as i see it - Pt. IV

[ara baliozian]

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

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LABELS

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When it comes to reading, I prefer to read a human being rather than a label. Even when I read an expert, I prefer one in whom the human being speaks louder than the expertise, the role, the profession, or the angle. By human being I mean someone with more doubts and uncertainties and less dogmas and infallible assertions. Even when wrong, a personal view has a better chance of being right than the best propaganda line that is dogmatic, self-righteous, infallible, and intolerant. I don’t ask anyone to agree with me. All I ask is that he deviate a fraction of an inch from the particular propaganda line that stands between him and reality.

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Victims need victims too. Victims also victimize. It is this that makes them as bad as their victimizers.

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Question and answer sessions are based on the assumption that the questioner knows nothing and he who answers them knows everything even when it’s the other way around.

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Sometimes I am accused of hating myself, to which I can only say, god save me from a narcissist (surely, one of the most loathsome labels) who thinks just because he is infatuated with himself, others should follow his example.

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I admire a writer who can say in a single sentence what I have been struggling to express in ten or a hundred pages. Example: “No people can be genuinely free so long as they look to others for their deliverance.” From Glenn Loury’s ONE BY ONE FROM THE INSIDE OUT.

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[ara baliozian]

Thursday, October 25, 2007

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THE CROCODILIAN BRAIN

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Writers like Zohrab and Zabel Yessayan make it abundantly clear in their fiction that enlightened Turks respected enlightened Armenians. Our conflict today is not between enlightened men but between our respective lowest common denominator. But then, so are all conflicts. Enlightened men engage in dialogue and reach a consensus simply because it is in their mutual interest to do so. It is different with barbarians.

Who is a barbarian? In the eyes of millions, among them learned scholars, Alexander the Great, Suleiman the Magnificent, and Genghis Khan were great men. It is said of Genghis Khan that, when he asked what was the greatest pleasure in life and one said falconry and another something else, he dismissed them with contempt and said, “The greatest pleasure, my friends, is killing the enemy and f***ing his wife.”

Who is the enemy? Anyone whose aim in life is to kill you. Even the church tells us to kill in self-defense is no sin, and the justice system of all civilized and progressive nations agrees. Cherchez not la femme but the crocodilian brain in all of us.

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When power goes unchecked, it is abused. Who checks the power of our mini-sultans and neo-commissars?

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An ideology or religion that divides a nation is not a blessing but a curse, it serves not god but the devil, it promotes not progress but degeneration.

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When reality is against us, objectivity becomes a hostile concept.

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Jean Cocteau: “Stupidity is always astounding, no matter how often one encounters it.”

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[ara baliozian]

Friday, October 26, 2007

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ON MORAL SUPERIORITY

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Whenever I make an honest effort to understand and explain my fellow Armenians, I invariably run across a self-righteous charlatan who reacts with such hatred and venom that I am reminded of a born-again Armenian in his eighties who once said to me: “The Turks were right to massacre Armenians. Armenians are evil. The Genocide was God’s punishment.”

Never mind about being tolerant of Jews and Turks, most of whom have done no harm to us and may even be on our side. We must first learn to be tolerant of our fellow Armenians.

*

But perhaps, instead of speaking of Jews, Turks, and Armenians, we should teach ourselves to speak of our fellow men.

As children we are all brought up to believe we are normal and we can rely on our understanding of what’s right and wrong. Some of us never outgrow that infantile stage. What does it mean to be normal? Who decides? Our environment of course, or rather, the majority within our environment. What if the majority is abnormal? In Nazi Germany, in Soviet Russia, in Mussolini’s Italy, the majority was dead wrong but only assumed to be right. It went further and it persecuted the minority by supporting a criminal regime. Hence the post-World War II slogan: “We are all assassins!”

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Well, not quite. Where there are assassins, there will be victims. Is it not safe to assume that the victims are morally superior to their victimizers?

Who is a victim? At all times and everywhere societies may be divided into masters and slaves, top dogs and underdogs, exploiters and workers, killers and victims. One way to define a victim is to say that given the opportunity he would prefer to be a master rather than a slave, a top dog rather than an underdog, and a killer rather than his victim. Now then, who is right and who wrong? Who is morally superior, the killer or the victim who would gladly change places with him? (Remember, even the Church sanctions killing in self-defense.) In such a context, can one really speak of moral superiority?

*

God and his angels may be right or morally superior but for reasons of their own they don’t get involved in human affairs or take sides. Why not? Theologians have come up with many answers that may make sense to them and to their brainwashed disciples and followers but to no one else.

Where does mankind stand today? When it comes to morality and justice, have we made any progress? Do you think God is on your side? You are of course free to think so but don’t expect others to agree with you.

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[ara baliozian]

Saturday, October 27, 2007

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ON FORGIVENESS AND UNDERSTANDING

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My Turkish friend and I agree on many things except the word genocide. He denies its reality with the same visceral certainty that I assert it. Last time the subject came up, I suggested the source of our disagreement may well be the fact that as children we were brainwashed by two different sets of charlatans. The main thing is, we don’t allow our disagreement to end our friendship. This is not what happens with fellow Armenians. Even when the disagreement is minor to the point of being insignificant, the friendship comes to a violent end with a torrent of verbal abuse.

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When I was a little boy I would try to see the positive in the negative and I would invariably find it. Like Pollyanna, after every misfortune, I would play the glad game. At one point I even saw something good in the Genocide: if it weren’t for the Genocide, I thought, we would still be Turkish citizens and share our existence with bloodthirsty Asiatic barbarians, instead of living in the enlightened West. One good thing about the Genocide was that it had liberated us from the shackles of Ottomanism!

*

What does the average citizen know what goes on in the world or, for that matter, in the next village? He has no choice but to rely on politicians, editors, and ghazetajis – at best dupes (like our own Zohrab) and at worst, riffraff.

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In 1981 a Turk by the name of Ali Agca (who, like most Turks, may have been part-Armenian) tried to assassinate Pope John Paul II. Three years later the Pope visited him in his cells and forgave him. He forgave him, yes, but he did not set him free. He set himself free. To forgive is a selfish act. It sets one free from the shackles of hatred. It does not say let bygones be bygones, let’s forget the past and bury the hatchet. It does not cancel the debt the criminal owes to society.

*

Unlike the Pope, who forgave his would-be assassin, we are no longer in a position to forgive Talaat and the perpetrators of the Genocide. But perhaps what we can do is understand the denialists who are denialists not by choice but by indoctrination.

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[ara baliozian]

Sunday, October 28, 2007

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WHO IS A FASCIST?

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People may think, feel, and speak like fascists but they object strenuously to being identified as such. How to recognize a dyed-in-the wool, real McCoy fascist? Easy! Follow the instructions below.

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THE THREE PILLARS OF FASCISM

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They are nationalism, anti-intellectualism, and anti-Semitism.

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NATIONALISM

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Not only are we nationalists, we also brag about it. We wear our nationalism like a badge. We look down on anyone who dares to say anything against it. We may even cover him with verbal abuse. I speak from experience.

How do we define nationalism? Answer: Love of country, contempt for fellow countrymen.

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ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM

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Read a history of our literature and draw your own conclusions. But if you are too busy to read books of no interest to you, take my word for it: our treatment of intellectuals has been a disaster area and we could easily qualify as one of the most anti-intellectual people on earth. We lost two generations of intellectuals under Talaat and Stalin, and both “purges” (to use a euphemism) with the cooperation of our philistines. But the worst was yet to come. Where Talaat and Stalin failed, our bosses, bishops, and benefactors (“Woe unto you that are rich, for ye have received your consolation!”) succeeded. Our intellectual class today has been so thoroughly marginalized that it might as well be extinct. The very few who exist, if at all, have gone underground, sometimes literally.

Oh! don’t get me wrong. We love and venerate poets who sing the eternal snows of Mount Ararat and the “sunripe flavor” of our language (whatever the hell that means) but we prefer to speak English in America, French in France, Greek in Greece, Turkish in Turkey, and with a forked tongue with one another.

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ANTI-SEMITISM

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Anecdotal evidence: after visiting New York City, an old schoolteacher of mine came to see me. “We saw a lot of Jews there,” said he. “They are people like us, don’t you know. They dress like ordinary folks, they walk like ordinary folks, and they look like the rest of us. Zarmatsa mnatsi!”

What about Jews who are pro-Turkish and anti-Armenian? Speaking for myself, I do not see them in terms of pro and anti, and if I were cornered to do so, I would say they are pro-themselves, and they have every right to be, and more power to them. Why are we surprised (like my senile schoolteacher) to learn that Jews are like everyone else, not to say, like us? So what if after millennia of persecution they have learned the hard way to place their own survival above the survival of others (who may or may not be anti-Semites)? When was the last time we placed the survival and welfare of other nations above ours?

Speaking of Armenians and survival, allow me to conclude by quoting Zarian, one of the greatest connoisseurs of the Armenian psyche: “Armenians survive by cannibalizing one another.”

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P.S. ON NATIONALISM

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After writing these lines, I read a long article-interview with Serge Tankian, leader of System of a Down, who is identified as an Armenian from Beirut and “a thoughtful, erudite man…a fervent social crusader with a special interest in the Armenian genocide.” We are further told he espouses the thesis that “nationalism” is one of the three evils that haunt mankind, the other two being “greed” and “indifference.”

#

 

[ara baliozian]

Monday, October 29, 2007

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THE SOURCE

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At the source of all divisions there is a dogma, that is to say, a charlatan who asserts infallibility by speaking in the name of god or ideology. The hidden message of all dogmas is: “No need to think for yourself. We will do the thinking for you. All you have to do is give us your consent, trust, and support” (which, in our context, means taxation without representation). After centuries of subservience to sultans and commissars, nothing comes more easily to us than to say, “Yes, sir!” to our bosses, bishops, and benefactors (“Woe unto you that are rich, for ye have received your consolation”).

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PORTRAIT OF A LEADER

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After ASSessing himself as a good Armenian, he expects everyone to think as he does. But when it comes to thinking, to accede to preconditions is to conform, to parrot, to echo. When thinking surrenders its freedom, it ceases to be thinking and Homo sapiens ceases to be sapiens, he becomes a robot, a slave, a sheep whose destiny is the slaughterhouse.

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MAILER SPEAKS

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Norman Mailer in a recent interview published in a French magazine: “The tentative title of my next book is ALL PRIESTS ARE LIARS.”

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CLASSY VERBAL ABUSE

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When a 19th-century English scholar by the name of Seely published a book about Jesus, a contemporary reviewer described it as “the most pestilential book ever vomited from the jaws of hell.” The book became a best-seller.

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PRIORITIES

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Our future is more important than our past. That doesn’t mean let bygones be bygones and amnesia. It only means rearranging our priorities.

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POLYBIUS SPEAKS

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Somewhere Polybius explains that good constitutions and laws make good citizens. In a just society, he writes, “vice will not readily spring nor will men be easily overcome by their enemies.” Except of course when they have been shaped by laws enacted by their enemies – in our case, Ottoman and Soviet constitutions and laws.

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ON AMERICAN POLITICS

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In this morning’s paper, the Dalai Lama on American politics: “No matter what the intentions, methods become unrealistic. So instead of solving the problem, they increase the problem.”

Whenever I hear an Armenian say that this or that boss, bishop, or benefactor (Woe!) is a good man with good intentions and as such beyond criticism, I am reminded of the American cliché: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” And whenever I am told I am wasting my time, I say, “I am gathering the material for a book.”

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[ara baliozian]

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

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VERSIONS OF THE PAST

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In his PAST IMPERFECT (New York, 2004) Peter Charles Hoffer explains that the official version of American history is essentially that of its dominant WASP minority, which means, Indians, women, immigrants, Catholics, Jews, and Blacks are marginalized to the point of irrelevance. The result, he goes on, is more fiction than fact, and more fraud than honest narrative. To further illustrate and expose the dishonesty of pro-WASP and pro-Establishment historians, Hoffer discusses at considerable length the works of, among others, Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin, both of whom were also accused of plagiarism.

What Hoffer says of American historians could be said of all nationalist historians, or for that matter, anyone who approaches his task with a belief system or ideology. To see the amount of fiction and fraud that has gone into a history of, say, Christianity by a Christian, read Edward Gibbon’s DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE. For more details on this subject, see also GOD’S FUNERAL by A.N. Wilson (New York, 1999).

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CIVILIZATION AND BARBARISM

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To be civilized also means to disagree in a civilized manner. One does not have to be a prophet to predict that those who disagree like barbarians will have more enemies than friends, and since it is impossible to agree on everything, the chances are they will make enemies even of their friends.

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ENDS AND MEANS

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In the final analysis, everything we say leads either to tolerance or intolerance, to love or hatred, to peace or war. If those who are partisans of intolerance, hatred, and war knew they would have to confront the enemy in a field of honor, I suspect they would think twice before spewing their venom.

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ARMENIANS IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

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“Since very few Muslims had traveled in Europe or commanded its languages, Ottoman and Iranian rulers often relied for their dealings with European states on agents who were drawn from their Christian minorities, Greek or Armenian.” From AFTER TAMERLANE: THE GLOBAL HISTORY OF EMPIRE by John Darwin (London, 2007), page 204.

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[Louise]

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

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ARMENIANS IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

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“Since very few Muslims had traveled in Europe or commanded its languages, Ottoman and Iranian rulers often relied for their dealings with European states on agents who were drawn from their Christian minorities, Greek or Armenian.” From AFTER TAMERLANE: THE GLOBAL HISTORY OF EMPIRE by John Darwin (London, 2007), page 204.

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I will quote Toni Morrison > She recalled when she was about 2 years old that her family's home was set on fire while she and her family were in it. "People set our house on fire to evict us..." Morrison said.

Her father felt he was better than the white men. "His experience taught him that he was always in the company of inferior people when he was surrounded by Whites. You know, he didn't let White people in the house. They came when he was not there--you know, insurance men, and so on."

 

 

[ara baliozian]

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

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COUNTING TO TEN

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1.

“And the jock shall dwell with the nerd and the cheerleader lie down with the wimp and there shall be peace upon the campus.” From BREWER’S DICTIONARY OF MODERN PHRASE & FABLE, compiled by Adrian Room (London, 2000), page 473.

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2.

If we have more writers than readers, and more chiefs than Indians, it may be because we have neither writers nor chiefs.

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3.

There is no sound as deafening as the whisper of your conscience.

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4.

The hardest thing in life is to admit one’s mediocrity and cowardice.

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5.

Never trust a man whose spirit of contradiction exceeds his common sense.

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6.

Naregatsi may indeed be right. You don’t need psychoanalysis to achieve sanity. All you need is the humility, objectivity, and courage to admit your failings.

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7.

If you think you have all the answers it may be because you haven’t yet begun asking the right questions.

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8.

He who sees only the best in himself will see the worst in others.

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9.

When a man decides to do the devil’s work, he will speak in the name of god.

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10.

Today’s quotation in our paper is by Bertrand Russell: “Few people can be happy unless they hate some person, nation or creed.”

If the kingdom of god is within us, so is the person, nation, or creed that we hate.

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[ara baliozian]

----------------------------------------

I will quote Toni Morrison > She recalled when she was about 2 years old that her family's home was set on fire while she and her family were in it. "People set our house on fire to evict us..." Morrison said.

Her father felt he was better than the white men. "His experience taught him that he was always in the company of inferior people when he was surrounded by Whites. You know, he didn't let White people in the house. They came when he was not there--you know, insurance men, and so on."

 

what did Morrison Sr. do was praiseworthy and courageous.

armenian translators in the ottoman empire only served the interests of the very power structure that was to massacre them.

[Louise]

[quote name='ara baliozian' about hate :

 

Elie Wiesel said that there is something worse than hate it's indifference.

[hagopn]

[quote name='ara baliozian' about hate :

 

Elie Wiesel said that there is something worse than hate it's indifference.

 

Then Elie Wiesel is worse than hate.

[Louise]

Then Elie Wiesel is worse than hate.

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Thank you Hagopn - I suppose I should read a little more about him and think about it.

The Nobel of Peace seemed great for me.

[ara baliozian]

Thursday, November 01, 2007

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DEFINITIONS

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In BREWER’S DICTIONARY (mentioned above), ACTION FRANCAISE is described as an ultra-nationalist, proto-fascist, anti-democratic, and anti-Semitic group that during World War II collaborated with the Nazis – how’s that for consistently? It ceased to exist after 1944, when its leader, Charles Maurras, was given a life sentence.

There are fairly detailed entries on GENOCIDE and YOUNG TURKS, in which Armenians are not mentioned. The historic assessment of Young Turks is on the whole on the positive side and it ends with the words: “Young people eager for radical change to the established order.”

The phrase AGREE TO DISAGREE is defined as “To cease discussion because neither side will compromise.” If an Armenian Moses ever makes an appearance among us, I do hope he will make this definition the first commandment of his Decalogue. To cease discussion! Why should that be so un-Armenian? Is it because as perennial losers we find the prospect of a meaningless verbal victory irresistible?

While reading the entry on Sartre’s HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE, it occurred to me that in our cases “other people” could be replaced with Turks, and in the absence of Turks, fellow Armenians.

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[ara baliozian]

[quote name='ara baliozian' about hate :

 

Elie Wiesel said that there is something worse than hate it's indifference.

 

when we hate, we are emotionally involved with a fellow man.

In indifference, there is no involvement. the other's humanity becomes an absent factor.

[Louise]

Thursday, November 01, 2007

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DEFINITIONS

 

While reading the entry on Sartre’s HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE, it occurred to me that in our cases “other people” could be replaced with Turks, and in the absence of Turks, fellow Armenians.

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Hell may be your own family too. In that case, you can't say nothing. As my grandmother used to

say: "Keep always high the honor of your family." Those that we love the most are those who make us suffer the most. We don't mind so much the critics or acts of the other indifferent people.

[hagopn]

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Thank you Hagopn - I suppose I should read a little more about him and think about it.

The Nobel of Peace seemed great for me.

 

Nobel Peace is wortheless. Even Ariel Sharon got it. heydar Aliyev was seirously nominated. "Peace" according to who?

[Louise]

Nobel Peace is wortheless. Even Ariel Sharon got it. heydar Aliyev was seirously nominated. "Peace" according to who?

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Heydar Aliev ! ah ! ah ! ah !

[ara baliozian]

Friday, November 02, 2007

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SHERLOCK HOLMES & THE SULTAN

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In a review of a new biography of Conan Doyle, I read that “the Sultan of Turkey, a man with a thousand concubines, used to have Sherlock Holmes stories read aloud to him in translation…What did Conan Doyle have that a thousand women above the Bosphorus could not supply?”

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CHARLES AZNAVOUR ON HIMSELF

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In a recent interview published in LE POINT (Oct. 11, 2007) I read: “France is my country, not Armenia. My heart is French, my soul Armenian. It’s like coffee and cream: once mixed they cannot be separated…I don’t know if I believe in God but I would like to believe in the immortality of the soul…I don’t watch television. Television is for the young and the old. I am neither young nor old…I am not a star. Everyone recognizes Bruce Willis, not me.”

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A FAMILIAR SCENARIO

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It happens every day. I read about it in the morning paper. An addict needs a fix, doesn’t have the money, walks into a bank, says he has a gun. The teller follows the routine set by the management and hands him a wad of cash. The bandit rushes out to a waiting stolen car, if he has a partner, or disappears in the crowd, and by the time the cops arrive, there is no trace of him in the neighborhood. Problem solved. Another fix taken care of until tomorrow.

I see this kind of scenario played out every day on our discussion forums. A member doesn’t like what another says. No need to stand on ceremony or engage in dialogue or even make sense. Just don the mask of a superpatriot or that of a Bible-quoting sanctimonious prick and let him have it…all in the name of God and Country of course. Problem solved or compounded? Who cares? What matters is instant satisfaction.

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A DIGRESSION

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Questions: A garbage-mouth superpatriot and a born-again reborn in the gutter? You see an inconsistency here? Who cares! We are Armenians. Rules of inconsistency or logic do not apply to us. We make our own rules. We know better.

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HISTORIC PARALLELS

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Speaking of instant satisfaction: consider the actions of our heroic revolutionaries at the turn of the last century. They didn’t like the way the Empire was run. What to do? Ask wealthy Armenian merchants to finance your insurgency. If they refuse to cooperate, kill a few as a warning to the rest. Even better, take over a bank, threaten the Sultan with death, and damn the consequences. As for the judgment of history: why worry about that if (in the words of Churchill) you are going to write it?

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[ara baliozian]

about family honor:

members of one's family are first and foremost human beings.

if they break the law, they should be exposed and tried to the full extent of the law.

if a father molests her daughter, he should fry...

we are all equal under the law.

we live in the rule of law, not of men.

in muslim countries, fathers rape their daughters, brothers ditto; and when she gets pregnant, they kill her...to save family honor...they call it honor killing!

that's not what we want, is it?

[ara baliozian]

Saturday, November 03, 2007

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SCANDAL

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When in the 19th century the English in India banned suttee (the burning of widows), the Hindus objected saying it was their custom. “Very well,” the English responded. “We also have a custom. When men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.” And that was the end of suttee in India. Moral of the story: Never justify criminal conduct simply because it has been around for such a long time that it has become a custom.

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What manner of men burn defenseless, innocent women in the name of tradition and get away with it? To put it differently: What kind of pervert legitimizes criminal conduct and what kind of cowardly dupes accept him as a role model instead of hanging him from the nearest tree?

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In the name of tradition, millions of women today are genitally mutilated not only in Africa but also in the United Kingdom. Closer to home: in order to support their families hundreds of thousands of men emigrate and thousands of women engage in prostitution because our bloodsuckers refuse to give up their corrupt practices legitimized during the Soviet era. Whenever this subject comes up, we like to say it will take at least two generations… that simply means, we have done nothing, we are doing nothing, and we plan to do nothing, in the name of tradition. The message to the bloodsuckers is a simple one: Carry on as before. You have our blessing. We respect your judgment and we trust your ways even if the result is poverty, prostitution, and exodus or “white massacre,” i.e. assimilation.

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I think of our fables that end with the words: “Three golden apples fell from heaven…” and I cannot help reflecting that this may indeed explain the large number of permanently damaged skulls among us.

#

 

[ara baliozian]

Sunday, November 04, 2007

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HAYADIATS

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It happened when I was nine or ten. After a very brief exchange with a Greek official, an older friend of mine said: “That man is hayadiats.” That was a new word for me and I couldn’t even guess what it meant. Later I realized it meant “Armenian-hater.” Jews are better off – they only have anti-s; we have haters, and not all of them goyim. Did the Greek official know enough about Armenians to hate us? I doubt it. Hatred, like love, has nothing to do with knowledge or understanding. It comes from the gut and is therefore blind. Some people have an instinctive drive to hate anyone who is different perhaps because they consider themselves the equivalent of the gold standard. Because I hold views different from theirs, fellow Armenians have called me all kinds of names. In the Ottoman Empire Armenians who betrayed Baronian to the police, and in the Soviet era Armenians who betrayed our ablest men to Stalin’s executioners (not all of them Russians or Georgians) probably thought of themselves as law-and-order gold-standard types too. And if you think the era of sultans and commissars belongs to our irrevocable dark past, it may be because, like a Chagall character, you float in a realm that is above the clouds.

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GOSTAN ZARIAN

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When I first read Zarian, I sensed immediately that I was in the presence of an Armenian with his feet planted firmly on planet earth. Don’t get me wrong. The average Armenian is not a daydreamer. In the marketplace he can be a tough, shrewd, ruthless operator (hence the popular Italian saying: “It takes seven Jews to fool an Armenian”). But when it comes to writing, he turns into a timid little rodent afraid of his own shadow.

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MORE ON ANTI-SEMITISM

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Anti-Semites have the questionable habit of putting Jews under a microscope and seeing things there that are not visible to the naked eye. It doesn’t even occur to them that if they were to give the same treatment to the Vatican or to any other race, creed, nation, or tribe (including Armenians) they will be surprised at the amount of dirt they can dig up. We all swim in the same “enfer de merde” and none of us can afford to assume a holier-than-thou stance.

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A FINAL COMMENT ON BETRAYAL

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About the Soviet-Armenians who betrayed an entire generation of our best writers to Stalin’s executioners: far from being anonymous, faceless, brainwashed dupes, they were the elite of our intellectual and political leadership. For more on this subject, see PAK DERNERI GAGHTNIKE (The Secret of Closed Doors): CHARENTS, BAKOUNTS & OTHERS, by D.V. Gasparian (Yerevan: Apollon, 1994, 727 pages).

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[ara baliozian]

Monday, November 05, 2007

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THE COBRA & THE MONGOOSE

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The best things in life are free, they say. They also say, you pay most for things you get for nothing. Flattery, for instance, may be free but it can also come with a heavy price, especially if you believe it.

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You tell a fool he is smart and he will think he is infallible; he may even adopt a criminal career thinking he will never get caught. Hence, the more than a thousand Armenian inmates in Los Angeles prisons. I am reminded of the cobra that got so used to biting rats that it ended up biting a mongoose.

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Differences of opinions among us are so radical that we might as well be aliens to one another. Instead of counteracting this dangerous trend, our speechifiers and sermonizers encourage it. Only when it comes to raising funds do they emphasize the importance of brotherhood.

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A writer does not choose his readers, in the same way that a law-abiding citizen does not choose his mugger.

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“Who remembers Armenians today?” Well, what about Biafrans? Who remembers them? I suspect not even Armenians.

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[ara baliozian]

Tuesday, November 06, 2007

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TOOTHLESS DOGS AND PROPHETIC GOATS

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Whenever I am insulted anonymously or from a safe distance, I think of the old Armenian saying: “A toothless dog always barks from a distance.”

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There is more common sense in our people than in the wisdom of our bishops. Hence the saying, “If there were wisdom in beards, goats would be prophets,” and “Better a wise delinquent than a foolish saint.”

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Willed ignorance is the kind of ignorance that is freely chosen because it is thought to be to one’s advantage. People who know or ought to know better but pretend otherwise are like the jackass that “travels to the Holy City forty times but it still comes back a jackass.”

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You may think of reading and writing as harmless activities. Medieval Jewish scribes who copied the Holy Scriptures knew better. “A single misplaced word or even letter, they said, “may mean the destruction of the world.” The bloodthirsty disposition of men is such, however, that even when copyists do a perfect job the result may be war and massacre. Millions of people have died because someone at the top of the food chain did not understand what he was reading, or he understood but pretended not to. What could be more clearly and unequivocally stated than “Thou shalt not kill”? And yet, at one time or another theologians have justified and legitimized torture, war, and massacre in the name of the Almighty.

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At the source of all our divisions and misfortunes search for the “fool who threw a stone into a well and forty wise men could not haul it out.”

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Hagop Baronian: “Do you want to dine and wine to your heart’s content every day? Be a bishop.”

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Rick Bayan on bosses: “The alpha male in a tribe of baboons.”

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Neshan Beshigtashlian: “Priests wear black cassocks because they are in perpetual mourning, and what they mourn is the death of the human being within.”

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[ara baliozian]

Wednesday, November 07, 2007

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GULBENKIAN, MIKOYAN,

BARONIAN & PARAJANOV

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My BREWER’S DICTIONARY OF MODERN PHRASE & FABLE quotes “Mr. 5%” (Calouste Gulbenkian) as having said it was “better to have a small slice of a big cake than a big slice of a small cake.”

The M in “MiG” we are further told stands for Mikoyan, the G for Gurevich, and the “i” means “and” in Russian. I am sure our aghbers from the Homeland know all this already, but their aghbers in the Diaspora may not.

*

Speaking of what we know and what we don’t: There is a type of Armenian who knows more about Turks than about Armenians, and the only thing he knows about Armenians is that they were massacred by the Turks. I once asked one such specimen if he knew anything about Armenian literature and he said he did not. Had he read a single Armenian writer, I asked next, and he replied he had not. Someone must have told him reading Armenian writers is a waste of time because none of them will tell him anything he doesn’t know already, even if what he knows is nada.

VIVA LA REVOLUCION!

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Speaking of Armenian writers: in the introduction by one of our pro-Establishment pundits to an English translation of Baronian I read that Baronian had been so nasty in his depiction of his contemporaries in Istanbul that he fully deserved to be betrayed to the Ottoman police. Is it conceivable that no one, not even the translator, bothered to point out the fact that this pundit was legitimizing betrayal?

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Another case in point: Speaking of Parajanov, I remember one of our chic Bolshevik elder statesmen saying: “He was a syphilitic homosexual and a black marketeer. They should have sent him to the Gulag and let him rot there.”

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As you may have guessed by now, I am not one of those who says, if it’s ours, it must be good, or my country right or wrong, or my mother drunk or sober.

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