warning

Sunday, July 19, 2009
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WHO IS A GOOD ARMENIAN?
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A good Armenian is first and foremost a good human being.
In that sense, a good Turk is a better Armenian than a bad Armenian.
A good human being, even if he is a Turk,
contributes to a pool of goodness
without which evil would triumph.
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Who is a bad Armenian?
A bad Armenian is one who says “Yes, sir!”
to his superiors on the grounds that
they know better.
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Some of the worst crimes against humanity
were committed by men who obeyed the laws of the land
and believed everything they were told
by men who were convinced God or truth to be on their side.
And they believed that because they could not tell the difference
between God and the Devil, or between truth and lies.
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Eleventh Commandment:
Thou shalt not believe sermonizers and speechifiers
who pretend to know better
but whose superior knowledge is nothing
but a vipers' nest of lies, superstitions, and prejudices.
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To me, the quintessential bad Armenian is he
who not only divides the nation
but pretends to do so not to satisfy his ambition
but to save the nation.
Now then, name a single Armenian
who has done less dividing and more uniting.
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If our dividers are bad,
what about those who support them in the name of patriotism?
Are they good or bad Armenians?
They can't be good.
That much we can say.
But are they really bad?
Hard to say.
At best they are misguided dupes.
At worst, they are fools
who have not yet learned to think for themselves.
Or, as the German saying has it:
“They are like dogs who know their master,
but not their master's master.”
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Monday, July 20, 2009
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JERKS
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The world is full of them, and you will find them in the most unexpected places. If you don't believe me, listen to far better men than myself:
Arnold J. Toynbee: “Private intellectual enterprise, unlike private economic enterprise, lives by co-operation not by competition.”
One of our white-haired elder statesmen (may the Good Lord have mercy on his soul) once warned me that our academics form mafias and if you are not a member, they treat you like an unwanted interloper trying to muscle in their territory. We have a genocide mafia; we have a pro-Oshagan mafia...speaking of which: once many years ago, I tried to organize a pro-Zarian mafia, sinner that I am (as 19th-century Russian novelists liked to say); but I was successful in recruiting only one member, who turned out to be a quisling and defected to the Oshagan side. I felt betrayed then, but I am grateful to him now. The world can do better with one less jerkoff.
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Toynbee again: “I am convinced that irreverence, where irreverence is due, is one of the cardinal virtues.”
In other words, when our “betters” behave like our worst, it is our patriotic duty to treat them with contempt rather than respect.
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Toynbee: “It is always easier, both intellectually and morally, to debit one's ills to the account of some outside agency than to ascribe the responsibility to oneself.”
Or, it is easier and more convenient to play the blame-game than to examine our conscience. Naregatsi's LAMENTATION may be said to be an extended dramatization of this idea.
When an eminent 20th-century British historian agrees with an 11th-century Armenian mystic who has been compared to Dante and Shakespeare, it is as sure a thing as money in the bank.
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What follows is my real favorite:
Toynbee: “In the life which Man has made for himself on Earth, his institutions, in contrast to his personal relations, are the veritable slums, and the taint of moral obliquity is still more distressing in the least ignoble of these social tenements of the Human Spirit – for instance, in the churches and the academies – than in such unquestionably malignant institutions as Slavery and War.”
Chekhov once said, “There is no fool like an academic fool.” And according to an Armenian proverb: “If a beard were a sign of wisdom, goats would be philosophers.” To put it differently: Don't believe everything you are told even if the teller is a bishop or a professor – especially an Armenian bishops and an Armenian professor.
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Tuesday, July 21, 2009
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REVIEWING THE SITUATION
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Optimism is unjustified when it ignores or covers up the seriousness of a problem on the erroneous assumption that what needs to be done it being done because we are in good hands.
Pessimism is also unjustified if it leads to defeatism, despair, and and paralysis.
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What are some of the problems we face today?
In the Homeland, an unemployment rate so high that it results in mass exodus, prostitution, and brain-drain.
In the Diaspora, divisions that deplete valuable resources by duplicating facilities and services (schools, churches, libraries, fund-raising bureaucracies, and so on), and a high rate of alienation and assimilation (also known as “jermag chart” = white massacre).
Another serious problem that we face in both the Homeland and the Diaspora is the fallacy that patriotism consists in supporting not so much the Homeland as its leadership no matter how corrupt and incompetent.
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A historic instance of optimism run riot is that of our dominant state of mind at the turn of the last century in the Ottoman Empire. Had our revolutionaries been pessimists and operated on the assumption that things could go not just wrong but catastrophically wrong, the outcome would have been less tragic.
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Perhaps the function of a writer is to introduce pessimism in an environment ruled by optimists and vice versa; and in that sense, to stimulate not popularity but disapproval, disagreement, ridicule, rejection, and insults, all of which, may I add, are, to me at any rate, more congenial than the consent of brainwashed dupes and inbred morons.
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Wednesday, July 22, 2009
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A WORD OF WARNING
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One of the inevitable facts of life is that at one time or another we all become dependent on people who may know something we don't know. In a strange city, we depend on taxi drivers. When we experience chest pains, we check into the emergency and are examined by a cardiologist. When something goes wrong with the plumbing, we call a plumber. Where does an Armenian writer fit into this system? Nowhere. Who needs him? Nobody! What does he know that we don't know? Nothing!
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The function of a historian is not to reconstruct the past by quoting witnesses and relevant documents – that's not history but “ant industry” (Spengler) – but to explain why things happened as they did.
The function of literature is not to entertain the reader by writing love stories, or odes to the mother tongue, or sonnets to the eternal snows of Mt. Ararat, but to understand reality.
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When in the 19th century Raffi said Turkey was no place for Armenians, he was ignored. When Zohrab predicted the massacres, they said, “Zohrab effendi is exaggerating.” When Bakounts called communism “an infection,” he was betrayed to the authorities and purged. And when Zarian exposed the lies of the Kremlin, they called him a CIA agent.
Why am I saying these things? Simply to warn those of my readers who may harbor secret literary ambitions.
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To be an Armenian writer means not only to be dependent on the charity of swine but also to recycle the propaganda of philistines, fools, and liars. If, on the other hand, you decide to speak the truth as you see it, my advice is, first declare financial independence and grow the skin of a crocodile...and may the mercy of the Lord be with you. Amen.
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