ara baliozian Posted July 4, 2007 Author Report Share Posted July 4, 2007 Wednesday, July 04, 2007 ************************************************ OBSERVATIONS ***************************** If you know you are a fool, you are almost smart. * We speak the worst lies when we speak of ourselves. * A story with a happy ending is an interrupted story. * If you believe you are smart no one except reality will make you change your mind, and sometimes not even that. * Our Turcocentric pundits write about the Turkishness of Turks. I prefer to write about the Turkishness of Armenians. * You tell a fool he is smart and he will believe it. * The smarter you are in one thing the dumber you will be in a thousand others. Like all rules this one too has its exceptions – two of them, as a matter of fact: Leonardo da Vinci and Jack S. Avanakian. * Three of the paintings in 1001 PAINTINGS YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE, Selected by Leading International Critics (New York, 2006) are by Sarkis Katchadourian (1886-1947) (“Three Generations”), and by Arshile Gorky (real name Vostanig Adoian: 1904-1948) (“The Leaf of the Artichoke Is an Owl” and “Betrothal I”). # Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ara baliozian Posted July 5, 2007 Author Report Share Posted July 5, 2007 Thursday, July 05, 2007 ************************************** AN INSIGHTFUL COMMENT ************************************** In what follows I will try to abridge and paraphrase the comments of a reader who, for reasons of his own, prefers to remain anonymous. “One way to explain the difference between the dignified silence of our forefathers who witnessed the massacres and experienced the deportations, and the verbal diarrhea of the present generation is to say that the first were victims of historic conditions and forces beyond their control and understanding, and the second victims of political rhetoric.” * A CASE OF PROJECTION *********************************** When some of my Armenian critics, who belong to the trashcan or verbal-abuse school of criticism, attribute to me words and ideas that are not mine, I have every reason to suspect they are projecting their own secret thoughts, which until then they did not dare to admit even to themselves. * WRITERS AND PUNDITS ********************************* Writers may be divided into those who write about many different things, and those who write about the same thing in different ways. There are also those who think just because they have conventional wisdom and the establishment on their side, they must be infallible and anyone who disagrees with them must be traitors, renegades, and enemies of the nation. It never even occurs to them that they may be victims of political rhetoric or propaganda, that is to say, verbal pollution. # Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Louise Posted July 5, 2007 Report Share Posted July 5, 2007 Thursday, July 05, 2007 ************************************** AN INSIGHTFUL COMMENT ************************************** In what follows I will try to abridge and paraphrase the comments of a reader who, for reasons of his own, prefers to remain anonymous. “One way to explain the difference between the dignified silence of our forefathers who witnessed the massacres and experienced the deportations, and the verbal diarrhea of the present generation is to say that the first were victims of historic conditions and forces beyond their control and understanding, and the second victims of political rhetoric.” * A CASE OF PROJECTION *********************************** When some of my Armenian critics, who belong to the trashcan or verbal-abuse school of criticism, attribute to me words and ideas that are not mine, I have every reason to suspect they are projecting their own secret thoughts, which until then they did not dare to admit even to themselves. * WRITERS AND PUNDITS ********************************* Writers may be divided into those who write about many different things, and those who write about the same thing in different ways. There are also those who think just because they have conventional wisdom and the establishment on their side, they must be infallible and anyone who disagrees with them must be traitors, renegades, and enemies of the nation. It never even occurs to them that they may be victims of political rhetoric or propaganda, that is to say, verbal pollution. # Concerning our forefathers, they were not all silent, my grand-mother, my mother and father talked to us everyday about their life before 1915 july 24, and the deportation and 4 years under the tents. My father had written his diary when he was 14 years old, every evening after his work he read to us a part of his diary, with comments. And all our neighbours were armenian survivors, they came at home and told us what they lived, the fire in Izmir... As to the writers, I class them in two categories: those who speak about the people outside , and those who speak only about themselves. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ara baliozian Posted July 6, 2007 Author Report Share Posted July 6, 2007 Friday, July 06, 2007 ************************************* BASTARDS ************************ “Literature needs freedom to thrive,” says an Armenian character in Elif Shafak’s THE BASTARD OF ISTANBUL, and goes on: “We didn’t have much of that to expand and enlarge Armenian literature, did we?” This fictional character and Elif Shafak seem to be unaware of the fact that we had a vibrant literature and far better writers under the Sultan, Talaat, and Stalin than we do today when we enjoy more freedom and financial prosperity than at any other time in our history. That’s because, in the words of Hagop Garabents (also Jack Karapetian), “Once upon a time we shed our blood for freedom. We are now afraid of free speech.” Please note that, unlike Gostan Zarian (“Our political parties have been of no political use to us: their greatest enemy is free speech”) Garabents was neither a dissident nor a critic. On the contrary, he was on excellent terms with our bosses, bishops, and benefactors. Instead of literature we now have anti-Turkish propaganda (the bastard of Armenian literature…or is it an abortion?). We have been traumatized, yes, certainly, no one denies that. But after making that assertion, the question we should ask ourselves is: Do we make an obsession of the trauma or do we seek a way out of the darkness that has paralyzed our creative impetus? # Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Louise Posted July 6, 2007 Report Share Posted July 6, 2007 Friday, July 06, 2007 ************************************* BASTARDS ************************ “Literature needs freedom to thrive,” says an Armenian character in Elif Shafak’s THE BASTARD OF ISTANBUL, and goes on: “We didn’t have much of that to expand and enlarge Armenian literature, did we?” This fictional character and Elif Shafak seem to be unaware of the fact that we had a vibrant literature and far better writers under the Sultan, Talaat, and Stalin than we do today when we enjoy more freedom and financial prosperity than at any other time in our history. That’s because, in the words of Hagop Garabents (also Jack Karapetian), “Once upon a time we shed our blood for freedom. We are now afraid of free speech.” Please note that, unlike Gostan Zarian (“Our political parties have been of no political use to us: their greatest enemy is free speech”) Garabents was neither a dissident nor a critic. On the contrary, he was on excellent terms with our bosses, bishops, and benefactors. Instead of literature we now have anti-Turkish propaganda (the bastard of Armenian literature…or is it an abortion?). We have been traumatized, yes, certainly, no one denies that. But after making that assertion, the question we should ask ourselves is: Do we make an obsession of the trauma or do we seek a way out of the darkness that has paralyzed our creative impetus? # We don't make an obsession, but we must never forget what our parents have suffered, and we must tell our children and grand-children. Nothing will be forgotten. But we don't think that from morning to night. All my children and grand-children study, they learn all music, or drawing and foreign languages, and learn to tell stories and tales, and so on. I am interested in wild flowers, I have made the inventory of all the wild flowers of the country and hills around my village. fo Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ara baliozian Posted July 7, 2007 Author Report Share Posted July 7, 2007 Saturday, July 07, 2007 ************************************* THE ARMENO-TURKISH COMPLEX ********************************************** In Elif Shafak’s THE BASTARD OF ISTANBUL I read the following lines delivered by an Armenian-American: “Some among the Armenians in the diaspora would never want the Turks to recognize the genocide. If they do so, they’ll pull the rug out from under our feet and take the strongest bond that unites us. Just like the Turks have been in the habit of denying their wrongdoing, the Armenians have been in the habit of savoring the cocoon of victimhood. Apparently, there are some old habits that need to be changed on both sides.” * Conventional wisdom becomes unconventional folly bordering on mass hysteria when it turns into intolerance of criticism and dissent. * Every propaganda line, regardless of its absurdity, will have a series of facts and reasons that support it. # Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ara baliozian Posted July 7, 2007 Author Report Share Posted July 7, 2007 We don't make an obsession, but we must never forget what our parents have suffered, and we must tell our children and grand-children. Nothing will be forgotten. But we don't think that from morning to night. All my children and grand-children study, they learn all music, or drawing and foreign languages, and learn to tell stories and tales, and so on. I am interested in wild flowers, I have made the inventory of all the wild flowers of the country and hills around my village. fo congratulations! you are on the right track. / ara Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Louise Posted July 7, 2007 Report Share Posted July 7, 2007 congratulations! you are on the right track. / ara I told you what I have done, but I did not tell what I missed to do. I am not proud of it. My children do not speak armenian neither my grand children, though I had them often to look after them. Now i know that I should have talked armenian to them when they were babies, but as there was no armenian people around me, I was alone, nobody to talk armenian with, I thought it was impossible for them to learn armenian. I was wrong. I know now that it was possible. To-day they want to speak armenian, but it is difficult now, they have no time, they study, or work, they learn one or two words. Only in the towns where there are armenian lessons, some children can speak armenian. So a great part of the diaspora will vanish. They know our story, they know their origin, but they cannot understand and speak the language. That is very sad, don't you think so ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ara baliozian Posted July 8, 2007 Author Report Share Posted July 8, 2007 Sunday, July 08, 2007 ****************************************** TRUTH AND PROPAGANDA ************************************** According to Marcus Aurelius, “Our life is what our thoughts make it.” This may have been true two thousand years ago when the people were not exposed to mass media. Our lives today are shaped less by ideas and more by propaganda. Literature is praised but propaganda believed. Who reads books today? But everyone reads newspapers, watches TV, and listens to the radio. Many more Germans were shaped by MEIN KAMPF than by THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN. Many more Russians were taken in by Stalin than shaped by the ideas of Solzhenitsyn, or for that matter, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. It is an undeniable fact of modern life that we are, all of us, at the mercy of spin doctors, public relations men, advertisers, sermonizers, speechifiers, and phony pundits who expect us to believe they speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. In the words of a contemporary American philosopher: “We live at a time when many quite cultivated individuals consider truth to be unworthy of any particular respect.” For more on this subject see Harry G. Frankfurt’s (the philosopher quoted above) two most recent books: “ON BULLSHIT (New York, 2005), and ON TRUTH (New York, 2006). # Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ara baliozian Posted July 8, 2007 Author Report Share Posted July 8, 2007 I told you what I have done, but I did not tell what I missed to do. I am not proud of it. My children do not speak armenian neither my grand children, though I had them often to look after them. Now i know that I should have talked armenian to them when they were babies, but as there was no armenian people around me, I was alone, nobody to talk armenian with, I thought it was impossible for them to learn armenian. I was wrong. I know now that it was possible. To-day they want to speak armenian, but it is difficult now, they have no time, they study, or work, they learn one or two words. Only in the towns where there are armenian lessons, some children can speak armenian. So a great part of the diaspora will vanish. They know our story, they know their origin, but they cannot understand and speak the language. That is very sad, don't you think so ? to be a good person or an honest human being is much more important than to be a member of any club, tribe, nation, or culture. i know many armenians who speak armenian fluently but i wouldn't trust them as far as i can throw them./ ara Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Louise Posted July 8, 2007 Report Share Posted July 8, 2007 to be a good person or an honest human being is much more important than to be a member of any club, tribe, nation, or culture. i know many armenians who speak armenian fluently but i wouldn't trust them as far as i can throw them./ ara ------------------------------ you refer to Kipling's poem...Look at the world we are living in. Kazantsaki's book. Our forefathers were too good; they have been eliminated. Louise Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ara baliozian Posted July 9, 2007 Author Report Share Posted July 9, 2007 Monday, July 09, 2007 *************************************** OBSERVATIONS ************************************* If there is one lesson that history keeps drumming into us is that we will be better off if we consider all politicians, regardless of race, color, and creed, guilty until proven innocent beyond a shadow of a doubt. * If Turcophile is a pejorative terms, why should Armenophile be any different? To an objective and impartial outsider, who knows little and cares even less about Turks and Armenians, both labels may suggest prejudice and as such of questionable validity. * Where there is an oversized ego there will be an undersized brain. I have said this before and I will say it again because an undersized brain also means an even more undersized memory; and, in the words of Socrates, favored by my Italian teacher of algebra, “to know is to remember.” * Like most people, I operate on the assumption that I am right. But I also know that to be right in one’s own eyes is easy. What’s hard to the point of being impossible is to convince oneself and others that, since truth is beyond our reach, we all of us engage in some form of charlatanism when we speak. As the old Chinese adage has it: “He who speaks does not know.” And according to a contemporary American philosopher: “Is love of truth itself merely another example of bullshit?” (Harry G. Frankfurt, ON TRUTH, page 14). # Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ara baliozian Posted July 9, 2007 Author Report Share Posted July 9, 2007 ------------------------------ you refer to Kipling's poem...Look at the world we are living in. Kazantsaki's book. Our forefathers were too good; they have been eliminated. Louise Let's not blame our defeats and misfortunes on goodness. we were defeated because we were divided; and we were eliminated because we -- or rather our revolutionaries -- trusted the West. /ara Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Louise Posted July 9, 2007 Report Share Posted July 9, 2007 Let's not blame our defeats and misfortunes on goodness. we were defeated because we were divided; and we were eliminated because we -- or rather our revolutionaries -- trusted the West. /ara you may be right. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Louise Posted July 9, 2007 Report Share Posted July 9, 2007 Monday, July 09, 2007 *************************************** OBSERVATIONS ************************************* Tallarmeniantales says we are liars, because they don't want our accounts to be the truth, they don't want the truth, but what my parents told me about what they suffered, I know it is the truth. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ara baliozian Posted July 10, 2007 Author Report Share Posted July 10, 2007 Tuesday, July 10, 2007 ****************************************** MEMO TO OUR TURCOCENTRIC PUNDITS AND THEIR READERS ******************************************************* If talk of Turks, massacres, and atrocities will make you a better person, more understanding and compassionate, by all means, go ahead, knock yourself out, make a career of it. But if it will make you more vengeful and prone to hate not only your enemy but also your fellow countrymen simply because they do not share your hatred (I have seen this happen), then I suggest it may be in your interest as well as that of your “cause” to leave the field to others better equipped to deal with it. # Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ara baliozian Posted July 11, 2007 Author Report Share Posted July 11, 2007 Wednesday, July 11, 2007 ***************************************** WHAT IS ARMENIANISM? *************************************** Observe an Armenian who has lived in the United States for sixty years and you may notice that he is more American than Armenian. Now consider what happened to us after six hundred years of life in the Ottoman Empire, and you may begin to understand why Turks prefer to call us as “Christian Turks.” * One way to classify an Armenian-American is to say that after being Ottomanized he has been Americanized. That doesn’t mean Americanization expunged Ottomanization. Identity is not a single-layer cake. * Armenianism: what is it exactly? I don’t know. But I do know that everything our propagandists tell us is wishful thinking and lies. We are not what we pretend to be. Nobody is! # Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Louise Posted July 11, 2007 Report Share Posted July 11, 2007 Wednesday, July 11, 2007 ***************************************** WHAT IS ARMENIANISM? *************************************** My parents were armenian. Being born in France, I have a French culture. I can express myself better in French than in armenian. Still, i feel armenian. In my heart, I do not feel French. They have not the same character as we have. Not the same history, our history is very important, it is exceptional, for instance the Swiss people did not experienced what we have experienced. Only the Jewish have, we have many common points with them. Not quite. I spend all my days translating articles in French. Or poetry. For armenian readers, who do not know or do not read armenian. I work only for Armenians, that's armenianism for me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ara baliozian Posted July 12, 2007 Author Report Share Posted July 12, 2007 we are all products of history, yes, certainly. but what is history? whose history? whose version of history? / ara Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Louise Posted July 13, 2007 Report Share Posted July 13, 2007 we are all products of history, yes, certainly. but what is history? whose history? whose version of history? / ara ----------------------------------------- I believe only armenian history, or my parents', or Raymond Kevorkian 's, Vahakn Dadrian's, they have studied directly the sources. The other countries historians are not objective. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ara baliozian Posted July 13, 2007 Author Report Share Posted July 13, 2007 Friday, July 13, 2007 ********************************************* NAPOLEON AND GANDHI ************************************** They fascinate me because they pulled the rug from under potentates, that is to say, bloodsucking mediocrities parading as leaders of men and representatives of God on earth. The means they employed were different but the end result was the same. * Only moronized people idolize leaders. Like all rules, this one too has its exceptions – Lincoln and FDR come to mind. But they too sat on a throne of blood. As for Napoleon and Gandhi: I see them less as leaders and more as destroyers of emperors, kings, princes, maharajas and similar riffraff. * I am not in the business of solving problems but in exposing those who stand to lose the most if our problems are ever solved. * Paul Tillich: “Life could not continue without throwing the past into the past, liberating the present from the burden.” # Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ara baliozian Posted July 13, 2007 Author Report Share Posted July 13, 2007 ----------------------------------------- I believe only armenian history, or my parents', or Raymond Kevorkian 's, Vahakn Dadrian's, they have studied directly the sources. The other countries historians are not objective. spoken as a true nationalist -- and what is nationalism if not the source of many wars and massacres, including our own genocide?/ara Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Louise Posted July 13, 2007 Report Share Posted July 13, 2007 spoken as a true nationalist -- and what is nationalism if not the source of many wars and massacres, including our own genocide?/ara ---------------------------------------- Nationalism is not activism ; I do no harm to anybody. The source of all wars and even our genocide has been the cupidity of our ennemies. They wanted to eliminate us and take our properties. Louise Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ED Posted July 13, 2007 Report Share Posted July 13, 2007 what is so bad about being Armenian nationalist at the same time be a good human being, aren't you one Ara? your sole presents here in this forum is a fine example! or you are here to give insomnia to some?!!. change the monologue........hardly anybody reads you anymore when French are nationalist, Americans, Germans, turks.....then there is a threat to world peace. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ara baliozian Posted July 14, 2007 Author Report Share Posted July 14, 2007 Saturday, July 14, 2007 ****************************************** DEFINITIONS ***************************** Politics: the art of manipulating the masses by means of lies. * Literature: sharing perceptions. * Chauvinist: a fanatic with 20/20 vision for his enemy’s failings and total blindness for his own. * Turcocentrism: a school of thought that says our most important concerns, hence our welfare, inner balance, and identity, revolve around Turks. * Which reminds me of a friend who, after urging me to change my last name, delivered the following comment: “As long as you bear a Turkish surname, you admit to having been branded by them.” And I thought: If only it were that easy to erase six centuries of subservience and all traces of Ottomanism by acquiring a new name! # Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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