as i see it - Pt. IV

[ara baliozian]

Friday, March 11, 2005

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OF LAMBS AND WOLVES,

FROGS, ELEPHANTS, AND TIGERS

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When Zarian said “An Armenian’s tongue can be sharper than a Turk’s yataghan,” and “Armenians survive by cannibalizing one another,” I have every reason to suspect he had Ottomanized Armenians in mind.

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Aldous Huxley’s definition of civilization: “A systematic withholding from individuals of certain occasions for barbarous behavior.”

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Some of my readers resent the fact that I dare to speak of our problems. If we are to believe them, all nations have problems, except us. And if we have problems it’s because the world outside (the savage Turks and the deceitful West) has foisted them on us. It follows, I should concentrate on exposing and solving the world’s problems and leave ours alone. Disagreement with this mindset is perceived as treason, betrayal, and collaboration with the enemy.

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We are told we were massacred because we were like lambs at the mercy of wolves. And the irony here is that, to prove this point, our lambs turn into a pack of wolves.

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I once heard one of our Ramgavar elder statesmen (in his eighties, bald, mustache, fluent in Russian) say: “We were like frogs trying to rape an elephant.”

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On another occasion, I heard an old lady, a survivor of the massacres, say: “The Turks are nice people if you don’t step on their tail.”

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William Saroyan: “Turks are like any other people, as good or as bad as Greeks, Jews, Russians, and Germans.”

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Zabel Yessayan: “Not all Turks are bad.”

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And I reflect that if they were wolves, they must have been vegetarian wolves because they did not devour us for 600 years.

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When I am told that we had no hand in shaping our destiny as a nation, that our conduct throughout the centuries and millennia has been beyond reproach, and our character as a nation is beyond criticism, I feel justified in wondering if I am dealing with reasonable men or inmates of an asylum for the incurably insane.

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And now, allow me to ask some rhetorical questions:

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When was the last time we had a leadership that was accountable to the people?

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Why is it that some of our ablest writers – from Raffi, Baronian, and Odian to Shahnour, Zarian, Avedik Issahakian, and Baruir Massikian, among many others, were critical of our political and religious leadership?

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Why is it that Naregatsi, our most revered writer who has been called “our Shakespeare,” is willing to identify himself as one of the vilest creatures on earth? – “a wicked and slothful servant; an abusive contradicter; an ass’s foal, intractable, wild, and uncouth; the broken lock on a door; the useless coin buried beneath the soil; ever active in satanic inventions; slow in mine observance of promises; diligent in malignant acts of ribaldry…” and so on and so forth.

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A suggestion: If you decide to contradict what I have said above, take care to do so more like a lamb and less like a wolf. Behave more like your definition of an Armenian and less like your idea of a carnivorous Turk.

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I am reminded of Anton Chekhov, who, when asked what was his message, replied: “Gentlemen, let’s behave more like gentlemen!”

#

[ara baliozian]

Saturday, March 12, 2005

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Being an adult means assuming responsibility for one's thoughts and actions; which also means questioning all received ideas, especially ideas dealing with God and Country. This is not as easy as it sounds. Billions of adults today profess belief systems simply because when they were children and unable to think for themselves, they trusted the judgment of an authority figure.

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I don't trust everything Armenian propaganda tells me. That does not mean I will be taken in by Turkish propaganda. On the contrary. Very much on the contrary!

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If we agree that not all Turks are bad, it follows, we should speak about them in such a manner as not to alienate the good, who may well be on our side.

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The quintessential dupe is he who will believe anything that flatters his vanity.

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When a sermonizer or speechifier tries to convince you that your God is the only true God and your country is better than any other country, you can be sure of one thing: he is either a dupe or a liar.

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Some readers complain that they find my ideas depressing. But I see myself as a bearer of good tidings. If I were to sum up my message, it would be: We are now free citizens in a free world. Both the Sultan and Stalin and their empires have been consigned to the dustbin of history. Armenians of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your Ottoman and Bolshevik chains.

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To readers who try to re-create me in their own image, I say: It is a writer's function to say what must be said, a reader's right to ignore him, and a moderator's or editor's privilege to silence him. Meddlers, kibitzers, and commissars have no place in this equation.

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I suspect there are more frustrated commissars or control freaks in a democracy than real commissars in a totalitarian regime.

#

[ara baliozian]

Sunday, March 13, 2005

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ON PATRIOTISM

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There is nothing wrong with patriotism, provided patriots on both sides settle their differences without involving civilians.

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Perhaps I take after my father. Was he a patriot? I am not sure. I don’t know. I don’t remember him ever using the word. I suspect he was too busy trying to survive in a hostile environment to have any time or inclination to speechify. He was the quintessential underdog, and for the underdog the difference between war and peace might as well be invisible to the naked eye.

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I wonder how many of our fire-breathing Bush-league patriots would be willing to confront their counterparts in a field of honor?

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Consider how many massacres would have been prevented in a world without patriotism.

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Our understanding of the past is dependent on our choice of sources. And when I speak of sources, I don’t mean sources of propaganda.

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Is a patriot capable of delivering a single objective sentence, especially if he considers objectivity unpatriotic?

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Has anyone ever been successful in convincing a man in love that the woman he loves, far from being the most beautiful woman in the world, is just a woman, like countless other women?

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“When the rich fight, it is the poor who die.”

#

[ara baliozian]

Monday, March 14, 2005

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War-makers are never wrong, or so they expect us to believe. If they win, they consider themselves beyond criticism. If they lose, they call it moral victory. In either case, the men at the top, if they want to stay at the top, must at all times project infallibility. Which means, anyone who dares to question their conduct must be seen as an enemy of the people – please note: not a critic of policy-makers, but of the people, who had nothing to do with the formulation and implementation of the policy.

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Whenever I make an honest effort to introduce some degree of objectivity in our perception of the past, I am accused of ignorance, and worse, of blaming the victim. Since I have consistently maintained the people to be double victims – victims of foreign aggression first, and victims of domestic incompetence second – I dismiss the second charge as the kind that consists in slinging mud hoping some of it will stick. As for being ignorant: I am more than willing to concede that, unlike my critics, I neither know nor understand everything. Which is why I ask questions. And I ask questions because I have doubts about our propaganda line.

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If our revolutionaries are blameless, as their dupes expect us to believe, why is it that General Antranik blamed the massacres on them and at one point publicly declared that, if it were up to him, they would be crucified.

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More questions: Why did Zarian say, “Our political parties have been of no political use to us. Their greatest enemy is free speech.” Why free speech? What are they afraid of? What are they hiding?

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If our revolutionaries are without blame, why did Hagop Oshagan say: “Our revolutionaries lost because they formed only tiny islands in a Turkish sea.” Did we have to be massacred by the million for our revolutionaries to make that obvious discovery?

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If our revolutionaries are without blame, why were they taken in by the double-talk of the West and the Young Turks?

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Somewhere Toynbee tells us that civilizations, empires, and nations are not killed, they commit suicide. Perhaps the question I have been asking is: What if we are not an exception to this rule?

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[Armen]

Somewhere Toynbee tells us that civilizations, empires, and nations are not killed, they commit suicide. Perhaps the question I have been asking is: What if we are not an exception to this rule?

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I think we ARE one of the exceptions to that rule. First, we are not a civilization and we cannot establish one. Moreover, we cannot even establish a normal conventional state! We are everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Therefore, we cannot effectively "commit a suicide" as a civilization. Meaning, if our head decides to kill itself, the hand won't obey the order or maybe it will shoot the leg or the neighbours ear. Such is our nature.

[ara baliozian]

Tuesday, March 15, 2005

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C.G. Jung (1875-1961), Swiss psychiatrist: “Our blight is ideologies – they are the long expected Antichrist.”

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Patriotism makes sense only if we place love of mankind and the world above love of country and countrymen. Unless patriotism fulfills this condition, it runs the risk of degenerating to the ideology of nationalism, and eventually to war and massacre.

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The ultimate aim of censorship is to suppress the free speech of a few in order to oppress the many.

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Propaganda is poison and freedom of speech its only antidote.

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MEMO TO READERS

WHO WOULD LIKE TO SEE ME SILENCED

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If you are right, prove it.

If you are wrong, admit it.

If you are not sure, be more flexible.

If you have a closed mind, open it.

If you are a fanatic, teach yourself to question your belief system. It is said that even the Pope of Rome questions his faith seven times every day.

If you are a man of faith, always keep in mind that faith justifies nothing. If it did, it would justify the jihadist Turks who massacred millions of innocent infidels in the name of Allah.

I would go even further and suggest that, if you make an assertion in the name of faith, it is sure to be false because to believe means to believe that which cannot be proved to the satisfaction of skeptics and non-believers, that is to say, the majority of mankind.

But if you decide to be abusive, identify yourself. Nothing can be more cowardly than to insult someone anonymously and from a safe distance.

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C.G. Jung: “Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.”

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[ara baliozian]

in that case perhaps you can explain why is it that

under the turks 100 years ago

we produced a number of literary giants,

but we don't even have midgets today.

 

if what you say is true, in what way are we better than gypsies?/ ara

 

 

 

I think we ARE one of the exceptions to that rule. First, we are not a civilization and we cannot establish one. Moreover, we cannot even establish a normal conventional state! We are everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Therefore, we cannot effectively "commit a suicide" as a civilization. Meaning, if our head decides to kill itself, the hand won't obey the order or maybe it will shoot the leg or the neighbours ear. Such is our nature.

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[Armen]

in that case perhaps you can explain why is it that

under the turks 100 years ago

we produced a number of literary giants,

but we don't even have midgets today.

 

This has nothing to do with Armenians in my opinion. The world has changed in that direction. There are very few, almost none, literary giants anywhere in the world.

 

if what you say is true, in what way are we better than gypsies?/ ara

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I don't think we are better than gypsies, or any other nation is better than them for that matter. Gypsies are excellent at what they do. They have produced a special kind of musical culture anywhere you find them. Be it Russia, Hungary, Romania or Spain. They create fun.

 

We are very different from them. We are good at creating other things.

[ara baliozian]

#

Wednesday, March 16, 2005

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Milan Kundera (b. 1929), Czech author: "Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary."

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Saroyan once said that he felt sorry for the Turks, thus proving that even a victim can be compassionate towards his victimizer.

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Our religion does not teach us to hate our enemies. Our religion teaches us to love them, even if they happen to be our victimizers.

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This is not a sermon on love and compassion. Like most of my fellow Christians, I am not a good Christian. But I wish I were. Neither do I agree with Saroyan. But I wish I did.

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I was brought up to hate Turks. I still do. With one difference. I no longer see my hatred as an asset but as a liability.

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I know now that hatred has so far failed to raise a single victim. Neither has it banished a single Turk. Hatred has not solved a single problem because hatred itself is a problem and the root of many other problems, mutual intolerance and divisiveness being only two of them.

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We begin by hating Turks and end by hating fellow Armenians simply because they refuse to echo our sentiments and thoughts. We dehumanize Turks as surely as we dehumanize fellow Armenians by demanding that they behave like parrots.

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If we view life as an endless experiment, we shall have to agree that hatred has failed. And if we view reality as infinitely more complex than algebra, we shall have no choice but to question the wisdom and integrity of our self-appointed pundits and elites who claim to understand everything and to know what must be done.

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[ara baliozian]

there is a contradiction in what you say:

if we are exceptions, then all nations are unique and there are no rules... no rules, no discussion, no discussion no disagreement.

 

don't get me wrong. i love gypsy music and its influence on many composers, from Brahms to Manuel de Falla...but i think there is more to life than entertaining foreigners.

 

as for literary giants.

i would be satisfied with mediocrities.

the truth is, we don't even have them.

 

no culture, no survival..../ara

 

 

This has nothing to do with Armenians in my opinion. The world has changed in that direction. There are very few, almost none, literary giants anywhere in the world.

I don't think we are better than gypsies, or any other nation is better than them for that matter. Gypsies are excellent at what they do. They have produced a special kind of musical culture anywhere you find them. Be it Russia, Hungary, Romania or Spain. They create fun.

 

We are very different from them. We are good at creating other things.

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[ara baliozian]

Thursday, March 17, 2005

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Philip Larkin (1922-1985) British poet: “I search myself for illusions like a monkey looking for fleas.”

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East and West, white men and black men, Jews and Palestinians, Armenians and Turks: these are only labels, and as such, can be misleading. The only legitimate labels I recognize are top dogs and underdogs, and I write in defense of underdogs because I come from a long line of underdogs; or, if you prefer, perennial losers and victims -- 600 years of subjection to tyrants, followed by massacres, dispersion, and slum life in an alien and hostile environment.

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I write as an underdog and against top dogs in the full knowledge that the secret ambition of underdogs is to be a top dog, and once upon a time all top dogs were underdogs. Confused? So am I.

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Reality is infinitely more complex than advanced algebra is to a child. Only the simple-minded simplify by hanging a label on a fellow man and expect us to believe they have him figured out.

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As the offspring of survivors on both sides, I resent it like hell when some anonymous whippersnapper comes along and wants to prove to me that the Genocide is real and it is not, as the Turks maintain, a figment of our collective imagination. What I don’t understand, and what needs to be explained, is the sudden eruption of evil. And what makes no sense to me is our claim over historic Armenia, which I find as absurd as Comanche claims over historic America.

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Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), Canadian media analyst: “It is the weak and confused who worship pseudo-simplicities.”

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[Armen]

there is a contradiction in what you say:

if we are exceptions, then all nations are unique and there are no rules... no rules, no discussion, no discussion no disagreement.

 

don't get me wrong. i love gypsy music and its influence on many composers, from Brahms to Manuel de Falla...but i think there is more to life than entertaining foreigners.

 

as for literary giants.

i would be satisfied with mediocrities.

the truth is, we don't even have them.

 

no culture, no survival..../ara

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Yes, I think all nations are unique in their contribution to humanity but general habits that unite a group of nations and make one (or more) of them different in some particular aspect still exist. These habits are a result of historical and other cirmustances.

 

Why not, we have you Ara. You are a normal writer. If you sacrifice yourself, you will become a great writer.

 

As far as the gypsies are concerned ... I think world is good when it is diverse. Many people envy gypsies because of their freedom and because of their ability to neglect money and material value. Something we Armenians lack nowadays as a breath of fresh air.

Edited March 17, 2005 by Armen

[ara baliozian]

Friday, March 18, 2005

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W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965), British author: “Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing his mind.”

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One of our partisan pundits has taken it upon himself to interpret my ideas to an audience of laymen. I am flattered. Since as a layman, I write for laymen, I never thought I was in need of an interpreter. But after reading his interpretation I can truly say that I am now in a better position to understand how Salman Rushdie must have felt after being interpreted by the Ayatollah.

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Our revolutionaries expect us to believe what’s uppermost in their

minds is the welfare of the nation. But I suspect they are very much like the rest of us: they care much more about money and fornication. Which is good, because if they cared more about the nation, we would now be in deeper doodoo. Think about it.

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This much said, let me add that I am more than willing to concede that our revolutionaries are selfless, dedicated, idealistic gentlemen with good intentions, provided they agree with me that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

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To hate is human. But to preach, promote, and legitimize hatred is something else. The difference between one and the other is as vast as that which exists between wishing someone dead and killing him.

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In the eyes of our revolutionaries the Genocide is a belief system that must be accepted and broadcast to the four corners of the world. To suggest or imply in any way that it is a historic fact that can be analyzed and understood amounts to being that lowest form of animal life known as a denialist.

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Whenever we confuse history with religion and politics with theology, we do more harm than good to our cause because by legitimizing a religion of hate and a theology of revenge, we appeal only to a minority. As for justice, lawyers and judges will tell you there is no such thing as a court of justice, only courts of law.

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Remember, the maxim “less is more” applies not only to architecture but also to many other fields of human endeavor.

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H.L. Mencken (1880-1956), American writer and critic: “A man of faith is one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ass: he is actually ill.”

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[ara baliozian]

there is nothing unique about such concepts as decline, degeneration, defeat, alienation, assimilation, authoritarianism, intolerance, dogmatism....and these are all viruses that have attacked us and so far we have refused to acknowledge this fact. uniqueness is not a hiding place. these things cannot be hidden because they are set on a hill and visible to all objective observers... / ara

 

 

 

Yes, I think all nations are unique in their contribution to humanity but general habits that unite a group of nations and make one (or more) of them different in some particular aspect still exist. These habits are a result of historical and other cirmustances.

 

Why not, we have you Ara. You are a normal writer. If you sacrifice yourself, you will become a great writer.

 

As far as the gypsies are concerned ... I think world is good when it is diverse. Many people envy gypsies because of their freedom and because of their ability to neglect money and material value. Something we Armenians lack nowadays as a breath of fresh air.

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[Armen]

there is nothing unique about such concepts as decline, degeneration, defeat, alienation, assimilation, authoritarianism, intolerance, dogmatism....

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There is something unique about it. I guess you would agree that the minority of observers of these faults among the larger group associate themselves with those faults, while at the same time clearly seeing their negativity. This contrasting phenomenon - being able to see these faults both subjectively and objectively - makes these observers to pass through a unique challenge.

Edited March 19, 2005 by Armen

[ara baliozian]

Saturday, March 19, 2005

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NOTES / COMMENTS

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If the Jews can claim Israel as their own after 2000 years, why can't Armenians claim historic Armenia after 600 years?

Next question: How many Armenians would be willing to fight 70 million Turks and Kurds?

No further questions, your Honor.

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Jews have many enemies, granted. But they also have many friends. We have only enemies. We can't even count on the support of our fellow Armenians.

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The world did not conspire to make us irrelevant. The world had our full cooperation.

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During World War I, we had the sympathy of the Great Powers.

Moral: Not only sympathy isn't worth a sh**, it can also be misleading, dangerous, sometimes even lethal.

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Once, when I said Armenians are smart in the presence of an alienated Armenian-American professor, he lost his temper. I did not understand it then, but I do now.

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Writing for Armenians: Trying to make sense of the incomprehensible to the unspeakable.

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Nothing can be as dangerous as the consensus of charlatans, and that's the only kind of consensus we have been able to reach so far.

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You cannot solve a problem if you don't acknowledge its existence.

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When we call a military defeat a moral victory, we pervert the meaning of words, and perverting the meaning words is the greatest obstacle to understanding.

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Religion, nation, ideology: it's impossible to speak about them without bias. If you want to understand Armenians, if you want to be objective about them, you must teach yourself to think like an odar.

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Bias can't be justified. Because if you justify your bias, you justify all bias, including your enemy's.

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The difference between Turkish inhumanity to Armenian, and Armenian inhumanity to Armenian is that the first is history, the second an ongoing occurrence. Even God, it has been said, cannot change the past. And if we cannot change ourselves, what can we change? Think about it.

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[ara baliozian]

the concept of uniqueness is a dead end.

every flake of snow and every blade of grass is unique, but we can still speak of them as cold or green.

i repeat, uniqueness, especially the self-conferred kind, is of dubious value.

we can only describe it, we cannot assess it in moral, political, semantic, or philosophical terms. / ara

 

 

 

There is something unique about it. I guess you would agree that the minority of observers of these faults among the larger group associate themselves with those faults, while at the same time clearly seeing their negativity. This contrasting phenomenon - being able to see these faults both subjectively and objectively - makes these observers to pass through a unique challenge.

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[phantom22]

Mr. Baliozian,

 

How true what you said. The only Armenians who can be objective about the Armenians are the Armenians who have been raised with an odar mentality, outside of the community.

 

No Armenian who has been raised inside the community can ever be free of the influences of the community, as even you Mr. Baliozian are a captive. If you were not, perhaps you would have achieved international reknown as did Michael Arlen, Sr. who shedded his Armenian skin (Dikran Kouyoumdjian) and became a perfect Englishman.

[ara baliozian]

Sunday, March 20, 2005

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W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965), British author: “ Suffering makes men petty and vindictive.”

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The easiest way to deceive a man is to convince him he is so smart that no one, not even the devil himself, can deceive him. This has been the modus operandi of our leadership. To cover up the fact that they behaved like dupes, they say Armenians are just about the smartest people on earth.

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There is bias in everything we think, feel and say about ourselves. One way to explain the collapse of Communism in the USSR, Nazism in Germany, and Fascism in Italy is by saying that they refused to acknowledge this fact and whenever a dissident dared to point it out, they silenced him.

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Truth will not set a man free if he prefers being a slave to lies.

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Only a deranged Armenian Saddam Hussein would contemplate a war against Turks and Kurds.

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I don’t write to be popular. I write to understand my fellow men (regardless of race, color, and creed) and the world in which I live. To write in order to achieve popularity is no better than prostitution.

And I write brief sentences and paragraphs because I am not paid by the word.

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Writing for Armenians means being abused by charlatans, misunderstood by fools, and insulted by wheeler-dealers. I go on because I am a writer by curse.

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I believe in being diplomatic with Turks but not with Ottomanized Armenians; and I call an Armenian Ottomanized when he does with this tongue what the Turks did with their yataghans.

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If you tell me I too use my pen like a yataghan, I will say that I use my understanding as a means to expose my illusions, not to cover them up. My options are limited: I either lie and spend the rest of my life covering up my lies, or I speak the truth as I see it and damn the consequences.

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As for entertaining my audience, I leave that to our comedians. And speaking of comedians: do we have them? Why is it that suffering has enhanced Jewish humor and extinguished ours?

#

[ara baliozian]

Monday, March 21, 2005

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Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953), American playwright: [Members of the State Department] are trained to be conspirators, card sharps, double-crossers and secret betrayers of their own people.”

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George Orwell (1903-1950), British author: “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.”

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We are all assassins in the sense that if we are not legally guilty of murder, we are morally guilty of wishing someone dead.

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When it comes to the Genocide, we agree on one important point with the Turks: if it weren’t for the meddling of the West, it wouldn’t have happened. It follows, the West too owes us an apology.

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Life is a bundle of contradictions because people are bundles of contradictions. We may understand fragments of it but never all of it. And the fragments we understand do not form a synthesis or even the fragment of a synthesis but another contradiction.

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Politicians who claim to know what must be done because they have grasped the meaning of a situation are no better than charlatans.

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The function of literature is to expose the lies of speechifiers and sermonizers and to remind them that there are more contradictions in life than they are dreamt of in their propaganda.

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Some of the most dangerous lies come to us as religious and ideological truths, sometimes even as undeniable facts.

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There will come a time when people will reject all religions and ideologies simply because imams and commissars believe in them.

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[ara baliozian]

Tuesday, March 22, 2005

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ON OPTIMISM

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Nothing works as planned.

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Dreams may come true sometimes, but daydreams seldom, and the pipe dreams of perennial losers, never.

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American presidential candidates like to be introduced as “the next president of the United States,” even when their audience is fully aware of the fact that there is a 50/50 chance they will lose.

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Prisons are full of criminals who thought they would not get caught. Unfounded optimism is another thing criminals share with politicians.

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Like politicians and criminals, I too am an incurable optimist. I continue to write as if I were in a position to change the mind of a single Armenian.

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As a child I too was exposed to countless speeches and sermons whose honesty it never even occurred to me to question.

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The only people who think they will never change their mind are people who don’t do much thinking to begin with.

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To how many of my readers I could say, “I understand you. I was there once. I continue to write in the hope that some day in the near or distant future (hopefully not too distant) you will understand me too.

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And now, if I knew how to pray, I would go down on my knees and say: “Our Father, Who art in heaven….”

#

[ara baliozian]

Wednesday, March 23, 2005

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ON SPEECHIFIERS AND SERMONIZERS

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Ever since David slew Goliath, every self-assessed David thinks he can do the same. Turkey is the Goliath of our gung-ho revolutionaries; charlatanism is mine. The questions we should ask at this point are: What if David is destined to slay Goliath only once every four thousand years? And what if, the rest of the time he is lunch, as we were at the turn of the last century? Think about that.

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Armenians speechifying on hatred and war against Turkey remind me of Toynbee's dictum that nations are not killed, they commit suicide.

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Heroes and martyrs do not, as a rule, speechify or sermonize on heroism and martyrdom.

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All fanatics are infatuated with their own infallibility.

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It has been said that there are two kinds of ignorance: natural and artificial. The artificial ignoramus we owe to propaganda.

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I have always suspected Armenians who speechify on hatred and war against Turkey from their comfortable suburban homes thousands of miles away from Armenia, in the full knowledge that if blood is shed, it will not be theirs.

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Propaganda is designed to appeal to the gut, not to the brain.

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All speechifiers and sermonizers speak with a forked tongue.

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A writer cannot make readers think, he can only hope to underline their secret thoughts, thus letting them know there are others who think as they do.

#

[ara baliozian]

Thursday, March 24, 2005

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IMAMS AND COMMISSARS

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All religions and ideologies produce their share of imams and commissars whose ultimate aim is not the truth but power.

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An imam or a commissar may be defined as one who cannot tell the difference between truth and propaganda, or believes propaganda to be the only truth.

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To a man of faith, his sermonizer is not a propagandist but a messenger of God. The same applies to a partisan and his speechifier.

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Loyalty to the party is not the same as patriotism. The party is not the people. Neither is it the brain of the people.

The ARF is not Armenia.

The Communist Party is not Russia.

Neither the Democratic nor the Republican Party in America speaks for the American people, only a fraction of it.

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To a commissar, his party is not just a political organization but a religion.

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To a born-again fundamentalist (be he Christian or Muslim) to even suggest that his religion is just a religion, like any other religion, is the height of blasphemy, and as such, a capital offense. In that sense, in the eyes of some fundamentalist, we are all infidels, giaours, and the scum of the earth.

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Propaganda is to truth what snake oil is to medicine.

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When it comes to understanding the past, any version that is not objective, will be contaminated by propaganda. The maxim “Less is more” applies here: less propaganda means more truth.

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The function of a dissenter or critic is to expose the lies of propaganda.

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Recent Russian history as seen through the eyes of men like Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn will be more objective than the version provided by commissars. Which is why, I find the version of our recent past provided by such witnesses as Gostan Zarian, General Antranik, and Arnold J. Toynbee (all of whom were in the loop) more accurate than that provided by our commissars.

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[ara baliozian]

Friday, March 25, 2005

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There are Armenians who believe Turks to be bloodthirsty savages and Asiatic barbarians. There are also Armenians who believe, with Saroyan, Turks are people like any other people – Greeks, Jews, Germans, and Russians. Now, suppose we were to allow both camps to negotiate with them, which camp do you think will have a better chance to reach a consensus first?

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It is the height of non sequitur to call Turks savages and to demand justice from them.

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Our pundits are graduates of the Humbug & Flimflam school of punditry.

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Our forefathers lived among the Turks for six centuries. I doubt if I could last six minutes among our imams and commissars.

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There is no jungle in the whole of Africa and the Amazon like the jungle of an Armenian discussion forum.

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If our imams and commissars ever take charge of the nation, it will be like lunatics taking charge of the asylum.

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To use hatred of Turks to justify hatred of fellow Armenians is to compound a felony.

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It is worth remembering as well as reminding our partisans that they don’t speak in the name of history, reality, god or truth, but only in the name of the party – that is to say, not even in the name of the nation or the people, only in the name of a fraction of the people.

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I know what it feels like being hated by Turks; I have been hated by Armenians.

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I see nothing wrong in being an imam or a commissar as long as they don’t use dupes to do their killing and dying for them.

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[ara baliozian]

Saturday, March 26, 2005

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I grew up in an ARF neighborhood. I was educated in an environment where the ARF wasn't even mentioned. As an adult I met friends and relatives in whose eyes the ARF was a terrorist organization. I know now that, instead of leading us to the Promised Land, our "betters" led us to the slaughterhouse, and our choice today is between 20-20 hindsight and the blind leading the blind. We must think about this.

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Charles King in THE BLACK SEA: A HISTORY (New York, Oxford University Press, 2004): "In Turkey, one can now purchase books on the Hemshin [Armenians], Laz, and other peoples of the Pontic coast, something that was unthinkable only a few years ago, when literature on ethnic minorities was practically nonexistent."

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Some readers have accused me of entertaining prophetic ambitions. If I am a prophet, I am one only in the sense that when I plant radishes in my backyard, I don't expect to harvest beets.

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The truth is an adversary we all share. Our only hope is to advance towards it rather than in the opposite direction.

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It took me a long time to realize that the -ian ending was not a guarantee of nobility.

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If we had the power, would our enemies escape total extinction?

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Perhaps what I am trying to say is that it is possible to think about Turks without turning into one.

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Jeannette Rankin (1880-1973), American politician: "You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake."

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