do know that everything our propagandists tell us is wishful thinking and lies. We are not what we pretend to be. Nobody is!
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[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Tuesday, July 10, 2007
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MEMO TO OUR TURCOCENTRIC PUNDITS
AND THEIR READERS
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If talk of Turks, massacres, and atrocities will make you a better person, more understanding and compassionate, by all means, go ahead, knock yourself out, make a career of it. But if it will make you more vengeful and prone to hate not only your enemy but also your fellow countrymen simply because they do not share your hatred (I have seen this happen), then I suggest it may be in your interest as well as that of your “cause” to leave the field to others better equipped to deal with it.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Monday, July 09, 2007
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OBSERVATIONS
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If there is one lesson that history keeps drumming into us is that we will be better off if we consider all politicians, regardless of race, color, and creed, guilty until proven innocent beyond a shadow of a doubt.
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If Turcophile is a pejorative terms, why should Armenophile be any different? To an objective and impartial outsider, who knows little and cares even less about Turks and Armenians, both labels may suggest prejudice and as such of questionable validity.
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Where there is an oversized ego there will be an undersized brain. I have said this before and I will say it again because an undersized brain also means an even more undersized memory; and, in the words of Socrates, favored by my Italian teacher of algebra, “to know is to remember.”
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Like most people, I operate on the assumption that I am right. But I also know that to be right in one’s own eyes is easy. What’s hard to the point of being impossible is to convince oneself and others that, since truth is beyond our reach, we all of us engage in some form of charlatanism when we speak. As the old Chinese adage has it: “He who speaks does not know.” And according to a contemporary American philosopher: “Is love of truth itself merely another example of bullxxxx?” (Harry G. Frankfurt, ON TRUTH, page 14).
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[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Sunday, July 08, 2007
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TRUTH AND PROPAGANDA
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According to Marcus Aurelius, “Our life is what our thoughts make it.”
This may have been true two thousand years ago when the people were not exposed to mass media. Our lives today are shaped less by ideas and more by propaganda. Literature is praised but propaganda believed. Who reads books today? But everyone reads newspapers, watches TV, and listens to the radio. Many more Germans were shaped by MEIN KAMPF than by THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN. Many more Russians were taken in by Stalin than shaped by the ideas of Solzhenitsyn, or for that matter, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. It is an undeniable fact of modern life that we are, all of us, at the mercy of spin doctors, public relations men, advertisers, sermonizers, speechifiers, and phony pundits who expect us to believe they speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. In the words of a contemporary American philosopher: “We live at a time when many quite cultivated individuals consider truth to be unworthy of any particular respect.”
For more on this subject see Harry G. Frankfurt’s (the philosopher quoted above) two most recent books: “ON BULLxxxx (New York, 2005), and ON TRUTH (New York, 2006).
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[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Saturday, July 07, 2007
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THE ARMENO-TURKISH COMPLEX
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In Elif Shafak’s THE BASTARD OF ISTANBUL I read the following lines delivered by an Armenian-American: “Some among the Armenians in the diaspora would never want the Turks to recognize the genocide. If they do so, they’ll pull the rug out from under our feet and take the strongest bond that unites us. Just like the Turks have been in the habit of denying their wrongdoing, the Armenians have been in the habit of savoring the cocoon of victimhood. Apparently, there are some old habits that need to be changed on both sides.”
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Conventional wisdom becomes unconventional folly bordering on mass hysteria when it turns into intolerance of criticism and dissent.
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Every propaganda line, regardless of its absurdity, will have a series of facts and reasons that support it.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Friday, July 06, 2007
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BASTARDS
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“Literature needs freedom to thrive,” says an Armenian character in Elif Shafak’s THE BASTARD OF ISTANBUL, and goes on: “We didn’t have much of that to expand and enlarge Armenian literature, did we?”
This fictional character and Elif Shafak seem to be unaware of the fact that we had a vibrant literature and far better writers under the Sultan, Talaat, and Stalin than we do today when we enjoy more freedom and financial prosperity than at any other time in our history. That’s because, in the words of Hagop Garabents (also Jack Karapetian), “Once upon a time we shed our blood for freedom. We are now afraid of free speech.”
Please note that, unlike Gostan Zarian (“Our political parties have been of no political use to us: their greatest enemy is free speech”) Garabents was neither a dissident nor a critic. On the contrary, he was on excellent terms with our bosses, bishops, and benefactors.
Instead of literature we now have anti-Turkish propaganda (the bastard of Armenian literature…or is it an abortion?).
We have been traumatized, yes, certainly, no one denies that. But after making that assertion, the question we should ask ourselves is: Do we make an obsession of the trauma or do we seek a way out of the darkness that has paralyzed our creative impetus?
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[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Thursday, July 05, 2007
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AN INSIGHTFUL COMMENT
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In what follows I will try to abridge and paraphrase the comments of a reader who, for reasons of his own, prefers to remain anonymous.
“One way to explain the difference between the dignified silence of our forefathers who witnessed the massacres and experienced the deportations, and the verbal diarrhea of the present generation is to say that the first were victims of historic conditions and forces beyond their control and understanding, and the second victims of political rhetoric.”
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A CASE OF PROJECTION
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When some of my Armenian critics, who belong to the trashcan or verbal-abuse school of criticism, attribute to me words and ideas that are not mine, I have every reason to suspect they are projecting their own secret thoughts, which until then they did not dare to admit even to themselves.
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WRITERS AND PUNDITS
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Writers may be divided into those who write about many different things, and those who write about the same thing in different ways. There are also those who think just because they have conventional wisdom and the establishment on their side, they must be infallible and anyone who disagrees with them must be traitors, renegades, and enemies of the nation. It never even occurs to them that they may be victims of political rhetoric or propaganda, that is to say, verbal pollution.
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