ara baliozian

MY REPLY TO RAFFI ******************************** I can provide all the solutions you want, my friend, with a simple word: honesty. Introduce honesty in our institutions and all our problems will be over. How do you convert a dishonest person to honesty? Man has struggled with this question for millennia without coming up with a verbal formula with which to perform such a miracle, alas! There is corruption, lies, and incompetence in the most advanced democracies. There are also critics, dissidents, and investigative reporters. Where are ours? / ara

NOTES / COMMENTS ******************************* So many of my Armenian friends have become enemies that I am beginning to view Armenian friendships as extremely demanding enterprises in which one side is expected to agree with the other so completely that even the shadow or suspicion of a disagreement may result in a declaration of hostilities. Those in power should be concerned about what I feel, think, and write not because I am me but because I speak as a concerned citizen, and where there is one, there may be another; and where there are two, there may be four, and so on; and if we don’t yet represent the majority today, we may do so tomorrow. No, I am not a voice in the wilderness because I count among my supporters not only alienated Armenians but members of organizations that are, as a rule, as divided as the communities they divide. A FRIEND: Nobody loves Jews. Everybody loves Armenians. MYSELF: Except Armenians. I deal in facts. If you don’t like them, don’t get mad at me because I am only an observer. Blame yourself for being too scared to face reality or too myopic to see beyond your proboscis. A community that has no place for dissidents and investigative reporters must be a community dupes run by liars afraid of exposure.

ARE ARMENIANS REALLY ARMENIANS? ***************************************************** Whether we like to admit it or not, we are, very much like the British, the Americans, and the Turks, a multicultural nation. Most of our nakharars, princes, kings, and warlords were of foreign extraction. Even some of our most ardent nationalist intellectual leaders (from Abovian to Zarian) married odars. The overwhelming majority of my friends (among them editors, poets, writers, educators) are either products of mixed marriages or married to odars. Some of our ablest men (from the Byzantine emperor Basil I to Anastas Mikoyan) served not Armenian but odar interests and powers, sometimes at the expense of their own homeland, by adopting or implementing anti-Armenian policies. Most of the beneficiaries of Gulbenkian’s wealth are odars. The reason why our outlook is nationalist to the point of being racist today is that in the 19th century our nationalist leaders (some of whom were also products of mixed marriages) used, even exploited, nationalist sentiment to unite us against the Turks (most of whom were half-Armenian) with disastrous results. And to justify or cover up their blunder, they continue to recycle nationalist propaganda, hatred for the Turks, and contempt for the West. It is this more than anything else that has led most historians and political scientists to assert that nationalism is not an ideology but an aberration.

NOTES & COMMENTS ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Only writers who consider themselves immortal can afford to write for posterity. I feel privileged if what I write today is read tomorrow, even if it is forgotten the day after. A power structure that has all the answers will view questions as subversive. A woman raising her skirt or a man dropping his pants will attract a bigger audience these days than a writer spilling out his guts. If a bigot is not yet a killer, it may be because history has not yet given him a chance to act out his convictions. It is impossible to agree or compromise with someone who contradicts your ideas with his emotions. Ideas and emotions, very much like polar bears and tigers, don’t mix. The gradual disintegration of a fascist personality in a democratic environment: what "a virgin subject pregnant with possibilities!" Those of my critics who attack my words but ignore catastrophic policies remind me of the hunter who ignored the charging rhino and concentrated all his efforts on killing a mosquito. In a democracy, abuse of power is probable; under fascism, inevitable. You cannot speak of dialogue, compromise, and consensus with a skinhead who threatens to silence you whenever you refuse to accept his prejudices and share his bigotry. I don’t need to know the truth to recognize a lie, in the same way that I don’t need to have seen the light to say that, for the blind leading the blind, walking by a ditch can be a risky business. If you ignore your critic today, you may have to face your killer tomorrow. Doctors are exposed to cancer, divorce lawyers to adultery, policemen to crime, and Armenian writers to readers eager to share their superior brand of wisdom, expertise (on any given subject), and understanding of human affairs in general and Armenian history, culture, and politics in particular. We live as though our problems were insoluble; but we argue as though all of us had a minimum of two solutions for every one of our problems. Some people are so outrageously wrong that they don’t have to be corrected; sooner or later life, facts, the reality principle will speak to them much louder than any logical argument or appeal to common sense. To err is human but to forgive (among Armenians) unheard of. We have survived our leadership: that to me is an irrefutable argument for God’s existence.

NOTES / COMMENTS ******************************** Some day if we create a world of our own or an Armenian empire, we may be in a position to make the rules. But until then, the least we can do is understand existing rules, if, that is, we want to determine which ones we have a chance to break and which we have no choice but to accept. To rely on our own definitions of right and wrong, or faith, truth, God, & so on (as we have done in the past) amounts to butting our heads against a brick wall thus certifying our status as perennial losers. Anti-Americanism is a stage everyone goes through at one time or another, including Americans. Americans know this, they understand it, and they can afford to go on living as if it were a routine virus infection like an attack of flu. In the free world, the role of the press is not to justify the policies of a regime but to expose its lies. A loud delivery cannot add originality to a received platitude or honesty to double-talk, in the same way that insults and curses cannot enhance or detract from the validity of an argument. The higher you climb the more anatomy you expose, the more vulnerable you become, and the more enemies you acquire. What could be easier than rising to the top? What could be harder than staying there? To those who recycle Vahan Tekeyan’s familiar line, "We need self-esteem as we need air and water," I say: Self-esteem can be an asset only when it is an extension of real ability; when it is based on illusions, lies, and propaganda, it can be a dangerous liability.

ARMENIAN LEADERS: PAST & PRESENT ************************************************ The Mamigonians were not statesmen; they were warlords. Statesmen unite the people; warlords divide them. That’s in the nature of the beast. A warlord that unites ceases being a warlord and becomes a statesman. One does not have to be a prophet or pundit to see that when you divide a nation you make it more vulnerable to the enemy. Therefore, to divide a nation and to dig its grave might as well be synonymous operations. If our warlords had behaved like statesmen and committed themselves to serving the interests of the nation (as opposed to the interests of their own dynasty, faction, or tribe) we would now be a major power in the Middle East, instead of perennial victims of bloodthirsty neighbors and blood****ing leaders, some of whom, probably most of whom, are not even Armenian. Personally I have nothing against the Chinese (Mamigonians), Jews (Bagratunis), and Assyrians (Ardzrunis). But I begin to loathe them when I realize they did not place the interests of the Armenian nation at the top of their priorities, perhaps because something in their own personal make up was missing, and that something may well have been kinship and solidarity with the people. Can an odar identify himself with the Armenian people to the same degree that an Armenian can? Can an Armenian identify himself with the country (say the United States) in which he lives and makes a living to the same degree that an American can? I have yet to meet an Armenian-American from the Middle East who is not anti-American, and I mean anti-American to the point of being pro-Saddam Hussein.