as i see it - Pt. IV

[ara baliozian]

Tuesday, May 02, 2006

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One reason vegetarians in the animal kingdom are perennial victims of carnivores is that they develop a consensus only to run away.

*

A career criminal in today’s paper: “I find the outside more scary than being inside.” He ought to know. The outside is at the mercy of people like him. Need I add that some of the worst serial child molesters have been Catholic priests, and some of the most dangerous serial killers have been statesmen?

*

Benefactors share their money, writers their ideas. As a community, or a collection of tribes, we respect both money and ideas in equal measure, and the idea we respect most is that money is infinitely more important than ideas.

*

What do we know about benefactors? Only how much they give. They are an extension of their capital. I once heard a benefactor deliver a short cliché-ridden speech in which he emphasized the importance of identity and culture. The same benefactor to a poet: “Desert people like Arabs may need poets. We don’t” And to a writer: “I hire and fire people like you.”

#

[ara baliozian]

Wednesday, May 03, 2006

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Turgenev to Dostoevsky: “Russia’s only contribution to civilization has been the samovar and the knout – and even they were invented by somebody else.” Elsewhere ( I think in SMOKE), one of his characters says, if Russia were to disappear tomorrow, no one would miss it – and to think that he was talking about the Russia of Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky…. But Turgenev being Turgenev, I am interested in anything he has to say, even when what he says is against my own convictions. Because I for one would miss Russia, and if not Russia than Russian literature, including Turgenev’s intensely Russian novels, especially FATHERS AND SONS.

*

Speaking of Pushkin: Reading him in English, including Nabokov’s English, is like viewing a cadaver. It has been a mystery to me why so many Russian writers worship him. Today I read a few of his lines in a Greek translation and I saw the light and felt the magic – the cadaver came to life, and what life! So much so that I am now planning to teach myself Russian.

*

Joe Queenan: “A good percentage of the British population are vulgar dimwits who care about nothing but shopping, alcohol, football and Posh Spice’s navel.”

*

Armenian writers don’t dare to speak freely about their fellow Armenians except in private conversations, correspondence and diaries. As a result the average Armenian continues to cling to such clichés as first nation this and first nation that….

#

[ara baliozian]

Thursday, May 04, 2006

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If you believe in something because you want to believe in it, or because it is to your advantage, or because it enhances your image and flatters your vanity, you will be closer to the truth if you believe the exact opposite.

*

There is only one way to see through lies and propaganda and that’s by learning to think against yourself.

*

At an early age I sensed that working for a living meant doing what others tell you to do even when these others happened to be idiots motivated by greed; and since I could not hide my feelings, I was constantly being fired, laid off, demoted, and forced to resign. As a result, I never made more than minimum wage.

*

Society moronizes you because it divides men into employers and employees, or masters and slaves (Hegel), or capitalists and workers (Marx).

*

Society tells you to gain the whole world even if it means losing your soul.

*

You are never at your best when you do what is expected of you, because to conform to someone else’s wishes means to sacrifice part of your freedom, your self, and your deepest impulses.

*

Three things to remember: (i) perennial victims are easy to manipulate; (ii) where there are victims there will also be manipulators; (iii) manipulators do not manipulate against their own interests.

#

[ara baliozian]

Friday, May 05, 2006

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MORALITY: IN THEORY AND PRACTICE

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In theory, the aim of morality is to establish what’s right and wrong, or what’s good and evil. In practice, it’s to misrepresent wrong as right, and evil as good.

*

Until very recently, to justify their racism, Americans invoked god. Children were educated to believe god is a racist, and racism was not a prejudice but one of god’s commandments. And if you think this type of perversion of morality was peculiar only to Southern hillbillies, consider the fact that at one point in his career, Mahatma Gandhi, that apostle of love, truth, and non-violence, called the British “satanic.” It probably never occurred to him that on the day the British quit India his own people would engage in satanic wholesale massacres – Hindus slaughtering Muslims, and Muslim slaughtering Hindus by the million.

*

I was myself brought up to believe that Turks massacred Armenians because all Turks are bloodthirsty, Mongoloid, subhuman barbarians; and I said as much in my first book, and was outraged when a Canadian critic called me a “racist” in his review of the book.

*

One of the most important undertakings of a state is to demonize the enemy. Children are brought up to believe the enemy eats babies for breakfast. To suggest otherwise, saying that the enemy is a human being like us, is seen as an act of treason.

*

Which is why arguing with a brainwashed Armenian can be as difficult as arguing with a brainwashed Turk. To paraphrase Lenin, a brainwashed person is a brainwashed person regardless of nationality. Which is also why only perverts use morality to assert moral superiority.

#

[ara baliozian]

Saturday, May 06, 2006

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TURKEY’S JOYCE

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James Joyce called himself “Shame’s Voice” because he exposed what his fellow countrymen tried to ignore, cover up, or pretend it does not exist, namely, Irish intolerance. In his own words, “Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.” Our own Joyce, Gostan Zarian, echoed this very same sentiment when he said, “Armenians survive by cannibalizing one another.”

*

It is not at all unusual for a murderer to begin by pleading not guilty. If the evidence against him is solid, he may plead self-defense. When more evidence to the contrary is presented by the prosecution, he may plead murder two, or justified homicide, or manslaughter. The same applies to perpetrators of genocide, with one difference. No nation in the history of mankind has ever invented a genocide, and having done so, believed in it for a hundred years.

*

Orhan Pamuk: Turkey’s Shame’s Voice.

#

[ara baliozian]

Sunday, May 07, 2006

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As a boy my ambition was to be a writer, but my idea of a writer then was as different from what I do today as a virgin is from a bordello madam.

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I don’t mind admitting that I have been a source of disappointment to a great many people. But I have been a source of greater disappointment to myself.

*

The slaughter of millions of innocent civilians is a serious matter that should not be forgotten. But it is equally wrong to make of it a collective obsession if only because our credibility is not enhanced if we project the image of monomaniacs.

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Choose yourself as god’s chosen and run the risk of being slaughtered by someone who decides to choose himself by a superior god.

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“I know better” is an enemy of “I could be wrong.”

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The Internet is the quintessential democratic medium. It allows imbeciles and hooligans as much space as Nobel-Prize winners.

#

[ara baliozian]

Monday, May 08, 2006

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WHAT I HAVE BEEN SAYING

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We are a people like any other people, and most of our problems have been self-inflicted. Because I have been saying this I have become an outcast. Nothing new in that. All in a day’s work. Thus it was in the past and thus shall it be in the future.

*

To those who object and say, “In what way was the Earthquake self-inflicted?” May I remind them of the maxim that is common knowledge among architects and contractors around the world: “Earthquakes don’t kill people, buildings do.”

*

And I remember, shortly after the Earthquake, when asked why the construction of buildings in Armenia, a well-know earthquake zone, was not closely supervised, a Moscow official with an Armenian last name stated on the evening TV news: “We don’t consider that our responsibility.”

*

My mother is fond of quoting an Armenian saying that goes something like this: “Even if responsibility of blunders were made of very expensive fur, no one would want to wear it.”

#

[ara baliozian]

Tuesday, May 09, 2006

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REVOLUTIONARIES

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Somewhere in Dostoevsky’s THE POSSESSED (sometimes also translated as THE DEVILS) a character says that when the revolution is fully achieved, “Cicero will have his tongue cut out, Copernicus will have his eyes put out, and Shakespeare will be stoned.”

*

Like politicians everywhere, revolutionaries too speak with a forked tongue: what they say is not always what they mean, and it is not at all unusual for them to say the exact opposite of what they mean. When they speak of freedom, they may mean the freedom to kill, when they speak of equality, they may mean suppressing excellence, and when they speak of fraternity they may have fratricide in mind.

*

If revolution were a religion, Cain and Torquemada would be two of its major role models and saints. In the eyes of some “useful idiots,” Stalin and Mao continue to be revolutionary saints.

*

“Wrong words are hard to take back,” reads a headline in our paper today. So are wrong actions and policies, but they can be easily justified by revisionists, and there is a revisionist as well as a useful idiot in all of us.

*

There is also a bourgeois. Like the revolutionary, the bourgeois may cling to ideas that have lost their validity, and both the bourgeois and the revolutionary may qualify as dupes or useful idiots of ideas that are eminently corruptible to the point of being their own contradictions.

#

[ara baliozian]

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

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ON THE RADIO

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People from all walks of life were being asked about their phobias. Some said death and dying, others old age and illness. An author said writer’s block. On the whole predictable stuff except for the woman who said: “I am fifty years old and I’m afraid I’ll never have sex again.”

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MY FAVORITE PUNCH LINE

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When an old Indian predicted a bad winter, they wanted to know how he could tell, and he replied: “White man makes big wood pile.”

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SPEAKING FROM EXPERIENCE

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Experience may teach us to avoid mistakes that we have made, but not all mistakes, of which there are an infinite number.

#

[Takoush]

Ara; I liked the 50 year old woman who's afraid of not being able to have sex in life anymore. That was funny.

 

I like the second phib too about white man piling up wood.

 

It's great.

[ara baliozian]

Thursday, May 11, 2006

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MARIA IORDANIDOU

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Ever since I read Lesley’s Blanch’s SABRES OF PARADISE – one of the very few books that I have read three times (the other two being Thomas Mann’s MAGIC MOUNTAIN and Arnold J. Toynbee’s STUDY OF HISTORY(volume xii): RECONSIDERATION) I read everything I can lay my hands on about the Caucasus. The only reason I read Maria Iordanidou (an unfamiliar name to me until last week) is that the title of one of her books is HOLIDAYS IN THE CAUCASUS. Immediately after I also read another book by her titled LIKE CRAZY BIRDS.

*

Maria Iordanidou may not be a giant in world literature, but unlike most giants, she is incapable of writing a single boring or unreadable line. She writes about her life in Istanbul at the turn of the last century, an extended stay in the Caucasus during World War I and the Russian Revolution, her residence in Alexandria, and final move to Athens on the eve of World War II.

*

In A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN, Virginia Woolf writes that since women can’t express themselves fully and authentically, they cannot take a rightful place in a literary tradition which has been shaped by men. Reading Maria Iordanidou is discovering the obvious fact that liberation consists in being oneself, and if one is honest one’s authenticity and originality will shrine through every sentence one writes.

*

Maria Iordanidou doesn’t write as a writer but as a human being. As a result, her humanity speaks louder than any literary tradition you care to mention. And though she writes about Turks, Armenians, Russians, Arabs, and Greeks, she judges no one. Which may suggest that most of our judgments about people are based on hearsay evidence.

#

[ara baliozian]

Friday, May 12, 2006

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When Canadian writers speak of survival they mean surviving the influence of the United States. There is even a popular brief history of Canadian literature titled SURVIVAL. When Armenian writers speak of survival they mean it literally -- surviving first the sultans and commissars, and after them our own mini-sultans and neo-commissars.

*

In his DECLINE OF THE WEST, Spengler tells us only “awake” people make history, the rest exist in subhistory. James Joyce said that history was a nightmare from which he was trying to awake. Whenever we make the Genocide our central concern we betray our unspoken wish to relive the history (or nightmare) that was inflicted on us.

*

By saying and repeating that half of Turkey is probably half Armenian, I hope to reduce by half our hatred of Turks. An absurd hope, because we are capable of hating our fellow Armenians as intensely as Turks. I speak from experience, both as provider and consumer of hatred. As for those holier-than-thou phonies who say they hate no one, they only want justice: I challenge them to explain Gostan Zarian’s dictum, “Armenians survive by cannibalizing one another.”

*

There is an unspoken principle in our post-Genocide literature which goes something like this: “Criticize everyone, including fellow writers, but leave probable sources of income, such as bosses, bishops, and benefactors, alone.” Case in point: In his OLD DREAMS, NEW REALITIES (Beirut, 1982), Antranik Zaroukian analyzes mercilessly the motives of a totally harmless 83-year-old Armenian priest who does his utmost to be of assistance to him, but says nothing remotely critical about the Catholicos who allowed Etchmiadzin to be run by KGB agents.

#

[ara baliozian]

Saturday, May 13, 2006

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THE NATIVES ARE RESTLESS

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Vassilis Vassilikos: “There is Midas, whose touch turned everything to gold, and there is anti-Midas, whose touch turned everything to crap.”

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If I knew what I know today, I would have chosen to write for a more tolerant bunch, like the Taliban of Afghanistan or the Sunnis in Iraq.

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After being exposed to the venom of my readers, I can’t help thinking: If they can be so nasty towards a harmless scribbler, what are they capable of doing to a defenseless Turk? -- (in their selfless search for justice, of course).

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Being honest in a dishonest environment is nothing short of a heroic act. Perhaps one of our greatest misfortunes is that we have produced many more martyrs than heroes, and one party’s hero is another’s…anti-Midas.

*

Somewhere Antranik Zaroukian writes that an Armenian hates tyranny but he considers it a privilege to serve a tyrant.

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To the hooligans who insult me I will only say, once upon a time I too was young and foolish and said things that I now regret.

#

[ara baliozian]

Sunday, May 14, 2006

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OF COCKROACHES

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One cockroach is enough to spoil all the food in a four-star restaurant. Likewise, one garbage-mouth hooligan is enough to alienate and silence all the moderates in a discussion forum.

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OF ACADEMICS

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Our academics tend to be liberal in odar politics and conservative in our own. I knew an Armenian-American academic, who once refused to accept an invitation to the White House during the Reagan administration, or so he claimed but, as the editor of an Armenian literary periodical, he was thoroughly pro-establishment; perhaps because, for an academic, to be remotely critical of our establishment would amount to biting the posterior that lays the golden egg. During the Soviet era, I remember, another one of our academics visited Armenia, after which he published his impressions in which he verbally chastised only the waiters of the hotel where he stayed. It seems they were too slow for His Excellency.

*

OF SUBSERVIENCE

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Antranik Zaroukian is right: Armenians may hate tyranny but they consider it a privilege (or good business) to serve tyrants. The jeweler of a murderous African tyrant once made headlines in our weeklies simply because he happened to be an Armenian.

*

OF HISTORY AND SUBHISTORY

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To use past tragedies (as our academics do) in order to avoid facing present problems is not learning from history but condemning ourselves to continue existing in subhistory.

*

OF BANKS

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Anonymous: “What does a bank do? It gives you an umbrella on a sunny day and takes it back when it pours.”

#

[Takoush]

Sunday, May 14, 2006

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OF COCKROACHES

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One cockroach is enough to spoil all the food in a four-star restaurant. Likewise, one garbage-mouth hooligan is enough to alienate and silence all the moderates in a discussion forum.

*

 

Hi Ara:

 

What you just wrote is funny and yet it isn't really funny; yet it is a reality. You speak such as the realities of our very life and our world. How true, for I can relate very unfortunately of two cockroaches right in here.

 

When I first came in here, I spoke with inspiration and with my nationalistic passions about my beliefs of my descent. After awhile I have been told off by some in here that they have an image of me of being harsh and not bending. Then lately I spoke in kind towards at least two to three people; mostly because at the time they supported me and showed kindness towards me. Yet now at least one such cockroach has told me that I kiss ass because I spoke in kind towards a few; and unfortunately now a couple of others are egging him also. Ironically of course, isn't this such a nice place to be Ara. I speak with you sometimes and I am told off by one other bully not to converse with you.

 

Frankly, I don't know where to turn and which way to turn. With their little brains they think they want to control me; but alas they cannot. I am completely and totally dismayed with certain people. By opening their cockroachish mouths or by bullying me they think they are in control and the better people; but in my mind they don't come close to being good. What do they know about me? for they know nothing, nothing at all. They don't know the good life I lived and the very good life I plan to continue to live.

 

Ara; I have been told by many people who have got to know me to be a very warm person, and forgive me to speak about myself; but I have also been told that I am a sweet person. Not at all what some of these people are charging at me unjustifiably. They are talking to the wrong person. Very wrong person.

 

And Ara; I wish you all the best things in life and in your endeavors!!!!!

 

Anahid

Edited May 15, 2006 by Anahid Takouhi

[ara baliozian]

Monday, May 15, 2006

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MORE ON ACADEMICS

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An Armenian-American academic once justified his pro-establishment stance to me by saying he had a family to support. If our academics cannot teach courage, truth, and honesty to the next generation, in what way are they better than Soviet academics who pretended to believe all dissidents were psychopaths in need of medical treatment, or Nazi academics who subscribed to the idea that all Jews were subhuman, or Turkish academics today who have allowed themselves to be brainwashed to believe that their politicians don’t lie and the Genocide is a figment created and promoted by their enemies?

*

To the academics who say, “I have at no time classified anyone as subhuman, neither have I justified the exile or execution of a single human being,” I say: You have not done these things not because you are a compassionate or fair-minded man but because the laws of the land won’t allow it. The question you should ask yourself is: “If I were an academic in a fascist environment, on whose side would I choose to be?”

*

In his book, OLD DREAMS, NEW REALITIES (Beirut, 1982) Antranik Zaroukian has this to say on Anastas Mikoyan: “What has this man contributed to the welfare of his fellow Armenians? The short answer to this short question is, nothing!” As a matter of fact, it is less than nothing, because Mikoyan was the architect of Stalin’s purges in Armenia in the 1930s during which some of our ablest men were shot or sent to the Gulag. And Mikoyan did these things not because he was evil or full of hate, but because he had a family to support.

*

To those who tell me I see only the dark side of our collective existence, I say, where the dark side is ignored or covered up, someone should take it upon himself to speak of it.

#

[ara baliozian]

Hi Ara:

 

What you just wrote is funny and yet it isn't really funny; yet it is a reality. You speak such as the realities of our very life and our world. How true, for I can relate very unfortunately of two cockroaches right in here.

 

When I first came in here, I spoke with inspiration and with my nationalistic passions about my beliefs of my descent. After awhile I have been told off by some in here that they have an image of me of being harsh and not bending. Then lately I spoke in kind towards at least two to three people; mostly because at the time they supported me and showed kindness towards me. Yet now at least one such cockroach has told me that I kiss ass because I spoke in kind towards a few; and unfortunately now a couple of others are egging him also. Ironically of course, isn't this such a nice place to be Ara. I speak with you sometimes and I am told off by one other bully not to converse with you.

 

Frankly, I don't know where to turn and which way to turn. With their little brains they think they want to control me; but alas they cannot. I am completely and totally dismayed with certain people. By opening their cockroachish mouths or by bullying me they think they are in control and the better people; but in my mind they don't come close to being good. What do they know about me? for they know nothing, nothing at all. They don't know the good life I lived and the very good life I plan to continue to live.

 

Ara; I have been told by many people who have got to know me to be a very warm person, and forgive me to speak about myself; but I have also been told that I am a sweet person. Not at all what some of these people are charging at me unjustifiably. They are talking to the wrong person. Very wrong person.

 

And Ara; I wish you all the best things in life and in your endeavors!!!!!

 

Anahid

 

Dear Anahid:

thank you for your good wishes.

if you function within an armenian environment

you must get used to dealing with garbage-mouth cockroaches.

Zarian said it better than i can:

"An armenian's tongue is sharper than a turkish yataghan." / ara

[ara baliozian]

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

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DECONSTRUCTION

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The first and most important aim of leadership is to convince the people they are in good hands.

*

The more backward the people, the more easily they are convinced (make it, brainwashed).

*

For thousands of years kings claimed to rule by divine right. Which meant, to question their judgment was to offend god – a crime punishable by death.

*

Stalin did not believe in god. He didn’t have to. He made himself one.

*

If we call the Middle Ages the Dark Ages, we should call the 20th Century the Darker Ages.

*

Are we in good hands? Have we ever been in good hands? Has mankind ever been in good hands?

*

What if everything we know is based on hearsay? What if on the day we learn to think for ourselves our present belief system would collapse like a house of cards?

*

Our “betters” tell us we are better and we believe them. But are we? What if the Turks refuse to plead guilty to the charge of genocide because they have been brought up to believe (very much like us) that as morally superior people they are incapable of committing crimes against humanity?

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We curse Talaat and brag about Mikoyan because at a time when we couldn’t think for ourselves we heard someone say Talaat was a hateful murderer and Mikoyan an admirable diplomat.

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At the cost of repeating myself: What if we are a people like any other people, including Turks? They had sultans, we have mini-sultans. The Bolsheviks had commissars, we have crypto-commissars.

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There is nothing new in what I am saying, which is based on a technique of cultural analysis called deconstruction originated by Jacques Derrida, a French philosopher who died two years ago.

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Deconstruction tells us, what we know – or think we know – is an extension of who we are and where we are coming from, and what we call thinking consists in confusing reality with illusion and truth with half-lies and propaganda.

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We call inevitable that which could have been easily prevented if we had been less prone to confuse fact with fiction. Which means that, our version of history would be radically altered if we did not think of our leaders as our “betters.”

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What if the only reason you don’t like what I say is that what I say does not flatter our collective ego?

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It has been said of Derrida that, “if one measure of success is the number of skins under which one manages to get, then Derrida was a certifiable genius” (Julia Keller).

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If I believe in deconstruction, why don’t I begin by deconstructing my own theories? My hope is that someone else will do exactly that, provided of course he does not take us back to the Dark or Darker Ages.

#

[ara baliozian]

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

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MEMOIRS OF AN IDIOT

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Once upon a time I was an idiot whose sole ambition in life was to be admired for his superior wisdom. If some of my gentle readers are to be believed, I haven’t change.

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WRITERS

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I know many more writers who have given up writing than writers who continue to write. If I continue to write, am I a utopian daydreamer or an obstinate idiot?

*

NATIONALISM AND PATRIOTISM

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The evil of nationalism consists in justifying murder in the name of patriotism; and the evil of patriotism consists in allowing itself to be easily exploited and misled by nationalism.

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KNOWLEDGE AND IGNORANCE

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The more you know, the more vulnerable you make yourself to the ignorance of others.

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OF COMPLEXES

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It is not at all unusual to meet a person with an inferiority complex who has nothing to feel inferior about, and a person with a superiority complex who fully qualifies as the scum of the earth.

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DEFINITIONS

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An opportunist is one who will fight injustice only if he is himself a victim, which also means that he will support any power structure that leaves him alone.

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A conformist is one who applies labels on others but never on himself, and he thinks as he does because those whose judgment he respects think the same way, which he assumes to be the only right way.

#

[ara baliozian]

Thursday, May 18, 2006

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READING BETWEEN THE LINES

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On the last page of Kafka’s THE TRIAL (1925) the central character, identified only with the initial K., is executed for no reason at all. After reading it, Anna Akhmatova is reported to have said, “He was writing about us.” Kafka has been called a prophet of the Holocaust and Stalin’s Terror. As far as I know, no one has ever suggested that he may have been a historian of our genocide, which preceded both the Holocaust and the Terror.

*

To be a dissident means to be against intolerance regardless of nationality. In that sense, Orhan Pamuk is neither anti-Turkish nor pro-Armenian, but anti-intolerance in its Turkish as well as Armenian manifestations.

*

I doubt if there is a single Armenian or Turk today who would readily admit to being intolerant. That’s another thing we share in common with them: unawareness.

#

[ara baliozian]

Friday, May 19, 2006

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CRITICS

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When a controversial 63-year old judge in Quebec by the name of Andree Ruffo was forced to resign, she made the following declaration to the press: “If you study anthropology, history or sociology, it’s clear that when someone arrives who disturbs things and who is different, you have to drive them (sic) away. If you look at what I’ve been criticized for, it’s that I haven’t fallen in line, that I haven’t been kind and that I haven’t been able to change.”

*

I did not choose to be a critic. It was reality that thrust the role on me. At one time or another I have wanted to be many things – from a garbage collector to a concert pianist – except a critic. To this day I approach my task with some degree of reluctance and distaste.

*

I was brought up as a good Catholic. I was trained to kiss hands. I must have kissed the hands of hundreds of priests, bishops, and one cardinal. On the day I decided to kiss no more hands or any other part of the male anatomy I was born against as a human being and became an enemy of all forms of subservience.

#

[tigranisbasileus]

Friday, May 19, 2006

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CRITICS

**********************

When a controversial 63-year old judge in Quebec by the name of Andree Ruffo was forced to resign, she made the following declaration to the press: “If you study anthropology, history or sociology, it’s clear that when someone arrives who disturbs things and who is different, you have to drive them (sic) away. If you look at what I’ve been criticized for, it’s that I haven’t fallen in line, that I haven’t been kind and that I haven’t been able to change.”

*

I did not choose to be a critic. It was reality that thrust the role on me. At one time or another I have wanted to be many things – from a garbage collector to a concert pianist – except a critic. To this day I approach my task with some degree of reluctance and distaste.

*

I was brought up as a good Catholic. I was trained to kiss hands. I must have kissed the hands of hundreds of priests, bishops, and one cardinal. On the day I decided to kiss no more hands or any other part of the male anatomy I was born against as a human being and became an enemy of all forms of subservience.

#

 

kathe fore pou diabazo tin graphein sas xaipomai.... ellhnas einai autos pou eixei labei ellhnikhn paideia...

mpravo sas pou den fobosaste na milate...kai gi'auto eimaste o monos laos pou sas bohthame...giati h leksi filotimo den uparxei se alllh glossa kai gi'auto bohthisame tous smyrnoarmenides kai tous kon-poliotes...

[ara baliozian]

Saturday, May 20, 2006

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THE TRIUMPH OF MEDIOCRITY

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The best an Armenian writer in the Diaspora can hope for himself, writes Antranik Zaroukian in his OLD DREAMS, NEW REALITIES (Beirut, 1982) is to be an elementary schoolteacher, provided of course he engages in some serious brown-nosing – I am now paraphrasing and abridging several paragraphs. But again he is smart enough to put the blame only on flunkeys and the leave the philistines at the top alone. Reading between the lines, one gets the impression that Zaroukian and the philistines responsible for creating this situation are member of the same society of mutual admiration.

*

Zaroukian also fails to note that he may well be the last Armenian writer of the Diaspora, and that nowadays it is the academics that do the brown-nosing by ignoring our present reality and concentrating their labors on medievalism and massacrism.

*

To those who say, I repeat myself, I have two questions: If reality repeats itself, why shouldn’t I? and, Who is more guilty – those who cry “Fire! Fire!!” or the arsonist?

*

I read the following in the NEW YORK TIMES today: “The suppression of dissent, while troubling anywhere, is unforgivable to people who work at newspapers.”

*

Perhaps I should also add that we believe and practice dissent all the time, not to say obsessively, but dissent directed only at Turks.

*

If the Turks are the bad guys, we must be the good ones, and as Hollywood teaches us, good guys are beyond criticism.

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[ara baliozian]

kathe fore pou diabazo tin graphein sas xaipomai.... ellhnas einai autos pou eixei labei ellhnikhn paideia...

mpravo sas pou den fobosaste na milate...kai gi'auto eimaste o monos laos pou sas bohthame...giati h leksi filotimo den uparxei se alllh glossa kai gi'auto bohthisame tous smyrnoarmenides kai tous kon-poliotes...

 

evkharisto para poli pou me thiavasis.

apo pou isse?

[ara baliozian]

Sunday, May 21, 2006

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CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

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Propagandists treat the past as if it were a supermarket, picking and choosing only the items that support its interests and ignoring the rest. But reality, being one and indivisible, refuses to be sliced like baloney.

*

The belief that God created man comes with a heavy price – keep your nose clean or else! Atheism comes with a price too – you are no better than a chemical accident waiting to disintegrate.

*

The believer’s options are between heaven and hell; the unbeliever’s, between freedom and nothingness.

*

When a man kills, it’s seldom for a good reason. But when nations engage in war and massacre, nationalist historians and religious leaders combine to convince the people they are carrying out the will of God. Capitalism legitimizes greed; religion, murder.

*

When a man kills in the name of God, who is the guilty party? The killer, he who brainwashed him, or He who is the source of their driving force?

*

The best argument against nationalism and for atheism: the spectacle of two nations killing, mutilating, and raping in the name of a Being who has the power to stop them but who prefers to stand by and do nothing. (As for the concept of free will: it may apply to the killers but not their innocent victims.)

*

The secret of popularity and success in flattering the collective ego of the maximum number of people by saying they are right (even when they are wrong) and God is on their side (even when there is no evidence to that effect). The secret of failure consists in exposing liars and their lies.

*

Society rewards those who deal in baloney and penalizes anyone who dares to think for himself.

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