notes / comments

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Monday, July 02, 2007
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NOTES AND COMMENTS
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We preach freedom of speech to others but among ourselves we practice censorship, and we are too self-righteous and arrogant to see a contradiction or even an inconsistency.
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Hatred becomes pathological when you hate even those who don’t share your hatred.
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Born to Armenian parents in Greece, educated in Italy, now a citizen of Canada and living in the shadow of the United States, I know to what extent nationalism and patriotism limit, distort, and even pervert a man’s perception of the world and his fellow men.
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Anyone who is against us is not necessarily wrong and anyone who is with us is not necessarily right.
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Adopting an anti-Turkish stance does not in any way strengthen our case. On the contrary.
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To proceed on the assumption that Turks are bloodthirsty Asiatic barbarian and compulsive liars is to guarantee that we will never reach a consensus with them.
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We are unaware of our failings because they have become habits.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Tuesday, July 03, 2007
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PHONY PUNDITS
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When a charlatan speaks the truth, he is bound to contaminate it with charlatanism. One reason why I am against phony pundits speaking about the Genocide…or anything else, for that matter.
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PARADOX
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In her acknowledgments to her novel THE BASTARD OF ISTANBUL (New York, 2007), Elif Shafak writes: “I am particularly indebted to Armenian and Turkish grandmothers, who have an almost natural ability to transcend the very boundaries that nationalists on each side take for granted.”
There you have it, the paradox of our collective existence: the generation that experienced the massacres and deportations is more progressive in its thinking than the generation that followed it.
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PROPAGANDA
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Between writers and politicians, the masses will always choose to trust the politicians not because politicians know better or are smarter but because they control the media and the machinery of propaganda.
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CENSORSHIP
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Censorship in defense of truth, never. Censorship in defense of lies, always!
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MORE YIDDISH PROVERBS
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God protects the poor from expensive sins.
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God loves the poor and helps the rich.
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He who is silent means something just the same.
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The worst libel is the truth.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Wednesday, July 04, 2007
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OBSERVATIONS
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If you know you are a fool, you are almost smart.
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We speak the worst lies when we speak of ourselves.
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A story with a happy ending is an interrupted story.
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If you believe you are smart no one except reality will make you change your mind, and sometimes not even that.
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Our Turcocentric pundits write about the Turkishness of Turks. I prefer to write about the Turkishness of Armenians.
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You tell a fool he is smart and he will believe it.
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The smarter you are in one thing the dumber you will be in a thousand others. Like all rules this one too has its exceptions – two of them, as a matter of fact: Leonardo da Vinci and Jack S. Avanakian.
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Three of the paintings in 1001 PAINTINGS YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE, Selected by Leading International Critics (New York, 2006) are by Sarkis Katchadourian (1886-1947) (“Three Generations”), and by Arshile Gorky (real name Vostanig Adoian: 1904-1948) (“The Leaf of the Artichoke Is an Owl” and “Betrothal I”).
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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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[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

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

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

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

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

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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