as i see it - Pt. IV

[ara baliozian]

 

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

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FRIENDSHIP AMONG NATIONS

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When some American diplomats opposed the recognition of our genocide, one of our Turcocentric pundits produced a widely circulated commentary titled “If our friends do it it’s not genocide.” Only an Armenian who does not understand history and has no conception of diplomacy could come up with such a headline.

Nations have neither friends nor enemies. They have interests. It happens to be in the interests of Washington today not to go against the wishes of Ankara not because Turks are friends but because they are more useful to them than we are. That’s all there is to it.

Because at the turn of the last century we thought the friendship of the Great Powers made us invulnerable, we rose, or rather our naïve revolutionaries did, against the Turks, and the Turks retaliated. One could say that our greatest tragedy was a direct result of the fact that we failed to understand the meaning of the word friendship in a historic or diplomatic context.

Now you may be in a better position to understand why medieval Jewish scribes thought a single misplaced word or letter in the Holy Scriptures may result in the destruction of the world.

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"Our political parties have been of no political use to us.

Their greatest enemy is free speech"

Gostan Zarian

[ara baliozian]

Thursday, November 29, 2007

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IN PRAISE OF FREE SPEECH

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Not being a megalomaniac with messianic ambitions, I don’t claim to be in the business of saving the nation. Far better men than myself have tried and failed in that particular endeavor. Besides, no one can save a nation that has condemned itself to the death of a thousand self-inflicted cuts. My sole aim is to show that those who parade as our saviors are no better than swindlers who have learned nothing from history.

You cannot shape the future of a nation without taking into account the lessons of the past or ignoring its central message, which is as accessible as the biblical dictum “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” And because I have been saying as much I have been silenced and ostracized. A psychoanalyst’s job is to shed light on the dark corners of the psyche. A historian’s job is to expose blunders in order that they may not be repeated in the future. A surgeon’s job is to cut out diseased tissue that may threaten the body. Taking away a writer’s freedom of speech is like taking away a surgeon’s scalpel.

No man is an island. No one speaks just for himself. To violate the free speech of a single individual is to willfully ignore the views of a fraction of the community, which also means to further divide the nation. And why? All because “our betters” are too arrogant to admit they are nothing of the kind. What they are is human beings like the rest of us, capable of making mistakes – some of them petty, others of colossal dimensions.

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[ara baliozian]

Friday, November 30, 2007

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ARMENIANS OF THE WORLD UNITE

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You have nothing to lose but your dividers.

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A divider who speaks in the name of the nation is a liar.

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There is only one way for a liar to think truth is on his side and that is by lying to himself.

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The best way to deceive people is to tell them they are too smart to be deceived.

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Dogmas, be they religious or ideological, in whose name we are divided are lies.

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If there is a god and if there is life after death, we may know the truth, but until then we are destined to know only a fraction of it; and a fraction of the truth can be more misleading and dangerous than a lie.

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A divider, no matter how wise, honest, and selfless, cannot speak in the name of the nation, only a fraction of it, and more often than not, an extremely tiny fraction.

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A divider who portrays himself as a savior is in reality a gravedigger. His prototype is the revolutionary in the Ottoman Empire.

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Armenians who identify themselves as Armenians and say they are proud of their identity form only a tiny fraction of the nation. The overwhelming majority have been successfully marginalized, alienated, assimilated, silenced, and reduced to the status of non-persons. But they exist as surely as any one of our bosses, bishops, and benefactors. They may even be better human beings if only because they deceive no one by parading as saviors during the day and turning into gravediggers at night.

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Armenians of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your gravediggers.

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[ara baliozian]

Saturday, December 01, 2007

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A CITIZEN OF THE WORLD

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Aznavour in a recent interview published in PARIS MATCH on his “Benetton family”:

“We are of all colors and creeds. My daughter’s husband is Muslim, I am Gregorian, my wife is Protestant. With such a family one is in a better position to understand other people’s problems. To have many cultures is great!”

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On Reading:

“For an illiterate I am an avid reader. I have a huge library – all of Guitry and Simenon. At the moment I am rereading Proust for the third time. First time he was a pain…second time hard going…third time magnificent.”

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On Politics:

“My wife threatens to divorce me if I ever run for office in Armenia.”

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On Old Age:

“My age [83] is an interesting one. It doesn’t bother me one bit. But it seems to matter to others.”

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On an Armenian Idiosyncrasy:

“In Armenia they all speak foreign languages. My mother spoke Greek and Turkish. My dad spoke Armenian and Russian. Though not Jewish, he understood Yiddish. All his life he spoke French with an accent so thick you could cut it with a knife.”

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[ara baliozian]

Sunday, December 02, 2007

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ON OUR PROBLEMS

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In a recent widely circulated commentary I read a list of our problems so long that it reminded me of the celebrated Stanislaw Lec aphorism “No snowflake in the avalanche ever feels responsible.”

If, instead of making long lists of problems we concentrate on those who create them, we may end up with Avedik Issahakian’s triad: “earthquakes, bloodthirsty neighbors, and brainless leaders.”

Problems like corruption, divisions that make no sense and serve no purpose, intolerance, xenophobia, Turcocentrism, incompetence, exodus from the Homeland, assimilation in the Diaspora, cultural decline, an appalling rate of unemployment, poverty, absence of solidarity, among others, have a single source: the undemocratic character of our institutions or the absence of accountability in our leadership.

In an authoritarian environment (and I say authoritarian to avoid saying Ottoman) problems will be explained and justified by saying they are extensions of political conditions and environmental factors beyond our control.

A partisan press will at no time shoulder responsibility so long as it can blame it on the opposition. Those who divide us will even go as far as saying that they divide us for our own good, to save us from the evil plans of their adversaries.

Where there is no free press, problems will proliferate until they become an avalanche, which will be explained as an act of god, and those responsible will emerge as innocent as a snowflake.

Now, suppose a small group of pundits come together and issue a number of recommendations, who will listen to them? Who will even acknowledge their existence?

Brainless leaders? Rather, brainy enough to make number one their number one concern and make it look like they are dedicated to the challenging task of saving the nation.

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Speaking of our problems: you will find a pretty good list in Khorenatsi’s “Lamentation” written fifteen centuries ago. Which may suggest that it is not unawareness of our problems that makes them hard to solve but irresponsible leaders who might as well be deaf, dumb, dim, dull, and dense.

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[ara baliozian]

Tuesday, December 04, 2007

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MY PARTISAN FRIEND AND I

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“You call us dividers as if that’s all we have done,” an angry friend tells me during a recent telephone conversation, and goes on: “Why don’t you ever mention the many positive contributions we have made to the community and the nation?”

I say nothing. I have learned never to contradict an angry Armenian.

Dear friend, if you are reading these lines, I would invite you to consider the case of the butler who after serving his master faithfully for fifty years, he poisons him. At his trial and in his defense he says to the judge: “Your Honor, the prosecution and its witnesses speak of me as if I were a murderer. I suggest that is a gross distortion of my character.”

Or consider the case of a surgeon who kills a patient in a botched operation. When taken to court he says: “I have performed many successful operations. There are hundreds of people alive today because of me. And here I am being treated as a common criminal.”

What I am trying to say is that we all have a role to play in the community. We all make a living for our positive contributions. No one gets a raise or a medal for his blinders or crimes. And when a man, after being a law-abiding citizen all his life, breaks the law, he has no choice but to pay the penalty.

I don’t believe in capital punishment but I would gladly make an exception in the case of a political boss whose number one concern is number one. As for a political leader who declares a war he cannot win, I say impeachment is too good for him. I believe the only honorable course of action for such a leader is to follow Hitler’s example and shoot himself. Finally, I urge you to consider the case of revolutionaries who rise against an empire they cannot topple and as a result of their failure millions of innocent civilians die...

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[ara baliozian]

Monday, December 03, 2007

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DENIALISM

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Those who are at the root of our problems will at no time admit we, or rather they, have problems, and if they have them, they can be solved, and if they can be solved it is up to them to solve them. Denialism is a favored word of ours provided of course it’s of the Turkish variant. As for Armenian denialism: we don’t even acknowledge its existence.

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THE FASCIST AND THE PHILOSOPHER

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The Fascist general who drove Miguel de Unamuno out of his university at gunpoint in 1936 is said to have screamed “Death to Intelligence,” and “Long live Death.” Shortly thereafter Unamuno had a heart attack and died.

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OTTOMAN WISDOM

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Ours is the wisdom of former slaves whose secret ambition is to emulate their former masters.

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ON APOLOGY

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It’s easy to apologize after you step on someone’s foot. But how do you apologize for leading a million and half innocent human beings to the slaughterhouse? That’s why neither their leadership nor ours will ever apologize to the people.

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NATIONALISM (i)

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My land, my people, my home, my rivers, my lakes, valleys and mountains, my backyard, my chickens. But never – never! – my blunders.

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NATIONALISM (ii)

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They brag about our victories and blame our defeats on others. If it were up to our propagandists, we would be the only nation on earth that has never committed a blunder or lost a single war.

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[ara baliozian]

Wednesday, December 05, 2007

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VISIBLE & INVISIBLE ARMENIANS

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You cannot argue with someone who is in a position to silence you. He has much more to lose than an argument. He stands to lose his infallibility. And no one can make an ass of himself as surely as he who thinks himself to be infallible.

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I have said this before and it bears repeating: the need to assert superiority is the surest symptom of inferiority.

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The only way for the inferior to come to terms with himself is to think he is better than others; and the only way to reach that objective is by being his own dupe. The problem with dupes is that they feel justified in deceiving others, as if to say, if deception is good enough for me, it should be good enough for you too.

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To confuse visible Armenians (fund-raisers, speechifiers, ghazetajis, wheeler-dealers) with their invisible counterparts would be like confusing la crème de la scum with la crème de la crème. I know many hard working, decent Armenians who have never delivered a speech or made a headline in any one of our papers; Armenians who do not pretend to know and understand more than they do; Armenians who have not written a single line for publication.

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It is better to do nothing than to do the wrong thing. It is better to know nothing than to know the wrong thing.

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[ara baliozian]

Thursday, December 06, 2007

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OF JACKASSES

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In America the higher your rise on the greasy pole the more of your posterior you expose. The average American today probably knows more about the Clintons than about his next-door neighbors. What do I know about our own leaders? Just their names and sometimes not even that. “I once called the Catholicos in Etchmiadzin,” a friend tells me, “and it was the KGB that answered.” When a Ramgavar semi-boss once promised to pay me a goodly sum if I undertook the task of writing profiles of prominent Ramgavars, I informed him I didn’t even know who they were, neither was I interested to know. Speaking of bosses, I am reminded of another incident with one of our national benefactors – let’s call him Jack S. Avanakian – who wanted me to translate his father’s youthful diary. “I translate only literary works,” I explained and added: “I am not aware of anyone by the name of Avanakian who has written a single line worth translating.” On the subject of jackasses: Did you know that our writers refer to one another as “boys”? I once heard an 80-year old writer say about Zarian: “I knew him – he was a good degha!” This was at a convention of Armenian writers (my first and last) during which I heard another writer refer to a national benefactor as “baron.” “Baron Jack S. Avanakian would not be interested in supporting such a project,” said he. I was a newcomer then and the thought occurred to me that I had landed not only on a different continent but also on another planet.

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[ara baliozian]

Friday, December 07, 2007

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FROM THE NOTEBOOKS

OF A PESSIMIST

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The two most incompatible things in the world: dishonesty and sunlight.

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You ask me if I would be willing to die for my country. Allow me to introduce my answer by saying, the only reason my country has not yet killed me is that I have been beyond its reach.

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In an English literary magazine I read a book review by a historian that ends with the words: “How many policy-makers know their history well enough to learn from its lessons?” I should like to see such a sentence produced by one of our dime-a-dozen pundits who are masters of the blame-game.

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“I heard you have become a pessimist,” an old friend whom I have not seen for fifty years tells me. And I reflect that where illusions and lies are dominant, truth and reality will be anathema. When Krikor Zohrab predicted the Genocide, they said, “Zohrab effendi is exaggerating.” And because I question the honesty of our pundits and propagandists, I am thought of as a pessimist.

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[ara baliozian]

Saturday, December 08, 2007

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DEFENDERS OF THE FAITH

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Propaganda is cunningly tailored to have (i) mass appeal, (ii) to be accessible to the average dupe, and (iii) to flatter his ego. By contrast, understanding reality or getting at the truth is an infinitely more demanding and sometimes even painful enterprise. Consider as a case in point the word survival as used by our propagandists. The nation survived, granted, but its best brains did not; neither did the best part of our own critical faculties. That is why when someone like Zarian, Shahnour, or Massikian tries to explain what really happened to us, we turn against him. That is also why I have trouble reaching Armenians who confuse ideology with theology, or politics with religion. Faith or a closed system of thought cannot be shaken by common sense and logic. Faith can only be replaced by another faith or closed system of thought. To put it differently, explanations work only with people with open minds. Hence the sorry spectacle of a sanctimonious prick or dealer in chauvinist crapola parading as a leader of men, defender of the faith, and savior of the nation.

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[ara baliozian]

Sunday, December 09, 2007

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THE 11TH COMMANDMENT

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Organized religions are popular for the same reason that Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini were: people hate to think for themselves. Shaw once said that he has made a fortune and enjoys an international reputation as a clever man because he takes the trouble to think for himself once or twice a year.

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Everything that is popular is based on a misconception, which is also why astrology is popular too.

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Organized religions contradict one another – Christians and Muslims believe in an Almighty God; Buddhists don’t. That doesn’t mean one is right and the other wrong. That only means, if God exists, you must live your life as if He didn’t, because God will not do your thinking for you for the simple reason that He has given you a brain, which happens to be a valuable piece of equipment that is a miracle of design as mysterious and incomprehensible as the universe itself.

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The hardest thing about writing is convincing philistines that you are worth listening to.

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Because I refuse to be a fool among fools I am called all kinds of nasty names, including infidel and atheist.

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Once upon a time we trusted our destiny on dividers, sultans, commissars, and charlatans (both foreign and domestic) and when things started going wrong we blamed it on bloodthirsty neighbors, bad location, and the Almighty Himself, never on our brainless leaders and their dupes, namely ourselves.

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My favorite 11th commandment: Thou shalt be self-reliant.

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God does not sermonize or speechify; mullahs, priests, and charlatans do that.

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We have become a bunch of whiners -- compliments of our nationalist historians and Turcocentric pundits who are masters of the blame game.

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Thou shalt not ask God to do your thinking for you.

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[ara baliozian]

Monday, December 10, 2007

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QUESTIONS / ANSWERS

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Q: Do you classify yourself as a good Armenian?

A: Frankly, I am so busy trying to be an honest man that I don’t even think about being an Armenian, let alone a good one.

Q: What do you say to readers who are outraged by what you write?

A: I say, Relax! We have survived centuries of oppression by brutal tyrants, countless wars, massacres, deportation, destitution, life in alien slums…we can survive the opinions of a minor scribbler who may well be, in your own estimation, a misguided fool.

Q: What it’s like writing for Armenians?

A: A butcher delivering a lecture to an audience of brain surgeons may be in a better position to answer that question.

Q: Do you think you have had any influence on our policy-makers?

A: Hell no! Even if I were a thousand times smarter and lived as long as Methuselah I doubt if I could change the mind of a single dupe who is brainwashed to believe he is too smart to be deceived.

Q: What’s the hardest thing about being honest?

A: Trying not to give in to the temptation of being dishonest and remembering all those instances in the past when I failed.

Q: Any projects?

A: Many.

Q: Such as?

A: A dictionary of Armenian misconceptions, which I will never write because it may well be as long as WAR AND PEACE and THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV combined.

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[Anoushik]

Happy Birthday Mr. Baliozian

 

I'm not sure if you visit other threads on Hyeforum, that's why I posted it here

[Yervant1]

I wish you a very Happy Birthday Ara!

[AVO]

Happy birthday Ara

[ara baliozian]

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

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THE TRAGEDY OF OEDIPUS

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If Armenians and their endless petty little problems bore you, join the club. If I go on writing about them it’s not because I am overly fond of them or would like to solve their problems (no one can do that except themselves) but because I want to understand my fellow men. To be bored with Armenians means to be bored with mankind, and ultimately with oneself.

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We are a microcosm. If we are a failure as a nation, so is mankind. The history of mankind is a disaster area because the average man is a dupe at the mercy of megalomaniacal, self-satisfied frauds who will say and do anything in defense of their powers and privileges. The list of sultans, kings, presidents, popes, and chief executive officers who abused their positions of trust or preached virtue and practiced vice stretches to infinity.

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Athens executed Socrates, Florence exiled Dante, Russia excommunicated Tolstoy, India assassinated Gandhi. You may now draw your own conclusions.

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When charlatans and dupes conspire, they end up praising honesty and burying honest men.

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To say that God punishes men for their transgressions is to misrepresent reality. It is man that punishes himself. The real tragedy of Oedipus is not that he killed his father and had sex with his mother but that he thought by blinding himself he could avoid seeing reality.

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[ara baliozian]

thank you, to all of you! / ara

[ara baliozian]

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

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CONFESSIONS OF A LIBERAL

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In one of his books Ben Bagdikian says that conservatives like Murdoch, Conrad Black, and Buckley control most of the media in America, and yet they bitch about the liberal media. Something similar could be said about our own pro-establishment right wingers, who control not only our media but also our community centers, schools, university chairs, and institutions. Hence the misconception that we never had it so good because we are in good hands. As for the one or two minor problems, like our mafia democracy in the Homeland: they will fix themselves in twenty or thirty years. What about dissenting voices? What dissenting voices? I don’t hear them. They don’t hear them because they have been ruthlessly and systematically silenced.

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There is a tendency in America to exaggerate the importance of words spoken in anger – Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitic tirade when arrested for drunk driving, for instance. When angry we say things we don’t always mean. I have myself said many harsh things in anger even about my mother whom I love very much. That doesn’t make me anti-motherhood or for that matter, God forbid, anti-apple pie.

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Speaking of motherhood: some Armenians look down at fellow Armenians who cannot speak their mother tongue. To them I ask: What’s the use of speaking Armenian if the sentiments you express are Ottoman?

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I have been called a variety of names, none of them remotely close to honest. And yet, that has been my sole aim in life: to be an honest witness.

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If you think you are a better Armenian, it is of course your privilege to do so and I will say nothing to disabuse you -- only warn you: if you expect all Armenians to agree with you, be prepared to be disappointed and end your days as a bitter old man.

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As for our ultra-conservative Turcocentric pundits and their ubiquitous, predictable, and cliché-ridden commentaries: the only way to describe them is to say they are ideal instances of diarrhea of words and constipation of ideas.

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As Brahms used to say on his way out from a party: “I apologize to anyone I may have neglected to offend.”

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[ara baliozian]

Thursday, December 13, 2007

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CAIN’S ANSWER

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Political lies have been with us for a long time. Even Plato discusses them in his Dialogues, which where written 2500 years ago.

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No one lies as surely as he who speaks in the name of truth or God. In the Bible we read that God asked Cain where Abel was, the implication being that Cain knew something God did not. And Cain replied: “I don’t know. Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Genesis 4:9).

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Speaking of lies, murder, and brotherhood: Our Turcocentric ghazetajis tell us they don’t hate Turks. Their sole aim, they say, is justice. But justice, like truth, is an abstraction. No one has ever laid eyes on it. Instead of abstractions, let’s speak of reality. The truth about reality is that we cannot speak about it, only fractions of it. That’s because we have only a limited number of words and reality has an infinite number of levels and complexities. That’s one reason why when we speak we lie.

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Does that mean Cain did not kill Abel? No. Of course not! It only means we don’t know why Cain became a murderer. Was it envy? Why should envy lead to murder? What is envy? What has made us capable of envy? Or rather, who has instilled envy in man? For what purpose? The infinite number of complexities generates an equal number of questions until the final one, which is also Cain’s: We don’t know because we are not God’s keeper.

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[ara baliozian]

Friday, December 14, 2007

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FRAGMENTS

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When nine out of ten are unanimous in believing one thing, go with the tenth, for believing and thinking are mutually exclusive concepts.

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I disagree with anyone who holds views that were mine thirty years ago; and if I don’t stand on ceremony with them it may be because I don’t stand on ceremony with myself.

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The man who views the world and his fellow men in black and white terms, as opposed to shades of gray, will invariably classify himself as all white even when he is pitch black.

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If character is destiny, as the ancient Greeks thought, the question we should ask is: To what extent our character as a nation has been shaped by 600 years of Ottoman oppression followed by 60 years of Bolshevik tyranny? If this question has so far gone unanswered it may be because our nationalists and masters of the blame-game have done their utmost to ignore or cover up that aspect of our identity.

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[ara baliozian]

Saturday, December 15, 2007

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FROM MY NOTEBOOKS

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Where charlatans are in charge,

honest men will be silenced.

Where ignoramuses are in charge,

knowledge will be outlawed.

Where the blind are in charge,

the one-eyed will be blinded.

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I don’t tell you things I already know.

I tell you things that I discover as I write.

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Why should I trust the judgment of underdogs whose sole ambition in life is to be top dogs so that they will have the pleasure of stepping on underdogs, even when the underdogs happen to be their brothers?

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The worst mistake we can make is to assume that Comrade Panchoonie is a character in a satirical novel by Yervant Odian written a century ago. Every other day I get a letter from him that ends with the word “mi kich pogh…” something similar could be said of Hagop Baronian’s “honorable beggars.” Characters in great literary works live much longer than their creators. Or rather, great writers achieve immortality through the characters they create.

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Our standards have fallen so low that every panchoonie, honorable beggar, and ghazetaji parades as a defender of the faith and the savior of the nation.

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What if I am wrong? There is always that possibility, of course. In my defense I will say that if only the infallible were allowed to speak, the only voice would be that of the Pope of Rome, we would all be Catholics, and Latin would be the most widely spoken language in the world.

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I.B. Singer: “I am not a vegetarian for the sake of my health, but for the health of the chickens. For animals, every day is Treblinka.”

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[ara baliozian]

Sunday, December 16, 2007

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THE DEATH OF SOCRATES

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When the Greeks executed Socrates, they did not just kill a man but someone who represented the very best of Greek wisdom. To silence a thinker is like burning down a library.

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The difference between an editor violating someone’s human right of free speech and a head of state ordering a massacre is one in degree. In both instances power is being abused at its maximum. Promote the editor (or a forum moderator) to head and state, and vice versa, demote a head of state to editor, and they will behave the same way.

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Stalin or Hitler saying they have no use for intellectuals is the same as an architect saying he has no use for higher mathematics. The result will be buildings that collapse as surely as Stalin’s USSR and Nazi Germany did.

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Hitler had no use for Jewish scientists. As a result, he lost to America some of Germany’s ablest minds, including Einstein. Had he been less of a racists, he would have won World War II and I would now be writing this in German. Toynbee is right: civilizations and empires are not killed, they commit suicide.

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What our critics were saying about Levon Der Bedrossian and Robert Kocharian, they are now saying about each other; and if what they say is true, they both deserve the hangman’s noose.

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Those who declare wars have a better chance to survive them than those who do the actual fighting.

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[ara baliozian]

Monday, December 17, 2007

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ILLUSIONS

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“Nothing you say makes sense!” a reader writes; and another: “Tell us something we don’t know.” These two contradictory comments suggest that I may well be on the right track. But perhaps I am deluding myself.

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I understand illusions. I have quite a few of them myself, as a matter of fact. I believe reason matters. I believe common sense is transferable. I believe explanations work. I think I may be able to make a difference. I like to hope where far better men than myself failed, I may succeed. Call it optimism run riot. Call it hubris. Whatever it is, it allows me to go on.

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“You repeat yourself,” I am reminded once in a while. So do our Turcocentric pundits. So do our sermonizers who quote the Scriptures from hundreds of pulpits every Sunday. Has anyone ever dared to stand up and accuse them of repeating themselves? Once when I said as much in a commentary, the secretary of an archbishop wrote an angry letter to the editor in which she said: “How dare you, sir, comparing the trash you dish out [i am now abridging and paraphrasing] with the Holy Scriptures which happen to be the word of God?” My answer: Almost everything I write may be considered a paraphrase or variations on the Biblical dictum “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

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Scratch a defender of the status quo and expose a hireling for whom the establishment is manna.

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There are no new ideas, only subtle adjustments of old ones.

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I should like to meet an Armenian whose first impulse is to understand rather than to dismiss as absurd that which he makes no effort to understand.

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[ara baliozian]

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

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TYRANNY VERSUS DEMOCRACY

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A community or a nation is not a congregation that will sing the same tune in unison. There will always be discordant voices. Get used to them. Our degree of tolerance and civilization depends on the manner in which we handle dissent.

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I have been rereading Herodotus. What a great storyteller he was! Speaking of a certain Greek city-state, he writes that its citizens preferred tyranny to freedom. Impossible, I thought. Who in his right mind would choose tyranny when he can live in freedom? And then I thought of my fellow countrymen and remembered the words of our progressive and enlightened citizens (self-assessed of course) who tell us we are not yet ready for democracy. If by “we” they mean our leaders, they may be right. If they mean a fraction of the people that have been brainwashed, ditto. But I have no doubt whatever in my mind that, given a choice, the overwhelming majority will choose to live in a democracy. You want proof? Consider Armenians in the United States and Canada who did not immigrate en masse to Armenia under Stalin.

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After centuries of oppression we have accumulated vast stores of resentment, anger, and bitterness. Our leaders are aware of this. That is why they channel this suppressed fury in the direction of the Turks. What motivates them to do that is self-preservation.

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The chances of the unthinkable happening will be diminished if we think about it. If the unthinkable did happen it is because those who thought about it were ignored. “Zohrab effendi is exaggerating,” they said…

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There is a type of critic (make it, kibitzer) who is so blinded by his own brilliance that he does not mind making an ass of himself. But he is smart enough to do so anonymously and dumb enough to add cowardice to narcissism.

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