as i see it - Pt. IV

[ara baliozian]

Sunday, September 03, 2006

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In Voltaire’s play MAHOMET OU LE FANATISME, the Prophet says, “Whoever dares to think for himself is not born to believe in me. Silent obedience shall be your only path to glory.” One of Voltaire’s many biographers points out that MAHOMET is not a Christian’s attack on a false religion, but an attack on all organized religions, which “are an imposture in the service of political oppression.” See Roger Pearson, VOLTAIRE ALMIGHTY: A LIFE IN PURSUIT OF FREEDOM (New York, 2005).

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Napoleon didn’t like men who could think for themselves either. He once said, “A man with an idea is my enemy.”

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Most of my so-called critics attack not my ideas but my freedom to express them, that is, my fundamental human right of free speech. But like all born and bred fascists, they are not aware of this.

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Nothing enhances wisdom or the appearance of it than silence. But fools being fools are driven by an inner compulsion to confess who and what they are.

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I am not afraid of being wrong. Why should I be? Am I not human? I leave infallibility to imams, commissars, and my critics. What I am afraid of is turning into a fool. Because, according to Nietzsche, that’s what happens to people who make it their business to deal with fools.

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I have been a source of disappointment to many people, beginning with myself. If I knew how to pray I would go down on my knees and say, “O Lord, give me the strength to say ‘A plague on all your houses!’ and fall silent.”

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Samuel Beckett once said that his ambition in life was “to sit on my ass and do nothing but fart.” A line and an ambition worthy of a Zen master.

#

[ara baliozian]

Monday, September 04, 2006

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Since everything is connected with everything else, no one is equipped to know and understand everything about anything. Only god (if he exists) may know everything. We miserable mortals are condemned to know and understand only a fraction of reality.

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All conflicts and disagreements are results of partial understanding and knowledge. Religions are popular because to believe in god means to follow the guidance of one who knows everything and is never wrong. But since “of the gods we know nothing” (Socrates), all assertions made in the name of god are based on total ignorance.

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Perhaps the most useful kind of knowledge is that which reveals to us the depths and breadth of our ignorance.

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Voltaire and Tolstoy saw no merit in Shakespeare, Tchaikovsky loathed Brahms, and Nabokov didn’t much care about “Faulknermann” and “Tolstoevsky.” Great men are poor judges of other great men. So are gods of other gods. And when gods disagree, massacre is sure to follow. Hence the dictum: “Since it was a religious war, there were no survivors” (Voltaire).

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A wise man once said, “I am willing to worship a man who is searching for the truth, but I would gladly kill him if he said he found it.”

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[ara baliozian]

Tuesday, September 05, 2006

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Speaking of the mindset of drunk drivers caught on the scene of an accident, a policeman is quoted as having said in today’s paper, they begin with a “sense of invincibility” and end by trying to “blame it on somebody else.” Overconfidence followed by the blame game: it explains so much about human nature, or life as we experience it, reality as we perceive it, and history as we write it.

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You want to learn from history? Examine your own heart.

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There are those who see nothing questionable in being subservient to an imbecile with more money. There are others who find the prospect unspeakably degrading and unbearably repellent.

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Unmasking a lie does not necessarily mean the destruction of the lie. That’s because what motivates most men is not love of truth but loyalty to self-interest. Where self-interest enters, black lies and white truths turn into shades of gray.

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The crimes of capitalism are many – no doubt about that. But so are the crimes of Christianity, Islam, and Communism. Where power enters, abuse of power is sure to follow.

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[ara baliozian]

Wednesday, September 06, 2006

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Armenian literature is a riskier racket than the mafia, and the only way the survive it is by dying young. Organized crime has two enemies: the police and rival families. Armenian literature has many more, among them tuberculosis (in the 19th century), Talaat and Stalin (in the 20th), and (in the 21st) censorship, audience apathy on the part of the majority, verbal abuse on the part of a faceless and anonymous minority, and last but far from least, the doubletalk of bosses, bishops, and benefactors, and their flunkies, who publicly deliver speeches in support of literature but the moment the sun sets they get their shovels out and start digging.

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I remember one of our bosses once delivering a speech in which he said, “Writers and poets have more influence in shaping the minds and souls of people than anyone else in the community.” Stalin once delivered a similar speech in which he called writers “engineers of the soul.” What happened next we know.

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I remember another one of our bosses saying in another speech, “My fondest ambition is to retire on a distant island and spend the rest of my life in solitude reading…” That one committed suicide, some say he was assassinated by members of a rival family.

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[ara baliozian]

Thursday, September 07, 2006

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IN PRAISE OF FREE SPEECH

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The first sentence of a commentary in our paper today that bears the headline, “Newspaper must provide a forum for free speech,” reads: “It is easier to love the theory of free speech than the practice of it.” And the final sentence: “And it is the responsibility of the citizen to accept that free speech includes not only the viewpoints that the citizen agrees with, but also those which cause gravest and most heartfelt offence.” John Roe, the author of this commentary is identified as “the Editorial Page editor.” I should like to see one of our own editors writing and publishing such a commentary. As for our pundits and academics who contribute regularly to our papers: I don’t remember any one of them raising his voice against censorship. John Roe is right: we may love the theory of free speech but we, all of us, (publishers, editors, pundits, and citizens) hate the practice of it. Either that or we define free speech as the freedom to spew anti-Turkish venom.

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[ara baliozian]

Friday, September 08, 2006

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TOWARDS A MORE BALANCED

VIEW OF REALITY

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Chamfort: “Everything I learned, I have forgotten: the little I remember, I guessed.”

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To understand one thing is to understand many other things.”

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An objective judgment is better than a prejudiced one.”

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By distorting reality, bias obstructs our path to understanding, and ultimately to reaching a consensus.

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These may not be as good or original assertions as Descartes’ celebrated “I think therefore I am,” but they are far more accurate than their opposites.

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Sooner or later all Armenians realize that to trust an Armenian on the grounds that he is Armenian is unwise. Among my friends and acquaintances I count several who began by trusting their fellow Armenians and ended by avoiding them like the plague.

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As a child I believed everything I was told by my schoolteachers and parish priest. As an adult I know that trusting mullahs and propagandists (regardless of race, color, and creed) is to consent to be brainwashed.

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To trust no one is as bad as to trust everyone. As an Armenian I may reject the Turkish version of the story. It doesn’t necessarily follow I accept the Armenian version.

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Our nationalist historians tell us the Turks planned to exterminate us long before the actions of our revolutionaries. What they don’t even try to explain is why would Turks do that to their “most loyal millet” at a time when enemies from within as well as without threatened their very existence?

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You don’t have to be a historian or a psychologist to recognize a contradiction when you see one. All you need is common sense, which, according to Descartes, is evenly distributed because no one complains that he doesn’t have enough of it.

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Common sense tells us to trust the judgment of an objective outsider is wiser than to trust those who are participants in a quarrel or controversy. The justice system of the civilized world is based on that assumption.

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In addition to being one of the greatest historians of the 20th Century, Arnold J. Toynbee was also the first scholar to document the Genocide and to publish several studies on Turkish abuses of power. As an anti-nationalist he rejected both Turkish and Armenian versions of the story. In his version, the Genocide is undeniable fact. It is also undeniable that by making unjustified territorial demands, Armenian nationalists were partly responsible in provoking it.

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If you reject Toynbee’s version on grounds that he is just another cold-blooded, dehumanized imperialist witness with an impaired sense of compassion and justice, I invite you to consider the testimony of an old Armenian lady who was also a survivor of the Genocide: “The Turks are nice people, provided you don’t step on their tails.”

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Is it conceivable that this traumatized old woman on her way to senility and death has a more balanced view of reality than all our pundits combined?

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A German philosopher once said, “The Germans are the best people in the world, but the trouble is there are so few of them.” Our problem may well be that our “betters” are our worst.

#

[ara baliozian]

Saturday, September 09, 2006

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Voltaire’s favorite prayer: “O Lord, please make all my enemies ridiculous.”

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The intolerant have a sharp eye for someone else’s intolerance, never their own.

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Once when I said that Germans had helped Turks in planning and executing the Armenian genocide, a German Armenologist reminded me that Germans had been the first scholars to establish the Sanskrit roots of the Armenian language. Academics!

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Friedrich Schlegel: “Words often understand each other better than the people who use them.”

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In his biography of Timothy Leary, of “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out” fame, Greenfield writes: “Tim loved everyone as if they were his own children – except for his own actual children.” Another Saroyan!

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It has been said, when women want to behave like men, they seldom behave like gentlemen. One could also say that when Armenians behave like Turks, they seldom behave like good Turks. I shiver to think what would happen if this type of Armenian were given a yataghan and unleashed against defenseless civilians who happen to disagree with him.

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Only if you have lived in darkness may you see the light. This cannot happen to someone who assumes his darkness to be light.

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“If the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.” Our history in a nutshell. It has been the perennial function of our academics to cover up this obvious fact.

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[ara baliozian]

Sunday, September 10, 2006

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Pericles as quoted by Thucydides in his PELOPONNESIAN WAR (5th century BC):”What I fear is not the enemy’s strategy, but our own mistakes.”

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Socrates as quoted by Plato in his REPUBLIC (473 BC): “Those who are now called kings and potentates must learn to seek wisdom like true philosophers in order that political power and intellectual wisdom may be joined in one.”

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I have yet to meet the partisan pundit who did not think of himself as smarter than Socrates.

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Socrates had many more questions and doubts than certainties. One of his very few certainties was the quintessentially anti-theological and anti-dogmatic assertion, “Of the gods we know nothing.”

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Gandhi once defined god as “Truth.” One could therefore transliterate the Socratic assertion, as “Of truths we know nothing.” We may only aspire to advance in their direction by rejection lies, half-lies, and propaganda.

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Propaganda does not solve problems, it creates them.

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Propaganda is propaganda regardless of race, color, creed, theology, and ideology

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The ultimate aim of all propaganda is to create bloodthirsty barbarians willing to kill in order to satisfy some moral moron’s lust for power.

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Massacres are not results of Asiatic barbarism but of propaganda.

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At one time or another we have all been dupes of propaganda because we have all been children.

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Dupes have two sets of enemies: (one) other dupes who believe in a propaganda line different from theirs, and (two) anyone who dares to identify them as dupes.

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A dupe without mortal enemies is unthinkable.

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[ara baliozian]

Monday, September 11, 2006

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PARALLELS

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What happened on 9/11 was a clear-cut case of terrorism, no one denies that. And yet, the Bush Administration did not want it investigated. What happened to us in 1915 was also a clear-cut case of genocide, and yet, anyone who dares to disagree with our official version of the story is reviled as a pro-Turkish revisionist and a traitor to the Cause.

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Since 9/11 we have learned a great deal about the failures and incompetence of successive administrations in Washington, all of which treated acts of Muslim terrorism that preceded 9/11 as isolated incidents that did not require radical shifts in policy. In the words of a witness to the 9/11 Commission, “the terrorists were not just lucky once, but again and again.” In short, 9/11 could have been prevented if all the warning signs had not been ignored or covered up.

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1915 was also preceded by a series of massacres at the turn of the century except that in our case the number of victims far exceeded the number of American victims, and our position within the Ottoman Empire was far more vulnerable to punitive reprisals.

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1915 may be said to have been a perfect storm in which Turkish tyranny and Armenian incompetence and utter lack of foresight combined to produce what Toynbee called “one of the two greatest tragedies of the 20th Century,” the other being the Holocaust of Jews during World War II. But unlike our own historians and pundits, Toynbee refused to treat the Genocide as theology even at the cost of being called a Turcophile heretic and a denialist.

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It is the height of cynicism to think that the only lesson we can learn from 1915 is to spew anti-Turkish venom and to pretend that the conduct of our political leadership has been and continues to be blameless.

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We were vulnerable to genocide in the years preceding 1915 as we are vulnerable today to two genocides even if only of the “white” variant – assimilation in the Diaspora and exodus from the Homeland. And what’s being done? The answer to this question seems to be, playing the blame game by voicing the convenient formula “historic and social conditions beyond our control.” It follows, we are in good hands and our establishment types, who happen to be paragons of competence and integrity, are doing everything that needs to be done. To which I can only say, “Give me a break!”

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[ara baliozian]

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

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LETTER TO THE EDITOR

KICHENER-WATERLOO RECORD

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GIVING THE DEVIL HIS DUE

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It is a thankless task to say the obvious, but there are times when it cannot be avoided. It was neither Jews nor the U.N. that created Israel but anti-Semites of all nations who prefer to identify themselves today as anti-Zionists. Before these gentlemen accuse the U.S. for its unconditional support of Israel, and Israeli aggression against Muslim terrorists, who prefer to identify themselves as freedom fighters, they should take a good look at themselves in the mirror and consider their contribution in shaping the status quo.

 

Ara Baliozian

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Tuesday, September 12, 2006

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By carefully editing the transmission of news and editing facts, those in power can misrepresent bad news to good news, and the most abject defeat to the most glorious victory.

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Confronted by a tiny Roman legion, our most celebrated emperor, Dikran (or Tigranes) II is said to have run away. And yet, we continue to call him “the Great” instead of “the Coward.”

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Confronted by a mighty Persian horde and a wall of Indian elephants, Vartan Mamikonian is said to have scored our most glorious moral victory, meaning military defeat.

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More about the Battle of Avarair: my Mekhitarist teacher of history, who happened to be a highly respected medievalist and the author of several learned volumes, once said that this particular battle was pure invention, it never happened.

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G.B. Shaw’s dictum, “All professions are conspiracies against the laity,” fits nationalist historians like a glove.

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I once asked one of our historians what he thought of Shaw, and he replied, “He was a fool.”

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It is said to Yeghishe (the historian of Avarair) that he was a propagandist of the Mamikonian dynasty. Which may suggest that, when history is not the propaganda of the victor, it is the consolation of the loser.

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Speaking of the Mamikonians: I am told one of our bosses once bragged that his family tree could be traced all the way back to the Mamikonians. I wonder if this clown was aware of the fact that the Mamikonians were of Chinese descent.

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The only way to acquire an objective account of our past is to avoid our historians.

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If I repeat myself it may be because there is no other way to refute lies that have acquired the status of mantras in our tribal consciousness. And if you tell me, under pretense of exposing lies, I am demolishing whatever pride we may have as Armenians, I say, this so-called pride has created dupes at the mercy of tribal charlatans who have proceeded to divide, alienate, and destroy the nation. Pride that is based on lies is an ephemeral illusion. It doesn’t work. It hasn’t worked for us. It is now time that we give truth a chance.

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[ara baliozian]

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

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FAITH: A BLESSING OR A CURSE?

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If two enemies fight and both believe god is on their side, both will win: the victory of one will be military, the victory of the other, moral.

Faith may not move mountains but it can change defeat to victory.

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If god is on your side, you can’t be wrong because god can’t be wrong.

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If invisible god is the only reality, visible reality is an illusion.

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Faith and science are not mutually exclusive concepts, but religions and religions are.

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Authentic men of faith believe god is incomprehensible; the phonies use the scriptures as if they were god’s political and moral agenda.

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Tolerance teaches us to respect all religions, faiths, and gods. Intolerance tells us, “My god is god, and your god is the devil.”

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Speaking of himself, a man of faith will say, “I believe therefore I am right.” Speaking of heretics and infidels (that is, the majority of mankind): “He believes therefore he is wrong.”

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If I knew how to pray I would say, “O God, save me from all men of god.”

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[ara baliozian]

Thursday, September 14, 2006

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The blunders of youth are the heaviest burden of old age.

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Those who speak of “social and political conditions beyond our control,” do so to justify their past failures and present inadequacies.

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After 600 years of life in the Ottoman Empire, subservience comes naturally to us, and subservience means loyalty to the master even if he happens to be an alien tyrant; and to be loyal to an alien master means to betray your own people. Hence Raffi’s dictum: “Treason and betrayal are in our blood.”

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You can hide your thoughts all you like, you can even say the opposite of what you feel, but you cannot hide your body language and style. In life, as in the boxing ring, you can run away but you can’t hide.

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I don’t trust people who make a comfortable living because they will do and say anything in defense of their comfort.

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Leaders are the curse of mankind. This is a rule with very few exceptions.

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[ara baliozian]

Friday, September 15, 2006

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THERE IS NO BUSINESS

LIKE SHOA BUSINESS

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There are Turkish charlatans as surely as there are Armenian charlatans, and they are the ones who have reduced the Tragedy of our genocide to a game of political football, each side blaming the other and adopting a morally superior stance. “When the rich fight,” Sartre says somewhere, “it is the poor who die.” Likewise, when political wheeler-dealers argue, truth is sacrificed on the altar of propaganda. As for the cries of the victims, past present, and future: no matter how hard I try I cannot take seriously the crocodile tears of our self-assessed dime-a-dozen pundits who blabber endlessly and ad nauseam about genocide. I grew up among survivors and I don’t remember any one of them uttering the word “tseghasbanoutiun” (genocide) or wasting a single moment trying to prove that it happened.

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Capital, Marx said, dehumanizes not only the worker but also the capitalist, society as whole, and human relationships. Constant and endless talk of Turkish denials dehumanizes not only Turks and us, but also our relations with the rest of mankind, including our fellow Armenians. Anyone who does not share our view of Turks as bloodthirsty barbarians is labeled a denialist.

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A victim will see the world only in terms of victims and victimizers, or those who are committed to the Cause and denialists. Because I speak of tolerance, respect for fundamental human rights, and a more objective assessment of the past, I have been called a pro-Turkish denialist. Armenian dehumanization of Armenian has already become a routine occurrence with us. I see it every day in Armenian discussion forums on the Internet, which are less discussion forums and more arenas of mutual verbal abuse.

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There are decent Armenians as there are decent Turks, and they don’t need the arguments of propagandists to be convinced of what happened. Such arguments convince only dupes and children of all ages who have not acquired the ability to think for themselves.

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I remember the late Puzant Granian (himself a survivor) saying, “At the rate we are going, we will be known to the rest of the world only as a nation that has contributed a million and a half victims to Turkish massacres. Our millennial history and countless other achievements will be ignored, forgotten, and buried.” But endless talk of genocide buries not only our other achievements but also our present problems, some of which (assimilation in the Diaspora and exodus from the Homeland) are of genocidal dimensions. Our monomaniacal obsession with Turkish denialists has made of us denialists of two “white genocides” and all talk of “social and political conditions beyond our control” is as convincing to a decent observer as the arguments of Turkish denialist charlatans.

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[ara baliozian]

Saturday, September 16, 2006

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All slaughters begin with the slaughter of common sense and decency. Hence, the post-World War II slogan, “We are all assassins.”

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The ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA (Chicago, 1979) on Talaat ***** (or, as the BRITANNICA spells it, Talat Pasa): “A man of swift and penetrating intelligence and integrity…an idealist, forceful but never fanatical or vengeful.”

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Genocides are perpetrated not by serial killers or criminals but by law-abiding, patriotic citizens with leadership qualities and superior intellects, whose sole aim in life is to defend and protect the nation and its interests against all enemies foreign and domestic.

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Nothing comes more easily to a mediocrity, a charlatan, and a moral moron than to convince himself he is a patriot with superior brains and leadership qualities.

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An Armenian pundit: Anyone who reads TIME or NEWSWEEK and one of our weeklies.

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[ara baliozian]

Sunday, September 17, 2006

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Whenever I am reminded by concerned friends that writing for Armenians is a waste of time (as if I didn’t know) the best explanation I can come up with is that America is a big country with big problems, and Armenia is a small country with bigger problems. Americans, moreover, believe in democracy. By contrast, our own attitude towards democracy is closer to that of Muslim fundamentalists, who will attack the Pope for quoting a medieval Byzantine emperor but will believe everything their mullahs tell them, even when they promise to be rewarded with a harem of virgins if they kill as many infidel dogs in the name of Allah as they can. Which is why the average letter to the editor by an average odar citizen in our local daily paper makes more sense to me than the long-winded and monomaniacal commentaries of our self-appointed pundits in our weeklies.

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Being committed to democratic values means appreciating the importance free speech. One of our self-inflicted tragedies is that the overwhelming majority of our press and media in general, very much like our educational institutions, are in the hands of political parties, about which Gostan Zarian has said: “They have been of no political use to us, their greatest enemy is free speech.”

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Where educational institutions are run by ideologues the result will be an overabundance of dupes and a scarcity of individuals who can think for themselves. My guess is, for every thousand Armenians there may or may not be one dissident but even that one is too many for our commissars. And if you think I am being too hard on our partisans, consider that for every ten million Soviets there was one dissident but even that one was too many for Stalinists; and for every one hundred million Muslims today there may or may not be one or more dissidents, but they are too intimidated to raise their voices and be counted.

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Where the dominant ideas are rooted in ideology and theology, the result will be not objective reality or truth but propaganda, and the dissidents will be treated not as critics with a valid perspective but heretics and blasphemers whose tongues should be cut out.

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We prefer monologue to dialogue, speeches and sermons to an exchange of views, and propaganda to truth. The average Armenian today thinks tolerance consists in being tolerant only of people who parrot his sentiments and thoughts. As for the others, they might as well be that lowest form of animal life, pro-Turkish denialists. But free speech means to respect even the free speech of Turkish denialists. Try to explain that to our fundamentalists in whose view the Genocide is not history but theology.

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[ara baliozian]

Monday, September 18, 2006

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CONFESSIONS OF AN INFIDEL DOG

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Once upon a time in the good old days when everything I wrote was printed in Armenian weeklies on the continent and in the Middle East, whenever I came across a positive remark about us, I would quote it in a review or an article, and needless to add, I would do the same with every negative remark about Turks. Much later I learned that this was exactly the method employed by anti-American propagandists in the USSR. If I remember correctly, it was Mike Wallace who exposed this fact during an interview with the editor who handled Pravda’s (may have been Izvestia’s) anti-American department. Asked to identify her sources, the young female editor showed him the latest issue of the NEW YORK TIMES. All she did, it became apparent, was to select and edit the negative news items -- things like murders, rapes, strikes, riots, demonstrations, homelessness, corruption in high places, and so on. Result: the average comrade in the street was convinced he lived in a Soviet paradise, while Americans were condemned to burn in their own hell, and serve those blood-sucking capitalist bastards right. Like Moliere’s bourgeois who spoke prose (as opposed to verse) and didn’t know it, I was a practicing propagandist and didn’t know it. With one difference: unlike the young Russian editor in her tiny cubicle, I wasn’t paid for my work. I did what I did because I loved Armenia and hated Turks.

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There are many things in life about which no one tells you anything. Case in point: no one ever bothered to tell me that the secret of living a comfortable life is to be a flatterer, not a critic, and that there is more money in kissing ass than in kicking it.

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Some years ago, after Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa on Salman Rushdie, many publishers and bookstores around the world, including America, refused to have anything to do with his SATANIC VERSES. More recently, American newspapers were afraid to reprint the Mohammed cartoons in the name of political correctness. And the Pope of Rome, because he dared to quote the testimony of a medieval Byzantine emperor about Muslim militarism, has now been effectively neutralized and gagged. The message of jihadists is clear: “We set no value on human rights and the free speech of infidel dogs. Step out of line and we will riot, burn, and kill.” (Today’s victim: a young Catholic nun if Africa.) As for anti-jihadist moderates: I sympathize with their silence because I have learned the hard way that you cannot reason with fanatics who speak in the name of god and patriotism.

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[ara baliozian]

Tuesday, September 19, 2006

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To engage in dialogue means to be open to reason. To refuse to engage in dialogue means to condemn oneself to extinction. Case in point: When at the turn of the last century our revolutionaries refused to engage in dialogue with Armenians within the administration of the Ottoman Empire, they condemned the people to extinction. For more on this subject, see Pars Tuglaci, THE ROLE OF THE DADIAN FAMILY IN OTTOMAN, SOCIAL, ECONOMIC, AND POLITICAL LIFE (Istanbul, 1993).

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And because Muslim fundamentalists today refuse to engage in dialogue with the West, they are moving in a direction that will make a showdown inevitable. As their genocidal threats towards Israel persist and their acts of terrorism and anti-Western riots increase in frequency and severity, the West will have no choice by to say to all Islamic states: “Recognize the universal validity of such democratic principles as freedom of speech, freedom of worship, and respect for fundamental human rights, or face annihilation.”

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We too are moving towards a showdown and our adversary is not “social and political conditions beyond our control,” but our tribalism and contempt for democratic values and dialogue. We may pretend to be part of the Christian West, but as Nikol Aghbalian has pointed out, we are more like Kurds and Turks, thoroughly tribal. Our nationalism is a sham because tribalism means loyalty to the tribe, and the tribe is not the nation.

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It is to be noted that Nikol Aghbalian (1873-1947) was neither a dissident nor a critic, but a political leader, an educator, and a literary scholar.

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Aghbalian on democracy: “When man does not submit himself to the rule of law, he will have to submit himself to the rule of men, that is to say, cliques and gangs.”

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Aghbalian on tribalism: “We Armenians are products of the tribal mentality of Turks and Kurds, and this tribal mentality remains stubbornly embedded even in our leaders and elites.”

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[ara baliozian]

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

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IF I WERE BUSH

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I would begin by democratizing friendly regimes, like the Saudis, even if it means twisting their arms and threatening them with annihilation; after which I would convince them to use their own money and personnel (of which they have more than enough) to democratize the rest of the Middle East. But after writing for Armenians for a good number of years, I have learned the hard way that if an idea makes sense, it will be universally rejected.

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VOLTAIRE’S FRENCHMEN

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Voltaire used to divide his fellow countrymen into two distinct groups: “the enemies of reason and merit, the fanatics, the stupid, the intolerant, the persecutors and the calumniators,” and the others. And now, allow me to introduce that rarest of all beings, a concerned Armenian who was also a friend of reason, and as such would have enjoyed Voltaire’s full approval.

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ARTIN DADIAN

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He was a prominent Ottoman diplomat who in 1896 headed a commission appointed by the Sultan to resolve the conflict between the Empire and the Armenian revolutionaries. The following is a quotation from one of his letters to the Tashnak party: “I suggest that today we have nothing but patience and tolerance. First, Europe shows complete indifference and says there is no Armenian question as far as they are concerned. Second, the threat of complete annihilation of the Armenian nation has not yet entirely passed, and third, the people are tired of revolutionary deeds and are ready to patch up their differences with the government in order to remain safe from further terrible events such as have almost wiped out our people from the face of the earth. Fourth, various organizations are fighting different causes, each in their own way, and in the middle of all this stands one pitiful Artin Dadian, who on the one hand begs the Sultan for mercy by telling him that this would be the best thing for his empire, and on the other hand fights base individuals who in order to attain their selfish aims are even willing to sell their nation.” (See Pars Tuglaci, THE ROLE OF THE DADIAN FAMILY IN OTTOMAN, SOCIAL, ECONOMIC, AND POLITICAL LIFE [istanbul, 1993]).

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[ara baliozian]

Thursday, September 21, 2006

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FROM MY DIARY

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“Not so loud, please!” Verdi said to an organ grinder who had planted himself beneath his window; and forever after the organ grinder sported a sign that said, “Student of Verdi.”

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Frances Mayes dedicates her latest book, A YEAR IN THE WORLD: JOURNEYS OF A PASSIONATE TRAVELLER (New York, 2006), “To the forgotten new yellow panties and bra left drying on the rim of the hotel bathtub.”

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A Chinese GI’s complaint to his sergeant: “Sarge, hey keep calling me Sneeze but my name ain’t sneeze. My name is Hep Chou.”

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In so far as criticism shows what can be done as opposed to what’s being done, it is always constructive.

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Can a dupe really speak of self-interest if his views are not his but someone else’s?

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You cannot reason with tyrants because they value their power above reason. Likewise, you cannot reason with men of faith because they value their religion above everything else, including their own survival.

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Since most Christians are Christian because they were born in a Christian country, and most Muslims are Muslim because they were born in a Muslim country, it follows, what determines a man’s choice of religion is geography rather than the merits of their belief system. It also follows, most believers, like most patriots, are dupes of an unthinking factor, namely real estate. Which also means, to say my religion or my country is better than yours amounts to saying my mud is better than your mud.

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[ara baliozian]

Friday, September 22, 2006

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Faith and fundamentalism, fundamentalism and fanaticism, fanaticism and collective insanity: not always easy to tell where one ends and the other begins.

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There is a beautiful English expression which is easily translated into Armenian but as far as I know it is seldom or never used by us: “Throw out the rascals!” – meaning, “Vote against the incumbents,” as if our incumbents were morally superior to American incumbents. In this connection perhaps I should add that until very recently we in the Diaspora couldn’t even identify our incumbents.

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On the Internet it is not always easy to tell if those who attack you anonymously are children or adult retards. Perhaps I should have a warning label on everything I write that says: “What follows may not be suitable for young audiences. Parental guidance is advised.”

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To generalize about Muslims may not be politically correct, but that should not prevent us from speaking of their mistreatment of women and their megalomaniacal imperial illusions based on the fact that, since they had an empire in the Middle Ages, they can have another in the near future, provided they follow the Guidance, which says, infidels have the same status in the eyes of Allah as dogs.

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Speaking of collective illusions and ambitions: in what way is our claim on historic Armenia any different?

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And speaking of generalizations: Let others think of us as a nation of cunning rug merchants. We see ourselves as heroes and martyrs; and heroes and martyrs don’t learn from their mistakes because they don’t make them.

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My favorite epitaph: “Here lies someone who tried to screw his fellow man as little as possible.” (Camilo Jose Cela.)

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[ara baliozian]

Saturday, September 23, 2006

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We brag about our facility with languages; and yet, Karzai speaks better English than Kocharian; some of our ablest translators are re-translators; most Armenians born and raised in America cannot speak their mother tongue, and most of those who speak it can’t read it.

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To love man means to hate exploiters, crooks, propagandists, dupes, charlatans, moral morons, tyrants, brown-nosers, flunkeys, hirelings, know-it-all smart-asses, liars, rapists, child molesters, thieves, killers…Perhaps to love man means to hate mankind.

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By the time you subtract the PR, spin, doubletalk, and propaganda factors, what’s left from the palaver of a politician may very well be not just nonsense but dangerous nonsense, the kind that starts wars and massacres.

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We may not cut out tongues and burn heretics at the stake, but that does not prevent us from making it clear that’s what we would like to do if we could get away with it.

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[ara baliozian]

Sunday, September 24, 2006

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THE TRIUMPH OF EVIL

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An elegantly dressed, coiffed, and bejeweled lady on Armenian TV spouting all the predictable clichés, among them:

“There is corruption in Armenia, certainly! But then there is corruption everywhere, including Canada.”

With one important difference: in Canada, when exposed, the corrupt are fired, sometimes even arrested, tried and jailed. Also, I have never heard a Canadian justify corruption by saying there is corruption everywhere.

*

“We shouldn’t judge our brothers in the Homeland. Are we better than they?”

True! We are not. We too are at the mercy of charlatans with their perennial Panchoonie punch line, “Mi kich pogh oughargetsek” (Send us a little money); and because I have been saying this, I have become persona non grata, and in the eyes of our chauvinists, an enemy of the people. Besides, if we don’t judge the corrupt, in a way we judge and condemn the victims at the mercy of their bloodsucking parasites.

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“The police stop and give you a ticket for traffic violations you didn’t commit.”

This may explain why everyone wants to emigrate except the police, who, according to a recent visitor “are the fattest and ugliest men I have ever seen.”

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“It may take two generations for our brothers in the Homeland to abandon their Soviet ways.”

Who benefits from this kind of talk? Surely not the victims. As for their victimizers: It is almost as if they were given a license to carry on with the full protection and consent of the people for another forty or fifty years – a license for which they didn’t even apply.

I have said this before and it bears repeating: our national sport is the blame-game: we blame the “red” massacres on the Turks and on the indifference of the Great Powers; the “white” massacre (exodus from the Homeland and assimilation in the Diaspora) on “social, economic, and political conditions beyond our control”; our tribalism on our climate and geography; and now, our corruption on the Kremlin. During the Soviet era I don’t remember any one of our chic Bolsheviks in the Diaspora complaining about Soviet corruption. On the contrary. We were told we were in the best of hands and we never had it so good.

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“Let’s not forget that, as a state, Armenia is only a new-born child.”

And yet, when it suits us, we claim to be one of the oldest civilizations, after which we brag about the fact that at a time when most of Europe lived in huts and caves, we enjoyed a Golden Age.

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To those who like to explain and justify our criminal conduct, may I remind them that evil triumphs only when the majority adopt a passive stance and they justify their cowardice, moral moronism, and absence of vision by engaging in charlatanism.

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[ara baliozian]

Monday, September 25, 2006

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ODIAN’S ARMENIANS

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On reading Yervant Odian’s COUNCILMAN’S WIFE (first serialized at the turn of the last century, later published in book form in 1921) one thing becomes abundantly clear: the Armenian community of Istanbul consisted of morally bankrupt schemers (I am being politically correct now, because “a bunch of degenerates” would be closer to the truth) who spent their lives backbiting and plotting against one another.

What has changed? As far as I can see, only one thing: we no longer have writers like Odian willing to write about what they see and experience. What we have instead are academics and self-appointed pundits who, afraid to deal with the dark side of our collective existence (please note that I am not saying community life) feel more comfortable and safe writing about the past, and if it’s not the Middle Ages, it’s the massacres, as if were history – I use the word in its colloquial meaning.

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Julien Green (1900-1998), Francophone American writer, on death: “It is only the liberation of the spirit from the flesh.”

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On biography: “Slices of cold beef.”

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On first impressions: “They are not to be resisted or ignored. One should never come to terms with vulgar people and vulgar not only in manner but also in spirit.”

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On the self: “We are strangers to ourselves from the day we are born, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to understand and adjust ourselves to him.”

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On life: “What happens in the world is of little interest. What happens within, that’s what really counts.”

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Bernard-Henri Levy (contemporary French philosopher): “Only jackasses and the dead have nothing to hide.”

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Abdelwahab Meddeb (Tunisian writer and professor of literature): “Islamism is the most absolute fascism ever conceived by man.”

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[ara baliozian]

Thursday, September 28, 2006

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FROM MY NOTEBOOKS

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He who asks a rude question neither wants nor deserves an honest answer.

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Two frequently used phrases in English that are never used in Armenian: “Speak truth to power,” and “The buck stops here.”

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“The buck stops here,” and the blame-game are mutually exclusive concepts.

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Sometimes the hardest word to pronounce is no.

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Last night on CBC [Canadian Broadcasting Corporation] an interview with a Turkish novelist who was taken to court because in her latest book an Armenian character from San Francisco refers to Turks as “butchers.” The Turks, it seems, are so eager to achieve membership in the European Union that even a single word in a work of fiction bothers the hell out of them.

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In the same way that we are brought up to believe we are a nation of heroes and martyrs, the Turks are brought up to believe they are a nation of empire builders and noble warriors, even if most of their so-called warriors were not Turks but brainwashed and castrated Christians.

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People who give others ulcers, heart attacks, and cancer, die of natural causes.

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I repeat myself because I consider it my duty to reassert the truth against ceaselessly repeated lies.

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Bernard-Henri Levy (contemporary French philosopher): “Israeli writers are better politicians than Israeli politicians because imagination is a necessary ingredient of good politics. By using their imagination, writers are in a better position to understand what it means to be and feel like a Palestinian.”

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[ara baliozian]

Friday, September 29, 2006

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HOW NOT TO BE A WRITER

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Misery likes company they say and they are right. If I encouraged anyone to adopt literature as a career, I have done so for purely selfish reasons. I know now to do so amounts to promoting insanity.

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Anyone who can write a sentence these days thinks he can also write a paragraph, a page, and a chapter. Result: an unlimited supply of trash most of which will never see the light of day. According to a recent statistic, only one in a thousand manuscripts is accepted for publication. That’s because for every honest man there are probably a thousand self-assessed geniuses, in the same way that for every authentic man of faith or servant of god there are a thousand mullahs, shamans, gurus, televangelists, fornicators, and child molesters; and for every statesman there are a thousand wheeler-dealers whose number one concern is number one.

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It is said that writers are appreciated only after they die. What unmitigated nonsense! What unadulterated rubbish! I can name a hundred Armenian writers who are neither appreciated nor read even by the overwhelming majority of their fellow Armenians. As for courses in creative writing, how-to books, lectures, seminars, and symposia that have been mushrooming hiroshimally: the most practical advice you will get from them is of the kind that tells you to “stand still and wave a white handkerchief, this should confuse the elephant.”

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Did anyone in Homer’s or Dostoevsky’s time even speak of such a thing as “creative writing”? My favorite advice, or rather anti-advice is: “Are you sure you are doing the wrong thing?” Because to do the right thing nowadays means to conform by saying “Yes, sir!” even when the right thing to do is to bellow “No!”

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