ara baliozian Posted February 21, 2009 Author Report Share Posted February 21, 2009 Thursday, February 19, 2009 *********************************************** PERVERTS ****************************************** God is the Unknown and the Unknowable. Truth resides not in places we have seen but in inaccessible dimensions about which we know nothing. * After defining military defeat as moral victory, we feel justified in identifying ourselves as perennial winners. Ah! The magic power of words and the irresistible temptation of confusing propaganda with reality. * One man's terrorist, we are told, is another's freedom fighter. One man's believer is another's infidel. One man's hero is another's bloodthirsty barbarian. I may pretend to understand these things but I am as confused as the rest of mankind -- except of course the heroic freedom fighter who believes he is following the Guidance. Or is it the brainwashed dupe who will believe anything that flatters his loathsome little ego? * To speak in the name of God and do the Devil's work: it takes perverted logic to reach such abysmal depths of moral degradation. * The greater the cultural achievements of a nation, the greater its depths of moral debasement. After Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler. After Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Stalin and Beria. * So you think I stress the negative and ignore the positive? Suppose you are hungry. You walk into a restaurant and order a big bowl of your favorite soup; and as you are about to enjoy it, you notice a fly in it. When you point that out to the waiter, he tells you 99% of your soup is fly-free. Why concentrate on the negative and ignore the positive? # Friday, February 20, 2009 *********************************************** AS I SEE IT ****************************************** To know better does not always mean to know the truth, and what's the use of knowing better if what you know is a lie? * The lower they sink, the higher their opinion of themselves. Psychologists have a word for this abnormality: they call it compensation. * Even people who hate doctors are glad to see them when they are in need of their help. The same does not apply to critics in an environment where everyone has somehow managed to convince himself that God is on his side, he is in good hands, and he never had it so good. * There will always be a demand for our weeklies if only because Armenians love to see their names in print. Our editors know this and they cram in as many names in every issues as they can. * One should never speak well of oneself – it smacks of boasting, and to boast is to confess a weakness, namely one's dependence on flattery, even if the flattery is self-administered. * Some comedians specialize in insulting their audience, and these comedians become popular because most people would rather be insulted than ignored. * In a letter from an Armenian poet: "After writing for Armenians all my life, I am beginning to hate Turks less." * Most people are careful not to make the same big mistake twice. The same does not apply to small mistakes which are classified as habits. # Saturday, February 21, 2009 *********************************************** ON FORGIVENESS ****************************************** To forgive does not necessarily mean to forget. On the contrary. To forgive sometimes means to remember forever after and to wonder what the hell was it that cornered you into such an unArmenian act as forgiving a scumbag who doesn't deserve to live. * To forgive in order to appear magnanimous or to assert moral superiority is closer to vengeance than to forgiveness. * Forgiveness, real forgiveness, is rooted in the realization that you are not much different from your enemy and that you may even be worse. * ON CONTROL FREAKS *********************************** When control freaks speak of freedom, they mean their freedom, your subservience. * SMILE ******************** In a convent: “I will ask you two easy questions and a hard one. What's the name of the first man?” “That's easy: Adam.” “What's the name of the first woman?” “That's easy too: Eve.” “What did Eve say when she first saw Adam?” “O my! That's a hard one!” * I saw six men kicking and punching my mother-in-law. My wife said, “Aren't you going to help” I said, “No. Six should be enough.” # Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ara baliozian Posted February 25, 2009 Author Report Share Posted February 25, 2009 Sunday, February 22, 2009 *********************************************** MEMO TO A YOUNG ARMENIAN WRITER ****************************************************** Always keep in mind that you will never be able to make a living by sharing your wisdom with readers who are much wiser than you. * No matter how good you are, you will have your critics, some of whom would gladly stone you to death. Think of Tolstoy on Shakespeare, Schopenhauer on Hegel, Turgenev on Dostoevsky, Russell on Sartre, and Sartre on himself. * When asked which church or community center you go to, say “I am with the good guys.” * The three pillars of fascism are: nationalism, anti-intellectualism, and anti-Semitism. I may have told you this before but some things bear repeating, maybe not as often as first nation this and first nation that, but at least once or twice a year. * One of our skinheads, who had verbally abused me for several years on a daily basis, once called to apologize. We had a long conversation. Shortly thereafter it became clear that he had not called to apologize but to gather more ammunition against me. * When it comes to enemy propaganda, we have 20/20 vision. When it comes to our own, we are blind. # Monday, February 23, 2009 *********************************************** READING ****************************************************** Since I don't do much traveling, I enjoy going places by proxy. I just finished reading Farley Mowat's big book on Siberia – SIBIR: MY DISCOVERY OF SIBERIA (Toronto, 1970) – a fascinating place that has attracted many travelers, among them Chekhov. Mowat writes that Russians love partying and their favorite drinks are Georgian wine and Armenian cognac. I suspect our cognac has done more damage to the Soviets – if only to their livers and longevity – than all their dissidents and ours combined. I am now reading Paul Theroux's GHOST TRAIN TO THE EASTERN STAR: ON THE TRACKS OF THE GREAT RAILWASY BAZAAR (New York, 2008), where he revisits places that he first wrote about thirty years ago – from London to Tokyo and all the way back via Siberia. Theroux is one of my favorite travel writers and his PILLARS OF HERCULES, about the countries on the Mediterranean coast, is a classic in the genre. When told by a Romanian academic that Turkey cannot join the EU for another ten years because “they have problems with human rights of the Kurds and the Armenians,” Theroux dismisses Kurdish demands as unreasonable, “and the Armenian business was a hundred years ago.” He goes on to identify himself as “a mild Turkophile” and reflects that “the massacre of Armenians a century ago, the later expulsion of Greeks, and the Kurdish outrages and Turkish reprisals are lamentable facts of Turkish history; still, no city in Asia is so self-consciously reform-minded and it is lucky in its writers, who are public intellectuals in the European mode – Orhan Pamuk was one of the many who denounced the downplaying of the Armenian slaughter. He represented a public conscience.” I should like to see one of our own writers in that role. # Tuesday, February 24, 2009 *********************************************** More on Paul Theroux's GHOST TRAIN TO THE EASTERN STAR: ON THE TRACKS OF THE GREAT RAILWASY BAZAAR (New York, 2008). **************************************************************** While in Istanbul, Paul Theroux has long conversations with several Turkish writers, among them Orhan Pamuk and the young, dynamic, outspoken, and stunningly attractive Elif Shafak. Speaking of Pamuk's trial, he writes it was a case of “a lion being judged by donkeys.” “Pamuk's crime,” he explains, “ was his mentioning to a Swiss journalist that 'a million Armenians and thirty thousand Kurds were killed in this country and I'm the only one who dares to talk about it.'” “Turkey has amnesia,” Elif Shafak tells him. “Turks are indifferent to the past, to old words, to old customs...We need to know about the Armenians.” Another speaks “about the burden of being a Turkish writer abroad. Westerners whose knowledge of Turkey was limited to MIDNIGHT EXPRESS and doner kebab would challenge them saying, What about the Armenians? What about the Kurds? How come you torture people?” In Baku we learn that there are Armenocentric Azeris as surely as there Turcocentric Armenians. “Azerbaijan is a police state,” Theroux is informed by a foreign diplomat. “TV is controlled. Print media is somewhat free, but an opposition editor was gunned down last year.” An Azeri tells him America should declare war against Iran because Iranian are bad people, but “Armenians are worse...In the 1990s they had captured the Azeri province of Nagorno-Karabagh, killing 20,000 Azeris and displacing a million more.” “In football, Armenia is our enemy. In life too,” another Azeri tells him. And, “We are overwhelmed by emotions! Armenians don't make any distinction between Turks and Azeris. Hey, it's all about 1915. When I was at Harvard, I met Armenians from Yerevan and had no problems. But Armenians from Watertown were very belligerent.” “...in March 1918 in an Armenian uprising, Armenians killed 30,000 Azeris.” Paul Theroux may identify himself as a moderate Turkophile but what's uppermost in his mind is to be objective, to report rather than to editorialize. We could learn from him. # Wednesday, February 25, 2009 *********************************************** FROM MY NOTEBOOKS **************************************************************** On the radio: four answers to the question “Do you believe in the present economic crisis?” asked at random in a train station: “No! I think that's something politicians talk about and I don't believe them.” “Yes. Some people I know have lost their jobs, but I am not worried because I am a teacher.” “(Laughing) I don't care because I have very little money.” “Sorry, I can't answer, my train leaves in four minutes.” * Julien Green: “Thoughts have wings, words only feet. That's a writer's greatest source of anguish.” * “We are Armenians!” yes, I know. But what kind? Ottomanized, Levantinized, Sovietized, Americanized?... Because most of our disagreements are rooted not in our views but in our identities or cultural backgrounds. * A French magazine calls Fidel Castro and Kim Jong-il of North Korea “the living-dead.” * If like me you prefer dialogue to long descriptive passages, Vladimir Sorokin's THE QUEUE (New York, 2007) is for you. Originally published in 1985, this is a Soviet-era work of fiction that consists in brief exchanges between people waiting in a long line hoping to buy whatever it is that's being sold at the other end. # Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ara baliozian Posted February 28, 2009 Author Report Share Posted February 28, 2009 Thursday, February 26, 2009 *********************************************** POLITICIANS AND INTELLECTUALS **************************************************************** Arnold Toynbee: “Society is the total network of relations between human beings. The components of society are thus not human beings but relations between them.” * A politician will never say or do anything that may question his ability to lead and to do what must be done, even when he is catastrophically wrong, and even if it means violating the human rights of his fellow countrymen. By contrast, the function of an intellectual is to say what must be said even if it means exposing the incompetence and criminality of politicians and in the process risking his own survival. As for propagandists: as extensions of politicians, they specialize in exposing the crimes of the opposition and ignoring and covering up their own. I am not implying here that politicians and propagandists are always wrong and intellectuals aways right. What I am suggesting is that it is not easy to reconcile the demands of self-interest with objectivity. * PARALLELS ******************************* There is a passage in Toynbee that explains even if indirectly what befell us a hundred years ago in the Ottoman Empire. In what follows, all you need to do is replace the words Egyptiac and Hyksos with Ottoman and Armenian: “At this moment the apparently defunct Egyptiac society was recalled to life and action by an overwhelming impulse to chastise the Hyksos trespassers who had ventured to desecrate a swept and garnished house by their unclean presence. The stimulus was so powerful, that it raised the Egyptiac society not just from the deathbed but actually from the bier on which it was being carried to the grave, and in this demonic xenophobia the society seemed to have discovered at the thirteenth hour, the long-sought elixir of immortality.” The final lines of this quotation may also suggest that the glue in nationalism is provided more by fear and hatred of the enemy and less by love of one's fellow countrymen. # Friday, February 27, 2009 *********************************************** HEAVEN AND HELL **************************************************************** If the system is good to you, you will be good to the system. Millions believed in Stalin because he promised heaven and earth, and he even delivered some of it in the guise of full employment, prosperity, power, and glory. And these believers, like all believers in organized religions, did not stop to question the validity of dogmas that legitimize intolerance, persecution, torture, murder, war and massacre. One could go as far as saying faith is the real source of all evil. * A belief system should be judged not by its promises but by its victims. Consider militarism, a belief system that promotes honor, courage, self-sacrifice, glory, and heroism: what mortal could resist these noble attainments? What decent human being would dare to suggest that their opposites, among them cowardice and dishonor, to be superior virtues? And now, listen to Toynbee on these military virtues: “It is flying in the face of all experience to jump to the conclusion that the only place where we can ever hope to find these precious things is the slaughterhouse where they have happened to make their first epiphany to human eyes.” * Closer to home: who supports the present regime in our homeland? First and foremost, our fund-raisers who, according to insiders, make a very comfortable living beyond the wildest dreams of those they claim to help. Unmask these bloodsuckers and you will come face to face with wheeler-dealers whose role models are Wall Street chief executive officers. Moral of the story: Don't be a fool. Don't believe everything your are told or read in the papers. Demand accountability and make sure the firm that does the accounting is not run by a brother-in-law or a co-conspirator. And last but not least, next time someone speaks of heaven, makes sure he doesn't mean your hell. # Saturday, February 28, 2009 *********************************************** RANDOM THOUGHTS **************************************************************** When a doctor kills instead of curing, his license is revoked. This law governing the practice of medicine does not apply to Wall Street chief executive officers probably because law-makers and CEOs are co-conspirators. * During World War II Armenians fought on both sides – on the Soviet side in the name of defeating fascism, on the German side in the name of liberating the Homeland. Both sides were convinced theirs was a noble cause. Neither had the initiative or intelligence to ask what's so noble fighting Hitlerism in the name of Stalinism and vice versa? It is simply astonishing the ease with which self-assessed intelligent people are moronized. * You want to know what makes Armenians so mean? Six hundred years of kissing Ottoman ass. # Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ara baliozian Posted March 4, 2009 Author Report Share Posted March 4, 2009 Sunday, March 1, 2009 *********************************************** TRUE STORIES **************************************************************** Once upon a time I had a friend who was nice to everyone, made no enemies, was invariably generous in his assessment of others, popular with both men and women. And yet, he died friendless. This is not a judgment on my part but a confession on his. He was an Armenian writer. * Not to love but to pretend to love. Not to believe but to pretend to believe. Not to know but to pretend to know. The world is full of them. * Should one be tolerant of intolerance? * Communism has been defined as state capitalism, and capitalism as socialism for Wall Street CEOs. * The search for reason leads to insanity. * The most comfortable seating position will give you back pain. * There is a slave in every conformist, a revolutionary in every dissenter, an atheist in every believer, a believer in every atheist, and a Turk in every Armenian. * Your truth is bound to be someone else's lie. * The worst nightmare for an exemplary man or a role model would be coming face to face with his double. * No one can be as ignorant as the man with all the answers. * All pro-establishment assertions boil down to the motto “I'm alright Jack!” # Monday, March 2, 2009 *********************************************** SOLVING PROBLEMS *********************************************** Solving problems is easy. What's hard is implementing the solutions. Consider the present global financial crisis that enriched a few at the expense of impoverishing many. It seems to me the solution is as clear as daylight and as simple as getting a refund for a defective or unsatisfactory item. In legal parlance: either restitution of funds acquired by the few or a jail term. If this solution is rejected on legal grounds, then all I can say is there is something wrong with the law and it should be rectified and enforced retroactively. When a doctor kills instead of curing, he cannot plead not guilty by reason of incompetence. Incompetence should not be rewarded but punished. Why should not the same principle apply to economists and financiers whose responsibility it is to take care of the welfare or economic health of the nation? It goes without saying that law-makers will never agree to pass a law that may expose their own incompetence or corruption or status as co-conspirators with Wall Street CEOs. But let the world solve its problems. Let's take care of our own first. How to solve our own problems? Easy! De-Ottomanize, de-Stalinize, and de-tribalize. What could be easier? What's hard is convincing our men at the top that, very much like their counterparts in Washington and Wall Street, they are not la crème de la crème but la crème de la scum. # Tuesday, March 3, 2009 *********************************************** AN ALIEN CULTURE *********************************************** During the war in Vietnam Americans were accused of genocide by a number of learned observers, among them Jean-Paul Sartre (see his ON GENOCIDE). In his GHOST TRAIN TO THE EASTERN STAR (New York, 2008), Paul Theroux writes that whenever he identified himself as an American in Vietnam, he met with smiles and friendliness -- “no moralizing, no frowns, no scolding. Almost all the Vietnamese I met were like this – not backward-looking and vindictive scolds muttering, 'Never forget!' but compassionate souls, getting on with their lives, hopeful and humane.” Elsewhere: “Travel in Vietnam for an American was a lesson in humility. They had lost two million civilians and a million soldiers, and we had lost more than 58,000 men and women. They did not talk about it on a personal level, at least not in a blaming way. It was not you, they said, it was your government...Blaming and complaining and looking for pity are regarded as weak traits in Vietnamese culture, revenge is wasteful. They won the war against us because they were tenacious, united, and resourceful, and that was also how they were building their economy.” While in Tokyo, a Japanese writer tells him: “We admired MacArthur – we still do. He's like a father figure.” # Wednesday, March 4, 2009 *********************************************** NOT ALL QUESTIONS HAVE ANSWERS *********************************************** Unlike most of my fellow countrymen, I was born a total ignoramus, and even after a lifetime of study and reflection, my area of ignorance is so vast that what I know might as well be a grain of sand on a beach that stretches from here to the horizon. * I learn something every day, which may suggest I have spoken as an ignoramus so many times that you would be a fool to take me seriously. * Who could be more ignorant that a man with all the answers? And who could be more prone to error that he who asserts infallibility? * Einstein said the universe is comprehensible but after decades of hard thinking he failed to explain it. * Heidegger said so far no philosopher has been successful in answering the question, why things exist? * We like to say people have the government they deserve. But I suggest no one guilty of petty larceny deserves to fry. * If the future of our nation is more important than the past, and if we have a better chance to resolve our differences as friends rather than as enemies, why should we not call Turks our brothers? # http://baliozian.blogspot.com/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ara baliozian Posted March 7, 2009 Author Report Share Posted March 7, 2009 Thursday, March 5, 2009 *********************************************** REFLECTIONS *********************************************** When I was a total ignoramus, I always assumed I knew more than the average Joe I happened to be dealing with. Now it's the other way around: I always assume to know less. * You can tell how ignorant a man is by how hard he tries to make you think he knows better. * The most ungodly people are those who speak in His name, and the most dangerous dupes are those who believe them. * I reject the notion that to be a good Armenian means to be a bundle of prejudices and nurse an unsettled score. Which amounts to saying, to be a good Armenian means to be a bad human being. * What's uppermost in the mind of a successful writer is to live up to his reputation. Which is why as a marginal scribbler and a total failure I find my status both liberating and stimulating. * It is written: “No one can be as dangerous as the man who has nothing to lose.” * The greatest challenge a country faces is not electing great leaders but leaders who are the least threat to its welfare. As for our unelected bosses, bishops, and benefactors: they might as well be our Bermuda Triangle. * Our ghazetajis operate on the assumption that the average Armenian reader prefers to read about little successes (no matter how imaginary) than colossal failures (no matter how real). Never underestimate the cunning of idiots. * Prejudice allows a man to tailor his questions to fit his answers. * If you don't know, pretend to know. Few people will have the time and appetite to get into a useless argument with a worthless phony. At least, that has been my experience. # Friday, March 6, 2009 *********************************************** MOSAIC *********************************************** Truth as a mosaic of lies -- like a pleasing design made of worthless pieces of glass or stone. * God as a point of reference or God as a means to expose our failings and imperfections, yes. But God as a license to do this, that, and the other – I say that's damn close to confusing God with the Devil. * What could be more absurd than to say, what I believe is true, what you believe is a lie. And yet... * Let us teach ourselves to question everything, beginning with our own judgment. * To say that ideas acquire legitimacy only when they serve our interests is to undermine the legitimacy of all ideas. * What follows is a true story. It happened last year in a Greyhound bus in Canada. A passenger stabs another passenger – a totally unprovoked attack -- and beheads him. When arrested and tried, he pleads not guilty by reason of insanity. God made him do it, he explains. I suggest the following definition of man: a creature who cannot tell God from the Devil. * If repetition is a crime, who is the victim? If repetition is a transgression, where is the harm? # Saturday, March 7, 2009 *********************************************** QUESTION *********************************************** Win an argument and lose a friend. It has happened to me more than once. Some of my worst enemies today are former friends; and they have become enemies because of a minor disagreement on an irrelevant topic. But perhaps they were never friends, and what they lost was much more than an argument. We are a confused bunch. No doubt about that. We are confused because we have been shaped by alien, tyrannical, and unjust laws – laws that viewed dissent as a capital offense, and desire for self-determination (i.e. freedom), that most human of all desires, as a crime against humanity or the integrity of the empire. When contradicted we feel threatened. There are even those among us (I call them skinheads) who see verbal abuse as a legitimate form of counter-argument. We will be born again as human beings on the day we learn to have a friendly disagreement. Remember my friends: free speech is a fundamental human right, dissent is not treason, a political party that places its own agenda above the solidarity and welfare of the nation is not democratic but tyrannical, and our political leaders are not bosses or representatives of god on earth but public servants. Because I say these things, am I then your enemy? # Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ara baliozian Posted March 11, 2009 Author Report Share Posted March 11, 2009 Sunday, March 8, 2009 *********************************************** IF *********************************************** If I speak well of some Turks it's because I have heard about good Turks and even met and dealt with some of them. If I am critical of my fellow Armenians it's because, very much like the rest of mankind, we are far from perfect. If, on the other hand, you think Armenians are beyond criticism, I can only say, you must be just about the luckiest man on earth because obviously so far you have dealt only with good Armenians. Either that or you are a nationalist, that is to say, blind in one eye. * I was brought up to believe reality is not what I see but what I was told to see. I have wasted so much time seeings things that weren't there. * Reading teaches us that our blunders, defeats, and humiliations are not unique to us and that countless others have been through the very same experiences. * It’s not easy civilizing barbarians. But what is infinitely harder is civilizing barbarians who brag about their past civilization. # Monday, March 9, 2009 *********************************************** KILLERS *********************************************** “But he was such a kind man!” neighbors say of a serial killer. I am not implying kindness is suspect. What I am saying is that there is a killer in all of us. * Regardless of what you say, you will have your share of critics who belong to the Richelieu school of criticism that says, “If you give me six lines written by the most honest man, I will find something in them to hang him.” * I don't expect to be published in a newspaper or magazine where archbishops advertise the sale of Oriental rugs in their cathedral. Neither do I expect to be welcome in an Internet discussion forum whose moderator is the son of a bishop or the hireling of a benefactor. * To be an honest man means to make many enemies and very few friends. * When in a hurry, go slower than your normal speed. * “After all, we are Armenians!” – meaning , anything we say or do must be accepted and forgiven, including that which would be normally unacceptable and unforgivable. Some Armenians use Armenianism the way cold-blooded killers use the plea of insanity. # Tuesday, March 10, 2009 *********************************************** ON JUSTICE *********************************************** I gave up publishing books on the day I realized we had more writers than readers. That may well be another first for us -- first nation to produce more writers than readers, and first nation to massacre more trees per capita than any other nation on earth. One thousand academics in the United States alone – and academics, as everyone knows, must either publish or perish. And then we have, what a friend of mine calls, “a massacre mafia” -- academics whose field is the Genocide and who review and promote books written only by members, they ignore all others. Once when I wrote something to the effect that massacre books may promote a victim mentality, several reader wrote in protest to say that they don't feel like victims. But suppose a member of your family has been traumatized by a criminal, say, like a rapist. Would you remind her of the rape every chance you get? You may deceive yourself into thinking you are not a victim on the conscious level, but what about your subconscious where the real action is? Writing books may well be another way of establishing our immortality and as such a legitimate reaction to genocide, granted. But writing books that no one reads? Like the offspring of all oppressed and victimized people we are first and foremost bundles of unsettled scores for whom verbal abuse is the only safe way to get even. Instead of constantly reminding us of our victimhood, we should be taught the value of such mantras as “Let the dead bury their dead,” and “What's done is done and cannot be undone.” I am not promoting amnesia. What I am doing is reacting against our masochists. Speaking about verbal abuse: once when I took it upon myself to remind a garbage mouth reader that insulting me simply because he disagrees with me is wrong, he said, “Sue me!” thus expressing an awareness of the fact that the rule of law is mightier than bitching, and one competently written legal brief is worth a thousand lamentations and as many insults. You want justice? Get a lawyer. # Wednesday, March 11, 2009 *********************************************** NOTES AND COMMENTS *********************************************** The real conflict is not between ideologies or belief systems but between those who cling to what they have (even when obtained by piracy or exploitation) and those who have nothing to lose. * Sometimes the only way to disarm your accusers is by pleading guilty to crimes that didn't even cross your imagination to commit. It is not easy to satisfy someone who has tasted blood. * The ideal citizen is a fool who allows himself to be brainwashed and manipulated. All others are classified as trouble-makers and malcontents. That's the way it is with gravediggers – they prefer to deal with corpses. * I don't write to have anyone's agreement. I write the kind of things I would have liked to have read in my formative years when I was programmed not to think for myself. * We live as though our problems were insoluble; but we argue as if we had a minimum of two solutions for every one of our problems. * Some people are so outrageously wrong that they don’t have to be corrected. Sooner or later life, facts, the reality principle will speak to them much louder than any logical argument or appeal to common sense and decency. # Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ara baliozian Posted March 14, 2009 Author Report Share Posted March 14, 2009 Thursday, March 12, 2009 *********************************************** ON OPTIMISM *********************************************** If all our writers, from Khorenatsi to Zarian, have so far failed to penetrate the thick walls raised by our political and religious leaders, whatever possesses me into thinking I have a better chance? And what kind of arrogance bordering on pathological megalomania is it that makes our Turcocentric ghazetajis entertain the illusion they will have better luck with the Turks? Perhaps there is a Don Quixote in all of us – a Don with the IQ of Rosinante, or is it Sancho Panza's jackass? * “Please, don't tell my mother I am a CEO on Wall Street. She thinks I am a pimp.” * When millionaires declare bankruptcy, they do so to protect their millions. Some laws, it seems, are made by crooks, for crooks. * In his autobiography,Theodore Reik, a Freudian psychoanalyst, writes that for many years he was deeply in love with a very attractive woman. But when he finally married her, the wedding night was a disaster. He seems to be saying, a penetrating awareness of the other is achieved only by penetration. * Both pessimism and optimism are more or less legitimate ways of forecasting the future. Sometimes pessimists are right, and sometimes optimists. But optimists are never right if their optimism is motivated by wishful thinking. Reality advances on a different plane from our wishes. That’s why, even when our dreams come true they have a tendency to turn into nightmares. # Friday, March 13, 2009 *********************************************** REFLECTIONS ON OUR HISTORY *********************************************** “If the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.” Our history in a nutshell. * There are two kinds of nations: those who divide and conquer, and those who divide themselves and are conquered. * The function of a belief system or ideology is to raise a wall between us and our perception of reality. The function of our nationalist historians, leadership, and educational system is to cover up this fact. And the function of our writers is to remind us of it. There are many references to this fact in our literature. (See below.) * To those who say, how could little Armenia resist the overwhelming might of ruthless empire builders like Genghis Khan (13th century), Timurlang (14th century), and Suleiman the Magnificent (16th century), my answer is: our predisposition for dividing ourselves was in full swing long before these gentlemen went on the warpath. Listen to our 5th-century historian, Yeghishé: “Solidarity is the mother of good deeds, divisiveness of evil onces.” Elsewhere: “We may not be allowed to question the integrity of princes, but neither should we praise men who pit themselves against the Will of God” (that is, the Reality Principle). And more to the point: “In the same way that a man cannot serve two masters, a nation cannot have two kings. If a nation is ruled by two kings, both the kings and their subjects will perish.” * Am I rubbing salt in our wound? Why not? -- if the wound is self-inflicted. * Raffi: “An Armenian's worst enemies are not odars but Armenians.” * Gostan Zarian: “Armenians survive by cannibalizing one another.” * Charents: “O Armenian people, your salvation lies only in your collective powers.” * For more on this subject, see my DICTIONARY OF ARMENIAN QUOTATIONS. # Saturday, March 14, 2009 *********************************************** LITERATURE *********************************************** The only time I am referred to as a writer by our commissars is when they tell me it is my duty as a patriotic Armenians to echo their sentiments and thoughts. You say I have said this before? How flattering! Not only you read me but you also remember what I say. * Money goes to money, they say. Something very similar happens to culture too. Consider the situation of 20th-century French literature, one of the most highly developed and influential in the world: the three playwrights who revolutionized the French theater (Samuel Beckett, Arthur Adamov, and Eugene Ionesco) were an Irishman, an Armenian, and a Romanian respectively). And now consider the situation of Armenian literature at the other end of the spectrum: not only we don’t encourage or welcome outside contribution, but we also alienate and silence our own (from Abovian to Zarian). Figure that one out if you can. # Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ara baliozian Posted March 18, 2009 Author Report Share Posted March 18, 2009 Sunday, March 15, 2009 *********************************************** BOOKS IN MY LIFE *********************************************** I grew up in time of war – two wars, as a matter of fact: World War II and the Greek Civil War. I grew up in a house without books. It was only at the age of fourteen that I read my first book – WITH FIRE AND SWORD by the Polish Nobelist Henrik Sienkiewicz: a historical novel of WAR-AND-PEACE dimensions, but less Tolstoy and more Dumas pére and Errol Flynn. The only thing I remember about it today is the name of the central character, Pan Mikael Volodiovsky. I read it in an Armenian translation done by a Mekhitarist monk. At one time the Mekhitarists were formidable translators and the most prolific of them all was Arsen Ghazikian, who single-handed translated all the epic poems of the Western canon from Homer to THE SONG OF ROLAND, among many other Greek and Latin classics. Two of his students, Padre Elia (Yeghia) Pachikian and Mesrob Janashian, were my teachers. Janashian was also the author of a highly detailed and competent HISTORY OF MODERN WEST-ARMENIAN LITERATURE. After FIRE AND SWORD I chanced on a thin paperback, Dostoevsky's THE GAMBLER, and was hooked on the Russians. What fascinated me about Dostoevsky was the fact that his characters spoke their mind, held nothing back, refused to stand on ceremony or consider what others may think of them. In that sense, they were more authentic human beings than anyone I had ever met. Chekhov was different. His characters impressed me as people I had known or could have known. There was nothing bizarre or incomprehensible about them. The Russians, and I include Tolstoy and Turgenev, made me realize that I wasn't alone, and whenever I try to reread them now I also realize that you can't go home again. # Monday, March 16, 2009 *********************************************** THOMAS MANN *********************************************** On a visit to Venice, a middle-aged German writer falls for a beautiful Polish boy on the beach, postpones his return home, and dies of cholera. (As a youth, Mann idolized Wagner, who also died in Venice.) I first read DEATH IN VENICE in Venice, at the age of fifteen, in an Italian translation. It left me cold. Much ado about nothing, I thought. Ten years later I read it again, this time in an English translation, with the same result. But I refused to give up on Mann and with CONFESSIONS OF FELIX KRULL, CONFIDENCE MAN I got religion. Immediately after I read and reread THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN, JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS, and DOKTOR FAUSTUS the way a born-again reads and rereads the Bible. Two things fascinated me about Mann: his subtle humor and his expertise on a wide range of subjects. When he expanded the Biblical story of Joseph into a four- volume, 2000-page long novel, for instance, he acquired an entire library on both the Bible and ancient Egypt. To write about the life of a modern composer, he befriended and pumped several famous musicologists, composers, and conductors, among them Adorno, Schoenberg, and Bruno Walter (who happened to be a next-door neighbor as well his daughter's secret lover). In politics and philosophy, he could argue both sides of any issue – an advantage over Shaw, Sartre, and Nabokov who took sides with disastrous results -- Shaw and Sartre in their support of totalitarian regimes, and Nabokov in his defense of the war in Vietnam. Mann has had his share of critics: Shaw ignored him, Sartre and Nabokov dismissed him as a bourgeois, Brecht called him “a short-story writer," Stefan Zweig thought he was long-winded, Furtwaengler accused him of changing nationalities as if they were shirts, and Hitler wanted him assassinated -- some said because THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN outsold MEIN KAMPF. * Mann on Hitler: “Thanks to his own baseness, he has indeed succeeded in exposing much of our own.” * “The totalitarian statesman is the founder of a religion; or, more accurately, the founder of an infallible, inquisitorial system of dogma that forcibly suppresses every heresy while itself resting on legend – a system to which truth must austerely submit.” * Mann on what it takes: “The creative genius must first become a world in itself, in which only discoveries and not inventions, remain to be made.” * “The intellectual man is almost as much interested in painful truths as the fool is in those which flatter him.” # Tuesday, March 17, 2009 *********************************************** ARNOLD J. TOYNBEE *********************************************** When asked by a journalist what had motivated him to dedicate most of his adult life to writing his monumental multi-volume STUDY OF HISTORY, Toynbee replied with a single word: “Curiosity.” Of the twelve volumes, my favorite is the 12th, subtitled RECONSIDERATIONS. Here Toynbee replies to his critics – an astonishingly large number of them from all over the world. Sometimes he is willing to admit error, at others he reaffirms his position and goes further. Case in point: “Spate's failure to keep his knowledge of the Jordan valley's history up to date would have been venial if the tone of his criticism had not been supercilious. However, my concern with Spate is not to return his fire but to follow out the second thoughts into which I have been stung by the stimulating shot with which he has peppered me.” One reason I enjoy reading and rereading RECONSIDERATIONS is its quintessentially unArmenian tone of tolerance and acceptance of dissent as worthy of consideration. Toynbee's general theory of the rise and fall of civilizations and empires goes something like this: civilizations grow by responding successfully to challenges under the leadership of creative minorities, and decline when the leaders fail to react creatively.” In his own words: “A growing civilization can be defined as one which the components of its culture [economic, political, artistic, and scientific] are in harmony with one another; and, on the same principle, a disintegrating civilization can be defined as one in which these elements have fallen into discord.” All general theories are vulnerable to contradiction and criticism. Plato's were criticized by his student, Aristotle, Marx's by Keynes, Spengler's by Jacques Maritain and Teilhard de Chardin, and Toynbee's by a wide range of specialists who saw in him an interloper who had dared to exploit their findings to serve his own alien agenda. In my view, Toynbee's greatest merit is not his general theory but the many brilliant observations on the human condition. Random samples follows: * On racial superiority: “The Jews, the Japanese, the British 'sahibs', the Nazis...all seem to me to have been chosen by no one except themselves.” * On critics: “Whenever a reviewer is tempted to treat an author as a dart-board he should remember that the missile which his hand is itching to lance is not a dart but a boomerang.” * On chauvinism: “Self-idolization is most flagrantly in evidence, not as a self-adjudicated reward for success, but as a self-exculpating compensation for failure.” (I think of these lines whenever I hear one of our charlatans bragging about our celebrities and achievements.) * “The egocentric illusion has always beset every living organism in which an ego has ever asserted itself.” * On pessimism and optimism: “The truth is that Valéry's pessimism and Gibbon's optimism are, both alike, rationalizing of feelings that are irrationally subjective.” # Wednesday, March 18, 2009 *********************************************** REFLECTIONS *********************************************** Whether God exists or not is not the problem. The problem, the real problem, the existential problem is placing as great a distance between us and the Devil as possible. Likewise, knowing the truth is not the problem. The problem is recognizing a deceiver when we see one. * Because I criticize Armenians I am accused of anti-Armenianism; and because some Turks quote me, I am accused of pro-Ottomanism. I may be wrong about everything but I have no doubt whatever in my mind that no one, not even the very best among us, are beyond criticism. And not to criticize in the name of patriotism is to support the corrupt and the incompetent, and when things go wrong, to blame the enemy who probably was also duped into supporting lying riffraff. * Among us, politics (or the art of the possible) is confused with ideology (the art of the impossible), and inevitably, ideology is confused with theology (the art of the incomprehensible), and theology is confused with pathology. Some day, in a future progressive and enlightened Armenian democracy, if our partisans are arrested and put on trial, they will be absolutely right in pleading not guilty by reason of insanity. * As solitary creatures, Armenian writers have been perennial victims of political parties and their satellite institutions, all of which have a tendency to divide their fellow Armenians into friends and enemies or yes-men and dissidents. As for dialogue: who has ever heard of such a thing in an Ottoman or Soviet environment, or, for that matter, in a crypto-Ottoman or neo-Stalinist context? # Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nané Posted March 18, 2009 Report Share Posted March 18, 2009 Sunday, February 22, 2009 * If like me you prefer dialogue to long descriptive passages, Vladimir Sorokin's THE QUEUE (New York, 2007) is for you. Originally published in 1985, this is a Soviet-era work of fiction that consists in brief exchanges between people waiting in a long line hoping to buy whatever it is that's being sold at the other end. # I greatly enjoyed reading this book. I think it would make a great short-film as well. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ara baliozian Posted March 21, 2009 Author Report Share Posted March 21, 2009 Thursday, March 19, 2009 *********************************************** SWINE *********************************************** Again and again we are told by so-called experts in Washington that the bonuses of the chief executive officers on Wall Street are such an insignificant fraction of the total bailout that it is a waste of time discussing them. These gentlemen must be blind not to see that a million dollars is a million dollars; it may be small change to some, but they are a fortune to the rest of mankind who must work for a living. And I suspect the outrage is less about the bonuses themselves and more about the fact that the very same individuals who are responsible for the present crisis have the judgment and manners of greedy swine. * C.G. Jung: "Even in our civilization, the people who form, psychologically speaking, the lowest stratum, live almost as unconsciously as primitive races." * The words of an honest man don’t need definitions; but the commas of a crook should be carefully examined under a microscope. * We are told by scientists that we are made of stardust, and it is the dust that survives. * I knew I was going places when a number of Oriental carpet dealers wanted to hire my services as reviewer and translator of their books. These gentlemen are not the kind that would waste their money carelessly. * It is men without honor who are the first to rise in defense of their honor. # Friday, March 20, 2009 *********************************************** ON A NUMBER OF THINGS *********************************************** Obama wants to negotiate with Iran. I suspect Iranians will not fall for his rhetoric as readily as those who voted for him. That's because they have their own brand of rhetoric; and when rhetoric meets rhetoric the result is bound to be a dead end. * Talaat's blunder: left to their own devices, Armenians would have done a far more through job on themselves. * While listening to the televised sermon of a bishop, I could not help thinking: “I don't believe a word he says, and I doubt if he does.” * Bonus: What's a five-letter word that starts with a “b” that stands for bastard, and ends with an “s” that stands for swine? * Armenian Ottomanism: alienating a fellow Armenian in the name of patriotism. * Atheism: If an ant were to speak to me and say, “I don't believe in your existence,” would I step on it? * Benefactors: Take away their money and what have you got? An empty suit, albeit an expensive one. Am I alienating benefactors? Hell no! What I say has as much effect on them as the fart of an ant. # Saturday, March 21, 2009 *********************************************** JOHN UPDIKE *********************************************** After COUPLES, I read everything he wrote, and he wrote a great deal, and he knew how to write -- fiction as well as criticism and poetry. He was an inspired craftsman. His nonfiction was as good as his fiction, which is not something that can be said about such contemporaries of his as Mailer, Bellow, and Roth. But somewhere along the line – it may have been after the second or third RABBIT – I gave up reading him. Shortly before he died a few days ago I read a critical essay about him by a young American writer in whose last sentence Updike was dismissed as an “asshole.” (I later learned this critic had committed suicide.) I am now reading Updike's TOWARD THE END OF TIME (1997), an autobiographical novel about old age that, as always with Updike, brims with sharp observations and verbal felicities. And now I am looking forward to reading his posthumous works – diaries, notebooks, correspondence, perhaps even an unfinished novel and several big biographies. * Some random samples of Updike's descriptive skill: “Girls with orange hair hanging like seaweed or loosely bound with gold barrettes like pirate treasure.” * “A runty senior with a huge mane of black hair that for diving he did up in a hairband like a Greek girl.” * “The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.” * “An aluminum screen door with a misadjusted pneumatic attachment that snaps like lightning the first two-thirds of its arc and then closes the last third slow as a clock ticking.” # Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ara baliozian Posted March 25, 2009 Author Report Share Posted March 25, 2009 Sunday, March 22, 2009 *********************************************** ON MYTHS *********************************************** We either react against the ideas instilled in us during our formative years, or we treat them as infallible articles of faith and stick to them to the bitter end. Deep inside somewhere Charents remained a nationalist even when he spoke against it; and Zarian remained an anti-nationalist even when he voiced nationalist nonsense. In a letter to a fellow Tashnak, the editor of HAIRENIK wrote: “If we treat him (Zarian) right, he may come to our side.” When he didn't, he was ignored and treated as an eccentric and a non-person. “I was told he was crazy and I stayed away from him,” a Tashnak neighbor of his once said to me, “and now you tell me he was a great writer?” According to Ilya Ehrenburg, Stalin said, “Don't touch Charents, he is on our side,” or words to that effect. But truth or God or the Reality Principle is on nobody's side. Studied in a Christian context, Greek myths about gods who fornicate with mortals sound blasphemous as well as ridiculous. And yet, the Greek effort to explain Reality makes as much sense today as the myths invented by Jewish, Muslim, and Christian theologians who have legitimized murder and massacre in the name of God. Toynbee is right: after choosing themselves, the chosen assert moral superiority and expect everyone else to be subservient to them. You are either with us or against us, they say, and if you are against us, you don't deserve to live. Some day when mankind is finally civilized, this kind of mindset will be viewed as worthy of barbarians and serial killers. # Monday, March 23, 2009 *********************************************** CROOKS UNLIMIMTED *********************************************** What's the use of writing if you end up alienating friends and making enemies of the very same people on whose goodwill you depend for your survival? On the other hand, what's the use of writing if you are not allowed to say what must be said? I may be more popular and have a better chance to survive by making at least minimum wage if I were to write cookbooks. I am not much of a cook, granted. My repertoire is limited to hard-boiled eggs, cheese sandwiches, pilaf, and spaghetti. But I am told you don't have to be a cook to write cookbooks. A best-selling author of cookbooks once told me, “I try at least once every one of my recipes before publishing them,” thus implying many other don't. If there are dishonest politicians, incompetent chief executive officers, and fornicating bishops, why not plagiarizing cookbook writers? * Speaking of crooks: why do you think Bernard Madoff wasn't exposed for twenty years? The answer is simple: Wall Street if full of them. Exposing him would have meant exposing themselves. And now that the bonus scandal has exploded, I am looking forward to the second act of the play – investigations, hearings, and indictments. As for the third act, I expect, very much like Watergate, it will end in the resignation, arrests, trials, and incarceration not only of CEOs but also of politicians and other fat cats. Unless of course there are so many of them that both Wall Street and Washington would be paralyzed. # Tuesday, March 24, 2009 *********************************************** THE PLACEBO EFFECT *********************************************** All talk of Historic Armenia belongs to the realm of archeology. In a political context, it makes as much sense as Historic Macedonia, Mongolia, or, closer to home, America. * There are so many laws and lawyers that protect the interests of the wealthy that even God wouldn't dare to challenge them. * Whenever a fellow Armenian contradicts me, I cannot help suspecting that he is too smart to be in a position to plead ignorance, and that his disagreement is more like a game, a challenge, or a thoughtlessly adopted political agenda. * A movement that fails to evolve a leader is as doomed as one that evolves two of them. * To label ideas as pro- or anti-Armenian can be misleading because what may be in our interests today may be against the Reality Principle tomorrow, as our revolutionaries in the Ottoman Empire discovered. After all, not all wars of liberation end in liberation, and “freedom or death” makes sense only if it means freedom for the majority. To confuse the placebo effect of some ideas with objective reality may result in disaster. # Wednesday, March 25, 2009 *********************************************** READING *********************************************** Books are my favorite companions. I don't care where I live as long as there is a good library in the neighborhood. Between a hell with books and a heaven without them, I would choose hell any day. Once, a few years ago, after observing the monotony of my daily routine and drab surroundings, a childhood friend commented, in my place he would have committed suicide. He promised to share his home and wealth with me if I agreed to return to Athens. Shortly thereafter he went bankrupt and died of a heart attack. I was reminded of this episode while reading Christopher Isherwood's mammoth DIARIES (1048 pages). In almost every other entry he speaks of encounters and conversations with the likes of Thomas Mann, Aldous Huxley, Greta Garbo, and Krishnamurti. And yet, he suffers from fits of depression and requires the constant care of quacks, shrinks, and swamis. There are endless passages about dreams, nightmares, meditation techniques, yoga, and mystical nonsense – passages I now skip for the sake of entries like the following: “After dinner, Aldous [Huxley] and I got in a corner. He was a little drunk, and started on a favorite topic: the poorness of all literature. Homer was terribly overrated, Dante was hopelessly limited, Shakespeare was such a stupid man, Goethe was such a bore, Tolstoy was silly, etc. etc.” (page 92). # Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ara baliozian Posted March 28, 2009 Author Report Share Posted March 28, 2009 Thursday, March 26, 2009 *********************************************** ON REVOLUTION *********************************************** The average layman may not understand the exact meaning of subprime mortgages, hedge funds, toxic assets, derivatives, and all the complexities of the present economic crisis, but he understands greed when he sees it, and recognizes a bloodsucker when he sees one. Anger is negative, we are told. Anger does not solve problems. Where would revolutions be without anger? Where would America be without its Revolution? Americans today, especially the homeless and the unemployed who number by the million, have many more reasons to be angry and to revolt against their financial officers on Wall Street and representatives in Washington than they had against the mad English king. You say, anger is negative? I say, what could be more positive than anger against corruption, greed, incompetence, and injustice? * Even if they are allowed to keep their bonuses, the CEOs will spend it in fear, they will live in fear, and they may even go underground for the duration. Some day they may even realize that accepting those bonuses was the dumbest thing they ever did. * Organized religions have victimized more innocent civilians than organized crime. The same could be said of organized ideologies, including nationalism, communism, and capitalism. * Under a corrupt or authoritarian regime, law and order might as well be synonymous with fear and lawlessness. # Thursday, March 26, 2009 *********************************************** RIFFRAFF *********************************************** A so-called young financial expert on TV speaking of Wall Street chief executive officers: “Their salaries could be as low as $75,000...they survive on bonuses...” Bernard Madoff ruined about 5000 investors. Wall Street CEOs ruined the global economy. They should be grateful that so far they haven't been arrested. The very least they can do is work for minimum wage until they correct their blunders. But of course, not being a financial expert, I can rely only on my common sense, which, it seems, flies out the window when applied to Wall Street riffraff. And this so-called young whippersnapper thinks he will be quelling the anger of the unemployed and homeless on the grounds that these poor CEOs work for next to nothing? * Speaking of American movies, a French critic once described them as “technical perfection in the service of cretinism.” What we have here is financial expertise in the service of moronism! Consider the following scenario: Your house is on fire. Firefighters arrive and after pouring gasoline instead of water they expect you to be grateful to them. Thank you for doing such a great job. Here, please accept this small check as a token of my appreciation. * Another scenario: You hire a contractor to fix your old house. He in turn hires electricians, plumbers, dry-wallers, roofers, and so on. But by the time they are through the house is torn down as in the story of the big bad wolf and the three little pigs. At which point, the contractor demands to be paid the agreed on amount plus a bonus. * We are told the CEOs who bankrupted AIG have already quit. So what? Let's get them back and let them work for a dollar a year. Liddy is doing it. Is decency on Wall Street limited to only one CEO? * Once upon a time, when Communists spoke of Wall Street, they meant everything that was evil in the capitalist system. Who could have foreseen that some day Wall Street would be perceived as such by the whole world, including Americans? # Saturday, March 28, 2009 *********************************************** MEN AND WOMEN *********************************************** According to a study conducted by a Vatican theologian, men and women are tempted by the same sins but in different order of frequency. Men are tempted by women, food, laziness, anger, vanity, envy, and avarice; and women by vanity, envy, anger, men, food, avarice, and laziness. * THE SINS OF THE ESTABLISHMENT ********************************************** To support only writers who are pro-establishment is to be against literature and for prostitution. * A NEW BOOK ************************* In a recent issue of LE POINT (Paris, March 3, 2009) I read the following ad for Gilbert Sinoué's EREVAN: “The great novel of the Armenian people.” “A great novel that speaks of a terrible truth.” “Written with intense emotion, but also with justice.” “Gilbert Sinoué makes us relive the tragedy of an entire people.” * CARLOS FUENTES ******************************* “It makes no difference whether you surrender your ass or your conscience: you will get them back in bad shape.” # Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ara baliozian Posted April 1, 2009 Author Report Share Posted April 1, 2009 Sunday, March 29, 2009 *********************************************** WHERE WE STAND *********************************************** Russians gave communism a bad name and Americans did the same with capitalism. The next “fail-safe” or “best” system, whatever it may be, will also bite the dust by its dedicated supporters as surely as communism and capitalism. It is almost as if the destiny of the best were to be the worst. * Armenianism: the triumph of dogmatism over solidarity. * It is the most assertive among us that are the most insecure. * What we are is not a monolithic structure but fragments of what we could have been. * We are constantly bombarded by lies that encourage us to hate our fellow men. It is almost as if the function of our “betters” were to make us worse. * Pablo Neruda: “I only know the skin of the earth, / And it has no name.” After “All men are brothers,” the best argument against nationalism. * I see a clear parallel between what contemporary composers have done to music, what artists have done to art, what politicians have done to statesmanship, with what economists have done to the global economy. # Monday, March 30, 2009 *********************************************** SOCRATES ******************* “We approach truth only in the proportion as we are farther from life.” * ON OBJECTIVITY *************************** Objectivity and passionate involvement are mutually exclusive concepts – unless of course one develops the difficult art of thinking against oneself, which means assuming one is wrong even when – especially when – one is absolutely certain of one's moral superiority and infallible judgment. * ON UNDERSTANDING ******************************* To understand and solve a problem, one must be objective, and one must be objective for purely selfish reasons – to improve one's chances of survival. Cultures that are not tolerant of objectivity or dissent (in this context, two words that might as well be synonymous) have a short lifespan. Think of the Soviets, the Nazis, the regime of the Young Turks, and more recently, the Nixon administration. Closer to home, think of all the dissenting voices in the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the last century that were ignored by our revolutionaries who to this day emphasize their heroism instead of questioning their judgment. * DEFINING EVIL ****************************** To know what must be done and not do it. To know that what one does is wrong but do it anyway. To know that “a house divided against itself cannot stand” and to divide it anyway. * WORTH REPEATING ****************************** The surest way of moronizing a nation is to brainwash the people into believing they are not just smart but smarter than any other nation, and anyone who dares to say otherwise is an enemy of the people. I speak from experience. The more moronized I was, the smarter I thought i was. # Tuesday, March 31, 2009 *********************************************** STRANGE BUT TRUE ************************************ What a strange world we live in! Chief executive Rick Wagoner (the one who traveled to Washington by private jet to ask for a handout) is getting $23 million for bankrupting General Motors as the management is demanding more concessions from the workers. * The best argument against women's intuition and men's IQ (if such a thing exists) is the high rate of divorce. * In the struggle for justice there are no losers. Even if you lose you may inspire others to carry on the struggle, or you may wear down the opposition even if it is by an invisible fraction of an inch. * No one can be as ignorant, or rather, as infatuated with his own ignorance, as he who pretends to know and understand everything. I would even go as far as saying, the safest way of judging a man's knowledge and understanding is by the number of times he is willing to say “I don't know” and “I don't understand.” * One of the most difficult things in politics is separating friend from foe – especially the kind of foe who knows all the right words and can easily guess what it is exactly that you want to hear. * It is only after the obvious solution is rejected that a problem is declared insoluble. # Wednesday, April 1, 2009 *********************************************** DON'T BE A FOOL! ************************************ A wise man (it may have been Aldous Huxley) once said that our planet is the insane asylum of the universe. It is said, “There are forty-three kinds of insanity.” Or, to paraphrase Tolstoy, “Every insane person is insane in his own way.” There is a school of psychology that says, since the social order in which we live in is insane, the function of psychiatry is to replace one form of insanity with another. Consider the case of Christians who believe the Bible to be the source of all wisdom, including scientific knowledge. Chief executive officers who believe they deserve million-dollar bonuses after bankrupting not only their business but also the global economy. After reading one of my commentaries, a Mekhitarist monk is quoted as having said: “He is an intellectual and all intellectuals eventually go insane.” Which may suggest that we are better at diagnosing insanity in others than in ourselves. Either that or we assume to be the norm and any deviation we label as insane. We may know how to survive, but do we know how to live? We brag about our literature but we suppress free speech. Don't be taken in by appearances. Don't believe everything you read in the papers. There are as many lies in the speeches of our speechifiers and the sermons of our sermonizers than there are forms of insanity. # Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ara baliozian Posted April 4, 2009 Author Report Share Posted April 4, 2009 Thursday, April 2, 2009 *********************************************** THE UNANSWERED QUESTION ************************************ It is said of the 18th-century French aristocracy that they knew how to live. Yes, that they did. They knew how to live alright! What they didn't know – which is infinitely more important than what they knew – was how to survive. With us it's the other way around: we know how to survive, or so we are brought up to believe, but not how to live. If we use the word survival only in reference to the nation, and if by nation we mean the regime, yes, we may qualify as survivors. The questions to be asked at this point are: What kind of survival is it that requires the death of millions of innocent civilians, including our best and brightest? What kind of survival is it that places the survival of the regime above the survival of the people? What kind of survival is it that allows the regime to brainwash the people into believing that it is our patriotic duty to serve the regime? Serving the regime is a fascist concept. In a democracy, it is the state that serves the people (not the other way around), which is why politicians are referred to as public servants. But that's not the end of the story, which in our case happens to be not so much a comedy of errors as a tragedy of fallacies, or again, as a perversion of priorities. Now then, let us suppose for the sake of argument that your family perishes and you are the sole survivor. Do you then go around bragging about your own survival? I don't think so! And yet, this is what we are encouraged to do to perpetuate the lie that we never had it so good because we are in the best of hands. A final question: We may indeed know how to survive, but do our leaders know how to govern? # Thursday, April 3, 2009 *********************************************** 4 STORIES / 4 MORALS ************************************ 1. The Pope holds shares in the Casino at Monte Carlo. * 2. After bankrupting the global economy, chief executive officers collect million-dollar bonuses. * 3. Priests make a comfortable living by exploiting someone else's crucifixion. * 4. Turcocentric ghazetajis try to make a name for themselves by exploiting the martyrdom of innocent victims. # Moral I: When you reach the top, the rules of the game no longer apply. * Moral II: The rules governing underdogs do not apply to top dogs. * Moral III: When it comes to taking care of number one, all rules are suspended. * Moral IV: After declaring yourself to be on the side of the angels, you may forge an alliance with the devil. # Saturday, April 4, 2009 *********************************************** AS OTHERS SEE US ************************************ Did Princess Diana (may she rest in peace) have one, or is it two, drops of Armenian blood in her veins? Was Guderian of blitzkrieg fame an Armenian? Why should anyone give a damn? It seems to me we are so hungry for celebrity that nothing would make us happier if someone were to prove that Hitler's or Stalin's great-great mother or father was half- or even one-quarter Armenian. * We have a great many writers today who write as Armenians. I for one would like to write as a human being. We are all born as human beings but somewhere along the line we are carefully educated to identify ourselves with a specific group, after which we are told all kinds of lies about that group and it makes no difference which group it is. * We are brainwashed to justify our regime's failings by saying we are a young democracy. We are also informed that Armenia is “the cradle of civilization.” Figure that one out if you can. * If I were to meet an Azeri today and if I were to identify myself as an Armenian to him, my guess is he would see in me someone with a bloodthirsty disposition. I am told Azeris today identify Armenians as “the Israelis of the Caucasus,” and when a Muslim calls you an Israeli, take my word for it, that ain't no compliment. * Hanging a label on a fellow human being is the beginning of all crimes against humanity. Azeri refugees today think of Armenians the way Armenians think of Turks. Have I said this before? Readers accustomed to hearing old lies expect me to come up with new truths. To them I say, the number of truths is limited and nothing that is true is ever new. # Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ara baliozian Posted April 8, 2009 Author Report Share Posted April 8, 2009 Sunday, April 5, 2009 *********************************************** THE CHARITY OF SWINE ************************************ We are told the favorite reading matter of Roman emperors was epic poems glorifying their deeds. Which reminds me of a book I once wrote for an Armenian publisher subsidized by one of our national benefactors in which his (benefactor's) name wasn't mentioned. Though the book was a success (three printings in as many years) the publisher was fired. * Roman emperors, Ottoman sultans, Soviet commissars, Armenian benefactors, Wall Street chief executive officers: they expect to be brown-nosed and rewarded even when they make a mess of things. They want smart people working for them but not smart enough to see their limitations. They support free speech provided it doesn't expose their failings. * The wealthy think of the poor as lazy parasites. The poor return the compliment by viewing the wealthy as a bunch of bloodsuckers. * Some of the worst blunders in the history of mankind were committed by men who assumed to know better. * In the world of high finance, the lower in the totem pall you are, the more checks and balances you have to deal with. * I think of my schooldays in Venice when the Mekhitarist monks charged us for the toilet paper we used. Then motivated by greed they trusted the wrong investment firm and lost everything. # Monday, April 6, 2009 *********************************************** HUMAN NATURE EXPLAINED ************************************ “In his place I would have done the same thing.” There is more truth in that sentence than in many treatises on understanding and human nature. * “...tribalism has impeded African progress. What Africa needs is precisely such transmutations of tribal loyalties to the larger loyalties of nationhood.” Why is it that none of our pundits dares to say as much about us? * Both Turks and Armenians are naïve dupes in so far as they believe in the lies of their own political leaders, the biggest lie being that as civilized people they are incapable of violating anyone's human rights, let alone committing crimes against humanity. Butter would not melt in their mouths -- or anywhere else for that matter. * Reality is versatile in its production of facts and by carefully selecting some and ignoring or rejecting others one can justify anything. Theologians, ideologues, historians, and propagandists in general are fully aware of this phenomenon and like lawyers they go about their business with ruthless dishonesty. * Somewhere Alain writes that we conceive of birth as something that happened in the past and of death as something that will happen in the future. But in reality, he tells us, they are both ongoing processes. Every moment that passes is a preview of death, and it is up to us to be reborn as human beings “today, now, immediately, it is our only chance.” # Tuesday, April 7, 2009 *********************************************** TWO FASCINATING WRITERS ************************************ In his DIARIES, Christopher Isherwood speaks of several encounters with Lesley Blanch (then wife of Romain Gary) but at no time does he mention that she is the author of SABRES OF PARADISE, one of the most fascinating books ever written on the Caucasus, and one of the very few books that I have read three times -- the others being THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN (Mann), LOLITA (Nabokov), and Toynbee's RECONSIDERATIONS. Simenon is mentioned only once to be dismissed as “a dreary little mind.” In my twenties and for about ten years Simenon became an obsession. I read everything that I could locate in libraries and bookstores. He wrote under several pseudonyms and may have published as many as five hundred book, and slept with as many women, he never tired of boasting in interviews, and did so to enhance his understanding, he would explain. I think it was Gide who first compared him to Chekhov. In a 1960 entry, Isherwood quotes Leon Surmelian as having said: “...among Armenians who come to America, it is always the third-rate who succeed,” and “Armenians are either businessmen or dreamers.” I remember once when I wrote Surmelian a letter proposing an interview, he turned me down and said he had just published an essay in the weeklies and I was welcome to comment on it in a letter to the editor. # Wednesday, April 8, 2009 *********************************************** ISHERWOOD AND WHITMAN ************************************ By skipping passages dealing with Ramakrishna, Krishnamurti, assorted swamis and gurus, and mercenary Hollywood producers, I was able to finish Christopher Isherwood's mammoth DIARIES. May I confess that what I enjoyed most are his one-liners on his fellow men and women: On Charles Laughton: “stupid, vain and pretentious...an arrogant old fool.” On Laura Huxley (Aldous Huxley's third and last wife): “[a] mannish well-tailored bitch.” On Claire Bloom (who was to become Philip Roth's wife): “demure but probably quite a bit of a bitch.” On Shelley Winters: “a blundering Jewish leftwing ass.” On Izak (OUT OF AFRICA) Dinesen (Baroness Blixen): “a withered monkey.” * I am now reading Walt Whitman. Some of his lines are piercing in their precision, as when he speaks of animals: “They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago...” We need more Whitman in our lives and less sermonizers and speechifiers who rub salt in our wounds and promise heaven which is even more inaccessible to them than it is to the rest of us. # Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ara baliozian Posted April 11, 2009 Author Report Share Posted April 11, 2009 Thursday, April 9, 2009 ******************************************** TO EACH HIS OWN ************************************ To us, the Genocide is a tragedy. To the Turks, it's an embarrassment. To American politicians running for office, a cash cow. To our own leadership, a distraction from present problems and their reluctance or inability to solve them. To our Turcocentric ghazetajis, an endless source of venom and an opportunity to play the blame-game as well as a chance to assert moral superiority. As for Turcophile historians who say it was the Armenians who massacred the Turks; I for one am not surprised. So what if after 600 years of subservience that gradually degenerated to brutal oppression, some Armenians took justice into their own hands? Would anyone dare to assert that, had the Ottoman Empire been an Armenian Empire and Turks an oppressed minority, they would have said, “Let bygones be bygones. Let us smoke the peace nargileh and forever after live like brothers?" * ON MORAL SUPERIORITY ********************************* We are told when God created angels and He gave them a free will, half of them turned into devils. It is therefore safe to assume that if sometime in the future the Good Lord were to give His angels another crack at freedom, another 50% of them would make the wrong choice. Which is why so far God in His infinite wisdom has not made the same mistake. Which is also why, when God wants to destroy a man, He gives him more power, because more power means greater freedom. * P.S. ***************** Yesterday I listed four books that I have read three times. I should have included another – Raymond Chandler's FAREWELL, MY LOVELY. * WORDS OF WISDOM ******************************** Chinese saying: “Extreme cleverness is as bad as stupidity.” # Friday, April 10, 2009 ******************************************** A MENSCHE ************************************ In his THE GREAT WAR FOR CIVILIZATION, Robert Fisk dedicated an entire chapter to the Armenian genocide. He does the same with his latest book, THE AGE OF THE WARRIOR: SELECTED ESSAYS (New York, 2008). After tearing to shreds Turkish and “gutless” American denialists, among them President Bush, General Petraeus, ambassador Ryan Crocker, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, he turns his outrage on Armenians themselves. When an interviewer in Yerevan makes a reference to Turkey's “lack of democratization,” Fisk demands to know: “What about Armenia's pliant press? And why was it that present-day Armenia seemed to protest much less about twentieth-century's first Holocaust than the millions of Armenians in the diaspora, in the U.S., Canada, France, Britain, even Turkish intellectuals in Turkey itself?...Long live the Soviet Union.” A man after my own heart! # Saturday, April 11, 2009 ******************************************** THE USES AND ABUSES OF FAITH ************************************************* Whenever I replace the word “God” with “the Unknown and the Unknowable,” what I read makes either more sense or no sense at all – as in “God loves you.” If God loves us, His definition of love is more akin to hatred. * Most of mankind's problems, including our own, stem from the fact that those who have God or capital (make it, Capital or god) on their side, consider themselves beyond criticism. * When a man is devoid of honor, compassion, and understanding, he adopts race, color, and creed as criteria. * Faith is an essential ingredient in one's life, we are told. Maybe so. But what if faith allows us to call anyone who does not share our belief system an infidel dog who doesn't deserve to live? * What do I think of mysticism? Let me quote my favorite mystic, Saint Teresa of Avila: “It is the humblest among you who are the most perfect not those who are favored in prayer or with ecstasies.” # Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ara baliozian Posted April 15, 2009 Author Report Share Posted April 15, 2009 Sunday, April 12, 2009 ******************************************** THE LANGUAGE OF DIPLOMACY ************************************************* According to Talleyrand (see below) “Speech was given to man to disguise his thoughts.” Elsewhere he gives the following definition of non-intervention: “Mot metaphysique et politique qui signifie a peu pres la meme chose qu'intervention.” (A metaphysical and political word that means approximately the same thing as intervention.) Had our revolutionaries known what Talleyrand knew, namely that, in diplomacy verbal support means the opposite of military intervention, the Genocide could have been averted. What a difference a single word makes! No wonder medieval Jewish scribes copying the scriptures were warned a single wrong letter would mean the destruction of the world. Which is why Turks are against the use of the word genocide: they know it would usher in escalating territorial and financial demands with no end in sight, in addition to legitimizing Kurdish territorial claims. * Talleyrand (1754-1838) maybe said to have been the French Mikoyan. No matter who was at the top he got along with him. He knew how to compromise, adapt, and survive. Like Mikoyan he was educated in a seminary and it was said of him (as it could have been said of Mikoyan): “He would sell his soul for money, and he would be right for he would be exchanging dung for gold.” # Monday, April 13, 2009 ******************************************** MY FAVORITE AMERICAN WRITER ************************************************* It was in FROM HERE TO ETERNITY by James Jones that I first “met” Gandhi, and it was in Gandhi's writings that I first read about Thoreau. I dare anyone to read him (Thoreau) and not be infatuated by his down-to-earth honesty and style that does not take any prisoners. * On politicians: “Office-seekers and speech-makers who do not so much as lay an honest egg.” * On patriotism: “The remembrance of my country spoils my walk.” * On society: “Pigs in a littler which lie close together to keep each other warm.” * On wealth: “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.” * On his fellow men: “The man I meet with is not often so instructive as the silence he breaks.” * On his choice of career: “I have tried trade; but I found that it would take ten years to get under way in that, and that then I should probably be on my way to the devil.” # Tuesday, April 14, 2009 ******************************************** ON BLUNDERS ****************** Since the number of blunders is infinite and man's capacity to commit them without limit, both the young and the old, the experienced and the inexperienced, the careful and the careless, and the wise and the fool are destined to commit an equal number of them. * MAN AND GOD ************************** If to believe in God were the same as believing in men who speak in His name, a suicidal terrorist would qualify as a man of faith instead of a brainwashed fanatic and a brainless dupe. * THE GOOD AND THE BAD ************************************* In the presence of a bad man I am diminished. In the presence of a good man I am born again. * ON BEING HONEST *********************************** One of the benefits of being honest is to be shunned by crooks. * ON ECOLOGY ****************************** God is not an ecologist. He exterminated dinosaurs, saber-toothed tigers, the mammoth, and countless other species. # Wednesday, April 15, 2009 ******************************************** DRAGON'S TEETH *********************************** “The Passage du Commerce Saint-André” by Balthus is no doubt one of the most mysterious paintings by one of the most enigmatic modern painters. The old man in it is identified by Balthus himself as an Armenian. See BALTHUS: A BIOGRAPHY by Nicholas Fox Weber (New York, 1999), page 27. I am reminded of the words of a much traveled Dutch doctor who once told me: “No matter where you go, you will run into an Armenian.” If Talaat were alive today he would be willing to concede that deporting Armenians was a blunder because it amounted to sowing dragon's teeth. * In DICTIONARY OF LITERARY AND THEMATIC TERMS by Edward Quinn (New York, 2000), there is an entry on “naturalism,” with a single bibliographic source, Y.H. Krikorian's NATURALISM AND THE HUMAN SPIRIT (1944). * ON THE ART OF WRITING ****************************** Reduce a page into a single line. * ON THE ART OF LIVING ***************************************** “Divorce reason and marry booze.” This according to Omar Khayyam. * ACCORDING TO HORACE ************************************** “Poems written by water-drinkers have a short lifespan.” * ON LITERARY IMMORTALITY ****************************************** It lasts as long as the blink of an eye when measured in cosmic time. * MORE WORDS OF WISDOM **************************************** Viscount Samuel: “It is those who strive to make things better who save them from becoming worse.” * The TALMUD: “Thy friend has a friend, and thy friend's friend has another friend: be discreet.” # Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ara baliozian Posted April 18, 2009 Author Report Share Posted April 18, 2009 Thursday, April 16, 2009 ******************************************** FROM MY NOTEBOOKS *********************************** You may have noticed that, when an intelligent man behaves stupidly, the reasons he invents to justify his conduct will be even more stupid. * A fanatic will always have more enemies than a moderate because he will arouse hostility among fanatics in the opposite camp as well as moderates in his own. * Even when our predictions come true they do so in such an unexpected manner or context that their accuracy becomes irrelevant. * It is not at all unusual for our chauvinists to preach Armenian civilization and to practice Ottoman barbarism. * Where a part-time janitor makes more money than a full-time writer, there will be an abundance of trashy propaganda and a total absence of ideas. * In all political movements, lust for power is invariably hidden behind noble slogans: the greater the lust, the nobler the slogans. * The nobler the idea or ideology, the more crooks it will attract. # Friday, April 17, 2009 ******************************************** CONTEMPT *********************************** A couple of weeks ago I was exposed to a long televised lecture on solidarity and the primacy of Etchmiadzin by a former members of the Communist Party from the Homeland, that is to say, a full-time professional divider and atheist. Because as an orphan during World War I my mother was brought up as a Catholic by nuns, my schoolmates made fun of me and treated me as a lesser Armenian, perhaps even a coward and a renegade, all because, it seems, during the massacres, when Turkish soldiers came to arrest Armenians, the Catholics would say, “I am not an Armenian, I am a Catholic.” A loud-mouth taxi-driver uncle of mine held me in visible contempt and even ridicule because I dared to have ambitions beyond his attainments. The secretary of a so-called cultural foundation, himself a writer and teacher, once screamed at me: “How dare you criticize us? Just who the hell do you think you are?” In recounting these very few but representative anecdotes, my aim here is not to preach mutual respect – that would be highly premature – but to provide an objective assessment of our present situation that may lead to an enhanced awareness of where we stand as a community and as a nation. To those who tell me I write about our problems but fail to provide solutions, I add the following solutions to this particular problem: If you want to be loved, don't make yourself hateful; and if you want to be thought of as a smart Armenian, don't behave like a damn fool. # Saturday, April 18, 2009 ******************************************** MY FAVORITE BIBLICAL ONE-LINERS ************************************************ “Where there is no vision the people perish.” * “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” * “The Kingdom of God is within you.” * ON CONTRADICTIONS ************************************* There are two kinds of contradictions: (one) the kind that leads to compromise and synthesis, and (two) the dead-end, dogmatic, or Armenian kind that arrests progress because reason is replaced with ego. Result: no vision, a house divided, death and destruction – that is, the Kingdom of the Devil. * HEADLINE ******************************* “I am proud of my Armenian ass,” reads the headline of an article about an attractive wench in one of our weeklies. This vulgar boast is preferable to me to still another headline by one of our Turcocentric ghazetajis. * QUESTION ************************** What is the difference between pride in one's ass and pride in one's ego? * ANSWER *********************** One way to sum up the plot of Homer's ILIAD is to say it is about a war of egos over the abduction of an ass that resulted in the destruction of Troy and the death of countless “esh nahadags.” Because he was blind, Homer could not see this aspect of his story. As a result, he glorified militarism and heroism. # Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ara baliozian Posted April 22, 2009 Author Report Share Posted April 22, 2009 Sunday, April 19, 2009 ******************************************** ON RECEIVED IDEAS ************************************************ At a time when I didn't know who Shakespeare was, I heard an adult say, “HAMLET is Shakespeare's greatest play.” I immediately adopted that line as dogma and repeated it whenever Shakespeare was mentioned, until I heard someone say, “I prefer MACBETH.” If all ideas are open to contradiction, received ideas are doubly so. “Notwithstanding what the Good Book says about divided houses,” a reader tells me, “there are benefits to being divided. If one part is defeated and perishes, the other survives. Perhaps that's the secret of our survival." Maybe so, but what kind of life is it whose sole aim is survival? No doubt to survive is better than the alternative, but I believe, and I hope you will agree with me when I say, there are greater goals in a nation's life than mere survival. Such as? Such as creating a new civilization. We did that once. Which means we can do it again. And how do we do that? We begin by questioning the validity of all received ideas, one of them being that since to endure is one of our greatest achievements, we can now relax and say “yes” to whatever we are told by our “betters,” who on closer inspection may well be nothing of the kind. They may even be our worst! # Monday, April 20, 2009 ******************************************** REFLECTIONS ************************************************ The fascist mind comes in two parts: the ideological and the criminal; and the function of the ideological is to camouflage the criminal. * Politicians who profess family values see nothing morally inconsistent in screwing the nation. * Because our enemies won, we were not allowed to name our traitors. * Like most Armenians, I have followed many controversies in our media, and I have witnessed many more, but I have at no time heard an Armenian say: "I was wrong!" or, even better, "I was dead wrong because I placed my own ego, interests, family, political party, church, or tribe above the interests of the nation." * A power structure that has all the answers will view questions as subversive. * A woman raising her skirt in public will attract a bigger audience than a writer spilling his guts out. * At one end of the spectrum we have decent human beings who happen to be Armenian, and at the other, carcinogenic agents who wrap themselves up in the flag in order to hide their true colors. # Tuesday, April 21, 2009 ******************************************** VARIATIONS ON A FAMILIAR THEME ************************************************ We are told sex and violence in movies lower the moral standards of a nation. What we are not told is that intolerance in organized religions and ideologies, in addition to lowering moral standards, it claims many more innocent victims. Intolerance also divides a nation thus making it more vulnerable to rape and massacre (of the “red” as well as the “white” variants). Don't get me wrong. I am not advocating for more sex and violence in movies. What I am doing is exposing the double-talk of religious and political leaders who speak with a forked tongue and are believed by dupes. * The guiding principle of all men at the top is, if the truth will harm your power, prestige, and integrity, it's okay to lie your head off. But the problem with lies is that they invariably create a chain reaction of more lies until the truth is buried beneath them like a needle in a haystack. Case in point: If the Turks are bloodthirsty savages, why were we their most faithful subjects for six hundred years? And if we are smart and they are dumb, why is it that it took us six centuries to unmask them? And even more to the point: if they are pathological liars and we speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, why are we against dissent and free speech? What are we afraid of? And if we have produced more heroes per capital than any other nation on earth, allow me to pose the following question: What could be more cowardly than fear of free speech? # Wednesday, April 22, 2009 ******************************************** WHY HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF ************************************************ History repeats itself for the simple reason that the men at the top are bastards and the people are as gullible as children. Thoreau was right when he said Egypt would have been better off if the people had drowned the pharaohs in the Nile like dogs instead of building pyramids for them; and Shaw was also right when he said we would have no more wars if soldiers took aim and shot not at the enemy but at their own sergeants. One reason he was an enthusiastic supporter of the Soviets is that Russian soldiers in World War I did exactly that. * Homer was dead wrong when he decided not to quote Greeks who said they resented killing and dying in defense of the non-existent honor of a slut who happened to be the wife of an impotent fool. * I once heard one of our notorious bloodsuckers say, if he were to work for an odar organization, he would make twice as much. In nature, parasites do their work in silence; among us, they demand our gratitude. * Among my readers, I have critics (which is understandable), enemies (which is less so), and mortal enemies (whose hatred of me is so visceral that it might as well be Ottoman). # Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ara baliozian Posted April 25, 2009 Author Report Share Posted April 25, 2009 Thursday, April 23, 2009 ******************************************** ON SHRINKS ************************************************ After the composition of his First Piano Concerto, Rachmaninoff is said to have experienced a crisis during which he became convinced he had lost his creative impetus permanently. But after seeing a psychiatrist he recovered his creativity and composed his Second Piano Concerto, or so we are told by his biographers. What we are not told is that if he had not seen a shrink, maybe he would have composed nine symphonies. Marlon Brando was under constant psychiatric care and instead of getting better, he got worse, in addition to making an unholy mess of his private life and his physique. Neither Tolstoy nor Dostoevsky were ever treated by a shrink, and my guess is, their problems were worse than Rachmaninoff's and Brando's combined. * Once upon a time, in the Middle Ages, we were celebrated for being good fighters. We still are, but only against the wrong enemy: ourselves. * I write for two totally non-literary reasons: to fight boredom and to acquire friends; and with every book I have published, I have acquired a new friend; also (alas!) twenty-two enemies. * There is no evidence to suggest that the average Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, or Jew is a better human being than the average agnostic or atheist. Which amounts to saying: all organized religions are more or less alike and very often they succeed only in legitimizing prejudice, promoting a false sense of moral superiority, and dehumanizing a fraction of mankind with such labels as pagans, heretics, infidels or giaours. # Friday, April 24, 2009 ******************************************** ARMENIAN MANIFESTO ************************************************ What choice did we have under the Ottomans and the Soviets? Wrong question. When we had a choice, we failed to present a united front to the enemy. And what made our enemies invincible was their solidarity. Let's not lose sight of that fundamental fact, which our dividers do their utmost to cover up in order to appear (a) to be blameless, and ( to continue dividing us. Blameless? Why do you think General Antranik wanted to see them hanged from the nearest tree? Why do you think Zarian called them “cannibals”? And please,don't tell me our sermonizers, speechifiers, and Turcocentric ghazetajis know better than Zarian, the General, and Charents, whose final “Message” mentions neither Turks nor Russians. Let's not have any illusions about our men at the top, who like Wall Street chief executive officers, care more about their powers and privileges than the welfare of the nation. Which is why, at the risk of repeating myself, I will say again: Armenians of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your dividers. # Saturday, April 25, 2009 ******************************************** MAXIMS AND REFLECTIONS ************************************************ It is not easy writing for readers who already know everything they need to know, even if what they really know happens to be recycled mumbo jumbo. * Work hard, but not too hard: you may be digging your own grave. * Authority thrives on ignorance. Where there are leaders (as opposed to public servants) there will be spin doctors, cover-up artists, an uninformed community, and dupes. * From nature’s point of view, chastity is a far more dangerous sexual perversion than all the others combined. * Venetian saying: "The priest’s friend loses his faith, the doctor’s his health, the lawyer’s his fortune." * Schopenhauer: "We pay an attention to the opinion of others which is out of all proportion to its value." * When midgets are in charge, giants become outlaws. # ====================================================================== Ara Baliozian reads the Armenians, yo’ ************************************************ by Christopher Atamian ************************************** Published: Saturday April 18, 2009 "Lying is done with words and also silence." -Adrienne Rich The poetic genre known as the aphorism goes back at least to Hippocrates, in 5th-century B.C.E. Greece. The word aphorism derives from the Greek aphorismos and denotes an original and easily remembered thought, expression, or witticism. Popular aphorists of the past include Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, and Erasmus. Armenians have a practitioner of this rarefied art as well, and he goes by the name of Ara Baliozian. The author of some 20 books of prose, poetry, and plays, as well as translations of Armenian writers such as Zabel Yessayan and Kostan Zarian, Baliozian was born in Athens, attended the now-defunct College Moorat-Raphael in Venice, and currently resides in Kitchener, Ontario. His newest work, a slim volume (56 pages) titled Pertinentes Impertinences, is a series of reflections and aphorisms in French translated from English by Denis Donikian, Mireille Besnilian, and Dalita Roger, and published last year by Arvesd Aysor in Yerevan. Baliozian writes about a wide range of topics and people, though he seems particularly at home when perhaps justifiably lambasting Armenian politicians and leaders. Baliozian takes no prisoners - intellectual or otherwise. This hasn't necessarily made him the most popular writer in the Armenian diaspora, though an increasing number of people now read his work with passion and a deep-seated sense of appreciation for his daring to say what so many others think. Whether Baliozian's views represent those of an enlightened minority or of a silent majority, his work should be read by every Armenian, especially when they are young and in their formative stages, as a means of opening their minds to different ideas and ways of thinking about their culture. In a sense, Baliozian is heir to the Armenian writers before him who dared to analyze and constructively criticize Armenian society. The Armenian mind that Baliozian deconstructs so ably is a direct descendant of the mentality that Hagop Oshagan describes in novels such as Mnatsortats and Haji Murad and that Constantinopolitan writers such as Krikor Zohrab wrote about before the Catastrophe of 1915. "If you want to understand Armenians," Baliozian writes, "don't read their nationalist historians; read instead a history of Armenian literature. The only reason we don't burn writers the way Indians burn widows is that we prefer to ignore them, which amounts to burying them alive." Baliozian on the sacred cows of Armenian culture: "Because I refuse to share their obsession with massacres and money, they call me negative. One way to be positive in their eyes is to adopt ‘Yes, sir!' as a mantra.'" (Both quoted from baliozian.blogspot.com. All quotes that follow are from Pertinentes Impertinences.) Baliozian's oeuvre is in point of fact rather subversive. He uses repetition to his advantage and hammers away at his iconoclastic thoughts and ideas in the same way that the Armenian press and powers that be have drilled their own propaganda into Armenian minds and hearts for centuries now. It's a welcome counterbalance. While no one would deny, for example, the terrible suffering that successive Ottoman and Turkish governments have inflicted on Armenians and on the Armenian psyche, Baliozian is quick to confront the type of knee-jerk anti-Turkism that portrays Turks as somehow more cruel or barbaric by nature than others: "Our magazines regularly publish so many anti-Turkish commentaries that if our editors were to define what it means to be Armenian, I would imagine they would define it as hating Turks. And to think that these are the exact same people who criticize me under the pretext that I am a repetitive pessimist." (p. 18) Baliozian's writing is also an intelligent and sometimes humorous call to introspection and societal self-criticism: "An Armenian-American composer admitted to me one day: ‘I hope that Armenians won't support me. I'd be grateful if they spared me their hostility.'" (p. 49) When analyzing the current Armenian craze for all things Gorky, Baliozian recalls the following: "Speaking of Arshile Gorky, one of our elder statesmen once told me: ‘Not a single Armenian bought a painting from Gorky while he was alive.'?" (p. 49) The author is at his most incisive when taking on taboos in Armenian intellectual history and commenting on the behavior of certain contemporary leaders: "Our charlatans tell us that our patrons, bishops, and do-gooders know better than we do because they speak in the name of God and Capital. And when God and Capital speak, the scribblers are meant to shut their mouths and listen. Otherwise their mouths must be shut for them, that is to say, cut their tongues cut out, in good old Ottoman fashion." (p. 27) There is isn't much to criticize about Pertinentes Impertinences apart from the fact that Baliozian, perhaps weary of repeating the same mantras that go unheeded, may indeed at times begin to sound repetitive. Baliozian's observations, however, are about as close as any contemporary Armenian writer comes to getting at the truth of things. And as the commonplace aphorism states, the truth will set you free. A fitting coda to this piece and to Baliozian's work comes from Kingsley Amis, whom the author quotes as saying: "If you don't disturb anybody with what you write, then I think there's no point in writing." (p. 47) All (re)-translations of Baliozian's writing from French to English were made by Christopher Atamian. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ara baliozian Posted April 29, 2009 Author Report Share Posted April 29, 2009 Sunday, April 26, 2009 ******************************************** ELEGY ************************************************ An American chief executive officer – young, handsome, healthy, fabulously wealthy – has committed suicide. One down, ninety-nine to go. * Two American governors, Spitzer and Blogojevich, were caught red-handed. One resigned, the other impeached. But to me, the greater scandal is the fact that several of Obama's financial advisers are former Wall Street chief executive officers. If it takes one to catch one, how come no one has been caught yet? Bernie Madoff? If he is in jail today it's because he confessed. And then there are the senators who deny the reality of the Genocide not because they are convinced that to be the truth but because they are being handsomely compensated by Turkish lobbyists. * The rich are swine. Even as I curse my fate, I thank God for making me poor. * What is the penalty for being wrong? If nothing, anyone can say anything he wants. * To be easily satisfied with one’s own arguments is an unmistakable symptom of advanced cretinism. # Monday, April 27, 2009 ******************************************** LIVE AND LEARN ************************************************ When it comes to learning about oneself, friends are useless, enemies more valuable. * Repeating oneself and being consistently negative are not mortal sins; being dishonest is. * A hundred years ago our political leaders were naïve daydreamers. Today they are – or rather they think they are – pragmatic operators. I have trouble deciding which is worse: being at the mercy of fools, or idiots who think they are smart? * Let others speak of the American dream, we can speak only of the Armenian nightmare. * What kind of loving Father is He that needs to be constantly reminded to “give us this day our daily bread,” after which He lets millions die of malnutrition and starvation. * You begin to learn only after you unlearn what you have been taught. Likewise, you begin to write only after you give up all literary ambitions. * I am grateful to readers who don't think highly of me. The temptation to believe sycophants can be overwhelming. * When experts disagree, prejudice casts the deciding vote. * Because the prodigal son returned, the fatted calf was butchered. Good news for the guilty son, bad news for the innocent calf. Why couldn't they have a vegetarian feast? # Tuesday, April 28, 2009 ******************************************** FEEDBACK ************************************** Do not bother reading what follows because I have said it before, and many others have said it before me. * Some readers tell me I make them laugh. Others say I depress them. I suggest it's not me they are talking about but our reality. * I wish I were a comedian. The ability to make people laugh at themselves I consider one of the rarest of all gifts. * We all have our share of failings, limitations, and blind spots. In religious parlance, we are all sinners, including saints. That's Naregatsi's message, in case you are not willing to take my word for it. With one difference. Some of us pretend otherwise, and they happen to be the worst, and it's their awareness of their condition that makes them compensate by assuming a holier-than-thou stance. * To my critics I say, criticize, if you must, the incompetence of our political leaders, the values of our merchants, the dogmas of our bishops, and the double-talk of our superpatriotic bloodsuckers. Do not shoot our critics, who like piano players in western saloons, are doing their best. * AMERICANISMS ********************************** “What's your racket?” “I am not a crook.” “Do bears shit in the forest?” “Does the Pope speak Latin?” And the other day in a movie: “Does the Pope shit in the forest?” # Wednesday, April 29, 2009 ******************************************** SKELETONS IN THE CUPBOARD ************************************** ********************************************* FIRST NATION? ********************* Love our enemies? We can't even stop hating one another. * EITHER / OR? **************************** “Do you think of yourself as a success or a failure?” Very much like the overwhelming majority of my fellow men, I think of myself as a working stiff. * MIRACLES ************************* There are two kinds of miracles: (one) useless – like walking on water; and (two) dangerous – like promoting alcoholism by turning water into wine. * MEMOIRS ********************* One reason I went into writing is that I hate working for nonentities who expect you to behave like a lesser nonentity – and all for minimum wage. I know now that writing for Armenians is no different – minus the minimum wage, of course. * WINNERS AND LOSERS *********************************** “Just because you are a loser, it doesn't follow so is the nation. Stop projecting!” I think of myself as someone who speaks of reality in an environment dominated by propagandists who speak of fantasy, which allows them to see moral victory in military defeat, and a Higher Truth in a Big Lie. # Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ara baliozian Posted May 2, 2009 Author Report Share Posted May 2, 2009 Thursday, April 30, 2009 ******************************************** ON INTELLECTUALS ************************************** Intellectuals are a nuisance to the rich and parasites to the poor. But their real enemies are neither the poor nor the rich but intellectuals. * ON TURCOCENTRISM ********************************** The unspoken message of our Turcocentric ghazetajis seems to be, the keys to the Gates of Heaven will be ours only after we do to them what they did to us. These ghazetajis are the true offspring of our revolutionaries in the Ottoman Empire who promised heaven and delivered hell. * ENEMIES ********************** We are our greatest enemies. I can prove this by saying I have done more harm to myself than all my enemies combined. * CRITICS ************************ Socrates and Jesus had them, and as everyone knows by now, saints have been the most consistently and universally abused people on earth. * ON AUTHORITY ********************** Respect for authority is the source of all evil. * ON REVOLUTION ********************************** Revolutions are less about justice or the distribution of wealth, and more about the distribution of power, and power will be abused regardless of who is at the top. For the slave, it makes no difference if his master is Turk or Armenian. # Friday, May 1, 2009 ******************************************** SIGNS ************************************** Everything is as it should be. I never had it so good. The surest warnings of an impending catastrophe. * You say I always see the dark side of things. I say someone has to. Paranoiacs have enemies too. And who said pessimists are always wrong? * You cannot hide your ignorance. It is your most transparent possession. * When an Armenian defeats another Armenian, it is the nation that loses. * A lie is like a deadly virus. Left unattended it will poison and kill its promoter as well as his dupes, families as well as communities, tribes as well as nations, empires as well as civilizations. * In democracies, dissidents like Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell were (and still are) universally respected, sometimes even Nobelized. We all know what happened to dissidents in the USSR. I venture to suggest, we Armenians (judging by the number of writers we have betrayed, silenced, starved and driven to suicide) are more like Stalinists than the British. # Friday, May 1, 2009 ******************************************** FROM MY NOTEBOOKS ************************************** We all make mistakes, especially the infallible. * The brainwashed never question their infallibility. * The brainwashed cannot speak for themselves, neither can they think, they can only follow orders, or, like monkeys, dance to the tune of an invisible organ-grinder. * The 5th century AD was our Golden Age, the 20th century our Stone Age. * When the old fight, it is the young who die. When the rich fight, it is the poor who die. If it were up to the old and the rich to do the dying, we would have no more wars. * Where there is an Armenian church there will also be a wealthy merchant with a guilty conscience. # Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ara baliozian Posted May 6, 2009 Author Report Share Posted May 6, 2009 Sunday, May 3, 2009 *********************************** WHAT IS LITERATURE? ********************************************** There is no consensus on the subject. Some say the function of literature is to understand reality. Others, to introduce or enhance moral standards. To educate, explain, and instruct. To fight corruption and injustice. To expose prejudices. To see beauty and eternity in a blade of grass. Dissidents believe the function of literature is to question authority. Those in authority disagree: they say writers should behave like a chorus singing hymns to their infallibility, greatness, integrity, vision, and glory. It has also been said what literature does is to make "sh*t look like rose jam" (Jean Genet). Speaking for myself, I believe the first and most important function of literature is not to bore the reader. And speaking of sh*t and rose jam: I am reminded of Saroyan defending his one-dimensional depiction of Armenian characters in his fiction by saying he had only “stylized” them -- probably meaning that he had done to Armenians what Leonardo had done to Mona Lisa, or what Balthus had done to his street scenes: that is to say, introduced something that is not present in reality. * Monday, May 4, 2009 **************************************** AMERICANS AND GENOCIDE ************************************* Hugo Chavez: “Columbus was the commander of an invasion that resulted in the greatest genocide the world has ever known.” Now you know why American presidents promise but they hesitate to deliver. All the Turks have to do is tell them, “Armenians are our Indians.” * A WOMAN ON WOMEN *********************************** Colette on feminists: “I would put them all in a harem.” * CIORAN ON THE FRENCH ************************************** “They prefer an elegant lie to a clumsily expressed truth.” * ON SACRED COWS ********************************* The only thing they are good for is shish kebab. # Tuesday, May 5, 2009 ***************************************** NOTES AND COMMENTS ************************************* To understand how easy it is to be wrong, all I have to do is review my past, and I don't mean my distant past. I mean yesterday. * There is more to being Armenian than hating Turks and lamenting our martyrs. Looking backward is useful only if we learn from our blunders. What have we learned so far? Life isn't fair? Big fish eat small fish? Politicians speak with a forked tongue? But then, are we fair to one another? Are our big fish vegetarian? Are our politicians honest? Don't make me laugh. * Truth may well be beyond our reach, but honesty is not. # Wednesday, May 6, 2009 ***************************************** THE INSULTED AND THE INJURED ************************************************** One of the most astonishing things about human nature, Dostoevsky tells us, is that it can get used to anything. For a thousand years we were ruled by tribal kings, princes, and nakharars. For six hundred years we were the obedient subjects of sultans and more recently of ruthless commissars. Today we find ourselves at the mercy of empty suits and bearded charlatans who rule by delivering empty verbiage and whose role models are not statesmen or men of faith but “crocodiles” (Chekhov). And whenever someone takes it upon himself to point this out, he is either starved or silenced permanently. And here I could make a long list of names from Abovian (who committed suicide) to Zarian (who for all practical purposes was buried alive). Have I said this before? Why shouldn't I say it again, if what I and many others before me have said has so far failed to register on our collective consciousness? “I can't write novels like Dostoevsky,” Oshagan is quoted as having said, “because we Armenians don't have Dostoevskian characters.” But what is the history of our nation with all its unspeakable betrayals, degradations, and suffering if not a character straight out of Dostoevsky? # Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ara baliozian Posted May 9, 2009 Author Report Share Posted May 9, 2009 Thursday, May 7, 2009 ***************************************** WHAT I KNOW ABOUT OUR RULING CLASSES ************************************************** We may not have an aristocracy or an elite, but we have always had a ruling class or classes, even if more often than not they were not our real rulers but “their” puppets – and by “their” I mean our masters and oppressors, that is to say, the enemy. We have always had dissidents too, even in our Golden Age (5th century AD), even if their word didn't carry much weight, and whenever not silenced by the likes of Talaat and Stalin, they were alienated by our “puppets” and ignored by the people. Consider our situation today: our ruling classes have the power and the money. They control our churches, community centers, schools, and the press. They run bureaucracies. They subsidize the publication of textbooks which legitimize and promote their own version of the past that is as objective and honest as any state-sponsored version of the past taught in, say, Turkish or even American educational institutions. What has been the contribution of our dissidents in our context? The same as that of the people – only victims. There is an American political saying, “Let the best man win.” In our case the chances are the winner will be “the best man” only for the enemy and the worst for the rest of us. This may explain why our dissidents, very much like the people, have been and continue to be perennial losers. # Friday, May 8, 2009 ***************************************** WHAT IF I AM WRONG? ************************************************** A question that comes up again and again is: “What would you have done in their place?” One way to answer that question is by saying I am more worried about what I should be doing in my place: Should I join them in covering up their blunders and make a comfortable living, as most of my former friends and academics are doing? Or state honestly what I think, even if it means living in solitary confinement in my self-imposed gulag? QUESTION: What if you are wrong? ANSWER: There is always that possibility, of course. To say otherwise would be a declaration of infallibility, which, by the way, is what they imply when they blame all our misfortunes on others. Besides, I'd much rather be wrong as an honest man than right as a rascal. But assuming I am wrong: What's the harm done? I can always be corrected, insulted, silenced...and I have been -- insulted and silenced more often than corrected. But when the leadership is wrong the result may well be either a “red” or a “white” massacre, that is, alienation and assimilation in the Diaspora and exodus from the Homeland. # Saturday, May 9, 2009 ***************************************** GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER ************************************************** Sex was a taboo subject in the Ottoman Empire but the Sultan could have as many as a thousand houris in his hourihouse. As for our own mini-sultans: after leading the nation to defeat, oppression, and massacre, they dare to speechify and sermonize on patriotism to the rest of us. * How do I know my version of the story to be the only true one? I don't. But unless proven otherwise, I shall continue to assert what I understand to be an honest and objective assessment of our situation. * Am I saying anyone who disagrees with me is dishonest? No! He could also be an ignoramus. * Another word for lamentation for the sake of lamentation is self-pity, and the aim of self-pity is to invite others to pity us. If you don't believe me, listen to Zohrab: “One should confront the misfortunes of life not with despair and dejection but in the same way that one confronts the sudden arrival of an unwelcome guest – with a smiling face. We Armenians should sing and laugh more often in order to develop that degree of emotional health and intellectual balance without which we can achieve very little in this world. A nation that is given to lamentation will never amount to anything.” * And here is Zohrab again on propaganda: “My code of ethics: between the real and the imaginary, choose the real; between truth and falsehood, choose truth, at all times, everywhere.” # Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ara baliozian Posted May 13, 2009 Author Report Share Posted May 13, 2009 Sunday, May 10, 2009 ***************************************** EXPLANATIONS ************************************************** There is a type of liar who after lying repeatedly ends up believing in his own lies. That's one way to explain the popularity of sermonizers and speechifiers. * Avedik Issahakian: “A wealthy man is nothing but a thief who has not yet been caught.” Perhaps because he does his thieving in a land whose legislators are themselves thieves. * Puzant Granian: “We have many national benefactors but not a single national writer.” That may be because benefactors prefer lies and flattery – that is to say, speechifiers, sermonizers, and brown-nosers. * Writers like Siamanto and Totovents could not stand life in America and returned to Istanbul under Talaat and to Yerevan under Stalin respectively only to be arrested and slaughtered, probably because they found the prospect of being dependent on the charity of swine worse than death. * The overwhelming majority of our writers agree in telling us that if we want to get at the roots of our misfortunes we must look within and that the blame-game is a Big Lie. Which means, our Turcocentric ghazetajis are no better than cretins whose sole aim in life is to moronize the people -- not a particularly demanding enterprise when dealing with a nation that has been brutalized by millennial oppression by some of the most ruthless and bloodthirsty regimes in the history of the world. # Monday, May 11, 2009 ***************************************** OF CABBAGES AND KINGS ************************************************** We should treat Turks as friends if only because it is easier to negotiate with friends than with enemies. If so far we have failed to do that it may be because we cannot even treat our brothers as friends. When was the last time an Armenian trusted another Armenian? * According to Lobo Antunes, a celebrated contemporary Portuguese writer, the only way to write is “to imagine yourself naked, smelling of formaldehyde, flat on your back in a marble tub, waiting for them to cut open your ribs with a huge pair of scissors.” A man after my own heart. I too believe to write any other way is to recycle propaganda. * If you play poker with a king and you win his kingdom, don't be surprised if he says, “Off with his head!” * I envy the rich for being in a position to deliver the line, “Talk to my lawyer!” * And speaking of the rich: It is said of one of our national benefactors that whenever someone approached him directly with a request for financial support, he would say, “Talk to my people.” * Self-deception is escape from reality, and those who deceive themselves might as well be open invitations to deceivers. # Tuesday, May 12, 2009 ***************************************** MART BIDI CH'ELLANK ************************************************** Do you want to understand Turks? Think of an Armenian with power. * The ideal dupe is someone who has been brought up to believe he is smart, he is progressive, and he is beyond criticism. Whereas a really smart person is more like Socrates who knew more than anyone else but who pretended to know nothing. * If I repeat myself it may be because I hope to have better luck with the next generation. Call me an optimist. In this line of work you have to be a little crazy to carry on. * What is the difference between literature and trash? The trash gets printed. * Our brainwashed dupes today are more pro-establishment than our bosses, bishops, and benefactors, in the same way that our oligarchs in the Homeland are more capitalist than Wall Street. # Wednesday, May 13, 2009 ***************************************** MART BIDI CH'ELLANK / II ************************************************** Our struggle, our real struggle, is not against men but against an abstraction that is lighter than a feather but weighs on us like a mountain: our history. Millennial oppression has so thoroughly dehumanized us that we can no longer act, we can only react blindly, and whenever we react blindly we do so not only against our own interests but also against reason itself. Consider our genocide as a case in point: we didn't have to predict it in order to take evasive action. All we had to do is listen to the countless warnings of foreign observers, missionaries, and our own insiders within the Ottoman administration. And consider what's happening today: our literature, our religion, and reason itself are unanimous in warning us that the only way to divide a house is by tearing it down. And yet...(the two saddest words in the English language, it has been said) we continue to waste millions by constructing two schools, two houses of worship, and two community centers when one would be not only sufficient but also the right thing to do. We all know what happens to the blind leading the blind, let alone to the blind, deaf, and dumb leading the blind, deaf, and dumb who have somehow managed to convince themselves that not only they are smarter than anyone else but also that God Almighty Himself is on their side. # Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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