as i see it

[arabaliozian]

comments

Sunday, September 13, 2009
***********************************************
RATS
********************************************
When New York publishers rejected Thoreau's works, he said: “My bait will not tempt the rats, they are too well fed.”
*
FASCIST RATS
****************************
If the Axis powers had won World War II, there would be a law now that says, all mention of the Holocaust is a criminal offense. America being a democracy, recognizes the primacy of free speech. As a result there is no corresponding law that deals with the extermination of Indians and the slavery of blacks. No one can arrest a black minister for saying “God damn America!” instead of “God save America.” Indian, black, and even white writers are as free to write big books on America's criminal past as white racists are free to think they did to the Indians what the Indians were doing to one another and what they did to the whites whenever they had the power. As for slavery: even the Greeks at the apex of their civilization (5th century BC) had slaves. Even wealthy blacks in America had slaves. In Africa the blacks enslave one another even today. And if the blacks could enslave whites, does anyone think they would refuse to do so on moral grounds? Hence, the animus against Obama.
*
WHITE OPPOSITION TO OBAMA
********************************************
Obama is not an American. He is a Muslim. He befriends terrorists. He was born in Africa. He is an illegal President. He is a Nazi. He is a liar. The secret aim of his health care reform is to bankrupt white America. And when that happens, we will be at their mercy and they will do to us what we did to them.
*
CLOSER TO HOME
*******************************
The Jews are doing to the Palestinians what the Romans did to them. Armenians (with the help of Greeks and Kurds) will be glad to do to us what they did to the Azeris and we did to them. The natives are restless. The rats are afoot!
That's not paranoia but reality, and a reality with so many precedents in history that it might as well be as routine and predictable an occurrence as sunrise and sunset.
*
OVERHEARD
**************************
“Multitasking is a myth. You can't chew gum and fart at the same time.” Neither can you stop blaming blacks for planning to bankrupt whites long enough to blame the chief executive officers (all of them as white as la crème de la scum) for bankrupting the world economy.
#
Monday, September 14, 2009
***********************************************
ON FAITH
********************************************
To believe means to believe the unbelievable.
To believe means to believe your belief system to be the only true one.
Not to believe in what someone else believes, or not to subscribe to his belief system, does not mean to disagree with him but to be immune to his Big Lie.
Faith is a prejudice that is at the root of countless conflicts and many more victims. But people continue to cling to it as if it were a self-evident truth rather than a Big as well as a Dangerous Lie.
*
I believe the Genocide happened.
My Turkish friend believes it never did.
We disagree because we were exposed to two different sets of educational systems or propaganda.
My friend has written a big book (over 800 pages) in which he proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Genocide is a fabrication of Armenian propagandists.
I have read this book and I remain unconvinced not only because I have read bigger books in which the Genocide is documented but also because I believe it happened, and he who believes is not open to reason or documentation or evidence.
*
Propaganda is worse than hearsay evidence – it is fabricated evidence. Hearsay evidence is not admissible in a court of law. Fabricated evidence is perjury and perjury is a serious criminal offense punishable by law. And yet, those who recycle propaganda outnumber those who think for themselves a million to one – roughly speaking of course. This is especially true in authoritarian regimes. It is different in democracies. There are schools of thought in the United States today that assert both Pearl Harbor and 9/11 could have been prevented.
I believe the Genocide could have been prevented too.
I believe those who assert the Genocide was inevitable are wrong. Because if it was inevitable, why is it that no one saw it coming? Why is it that no one warned the people?
“To what purpose?” my partisan friends demand to know whenever the subject comes up.
“So that the people would weigh their options and make an informed decision.”
“Such as?”
“Such as to stay put and be butchered or get the hell out.”
“And abandon all their possessions?”
This response reminds me of Paul Valéry who somewhere speaks of a man who refused to let go of his umbrella and was run over by a bus.
*
I believe the Genocide to be a result of two colossal blunders committed by nationalist fanatics and fools on both sides. It goes without saying that to massacre innocent civilians is a far more serious crime than stupidity or ignorance.
Ignorance may be the most innocent of all transgressions but in life it is the most severely punished. If there are inflexible laws in life, this surely must be one of them.
And speaking of inflexible laws, here is another: If you refuse to learn from your blunders, you condemn yourself to repeat them.
What have we learned from our genocide?
What else but to say we are at the mercy of inevitable historic conditions or forces beyond our control?
Same mistake, same propaganda, same Big Lie fabricated and recycled by men who are too lazy or stupid to think for themselves.
#
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
***********************************************
A PAGE FROM MY DIARY
********************************************
A frequently asked question: “What would you have done in their place?”
My answer: Probably what they did, but having done so I wouldn't compound the felony by spending the rest of my life pretending to be the exact opposite of who and what I am; neither would I expect others to look up to me as a role model, or a leader of men, or a noble specimen of humanity, or a man of vision.
*
If you ever ask an Armenian writer (assuming you can find one) to describe the nature of his employment, the chances are (if he is an honest man) he will say: “It is a demanding job with a negative income in a carcinogenic environment.”
*
I have dealt with too many of my fellow countrymen to be a friend of the human race.
*
I believe free speech to be a human right. I am therefore guilty of unArmenian activities.
*
Where wishful thinking enters, disappointment is sure to follow.
*
The first paragraph in the propaganda of barbarians reads:
“We are civilized.
We speak the truth.
Those who disagree with us are liars
and the world will be a better place without them.”
*
The difference between those who think and speak for themselves and those who recycle propaganda is that the propagandists are never wrong.
*
The height of luxury for me is the ability to say “Talk to my lawyer.”
*
Writers cannot silence politicians but politicians have been silencing writers for centuries.
*
I speak in defense of human rights. The opposition speaks in the name of God, Capital, and Patriotism. I have as much chance to survive as a vegetarian who is surrounded by a tribe of starving cannibals.
*
Someday I would like to meet an Armenian who is not driven by the need to prove himself smarter or more patriotic than I.
*
Judge an idea or ideology not by its definition but by its history.
#
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
***********************************************
NOTES / COMMENTS
********************************************
W. Somerset Maugham: " Suffering makes men petty and vindictive."
*
A friend writes:
“The lawyer husband of a former student of mine was part of a non-partisan U.S.
commission to monitor the last elections in Armenia. They found irregularities.
Afterward, the 'winner' of the presidency asked his defeated opponent to come see him in his office. When the ex-candidate stepped into the President's office, a bunch of thugs beat the opponent so badly he had to be hospitalized. As his opponent was being beaten, the President said, 'That's for being insolent.'
Democracy comes to Armenia."
*
I believe in being diplomatic with Turks but not with Ottomanized Armenians; and I call an Armenian Ottomanized when he does with his tongue what the Turks did with their yataghans.
*
Eugene O'Neill: “[Members of the State Department] are trained to be conspirators, card sharps, double-crossers and secret betrayers of their own people."
That's what I mean when I say our “betters” are our worst.
*
When it comes to the Genocide, we agree on one important point with the Turks: if it weren't for the meddling of the West, it wouldn't have happened. It follows, the West too owes us an apology.
#

[arabaliozian]

name

Sunday, September 20, 2009
***********************************************
IN THE NAME OF GOD
********************************************
When a Catholic tells me “the Pope thinks...” all I want to know is if an imam agrees with him. Because if he doesn't, I am more than willing to dismiss both of them as charlatans. And it is not enough for them to agree on the essentials – God is one, God is our Father, God is love, God is compassionate, We are His children, He owns the Day of Judgment, and so on and so forth – they must also agree on the inessentials and the irrelevant. Because in the past, even Christians have slaughtered Christians on account of a single word. Which may explain why there is a school of thought that believes the Earth is the insane asylum of the galaxy.
*
I hope you will agree with me when I say a single wrong word does not justify the murder of a single innocent human being. And if you disagree with me today, you may agree with me tomorrow. Not only disagreements, unlike diamonds, are not forever, but they are also cheaper than a dime a dozen.
*
I suggest it is wrong to say “I think...” It is more accurate to say “There is a school of thought...” or even better, “There is a propaganda line...” And as we ought to know by now, for every “school” or “line” there is another that will contradict it. This applies not only to politics, history, ideology, religion, and philosophy, but also to science. According to Popper (the greatest 20th-century philosopher of science) there is no such thing as a scientific theory that is not wrong for the simple reason that progress in science is made by exposing the errors of past theories -- as when Einstein corrected Newton, and as no doubt Einstein himself will be corrected in the future.
*
What does the Pope or an imam think?
Rather, why should anyone give a damn?
If a pope were to agree with an imam, one of them would be out of a job.
Which may suggest that most disagreements, the most important ones on which the survival of millions may depend, are direct results of the fact that two charlatans refuse to share power.
#
Monday, September 21, 2009
***********************************************
THE MONKEY ON MY BACK
********************************************
Don't get me wrong.
It is not my ambition
to save the nation.
The very best I may succeed in doing
is giving one or at most two charlatans
a little insomnia --
and when I say a little
I mean a fraction of a second.
Save the nation?
That would be megalomania run amok.
Think of Russia:
after Tolstoy and Dostoevsky,
Lenin and Stalin.
After Thomas Mann and Gramsci
Hitler and Mussolini.
And closer to home:
after Baronian and Odian,
deportation, starvation, and massacres.
No one, not even a messiah
can save a nation on its way to the devil.
No one can stopper a volcano
or arrest an avalanche
on its downward path
or appeal to the common sense
of an earthquake
or reason with a tsunami.
No one can edit or amend
the Writing on the Wall.
I write because writing has become
a habit and habits are easier to keep
than to give up.
#
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
***********************************************
CULTURE AND BARBARISM
********************************************
Culture is not a single unified and harmonized concept but a collection of contradictory traditions, habits, and values. Culture also means anti-culture. Every culture contains the seeds of its own destruction, in the same way that every tradition and value that does not evolve condemns itself to the dustbin of history.
For one thousand years the Bible was seen as the Word of God and the Pope as God's sole representative on earth; and as such he could do no wrong even when he legitimized the torture and death of heretics or anyone else who dared to think for himself. As a result, all the scientific advances made by the Greeks were destroyed, buried, and forgotten.
*
Most of my critics attack me on cultural grounds because they confuse my defense of human rights with contempt for our traditional values as embodied by our bosses, bishops, and benefactors. They define a good Armenian as one who says “Yes, sir!” to authority figures who themselves said “Yes, sir” to the Sultan and to Stalin. A good Armenian is thus one whose Armenianism is a direct offspring of Ottomanism and Sovietism. He is quintessentially anti-democratic, narrow, obscurantist, oppressive, tyrannical and doomed to extinction as surely as medieval papacy, the Ottomanism of sultans, and the Sovietism of commissars.
Don't get me wrong. I am not engaging in prophecy. I am simply describing what I see – namely the high rate of alienation and assimilation in the Diaspora and exodus from the Homeland.
*
Moral I: If the popes of Rome could be wrong for a thousand years, so can our bishops for ten thousand years.
*
Moral II: What matters is not what others (including myself) tell you, but what you really think.
*
Moral III: The only way to discover what you really think is by not allowing anyone's authority to blind your critical judgment.
*
Moral IV: The ultimate aim of all authority is to grind you to dust.
*
Moral V: There is only one way to assert your freedom and that is by resisting authority.
#
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
***********************************************
THE OPPOSITION
********************************************
To wear down the opposition may not be victory
but I like to believe it is not altogether without merit.
*
Everything that is worth saying has been said.
What remains to be done is to repeat and emphasize.
*
Because we agreed on ninety-nine things
and disagreed on one,
he became my mortal enemy.
*
Because I refuse to share their narcissism,
they tell me I hate myself.
*
Overheard on the radio:
“There is more money in delivering pizza
than in being a philosopher or writer.”
*
My venom, if you want to call it that,
is nothing but concentrated reality.
*
Their two favorite ways of solving problems:
to cover them up or to pretend they are not there.
*
In the eyes of those who judge people by their income,
I am no better than white trash,
and I'd rather be white trash on financial grounds than
on moral grounds.
*
I understand them because once upon a time
I believed them,
I looked up to them,
I wanted to be one of them.
#

[arabaliozian]

prologue

Sunday, September 27, 2009
***********************************************
IF THE PAST IS PROLOGUE
********************************************
The only thing that so far has changed in our collective existence is the size and nature of our blunders.
*
To make plans without taking into consideration the unforeseen, the unknown, and the unknowable is to court disaster.
*
The apologists of the Wall Street bonus scandal call it “an insignificant fraction of the bailout money.” That's what they said about Watergate too -- “a third-rate burglary.”
*
I once heard an Armenian from the Homeland say, “So what if he [Nixon] lied? They lie to us every day.”
*
I look forward to the day when capitalism will bite the dust as communism did.
*
They gave the Nobel Prize to Arafat and Kissinger but not to Tolstoy and Gandhi. And when they awarded the Prize to Thomas Mann they did so not for THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN but for BUDDENBROOKS.
Had Hitler won World War II, he too would have been considered for the Nobel Prize “for pacifying the West after thirty centuries of almost ceaseless internecine conflicts.”
*
“After Hitler won World War II...” What a novel one could write with such a first line!
*
Before you dare to disagree with an Armenian, consider the words of an old wise man: “When you fight with a pig, you both get dirty, but only the pig likes it.”
#
Monday, September 28, 2009
*****************************************
IN PRAISE OF BREVITY
*********************************
Better a bad haiku than a mediocre sonnet.
In writing the principle that never fails is brevity. Keep it short!
A paragraph may be admirable in its beauty and complexity,
but it is one-liners that stick to one's mind.
“To be or not to be...”
“Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains.”
“A bourgeois is a bourgeois regardless of nationality.”
“An Armenian's tongue is sharper than a Turk's yataghan.”
“Once upon a time we were willing to die for freedom, we are now afraid of free speech.”
*
ONE-LINERS FROM DIOGENES
*********************************************
To the son of a prostitute who threw a stone at him:
“Be careful, my boy, you may be hitting your father.”
To a bald man who insulted him:
“I congratulate the hairs on your head for abandoning a fool like you.”
On being reprimanded for masturbating in public:
“I wish I could satisfy my hunger as easily.”
*
ON NATIONALISM
*******************************
In the Middle Ages Armenians ruled empires and they were themselves ruled by Jews (Bagratunis) and the Mamigonians (Chinese). What has nationalism done for us except to divide us further?
#
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
*****************************************
OBITER DICTA
*********************************
In the eyes of God, some wars are just.
Yes, but whose God?
*
I have been cheated by the poor and I have been cheated by the rich. The difference is that when I was cheated by the rich, they made it look like they were doing me a favor.
*
What others think of us may be as removed from reality as what we think of ourselves.
*
I look forward to the day when I will no longer look forward to anything.
*
Jesus and Torquemada, Marx and Stalin, God and the Devil: Can they be really separated?
*
There is a type of contradiction that is a symptom not of inconsistency but of ferment.
*
No one lives long enough to enjoy his immortality.
*
Our body language is invisible to us.
#

Wednesday, September 30, 2009
*****************************************
SCHOOLS OF PHILOSOPHY
*********************************
Speaking of the superficiality of the Byzantine Empire, Zarian remarks somewhere: “Not a single school of philosophy.” By contrast, America may be said to be bursting at the seams with schools of philosophy.
The first time I heard someone say, “Live and let live, that's my philosophy,” I thought he was being funny. It took me a while to realize that he was dead serious. If a cliché can be a philosophy, any moron can parade as a philosopher. Which reminds me of the fact that after the Americans liberated Greece and GIs were seen everywhere in Athens, a new phrase entered the Greek language: “Do you take me for an American?” Meaning, “Do you take me for a moron?”
*
It must be just about the oldest trick in the world. You want to fool someone? Convince him he is so smart than no one can fool him.
You want to convince an entire race of men to behave like unspeakable barbarians? Convince them into believing they belong to a superior race.
That's why “Life is a bitch,” “Sh*t happens,” and “There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.” That is always why “There are more sorrows on earth than there are stars in heaven.” (Apik Avakian)
*
Closer to home: Do you need a class of men to behave like neo-Stalinist crypto-commissars? Brainwash a bunch of bullies into thinking they have leadership qualities. That is also why our political leaders are no better than the scum of the earth.
#

[arabaliozian]

idiots

Thursday, October 1, 2009
*****************************************
ON THE PRINCIPLE OF CONSISTENCY
***********************************************
I don't understand why some Armenians consider the phrase “I don't understand” unArmenian.
*
Whenever I agree with a writer, I feel as though one of us were redundant. Which is why I find disagreement more stimulating, provided of course it is not an expression of prejudice or oneupmanship.
*
How Armenian are we when our cuisine and music share more features with contemporary Turkey than with 5th-century Armenia? I don't mention art and literature because it is extremely difficult to speak of the shadow of a black hat in a dark room.
*
When two people believe God or Truth to be on their side and they contradict each other, it is safe to assume it is not God or Truth that they share but Big Lies and the Devil.
*
What if God exists but wants to remain anonymous, inaccessible, and incomprehensible?
*
Isn't it absurd to think that after a burst of creativity God called it quits and retired? It makes more sense to assume that He is creating other universes in other dimensions even as I write these lines? -- if, that is, the principle of consistency (“Unless something very drastic happens, tomorrow will be the same as today”) applies.
#
Friday, October 2, 2009
*****************************************
HOW SMART ARE WE?
***********************************************
Our greatest obstacle to progress is our conviction that we are so damn smart that we can do no wrong.
*
History speaks louder than propaganda, but not to the deaf.
*
How smart are we if it took us 600 years to figure them out?
*
Being smart and being a dupe are mutually exclusive concepts.
*
No one is smart enough to tell an Armenian something he doesn't already know.
*
If I were to name my greatest enemy, it would've to be unawareness of my own ignorance.
*
Reading words, understanding their meaning, and placing the meaning in its historical context are three separate operations and require three different disciplines.
*
An idea that is against our own interests may not be anti-Armenian in the same way that being a law-abiding citizen and saying yes to authority may not be patriotic.
*
Ideas and imagination, intention and action, reality and fantasy: there are no sharp dividing lines between them. With a good lawyer one could plead not guilty, even when guilty as hell, make a good enough case to a jury of one's peers, and get away with murder.
*
There is no such thing as a sterile idea, only sterile minds.
*
Socrates and Christ have taught me, to say what must be said can be a capital offense.
*
I can't imagine anything more unpleasant and dangerous than a mind without doubts.
#
Saturday, October 3, 2009
*****************************************
IDIOTS
***********************************************
Christians believe their religion to be the only true one. Muslims, ditto.
Where there is unanimity, “cherchez” the Big Lie.
*
We brag about being survivors. Imagine a man who survives an accident in which his entire family perishes. Would it even occur to him to brag about his survival?
We are taught to brag by idiots who expect us to see a positive needle in a haystack of negatives.
*
Zabel Yessayan and Gostan Zarian survived the Turk's yataghan but fell victim to Armenian idiots – the very same idiots who expect us to believe we never had it so good because we are in the best of hands.
*
The aim of propaganda is to moronize the masses by convincing them not to think for themselves because leaders are the brains of the nation, which amounts to saying the people are brainless.
*
The French say “Cherchez la femme,” to point out the fact that some very smart men have committed murder because they were infatuated with a worthless slut. Our literature may be said to be a constant battle against our infatuation with empty verbiage. Hence its unpopularity with idiots.
#

[arabaliozian]

types

Sunday, October 4, 2009
*****************************************
OBSERVATIONS
***********************************************
George Orwell criticized Dickens for “always pointing to a change of spirit rather than a change of structure.” If Dickens did that, it may be because a change of heart or spirit must precede a change of structure. Before you convert swine, you must introduce them to themselves. In the Soviet Union the structure changed but the heart went from bad to worse.
*
Dissidents win even when they lose in so far as they keep the tradition of dissent alive.
*
Both Tevye the Milkman and Bernard Madoff are members of the same tribe. Now then, go ahead and generalize.
*
It is easy to have all the answers if you ask the wrong questions.
*
There are two kinds of divisions, (one) dog-eat-dog, and (two) Armenian, and of the two, the second runs deeper.
*
Honesty and dishonesty are two painfully acquired habits.
*
If perfection cannot be improvised, it can't be worth achieving. God did not create a perfect world. What's good enough for God, it should be good enough for man.
*
Power means the power to get away with murder and to have the powerful on your side. Where power enters, justice is orphaned.
#
Monday, October 5, 2009
*****************************************
ARMENIAN TYPES
***********************************************
The white-haired elder statesman,
the "mi-kich-pogh" Panchoonie,
the apres-moi-le-deluge and
what's-in-it-for-me wheeler-dealer,
the loud-mouth charlatan,
the inbred moron who assesses himself as a genius,
the phony pundit (whose wisdom
is a figment of his imagination --
sometimes even recycled enemy propaganda:
remember our chic Bolsheviks),
the brown-noser,
and the grub-first-then ethics speechifier.
If I speak with some authority on all these types
it's because at one time or another I have been all of them --
all except the white-haired elder statesman --
my hair is black with only a shake of salt in them.
*
You begin to acquire a moral compass on the day you feel guilty about acts you committed without a single trace of remorse.
*
If some very smart men profess very stupid belief systems, it may be because the aim of belief systems is not to make sense but to satisfy a need, like hunger. The rest is propaganda.
*
God is one, but the lies spoken in His name are without number.
*
To simplify matters for the simple-minded, let us say there are two kinds of people: (one) the brainwashed dupes, and (two) those whose ambition it is to be a human being.
*
Most Greeks and Turks (probably the overwhelming majority) are neither Greeks nor Turks, only citizens of Greece and Turkey. As for my fellow Armenians, I will speak only for myself: On a clear day I can trace my ancestry all the way back to my father.
*
History seems to suggest that the most effective way to combat a Big Lie is with bigger lies.
#
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
*****************************************
LIFE IS SHORT
***********************************************
Life is short,
art long, but even longer
is the list of things
that must be said and done.
*
You say, “Me wrong? Never!”
and I say “How I wish I were wrong.”
*
I have yet to meet a smart Armenian
who was not self-assessed
and a self-assessed Armenian
who was not a damn fool.
*
How to succeed as a writer?
I don't know.
But I can tell you how to fail:
Be an Armenian writer.
Michael Arlen succeeded
because he pretended to be an upper-crust Englishman.
Saroyan succeeded because he wrote about characters
that were as imaginary as Winnie the Pooh.
Compare the characters in PAPA, YOU'RE CRAZY
and MAMA, I LOVE YOU with their real counterparts –
himself and his two children
whom he disowned like an enraged grizzly bear.
#
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
*****************************************
IDIOTS (II)
***********************************************
Simenon, the author of over 500 books, believed it is law-abiding citizens who create murderers.
In his ANTI-SEMITE & THE JEW, Sartre asserts that Jews are created by anti-Semites.
Goethe once said that he can't imagine a crime he is not capable of committing. But not even he could have imagined that some day his fellow countrymen would be capable of incinerating millions of innocent civilians.
Speaking of the Armenian massacres, Toynbee tells us, given the right combination of circumstances, we, all of us, are capable of behaving like Turks.
In novels like CRIME & PUNISHMENT and THE POSSESSED (sometimes also translated as THE DEVILS), Dostoevsky identifies himself with characters who commit unspeakable acts to such a degree that he leaves no doubt as to his inner drives.
Long before the writers and thinkers mentioned above, our own Naregatsi described himself as someone a respectable citizen wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole.
Moral: Only self-righteous and self-satisfied idiots assert moral or racial superiority.
#

[arabaliozian]

justice

Thursday, October 8, 2009
*****************************************
HOW TO RECOGNIZE
AN HONEST MAN
***********************************************
A readiness to speak against one's own interests, or the courage to face and admit openly one's own failings, is the hallmark of an honest man.
By contrast, parading as a holier-than-thou role model is the quintessence of dishonesty.
But the most dangerous form of dishonesty is the assertion that man is fallible in all matters except in his choice of belief systems.
*
When Gandhi, Einstein, and Thomas Mann were offered the presidency of India, Israel, and East Germany respectively, they said, no thanks. Which reminds me of Plato's dictum that those who seek power are the least qualified to handle it. That to me might as well be the most convincing explanation as to why world history is an endless catalog of lies, disasters, and tragedies.
*
Our local paper has a literary critic who manages a bookstore. He contributes a regular weekly column devoted to new books and he is unfailingly kind to all the writers he discusses. Who takes him seriously? Only dupes, and there must be quite a few of them because he has been in business for many years.
*
Closer to home: to defend one's views just because they are one's own, even when the evidence is against them, is another instance of dishonesty. But the most widespread and universal symptom of dishonesty is saying “Yes, sir!” to someone simply because he has more power or money or prestige. Speaking for myself, I don't think those who speak in the name of God and capital (make it, Capital and god) are wiser than the rest of us. If anything, it's the other way around. Which is why I maintain the most egregious case of dishonesty is the assertion by the Catholic Church that in matters of faith the Pope is infallible – an assertion rejected even by some eminent Catholic theologians. Because, if true, all other organized religions, including an important faction of Christians, must be wrong. Which they may well be, but not because they reject the Pope's infallibility.
#
Friday, October 9, 2009
*********************************************
ASSETS & LIABILITIES
**********************************
A writer's two best assets:
the sensitivity of an open wound
and the hide of a rhino.
*
Money cannot solve our problems.
Money may even exacerbate them.
That's because where money enters,
philistinism is bound to follow.
And where philistinism enters,
mediocrity becomes the dominant mindset.
That's the only reason why
our problems remain unsolved.
As for our so-called “conditions beyond our control”--
they are nothing but convenient cover-up words
for our lack of vision and incompetence.
*
The biography of a man
duplicates the history of mankind,
with one difference:
what follows the Dark Ages
is not always Enlightenment.
*
There is so much talk of massacres in our media
that most Armenians are brought up to believe
genocide is the only legitimate violation of human rights.
As for free speech:
no one speaks in its defense because no one cares.
#
Saturday, October 10, 2009
**********************************
JUSTICE & THE LAW
********************************************
Armenians who oppose the Protocols do so because they are fearful we may lose. Justice, after all, is blind, and the law “is a ass” (Dickens). As a matter of fact, lawyers prefer to speak of evidence and the law rather than justice.
*
Relying on the evidence of insiders, an Armenian editor once published a critical article about the operation of an Armenian organization headed by a national benefactor,who took him to court; and because the insiders refused to testify against the benefactor (they were either hirelings or recipients of his generosity), the editor not only lost but also had a stroke and went bankrupt. That's justice Armenian style for you.
*
I have been to court only once in my life – small claims court. My adversary, an incompetent repairman who refused to do what he was paid to do. I took him to court with the absolute certainty that I couldn't lose. But I lost. He lied and the judge believed him and rejected my version of the story on the grounds that I couldn't produce a witness.
*
Why did I lose? I can think of many reasons. The judge may have been a racist. The repairman, like the judge, had an Anglo-Saxon name. How dare I, an immigrant, question Anglo-Saxon efficiency and integrity?
The judge had had no experience with incompetent or dishonest repairmen – who, after all, would dare to cheat a lawyer or a judge?
The judge's father had been a hard-working repairman who had also been unfairly accused of incompetence...and so on and so forth.
The fact remains that I lost and learned what I should have known all along, namely that, injustice is the price we pay for justice. That's not a contradiction but life, and life, as we all know, is not fair.
#

[arabaliozian]

protocols

Sunday, October 11, 2009
************************************
THE PROTOCOLS
************************************
Our leaders must be celebrating.
They now have another reason to divide the nation.
Why do they oppose the findings of an independent commission?
Words on a piece of paper, agreements, treaties: they can't change reality. They have been ignored in the past, many times, and they can be ignored again. They are binding only if we allow them to bind us, and no one has the power to do that.
Who takes politicians and academics seriously?
A so-called impartial commission does not scare me. It is here today, heard tomorrow, forgotten the day after.
Relax! The sky isn't falling.
Nothing can be more naïve than to confuse the verbal commitments of diplomats with accomplished facts.
If, say, ten or a hundred years from now, an independent commission were to decide there is no God, do you think believers will give up their faith? They didn't under Lenin, Stalin, Mao and their kind.
And speaking of God: the Scriptures tell us, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” And yet our leaders keep dividing us. If they can ignore the Word of the Almighty, why can't they ignore the empty verbiage of a commission? If only they had been more skeptical a hundred years ago and ignored the verbal support of the West! There would have been no Genocide and no Genocide commission deciding whether the Genocide was in fact a genocide.
*
The daily quotation of my morning paper today is by Aldous Huxley and it reads: “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
Go ahead, say it ain't so!
#
Monday, October 12, 2009
************************************
DEAD MEN WALKING
************************************
In a book of abusive terms I once read that Greeks call Armenians “Turkish gypsies.” That was news to me probably because I seldom ventured outside our ghetto outside Athens – though I was fully aware of the fact that Greeks were not particularly fond of us. Not that they had any reason to be. In their eyes we were unwanted interlopers, D.P.'s (a Canadian abusive term for "displaced people"), who lived crowded in a ghetto that looked like a gypsy encampment.
*
Speaking of abusive terms: I have met many Armenians from the Homeland and none of them has ever called me “aghber.” If the natives call us “aghber” in the Homeland, why not in the Diaspora?
I suspect they don't call me “aghber” for the same reason that a white man is careful not to use the “n” word while visiting Africa, or refer to the natives as Japs while in Tokyo.
*
On a number of occasions I have been told when Armenians call their fellow Armenians “aghber,” they mean not “trash” but “brother.” But I happen to know from personal experience that no one can be as abusive to Armenians as a fellow Armenian (see below). If you don't believe me read Naregatsi on Naregatsi. Read Raffi, read Daniel Varoujan on priests, read Baronian, Odian, Massikian, Zarian....
*
I dare anyone to read Odian's FAMILY, HONOR, MORALITY (Istanbul, 1910) and not think of his fictional characters as dead men walking – not in the sense of inmates on death row but as men so degraded and dehumanized that they might as well be dead. And if you think Armenians today – be they in New York, Los Angeles, or Yerevan – are alive, it may be because we don't have writers of Odian's caliber, only Turcocentric ghazetajis and academics who come alive only when they speak of massacres.
What kind of life is it that is fixated on death?
I shiver to think what would happen to someone like Odian today who would have the courage to speak of Armenians not as they wish to be described but as they are.
*
Speaking of his tuberculosis, Albert Camus writes: “The illness comes on quickly, but leaves very slowly.” He fails to note that sometimes tuberculosis may even result in death.
*
Speaking of Armenians being too nice to use abusive terms: I don't mind admitting that on occasion I have myself described some of them as “Ottomanized morons,” “the scum of the earth,” and “inbred morons”-- but always in retaliation of worse insults, whether fairly or unfairly not up to me to decide...remains to be seen...posterity will tell...take your pick!
#
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
************************************
HEMINGWAY ON KEMAL ATATURK
************************************************** **
“[He] looks like an Armenian lace seller than a Turkish general. There is something mouselike about him.”
What does an Armenian lace seller look like? I plead nolo. An Armenian lace seller makes as much sense to me as a Patagonian barber or a Syrian carpenter.
But if you are an American writer writing for an American audience, you can say anything and get away with it.

OSHAGAN & DOSTOEVSKY
************************************
Oshagan was wrong when he said he could not write like Dostoevsky because Armenians did not have Dostoevksian characters. But Dostoevsky's characters owe more to his imagination than to his fellow countrymen. Even Russian writers like Turgenev and Nabokov found Dostoevsky's characters unRussian. As for Oshagan: since he could not write like Dostoevsky, he chose to write like Proust, whose French characters are even more unArmenian than Raskolnikov and Dimitri Karamazov.
*
TURGENEV ON DOSTOEVSKY
********************************************
Whenever he saw anything morbid and strange, Turgenev would say, “C'est du Dostoevsky.”
*
CHEKHOV & ZOHRAB
***********************************
When Chekhov discovered he could make money by writing stories, he gave up medicine – he went on practicing whenever the situation demanded but never charged for his services.
Had Zohrab given up lawyering, he could have been as great a short story writer as Maupassant and Chekhov. There was some money in Armenian literature at the turn of the century in Istanbul but not enough for Zohrab's upper crust lifestyle. To give you an idea how much money there is in Armenian literature today: I am told one of our national benefactors financially supported several writers, among them Shahan Shahnour, by sending them a regular monthly check of $8.00 (eight dollars).
*
SHAKESPEARE
*******************************
One reason he was great is that he had a great audience. He wrote for kings and queens, and even his queens had cojones. An Armenian writer writes for Levantine philistines in the Diaspora and the offspring of commissars in the Homeland. That's why even Turks are ahead of us in literature.
*
ON LEVANTINE PHILISTINES
**************************************************
There is a Turkish saying: “Eshek khoshavdan ne annar?” (What does a jackass know about stewed raisins?”
As for the commissars in the Homeland: they are more like Raskolnikov without a conscience. My guess is, they miss the good old days when they could hunt down and shoot writers like rabbits.
#
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
************************************
A RECURRING EXPERIENCE
************************************************** **
When as a child I first heard the story about the Ottoman Bank takeover by a small band of young revolutionaries in Istanbul, who then negotiated their safe passage to a foreign country, but whose actions provoked the massacre of over 5000 innocent civilians: I admired the daring of our youthful heroes, hated the Turks for their cruelty, and suffered with the blameless victims.
That's when I was a child.
Now that I am no longer a child, I have second thoughts.
What kind of heroism is it when the heroes survive and the people perish?
Our revolutionaries justify this colossal blunder by saying, “We made headlines around the world!”
Maybe. But who gives a damn about headlines in newspapers?
The Genocide that followed made headlines too. And again the ship went down, the people drowned, but our captain survived. And we are now taught to say, Long live the captain!
We are also taught to brag about our will to live; and by “our” they of course mean their cunning to survive.
As for the people: the people exist to serve the nation – meaning the leadership. What we are not taught is that this is another definition of fascism.
In a democracy it's the other way around. The state and the leaders (also known as “public servants”) serve the people.
Democracy?
What do we know about democracy?
I have had an Armenian education and I don't remember anyone mentioning democracy.
To speak of democracy to an Armenian audience amounts to explaining the subtle aroma and flavor of rosejam to a jackass.
“If one has character,” Nietzsche tells us, “one has also one's typical experience that recurs again and again.”
One could also say, “If one has no brain...”
#

[arabaliozian]

songs

Thursday, October 15, 2009
************************************
THE SOURCE OF ALL EVIL
************************************************** **
Rabbis, imams, sultans and their Christian counterparts in the West: They may believe they speak in the name of God but they speak in the name of a figment of their imagination in which they are, if not God, than one with the Almighty. What makes them powerful is their connection with the collective unconscious, and the unconscious is the source of all evil.
*
You begin to think for yourself only on the day you begin to see the Big Lie that is at the root of all propaganda lines.
*
Call a military defeat a moral victory and you've got yourself a win-win proposition; which may suggest that, in addition to being the first nation to convert to Christianity, we may also qualify as the first nation to be taken in by the "massals" of spin doctors.
*
We have been careless in our choice of enemies and even more careless in our choice of friends who can be even more dangerous than enemies. Our leaders did not massacre us, true, they only made us more vulnerable to massacres.
*
There has been so much oppression, injustice, and slavery in the world that one is tempted to conclude God may not always be on the side of equality, liberty, and fraternity.
#
Friday, October 16, 2009
************************************
REVIEWING THE SHITUATION
************************************************** **
The Jews worshiped Jehovah,
the Greeks Jupiter,
the Russians Jugashvili,
and the Yanks the Almighty –
and I don't mean the Good Lord.
If you see progress here,
I must be blind.
*
The Turks are a nasty folk,
and so am I
because I refuse to be bamboozled.
*
Sartre was an atheist.
He believed in freedom
but supported Stalin, Mao, and Castro,
not exactly friends of freedom.
Sartre's master was Heidegger
whose master was Hitler.
*
In the Ottoman Empire
we were brainwashed
to be loyal subjects of the Sultan.
In the Soviet Union
we were brainwashed to be good comrades
and to kill and die for the Union,
but mostly to die.
We are now being brainwashed
by the brainwashed
to believe we are in good hands.
Now then, go ahead and say
you see a light at the end of the tunnel,
because speaking for myself,
I don't even see a tunnel --
probably because I am blind.
#
Saturday, October 17, 2009
************************************
SONGS OF THE BLEEDING THROAT
************************************************** **
Because history is the propaganda of the victor, we have made of it the consolation of the loser. Our revolutionaries assert they were not terrorists, they were freedom fighters. Americans are familiar with that line and they don't buy it. That's why when it comes to Genocide recognition they side with the Turks. They have other reasons. Imperial powers have neither friends nor enemies, only interests, and American interests are not on our side. We are of no use to them – except in time of elections when they are more than willing to tell us what we want to hear and we are more than willing to believe them. Being dupes comes naturally to us. It might as well be a habit, an addiction, a gorilla on our collective back impossible to shake off. Americans know this. So do our own leaders, whose lies are as bare-faced as those of Yanks running for office.
*
The average book on Turkish atrocities is another atrocity. In our efforts to paint them all black and ourselves all white, we succeed only in exposing our propaganda and damaging our credibility.
I am reading a new book on the Genocide in which our deportations during World War I are compared to the Japanese deportations in America during World War II. There are “loaded” comparisons as surely as there are loaded questions and as such they should be inadmissible, and those who make them ought to know better. It would be fairer to compare the treatment of Blacks and Indians in America with the treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire.
*
So far no book by an Armenian comes close to explaining why a writer of Siamanto's stature hated life in America so much that he preferred to return to Istanbul knowing full well that he could be butchered. Which he was. Or why an intellectual like Roupen Sevag, a medical doctor by profession and another victim of the Genocide, defended the Turks to his German fiancée when she was critical of them and wanted to convince him to move to Europe.
*
Speaking of Oshagan, Zarian writes somewhere that when writers like him speak of Homeland they don't mean Armenia but Istanbul. Several decades before the massacres, Raffi warned the Ottoman Empire was no place for Armenians. And notwithstanding Zarian's own repeated warnings that Soviet Armenia was no place for Armenians, American-educated Totovents and Sorbonne-educated Zabel Yessayan returned to Armenia only to perish in Stalin's Gulags. If our ablest intellectuals behave like dupes, why should we be surprised that there are still Armenians who trust our wheeler-dealers who try to brainwash us into believing we are in good hands and we have nothing to worry about?
#

[arabaliozian]

think

Sunday, October 18, 2009
************************************
WE NEVER LEARN
************************************************** **
“We may think of Turks as backward Asiatic slobs,” Shahan Shahnour warns us somewhere, “but make no mistake about it: when it comes to Armenians, they can be very, very calculating and methodical.”
If the intention of the Protocols was to pit the Diaspora against the Homeland, it was must be declared a brilliant coup -- judging by the Diaspora's venomous opposition to the regime in Yerevan.
*
The Turks are now imposing punitive taxation on their media barons critical of the regime. It seems they respect a free press as much as we do.
I will never forget the conversation I once had with the publisher of a bilingual (English-Armenian) weekly in Los Angeles. He began by informing me that he had received a call from the secretary of a national benefactor.
“What did he want?” I asked, smelling a rat.
“He demanded why I go on publishing you,” was his reply.
“And you said?”
“I said I edit only the Armenian section, someone else handles the English section.”
“Did he buy that?”
I guess he didn't because shortly thereafter I was fired with no explanation, severance pay, or even a thank you note for my decade -long pro bono weekly contributions of book reviews, commentaries, and translations.
#
Monday, October 19, 2009
************************************
COMMENTS
************************************************** **
“Deal may end Turkish-Armenian friction,” reads the headline of a commentary on the Protocols by a British pundit. So far however it has succeeded only in increasing Diaspora-Homeland friction.
*
According to a British diplomat, also quoted in today's paper: “Africans as a whole are not only not averse to cutting off their nose to spite their face; they regard such an operation as a triumph of cosmetic surgery.”
My first thought: That makes two of us.
*
If you can't explain the inexplicable, what's the use of writing?
*
Every morning on waking up sometimes I fail to remind myself that the sun does not rise to hear me crowing.
#
Tuesday, 20 October, 2009
***********************************************
MAKING CONNECTIONS
*************************************
“A dog starved at his master's gate
Predicts the ruin of the state.” (William Blake)
*
To understand history means to see the connecting tissue that binds two apparently unrelated occurrences. Naregatsi's lamentations and a thousand years of subservience. Abovian's suicide and the Genocide. Tolstoy's excommunication and the Russian revolution. The persecution of dissenters and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
*
Perhaps one reason we don't behead our “kings” is that they know how to flatter our vanity. Example: We are a young nation and the oldest civilization.
*
If on occasion I insult my fellow Armenians it may be because so far flattery has not worked for us.
*
If they massacred us because they hated us, does that justify our own hatred for them? What if hatred is toxic to our understanding of our enemies, or for that matter of our friends, and ultimately of ourselves and reality?
*
I never say anything about others that I am not prepared to say about myself. It is through my own failings that I recognize them in others.
#
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
****************************************
SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT
************************************************** ******
Someone voices an opinion, another develops it, a third sees an idea in it, and a fourth formulates a general theory. That's how human thought is advanced. But where there is intolerance, there will be censorship, and where there is censorship, progress will be arrested, creativity aborted, and man moronized.
*
I too am a survivor – not of Turkish atrocities but of moronized fellow countrymen.
*
All men are created equal, but some men are in a better position to say one thing, do the opposite, and get away with murder.
*
Like most men I was educated to be a dupe, but unlike most men I continued to be one even in my advanced years. When an Armenian writer from Beirut once told me he had given up writing because several of his masterpieces had burned during the civil war in Beirut, I believed him. But when I mentioned this to another writer from Beirut, I was told that's a favorite cliché of Beirutsi intellectuals – to blame the non-existence of their works on the war.
*
What we need is an Armenian Human Rights Commission that will expose our dismal human rights record. We are either for human rights or against it. If we are against it, we must be for Levantine charlatanism, Soviet brutality, and Asiatic barbarism.
*
We have a veritable alphabet soup of organizations and bureaucracies run by Levantine wheeler-dealers in the Diaspora and former commissars in the Homeland. What we don't have and need badly is a Human Rights Commission.
Bureaucrats are bureaucrats regardless of nationality. Unchecked by watchdog agencies, they will grab as much power as they can. But what I find even more repellent than power-hungry bureaucrats is the silence of our academics and intellectuals. Mart bidi ch'ellank.
*
I wonder, do Turks have a Human Rights Commission? If they don't, in what way are we different from them? If they do, is it conceivable that they are more civilized than we are? Something to think about.
#

[arabaliozian]

kiss

Thursday, October 22, 2009
****************************************
A BLAME-GAME SCENARIO
************************************************** ******
On hearing one of our elder statesmen blame our misfortunes on “chezoks” or non-partisan Armenians, I wrote a commentary in which I identified my father as a chezok and explained that he had been too honest to engage in charlatanism, too busy trying to provide for his family in time of war in an alien environment, and too unassuming to associate himself with individuals who thought of themselves as the offspring of heroes engaged in the difficult task of saving the nation.
On reading this, our elder statesman telephoned and said one reason he had said that about chezoks was that he though I was a member of the Party. Had he known I wasn't, he wouldn't have said what he said. I didn't have the heart to tell him I was not a chezok, I was anti-partisan on the grounds that I considered our revolutionaries the source of most of our misfortunes.
*
Finally a new book on the Genocide in which our revolutionaries are described as “a group of teenagers and twenty-somethings,” a “vicious political clique of terrorists” and “experts in deception and distortion.” The last two quotations are by John Roy Carlson (real name Avedis Derounian), a prominent Armenian-American journalist who witnessed the assassination of Tourian in 1933 in New York and wrote a best-selling book on fascist organization in America titled UNDER COVER.
*
Our historians are consistent in describing Armenians as a "historically persecuted race…an orphan nation" that has experienced "massacres, atrocities, and massive destruction" (Dadrian). What they fail to explore is, to what extent our own tribalism, lack of solidarity, and incompetent leadership -- things that have been discussed at some length by our own chroniclers, novelists, essayists, and satirists -- were a contributing factor to our perennial status as losers and victims.
#
Friday, October 23, 2009
****************************************
CONSOLATION MANTRAS
************************************************** ******
We all make mistakes.
Tomorrow is another day.
Nobody's perfect.
Let bygones be bygones.
To each his own.
Easy come, easy go.
Forget about it.
This too shall pass. (A favorite of sufferers from chronic constipation).
Forgive and forget.
It takes all kinds.
We all die. (Once when I said that to a friend, he said: “Yes, but people like us die every day.”)
*
De Gaulle once blamed his problems on the 254 (or is it 378?) varieties of cheeses the French eat. We are better off. So far no one has blamed our problems on pilaf and shish kebab.
*
Propagandists don't believe in their own propaganda.
“The Pope doubts his faith seven times every day” (Italian saying).
“Idol-makers don't believe in idols” (Chinese saying).
*
Why the need for Ten Commandments? It would have been simpler to instill in us the ability to discriminate right from wrong, or God from the Devil.
*
Because I refuse to recycle chauvinist crapola, I am told I hate myself. That's Armenian logic for you. I wonder, what's Ottoman logic like? I don't know, but whatever it is, it can't be worse than Armenian logic.
*
Success spoils people. Failure by contrast makes them tougher and wiser. Like all rules, this one too has its exceptions, namely, Armenians.
*
One of my favorite lines in fiction: “And then something very unexpected happened.”
*
Armenians don't mind long sermons against sin and longer speeches on patriotism. But when it comes to reading, they have a very short attention span. That's one reason why I write short sentences.
*
Most people fail because they try to excel in someone else's field.
#
Saturday, October 24, 2009
****************************************
KISS ME, I AM ARMENIAN
************************************************** ******
Like love and hatred, ideologies and belief systems have a tendency to dehumanize men by reducing them to predictable clichés. That's because they create an environment wherein the men at the top behave like wolves and their followers like sheep.
*
To be a leader consists in mastering the technique of flattering and manipulating.
Fools will believe anything they are told provided they are first brainwashed to believe they are too smart to be fooled.
*
The Greeks brag about their past, the Yanks about their present. If you are disposed to brag, you will find something, anything, including military defeats by calling them moral victories, including being massacred by the million by calling it first genocide of the 20th century. I wouldn't be surprised if some day we hear of a jungle tribe in South America that brags about being the only tribe that believes in the divinity of ants and anacondas.
*
In a world where everyone thinks he is the best, he is the chosen, he is superior to all others, our choice is either being like them or defending our humanity even if it means having more doubts than certainties.
*
Though I have written a great deal about history, I am not a historian. But I can recognize a propagandist when I see one.
*
We a small, peace-loving, civilized, landlocked country surrounded on all sides by warlike, bloodthirsty giants? Not quite. We were not always small and we were not always landlocked, and we were not always peace-loving.
*
We are not so much a work in progress as a case of arrested development.
Kiss me, I am Armenian?
I will be grateful to my fellow countrymen if they don't kick me in the balls.
#

[arabaliozian]

pathology

Sunday, October 25, 2009
****************************************
OPTIONS
************************************************** ******
A slave has two options: to obey or to die. An Armenian writer's position today is not much different: he either says “yes, sir!” to our bosses, bishops, benefactors and their flunkies or he starves.
*
Like commissars, readers who are against criticism can be nasty critics and excellent executioners.
*
If you have been taken in by fools, you can't be as smart as you think you are. Now then, consider the number of times we have been taken in by the empty verbiage of promises and treaties of the West, our Big Brothers to the North, and American presidential candidates. I suspect if fools of the world had their own United Nations and we applied for membership, we would be rejected as surely as Turks are today by the EU on the grounds that we are not smart enough to be one of them.
*
If I am the only one who writes as I do, that doesn't mean I am also the only one who thinks as I do.
*
If you disagree with those who speak in the name of God and Country, you will be accused of speaking in the name of the Devil and in defense of treason. And dupes being dupes (present company suspected) will be against you.
*
What if I am wrong?
O how I wish I were!
*
“The unspoken message of everything he wrote was his conviction that far from being the smartest people on earth, his fellow countrymen were the dumbest.”
I would welcome this verdict in my obituary.
*
Words and actions have consequences; so do silence and inaction.
#
Monday, October 26, 2009
****************************************
GOLDEN APPLES
************************************************** ******
One reason I write as I do is to celebrate the fact that I am no longer dependent on the charity of swine. Another is that no one gives a damn. In the kind of environment we have created for ourselves, the status of Armenian writers is (in the expression of Southern hillbillies) lower than a snake's belly full of buckshot.
*
And speaking of hillbillies: There was once and was not an old peasant by the name of Abou Hassan who had a worn out pair of shoes he wanted to get rid of. First he flings them out the window and they come flying right back in – compliments of an irate passerby. Next he takes a long walk and hurls them into a lake. Again they are returned to him by a furious fisherman. Finally he decides to bury them in his backyard. But as he gets busy digging a hole under cover of darkness, he is spied on by a nosy neighbor who thinks old man Abou is trying to hide his valuables...
*
Armenian writers and Abou Hassan's worn out shoes share one thing in common: they are not easy to get rid of. Systematically murdered by the likes of Talaat and Stalin, silenced and starved by our bosses, bishops, and benefactors, they refuse to be cast aside, drowned, and buried.
Why?
To what end?
For what purpose?
*
In Nicholson Baker's latest novel, THE ANTHOLOGIST (New York, 2009) I come across the following three lines from a poem by Coventry Patmore that may provide a tentative answer:
“When all its work is done, the lie shall rot;
The truth is great and shall prevail,
When none cares whether it prevail or not.”
*
Armenian fables have a traditional ending that goes something like this:
“Three golden apples fell from heaven: the first for the teller of the tale, the second for those who heard it, and the third for those who understood it.”
What happens to the third golden apple when no one understands the hidden message of the story?
*
We are told people deserve their leaders. The same applies to their writers. If we no longer have writers like Abovian, Raffi, and Zabel Yessayan it may be because we are buried beneath a Mt. Ararat of rotten apples.
#
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
****************************************
MINOU
************************************************** ******
When a little girl by the name of Minou Drouet published a volume of verse and was hailed as a prodigy by the French press, Cocteau said: “Every child is a genius except Minou Drouet.” And sure enough, she was never heard from again.
*
No one is born mediocre. Mediocrity is premeditated, planned, advertised, and promoted on the grounds that we need factory hands to build cars, construction workers to raise sky-scrapers; we need janitors and garbage collectors more than we need prophets; and above all, we need dupes willing and eager to fight and die for us in the name of patriotism.
*
A coward thinks he deserves a medal for slicing a watermelon; and my guess is, bullies like Bush Jr. and his vice think they deserve to be treated like saviors of the nation for their tough talk.
*
Those who have been exposed to only one side of the story as children, will find it very difficult to believe there may be another side as adults.
*
Who is more guilty: our enemies who slaughtered us or our friends who, for all practical purposes, they might as well have issued an invitation to the slaughter? As for our revolutionaries: all they appear to have learned from their blunders is to make fiery speeches.
#
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
****************************************
PATHOLOGY
************************************************** ******
To hate, to really hate,
means to hate even those
who do not share your hatred.
That's the way our Turcocentric ghazetajis hate.
You can recognize a Turcocentric ghazetaji
by the fact that he writes only against Turks,
and he hates because he has been taught to hate.
He is following orders.
He has been told
Turks are the source of all evil.
As for the arrogance,
the incompetence,
and the stupidity of our bosses:
what arrogance?
What incompetence?
What stupidity?
What bosses?
A dog, it is said, knows his master,
but not his master's master.
Once, when I tried to explain
the dangers of pathological hatred
to one of our ghazetajis, he said:
“But all I am doing is
trying to defend our interests.”
Why is it that with defenders like him
I feel more threatened?
If you live in a world of illusions,
reality becomes a source of dread.
And because I speak of reality
I am identified as an enemy,
and worse, as pro-Turkish.
#

[arabaliozian]

comments

Thursday, October 29, 2009
****************************************
COMMENTS
************************************************** ******
“Education is a womb-to-tomb activity. The person who isn't educating himself is obviously dead.” From INTERVIEWS WITH NORTHROP FRYE (Toronto, 2008, page 68.)
*
I remember to have read somewhere, it is easy to resurrect a corpse; much more difficult to raise the brain-dead.
*
In a recent issue of THE NEW YORKER (Oct. 21, 2009) there is a portrait of Nikki Finke, a Hollywood columnist, where we read that she “portrays many of the town's leaders as jackasses who elbow underlings aside to hog the spotlight... downsize underlings while lining their own pockets, and generally besmirch the fabric of civilization.”
*
Our problems are universal, with one difference: we don't like talking about them and whenever someone dares to do so, we shut him up in the name of patriotism, of course!
*
Our emperors have no clothes because what they need to hide is so tiny that it might as well be invisible to the naked eye.
*
Armenians are incomprehensible not because they are too complex but because they are absurd.
*
Is writing for Armenians some kind of anomaly or a complex in need of psychological therapy? I am not sure. Judging by the number of writers we have produced and the zero effect they have had on the direction of our collective existence, it must surely qualify as an exercise in futility and a total waste of time. Perhaps one reason I go on writing is to remind our jackasses that they can't fool all the people all the time, and if there is only one they can't fool today, there may be two tomorrow.
*
I am told there are readers who can't stand the sight of my name on their computer screen. I have an instant solution to that problem: it's called the Spam button. You don't know about it? Ask a child.
*
Ajarian, the foremost authority on the Armenian language, is quoted as having said: “Who among us can pretend to know the Armenian language?”
#
Friday, October 30, 2009
****************************************
OTTOMANISM AND ARMENIANISM
************************************************** ******
“If you have them at your mercy and they are in no position to retaliate, be merciless!” That's the Ottoman way. The Armenian way? About the same. If on occasion I show no mercy in my dealings with our jackasses, it's for a good reason: to let them have a taste of their own venom.
*
“Before they start accusing me of sins I have never even dreamed to commit, let me plead guilty to all of them to satisfy their blood lust.” This may well have been Naregatsi's state of mind when he sat down to compose his LAMENTATION. And judging by the astonishing number of sins he enumerates, the 11th century must have been our Golden Age of Backbiting.
*
It is written: “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.”
Armenian translation: “If he is innocent and you are guilty, stone the bugger to death before he has a chance to expose you.”
*
There is an inflexible law in our collective existence: “The better you get, the worst they treat you.” You want evidence? Make a list of our best writers and consider the manner of their deaths. And remember to include Talaat's and Stalin's victims because they were betrayed by their fellow Armenians. Americans treat their dogs with greater kindness. My guess is, the reason why we have a veritable alphabet soup of cultural and charitable foundations is to cover up our philistinism and Ottomanism.
#
Saturday, October 31, 2009
****************************************
IN PRAISE OF THE OPPOSITION
************************************************** ******
Only the insecure read to have their prejudices reinforced.
As a Catholic I enjoyed reading books that were on the Index.
I was taught to believe Turks were bloodthirsty savages. I now have Turkish friends with whom I enjoy exchanging views – something I cannot say about my fellow Armenians.
After a brief stay in New York City, an anti-Semite friend of the family from Greece paid us a visit. “I saw quite a few Jews there,” he said at one point. “Guess what. They are people like you and me!”
I have met several Armenians, among them a poet and a businessman, who on visiting Turkey, they became infatuated with Turks. I have also met Armenians who after visiting the Homeland and on their return to America, they went down on their knees and, like the Polish Pope, kissed the tarmac.
I have learned more about Tashnaks by reading Ramgavars and vice versa.
I am a liberal who enjoys reading the NATIONAL REVIEW, and one of my favorite contemporary American writers is Buckley's son, Christopher.
Friends justify your blunders and cover up your failings, they thus do more harm than good. I have learned more about myself by reading my critics. Perhaps one reason we have been going backwards as a community is our collective fear of criticism and dissent.
Mart bidi ch'ellank!
#

[arabaliozian]

q/s

Sunday, November 1, 2009
****************************************
MALEFACTORS
************************************************** ******
If I write what I think, it may be because so far no one has paid me to write what he thinks. And since no one has made that kind of indecent proposal, I have not even been tempted to surrender my virginity.
*
I don't trust the judgment of the powerful and the rich.
The greater the wealth, the emptier the suit.
In an environment where benefactors are kings, only brown-nosers prosper.
*
The establishment our capitalists support is reactionary, anti-intellectual, narrow, and intolerant.
It is against dissent and dialogue.
It is for decline and degeneration.
To our hirelings they may be manna from heaven, but to all honest men, they are no better than malefactors.
*
Turks quote me?
So what? I don't consider that a liability.
They quote me not because I am anti-Armenian or pro-Turkish but because I expose Armenian lies, in the same way that we quote Turks who expose Turkish lies.
Not all Turks are liars and not all Armenians are honest men.
If and when Armenians and Turks develop a consensus it will be because of the effort of dissidents, not those who trumpet chauvinist crapola from podiums and newspaper editorials.
#
Monday, November 2, 2009
****************************************
RECAPITULATIONS
************************************************** ******
Our propagandists tell us we are the smartest people on earth.
Our writers are unanimous in telling us we are our own worst enemies.
How smart is that?
*
After creating an environment in which only bottom-feeders are allowed to survive and prosper, our propagandists tell us we are survivors par excellence.
*
Everyone likes to be told he is smart.
No one likes to be told he is dumb.
Our propagandists know this, but like all propagandists, they view deception as an integral part of their job.
*
Propaganda consists in exploiting lies.
Literature consists in exposing them.
You may now guess which branch of human endeavor prospers and which starves.
*
Ignorance, intolerance, and subservience to authority are not assets but they are touted as such by all propagandists.
*
The fact that I disagree with propagandists may well be irrelevant.
What is relevant however is that propagandists disagree with one another too – and I am not talking about Armenian versus Turkish propagandists but Armenian versus Armenian propagandists.
Case in point: Once, many years ago, after I interviewed a Tashnak leader, a Ramgavar wrote a letter to the editor in which he accused the Tashnak of being a compulsive and habitual liar. But what really surprised me was the fact that in his defense, the Tashnak did not deny the charge; instead he retaliated by dismissing the Ramgavar as a brainwashed Bolshevik.
Hatred of Turks also means hatred of fellow Armenians who do not share our ideology.
*
The two pillars of propaganda, loyalty and respect for authority, have been at the root of some of the worst crimes against humanity, including our own genocide. So much so that, “following orders” is no longer thought of as a legitimate legal defense.
*
No one can be as easily manipulated as a cowardly ignoramus. Such a one can even be brainwashed to die like a hero -- or, as the Armenian expression has it, as an “esh nahadag” (=a jackass martyr).
*
To brainwash innocent children is not thought of as a crime against humanity but as education; and to brainwash a nation is thought of as a patriotic duty.
*
On the Genocide: I am so busy examining my conscience that I leave the legalities to lawyers.
*
If you are arrogant enough to think that you know and understand all you need to know and understand, learning will become such an unbearably humiliating experience that ignorance will be seen as the more comfortable alternative.
*
Where there is a pundit there will also be a counter-pundit.
Whom to trust?
My answer: The pundit whose views are less flattering to my ego.
#
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
****************************************
HISTORY AND HISTORIANS
************************************************** ******
Historians don't understand history, or so we are told by historians themselves, who, as a rule, are also critics of their predecessors and contemporaries.
In his criticism of Karl Marx, Toynbee tells us one cannot explain historic occurrences by the faulty distribution of wealth. In other words – to somewhat simplify matters – money is not the only source of evil in human affairs; sometimes it's faith or organized religions. That's why he concluded his 12-volume STUDY OF HISTORY by saying mankind will know peace only when all religions are reorganized on the basis that Truth (Gandhi's definition of God) is One. The rest is propaganda.
Trevor-Roper criticized Toynbee – criticized? make it, savaged; make it, tore him to shreds – for being not a historian but a mystic and a prophet.
Were Toynbee and Trevor-Roper fair in their critiques of Marx and Toynbee respectively?
*
After an interview with Hitler in the 1930s, Toynbee stated “Herr Hitler is a man of peace.”
And Trevor-Roper: after publishing a best-selling book on the last days of Hitler, he authenticated Hitler's diaries which were later exposed as forgeries.
We all have our blind spots and historians are no exception.
Do Historians understand history?
They do, but only a fraction of it.
*
What about our own historians?
I am afraid the massacres in the Ottoman Empire have acted on them the way the Greek mythological figure of Medusa is said to act on those who beheld her: they (the massacres) have turned them(our historians) into stone.
*
Has any one of our historians been successful in explaining our decline and degeneration?
Why is it that for six hundred years we were not only subservient to a brutal empire but also acquired the reputation of being its “most loyal millet [subject nation]?”
To what extent subservience and massacre have combined to make of us what we have become?
Finally, has any one of our historians attempted to expose the absurdities of our propagandists?
Why not?
Is their intellectual blindness a result of ignorance or cowardice?
#
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
****************************************
QUESTIONS
************************************************** ******
Never ask “Is he with us or against us?”
Ask instead, “Am I right or wrong?”
*
I like this thought by Jean Rostand: “In a future age we shall be just as astonished to find that we have had politicians as leaders as we are, today, to find that we once had barbers as surgeons.”
*
Gostan Zarian: “With us, the emphasis is on cunning: a character trait of slaves, devoid of creative impetus, never a source of strength.”
*
Nietzsche: "What is evil? Whatever springs from weakness."
*
Eric Hoffer: "Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many."
*
Is what I am doing of any use to anyone?
I have no idea.
Why am I doing it?
I don’t know.
If I fall silent, will anyone miss me?
I doubt it.
After twenty years of hard labor have I accomplished anything?
I don’t think so – unless you consider perforating a few swollen egos
an accomplishment….
#

[arabaliozian]

if...

Thursday, November 5, 2009
****************************************
WHAT IF I AM WRONG?
************************************************** ******
That would be too good to be true!
Because if I am wrong, it means our writers from Khorenatsi (5th century) to our own days have been wrong in accusing our political leadership of incompetence and corruption.
It means no foreign or domestic tyrant has ever been successful in dividing us.
It means our bishops and benefactors have at no time used to the power of God and capital (make it, Capital and god) to divide us.
It means when Raffi said “treason and betrayal are in our blood,” he was only voicing his deep-seated hatred of his fellow countrymen.
It means when Baronian said, “If you want to wine and dine every day, be a bishop,” he was writing under the influenced of cynical and atheist French intellectuals who were in vogue at the turn of the last century in Istanbul.
It means our revolutionaries were at no time taken in by the empty promises of the West and the Turks had no reason to exterminate us because, as “the most loyal subjects” of the Empire, they needed our help against foreign and domestic enemies who were unanimous in their desire to see the Empire dismembered and buried never to rise again.
It means our post-World War II repatriates were treated by the natives not as “white trash” but as “brothers.”
Finally, it means when Gostan Zarian returned to the Homeland during Khrushchev's thaw, he was treated by his fellow writers as a literary giant rather than as an undesirable midget.
#
Friday, November 6, 2009
****************************************
GREED
************************************************** ******
When belief systems are bureaucratized, they become interchangeable.
The Vatican and the Kremlin: two opposing systems, same number of innocent victims.
Criticism becomes treason when it targets in Infallible.
Greed for power turns decent men into cannibals.
That is why the wise shun power and in doing so they become victims.
In a dog-eat-dog world, the wise defend their humanity and are devoured.
*
An Armenian writer's first and only commandment:
“Thou shalt not write a single word that may offend a future source of income.”
Nothing comes easier to an Armenian writer than to verbally abuse a fellow writer.
I once heard an 80-year old writer refer to Zarian as “boy” and to an empty suit as “baron.”
*
Americans were defeated in Vietnam, but as far as I know no American ever called it a “moral victory.”
Moral victories are for losers.
No one ever goes to war to prove the moral inferiority of his enemy.
*
Can God speak to man?
Of course He can.
God can do anything!
But can man understand God?
Of course he cannot.
If man understood God, there would be only one God as opposed to ten thousand of them.
#
Saturday, November 7, 2009
*****************************************
MY FRIEND, THE RABBI
*************************************
I have been cheated so many times
by so many people
in so many different ways that,
theoretically speaking,
the only time I should feel comfortable
is when I do the cheating,
which I never do,
not because I am morally superior,
but because I have had so little practice
that I am liable to get caught and fry.
*
“Why do the wealthy cheat the poor?
Why would someone who has everything
cheat someone like me who has nothing?”
I said, and he explained:
“How do you think they got to be wealthy?”
*
If an Armenian can be a friend to the devil,
he can be a friend to the Turk.
But to another Armenian? -- that's different.
*
EMPTY SUITS
**********************
First, they exploit their workers,
then they overprice their product
and after they make their first billion
they hate paying taxes
and love parading as kings,
and then they realize
being an Armenian is a bloodsport.
I speak from experience.
I write for them
*
Kirk Douglas defines an actor
as “someone who loves rejection.”
Hollywood stars and Armenian writers:
who would have thought?
#

[arabaliozian]

fools

Sunday, November 8, 2009
*****************************************
FOOLS
*************************************
They don't brag about their culture
and they have a Nobel-Prize winner.
We brag about ours,
and what have we got?
Ask an Armenian to name a contemporary Armenian writer
and he will give you a dirty “Who-gives-a-damn?” look.
*
Will Safire (may he rest in peace) once said
Germans have a tendency “to look the other way
when moral values are threatened.”
Ask an Armenian
what a moral value is
and the chances are he will give you
a “What-the-hell-is-that?” look.
Ask him what a human right is
and he will give you a hostile “Don't-waste-my-time” look.
Ask him if we are civilized, progressive, and smart
and he will reply
“Of course we are!” with a look that says
“How dare you ask such a dumb question, you fool?”
*
After centuries of life under sultans and commissars,
we might as well be blind
to moral, aesthetic, and democratic values.
*
No use blaming others.
The fault is in us or rather
in our mini-sultans and neo-commissars.
*
All nationalists lie
when they speak about themselves
and their enemies.
*
“For a fool he sure is smart!” I used to think,
until I realized he was not the fool,
I was.
#
Monday, November 9, 2009
*****************************************
LIES
*************************************
If a man marries seven times
it only means one thing:
he is a poor judge of feminine flesh.
Likewise, if a nation has been subservient
to alien tyrants for a thousand years,
it only means one thing:
its unspoken motto is not
“freedom or death”
but “survival at all cost.”
*
Instead of raising our children
to brag about our survival,
we should teach them honesty.
And since we don't have an Armenian word for honesty,
we should invent one.
The alternative is rewriting history
and engaging in double-talk.
*
No one likes liars.
Even liars prefer to deal with honest men.
*
We are divided because both sides
are too busy covering up their lies
to be honest with themselves,
their counterparts, and the people.
*
For an adult to believe in Santa is bad enough,
but what is infinitely worse
is to be an habitual and compulsive liar
and to brag about one's honesty and love of truth.
#
REPLIES
TO A STUDENT'S QUESTIONS
************************************************** ***************
Question: Do you believe what the Turks did to the Armenians in 1915 was genocide?
Answer: I do.
Q: Do you believe it was a deliberately adopted and systematically implemented policy by the Turkish government?
A: No doubt about that. It was planned and executed in cold blood. The evidence -- the testimony of survivors, eyewitness accounts, historians who have studied the record, not all of them Armenian, some of them Turkish -- is overwhelming. Besides, no nation in the history of mankind has ever fabricated a genocide and believed in it for nearly a century.
Q: Do you know or have you ever met a survivor?
A: I grew up in a ghetto near Athens, Greece, populated by several thousand survivors. Most of them were not educated or literate. They didn't like to reminisce. Besides, they were engaged in the serious business of surviving World War II, the German occupation, blockade by the Allies, the Greek Civil War... The poverty was appalling. The housing a disaster area -- as bad as the worst slums in South America and India.
Q: Some say the so-called deportations were flight from the violence – true or false?
A: My father was a teenager in 1915 and he was lucky in that a friend of the family, a Turkish cop, warned the family of the coming deportations. He was able to flee the violence but only with the shirt on his back. My mother was only a tiny baby who ended up in an orphanage in Lebanon run by Catholic nuns.
Q: Do you think the Armenian genocide has had any impact on the world?
A: None whatever! There have been more genocides in the last century than at any other time in the history of mankind.
Q: In your opinion, what is the most important thing you have heard concerning the genocide?
A: The unimaginable cruelty of the sadistic criminals – and they were criminals – who carried out the deportations.
Q: Do you believe that the deportations and marches of Armenians in 1915 were deliberately designed by the Turkish government to lead to the death of the deportees, or do you believe that it was unintentional?
A: It was deliberate and intentional – no doubt about that. The only explanation I have is that, the Turks were convinced they were fighting for their own survival against overwhelming enemies from without as well as from within, among them the Armenians.
Q: What do you think is the most important thing that people can learn from the Genocide?
A: Like all belief systems and ideologies, nationalism can also be abused. It was in the name of nationalism that our revolutionaries challenged the might of the Ottoman Empire, and it was in the name of nationalism that the Young Turks thought the only way to defend the integrity of their nation was to exterminate the Armenians.
Q: What are your impressions of people who say it wasn't really a genocide?
A: People can be brainwashed to believe anything. Luckily not everyone is vulnerable to being brainwashed. There is now a generation of Turkish intellectuals that no longer believe what their politicians dictate.
Q: Did your mother or anyone you know who went through the genocide ever mention concentration camps, mass burnings, starvation or massacres?
A: Both my father and mother were among the lucky ones who did not witness or experience these things – except near starvation and abominable poverty in an alien environment.
Q: What is the single most important thing you would tell someone who questions the reality of the Armenian genocide?
A: Only this: state propaganda cannot be a reliable source of information.
#
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
**********************************
DIARY
*****************************
With reasonable men, reason is enough.
With children, repetition has a better chance.
*
No one can be as dumb
as he who has been brainwashed to believe he is smart.
*
According to Northrop Frye, the foremost Canadian authority on the Scriptures, the aim of the Bible is to expand human consciousness.
*
Philosophers are more modest than prophets. They don't pretend to speak in the name of God. No one has ever declared a war or tortured a fellow human being in defense of Plato's or Schopenhauer's theories.
*
The day man invented God,
he let loose the equivalent of ten thousand atomic bombs.
Who thinks of God as a weapon of mass destruction?
And yet...(the saddest words in the English language, it has been said).
*
For writing as I do, once upon a time I would have been sliced into ribbons and fed to the dogs by the Pope's henchmen.
*
Believing in miracles is bad enough.
Believing that man is worthy of them is worse.
*
To punish the guilty, sometimes Canadians send them back to their homeland.
I can't imagine a worse punishment.
*
Are we worthy of our martyrs?
What about our heroes?
Do we have them?
*
Every house in which I have lived has been torn down by either war or real-estate developers. My alma mater is now a motel. Which is almost like saying, my childhood sweetheart is now a bordello madam.
*
I have been a source of disappointment to everyone I have met, including myself, and I cannot decide whether that's an asset or a liability.
*
Good Armenians?
One in a thousand --
and I belong with the 999.
*
Eduardo Galeano in his MIRRORS writes: “Those who knew Leonardo said he never embraced a woman. Yet from his hand was born the most famous portrait of all times. A woman.”
And:
“Queen Elizabeth of England and the Sun King of France ate with their hands. When Michel de Montaigne ate in a hurry, he bit his fingers.”
*
When an old Indian predicted a bad winter and was asked how he can tell, he replied: “White man make big wood pile.”
#