as i see it - Pt. IV

[ara baliozian]

Monday, March 05, 2007

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FROM MY DIARY

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For two years a best seller in the Arab world, the YACOUBIAN BUILDING by Alaa Al Aswany is now available in English. In a glowing review of this novel in the SPECTATOR I read that the building of the title is named after Hagop Yacoubian, “an Egyptian millionaire and doyen of Cairo’s Armenian community.” The building itself is described as “a ten-storey block of apartments in Suleiman Basha Street.” I would like to hear from anyone who may know more about this fellow countryman.

*

To policeman, lawyers, and judges, the word murder does not have the same meaning as it does to the victims’ family. Something similar could be said of our Turcocentric pundits and the word genocide. In their writing the word is depersonalized and despoiled of its original meaning. It is almost as if our pundits were collaborating with denialists by minimizing the seriousness of the charge.

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To be effectively brainwashed means to be totally unaware of the fact.

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Paul Valéry: “A painter should not paint what he sees, but what will be seen.” I think of Gertrude Stein in her old age looking like Picasso’s portrait of her in her younger days; and of Marlon Brando studying Renaissance paintings for expressions and body postures.

*

Victor Hugo: “Some people have libraries the way eunuchs have harems.”

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[ara baliozian]

Ara,

 

We know that Turks are primarily mongrelized Armenians. How much Turkish blood flows in the veins of Armenians? To what extent have we fornicated with Turks over our 1,000 year association? How much Turkish blood has been mixed into the Armenian genepool?

 

good questions. i too would like to have them answered. but i doubt if anyone can.

 

[ara baliozian]

Tuesday, March 06, 2007

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BETTE’S COMPLAINT,

AMONG OTHER THINGS

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When two readers insulted me, a third moved in for the kill by saying: “If one man calls you an ass, you may ignore him. But if two men call you an ass, buy a saddle.” And I couldn’t help thinking: Behold a self-satisfied ass and compulsive liar who pretends to enjoy universal popularity just because his mother loves him.

*

A good slogan that speaks to the gut is a hundred times more effective that a thousand irrefutable arguments that speak to the brain.

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One of Philip Larkin’s lines reads, “groping back to bed after a piss.” Now, that’s what I call real poetry. As for “the eternal snows of Mount Ararat,” Turks can have it.

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In the same way that bad things happen to good people, bad people happen to good ideas. The nobler the idea or ideology or belief system, the more repulsive perverts it will attract – from Christianity and the Inquisition to Marxism and Stalin.

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Denis Diderot: “You may ask me to search for the truth, but not to find it.”

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Bette Davis in her old age as quoted in Penelope Mortimer’s memoirs: “I haven’t had a f*** in ten years.”

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[ara baliozian]

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

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ON ARMENIAN SELF-ESTEEM,

AMONG OTHER THINGS

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If he is a loudmouth imbecile and enjoys throwing his weight around, he must be an Armenian. Please note that I am talking about myself now, or rather, the way I am perceived by some of my readers who invariably ascribe my failings to my identity as an Armenian. The implication being, had I been a Patagonian or Hottentot, I would have none of these defects. So much for Armenian self-esteem…

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I once met a patriotic Armenian whose only source of wisdom was popular Turkish sayings. Which reminds me of Zarian’s observation, “even their filth is picked up from alien gutters.”

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In an undemocratic or pseudo-democratic state or community, the people are like fish in a tank: they think they are free because they can’t see the walls. Freedom, real freedom, is not to do this, that, or the other. Freedom means participation in power.

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Balzac: “There are two kinds of fools: speaking fools, and silent fools. The silent are more tolerable.”

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George Braque: “Truth exists. One can invent only lies.”

 

[ara baliozian]

Thursday, March 08, 2007

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SELF-DECEPTION

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A jury of his peers has found Vice-President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff guilty of lying to the authorities. Nothing new in that. Vice presidents lie, presidents lie, the press lies, everybody lies. We deceive not only others but also ourselves. All power (political as well as religious) is based on a big lie. Nothing can be more naïve than to divide mankind into two and say, “Their side lies, ours does not.”

*

We all have a dominant idea that colors and orients our thinking. Mine is self-deception – or the infinite strategies we adopt in order to appear better than we are. The big lie in political leadership is that the men at the top know better what’s good for the people; and when they declare war and lose it, they blame it on others. Hitler blamed the loss of World War I on Jews, and the loss of World War II on his fellow Germans, because, he said, they had failed to live up to his vision. To this day Stalinists blame the collapse of the Soviet Union on dissidents like Solzhenitsyn. And we blame our genocide on the barbarism of the Turks, most of whom (very much like Sultan Abdulhamid II and Talaat) may have been part Armenian.

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In everything that is said, a great deal remains unsaid.

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A good answer is one that leads to at least two new questions.

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Alain: “To think is to say no.” (It follows; to say yes is to allow others to do your thinking for you.)

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Julien Green: “The oppressed console themselves by believing to be morally superior to their oppressors.”

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Henry de Montherlant: “In man, it is the butterfly that turns into a worm.”

#

 

[ara baliozian]

Friday, March 09, 2007

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VARIATIONS ON A FAMILIAR THEME

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James Thurber: “You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.”

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Jean Cocteau: “There is an ape and a parrot in all of us.”

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A headline in our paper today reads: “Japan denies its wartime atrocities.” Sounds familiar?

In the article that follows we are informed that during World War II, Korean and Chinese girls as young as 14 were kidnapped by Japanese soldiers to work as sex slaves or “comfort women.”

Rings a bell?

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My mother is fond of saying, “Even if guilt were made of the most expensive fur, no one would want to wear it.”

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Control the flow of information and you control knowledge. Control knowledge and you shape the human mind. Where there is censorship there will be dupes.

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In a totalitarian state people have as much freedom of thought as caged animals in a zoo, with one difference: the animals can see their iron bars.

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The less you know, the more easily you are hoodwinked, flimflammed, and bamboozled. The ideal dupe is a total ignoramus.

#

 

[ara baliozian]

Saturday, March 10, 2007

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BENEFACTORS

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If I understand them correctly, they are the kind of people who feel more at home in the company of calculating machines and number rather than human beings and ideas.

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AS FOR BOSSES

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Given the choice between yes-men or conformists and people who think for themselves, they will invariably choose conformists. The ability to conform is a talent, like any other, and I don’t mind admitting, I have none of it.

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TURKS AND ARMENIANS

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“Armenians and Turks, Turks and Armenians,” I can imagine some readers thinking. “Man, am I getting tired of that sh**!” to which I can only say, “Welcome to the club.”

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A NEW BOOK

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IRENE NEMIROVSKY: HER LIFE AND WORK, by Jonathan Weiss (200 pages, Stanford University Press, 2007). An excellent biography of a remarkable French writer of Jewish descent who ended her short life in a German concentration camp during World War II. We are informed here that she disliked both Jews and Armenians: a writer after my own heart, not because I love haters but because I find self-satisfied people arrogant, obnoxious, stupid, and unworthy of Planet Earth.

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PEARLS BEFORE SWINE

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Jean Giroudoux: “Plagiarism is at the root of all literatures, except the first which is unknown.”

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Henri Michaux: “Anyone who does not contribute to my perfection: zero.”

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[ara baliozian]

Sunday, March 11, 2007

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ANSWERS

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Organized religions are the best proof of the fact that an answer, any answer, even the wrong one, is better than no answer. The same applies to ideologies when they are confused with theology.

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One of our ideologies stands for independence and freedom. But how independent and free can they ever be if they live in fear of free speech?

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A GUESS

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There are more Armenians today who don’t identify themselves as Armenians than Armenians of the opposite disposition.

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PEARLS

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Francis Ponge: “It is by his death that a man proves he deserved to live.”

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Jean Cocteau: “The future belongs to no one. There are no precursors, only retards.”

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Julius Caesar: “I’d rather be first in this village than second in Rome.”

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “The most important prediction we can make is that we cannot predict everything.”

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[ara baliozian]

Monday, March 12, 2007

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ON REVOLUTIONARIES

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I have at no time questioned the good intentions of our revolutionaries. What I have been doing is reminding them that hell is paved with good intentions.

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In an intolerant environment, even an often-repeated cliché can make one an enemy of the people.

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What could be more cowardly than fear of clichés?

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No writer has ever silenced a politician. Censorship has always been a one-way street.

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ON SERIAL KILLERS

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Serial killers operate on the assumption that truth is as easily killed as defenseless civilians.

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[ara baliozian]

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

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A REQUEST

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Before you contradict me, I beg you to reflect for ten minutes. Because everything I say is a result of at least twenty and sometimes thirty years of experience, study, and reflection.

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CONFESSION

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I don’t mind admitting that I have been wrong so many times in the past that I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if someone were to prove me wrong not just on this or that specific point but on everything. I say this because just when I think I have committed every conceivable blunder I commit a new one. But the blunder that I keep committing again and again is trying to reason with fellow Armenians who know better. For I have yet to meet an Armenian who did not know better.

*

SOCRATES

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Socrates never said “I know better.” What he said was “The only thing I know is that I don’t know.” What would happen to Socrates in New York, Moscow, or Toronto today? He would be ignored as a harmless and unemployable misfit, eventually acquire the status of a homeless street person, and die of exposure. There are better ways of getting rid of a nuisance than a public trial and the administration of hemlock, both of which cost money.

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PHILOSOPHY TODAY

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Nobody takes philosophy seriously these days; and yet, everyone has a philosophy, even when it happens to be a cliché. “Live and let live, that’s my philosophy,” they say; or “You only live once.” These "philosophers" never ask whether or not they deserve to live at all.

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ENEMIES

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The hardest thing to explain to an Armenian is that divisiveness, corruption, and incompetence are a far greater threat to our survival today than Turks were a hundred years ago. And yet, what we get from our Turcocentric pundits and media is endless talk of past atrocities. After which they accuse me of being negative.

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PAUL JOHNSON ON CROCODILES

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“Everything about a croc is efficient. It copulates under water and takes exactly ten minutes, which oddly enough is the time it took Napoleon Bonaparte.”

 

[ara baliozian]

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

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MEN AND APES

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The status quo will always have its supporters. Even criminal regimes had their rostrum of friends, among them famous writers, composers, scientists, conductors, and Nobel Prize winners. And where there are great men who support a regime for their own reasons, there will also be an abundance of mediocrities and dupes who will support it because better men than themselves do so.

In my anti-Soviet days this type of ape in human form would write me angry letters saying, “Do you think you are smarter than Saroyan?”

What happened to these famous men who supported Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini? Some committed suicide, others like Ezra Pound were declared insane and spent a number of years in an asylum, a few wrote books admitting their mistakes.

It is said that when asked about Jesus, the dying Pilate replied: “I don’t remember anyone by that name.”

The human brain is a marvelous, not to say miraculous, tool a thousand times smarter than the smartest computer. Learn to use it. And if you have your own, why rely on someone else’s? To put it more bluntly, if you are a man, why behave like an ape?

#

 

[ara baliozian]

Thursday, March 15, 2007

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MAFIAS

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The problem with our so-called cultural foundations is that they are staffed by self-assessed intellectuals, poets, writers, and pundits with their own narrow agendas and criteria, whose central concern is the ruthless elimination of the competition. Translated into dollars and cents this means, when mediocrities are in charge, only lesser mediocrities will have a chance to qualify for support.

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The immediate satisfaction of our instincts makes stronger demands on us than reason, common sense, and decency. There you have the source of much human suffering.

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I will be a popular Armenian writer on the day mice become infatuated with mousetraps.

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[ara baliozian]

Friday, March 16, 2007

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FROM THE SUBLIME TO THE RIDICULOUS

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When Dorothea Ertmann’s son died, her piano teacher came to see her but “instead of expressing his sympathy with words, he sat right down at the piano, without a word, and extemporized at length.” Dorothea Ertmann is identified as a Bach interpreter and her piano teacher as Beethoven. I read this in Martin’s Geck’s J.S. BACH: HIS LIFE AND WORK (Illustrated, 738 pages, Index, Bibliography. New York: 2006) and in connection to the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue D minor. Geck goes on to explain that Beethoven “knew the Chromatic Fantasy, which since 1802 was widely available in Vienna in print as well as in manuscript, indeed, he copied parts of it himself in 1810.” Elsewhere he explains why one sometimes responds to Bach’s music with laughter and tears at the same time. Though at times scholarly and overly technical, as all books on Bach tend to be, this is no doubt one of the very best books on the subject that contains many accessible pages to the average layman.

*

Marcel Proust: “Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.” Maybe so, but so far, all grief seems to have done for us is develop our ability to sell Oriental rugs. To those who object and say, there are at least a thousand Armenian academics in America alone, I say: most of these academics are alienated Armenians and have not written a single line on Armenians; the rest are mostly genocide pundits and they go about their business the way Oriental rug dealers do.

*

In a commentary in our paper today, titled “Iraqi terrorists are targeting intellectuals,” we read: “The terrorists who are fighting for control of Iraq realize that freedom of expression and learning are their enemies.” This is true not only of terrorists in Iraq today but also fascists, authoritarian regimes, and intolerant and dogmatic people everywhere.

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[ara baliozian]

Saturday, March 17, 2007

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ON POWER

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“Don’t trust anyone over thirty.” Wrong. Don’t trust anyone with power, even if he is in his teens or twenties; or anyone without power whose ambition is to become powerful. In short: don’t trust anyone. I remember, the first thing I did when I acquired some power was to abuse it. My power was mostly in my imagination and the abuse was as severe as a harmless practical joke. But the fact remains that I abused it as naturally and as thoughtlessly as I breathe or sneeze. Which is why I don’t trust anyone with power, or “the insolence of office,” as the Prince of Denmark (who ought to know) puts it. I have yet to meet a partisan or panchoonie, a bishop or archbishop, who did not abuse his power whenever he thought he could get away with it. Power corrupts because it promotes abuse, and no one is as severely and promptly punished as he who takes it upon himself to expose the abuse.

*

Cain killed Abel not because he was a born killer but because he had the power and the opportunity. To say that empire builders like Alexander the Great, Caesar, and Napoleon were better than Cain is an illusion advanced by militarist historians -- the very same militarists who supported the likes of Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao who killed more innocent people than a thousand serial killers.

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Where men are in power, women will be abused. But not just women. It was G.B. Shaw who once observed that an upper-class lady spends enough money on her clothes and jewelry to feed a thousand hungry children a year.

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People mourn when solders die. They should mourn on the day war is declared.

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[ara baliozian]

Sunday, March 18, 2007

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THE BLACK AND THE YELLOW

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Time is the greatest magician. It turns black to white, and night to day; it exposes crooks and does away with the obnoxious effortlessly, all the while remaining invisible. Writing history is trying to understand and explain the incomprehensible tricks of this magician knowing full well that one’s efforts are doomed to failure. That is why historians from Herodotus to Toynbee have been accused of lies and charlatanism. And speaking of black and charlatanism: there is a Canadian by the name of Black, Conrad Black, who had everything any man ever desired —wealth, power, intellect, looks, and an attractive, young, and smart wife (both Lord and Lady Black are prolific writers) who now stands accused of crimes that could land him in prison for 101 years. And then there is Bush whose understanding of history never went beyond Hollywood westerns -- a good guy on a white horse liberating Dodge City from the nefarious grip of a bad guy and his gang of cutthroats. With one difference: unlike Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda, and Alan Ladd, this particular Texan never planned to confront the bad guy himself at high noon or at any other time of day or night. He was going to let others do the killing, dying, maiming and being maimed. He may think of himself as the leader of the mightiest empire in the world but he is neither Caesar nor Alexander the Great or Napoleon. Even Hitler had more first-hand experience of war than he.

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The easiest thing in the world, to solve someone else’s problems; the hardest, to solve one’s own.

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[ara baliozian]

Monday, March 19, 2007

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FROM MY DIARY

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Once in a while, when I’ve got nothing better to do, I google myself and read some of the comments. When the insults or words with more asterisks than letters outnumber the positive comments, I know I have not lost my touch and must be on the right track.

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It is said, on the day Christians discovered the Bible, every Protestant became a pope. Something similar could be said of the average Armenian who discovers a belief system or ideology: he becomes either a Torquemada or a commissar.

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War becomes a viable option provided (a) it is winnable, and ( the enemy is in the league with the devil.

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Most Americans are against the war in Iraq today because (a) the war seems unwinnable, and ( the only way to win it is to adopt the tactics of the enemy by doing to them what they would do if they had weapons of mass destructions, i.e. nuke them back to the Stone Age.

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Edited March 19, 2007 by ara baliozian

[ara baliozian]

Monday, March 19, 2007

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FROM MY DIARY

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Once in a while, when I’ve got nothing better to do, I google myself and read some of the comments. When the insults or words with more asterisks than letters outnumber the positive comments, I know I have not lost my touch and must be on the right track.

*

It is said, on the day Christians discovered the Bible, every Protestant became a pope. Something similar could be said of the average Armenian who discovers a belief system or ideology: he becomes either a Torquemada or a commissar.

*

War becomes a viable option provided (a) it is winnable, and ( the enemy is in the league with the devil.

*

Most Americans are against the war in Iraq today because (a) the war seems unwinnable, and ( the only way to win it is to adopt the tactics of the enemy by doing to them what they would do if they had weapons of mass destructions, i.e. nuke them back to the Stone Age.

#

 

[ara baliozian]

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

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WHEN YOU SEE A BAD MAN

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In an Armenian-Turkish discussion forum on the Internet, a Turkish writer has posted an article in which he quotes several foreign and ostensibly objective observers to prove that Armenians are no better than the worst scum on earth, thus implying that if [that “if” must be emphasized] if the Turks did what they are accused of having done to the Armenians, they did the world a favor by cleansing it of such vermin. What seems to escape this particular Turkish patriot’s attention is that, if what he says is true, then part of the blame must be shouldered by the Turks themselves because after 600 years of uninterrupted life in the Ottoman Empire, Armenians must be seen as products of Ottoman culture.

*

Question: What was it that made the Turks wait for 600 years to do what must be done? Compassion? Next question: Has anyone ever advanced the theory that compassion has been a central concern of the Ottoman Empire, or for that matter, of any other empire, especially at a time when its own survival was at stake?

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This Turkish writer forgets that until the turn of the last century Armenians were known as “the most loyal [and therefore the most desirable and useful] millet” within the Ottoman Empire. It is only when the Empire began to disintegrate and every national group claimed its place in the sun that Armenians became the worst scum on earth. In other words, the reason why Armenians were targeted for extermination was not their moral turpitude or defective DNA but the most human and universal desire of all: that of self-determination. But again, it should be emphasized that most Armenians, very much like most Turks, lacked political awareness. The troublemakers were as non-representative of the nation as a whole as was the Young Turks’ ephemeral regime.

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The world will be a better place on the day we all stop projecting our worst instincts on an alien group and start examining our own conscience. There is an old saying: “When you see a good man, emulate him. When you see a bad man, examine your own heart.”

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[ara baliozian]

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

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ON A COMMON FALLACY

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Politicians operate like lawyers: it is their job to defend their side at any cost even if their side or client happens to be a serial killer. To this day Talaat, Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler have their friends in the same way that Lincoln, FDR, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King have their enemies.

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Most political controversies are based on the assumption “our side speaks the truth, the other side lies.” Translated into dollars and cents, this simply means: my self-interest matters more than your self-interest. Whenever I read an opinion or commentary that assumes this fallacy to be a self-evident truth, I know I am dealing with a dupe and a moral moron.

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We all know there is a difference between self-interest and self-sacrifice. We look up to heroes and martyrs and down on charlatans and swindlers. A politician is more akin to a charlatan than to an honest man, and propaganda works because there is a swindler in all of us.

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THE VOICE OF WISDOM

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Georges Braque: “Art disturbs, science reassures.”

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Choderlos de Laclos: “Crooks have virtues as honest men have weaknesses.”

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André Gide: “The appetite for knowledge is born in doubt. Stop believing and start learning.”

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Claude Lévi-Strauss: “Wisdom consists not in providing true answer but in asking the right questions.”

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[ara baliozian]

Thursday, March 22, 2007

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AN OPEN LETTER TO HARUT SASSOUNIAN

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You tell me to stick to literature and leave politics to better-qualified heads. You seem to be unaware of the fact that politics or political science is a branch of philosophy, and philosophy is a branch of literature, and the aim of literature is not to entertain readers but to understand man. Understanding man is also the aim of psychology and the study of history. Historians try to establish not just what happened but why. They may agree on the “what” (i.e. the facts) but they may disagree, and often do, on the “why.”

You seem to think pro-Armenianism consists in anti-Turkism. What is your single-minded and obsessive anti-Turkism if not a mirror image of Talaat’s anti-Armenianism? It is true, there is a difference in that, you and your fellow partisans do not advocate indiscriminate massacre, but some may be justified in seeing that as an extension not of moral superiority but of military inferiority.

Next time you pen one of your consistently predictable weekly editorials I suggest you refrain from narrowing your vision by thinking in terms of labels, such as Turks and Armenians, but seeing both as human beings. You must know by now, we have friends among them as surely as we have enemies among us. And it was not Turks who committed the Genocide, but fascists, and fascists come in all shapes, sizes, races, colors, and creeds, including, alas, Armenians.

What is fascism if not a closed system of thought that is self-righteous, dogmatic, intolerant, narrow, and single-minded in its hatred of the enemy. And what is a fascist if not someone who does not believe in dialogue, compromise, and consensus? I repeat: what motivates a fascist is hatred. Without hatred fascism would lose its focus and collapse into impotent and incoherent rage. Hitler needed Jews, Stalin needed not only bourgeois capitalists but also communist deviationists (i.e. Trotskyites), Talaat needed Armenians, and we need Turks – or rather, the fascists among us do. I believe hatred or any kind of intolerance to be an obstacle to understanding not only of others but also of ourselves. If you say we don’t hate anyone, we want only justice, then I ask: Why should understanding, objectivity, and impartiality be an obstacle to justice? On the contrary!

As I see it, we have two options: we either move towards mutual tolerance and co-existence or we follow the dictates of our instinctive need for revenge and, in the process, lower ourselves to the level of those we hate. Armenians and Turks will never reach a consensus as long as they see reflections of themselves in the other, and reflections not of the best but of the worst in themselves.

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After writing these lines, I read the following in a review of Susan Sontag’s posthumously published collection of essays titled AT THE SAME TIME: “…political righteousness was never enough for Sontag. She defends ‘the saving indifference, the saving larger view, that is the novelist’s or the poet’s – which does not obviate the truth of political understanding, but tells us that there is something more than politics, more, even, than history.’” (NEWSWEEK, March 12, 2007.)

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[ara baliozian]

Friday, March 23, 2007

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ONCE UPON A TIME

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When I was young, naïve, and gullible, I divided mankind into two: the good guys and the bad guys.

When I was a dupe I had no doubt whatever in my mind that I was with the good guys.

When I had the IQ of a Mongoloid, even when I behaved badly I thought of myself as good.

When I had the outlook of a Neanderthal, I thought Turks could do nothing right and Armenian could do no wrong. I thought so even when I saw Armenians behaving badly.

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To those who go on thinking like Neanderthals and try to convince me I am wrong and they are right, I say, You are wasting your time. I know where you are coming from and I know where you live, because deep inside somewhere part of me still lives in the same cave. Once a Neanderthal always a Neanderthal. Our reason, our understanding, our thinking may change, but our feelings stay the same.

*

On the day Mount Ararat is returned to us, there will be headlines in our papers saying, DORMANT VOLCANO ABOUT TO ERUPT.

If a village near the border is returned to us, another headline will announce, WARNING: PROPERTIES BOOBY-TRAPPED, WELLS POISONED, BRIDGES FALLING DOWN.

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“After shaking hands with an Armenian, count your fingers.” Who started this rumor? Turks, who else?

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I suppose to ask Armenians and Turks to treat one another as human beings is as difficult as asking two bordello madams to treat each other as virgins.

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[ara baliozian]

Saturday, March 24, 2007

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MEGALOMANIA

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On several occasions in the past I have identified myself as a former fascist. It would have been more accurate had I identified myself as a misguided fool. But then, are not all fascists misguided fools in so far as they live in a world of illusions to such a degree that reality becomes an absent factor in their own image of themselves and ultimately in the policies they adopt? Mussolini thought by reviving the Roman Empire he could be another Caesar. Hitler thought the real Chosen People were not the Jews but the Germans. Stalin thought the Messianic Trinity of Marx, Engels, and Lenin had solved all the problems of mankind and he held in his hand the Golden Key of a New and Universal Kingdom. When fascists promise heaven, you can be sure of one thing: they will deliver hell. Something similar happened to us. Our own Mickey Mouse Mussolinis promised Historic Armenia, perhaps even the Empire of Dikran the Great, and they delivered the Genocide. Misguided fools, us? Of course not! Things went wrong, yes, but it wasn’t our fault. We were betrayed by the Soviets. We were betrayed by the Great Powers of the West. We were betrayed by the regime of the Young Turks. We were right. It was the rest of the world that was wrong. What is it about us that makes us consistently right and the rest of the world consistently wrong? What else but megalomania? And not just garden-variety megalomania but self-righteous, dogmatic, obstinate, collective, and terminal megalomania. And terminal because we’d rather see the nation go down the drain than admit error.

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[ara baliozian]

Sunday, March 25, 2007

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THE VOICE OF GOD

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When an Armenian speechifies or editorializes he does so not only as the voice of the people but also as the voice of God, and that’s the only time he comes close to believing in His existence.

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Politics is not theology. One should never speak of black-and-white certainties. To do so is to expose oneself as a fanatic and a fascist. If so far Turks and Armenians have been unable to reach a consensus it may be because they have consistently ignored the gray areas that they share in common.

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The aim of literature is to raise consciousness; the aim of propaganda is to lower it.

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No one wants to be identified as a racist; and people will say anything to improve their image. Once I even cornered a notorious anti-Semite to say “I love Jews.” But forever after he hated me. And whenever I corner an Armenian to say, “I don’t hate Turks,” I make another enemy for life.

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It’s the easiest thing on earth to make an Armenian enemy. Sometimes all it takes is to begin a sentence with the words “I think…” That’s because he will immediately assume you are muscling in his territory.

*

An Armenian will always prefer the company of yes-men and brownnosers. He has no use for thinkers. That’s why to be an Armenian writer means to be the wrong man at the wrong time and place and in the wrong line of work; that is also why to read the biography of an Armenian writer is to read a tragedy.

*

Our writers may no longer die of tuberculosis in their late teens or early twenties; Talaat’s and Stalin’s henchmen may no longer be around, but philistines and commissars are very much alive. How else to explain the death of Armenian literature?

*

Voltaire: “The surest thing is to be sure of nothing.”

*

Joseph Joubert: “The sound of drums dissipates thoughts; it is for this very reason that this instrument is eminently military.

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[ara baliozian]

Monday, March 26, 2007

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REPLY TO HARUT

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“Against my friends only God can defend me.

Against my enemies I can defend myself.”

*

You tell me our editors no longer publish me because I am an anti-Armenian charlatan who repeats himself. As speculation this has as much merit as your other speculations, among them your self-conferred and self-assessed status as an expert on Armeno-Turkish relations.

Instead of engaging in counter-speculations, allow me to introduce some relevant facts on the grounds that “an ounce of facts is worth a ton of speculations.”

When after working for many years without compensation I asked to be paid less than minimum wage for my work, one of our editor/publishers stopped publishing me. When asked why, he failed to reply.

Two other editors promised to comply and a month later sent me checks that bounced.

Another editor suggested I should be grateful to him for publishing me because in doing so he was giving me the opportunity to be another Saroyan, who once upon a time had also worked for him for nothing.

Still another told me the secretary one of our national benefactors, on whose goodwill he depended, had phoned to complain that he did not agree with my kind of writing.

Because I failed to praise a third-rate English translation of a second-rate Armenian book – which compounded the felony by being shockingly overpriced…(as you may remember, I was not just contributing commentaries but also translations, books reviews, and interviews) – one of our academics wrote a long angry letter to my editor, suggesting I did not deserve to live.

Shall I go on?

Still another editor spread the outrageous rumor that my greed knew no bounds because I demanded $1,000 (a thousand) for a day’s work.

*

As for being anti-Armenian: I have every reason to suspect that accusation to be another one of your fabricated speculations based on a fallacy: namely, the identification of the nation with its non-representative leadership. I have been critical of our leaders and their dupes, yes, certainly! But I have at no time written a single line against the people whom I have always considered as double victims of foreign as well as domestic corruption, incompetence, and lies.

Is not one of the functions of a free press to be critical of political leaders?

Is all this new to you? Is it conceivable that as an editor/publisher you know nothing about the situation of our press or the moral and intellectual integrity of your fellow editors/publishers? If you are so abysmally naïve and uninformed as to what’s going on around you, how can you know or hope to understand what’s going on in the minds of individuals thousands of miles away from you?

*

I began with a popular saying. Let me conclude with another:

“When in a hole, stop digging.”

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[ara baliozian]

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

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TRUTH AND JUSTICE

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To speak of truth and justice is to deal in shadowy theological terms and moral/judicial concepts on which even theologians, moral philosophers, and legislators disagree. A lawyer will tell you that his primary concern is not justice but evidence and interpretation of the law. A judge will tell you that courthouses are not courts of justice but courts of law. A politician will tell you his primary concern is not and has never been truth but self-interest. Hence the slogan of the British Empire: “We have neither friends nor enemies, only interests.”

*

I was brought up to believe the Turks did what they did to us because they are bloodthirsty Asiatic barbarians. Though I am no longer a child, deep inside somewhere I still feel and think so. But I also know that there is a barbarian in all of us. If only because, according to psychologists and biologists, part of our brain is crocodilian – i.e. it has the same shape as the brain of crocodiles. I also know that when a man thinks his existence is in peril, he will not stand on ceremony and behave like a civilized human being – which is why to kill in self-defense is not a crime.

*

In 1915 did the Turks believe their existence to be in peril? Or rather, was it reasonable of them to think so? What about us? Can we really plead not guilty on all counts? Were we right to believe in the verbal commitments or propaganda of the Young Turks, the Great Powers of the West, the Russians, and last but not least, in the reality or possibility of a recaptured Historic Armenia? If we were wrong on all these counts, can we really assert we played no part in digging our own graves and that our revolutionaries were not blundering fools but heroes and statesmen of vision? If smart, cosmopolitan, educated people like us were justified in being deceived by practically everyone we came into contact, is it conceivable that dumb and primitive savages fresh out from the depths of Asian steppes, were also justified in being deceived into thinking we were their mortal enemies and together with the rest of the infidel world, we threatened their very existence?

*

The aim of these questions is not to establish truth and justice but to ask: Where do we go from here? Do we advance towards mutual understanding or do we continue to hurl insults at one another? -- which is what we have been doing for nearly a century, in addition to wasting millions on lobbyists, academics, and propaganda.

*

By the way, I do not think we are smart, except perhaps when it comes to selling Oriental rugs. I also do not think Turks are dumb: those who planned and carried out the Genocide were born, raised, and educated in Europe, and some of them may even have been part-Armenian.

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