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[arabaliozian]

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Thursday, April 19, 2007
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THE MOST IMPORTANT QUESTION
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We have become such compulsive players of the blame-game that it doesn’t even occur to us to ask the most important of all questions: Where did we go wrong? Were we justified in trusting the Russians, the Great Powers, and the Young Turks? Was our trust in them based on historic precedent or propaganda? Was our optimism a result of objective analysis or wishful thinking?
My purpose in raising these questions is not to find fault with our past conduct – after all, what’s done is done and cannot be undone – but to ask, how justified are we when we predict the future by saying such things as, it will take two or three generations for our bloodsuckers to see the light and behave like servants of the people? Or, how justified are we in sinking millions on our anti-Turkish campaign in the hope that, since historic Armenia was ours 600 years ago, it will be ours again in the near or distant future because a fraction of the civilized world is with us? Or again, how justified are we in placing our trust in the verbiage of our bosses, bishops, benefactors, and Turcocentric baloney artists?
Another reason I ask these questions is that, if we want to convince the Turks to behave with some degree of honesty and decency, we must first put our own house in order. If we want to educate that fraction of the so-called civilized world that is not with us, we must begin by educating ourselves. If we want others to do the right thing, the least we can do is refrain from doing the wrong thing.

[arabaliozian]

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Friday, April 20, 2007
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AN ESSAY THAT COMES WITH A WARNING
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In what follows I speak only for myself and all those who brought me up to hate Turks. Repeat: none of the sentiments and thoughts expressed here applies to our Turcocentric pundits and miscellaneous baloney artists who, very much like all baloney artists, speak with a forked tongue when they say they hate no one, they only ask for what is theirs.
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What does it take to understand a nation? The jury of historians and psychologists is out on that one, because, like individuals and human nature in general, nations are bundles of contradiction. They harbor within them the best and the worst. It is the easiest thing in the world to love or hate them by selecting and cataloguing their crimes or selfless heroic deeds and triumphs over adversity – an academic field of enquiry favorite by nationalist historians.
It may be flattering to our vanity to divide mankind into two, the good (us and our friends) and the bad (our enemies and their partisans). But how objective or valid is it? If we paint ourselves all white and our enemies all black, we shouldn’t be surprised if they do the same. Do we judge Germans by Bach and Beethoven or by Hitler and the Holocaust?
By repeating ad nauseam as we do that we are the victims and they are the victimizers, we may eventually end up convincing ourselves that we can do no wrong even as we behave like swine.
Zohrab observes somewhere that there are as many kinds of Armenians as there are environments in which they live. So that an Ottomanized Armenian and a Frenchified Armenian are as different from one another as a Turk is from a Frenchman – assuming of course there is such a thing as a typical Turk or Frenchman.
“Betrayed by an Armenian, he was saved by a Turk.” I remember to have heard or read this sentence somewhere in reference to Gomidas (Komitas) Vartabed. To make sure my memory is not deceiving me, I consult a recent biography, where I read the following: “Komitas’s opponents [among them Patriarch of Istanbul Ghevont Turian] contacted the Turkish secret police and falsely accused him of including politically subversive songs in his concert program.” (Rita Soulahian Kuyumjian, ARCHEOLOGY OF MADNESS: KOMITAS – PORTRAIT OF AN ARMENIAN ICON [Princeton, NJ], Gomidas Institute, page 74.)
Speaking of religious faith, Sartre says somewhere: “We believe that we believe, but we don’t believe. Likewise, we may believe that we understand Turks and Armenians, but we don’t.
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[arabaliozian]

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Saturday, April 21, 2007
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WHY I WRITE THE WAY I WRITE
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Whenever I see someone’s two cents’ worth on my monitor, I am provoked into posting my own one-cent’s worth. If that’s vainglorious, I plead guilty as charged.
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There are many good Armenians, concerned readers remind me once in a while, but I keep harping on the bad ones thus projecting a bad image. Image is a PR concern and I have no desire to muscle in their territory. My concern is elsewhere. My concern is the nation’s direction. If you read our writers from Khorenatsi (5th century) to Zarian (20th) you may notice they too were concerned with the same thing.
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Good Armenians exist in the same way that good Turks do. But these good men are not represented in Yerevan and Ankara. There may even be good bosses, bishops, and benefactors, but they are as much at the mercy of their bad counterparts as the rest of us who are in no position to change the direction of our collective destiny.
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Those who oppose the war in Iraq today are convinced the Bush administration is ego-driven, misinformed, and wrong, in addition to being corrupt and incompetent. That doesn’t mean everyone in the executive branch is rotten. None of us can predict the future. If tomorrow or next month or year the Middle East is democratized, I am sure everyone will rejoice – everyone, including those who oppose the surge today. Likewise, if one of these days or before I drop dead, our leaders see the light and change direction, I will be the happiest Armenian alive. But until then I will continue to be critical of our charlatans and dupes who in the name of misguided patriotism try to convince us we are in good hands and Turks are the source of all evil.
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Finally, I don’t write against anyone. I write against the self-centered, prejudiced ignoramus that I was, and according to some of my gentle reader, I still am.
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Because I speak of tolerance I am accused of being intolerant. Because I speak against the knee-jerk anti-Turkism of our Turcocentric pundits, I am accused of being anti-Armenian. That’s not criticism. That’s infantile nonsense. And remember: bad leaders have ruined empires; bad writers – in addition to being unreadable -- have harmed no one but themselves.
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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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[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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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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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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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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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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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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