notes / comments

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Monday, March 19, 2007
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FROM MY DIARY
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Once in a while, when I’ve got nothing better to do, I google myself and read some of the comments. When the insults or words with more asterisks than letters outnumber the positive comments, I know I have not lost my touch and must be on the right track.
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It is said, on the day Christians discovered the Bible, every Protestant became a pope. Something similar could be said of the average Armenian who discovers a belief system or ideology: he becomes either a Torquemada or a commissar.
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War becomes a viable option provided (a) it is winnable, and (b) the enemy is in the league with the devil.
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Most Americans are against the war in Iraq today because (a) the war seems unwinnable, and (b) the only way to win it is to adopt the tactics of the enemy by doing to them what they would do if they had weapons of mass destructions, i.e. nuke them back to the Stone Age.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Tuesday, March 20, 2007
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WHEN YOU SEE A BAD MAN
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In an Armenian-Turkish discussion forum on the Internet, a Turkish writer has posted an article in which he quotes several foreign and ostensibly objective observers to prove that Armenians are no better than the worst scum on earth, thus implying that if [that “if” must be emphasized] if the Turks did what they are accused of having done to the Armenians, they did the world a favor by cleansing it of such vermin. What seems to escape this particular Turkish patriot’s attention is that, if what he says is true, then part of the blame must be shouldered by the Turks themselves because after 600 years of uninterrupted life in the Ottoman Empire, Armenians must be seen as products of Ottoman culture.
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Question: What was it that made the Turks wait for 600 years to do what must be done? Compassion? Next question: Has anyone ever advanced the theory that compassion has been a central concern of the Ottoman Empire, or for that matter, of any other empire, especially at a time when its own survival was at stake?
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This Turkish writer forgets that until the turn of the last century Armenians were known as “the most loyal [and therefore the most desirable and useful] millet” within the Ottoman Empire. It is only when the Empire began to disintegrate and every national group claimed its place in the sun that Armenians became the worst scum on earth. In other words, the reason why Armenians were targeted for extermination was not their moral turpitude or defective DNA but the most human and universal desire of all: that of self-determination. But again, it should be emphasized that most Armenians, very much like most Turks, lacked political awareness. The troublemakers were as non-representative of the nation as a whole as was the Young Turks’ ephemeral regime.
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The world will be a better place on the day we all stop projecting our worst instincts on an alien group and start examining our own conscience. There is an old saying: “When you see a good man, emulate him. When you see a bad man, examine your own heart.”
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[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Wednesday, March 21, 2007
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ON A COMMON FALLACY
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Politicians operate like lawyers: it is their job to defend their side at any cost even if their side or client happens to be a serial killer. To this day Talaat, Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler have their friends in the same way that Lincoln, FDR, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King have their enemies.
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Most political controversies are based on the assumption “our side speaks the truth, the other side lies.” Translated into dollars and cents, this simply means: my self-interest matters more than your self-interest. Whenever I read an opinion or commentary that assumes this fallacy to be a self-evident truth, I know I am dealing with a dupe and a moral moron.
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We all know there is a difference between self-interest and self-sacrifice. We look up to heroes and martyrs and down on charlatans and swindlers. A politician is more akin to a charlatan than to an honest man, and propaganda works because there is a swindler in all of us.
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THE VOICE OF WISDOM
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Georges Braque: “Art disturbs, science reassures.”
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Choderlos de Laclos: “Crooks have virtues as honest men have weaknesses.”
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André Gide: “The appetite for knowledge is born in doubt. Stop believing and start learning.”
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Claude Lévi-Strauss: “Wisdom consists not in providing true answer but in asking the right questions.”
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[arabaliozian]

open letter

Thursday, March 22, 2007
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AN OPEN LETTER TO HARUT SASSOUNIAN
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You tell me to stick to literature and leave politics to better-qualified heads. You seem to be unaware of the fact that politics or political science is a branch of philosophy, and philosophy is a branch of literature, and the aim of literature is not to entertain readers but to understand man. Understanding man is also the aim of psychology and the study of history. Historians try to establish not just what happened but why. They may agree on the “what” (i.e. the facts) but they may disagree, and often do, on the “why.”
You seem to think pro-Armenianism consists in anti-Turkism. What is your single-minded and obsessive anti-Turkism if not a mirror image of Talaat’s anti-Armenianism? It is true, there is a difference in that, you and your fellow partisans do not advocate indiscriminate massacre, but some may be justified in seeing that as an extension not of moral superiority but of military inferiority.
Next time you pen one of your consistently predictable weekly editorials I suggest you refrain from narrowing your vision by thinking in terms of labels, such as Turks and Armenians, but seeing both as human beings. You must know by now, we have friends among them as surely as we have enemies among us. And it was not Turks who committed the Genocide, but fascists, and fascists come in all shapes, sizes, races, colors, and creeds, including, alas, Armenians.
What is fascism if not a closed system of thought that is self-righteous, dogmatic, intolerant, narrow, and single-minded in its hatred of the enemy. And what is a fascist if not someone who does not believe in dialogue, compromise, and consensus? I repeat: what motivates a fascist is hatred. Without hatred fascism would lose its focus and collapse into impotent and incoherent rage. Hitler needed xxxs, Stalin needed not only bourgeois capitalists but also communist deviationists (i.e. Trotskyites), Talaat needed Armenians, and we need Turks – or rather, the fascists among us do. I believe hatred or any kind of intolerance to be an obstacle to understanding not only of others but also of ourselves. If you say we don’t hate anyone, we want only justice, then I ask: Why should understanding, objectivity, and impartiality be an obstacle to justice? On the contrary!
As I see it, we have two options: we either move towards mutual tolerance and co-existence or we follow the dictates of our instinctive need for revenge and, in the process, lower ourselves to the level of those we hate. Armenians and Turks will never reach a consensus as long as they see reflections of themselves in the other, and reflections not of the best but of the worst in themselves.
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After writing these lines, I read the following in a review of Susan Sontag’s posthumously published collection of essays titled AT THE SAME TIME: “…political righteousness was never enough for Sontag. She defends ‘the saving indifference, the saving larger view, that is the novelist’s or the poet’s – which does not obviate the truth of political understanding, but tells us that there is something more than politics, more, even, than history.’” (NEWSWEEK, March 12, 2007.)
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[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Friday, March 23, 2007
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ONCE UPON A TIME
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When I was young, naïve, and gullible, I divided mankind into two: the good guys and the bad guys.
When I was a dupe I had no doubt whatever in my mind that I was with the good guys.
When I had the IQ of a Mongoloid, even when I behaved badly I thought of myself as good.
When I had the outlook of a Neanderthal, I thought Turks could do nothing right and Armenian could do no wrong. I thought so even when I saw Armenians behaving badly.
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To those who go on thinking like Neanderthals and try to convince me I am wrong and they are right, I say, You are wasting your time. I know where you are coming from and I know where you live, because deep inside somewhere part of me still lives in the same cave. Once a Neanderthal always a Neanderthal. Our reason, our understanding, our thinking may change, but our feelings stay the same.
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On the day Mount Ararat is returned to us, there will be headlines in our papers saying, DORMANT VOLCANO ABOUT TO ERUPT.
If a village near the border is returned to us, another headline will announce, WARNING: PROPERTIES BOOBY-TRAPPED, WELLS POISONED, BRIDGES FALLING DOWN.
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“After shaking hands with an Armenian, count your fingers.” Who started this rumor? Turks, who else?
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I suppose to ask Armenians and Turks to treat one another as human beings is as difficult as asking two bordello madams to treat each other as virgins.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Saturday, March 24, 2007
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MEGALOMANIA
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On several occasions in the past I have identified myself as a former fascist. It would have been more accurate had I identified myself as a misguided fool. But then, are not all fascists misguided fools in so far as they live in a world of illusions to such a degree that reality becomes an absent factor in their own image of themselves and ultimately in the policies they adopt? Mussolini thought by reviving the Roman Empire he could be another Caesar. Hitler thought the real Chosen People were not the xxxs but the Germans. Stalin thought the Messianic Trinity of Marx, Engels, and Lenin had solved all the problems of mankind and he held in his hand the Golden Key of a New and Universal Kingdom. When fascists promise heaven, you can be sure of one thing: they will deliver hell. Something similar happened to us. Our own Mickey Mouse Mussolinis promised Historic Armenia, perhaps even the Empire of Dikran the Great, and they delivered the Genocide. Misguided fools, us? Of course not! Things went wrong, yes, but it wasn’t our fault. We were betrayed by the Soviets. We were betrayed by the Great Powers of the West. We were betrayed by the regime of the Young Turks. We were right. It was the rest of the world that was wrong. What is it about us that makes us consistently right and the rest of the world consistently wrong? What else but megalomania? And not just garden-variety megalomania but self-righteous, dogmatic, obstinate, collective, and terminal megalomania. And terminal because we’d rather see the nation go down the drain than admit error.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Sunday, March 25, 2007
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THE VOICE OF GOD
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When an Armenian speechifies or editorializes he does so not only as the voice of the people but also as the voice of God, and that’s the only time he comes close to believing in His existence.
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Politics is not theology. One should never speak of black-and-white certainties. To do so is to expose oneself as a fanatic and a fascist. If so far Turks and Armenians have been unable to reach a consensus it may be because they have consistently ignored the gray areas that they share in common.
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The aim of literature is to raise consciousness; the aim of propaganda is to lower it.
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No one wants to be identified as a racist; and people will say anything to improve their image. Once I even cornered a notorious anti-Semite to say “I love xxxs.” But forever after he hated me. And whenever I corner an Armenian to say, “I don’t hate Turks,” I make another enemy for life.
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It’s the easiest thing on earth to make an Armenian enemy. Sometimes all it takes is to begin a sentence with the words “I think…” That’s because he will immediately assume you are muscling in his territory.
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An Armenian will always prefer the company of yes-men and brownnosers. He has no use for thinkers. That’s why to be an Armenian writer means to be the wrong man at the wrong time and place and in the wrong line of work; that is also why to read the biography of an Armenian writer is to read a tragedy.
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Our writers may no longer die of tuberculosis in their late teens or early twenties; Talaat’s and Stalin’s henchmen may no longer be around, but philistines and commissars are very much alive. How else to explain the death of Armenian literature?
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Voltaire: “The surest thing is to be sure of nothing.”
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Joseph Joubert: “The sound of drums dissipates thoughts; it is for this very reason that this instrument is eminently military.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Monday, March 26, 2007
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REPLY TO HARUT
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“Against my friends only God can defend me.
Against my enemies I can defend myself.”
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You tell me our editors no longer publish me because I am an anti-Armenian charlatan who repeats himself. As speculation this has as much merit as your other speculations, among them your self-conferred and self-assessed status as an expert on Armeno-Turkish relations.
Instead of engaging in counter-speculations, allow me to introduce some relevant facts on the grounds that “an ounce of facts is worth a ton of speculations.”
When after working for many years without compensation I asked to be paid less than minimum wage for my work, one of our editor/publishers stopped publishing me. When asked why, he failed to reply.
Two other editors promised to comply and a month later sent me checks that bounced.
Another editor suggested I should be grateful to him for publishing me because in doing so he was giving me the opportunity to be another Saroyan, who once upon a time had also worked for him for nothing.
Still another told me the secretary one of our national benefactors, on whose goodwill he depended, had phoned to complain that he did not agree with my kind of writing.
Because I failed to praise a third-rate English translation of a second-rate Armenian book – which compounded the felony by being shockingly overpriced…(as you may remember, I was not just contributing commentaries but also translations, books reviews, and interviews) – one of our academics wrote a long angry letter to my editor, suggesting I did not deserve to live.
Shall I go on?
Still another editor spread the outrageous rumor that my greed knew no bounds because I demanded $1,000 (a thousand) for a day’s work.
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As for being anti-Armenian: I have every reason to suspect that accusation to be another one of your fabricated speculations based on a fallacy: namely, the identification of the nation with its non-representative leadership. I have been critical of our leaders and their dupes, yes, certainly! But I have at no time written a single line against the people whom I have always considered as double victims of foreign as well as domestic corruption, incompetence, and lies.
Is not one of the functions of a free press to be critical of political leaders?
Is all this new to you? Is it conceivable that as an editor/publisher you know nothing about the situation of our press or the moral and intellectual integrity of your fellow editors/publishers? If you are so abysmally naïve and uninformed as to what’s going on around you, how can you know or hope to understand what’s going on in the minds of individuals thousands of miles away from you?
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I began with a popular saying. Let me conclude with another:
“When in a hole, stop digging.”
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[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Tuesday, March 27, 2007
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TRUTH AND JUSTICE
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To speak of truth and justice is to deal in shadowy theological terms and moral/judicial concepts on which even theologians, moral philosophers, and legislators disagree. A lawyer will tell you that his primary concern is not justice but evidence and interpretation of the law. A judge will tell you that courthouses are not courts of justice but courts of law. A politician will tell you his primary concern is not and has never been truth but self-interest. Hence the slogan of the British Empire: “We have neither friends nor enemies, only interests.”
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I was brought up to believe the Turks did what they did to us because they are bloodthirsty Asiatic barbarians. Though I am no longer a child, deep inside somewhere I still feel and think so. But I also know that there is a barbarian in all of us. If only because, according to psychologists and biologists, part of our brain is crocodilian – i.e. it has the same shape as the brain of crocodiles. I also know that when a man thinks his existence is in peril, he will not stand on ceremony and behave like a civilized human being – which is why to kill in self-defense is not a crime.
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In 1915 did the Turks believe their existence to be in peril? Or rather, was it reasonable of them to think so? What about us? Can we really plead not guilty on all counts? Were we right to believe in the verbal commitments or propaganda of the Young Turks, the Great Powers of the West, the Russians, and last but not least, in the reality or possibility of a recaptured Historic Armenia? If we were wrong on all these counts, can we really assert we played no part in digging our own graves and that our revolutionaries were not blundering fools but heroes and statesmen of vision? If smart, cosmopolitan, educated people like us were justified in being deceived by practically everyone we came into contact, is it conceivable that dumb and primitive savages fresh out from the depths of Asian steppes, were also justified in being deceived into thinking we were their mortal enemies and together with the rest of the infidel world, we threatened their very existence?
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The aim of these questions is not to establish truth and justice but to ask: Where do we go from here? Do we advance towards mutual understanding or do we continue to hurl insults at one another? -- which is what we have been doing for nearly a century, in addition to wasting millions on lobbyists, academics, and propaganda.
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By the way, I do not think we are smart, except perhaps when it comes to selling Oriental rugs. I also do not think Turks are dumb: those who planned and carried out the Genocide were born, raised, and educated in Europe, and some of them may even have been part-Armenian.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Wednesday, March 28, 2007
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DEFINING LITERATURE
BY MIRNA DOUZJIAN
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“1. Miscellaneous writings whose central themes are Mount Ararat, the Homeland, and the Massacres. 2. Anything that is unreadable and remains unread. 3. Miscellaneous writings by idlers, daydreamers, deranged eccentrics, and individuals who have nothing better to do.”
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OFFENDING THE GODS
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When those in power want to silence someone, they invariably come up with an excellent reason. They permanently silenced Socrates because they accused him of offending the gods, when all he was doing was exposing their ignorance. One reason why some of our greatest masterpieces, like Yervant Odian’s THE COUNCILMAN’S WIFE and FAMILY, HONOR, MORALITY, remain untranslated, unread, buried, and forgotten is that they offend our gods.
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MORE ON OUR GODS
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Our publishers have become so dependent on the goodwill of our bosses, bishops, and benefactors that there are no more safe subjects for discussion except Turks. Hence the proliferation of books on massacres by Turcocentric pundits in whose view Armenian history begins and ends in 1915.
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TURCOCENTRISM: A DEFINITION
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A mental condition that is more akin to an acute obsession that requires immediate psychological therapy.
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DIALOGUE, ARMENIAN STYLE
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A confrontation in which both sides spend more time slinging mud at each other than trying to make sense.
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THE LESSONS OF HISTORY
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Since they were deceived by every nation they dealt with, the only thing our leaders appear to have learned is to deceive, and since they are not smart enough to deceive anyone else, they deceive their own people, after brainwashing them to believe they are just about the smartest people on earth, on the grounds that it takes seven xxxs to deceive an Armenian.