notes / comments

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Saturday, February 24, 2007
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REFLECTIONS AND COMMENTS
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To achieve excellence is easy. What’s hard is discovering the specific endeavor in which you are destined to excel.
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Someday, somewhere everything will be explained, by which time we may no longer be in need of explanations.
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Readers are less interested to know how honest or wise you are and more interested to know how dishonest and foolish you have been. What’s the use of being positive in your assessment of yourself when others have an eye only for the negative?
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There was a time when I wrote nothing but fiction. I continue to write fiction today but only to expose it.
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To write against propaganda is to expose fiction.
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Our national prestige is a fiction of our collective imagination.
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Both dupes and charlatans live in a world of fiction where they imagine themselves to be not only honest and wise but also patriotic.
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There is more imagination in conspiracy theories than in science fiction.
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The Goncourt Brothers: “To believe in nothing is as bad as any religion.”
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Victor Hugo: “Crowds are good only for rioting. For a revolution you need people.”
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Raymond Queneau: “Humor tries to purge the idiotic from great and noble sentiments.”
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Raymond Aron: “Every belief system begins as a heresy.”
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[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Sunday, February 25, 2007
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BARBARIANS WITHIN THE GATE
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To civilize a barbarian is easy. What’s hard is to civilize a barbarian who thinks he is better than you. I am willing to concede that our Turcocentric pundits may know more about Turks than I do, but I know something about us that they may not, namely, we are not all as civilized as we think we are and, which is worse, there are those among us who don’t seem to be favorably disposed towards civilization.
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DISAPPOINTMENT
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We are disappointed in people because we cannot be objective about them, which means that the source of disappointment is not them but us.
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HYENAS
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There is a type of reader who follows you from a safe distance hoping you will stumble, fall, and break your neck so that he can feast on your carcass,
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FIRST AND LAST IMPRESSIONS
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My first impression of Canada: I thought I had landed on an alien planet. I now feel that way when I visit an Armenian community center.
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ON THE ART OF WRITING
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I will tell you all I know about writing provided you promise to ignore and forget everything I say. What matters in writing is not following in someone else’s footsteps but in finding your own path.
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I LOVE BRAHMS
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After a visit and on his way out, Brahms would say, “I apologize to anyone I may have failed to insult.”
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ON COPS
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Charles-Louis Philippe: “It is practically impossible to speak to a policeman without seeming to lie to him.”
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[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Monday, February 26, 2007
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EXPLAINING THE INCOMPREHENSIBLE
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For 600 years Armenians and Turks lived side by side in the same country, breathed the same air, ate the same food, and spoke the same language, with only one difference: Turks did these things as masters and Armenians as slaves. For 600 years Turks had their way with us, so much so that they think they can now convince us to believe the Genocide is a figment of our imagination.
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Turks cannot understand Armenians because they continue to think as masters and they expect Armenians to behave as slaves.
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Being subservient to Turks for 600 years! I cannot imagine a worse nightmare, except perhaps being subservient to Armenians for 6 minutes. That’s because it is one thing to be slaves to masters and another to be slaves to former slaves.
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Turks may begin to understand Armenians only if they imagine themselves to have been subservient to Armenians for 600 years, for which they may need an imagination of Shakespearian cast.
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As masters, Turks think it is not up to slaves to question their conduct or integrity. So that if the master rapes and murders one of his slaves and afterwards asserts the slave died of natural causes, the surviving slaves in his household have no choice but to corroborate his testimony. Not to do so would amount to mutiny and a capital offense. Hence, Hrant Dink’s execution.
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After the Will of Allah comes the will of the master. And the Will of Allah is to the master what the will of the master is to the slave.
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To convince Turks they are guilty of genocide is as hard as convincing a Stalinist (and our chic Bolsheviks) to believe Stalin was wrong and his innocent victims (all 25 million of them, give and take a million or two) were right; or to convince a jihadist to believe that he is on the wrong warpath.
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As far as the average Turk goes, the Ottoman Empire is not dead but very much alive – if only in his own heart; in the same way that in the heart of every good Christian Jesus not only lives but also saves.
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If you want to know more about masters and slaves, Hegel is your man. As far as I know Hegel did not write a single line about Turks and Armenians but he had a great deal to say about masters and slaves, and what he had to say is just about the best thing I have read about Turks and Armenians.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Tuesday, February 27, 2007
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ONCE MORE ON IDENTITY
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Identity is one of those concepts about which you can say anything you want and get away with it provided you preach to the converted. Speaking for myself, I see my identity as a burden, or the final stage of a succession of defeats, tragedies, degradation, lies, blunders, and above all, futile efforts to misrepresent them as triumphs of endurance, nobility, perseverance, strength, dedication to principles…in short, not defeats but moral victories. If true, we should be grateful to our enemies, because if it weren’t for them, we wouldn’t have become the paragons of virtue we pretend to be.
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The very same people who at the turn of the last century believed if we rise against the Turks we will be rewarded, now believe if we corner them into pleading guilty to the charge of genocide we will ditto. Even when some dreams turn into nightmares, daydreamers will continue to engage in self-deception.
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There are those who don’t like me.
I don’t understand them.
Others like me.
I understand them even less.
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He lived in fear of death all his life and as he was dying he thought living had been infinitely harder.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Wednesday, February 28, 2007
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THE DEMANDS OF PATRIOTISM
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It is an unfortunate fact that the demands made on all of us by patriotism are stronger than the demands of truth, perhaps because all state-sponsored educational systems emphasize god and country at the expense of objectivity and honesty.
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Once upon a time I too was infatuated with my own ignorance. So much so that, whenever I consider my past convictions, I feel like digging a hole and burying myself in it.
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Some of my Turkish friends are disappointed in me because I refuse to accept the fact that the Genocide is a figment of our collective imagination. Because I have been critical of our political leadership, these Turkish friends assume I am the kind of Turcophile who thinks, as admirable specimens of humanity, Turks can do no wrong and are therefore as white as the driven snow.
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I may question everything our side says but I have no reason whatever to question the testimony of such pro-Turkish historians as Lord Kinross, Bernard Lewis, and Arnold Toynbee (among many others) – and I don’t mean the young Toynbee who began his career as a bureaucrat in the belly of the British imperial machine, but the mature Toynbee who acquired Turkish friends, studied the Turkish language, and concluded that Armenian territorial demands at the turn of the last century had been totally unjustified. Even so he at no time questioned or doubted the reality of the Genocide and the ruthless brutality with which it was carried out.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Wednesday, February 28, 2007
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THE DEMANDS OF PATRIOTISM
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It is an unfortunate fact that the demands made on all of us by patriotism are stronger than the demands of truth, perhaps because all state-sponsored educational systems emphasize god and country at the expense of objectivity and honesty.
*
Once upon a time I too was infatuated with my own ignorance. So much so that, whenever I consider my past convictions, I feel like digging a hole and burying myself in it.
*
Some of my Turkish friends are disappointed in me because I refuse to accept the fact that the Genocide is a figment of our collective imagination. Because I have been critical of our political leadership, these Turkish friends assume I am the kind of Turcophile who thinks, as admirable specimens of humanity, Turks can do no wrong and are therefore as white as the driven snow.
*
I may question everything our side says but I have no reason whatever to question the testimony of such pro-Turkish historians as Lord Kinross, Bernard Lewis, and Arnold Toynbee (among many others) – and I don’t mean the young Toynbee who began his career as a bureaucrat in the belly of the British imperial machine, but the mature Toynbee who acquired Turkish friends, studied the Turkish language, and concluded that Armenian territorial demands at the turn of the last century had been totally unjustified. Even so he at no time questioned or doubted the reality of the Genocide and the ruthless brutality with which it was carried out.
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Thursday, March 01, 2007
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WHEN GOOD PEOPLE BEHAVE BADLY
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Some of my Turkish friends are outraged that their fellow countrymen stand accused of having committed unspeakable acts against innocent and unarmed civilians. To them I say, don’t take it so hard. Some of the most civilized people on earth – from Golden-Age Greeks (5th-century BC) and more recently to Germans – have been guilty of such acts. Most Turks may indeed be decent folk but that doesn’t and cannot alter the fact that raising and running an empire has at no time been an activity compatible with decency. Remember, even Mahatma Gandhi at one point called British rule in India “satanic,” and satanic is how the powerful appear to the powerless. As for the powerless themselves: on the day the British quit India, millions of innocent Hindus were massacred by Muslims, and vice versa. Which may suggest that if you give power to the powerless, they too will commit satanic acts; which is also why I have consistently maintained that if the Ottoman Empire had been an Armenian Empire, and the Turks had been a minority within that empire, the chances are we would have done to them what they did to us. Man is not only capable of behaving like a predatory beast in the jungle, but also doing so in the name of a loving, merciful, and compassionate god. Figure that one out if you can.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Friday, March 02, 2007
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FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
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Sometimes when one is right on one level one may be wrong on another. Life or reality is more accommodating to contradictions than logic and the human mind.
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When two versions of the past are in conflict, it is self-serving to believe the version that is more flattering to our ego.
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Another way to define a coward: “One who prefers propaganda to truth.”
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One of the easiest things in life is to confuse what we should think and feel with what we really think and feel.
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The world is full of disappointed people because they trusted their friends and mistrusted their enemies.
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There is such a thing as being too self-righteous to be right.
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To the oversensitive person, every encounter with reality can be a traumatic experience.
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Whenever I take myself too seriously someone is sure to call me an idiot.”
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Valéry Larbaud: “Affairs begin in champagne and end in chamomile.”
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Eugene Goodheart: “The cure for loneliness is solitude.”
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Anatole France: “Without irony, the world would be like a forest without birds.”
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[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Saturday, March 03, 2007
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FRACTIONS
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For a long time I thought Armenians were incapable of committing certain acts because they were more civilized than Turks, Kurds, Arabs, Muslims in general, Gypsies, xxxs, Japs, Greeks, Germans, Americans, Russians…in short, the rest of the world. I know now that we all swim in the same soup. We are what the world made us and the world is not a nice place inhabited by nice folk. And whenever I hear a Turk saying, when others speak about them they lie, and when they speak about themselves they speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, I know I am in the presence of someone who knows little about the world and even less about himself and his fellow men.
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In a court of law, when a witness is caught in a lie, his entire testimony becomes suspect even if there is evidence to suggest he speaks the truth. Which is why when someone makes an absurd assertion, as I did about Armenians when I was a dupe, forever after what he says is tainted the way a perjurious witness’s testimony is.
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It is a sure symptom of immaturity and insecurity to identify oneself with a group, be it a political party, a tribe, a nation, a race or religion. No one can speak for another or explain why he behaved as he did. When Freud, Adler, and Jung analyzed the human psyche, they began with their own: the first emphasized sex, the second power, and the third myths and archetypes. In other words, each saw only a fraction of the whole. Who was right and who wrong? They may have been right as far as the fraction goes, but wrong about the whole; thus proving that the human mind is better at dealing with fractions. But “a fraction of the truth,” is how propaganda is defined. The question we should ask at this point is: when one is wrong about oneself, can he be right about anyone else?
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[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Sunday, March 04, 2007
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THE ART OF MAKING ENEMIES
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The only way to make Armenian and Turkish friends is to agree with them. Dare to disagree with them and you run the risk of insulting either Turkishness or Armenishness – two terms that as far as I know no one has ever bothered to define perhaps because they are indefinable -- unless of course they mean everything that is good, moral, just, right, humane, civilized, and in general, positive in life. Which would make both nations paragons of virtue and role models to the rest of mankind. And now, imagine if you can, a world inhabited only by Turks and Armenians. It would be hell on earth for critics and dissidents, and heaven on earth for yes-men and brownnosers, who on occasion like to engage in cannibalism. My guess is, after centuries of cohabitation and intermarriage (or is it interfornication?), the pureblooded Turk or Armenian is a figment of our imagination. So must be, by extension, the concepts of Turkishness and Armenishness.
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The more you learn, the more aware you become of what you don’t know. Only the ignorant brag about their knowledge.
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Gaston de Levis: “Of all sentiments, pride is the most difficult to fake.”
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Barbey D’Aurevills: “It is that which we don’t understand that we try to explain.”
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Paul Léautaud: “I believe in dictionaries.”
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