notes / comments

[Virgil]

Re: notes / comments

Ara, stop claiming that you are only "writing" and that you have a right under "freedom of speech" to express any comment you would like to express, the reality is that your opinions on borderline offensive to the majority of Armenians and, for the most part, lack any objectivity (I find it funny how you claim to be "objective"). Just admit it, you are a hypocrit and admit it that being writer does not entitle you to insulting Armenians even for the sake of "making a point". And please, refrain from the "holier than thou" stance, whether by choice or circumstance, you are product of nationalism and are living in a state that funds your livelihood through the securement of national interests. I can only hope you wake up from this selfhate and irrationality, but I know you will die first.

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Sunday, January 27, 2008
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FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
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It would be useful for all Armenians to be reminded once in a while that we live in a world where wars and massacres are dime-a-dozen routine occurrences.
*
Leaders, all leaders, even the most enlightened and progressive, share in common the conviction that the less the people know the better.
*
Sooner or later every Armenian writer must resign himself to the fact that there isn’t much he can say to readers who know better and have all the answers.
*
We like to say that xxxs go out of their way to support their own and that we go out of our way too but only in the opposite direction. But I am suspicious of all ethnic or racial generalizations. In my view, it is a fact of human nature that envious mediocrities will do their utmost to obstruct the path of anyone that threatens to expose their mediocrity.
*
Reason alone is not enough, but reason is all we have in a world where faith, dogma, and subservience -- that is unreason -- are synonymous.
*
Breakdowns occur because we cannot go on deceiving ourselves, others, and least of all, reality.
*
When a man says God is on his side, he is sure to be closer to the Devil.
#
Monday, January 28, 2008
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ON TURKISH LOVE & ARMENIAN HATRED
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If Turks love me and Armenians hate me (this according to one of my gentle anonymous readers on the Internet) it may be because Turks are not always wrong and Armenians not always right -- especially when it comes to judging their fellow Armenians.
To avoid recognizing the devil in us we demonize others –i.e. we project. In the same way that xxxs demonize anti-Semites, and some blacks demonize white men (“White man is the devil”), we demonize not only Turks and the Great Powers of the West, but also anyone who dares not to be on our side. On more than one occasion I have myself been demonized by fellow Armenians simply because I refuse to parrot their favorite brand of propaganda. Hence my skepticism of all blame-games.
Playing the blame-game might as well be synonymous with being infallible, and being infallible means an inability to learn from one’s mistakes, because in order to learn from them one must first admit them.
An addict of the blame-game is a morally bankrupt man because he’d rather lose his reason than give up his addiction.
As for Turks loving me: as far as I know, Turks don’t read me, and if they read me, they don’t comment on what I write. The only Turk who has written me agrees with me that Armeno-Turkish relations will have a better chance to improve on the day extremists on both sides are marginalized thus allowing the moderates the upper hand.
As for Armenians who hate me: I also have a good number of Armenian readers who agree with me, and others who are critical only because I don’t go far enough in my criticism. My comment on Armenians who hate me: their verbal abuse is such that it does not require any comment on my part.
#
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
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THE BARBARIANS AMONG US
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After reading Plato’s dialogues, Shaw’s plays, and countless letters to the editor in foreign newspapers and magazines, I have discovered that every assertion can be contradicted and every generalization questioned without resorting to verbal abuse. Verbal abuse not only detracts from the merit of the argument but also exposes the writer’s character, IQ, and level of upbringing.
*
It is not true that I criticize Armenians, or only Armenians, or all Armenians; I criticize only charlatans and their dupes regardless of nationality – dupes who have dug themselves into a hole so deep that they can no longer see the light of reason.
*
It has been said that suffering is one of the very best ways to learn to know oneself. But I guess, when given the opportunity to learn, some people will choose the bliss of ignorance.
*
The trick in good writing is to convince the reader that you write to express not your own sentiments and thoughts but his.
*
We are not a nation but a mosaic of tribes and products of different environments and cultures. Unless we stress what we share, learn to explain ourselves in a civilized manner, and understand one another – none of which can be achieved by means of insults and verbal abuse – we are doomed.
#
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
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REASON AND AUTHORITY
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Theophylactus Simocatta the Egyptian (500-630 A.D.): “By reason, men converge toward one another and advance from the outer surface to the inner mind. Reason has showered innumerable blessings upon men and is an admirable collaborator with nature.”
*
If one is brought up to respect authority, those in authority are brought up to deceive and intimidate. Authority and subservience produce dogmatism, intolerance, and ultimately war and massacre. Is anarchy the answer? No. Skepticism? Yes. Don’t believe everything you are told. Authority is a double-edged sword that speaks with a forked tongue. Its main concern is to legitimize its own power at all cost even if it means the conscious avoidance of truth and the destruction of the world.
*
The best way to achieve immortality is to speak the truth to liars, for liars have the memory of elephants.
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Sunday, February 03, 2008
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REFLECTIONS
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When told non-violence is for cowards, Gandhi replied: “I prefer violence to cowardice. A coward has no right to call himself a member of the human race.”
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A nation whose rulers are ignorant philistines, both ignorance and philistinism will be the norm and anyone who refuses to conform will be an enemy of the people – not an enemy of ignorance and philistinism, but a traitor to the cause.
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There are honest men and there are liars, and i prefer an honest Turk to a lying Armenian.
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In his efforts to assert his Armenianism, one of our nationalist leaders claimed to have traced his ancestry all the way back to the Mamikonians (Chinese) -- or was it the Bagratunis (xxxs)?
*
“There is no such thing as a Turk,” a Turkish friend once informed me. “We have all been bastardized and mongrelized. We are all the offspring of mixed marriages that go back hundreds of years. There is a Greek, an Armenian, a xxx, a Kurd, and an Albanian in all of us.”
*
In the Armenian ghetto where I was born and raised there was a blond barber called Alaman (German in Turkish) and a greengrocer named Kurdoghlanian (Son of a Kurd). They were accepted as Armenians and no one questioned their pedigree, perhaps because everybody was too busy trying to survive in an alien environment to care about such impure concepts as “pure blood.”
*
No matter how hard they try, they will never convince me that honesty and objectivity are anti-Armenian, or that the statement “All men are brothers” is pro-Turkish.
*
To brainwashed dupes who question my Armenianism on the grounds that I am critical of fellow Armenians, I ask: If I speak the truth and in doing so I expose liars, am I good or bad? After long centuries of living in fear, aren’t you tired of lies? Why should truth be a source of dread? What if in treating an honest Armenian as if he were a Turk, you succeed only in exposing your Ottomanism?
*
A historian is not judged by the degree of his patriotism, nationalism, loyalty or subersvience to a power structure, but by his honesty and impartiality. For more on this subject see Michael Grant’s GREEK AND ROMAN HISTORIANS: INFORMATION AND MISINFORMATION (London, 1995).
#
Monday, February 04, 2008
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RANDOM THOUGHTS
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If you speak the truth to liars, they will call you a liar. What else can they do? If you are an honest man among crooks, they will call you a crook. That’s their only line of defense and they will take it for all it’s worth.
*
To deprogram someone against his will can be a formidable undertaking and it doesn’t always work. The alternative – to hope that he will deprogram himself – may take years and sometimes decades, depending on a number of variables which are not worth going into. The fact remains that because we are all products of a cultural milieu with its own specific and clearly defined educational system and dominant ideas, we cannot claim to be who we are in the same way that a wooden table of chair can no longer claim to be a tree in a virgin forest.
*
Crooks and liars are relatively easy to deal with because they are aware of who they are and they feel vulnerable to exposure. Dupes who have been brainwashed to believe they are honest men are infinitely harder to deal with because the lies they recycle are not theirs but someone else’s. This fact makes them invulnerable to reason because there exists between them and reality an impenetrable wall of illusions, and nothing comes more naturally to us than to confuse illusions with reality. Consider what happened to us at the turn of the last century when our revolutionaries thought the Great Powers cared for us. And consider what happens to us today whenever a political candidate, for obvious reasons of his/her own, promises to recognize the Genocide.
*
It is said, investigative reporters are the eyes and ears of a nation. Where are our investigative reporters? Do we have them? Did we ever have them? Why is it that we have dozens of papers but not a single investigative reporter? Are we afraid of what they will uncover?
*
Turks worry me less than the Turk within us.
#
Tuesday, February 05, 2008
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TURCOPHOBIA
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Dionysius of Halicarnassus (first century B.C.), in THE ANCIENT HISTORY OF ROME: “The majority of the Hellenic public have been misled by the false view that founders of Rome were uncivilized vagrants and outlaws who were not even freeborn; and that the secret of Rome’s gradual advance in world dominion has not been her righteousness or her fear of God or any moral quality, but some blind, mechanical and immoral operation of Fortune, who has bestowed her greatest gifts upon her most unprofitable servants, and the lowest of savages…It is my hope that the discovery of the truth may induce a proper appreciation of Rome, unless they are her fanatical and irreconcilable enemies.”
*
Istanbul is not Rome, granted; but neither is Armenia the Garden of Eden.
*
A reader born and raised in Turkey tells me, “Turks can be very nasty if you ever dare to say anything remotely critical about them in their presence.”
Are we different?
“Maybe not, but they massacred us, we didn’t massacre them.”
According to impartial witnesses whenever we had the upper hand, we did to them what they did to us.
“They massacred two million; how many did we massacre, two thousand or two hundred?”
That doesn’t make us more civilized or morally superior. To say otherwise is to confuse military inferiority with moral superiority. You cannot live under a ruthless master for six hundred years without assimilating part of his ruthlessness. Neither can you say to a man, “I want to be friends with you but only on condition that you admit to being a cold-blooded murderer, a thief, a liar, and a bloodthirsty barbarian who should have stayed in Mongolia and never ventured westward where you will never be accepted as a member of a civilized community.” But if you do, don’t be surprised if he doesn’t respond with expressions of gratitude and joy.
*
Do you want to know why sooner or later Hitler’s name props up in Armenian arguments? The following easy-to-remember formula may be as good an explanation as any:
nationalism + antiSemitism + anti-intellectualism = fascism.
#
Wednesday, February 06, 2008
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OUR BETTERS OR OUR WORST?
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Since time immemorial man has known that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” And yet, the only enterprise in which our leaders have been consistently successful throughout our millennial existence has been in dividing us and in keeping us divided.
Our writers have called them “useless” (Zarian) and “brainless” (Issahakian), and if you think they overstated their case, you should hear what they (our leaders) call one another.
Once, many years ago, when I published an interview with a Tashnak leader, which dealt not with politics or history but with childhood reminiscences and the personalities that had shaped his character and worldview, a Ramgavar leader published an attack so nasty that I was left speechless. This may explain the gutter mentality of some of my brainwashed partisan critics.
*
When things didn’t work out for them, the Bagratunis moved to Georgia, and from Georgia to Russia. When our revolution in the Ottoman Empire failed, our revolutionaries abandoned the people at the mercy of butchers and kept themselves busy by writing long-winded memoirs. They had a Plan B for themselves but only a Plan A for the people.
*
They flatter us by bragging about our survival in an environment where many others perished. They are right: “they” survived all right while countless others did not. They survived to what end and for what purpose? To divide us, of course, and to make sure we stay divided. That’s because that is the only undertaking in which they excel – after all, they had millennia of practice in which to refine and master the technique.
*
Are they our betters or our worst? I will let you answer that question in the hope you will come up with the right answer not because you are smart (I will let them use the maneuver of treating you like fools after flattering you to believe you are just about the smartest people on earth) but because I trust you are capable of using your common sense, which, it has been said, is the least common of all faculties.
#




"Intellect is invisible to the man who has none."
Arthur Schopenhauer

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Thursday, February 07, 2008
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THE UNMENTIONABLE IN PURSUIT
OF THE UNEATABLE
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If I am to believe my critics, I am a self-hating narcissist. To which I can only say, “No comment.”
*
One can master the demanding discipline of suffering fools gladly only with the help of the Good Lord. Which is why this particular discipline is less accessible to agnostics and atheists.
*
We all labor under the inflexible law of demand and supply, and the demand these days is for flattering and chauvinist crapola. That’s why everybody speaks about Turkish criminal conduct and no one even dares to mention our “brainless” and “useless” leadership. And because I stress that aspect of our history and status quo, I have become persona non grata and I am called a self-hating s.o.b. with illusions of grandeur, one of which is that I think of myself as a writer. If I am not a writer, why bother reading me in a world that is abundant in unread masters, including our own? Instead of reading our great writers, they read massacre books, which reinforce their image of themselves as perennial victims, after which they wallow in self-pity.
*
Two of the dangers of Turcocentrism is (one) allowing ourselves to be defined by our enemies, and (two) offering them a rent-free permanent residence in our psyche -- which also means allowing them to carry on re-creating us in their own image. Hence the ubiquitous presence of anonymous borodakhos and anpardavan srigas in our internet discussion forums whose idea of criticism is slinging mud hoping some of it will stick, and when none of it even hits the intended target, they keep slinging hoping they will have better luck next time – just like our revolutionaries, who, after repeated massacres, refused to reconsider their tactics, in the same way that now they refuse to acknowledge any responsibility. Learning from our blunders? No time for that. We are too busy trying to educate our enemies who have made it abundantly clear they do not intend to be educated by their former slaves.
#
Friday, February 08, 2008
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ON ARMENIAN ANTI-ARMENIANISM
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Krikor Zohrab (1861-1915): “Oppression corrupts everything it touches, even the highest moral virtues.”
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Derenik Demirjian (1877-1956): “Every Armenian has another Armenian whom he considers his mortal enemy.”
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Lucretius (98-55 B.C.): “Differences among men, which reason is unable to expel, are so exceedingly slight that there is nothing to hinder us from living a life worthy of gods.”
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The anti-Armenian Armenian is as real as the anti-Semitic xxx; but whereas the anti-Semitic xxx is an exception, an anomaly, and an aberration, the anti-Armenian Armenian is the rule.
The anti-Armenian Armenian is against any Armenian who does not subscribe to his definition of Armenianism – a definition that is as authoritarian, inflexible, dogmatic, and narrow as himself. In his view, abstractions like tolerance, free speech, fundamental human rights, dialogue, compromise, consensus, and solidarity are degenerate Western concepts whose sole intent is the destruction of the nation; and when he speaks of the nation or nationalism, what he really means is his tribe and tribalism. Fully aware of this collective complex, our leaders have done their utmost to exploit it to their advantage and in defense of their tribal powers and privileges.
Left to their own devices, people do not divide themselves. Divisions are introduced and legitimized by leaders for the simple reason that the average Armenian has no interest in subtle ideological and theological theories. He is too busy trying to survive in an alien, and sometimes even hostile and despotic environment to waste any time on metaphysics.
The Turks have a law (article 301) that says it is a crime to insult Turkishness. We don’t have such a law not because we are more civilized or progressive but because every Armenian is a prosecutor with his own article 301, and if anyone dares to violate it, he runs the risk of being buried beneath an avalanche of verbal abuse. I speak from experience.
#
Saturday, February 09, 2008
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A WRITER AND HIS READERS
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If I understand some of my readers correctly, the function of a writer is to know and understand his readers in order that he may better pander to their needs. If his readers are prejudiced, he should legitimize their prejudices. If his readers hate Turks, he should say they love everybody, they only want justice. A writer who fails to cover up or justify his readers’ failings and limitations ceases being a writer and becomes – in the words of these readers -- a fool and an s.o.b.
I am flattered. I am read by readers so smart that compared to them I am a fool. I must therefore conclude that, if they continue to read me, I must have a special gift, a gift that all writers dream to have, namely, that of being irresistible. Which amounts to saying I am on my way to achieving immortality.
#

[Selpak]

Re: notes / comments

1 samsun 2 ekmek alınacak

[Armenian]

Re: notes / comments

Let's not give this Ara Baliozian character the satisfaction of thinking that he is one of our "writers" and/or "intellectuals." As far as an Armenian writer is concerned, Ara is only worthy of being considered a mediocre writer, at best. As far as his intellect is concerned, Ara is an intellectual midget, at best. And as far as him being an Armenian is concerned, Ara is not an Armenian. The aforementioned characteristics of Ara are the fundamental reasons why he has been rejected from the Armenian society. While Armenians adore, even worship, their poets and writers - Kaputikyan, Sevag, Charents, Isahakian, Tumanyan, Ishkhan, Varujan, Raffi, Emin - just to name a few, this "Ara Baliozian" character remains virtually nameless. And this is the essential why we see his anger, his disgruntlement and his self-hate.

In Ara's twisted mind, had he been an American, or a Canadian, or simply a westerner, he would have gained fame... However, since Ara writes for "Ottomanized Armenians" and "Gazetajis" he has gotten no where...

Nevertheless, this thread called "notes / comments" is essentially a depository of Ara's self-hate, egomania, delusion, hysteria and disgruntlement. As any self-respecting Armenian can see from his written crap, the depth of Ara's emotional/intellectual problems are bottomless. I personally read Ara's rants just to observe firsthand the kind of psychological damage diasporan Armenians suffer from. In short: Ara's written crap is nothing but the 'brain-farts' of a self-hating egomaniac living in the twilights of his life.

There are Armenians who assimilate and disappear without a trace. And then there are assimilated ones like Ara... The problem with his kind, however, is that once they 'assimilate' they continue sticking around to give us 'advise.'

If I was to describe Ara's literary work with one word it would undoubtedly be - GARBAGE

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Sunday, February 10, 2008
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MEDITATIONS
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Nothing comes easier to an Armenian than to overestimate himself to the same degree that he underestimates his fellow men. Hence the familiar phenomenon of the inbred moron who assesses himself as a genius.
*
You may think you know more about yourself than anyone else, but the truth is, what you know is so biased that it might as well be devoid of all value.
*
Sometimes you are judged less by what you know, what you can do, or who you are, and more by your underarm deodorant.
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The aim of propaganda is to mislead and deceive not the enemy but ourselves.
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Patriotism is invariably connected to militarism, and the end of militarism is the slaughter of the enemy – in the name of self-defense, of course.
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It’s when you think you can do no wrong that you commit your greatest blunders.
#
Monday, February 11, 2008
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TURKISHNESS & ARMENISHNESS
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A nearby university town plans to build a 75-foot tall tower proclaiming its “intelligence.” In a letter to the editor I read the following comment: “If we go ahead with this foolishness, most thoughtful people will regard our city as a bunch of idiots.” I agree. Nothing can be as idiotic as bragging about how smart we are.
*
In the Ottoman Empire our daughters were forced into harems. Today they are driven into prostitution, as our sanctimonious benefactors spend millions building churches and museums, which are nothing but monuments proclaiming their greed, wealth, big egos, and arrogance rivaling that of sultans.
*
That some of my readers hate me (and they never lose an opportunity to say so) I know. What I don’t know is whether they hate me more than they hate Turks.
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The more I deal with Armenians the better I understand Turks.
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To use love of country as a license with which to hate fellow countrymen is thought of not as a perversion and a liability but as a virtue and an asset called patriotism.
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We are united by hatred of the enemy but divided by hatred of one another. You may now guess which hatred is more damaging to the nation.
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The ugly Armenian is convinced that Armenishness is superior to Turkishness.
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Our second greatest tragedy, which we don’t even mention, is the fact that they had 600 years during which to successfully re-create us in their own image.
#
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
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PARADOXES AND CONTRADICTIONS
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In his NATURAL HISTORY, Pliny writes, “Not even for God are all things possible – for He cannot commit suicide.” Maybe not, but He can walk out on us, as He has done on more than one occasion. The question we should ask is: What if we gave Him more than one good reason to do so?
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The Armenian paradox: we don’t support one another but we demand the support of the world.
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With us, friendship is a sometime thing. Whenever I make an Armenian friend, I think of him as a future enemy and I am seldom disappointed.
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After deceiving himself, he deceives others with a clear conscience.
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We have been so thoroughly tribalized that sometimes the distance between two Armenians is as great as the distance between an Armenian and a Turk.
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Whatever understanding I have acquired of Turks it has been through my fellow Armenians.
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Armeno-Turkish friendship will be possible only on the day Armeno-Armenian friendship becomes a reality.
#
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
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PROBLEMS
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As soon as you solve a problem you are faced with another. That’s life – an endless succession of problems the last of which no one can solve.
*
A good story cannot be the whole story, and a happy ending is only a beginning.
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Dupes can be easily manipulated to think they are too smart to be duped.
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I don’t write for Armenians as an Armenian. I write as a human being for fellow human beings.
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Academics write in a jargon-ridden turgid prose because they don’t want to be read and “understood” by laymen. Criticism by fellow academics is bad enough. What’s unbearable is verbal abuse by idiots.
*
Studies show that getting involved in Armenian affairs can be as hazardous to your health as smoking four packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day.
#

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Thursday, February 14, 2008
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CLICHÉS
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The starving Armenian writer is as much a cliché among us as “the starving Armenian” was to the world during World War I. On more than one occasion my anonymous detractors, whom I suspect to be either bishops or sons of bishops, have accused me of living on welfare. It is an undeniable fact that in a barbarian environment writers either starve or have no choice but to depend on the charity of swine. But in a civilized society writers enjoy the support of the state by means of literary prizes, grants, royalties, public lending rights, and copyright laws, which means, whenever a book is borrowed from a public library or even a single page is xeroxed, a writer gets his cut. To my detractors I therefore say: I may write for barbarians like you but I live in Canada, which happens to be a civilized country. I say this for another reason, namely, to let boys and girls with literary ambitions know that there is life before death even for Armenian writers, provided of course they avoid living and working among philistines with a forked tongue who praise writers only after they are safely dead and buried.
*
Once, when I addressed one of my persistent and anonymous critics as “Your Eminence,” he was never heard from again.
*
Even when not bishops, my detractors share with them two important features: dogmatism and infallibility.
*
A definition of dogmatism: “50% wishful thinking and 50% dishonesty.”
#
Friday, February 15, 2008
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THE REAL STORY
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We speak about our genocide in order to avoid speaking about a greater tragedy: our leadership.
*
When it comes to writing and reading, I prefer the stench of reality to the perfume of imagination.
*
Even the smartest man on earth is no match for “the cunning of Reality” (Hegel) with an infinite number of tricks and traps up its sleeve.
*
Changing water into wine – that’s nothing. The fact that water exists is the real miracle.
*
After saying something, have you ever wondered why you said it? What that means is that our words spring from a source that is beyond our understanding.
*
The beauty of free speech is that it allows a fool to make a bigger fool of himself.
*
They tell me I am consistently negative. What nonsense! To write is to hope. I will stop writing only on the day I give up all hope.
*
To those who demand solutions, I say: History provides us with an infinite number of precedents and solutions; and by history I don’t mean the history of nationalist historians. Nationalist historians are to real historians what Inspector Clouseau is to Sherlock Holmes.
#
Saturday, February 16, 2008
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THE WRONG SORT OF PEOPLE
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Jon Wynne Tyson: “The wrong sort of people are always in power because they would not be in power if they were not the wrong sort of people.”
*
Nothing can be more naïve than to say, since someone’s words, ideas, or actions are motivated by patriotism, they must be good; and nothing can be more infantile to the point of being idiotic than to confuse dissent with treason. Against how many innocent men has the charge of treason been leveled by the likes of Hitler and Stalin?
*
Because I try to be objective, they tell me I am motivated by self-loathing. It is true, I am not particularly fond of myself. To those of the opposite disposition, I say: No honeymoon under heaven is endless. Let’s talk when your honeymoon with yourself is over.
*
I am reminded of our revolutionaries in the Ottoman Empire and their ideals and dreams. Their infatuation with themselves and the righteousness of their cause was such that they had a Plan B only for themselves. They made the same mistake Hitler did, with one difference. At the end of the story, Hitler committed suicide.
*
Charlatans come in groups because there are so many of them.
#

[jgk3]

Re: notes / comments

"They tell me I am consistently negative. What nonsense! To write is to hope. I will stop writing only on the day I give up all hope."

I write some things on the internet too, not because I wish to restrict my mind to what I have written, but because I hope that maybe those words can help them out, if only slightly.

"Changing water into wine – that’s nothing. The fact that water exists is the real miracle."

I like this phrase very much...

[arabaliozian]

Re: notes / comments

Sunday, February 17, 2008
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MEMO:
TO OUR TURCOCENTRIC PUNDITS
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If you treat them as enemies, you should not be surprised if they behave as enemies. One way to define diplomacy is to say that it consists in treating an adversary as if he were a future ally. History provides us with many instances of past enemies who are now the best of friends. Another point worth emphasizing: it is a tragedy not an unsettled score. To treat it as if it were an unsettled score is to make of it a political football game. But perhaps before we teach ourselves to treat them as potential friends, we should learn to treat one another, if not as brothers, than at least, as human beings, who like all human beings may not always see eye to eye with us. Am I making too many unreasonable demands on you? If so, then please accept my heartfelt apologies.
*
FURTHER READING
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The literature on the subject is vast to the point of being limitless. If you are interested, I suggest you begin with the Gospels. I am not suggesting taking the Gospels literally and loving them. What I am suggesting is that we treat them less as once bloodthirsty Asiatic barbarians always bloodthirsty Asiatic barbarians, but as fallible human beings with their own share of blind spots, prejudices, and failings, always keeping in mind that very probably half of them may well be half-Armenian.
#

Monday, February 18, 2008
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HONESTY
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Most of my readers are smarter than I am. If they were as honest, they would be far ahead of me.
*
Events in history are like the final paragraphs in mystery novels, or like plants with very deep roots. We planted the seed of our genocide on the day we surrendered our destiny into the hands of the Sultan.
*
I once heard David Suzuki, a well-known Canadian dissident, identify himself as a “xxxx-disturber.” Writes Carlos Fuentes, a prolific Mexican writer and diplomat: “You can only live by sticking your neck out, dirtying your fingers, exposing yourself.” I prefer the Canadian’s version of the story.
*
When it comes to belief systems, objectivity may be difficult, even impossible to achieve. But honesty is not. An honest Christian or Muslim will have to concede that his religion has been a mixed blessing and, for countless innocent victims, an unmitigated curse.
#

Tuesday, February 19, 2008
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HOMELAND & DIASPORA
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According to foreign observers, there is freedom of the press in Armenia. If true, that means our brothers in the Homeland have been more successful in de-Stalinizing themselves than we in the Diaspora have been in de-Ottomanizing ourselves.
*
Why should I, or anyone else for that matter, be on the side of a victim whose secret ambition is to be a victimizer?
*
An important part of life consists in being assessed by individuals who have assessed themselves as competent judges.
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One good thing about alienation is that it allows one to be more objective.
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Education allows the educated classes to acquire more ways to mislead and deceive the uneducated.
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To be a nationalist in the Diaspora amounts to living where the money is and saying your heart is on Mt. Ararat. The true definition of homeland is not where your ancestors were born but where you are allowed to work and provide for your family.
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Wednesday, February 20, 2008
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STRAIGHT TALK
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If you think my approach to Armenian issues is blunt and undiplomatic – too much vinegar and not enough honey – it may be because my target is not the general reader but myself. Once upon a time, when I was young, I too thought like a dupe, spoke like a moron, and behaved like a prick. I know now that you cannot expose double-talk with a forked tongue. Diplomacy doesn’t work with white men with black hearts.
And speaking of straight talk: I just read a brief memoir of an Armenian writer by her son who says his mother contracted cancer and died because her readers made her life a misery. Nothing further, your Honor.




"Intellect is invisible to the man who has none."
Arthur Schopenhauer