notes / comments

[Armenian]

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I have been told this is a never before seen image of Ara B. producing his intellectual materials in Canada...

[garod]

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Give up behaving as a child.Mature people don't tell their ideas with aid of banal photos.

[Armenian]

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Give up behaving as a child.Mature people don't tell their ideas with aid of banal photos.

The only people that give this self-hating pseudo-intellectual any credit are Turks like you...

[garod]

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The only people that give this self-hating pseudo-intellectual any credit are Turks like you...

Suddenly I remembered other version of this sentence which are said by fascist Turks to Orhan Pamuk, Elif Safak and some others.

How shocking that fascists use same words and have got many similarities

[KarotheGreat]

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Funny that all of you xxxxers think the same

[arabaliozian]

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Friday, October 12, 2007
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ARMENIANS AND BOLSHOI BOLSHEVIK B.S.
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During the Soviet era we were brainwashed to believe the Russians were our Big Brothers (no, not in the Orwellian sense). Even some Russian intellectuals dismissed this preposterous claim as ridiculous in view of the fact that Armenians pre-existed Russians by a good number of centuries. I was reminded of this Big Brother b.s. the other day when I read in one of our discussion forums something to the effect that we should be grateful to our Big Brothers because if it hadn’t been for them we would have been wiped off the map. What we are not told in this context is that during World War II 350,000 Armenian boys died fighting in defense of Russia.
Questions: How many Russians died in defense of Armenia? Is it one or two? Who, pray tell, defended whom? It seems to me the more accurate question to be asked in this context is: How many Armenians did the Russians murder in cold blood in defense of their own Big Lies?
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After World War II our pro-Soviet leadership in the Diaspora encouraged Armenians to repatriate. Cardinal Aghajanian openly opposed this move – an act of courage on his part since he had a sister living in Georgia (some believe this may have been the main reason why he was not elected pope in 1958). And speaking of Russians murdering Armenians (with the full cooperation of Armenians, of course): after the Bolsheviks had systematically exterminated our political, intellectuals, and ecclesiastical leadership in successive waves of purges, there were pro-Soviet Armenians in the Diaspora who went on preaching Big Brotherhood. If, after “purging” our intellectual elite in Istanbul, Talaat had declared he had done it to save Armenian literature, Armenian culture, and the Armenian identity, I have every reason to suspect some Armenians would have believed him, provided of course he had also awarded these dupes a medal, a title, and a steady income. We may be dumb but we also know how to take care of number one.
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I remember a pro-Soviet Armenian archbishop in New York in the 1980s telling me, “There is no future for you in the Diaspora. But if you repatriate they will take good care of you there.” Take good care of me in what sense, I wondered. The mafia takes care of its own too.
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The Catholicos of Etchmiadzin had better luck with Zarian. He promised to have his complete works published in Yerevan and informed him of all the fringe benefits that writers enjoy there. And Zarian, who ought to have known better (in two of his major works, TRAVELLER AND HIS ROAD and BANCOOP AND THE BONES OF THE MAMMOTH, published in the 1920s and ‘30s, he had exposed the aberrations and crimes of the regime) allowed himself to be seduced by the siren song of the Catholicos and moved with his family to Yerevan, where even his application for membership in the Writers’ Union was rejected.
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In Jason Goodwin’s THE SNAKE STONE (London, 2007), a stateless Polish diplomat in 19th-century Istanbul, delivers the following line to Yashim, a eunuch: “Together we make a man, you and I. For you are a man without balls, and I am a man without a country.” Some day if a novelist ever writes about an Armenian character, my hope is he will not describe him as a man without balls, without a country, and without a brain.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Saturday, October 13, 2007
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READING, WRITING, THINKING
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Once, recently, when I said something to the effect that our writers were my role models, one of our Turcocentric ghazetajis took me to ask for my arrogance. “How dare you compare yourself to our great writers?” said he. Of course, I had done nothing of the kind. But I will gladly amend my statement by saying I may or may not know anything about literature, but I do know something about honesty and being an honest witness. And were not our writers honest witnesses?
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My advice to those who have not yet mastered the alphabet: Do not attempt to read between the lines.
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Armenians, who hate to read, love to read our brown-nosers. Knowing this, our brown-nosers dish it out with a trowel, and they are believed because their credibility stands on a higher level than the credibility of our writers.
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Justin Kaplan, biographer of Mark Twain: “The first rule of biography: shoot the widow.” If anyone ever decides to write a biography of one of our bishops, he shouldn’t worry about shooting widows. What he should worry about is being shot at by one of his loyalists.
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There is only one worse thing than a wheeler-dealer parading as a statesman, and that’s a man of the cloth getting involved in politics. I cringe whenever I see a mullah or a bishop shaking hands with a “statesman.”
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To our anti-Semites, I say: Leave anti-Semitism to anti-Semites. The world doesn’t need more of them. I have never seen a sign saying “Wanted: anti-Semites.” But if I ever do, I will be in touch.
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As Brahms was fond of saying on his out from a party: “My apologies to those I may have failed to offend.”
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[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Sunday, October 14, 2007
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NEST OF VIPERS
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When it comes to our clergy and their contributions to our spiritual and intellectual welfare, no institution can rival the Mekhitarist order. And yet, writing nearly a hundred years ago, Daniel Varoujan has this to say about them: “The sermons of our clergy are as sweet as their prayers but their hearts are as black as their cassocks. There are some good souls among them who deserve our respect, granted, but the rest are a nest of vipers.” What Varoujan doesn’t tell us is that the “good souls” are invariably marginalized and rendered ineffective.
Varoujan was educated by Mekhitarist monks in Venice. So was I. It occurs to me now that they at no time emphasized the importance of unity and solidarity probably because they too had split into two independent branches, both of which are now bankrupt and moribund, not because they lacked popular and financial support but because they were taken in by smooth-talking crooks who stole their millions (perhaps even billions) by promising them greater wealth.
Because being duped comes naturally to us we feel the need to compensate by assessing ourselves as smart. But whereas our status as perennial dupes is a fact, our self-conferred superior IQ is fiction bordering on fantasy.
It has been said that once upon a time we were slaves; we are now slaves of former slaves. We could also say that, once upon a time we were dupes; we are now dupes of former dupes.
Here is another useful quotation by Daniel Varoujan: “What’s the use of acquiring knowledge and developing one’s esthetic judgment in a world run by ignorant scum?”
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[arabaliozian]

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Monday, October 15, 2007
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THE UNSPEAKABLE IN SEARCH
OF THE INCOMPREHENSIBLE
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Whenever I am accused of being an atheist, I say, “I don’t believe in the god of our priests.” That seems to placate my accusers, who are more than eager to change the subject.
*
No word, no being, no concept has been more mercilessly, consistently, and ruthlessly exploited and abused than that of god.
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“Man cannot create a single worm, yet he has created ten thousand gods.” And all these gods have their followers who claim their god is the only true god.
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There are those who see god everywhere. There are others who see only the absence of god. And then there are men of faith willing to slaughter one another on grounds that all gods except their own are phonies.
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In all organized religions, obedience to god inevitably evolves to subservience to men who speak in the name of god. It is easy to speak in the name of god, but much more difficult to speak with his wisdom.
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Where there is talk of god, the result will be intolerance, hatred, persecution, torture, terror, and slaughter, all of which must be god’s way of punishing the arrogance of men who dare to speak in his name.
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[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Tuesday, October 16, 2007
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THEOLOGIANS AND MYSTICS
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One way to describe a theologian is to say that he is like an ant in a deep hole who claims he can describe what’s on the other side of the horizon as seen from the top of a mountain; or, he is like a man who searches for a black hat in a dark room, both of which (hat/room) are figments of his imagination.
As for interpreting the word of god: I urge you to read two classics in the field: Bertrand Russell’s WHY I AM NOT A CHRISTIAN, and G.B. Shaw’s preface to his play, ANDROCLES AND THE LION (which, like most of his prefaces, is longer than the play).
I wouldn’t be surprised if some day theological treatises are read the way we read science fiction today.
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MYSTICS
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As Aldous Huxley explains in his PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY, mystics of all persuasions speak essentially the same language, and their two central messages are, (i) their visions or experiences are more real than reality, and (ii) they cannot be described with words.
My favorite mystics are the Zen Buddhists (who, by the way, happen to be atheists) and my favorite writer on Zen is not D.T. Suzuki but Arthur Koestler, and I quote from his THE LOTUS AND THE ROBOT: “Inarticulateness is not a monopoly of Zen; but it is the only school which made a philosophy out of it, whose exponents burst into verbal diarrhea to prove constipation.”
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WHAT I THINK
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To those who say, we don’t want to know what others may have said on the subject; we want to know what you think. My answer is: I was brought up as a Catholic, which means, as a child I was thoroughly indoctrinated by priests, brothers, nuns, monks…the whole schmear. But I am no longer a child and long beards, big books, and solemn titles no longer impress me, and I respect an Eminence as much as I respect a Highness or an Excellency.
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LETTER TO THE EDITOR
K-W RECORD
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October 16, 2007

In his commentary on the recent Congressional vote on the Armenian Genocide (U.S. motion will damage relations with Turkey – Oct. 16) Gwynne Dyer writes that, unlike the xxxish Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire was not premeditated – in his own words: “It was certainly genocide, but it was not premeditated, nor was it systematic.” What he fails to note is that the Genocide was not an isolated or a spur-of-the-moment improvised reaction. The systematic massacre of Armenians began in 1894 and was followed up by successive waves of massacres in 1895, 1896, and 1909. The disposition to massacre was there long before the Genocide of 1915. In what way, may I ask, genocide by predisposition is politically or morally more acceptable than genocide by premeditation?


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