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[arabaliozian]

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Tuesday, May 01, 2007
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THE PUNCH LINE
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If you want to know what it means to be an Armenian, read our writers, the explorers of our psyche. As for the sermons of our bishops and speeches of our bosses and their assorted hirelings, they all lead to the same predictable punch line, “mi kich pogh oughargetsek” (send us a little money).
What happens to the money after they get it? Only they know. Accountability is not in our DNA. Once, when an editor in Los Angeles exposed the corruption within one of our political parties, he was beaten within an inch of his life.
I wonder how some of my readers would react if I were to add that punch line to everything I write. My guess is, they will tell me to shut up, mind my own business, and leave them alone. They are saying as much now, when it hasn’t even crossed my imagination to make any demands on them. In their view, there is only one thing wrong with our community life, namely, malcontents like me who have an eye only for the negative.
Corruption? Sure, we have our share of it, who doesn’t?
Incompetence? Ditto.
Critics? Well, yes, they too are everywhere, but we’d rather not have them, you see. We’d rather not be reminded we are people like any other people. We’d much rather be told we are special, we are unique, and we have nothing to worry about because we are in good hands.
When on the eve of the Genocide, Krikor Zohrab predicted the coming catastrophe, he wasn’t believed. “Zohrab effendi is exaggerating,” they said. If the Great Powers of the West and the Good Lord are on our side, what could possibly go wrong?
The support of the Great Powers was of course only verbal, and the Good Lord has at no time shown any inclination to interfere in our affairs, but we prefer to be brainwashed to believe otherwise and to ignore, and whenever possible, to silence the pessimists who see only the dark side of things.
Please note that, seven years after the Genocide, history repeated itself. Armenians of Smyrna were brainwashed by their bishop to believe they had nothing to worry about and that Ataturk was a friend. And what was bound to happen, happened.
Who was that particular bishop and what happened to him? As they say, thereby hangs a tale. He was none other then the very same Ghevont Tourian (1879-1933), (brother of poet Bedros Tourian) who had betrayed Gomidas Vartabed to the Turkish secret police. In the SOVIET-ARMENIAN ENCYCLOPEDIA (volume 3, page 462) we read the following: “Because of his patriotic activities, Tourian was persecuted by members of the ARF (Tashnagtsoutiun) and knifed to death on 24 December 1933 in the Holy Cross Church of New York.”
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[arabaliozian]

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Monday, April 30, 2007
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PROFILE OF A GOOD ARMENIAN
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The more patriotic an Armenian, the more clearly defined his views on what it means to be a good Armenian; and no one can be as intolerant as an Armenian with clearly defined black-and-white views who believes truth and God to be on his side.
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An intolerant Armenian is a dogmatic and self-righteous Armenian of the you-are-either-with-me-or-against-me variant; and if you are against me you might as well pro-Turkish. Such an Armenian is a divider. His nationalism is disguised tribalism, and his patriotism a sham. And here is the irony: an intolerant Armenian is an Ottomanized Armenian, and an Ottomanized Armenian is an oxymoron (emphasis on the last two syllables). Which simply means, he is neither Armenian nor Ottoman. He is as programmed and fixed in his views and reactions as a robot. When he thinks, he doesn’t feel; and when he feels, he doesn’t think.
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An authentic Armenian is also an authentic human being. Think of the profound humanity, even universality, of our folk songs, liturgical music, and religious architecture that date back to a time when we were free and not yet contaminated by Ottoman venom and Levantine filth.
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When asked by English friends if he was really an Armenian, Michael Arlen is quoted as having said (I quote from memory): “Who would want to identify himself as an Armenian [or make such a painful admission] if it weren’t true?”
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The thought that comes naturally to all Armenians: “If he is Armenian, he is sure to be second rate.” Or, “If he is one of us, he is bound to be a loser and a mediocrity.” Which may explain why someone of Oshagan’s stature dismissed Zarian as a plagiarist without providing a single shred of evidence. And when Shahnour, quoting chapter and verse, proved Siamanto to be a plagiarist and Zartarian a second-rater, he was accused of being anti-Armenian and at one point publicly thrashed by superior type patriots. That’s what I call Ottomanism in action.
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Please note that everything I have said so far is based on self-analysis. If it doesn’t apply to you, feel free to consider yourself a good Armenian, an exemplary human being, and a role model.
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[arabaliozian]

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Sunday, April 29, 2007
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THAT WHICH MAKES US WHAT WE ARE
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Being a human being is a privilege as well as a responsibility. Being a member of a group – be it club, party, tribe, nation, or race – promotes a herd mentality, which means, it allows one to behave like swine with a clear conscience.
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We have been divided, conquered, and ruled so often and for such a long time that dividing ourselves has become part of our behavioral DNA to such a degree that most of us see nothing wrong or remotely questionable in it. Even when no one divides us, we divide ourselves. I will know things are about to change only when we reverse this trend. Until then I will consider all talk of progress as empty verbiage whose sole intent is to deceive the deaf, blind, and stupid.
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Explanations may be transferable, understanding is not.
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For everyone who says one thing, there will be another who says something else or the exact opposite. Next time you meet a boss, bishop, or benefactor, ask him why he belongs or prefers to support group A rather than group B. You may notice that he will parrot received ideas and clichés. That’s one reason why I suspect anyone who places his nationality or ideology ahead of his humanity.
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[arabaliozian]

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Saturday, April 28, 2007
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BEN BAGDIKIAN ON U.S. MEDIA
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“Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach’s SAINT MATTHEW PASSION on a ukulele.”
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“The central function of journalism is to permit a more valid view of reality.”
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“Arguers against change like to say, 'You can’t legislate morals,' but it is hard to convince me that authority figures can’t evoke more humane attitudes, just as they obviously do the opposite.”
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“Our major media probably offer the narrowest range of ideas available in any developed democracy.”
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One point in favor of the American press: it has produced a major investigative reporter like Ben Bagdikian. Now then, name if you can a single Armenian journalist – and I don’t mean ghazetaji. I could name several who were rudely silenced by mediocrities whose “greatest enemy is free speech” (Zarian).
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[arabaliozian]

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Friday, April 27, 2007
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PAST AS PROLOGUE
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A few years ago Church Unity was the hot topic in our press. There was an endless stream of commentaries, polemics, and letters to the editor. Everybody was for it, it seems. Both proponents of unity and the two sides in the controversy agreed that unity was an important goal and the sooner it was reached the better for all concerned. In the end nothing was done because both sides kept stonewalling. As a result, the controversy died down not to rise again. I suspect something similar will happen to the Genocide issue. It’s our style – the Ottoman way.
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OLD TIME RELIGION
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In a democratic environment there are investigative reporters and the loyal opposition whose combined job is to contradict, criticize, and expose corruption within the executive. Where are our investigative reporters? Where is our loyal opposition? Throughout our millennial existence, did we ever have them? When some of my gentle readers identify me as an enemy of the people who takes his marching orders from Ankara, what they really mean is, we have no use for democracy and human rights like free speech. The Ottoman way is good enough for us.
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[arabaliozian]

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Thursday, April 26, 2007
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THE ABUSES OF IDEALS
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To some misguided patriots, nationalism may appear as a noble, even a necessary, ideology; but like all ideologies (from Christianity to Marxism) it has had and will continue to have its share of abusers and perverts. Talaat was a nationalist, Stalin a Marxist, and Torquemada a Christian. Does that mean we should suspect all ideals and principles? Of course not! What we should suspect is power, doubletalk, and propaganda. That’s where critics come in, and that’s why brainwashed dupes are their greatest adversaries.
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All power is suspect; but even more suspect is the apathy of the average, well-intentioned, law-abiding citizen who thinks he is in good hands, and that those in power will leave him alone as long as he doesn’t dirty his hands by getting involved in politics. The root of all major tragedies may be traced to this mindset.
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The reason why I target Armenians rather than Turks for criticism is that there are better men than myself engaged in criticizing their fellow Turks. Another reason, attacking Turks has become a lucrative sport with our Turcocentric pundits and academics, whose aim is not so much to expose Turkish criminal conduct but to cover up our own. Besides, an Armenian criticizing Turks will not have much of an audience in Turkey; not that he will have much of an audience among Armenians, which may well be another thing we share with Turks, namely, a visceral, not to say, Ottoman intolerance of all dissent.
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[arabaliozian]

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Wednesday, April 25, 2007
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IDEAS IN HISTORY
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Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were Greeks; the prophets of the Old Testament and Jesus were xxxish. And yet, the history of Greeks and xxxs has been a concatenation of defeats, tragedies, and oppression. Now then, go ahead and blame Khorenatsi and Naregatsi, or Raffi, Baronian, and Zarian for all our problems.
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Trying to change a situation without first understanding it is like trying to put out a forest fire with a bottle of soda water.
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Some people have been traveling on the road of dishonesty for such a long time that honesty appears to them as cynicism, objectivity as charlatanism, and straight talk as venom.
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If Turkish denialists question the reality of the Genocide, we deny the depth of our malaise. There are those who think, if a handful of dedicated individuals with good intentions get busy within our communities, we have an excellent chance to extricate ourselves from the abyss. Inevitably, they reach the conclusion that things are not as easy as they thought they would be and they give up in disgust. Their line of thinking goes something like this: If I can be more useful to my fellow men in an alien environment, why bother with a bunch of ingrates who, in Zarian’s assessment, “survive by cannibalizing one another”?
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Instead of saying my assessment of our present situation is inaccurate, they call me, at best, a pessimist, and, at worst, a charlatan.
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The trouble with being brainwashed is that you become fixed in your thinking; you cannot move ahead or go beyond of what you think you think, and when it comes to thinking, what matters above all is going beyond and moving ahead.
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[arabaliozian]

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Tuesday, April 24, 2007
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THE TRIUMPH OF MEDIOCRITY
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Nothing can be more misleading than to approach reality with received or preconceived notions, especially notions cunningly and carefully chosen by those in power to flatter our collective ego and to cover up their mediocrity. If you want to understand your fellow Armenians or, for that matter, your fellow men, begin with yourself and forget what you were taught as a child. The first step in all learning is unlearning.
Instead of bragging about being the first nation to convert to Christianity, ask yourself: “How good a Christian am I?” Next question to ask: if our ruling classes saw the light and converted to Christianity at the beginning of the 4th Century, they just as readily saw the darkness and converted to atheism in the 20th. What are we to make of that?
By teaching us to brag, our leaders hope to convince us we are in good hands and we have nothing to worry about, when the exact opposite is the case.
We brag about our survival in order to forget that most of us, including the best and the brightest, did not survive.
If we assume the invisible and hostile forces of history (assuming of course such forces are not within us but in a realm beyond our reach and control), had targeted us for extinction but only a few of us managed to survive, we could just as easily assume that, with less mediocre, corrupt, incompetent, and divided leaders not seven but seventy million of us could have survived. Very probably there are more than seventy million Armenians today, but most of them prefer to identify themselves as Americans, Hungarians, Italians, Bulgarians, Russians, even Kurds and Turks.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying there is something fundamentally wrong with our DNA. We are people like any other people. We have produced many great leaders, even leaders of mighty empires, and I don’t mean Dikran, the so-called,“Great” and his Mickey Mouse ephemeral empire. Oswald Spengler, one of the greatest historians of the 20th century has called such an Armenian leader (Basil I, founder of the greatest dynasty in the Byzantine Empire) “a Napoleonic figure.” And Toynbee, the other great historian of our time, has written a huge scholarly biography of Basil’s son and successor, Constantine Porphyrogenitus.
What I am saying here is that, where mediocrities are in charge, excellence will be persecuted; where crooks are in charge, honesty will be anathema; where fascists are in charge, the rule of law and accountability will be seen as unpatriotic; and where the unprincipled are in charge, opportunism will be the norm.
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[arabaliozian]

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Monday, April 23, 2007
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A BATTLE ON TWO FRONTS
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Questions that I ask myself whenever I sit down to write: “Why bother? What’s the use? Why go on? To what end? What have I accomplished so far?” And the tentative answer that I come up with: “I am not sure. I have no idea…unless it is to let those in power know that they may fool most of the people most of the time, but there will always be one or two who will refuse to be taken in by their nonsense, even if the two happen to be a minor scribbler and his mother living in the middle of nowhere.”
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My mother has known all along that writing is a waste of time. In retrospect, I have to agree with her. I know now I would have been more useful to my fellow men had I been a carpenter or a bus driver. Or a travel agent. That’s what my mother wanted me to be, a pilot or a travel agent. She loves going places and I don’t even drive. The only two places that I visit regularly are the library and the church – both within walking distance. I go to church not to pray but to carry on a love affair with the organ works of J.S. Bach.
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There are some things that one is destined to understand only at the end of one’s life. Youth is a time for daydreams and megalomania. I know now that a writer doesn’t have much of a chance because his war is a battle on two fronts: (one) against those in power, their hirelings, and dupes; and (two) the philistines in whose eyes writers, poets, philosophers, and intellectuals in general are at best daydreamers and at worst mental masturbators.
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Who is to blame for World War II and the Holocaust? Most people will say, Hitler and the Nazis. Strangely enough, Thomas Mann put part of the blame on German literature. Unlike their French counterparts, German writers, he said, had spent more time exploring their inner life and less time on social issues. As a result, the German people had lacked the sophistication and political awareness to see the Nazis for what they were – not the future saviors of the nation but its destroyers. True or false? False, according to a French contemporary of Mann, who concluded his memoirs with the words: “Literature saves no one,” and “…no man is ever anything but a swindle.” (See Jean-Paul Sartre, THE WORDS.)
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[arabaliozian]

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Sunday, April 22, 2007
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WANTED: A MESSIAH
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Those who see the best in themselves will tend to see the worst in others. We all need scapegoats. Turks are ours, and we are theirs. Naregatsi – our Dante and Shakespeare combined – saw the worst in himself but the best in God, who, he said, would forgive all his sins not because he deserved His forgiveness but because His love knew no bounds. And then there are those who say, we all swim in the same soup; there is good and evil in all of us. It’s all a question of perspective. Talaat is a statesman of vision to them and the worst villain that ever crawled between heaven and earth to us. Or, as the African chieftain is quoted as having said to C.G. Jung: “When my enemy steals my wives, it’s bad. When I steal his, it’s good.”
Sometimes I am told I am on the wrong path, my efforts are misguided. I should change my style, way of thinking, and attitude towards my fellow Armenians. Instead of seeing the worst in them I should see the best, emphasize the good, stress the positive, ignore the negative. I find it hard to believe that we have failed as a nation because our writers failed in their mission. The history of our literature goes back 1500 years during which we have produced an astonishing variety of writers, some of whom, like Khorenatsi, pointed out our shortcomings, others saw the best in us (Abovian), still others (like Baronian and Odian) saw the worst; and then there is Raffi, who saw the best as well as the worst. Even more revealing is the case of Zarian, who began his brilliant literary career by calling us the real chosen people and concluded it by saying we survive by cannibalizing one another.
Do we really need a messianic figure with a new style and belief system that will set us on the right path? Speaking for myself, I don’t believe in messiahs and quick fixes. I believe in self-criticism more than in criticism. This may explain why sometimes I am perceived as anti-Armenian and pro-Turkish. To be misunderstood, rejected, silenced, and ignored: so what else is new?
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