ARA HOME PAGE

2012-01-28T07:49:00.001-08:00

Friday, January 27, 2012
****************************************
DIARY
*****************************
According to a pundit in my morning paper:
... “Obama is trying to gain a foothold in the Middle East via Turkey.”
My first thought:
Kiss ARG (American Recognition of the Genocide) goodbye.
*
According to another pundit:
“Russia today is ruled by petro-kleptocrats.”
Ditto with us, minus the “petro.”
*
ON GINGRICH AND ROMNEY
***************************************
The naked face of the 1%.
Eyeless men with a vision.
Insatiable carnivores parading as vegetarians.
They promise to solve the very same problems they created.
Imagine Turks promising to resurrect our dead.
#
Friday, January 27, 2012 / b
**********************************

NOTES & COMMENTS

*************************************

The best thing I can say about life is that

it happens only once.

*

In his last collection of essays titled ARGUABLY (Toronto, 2011) Christopher Hitchens writes:

“Turkey continues to lie about the massacre of the Armenians.”

Further down he adds he prefers

Ambassador Morgenthau’s “race murder”

to Raphael Limpkin’s “genocide”

because it’s “more dramatic and urgent.”

*

To have seen the light

is not a permanent condition but a transitory stage.

*

Where I saw the light

I now see shades of darkness.

Where I saw one meaning

I now see ambiguities.

*

Tell me what is it that you want more than anything else

and I will tell you not only will you be disappointed if you get it

but you will also miss the good old days when you didn’t have it.

#

Saturday, January 28, 2012
****************************************
SPEAK THE TRUTH
*********************************
“Speak the truth and no one will believe you.”
That’s because we live in a world saturated with Big Lies
Armenians are smart.
Jews are the Chosen.
Germans are superior.
Christians are infidel dogs.
White man speaks with a forked tongue?
(That doesn’t mean Indian did not massacre Indian
in the absence of white men.)
Who believes in these lies?
Only dupes (the 99%) with a negative IQ.
You qualify?
Congratulations.
#

comments

2012-01-21T08:05:00.001-08:00

Sunday, January 15, 2012
*****************************************
MEDITATION
*********************************************
Everything makes sense.
Nothing makes sense.
Which is right?
Both!
Neither!
Or perhaps it is not up to us to decide.
*
After every school of philosophy
there will be another that contradicts it.
After Plato, Aristotle.
After Hegel, Schopenhauer.
But also Marx.
And after Marx, Stalin.
*
For every believer in the existence of God
there will be another who denies it;
or, like the Pope of Rome
(according to an old Italian proverb)
who doubts his faith in His existence
seven times a day.
*
Sartre was obsessed with the idea of freedom.
He probably wrote more about freedom
than any other philosopher dead or alive.
And yet, he also supported Stalin and Mao
to whom freedom meant
the freedom to enslave and kill millions.
Explain that if you can.
*
We are like sheep.
Are our leaders shepherds
or a pack of wolves?
We may be wise enough to raise questions
but not to answer them.
Answers may come after we die –
assuming of course we survive our death.
*
The purpose of life is not to make sense
but to do our best.
But what if our best is the worst for others?
How else to explain the execution of Socrates,
the crucifixion of Christ,
and the assassination of Gandhi?
#
Monday, January 16, 2012
*****************************************
FROM HERE TO ETERNITY
*********************************************
“Democracy may suit civilized and progressive people
of the West but not Asiatic barbarians
whose character, mindset, and values
were shaped by bloodthirsty Ottoman Turks
and Stalinist ruffians.”
This indeed is the unspoken rationale
of our ruling classes.
*
Double-talk comes naturally to all
who are involved in politics.
Preach one thing, practise the opposite.
Preach family values, practise fornication.
Murder innocent civilians and say “Allawa akhbar!”
Or do the Devil’s work in the name of God.
Lower taxes on the 1% and say
you are on the side of the 99%.
*
One of the Kennedy women (a divorcee) once wrote a book
on the double-talk of the Catholic Church
which is against divorce for the poor
but more than willing to grant it to the rich
even if it means by doing so
the children of the previous marriage
acquire the status of bastards.
*
If the Pope of Rome engages in double-talk
why should we be outraged
when our own sultans,imams, and commissars do likewise?
Next question:
If the Arabs of Africa can have a Spring,
why should we behave as though
we were condemned to freeze in the Gulag
from here to eternity?
#
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
*****************************************
TWO CANDIDATES
*********************************************
Gingrich likes to identify himself
not as a lobbyist but as a historian.
My question is,
Who has ever heard of a historian
Who could make more money in a single week
than the combined lifetime incomes
of Herodotus, Gibbon, Spengler, and Toynbee?
*
As for the other one,
the Mormon moron:
he keeps saying he created 100,000 jobs
when the evidence shows he destroyed many more.
*
Why do these two candidates speak as they do?
Do they think those who are going to vote for them
are retards?
What else?
*
As for the political thinking
of the average Armenian:
it is a symptom of our pathological narcissism
to suggest that it is more developed
than that of the average Yank.
#
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
*****************************************
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
*********************************************
Because I refuse to say “Yes, sir!”
to those who tell me
“Not only you must believe what I believe
but also what I don’t believe,”
I am accused ot being guilty of a capital offense.
The only reason I am alive today is that
my accusers are toothless.
#

leaders

2012-01-14T07:23:00.001-08:00

Thursday, January 12, 2012
*****************************************
LEADERS
*********************************************
Who are our political leaders?
What do I know about them?
I know more about Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann
than about our own leaders.
If I try hard enough I may remember a handful of names
but afterwards I do my best to forget them.
About leaders in the Homeland
I have been told by an insider that
they are former KGB agents.
True or false?
I don’t know and I care even less.
About leaders of the Diaspora:
I remember an elder statesman telling me
some of them were Turks
who spoke Armenian fluently
and knew all there was to know about us.
True or false?
Does anyone care?
I no longer have any illusions.
I know for a fact that even in the so-called
open democracies of the civilized West
politics is a filthy business.
I shudder to think about our Ottomanized Diaspora
and Sovietized Homeland.
Poor Armenia – forever an orphan
at the mercy of manipulators
who are themselves manipulated by alien interests,
like dogs who know their master
but not their master’s master.
#
Friday, January 13, 2012
*****************************************
ONCE UPON A TIME
*********************************************
Once upon a time almost everyone I met was older than I.
Now, almost everyone I meet is younger.
*
Once upon a time I had many questions
and I believed in the answers
that I was given by my betters.
*
Once upon a time I believed everything I read in the papers.
Now, I trust our editors as much as I trust
our bosses, bishops, and benefactors.
*
Once upon a time I loved to travel,
explore unfamiliar places and meet new people.
I now find solitary confinement preferable.
*
The world has become a strange place
but the strangest of all places is my own homeland
and the strangest of all people are my fellow countrymen.
*
If we don't know why things exist,
what can we really know?
*
One does not have to be an insurance broker
to know that heroes have a shorter life span than cowards.
*
Murder Inc. is a capitalist phenomenon.
Under communism murder becomes a monopoly of the state.
#
Saturday, January 14, 2012
*****************************************
MORE VARIATIONS
*********************************************
If you want to know more about Armenians,
read about Turks.
*
Very early this morning,
in a 30-minute radio documentary on Turks,
I heard a pundit say:
“Subservience to the military and amnesia
come naturally to Turks.”
*
Their unspoken slogan, like ours:
“The Sultans are dead. Long live Ottomanism.”
*
So what else is new?
The more I peer into our collective unconscious,
the less I like what I see there.
*
To some of my readers I am an enemy
because they don’t like to see their reflection in the mirror
that I hold up to them.
*
No one has ever said
confronting oneself is a pleasant experience.
*
Where there is amnesia
there will also be unspeakable memories.
*
They call us “Christian Turks,”
in the same way that the Yanks call their natives
“American Indians.”
The defeated have as much choice in identifying themselves
as dogs.
*
Solon, the Lawgiver (7th century BC)
in an address to the Athenians
(I quote and paraphrase from memory):
“Individually you may well be very smart
but collectively you behave like damn fools.”
#

more...

2012-01-11T07:27:00.001-08:00

Sunday, January 08, 2012
*****************************************
JACK S. AVANAKIAN
STRIKES AGAIN
*******************************
“I write all the time and
I never run out of things to say,”
one of our writers
(let’s call him Jack S. Avanakian)
once bragged to me.
“I can write about anything,” he went on.
“I can even write about not being able to write.”
Maybe so, I remember to have thought.
The question is, is what you write readable?
I for one have never heard anyone say.
“Last night I had some fun reading Jack S. Avanakian
and came across the following interesting line...”
Only the intellectually bankrupt brag.
*
One of the worst things that can happen to a man
is saying or even doing the wrong thing
with the conviction that it is the right thing.
And if you think that’s exactly my case,
allow me to remind you that
everything I say has been said before
by far better men than myself.
Originality is not one of my priorities.
My aim is to remind readers of things
they no longer remember or they prefer to forget.
Our educational system is designed to promote amnesia.
As a result we are a nation that suffers
from collective and self-induced
and departmentalized Alzheimer’s.
We have the memory of elephants
when it comes to what others have done to us,
but we pretend not to remember
what we have done to ourselves.
Which is where I come in.
#
Monday, January 09, 2012
*****************************************
IF
*******************************
If the thing you need most is money,
prepare yourself to be exploited.
If what you need is understanding
prepare yourself to be misunderstood.
If you need respect,
prepare yourself to be insulted.
What we need and what we get
might as well be black and white.
*
I believe there is life after that.
I have no doubt about that.
It’s one of the very few certainties that I cherish.
Just because I die,
it doesn’t mean everybody else does.
Life goes on.
*
If they have jackasses as leaders,
even the smartest people on earth
will be defeated by the dumbest.
*
The greatest obstacle to progress
is the sensible man who says:
"You cannot change human nature.
Nobody listens. Nobody gives a damn.
You are wasting your time."
#
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
*****************************************
THE MEANING OF PROPAGANDA
*********************************************
“You don’t have to think,” propaganda tells us;
“I will do the thinking for you.
Because I can think and you can’t.
You are an ignoramus.
You are nothing.
You are what I tell you you are.”
*
It’s astonishing how many are taken in
by this line and willingly surrender
their most valuable possession
(the ability to think for themselves)
to megalomiacal and bloodthirsty charlatans.
*
By flattering our collective ego
(first nation this, first nation that,
God’s favourite, creative, progressive…)
propaganda dehumanizes us
by confiscating that which makes us human
by replacing “I think therefore I am” with
“I don’t think therefore I am a good Armenian.”
Instead of facts, propaganda gives us fiction;
instead of reality, fantasy;
instead of progress, paralysis and stagnation.
*
On the last page of Kafka’s TRIAL,
the central character
identified with the single letter K
is butchered “like a dog” and no one knows why.
Kafka doesn’t explain.
He provides no answers.
He didn’t have to.
K represent Germans, Spaniards, Russians, Jews, Armenians…
in short, 20th-century man
who was brainwashed and butchered in a ditch
for no reason at all.
That’s the real tragedy – our tragedy.
Not to die for a good cause
but to be butchered by anonymous executioners
working for faceless men
who operate on the assumption that
they know better because God is on their side.
*
Did I say God?
Make it the Devil!
There it is, the true meaning of propaganda:
“Speak in the name of God
and do the Devil’s work.”
#
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
*****************************************
VARIATIONS ON A FAMILIAR TUNE
*********************************************
An ideology or a religion should be judged
not by its dogmas and commandments
but by its propaganda:
the more propaganda the more lies.
The more systematic its indoctrination
or educational system
the more dishonest its assertions and certainties.
The more authority sources (holy scriptures and hierarchy)
the more fascist.
The more rituals the more mumbo jumbo.
The more monumental its architecture
the shakier its foundations
(remember the pyramids and
the construction of St. Peter’s in Rome).
The longer its history
the more uncertain its future.
*
If millions of Turks are brought up
to be proud of their identity,
then pride (not just theirs but all pride)
must be just about the phoniest means of achieving self-esteem.
I will go further and say,
where there is pride there must also be more reason for humility.
Where there is peace there must be a throne of blood.
The American Civil War is proof of the fact that
to defend democracy it is necessary to employ fascist means.
*
We are defined not by our assets
but by our liabilities – especially liabilities
that parade as assets.
#

memos

2012-01-07T07:37:00.001-08:00

Thursday, January 05, 2012
*****************************************
MEMOS
*******************************
Don’t believe everything you hear.
Don’t believe everything you read.
But above all,
don’t believe everything you believe.
Remember, the Greeks believed in Zeus
and they were just about the smarted people
that ever lived.
*
Actions have consequences;
so do inactions.
Case in point:
600 years of inaction under the Sultans.
*
God created believers as well as non-believers.
Now consider the case of a believer who kills
and a non-believer who is a pacifist.
On whose side will God be?
*
I am in no position to penalize anyone.
I just speak the truth and let
them suffer the consequences.
Did I say “the truth”?
Strike that.
Make it “my side of the story.”
Or even better,
“I just state the facts as I see them.”
I have no desire to be accused of megalomania
or of harbouring prophetic ambitions.
#
Friday, January 06, 2012
*****************************************
WISHFUL THINKING
*******************************
“A journalistic terrorist
of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s.”
That’s how I am identified in a recent blog
by a gentle reader who probably thinks I am dead –
no doubt a clear-cut case of wishful thinking.
*
Never antagonize someone who can afford a better lawyer.
Even if you are 100% right
and he is 100% wrong, you will lose.
That’s justice, American style.
*
When the subject of the poor and unemployed
comes up in Yerevan, my guess is
members of the regime say:
“Let our ‘aghbers' of the Diaspora deal with them –
they can afford it,” or words to that effect.
To our ‘aghbers’ I therefore say:
what if all your charity does is
to postpone the final showdown
between the 99% and the 1%?
Your charity will make sense only if
an equal amount of effort is chanelled
into excposing the crooks and thieves.
#
Saturday, January 07, 2012
*****************************************
IRRELEVANCE
*******************************
In a commentary titled “Eight nations are on the endangered list”
by Zbigniew Brzezinsky, we read the following about Georgia:
“American decline would leave this tiny Caucasian state
vulnerable to Russian political intimidation and military aggression.”
Elsewhere the Baltic states are also mentioned and discussed
but Armenia is ignored.
My first thought:
We have finally achieved a state of total irrelevance
in the eyes of the world.
Who gives a damn what happens to us?
Not even Armenians.
#

comments

2012-01-04T07:10:00.001-08:00

Sunday, January 01, 2012
*****************************************
IS THE CUSTOMER
ALWAYS RIGHT?
*******************************
To readers who are brought up to believe
it is a writer’s function to instruct, to entertain,
and to be original, I say,
he who has been brainwashed as a child
cannot be open to instruction.
My aim is not to entertain but the exact opposite:
to make you aware of your own degradation.
As for being original:
in so far as I speak
of the origins of your degradation,
I am being original
even when I bore or irritate
the hell out of you by repeating myself.
*
Don’t think of me as a writer.
Think of me as a counter-propagandist.
As for readers who like to inform me
that I know nothing and I understand even less,
I say: I ascribe that to Armenians like you
who refuse to share their knowledge and understanding
with the rest of us.
Knowledge and understanding are not things to keep,
like money, but things to share, like love.
And if after reading this
you decide to continue reading me,
have the decency not to bitch
and make unreasonable demands on me.
But if you do, don’t be surprised if I ignore you.
#
Monday, January 02, 2012
*****************************************
REFLECTIONS
OF A NON-BELIEVER
*******************************
Einstein: “I am a deeply religious nonbeliever.”
*
You can be a born-again believer
as well as non-believer.
You can be a born-again anything.
The only thing you cannot be
is a born-again cadaver.
*
All men of faith are convinced
of the 10,000 gods that men have created
9,999 are phonies.
*
Men of faith believe non-believers will go to hell
because they denied the existence of the Almighty.
Now then, if an ant or a worm were to deny my own existence
would I step on it?
Would such denial even register on my consciousness?
*
May I also add that I am not the forgiving type.
My greatest hope is that
anyone who has ever done me any dirt
will burn in hell for all eternity
#
Tuesday, January 03, 2012
*****************************************
UNFORGETTABLE LINES
FROM SARTRE
*******************************
The two things that make a line unforgettable are
(one) once read it is never forgotten, and
(two) it’s like a key that unlocks a door
to reveal not another room but a new horizon.
************************************************
“Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims,
but by the way it kills them.”
*
“…the anonymous desirability of all flesh.”
*
[To write about genius is] “to retrace in detail
the history of a liberation.”
*
“I plunged into humility to evade humiliation.”
*
“To love is to hate the same enemy.”
*
“I turned rebel later only through having pushed submissiveness
to the extreme.”
*
“The ascetic is a man rich enough
to choose his poverty freely.”
*
“Psychoanalysis has no principles.”
*
“…for no man is ever anything but a swindle.”
*
“Human life begins on the other side of despair.”
*
“Mysticism suits displaced persons
and superfluous children.”
#
Wednesday, January 04, 2012
*****************************************
NOTES / COMMENTS
*******************************
The secret aim of our political leaders
is to be better charlatans.
*
I once heard one of them say:
“I have said this before, many times,
and I am going to say it again!”
And I thought, has anyone ever accused him
of repeating himself?
*
“If you are with me you are a friend.
If you are against me you are an enemy.”
Provided of course your judgement is infallible.
*
The support of a writer
by a political party is as good as a kiss of death.
*
Blood may well be thicker than water
but common sense goes farther than chauvinist crapola
and common decency is superior to mumbo jumbo.
*
A charming man does not waste his charm
on someone he considers useless to him.
#

comments

2011-12-31T08:04:00.001-08:00

Thursday, December 29, 2011
*****************************************
DEMOCRACY
*******************************
On more than one occasion
I have heard it said that we Armenians
are not yet ready for democracy.
What does that really mean?
Our leaders prefer to behave as our masters
rather than our servants?
Given the choice, who wouldn’t?
*
We have been so systematically and thoroughly moronized
by Turks, Russians, and our own
Ottomanized and Sovietized leadership that
by the time we learn to think for ourselves
we might as well be on the verge
of senility, dementia, or Alzheimer’s,
and probably all three at once.
*
If any one of our “Dear Leaders”
were to drop dead today,
who would shed a single tear?
What is the difference between North Koreans and us
when it comes to brainwashing?
They don’t have a choice.
We do.
We live in democracies
and we know what freedom and human rights are.
They don’t.
*
Tunisians and Libyans are ready for democracy,
and we who are smart, progressive and westernized are not?
When we say Armenians are not yet ready for democracy,
is that we speaking or our moronized, mangled, tortured,
and degraded, political awareness?
#
Friday, December 30, 2011
*****************************************
IDEAS
*******************************
Our most important ideas,
the ones that shape our worldview,
are not ours but those of the establishment
within which we were born and raised.
These ideas have been systematically and carefully divested
of all doubts and inherent contradictions.
They are like skeletons – unthinking, cold, dehumanized.
It is this corrupt and degenerate abstractions
that are at the root of all prejudices and intolerance.
So that when we speak of ways of thinking,
what we really mean is ways of non-thinking.
It follows, the irrational element in our thoughts
far outweigh the rational.
We don’t shape our ideas.
They shape us.
And because they are irrational,
they distort and pervert our reason.
When we disagree with one another,
we should teach ourselves and our children to say
not “I am right and you are wrong,”
but “Very probably we are both wrong.”
#
Saturday, December 31, 2011
*****************************************
WAR AND PEACE
*******************************
Overheard: “The war is over
but there is no peace.”
*
We have declared our independence
but we are not free.
*
I repeat myself?
Our propaganda repeats itself too.
So does my counter-propaganda.
*
What is the difference between propaganda
and counter-propaganda?
Propaganda is a lie that flatters.
Counter-propaganda is the truth that hurts.
*
Flattery pays.
That’s why our bosses and bishops are millionaires
and our intellectuals are dependent
on the charity of swine.
*
Their sultans and commissars are dead.
Long live ours!
*
As for corruption: we have so much of it
that we could export it,
if it were an exportable product, like Arab oil.
*
According to a pundit in my morning paper,
until very recently Muslim countries seemed
remarkably impervious to democracy.
Thank God we are not Muslims;
we have only been muslimized and sovietized.
#

comments

2011-12-28T07:10:00.001-08:00

Sunday, December 25, 2011
*****************************************
IN BRIEF
*******************************
The victims of politicians
outnumber the victims of criminals.
*
There are two gods:
the god of priests and the other one.
We know a great deal about the first,
nothing about the other.
*
Turks are brainwashed to believe
they are noble specimens of humanity
to the same degree
that we are brainwashed to believe
we are smart.
Why should we be surprised
if the encounter of these two big lies
resulted in massacres?
*
I should like to read an interview
with a political or religious leader
that begins with the question:
“Let’s cut the crap, shall we?”
*
“What the hell happened to you?”
would be my first question
to one of our bosses, bishops, and benefactors.
*
Violence works but only at first.
Lies convince but only dupes.
#
Monday, December 26, 2011
*****************************************
AS I SEE IT
*******************************
Sometimes I am misunderstood
not because I am difficult to understand
but because the brainwashing has been
too systematic, thorough, and successful.
*
To speak of the “Red” Genocide
in order to cover up the “White” one,
or to speak of past violations of human rights
in order to cover up present ones:
what could be more horribly cynical?
Or rather: what could be
more quintessentially Armenian?
*
Animals defend their territory.
Men do too. But men also defend
their prestige, pride, vanity,
prejudices and ignorance.
*
Speaking with a forked tongue
comes naturally to most lawyers, politicians,
statesmen, religious leaders, businessmen, and so on.
And the higher their position in the hierarchy
the more transparent their double-talk.
#
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
*****************************************
ACTIONS AND CONSEQUENCES
*******************************
There are two kinds of actions:
planned and spontaneous.
The Tunisian fruit vendor’s self-immolation
was spontaneous;
the actions of our revoltuionaries
at the turn of the last century in the Ottoman Empire
were planned.
The first was a success beyond anyone’s imagination;
the second resulted in one of the greatest disasters
in the history of mankind.
*
History is unpredictable.
God laughs at man’s plans and calculations.
The selfless act has a much better chance to succeed,
and sometimes to succeed beyond anyone’s imagination,
than the cold-blooded, carefully planned and calculated act.
*
Marx thought he had discovered the way history works
and he created the nightmare of communist regimes.
When Jesus said “the kingdom of God is within you,”
he should have added,
“so is the empire of the Devil.”
*
“Existence is a vicious abstraction,”
Bertrand Russell tells us; which means
our actions will inevitably end
in an existential labyrinth of consequences
whose end result will be totally unpredictable.
*
Elsewhere Russell writes:
“Since men tend to value present pleasures
more than pleasures in the future,
the wise man will exercise prudence and self-restraint.”
He should have added, “by which time the wise man
may be too old to get it up.”
*
Moral: No matter what you decide to do,
you may regret it.
Bouazisi did not live long enough
to witness his final victory.
#
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
*****************************************
NOTES & COMMENTS
*******************************
Anyone who is committed to an ideology or religion
will have his own version of the past.
Believers are natural-born revisionists.
*
All political parties,
regardless of nationality and ideology,
have a tendency to promise more than they can deliver;
sometimes they even promise heaven and deliver hell.
*
It is only natural for those who are part of the problem
to pretend not to see the solution.
*
Never insult an Armenian writer:
being one is insult enough.
#

love/etc.

2011-12-24T06:47:00.000-08:00

Thursday, December 22, 2011
*****************************************
ON LOVE AND HATE
*******************************
Love has inspired many songs
but we owe our wars, revolutions, and massacres
-- that is to say history – to hatred.
Hatred plays a much more important role in life than love
or any other factor you care to mention,
including indifference and boredom.
Boredom and indifference may be said to be ahistorical
only in the sense that they allow hatred to shape reality.
Boredom and indifference victimize no one,
they only allow victimizers a free hand.
*
A man of power believes history to be on his side.
But history does not takes sides.
Even a solitary, unarmed and anonymous street fruit-vendor
has the power to topple brutal regimes like dominoes.
It is all a matter of time,
and in cosmic terms, a fraction of a second.
Only Almighty God is secure in His place
and He doesn’t even have to exist in order to rule.
#
Friday, December 23, 2011
*****************************************
AS I SEE IT
*******************************
The average Armenian is an idiot
who has been brainwashed to believe he is smart.
If you can’t see this clearly
it may be because you have been systematically moronized.
And if you think I am different
I will be more than happy to quote Flaubert:
The average Armenian “c’est moi.”
*
I have collected so many grievances against my fellow men
that I am beginning to suspect Alzheimer’s may well be
a blessing in disguise.
*
If it weren’t for past grievances
not only Armenian would live in peace with Turk
but also with fellow Armenian.
Maybe that’s what mankind needs:
a drug that will kill bad memories
without damaging any other vital organ.
*
Armenia is the site of the Garden of Eden
with one difference:
in the original Garden humans outnumbered reptiles….
#
Saturday, December 24, 2011
*****************************************
THE ROOT OF INTOLERANCE
*******************************
Authority will never sanction anything
that may question its legitimacy.
One could even say authority and intolerance
might as well be one and the same.
To speak of the tolerance
of a boss, bishops, or benefactor is
like speaking of the shadow of a black hat
in a dark room.
*
ON LOVE
**********************
Cesare Pavese: “One does not kill oneself for love or a woman,
but because love – any love – reveals us
in our nakedness, our misery, our vulnerability, our nothingness.”
It is to be noted that Pavese, an Italian novelist,
fell in love with an American actress,
was rejected, and killed himself.
*
ON IMPERIALISM
***************************
Imperialism may be justified on the grounds that
if we don’t do it to them they will do it to us;
and as everyone must know by now,
in politics and world affairs in general
it is not always the best man that wins.
History provides us with many examples
of this aberration,
beginning with Turks versus Armenians,
or for that matter, the rest of the world versus Armenians.
#

comments

2011-12-10T07:43:00.001-08:00

Thursday, December 08, 2011
*****************************************
NOTES AND COMMENTS
*******************************
A good line once read is never forgotten.
It is my ambition in life to produce such a line.
Call me a megalomaniac.
*
In our environment agreement means
sharing the same bias.
*
When a man sees the light
he assume everyone else is blind.
*
I once met a born again
who thought I was a dead man walking.
*
Because I did not worship his God
he thught I worshipped the Devil.
*
Whenever I see the photo of an Armenian writer
in the company of a boss or bishop,
I can't help thinking,
"There goes the neighborhood."
*
To those who say I repeat myself:
Only if you insist on reading me –
for which many thanks!
#
Friday, December 09, 2011
*****************************************
NOTES AND COMMENTS
*******************************
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
I am informed this morning on the radio,
is the most widely translated document in the world;
also (my guess) the most ignored.
Has it been translated into Armenian, I wonder.
I am not casting aspersions;
only sharing my ignorance and need for answers.
*
Bias is universal.
Resistance to bias
a slowly and painfully acquired asset.
*
All nationalists are brought up to believe
they are all white and their enemies all black.
When in fact they are not even gray but brown --
the color of @#$%.
*
Crude, you say.
So is life.
We have no choice but to deal with it
on its own terms.
*
My parents survived the Turks.
I am now busy trying to survive my fellow Armenians.
#
Saturday, December 10, 2011
*****************************************
WE ARE THE 50%
*******************************
What we need is a revolution
and I don’t believe in revolutions.
At best we may get reforms
but if the past is an index
we have no reason for optimism.
*
Subtract the brown-nosers, the yes-men,
the hirelings, the brainwashed, the dupes,
the alienated and assimilated,
we may be closer to the 50%
rather than the 99%.
*
We are no longer at the mercy of our enemies
but of a far more invincible and insidious adversary:
our own leadership.
Our Wall Street is in the convolutions of our cortex.
*
The only way to describe our situation is to say that
we are committing slow-motion suicide
by self-inflicted ten thousand cuts.
In that sense one could even say that
Turks were more merciful than
our own bosses, bishops, and benefactors.
*

comments

2011-12-03T08:20:00.001-08:00

Thursday, December 01, 2011
*****************************************
What can you possibly know about a country
if you have never tried to make a living there?
What can you possibly know about the human condition
if you have at no time been dependent
on the charity of swine?
For 25 years I had to produce pseudo-Saroyanesque trash
in order to make minimum wage.
The reason why I write as I do today is that
I have declared my financial independence
and, with it, to write as I please
without fear of retaliation.
I may not be a “good” Armenian
as defined by our Ottomanized, Sovietized, and Americanized
wheeler-dealers but I like to believe
I fully qualify as a born-again human being.
#
Friday, December 02, 2011
*****************************************
A lie is like a deadly virus.
Left unattended it will poison and kill its speaker
as well as his dupes,
families as well as communities,
tribes as well as nations,
empires as well as civilizations.
#
Saturday, December 03, 2011
*****************************************
After listening to the patriotic spiel
of a fellow passenger on a train,
Tolstoy is quoted as having said:
“As long as there are men like you
we will have wars and massacres.”
Likewise, as long as there are organized religions
we will have prejudice, intolerance,
and crimes against humanity.
*
The true enemies of God
are men who speak in His name.
*
Tolerance means not only to be open to new ideas,
including ideas that contradict our own,
but also to welcome and cherish them.
*
If we admit there is some truth in all belief systems,
we must also admit that truth is not in a single god
but in all gods; or, in Gandhi’s words:
“If God is Truth even atheists are believers
because they believe in God’s non-existence.”
*
God is either on no one’s side or on everybody’s side.
To say, like the Nazis, “God is with us,”
is not theology but pathology.
(For more on this subject,
see Toynbee’s STUDY OF HISTORY, volume x.)
#

review

2011-11-30T07:24:00.000-08:00

Sunday, November 27, 2011
*****************************************
Q/A
********************
I cannot think of a single important decision or judgment
that I have made in the past
that did not contain a 99% margin of error.
Let that be a warning to all those with whom
I share my wisdom.
*
What do the Pope of Rome and Stalin have in common?
Infallibility.
*
When asked to name my favorite Armenian dish,
I identify myself as a vegetarian.
When told there are many delicious vegetarian dishes
in our cuisine,
I say I prefer to keep my answers to that subject short
because all talk of pilaf and shish-kebab bores me stiff.
*
And speaking of questions:
I don’t remember a single interview
with an African-American writer
in which mention was ever made of chicken and watermelon.
*
A question I have never been asked:
“On a scale of 1 to 10 how would you rate our leadership?”
The obvious answer is minus one, of course!
#
Monday, November 28, 2011
*****************************************
Why is it that some very smart and learned Armenians
confuse anti-charlatanism with anti-Armenianism?
Why is it that some very cunning Armenians
in their defense of their own selfish, narrow interests
voice reasons worthy of an inbred moron?
*
When it comes to Genocide recognition
the American question is not whether it is true or false but
“What’s in it for us?”
Call that cynicism if you like.
They call it pragmatism.
*
Whenever I write for Armenians
I remind myself that I am breaking the commandment:
“Thou shalt not share your wisdom
with wiser men than yourself.”
*
Wisdom and serenity are mutually exclusive concepts.
You can’t be serene in a world of lunatics
who think you are the lunatic.
#
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
*****************************************
It is a universally shared human weakness
to prefer flattery to criticism,
but it is adangerous addiction
to prefer lies to truth.
*
On a radio program on children’s poetry this
morning, I overheard the following quotation:
“There is some shit / I will not eat!” That’s
what I call good poetry – rhythm, music, and
words that once heard are never forgotten.
*
Belief systems have nothing
to do with reality and everything to do with the
power to shape our perception of reality.
#
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
*****************************************
BOOK REVIEW
********************************************
TWILIGHT VISIONS.
By Vahan Vahanian (Jansezian).
Los Angeles. 2011. 255 pages.
(In Armenian)
**************************************************
“I am told I go to extremes in my assertions,
to which I say, What are words for?"
The labyrinth of Armenian life in Los Angeles
is Vahan Vahanian’s territory
and he has as many stories to relate as Scheherazade.
His style is brief, to the point,blunt.
He takes no prisoners.
“With the dollar, a man who signs his name with an X
is treated as a philosopher.
Without the dollar a genius is shunned as a lunatic…”
“That’s the way it is in America.
Novelties aplenty,
real-estate developments everywhere,
institutionalized larceny rampant,
refinement an absent factor.”
Vahanian is not afraid to step on toes or,
for that matter, to kick balls.
A man after my own heart.
As the editor/publisher of a newspaper
that is distributed freely,
neither is he afraid to alienate a fraction of his audience.
He speaks of a woman who tells him
her aim in life is to have more of everything –
“more fun, more money, more jewelry and more sex with younger men…”
“In Los Angeles there is neither brotherhood nor friendship.”
Phony intellectuals, exhibitionists, megalomaniacs, and womanizers
are a dime a dozen.
Vahanian may speak of depressing things
but he does so with a friendly smile
and his smile is infectious.
“Every other Armenian you meet these days
has political ambitions.
If Raffi Hovannisian and Jirair Libaridian made it,
why can’t I?”
And there is the self-appointed genius with literary ambitions:
“Did you get my article?”
“When are you going to print it?”
“No editorial changes, please!”
“How much are you going to pay me?”
If to say what must be said were music,
Vahan Vahanian would be our Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms.
(For more information, write to newarmenia ).
#

women

2011-11-26T07:43:00.001-08:00

Thursday, November 24, 2011
*****************************************
WOMEN
**************************************************
To how many women we could say:
I love you with all my heart
and I shall continue loving you to the end of my days,
but not you as you are,
but you as a figment of my own imagination.
*
ON VANITY
*********************
Charlie Chaplin asked Truman Capote
to read the manuscript of his memoirs
with the eyes of a professional writer.
When Capote did and reported back with a list of suggestions,
Chaplin said: "Get the hell out of my sight!"
*
ON ORIENTAL WISDOM
*********************************
To avoid grief, conflict, misery and suffering,
do nothing and be nobody. Or simply, imitate the dead.
That’s what most Oriental wisdom boils down to.
But since life is only an extremely tiny interval of light
in the darkness of non-being,
it should be as different from death as we can make it
even if in the process we experience confusion and misery.
#
Friday, November 25, 2011
*****************************************
FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
*****************************
The official Kemalist classification of Armenians
as “Christian Turks” is patently absurd
in view of the fact that we are devoid
of both Christian charity and Turkish solidarity.
*
What motivates us to assess ourselves
as smart, progressive, compassionate, and God’s chosen
is the suspicion that we may be none of these things.
*
One of the worst things that can happen to a nation
is to believe in its own propaganda;
and one of the worst things that can happen to a leader
is to become a dupe of his own lies.
Speaking for myself,
I committed my worst blunders
after convincing myself that I knew better
and anyone who dared to contradict me
was a damn fool.
*
When it comes to women,
not only boys will be boys
but also men of all ages.
Hence the saying,
“The brain of a man is the body of a naked woman.”
#
WHAT’S YOUR RACKET?
*********************************
Even after 30 books and over a thousand articles,
stories, and essays in periodicals and newspapers
I hesitate to identify myself as a writer
because more often than not I am asked:
"How come I have never heard of you?"
to which I am tempted to reply:
"Next time you visit your public library
check and see how many names you recognize
besides Shakespeare’s and Hemingway’s?"
*
HIS RACKET
****************************
I can’t imagine Mozart at the age of thirty saying:
"I have composed enough. I am quitting."
I have no doubt whatever in my mind that
Mozart would have gone on composing
even at the age of 80, very much like Verdi.
Likewise, I can’t imagine God saying,
"I have created the universe and enough is enough!"
What if, even as I write these lines,
God is busy creating other universes
in other dimensions?
#

dupes

2011-11-23T07:07:00.001-08:00

Sunday, November 20, 2011
*****************************************
NOTES AND COMMENTS
**************************************************
A headline reads:
“Should Some Bankers Be Prosecuted?”
The obvious answer is, of course!
Gross incompetence is penalized in all other lines of work.
Why should bankers be immune?
Is it because as the 1%
they control 99% of the power?
*
A typical passage in the article reads:
“The federal government has been
far more active in rescuing bankers
than in prosecuting them.”
And why?
Because the 1% can afford politicians,
the 99% cannot.
*
What is American-style democracy
if not the fascism of capitalists?
*
When we demonize Turks
we forget that angels and demons
are creatures of our imagination
and that in reality some Turks may well be better or wrose,
but none of them is an invulnerable being
beyond our reach.
*
Sartre is right:
in human relations
magic plays a more important role than
reason, common sense, and experience.
Where imagination enters,
misconceptions are sure to follow.
*
All popular ideas can be easily and safely contradicted
and they have been.
One could even say,
thinking consists in exposing contradictions.
#
Monday, November 21, 2011
*****************************************
AS I SEE IT
**************************************************
Once, recently, when I said something to the effect
that our treatment of writers
has been worthy of barbarians,
it was the barbarians who were eager to prove me right
by hurling insults at me and in general
behaving like hoodlums on the warpath – as if
that was the only way they knew
how to prove me wrong.
*
"For a smart man you can be very naïve!"
a trial lawyer, who is also a good friend, tells me.
I don’t know about smart
but I am worse than naïve
when I get emotionally involved.
Emotion reduces a complex reality
into a one-dimensional extension of ourselves.
Emotion, writes Sartre somewhere,
attempts to change the world by means of magic.
What could be more primitive?
*
The most beautiful spectacle I have ever beheld
was a sunrise from a seventh story hospital window;
and to think that the purpose of a sunrise
is not to provide man with beauty.
#
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
*****************************************
THE HUMAN CONDITION
**************************************************
It’s not Armenians against Turks,
Germans against Jews,
Jews against Palestinians,
or Cain against Abel.
It’s man against man.
If the world were populated
by a single race, nation, or tribe,
the number of wars, revolutions and massacres
would remain constant.
*
God created man.
God also created the Devil
and the Devil belongs to no race, nation, or tribe.
*
Organized religions are maneuvers
designed to allow one to sit at the right hand of God
and to behave like swine.
*
God created time and space.
What would stop Him from creating
an infinite number of other dimensions?
*
God created man.
He must have been bored stiff.
What other possible explanation is there?
#
Why are you so tough on your fellow Armenians?
I am asked once in a while by concerned readers.
I am not tough on Armenians.
I am tough on deceivers, dividers, and bloodsuckers
regardless of nationality.
I am tough on all victimizers.
Now then, identify yourself please.
Are you a victimizer or a victim?
If you are a victim, why do you object
to my speaking up against your tormentors?
*
Dupes are not born but made
and what makes them is childhood indoctrination --
brainwashing for short;
and if you say you were not brainwashed
i will say, that's because
those who brainwashed you
were successful in convincing you
you were being educated.
#

comments

2011-11-19T09:29:00.000-08:00

Thursday, November 17, 2011
**********
YES IM ANOUSH HAYASTANI
(TO MY SWEET ARMENIA)
**********
How sweet was it to the poet
who wrote that line?
After being betrayed to the authorities
by his fellow Armenians,
he committed suicide
by banging his head against the wall.
Many others were shot in the neck
or driven to Siberia.
If you say all that happened in a different era
and under a different regime, I say,
regimes may change
but the scum always rises to the top.
*
There is a sultan and a commissar in all of us.
If we ever undertake the task of
de-Ottomanizing and de-Stalinizing ourselves,
how many of those who are in power today
would remain in power?
*
If you are one of those readers
who think I have been consistently wrong
in my judgment of my fellow countrymen,
all I am prepared to say in my defense is,
I have at no time violated anyone’s human right of free speech.
Can you say the same about the status quo
in whose defense you speak?
#
Friday, November 18, 2011
**********
CONFESSIONS OF AN IGNORAMUS
**********
Do we have a constitution?
What does it say about free speech?
Is it for it or against it?
If it’s for it,
why is it that some of our ablest intellectuals
live in exile?
What about a Supreme Court?
Do we have one?
Who are its members?
What do we know about them?
Are they for or against fundamental human rights?
Do we have dissidents?
How many?
Who are they?
How many members of the present administration
are former KGB agents?
*
We are told most American senators and congressmen
are millionaires, sometimes even multimillionaires.
What about their Armenian counterparts?
Do we have anything resembling
the Occupy Wall Street movement in Yerevan?
*
A few years ago the Canadian spy agency
called me and said they were going to send someone
to interrogate me about our present situation.
I said I was the wrong man for such an undertaking;
it would be a waste of their valubale time;
I was only a distant observer;
I knew little or nothing about specifics.
They disagreed.
They said they read my commentaries in the Armenian press
and they considered me an expert on the subject.
An excpert?
An expert!
They must be joking.
They were not joking.
If they were interested in names
I could be of no use to them
because I didn’t even know someone who knew someone.
What kind of expert was I
if I had more questions than answers?
*
And if so far I have made no effort to know more
it maybe because in this case
ignorance may indeed be bliss.
#
Saturday, November 19, 2011
**********
ARMENIAN LITERATURE
**********
Canadian literature is rumoured to be dreary.
By contrast, Armenian literature is not even rumoured
to be defunct or non-existent.
*
One advantage in being non-existent is that
no one bothers to spread the rumour that it is trash.
*
The only people who take Armenian literature seriously
are Armenian writers who take themselves seriously.
*
The central concern of Armenian writers
who take themselves seriously
is to expose the mediocrity of all others.
*
“Yes im anoush Hayastani.”
I should like to see one of our poets producing a sonnet
titled “To my sweet fellow countrymen.”
#

2011-11-16T07:07:00.001-08:00

Sunday, November 13, 2011
*****************************************
ETHOLOGY
*****************************************
Pick a man, any man, from the gutter,
give him a title and a regular salary,
and forever after he will say
he never had it so good.
One reason I write as I do is that
I was spared that kind of treatment.
I was born in the gutter and my guess is
I will die in it.
I am not complaining.
Things could have been much worse.
What saved me was pure luck.
No one ever bothered to give me a title.
As for salary:
what I was offered was never above minimum wage.
Had it been above minimum wage
I may have chosen a different path
and I would now be on my way to the devil.
#
Monday, November 14, 2011
*****************************************
WHERE I STAND
*****************************************************
There are advantages
to being a third-rate minor scribbler
living in the middle of nowhere.
To begin with you are left alone.
Your readers are so few in number
that if you alienate one of them
it doesn’t feel like you have lost
half of your income from royalties.
*
By contrast, consider the case
of an Armenian-American academic
with a regular salary and a captive audience.
Not only will he be careful
not to say anything that may be construed
as critical of God and capital
(make it Capital and god) in general
and benefactors in particular
(one of whom may be subsidizing his “chair”)
but also anyone who may be remotely connected with them.
In short, he will support the status quo
and pretend we never had it so good
because we are in the best of hands.
*
During the Ottoman and Soviet eras
our poets wrote odes and panegyrics
to sultans and commissars.
Habits die hard.
“Treason is in our blood,” said Raffi.
So is cowardice.
Hence the scarcity of dissidents
and the overabundance of brown-nosers.
#
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
*****************************************
CHUCK YOU, FARLEY!
*****************************************************
“You call yourself a dissident?”
said a (Soviet-Armenian) writer from Paris.
“Did they throw you out of your home and homeland?”
No, they didn’t because they couldn’t.
I was born and raised on foreign soil
and my home was mine, not theirs.
The contempt in his voice was such that
I understood why in their eyes
we will never rise above the status of “aghber.”
*
Because I try to be honest and objective
I am dismissed as pro-Turkish by some of my readers
as if being dishonest were an integral part
of the Armenian identity.
*
I must get used to the idea that
some of my fellow Armenians are so wrong
that they challenge all concepts of wrongness,
so that one could say they are not even wrong!
#
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
*****************************************
THE 99%
**************************************************
There is no such thing as a belief system
without childhood indoctrination.
Eliminate indoctrination and the chances are
a belief system will collapse
into an abyss of absurdities.
*
It can truly be said of dupes that
they are the 99%.
*
On the radio this morning:
“Pakistan today is ruled by criminals.”
An American pundit:
“Almost everyone in Washington is on the take.”
*
He who admits to being a dupe
will not admit to being a coward, a liar, and an idiot.
*
Workers of the world unite?
Even better:
Dupes, idiots, and victims of the world…
*
What belief systems do is
convince idiots they are smart,
barbarians they are civilized,
and the scum of the earth they are the Chosen.
*
You think I am being cynical?
Allow me to confide in you:
Reality is worse!
*
Sigmund Freud: “The first human
who hurled an insult instead of a stone
was the founder of civilization.”
#

lies

2011-11-12T07:47:00.000-08:00

Thursday, November 10, 2011
*****************************************
YOUR CHOICE
*****************************************************
There are no new or original ideas.
We are all in the recycling business.
I like to believe I have at no time recycled fascist crap
in the name of patriotism or religion.
*
Faith is gut-driven.
So are dogmas.
Where the brain is marginalized,
disaster is sure to follow.
*
Where there is faith,
there will be intolerance.
Where there are dogmas,
there will be heresies.
Where there are heretics,
there will be persecution.
You may now draw your own conclusions –
or confusions.
Your choice.
#
Friday, November 11, 2011
*****************************************
LIES
*****************************************************
Where there is power
there will be propaganda;
and where there is propaganda
there will be lies.
*
We are told again and again that
our Church played a key role
in the survival of the nation.
Listen to Raffi:
“Our clergymen preached patience to us
thus promoting subservience to the point of slavery…
they have always been against individual freedom.”
*
As recently as the collapse of the Soviet Union,
the Catholicos of Etchmiadzin opposed independence.
*
In Manuel Sarlisyantz’s A MODERN HISTORY
OF TRANSCAUCASIAN ARMENIA (Leiden, 1975, page 326)
we read:
“The pro-Soviet Archbishop Tiran Nersoyan was, in 1944,
appointed from Etchmiadzin to be
Prelate of the Armenian Church in North America.
He endorsed Communism as ‘leading to a Christian ideal’
and had written that
'what the clergy is…on the spiritual level,
the Communist Party is on the worldly level
of politics and economics.'”
(See T. Nersoyan, A CHRISTIAN APPROACH
TO COMMUNISM, [London, 1942, page 29].)
#
Saturday, November 12, 2011
*****************************************
LIES (II)
*****************************************************
Very early this morning
when I was half asleep
I heard someone say on the radio:
“We havent’ had democracy in 20 years.”
And I thought, we haven’t had it for 2000.
*
More often than not
our choice is not between truth and lies
but between big lies and bigger ones.
*
The cowardice of the many
and the stupidity of the few:
that’s the only way to explain our past.
The rest is propaganda.
*
And now that I have spoken the truth
I deserve a horse with which to gallop off
in all directions
in a cloud of dust.
#

more...

2011-11-09T07:36:00.001-08:00

Sunday, November 06, 2011
*****************************************
METAPHYSICAL REFLECTIONS
*****************************************************
If God knows neither fear nor doubt,
can He really understand man?
*
When we speak of God
it is useful to remember that we speak of Him
not as He is but as we conceive Him to be;
and it is a serious blunder to conceive of God
in our own image.
*
We may have the answers to the most important questions
only after we die. In that sense,
death may be not an end but a beginning.
*
To God past and future are one
and both might as well be a fraction of a second.
*
What if the Big Bang as we know it
is only the last bang in an infinite series of bangs?
*
Everything we say about God is based on hearsay evidence
and therefore inadmissible.
*
God and men are more fiction than reality.
*
Reality (or God or Truth) is so different
from what we imagine it to be that
if the two ever met
they would not recognize each other.
#
Monday, November 07, 2011
*****************************************
FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
*****************************************************
To go down into the gutter with your adversary
is almost to agree with him -- if not with his words
than with his way of life.
*
No Armenian writer loved his fellow Armenians
as much as Khachatur Apovian – and he committed suicide.
*
I don’t criticize ideas;
I criticize their absence,
*
In a controversy to be silent
is to support the status quo.
#
Tuesday, November 08, 2011
*****************************************
HOW MANY ARMENIANS?
*****************************************************
We have more questions than answers.
Who qualifies as an Armenian?
What if half of Turkey is half Armenian?
Because an Armenian girl was legally raped as a teenager,
does it follow that her offspring
acquired the national identity of her rapist
who may have been himself half Armenian?
An Armenian who is against us,
is he not more Turkish than Armenian?
A Turk who is with us
is he not more Armenian than Turkish?
If to divide-and-rule is enemy action,
do our dividers qualify as Armenian?
How many of our bosses, bishops, and benefactors
(who support only one faction) qualify as Armenian?
If we say only Armenians who are for solidarity
qualify as Armenian,
who will dare to say he is against solidarity?
If we preach solidarity and practise divisions
do we not speak with a forked tongue?
Can an Armenian who speaks with a forked tongue
qualify as a human being?
Confused?
You should be.
i am.
Who said reality is easy to figure out?
#
Wednesday, November 09, 2011
*****************************************
OBSERVATIONS
*****************************************************
After a disaster,
those who are partly or wholly responsible for it,
will come up with a thousand reasons why
the disaster was inevitable.
Don’t believe a word they say.
Their priority is not to understand and explain
but to mislead and deceive.
Their aim is not to learn from history
in order not to repeat it,
but to salvage their powers and privileges.
*
To say where there is power there will be abuse of power
is like saying where there are people
there will also be the law of gravity.
*
Haves and have nots?
It would be more accurate to speak of
bloodsuckers and their victims.
*
Deceivers and dupes?
Even better: predators and herbivores.
*
Class warfare?
I suggest telling bloodsuckers
to minimize their intake of blood
does not qualify.
*
There are many things that can be seen
even by a legally blind man,
but most of us are so carefully and consistently indoctrinated
that we are willing to testify under oath
we saw nothing.
*
Sh*t happens because most men are sh*ts.
And more often than not
a deceiver is as much of a sh*t as a dupe.
*
Voltaire on the origin of religion:
“From the meeting of the earliest scoundrel
with the very first fool.”
#

insanity

2011-11-05T07:33:00.000-07:00

Thursday, November 03, 2011
*****************************************
SWAN SONG
********************************
If you have any hopes,
prepare yourself to see them shattered.
*
The source of all my problems?
I value honesty above everything else.
So much so that
I’d much rather listen to the braying of an honest jackass
than to the seductive song of a phony nightingale.
*
When it comes to painful experiences
I have the memory of an elephant.
As for happy ones:
I can’t think of a single one that did not end badly.
*
The first thing I did when I came to Canada
from war-torn Greece was to buy a loaf of bread
and a cup of coffee.
The bread tasted like @#$%
and the coffee was so hot that it burned my tongue.
After that everything went downhill.
*
The only thing that cheers me up these days
is the prospect of death.
#
Friday, November 04, 2011
*****************************************
PARALLELS
********************************
In an interview published in TIME (Oct. 10, 2011, page 64),
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan
has this to say on the Israelis:
“As long as they refuse to apologize for the nine people
of Turkish descent who lost their lives
on the flotilla, as long as they refuse to pay compensation
to the families and as long as the embargo on Gaza
has not been lifted, the relations between the two countries
will never be normalized.”
*
On President Bashar Assad of Syria:
“It is impossible to preserve my friendship
with people who are allegedly leaders
when they are attacking their own people,
shooting at them, using tanks.”
*
It can truly be said of Erdogan and Turks
that they are a clear-cut case of the blind leading the blind.
To my Turkish friends and readers I therefore say:
“See you in the ditch.”
#
Saturday, November 05, 2011
*****************************************
ON INSANITY
********************************
In his biography of Alexander the Great,
Plutarch writes:
“One of the largest and most handsome lions,
which was kept in Babylon
was attacked and kicked to death by an ass.”
*
Shaw may be right:
the insane should be punished more severely than the sane
if only because they are more unpredictable and dangerous.
*
And speaking of insanity:
if you are in love,
you should remind yourself at least once a day
that your beloved is less a real person
and more a product of your imagination.
*
I don’t agree with a reality that makes crooks wealthy
and honest men poor,
and because I speak of this reality,
some of my readers hate me
as if I were responsible for everything
that has gone wrong in their lives.
*
Subtract imagination from love
and the result may be closer to contempt than affection.
#

news

2011-11-02T06:54:00.001-07:00

Sunday, October 30, 2011
*****************************************
BROTHERS
********************************
The West has its share
of dupes, fools, fanatics, racists, skinheads,
serial killers, child molesters,
and chief executive officers –
in short, hoodlums and hooligans –
as Turkey has its share of denialists.
It’s beyond me why anyone in his right mind
would expect them to be morally superior.
#
Monday, October 31, 2011
*****************************************
OVERPOPULATION
********************************
In my lifetime alone
world population has increased
from three to seven billion.
Scientists tell us the planet cannot sustain
this rate of growth.
Contraception is the only solution.
So far politicians have done nothing in that direction
because they don’t want to offend the Catholics.
But I believe the Pope is as much to blame
as film producers who glamorize sex
and treat pregnancy (if at all) as if it were
an alien, disconnected, and rare condition.
#
Tuesday, November 01, 2011
*****************************************
REREADING TOYNBEE
********************************
After Shakespeare, he is for me the most quotable English writer.
But whereas Shakespeare is universally admired,
Toynbee continues to have more enemies than friends,
especially among his fellow English historians,
probably because he exposed their mediocrity.
In that sense, he reminds me of our own Zarian.
I love Toynbee’s ideas; but what I love even more
is his Mandarin prose.
*
ON GOD
*****************
“I believe that Man has been given the capacity to see God, and I believe that this is the summum bonum towards which all creation groans and travails.”
*
THE CHOSEN
************************
“The Jews, the Japanese, the British ‘sahib’, the Nazis…all seem to me to have been chosen by no one except themselves.”
*
ON HIS CRITICS
************************
“Their pummelings have given me a mental massage that has loosened the joints and muscles of my mind and has set it moving on a new course.”
*
A GOOD QUESTION
*********************************
“If the Turkish atrocities could be explained as anachronistic outcrops of a residual savagery in the hearts of recent proselytes to a Western
way of life, how was a Western historian to explain the apostasy of Germans who were native-born children of the Western household?”
*
ON PATIENCE
************************
“A capacity to suffer fools gladly and to do this with gusto, not as a martyrdom, but as a fine art which the practitioner can practise with zest.”
#
Wednesday, November 02, 2011
*****************************************
IN THE NEWS
********************************
Until very recently
Ayatollah Khamenei and Ahmadinejad were as close
as “kolo kai vraki” (bum and pants).
Today “one of Ahmadinejad’s advisers
stands accused of raping 340 virgins during the last year.”
Not even a writer with the fertile imagination
of Gabriel Garcia Marquez could have written such a sentence.
For more, much more, on the subject,
see Abbas Milani, “Desperate Dictatorship,”
(THE NEW REPUBLIC, Oct. 6, 2011, page 30).
*
Peace is wonderful.
Friendship is great.
Love is best.
But one must be a pervert of the worst kind
to love creeps like Khamenei and Ahmedinejad who,
after conspiring to commit countless crimes against humanity,
end up hating each other.
*
Where there is too much talk of God,
can the Devil be far off?
#

on love

2011-10-29T07:46:00.001-07:00

Thursday, October 27, 2011
*****************************************
REFLECTIONS
**********************************
There is a dupe, a coward, and a bully in all of us.
That’s the only way to explain world history.
*
Q: If you were an animal,
what animal would you be?
A: A vegetarian tiger.
I hate predators.
They are the commissars of the animal kingdom.
*
Good writing consists in deleting.
Silence can be more eloquent than
a torrent of rhetorical verbiage.
A history of silence will have no quotations.
*
If there are homophobes it may be because
they were traumatized by serial pedophiles,
among them such authority figures as priests.
*
After every line I write I ask myself:
Why should anyone be interested in this?
What if he already knows or understands what I am saying?
What if he is ahead of me when it comes to certain ideas
and experiences?
#
Friday, October 28, 2011
*****************************************
SOCRATES
********************************
When asked where he came from,
Socrates is said to have replied:
"Not from Athens but from the world."
And yet, when he was condemned to death by the Athenians
and was given an opportunity to escape,
he said he’d rather die in Athens
than live anywhere else.
*
BEETHOVEN’S SHADOW
********************************
When Vahe Berberian once suggested that
Beethoven’s somewhat overblown shadow
unfairly eclipsed the reputation and worth
of many other equally great composers,
among them Boccherini,
Paul Jungmann, the quintessential German –
blond, blue-eyed, intense, unsmiling – said,
one should not speak such nonsense
in the presence of children.
Forever after music was never discussed in his presence.
*
PROPAGANDA AND LITERATURE
********************************************
All our problems must be ascribed to our enemies,
our propaganda tells us.
The enemy is us, literature reminds us.
And propaganda is more popular than literature
because no one likes to be told
he is a fool or a pervert bent on self-destruction.
#
Saturday, October 29, 2011
*****************************************
ON LOVE AND DEATH
********************************
Love is an arrow, marriage a boomerang.
*
Where there is love
there will be a pierced, broken, shattered, or shish-kebabed heart.
*
There is a Greek myth
whose intent is to emphasize the fact that
the woman you love
and the woman you marry are seldom one and the same.
The critical passage in it reads:
“No lovely naked bride awaited him
on the marriage bed,
but a tangled knot of hissing serpents.”
*
Your children will break your heart
as surely as your parents (when they die).
*
I first fell in love at age eight
with my schoolteacher.
She married another,
had a nervous collapse,
attempted suicide,
and became physically unrecognizable,
by which time I was nine and in love with another –
this time a coeval.
*
My dictionary defines “passion” as “suffering.”
*
The woman you love
and the woman you cease to love –
what a difference!
Not just black and white
but everything and nothing.
*
According to a Frenchman,
“the heaviest body in the world
is the woman you have ceased to love.”
*
After mentioning a dead person
it is customary to say, “may s/he rest in peace,”
when it is not the dead that are in need of peace
but the living.
*
Stendhal, the author of ON LOVE,
one of the best books on the subject:
“All my life I have always seen what I imagined
rather than reality.”
*
And Tolstoy: “In the presence of others,
women – especially when they are young –
pretend so skillfully that no one can see them as they are.”
#

summing up

2011-10-26T07:03:00.000-07:00

Sunday, October 23, 2011
*****************************************
POLITICS
**********************************
The secret aim of all propaganda
is not to spread lies – be they small, middling, or big –
but to convince you to believe
your brain is a useless organ;
and it becomes useful only when authorized by the state
or a central authority.
This may explain why fools have as many certainties
as the wise have doubts.
Speaking for myself: my only certainty is that
when fools are in charge,
war and massacre are sure to follow.
*
What a book one could write on politics
as the art of deception.
*
Kemalism in four words:
“Fez, no. Yataghan, yes.”
*
No one will ever accuse me
of taking myself seriously.
On more than one occasion
I have identified my role in our collective existence
as that of a @#$%-disturber.
*
A statesman is a politician who has done one right thing.
#
Monday, October 24, 2011
*****************************************
EARTHQUAKE
**********************************
It must be obvious by now that
the regime in Ankara has invested more money and manpower
in rewriting history and in persecuting Kurds
than in providing safe housing for its citizens.
*
THE RICH AND THE POOR
************************************
The rich like to believe the poor are lazy
and the poor like to believe the rich are greedy.
Who is right?
As far as I know no pundit has so far
dared to suggest that
we owe the present global economic crisis
to the laziness of the poor.
*
A ROLE MODEL
****************************
Crime doesn’t pay?
But it paid and paid handsomely to Gadhafy
for almost half a century.
I wouldn’t be surprised if future dictators
adopt him as a role model.
#
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
*****************************************
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
**********************************
We are expected to believe that
our revolution at the turn of the last century
in the Ottoman Empire was a success
even if the patient died.
*
Propaganda is designed to flatter the vanity of a few
even if it means insulting the intelligence of the many.
*
What Talaat and chief executive officers
on Wall Street have in common is the certainty that
if the law is on their side
they can get away with murder.
*
Richelieu: “If the poor are too well off
they will be disorderly.”
It follows, the poor must remain poor for their own good
and in the name of law and order.
*
Pushkin: “Where there is a trough, there will be swine.”
The only reason textbook on political science
don’t begin with that line is that
all educational systems are controlled by politicians.
*
Proust: “The pleasure an artist gives
is to make us know an additional universe.”
#
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
*****************************************
SUMMING UP
**********************************
After six centuries of servile subservience
a sudden eruption of violent uprisings.
I dare anyone to suggest that
our collective destiny has not been shaped
by cowards and fools.
Treating them as heroes with good intentions
is to forget that hell is paved with them.
*
Bullies at the mercy of bigger bullies:
that just about sums up our present leadership.
Dzour nesdink, shidag khossink!
#

g/g

2011-10-22T07:40:00.001-07:00

Thursday, October 20, 2011
*****************************************
COMMENTS
**********************************
Don’t judge a man by his opinion of himself
or a political party by its propaganda.
*
You may hope to be forgiven by a Turkish enemy
but by an Armenian friend, never!
I speak from experience.
*
Whenever I disagree with an Armenian,
every Armenian who agrees with him
becomes my enemy.
*
African proverb: “Until lions have their historians,
tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunters.”
#
Friday, October 21, 2011
*****************************************
GUESSING GAMES
**********************************
An unforgettable line from a forgotten American movie:
A lecherous hombre with a foreign accent
to a scantily clead sexy teenager:
“I want to balanga you with my bonnie johnnie.”
My guess is, as children that’s how we learn languages:
we may not understand the words
but we can guess their meaning.
As when in winter a man shivers and says,
“I am cold,” for instance;
or when he says “I am thirsty”
and is given a glass of water.
But as we grow older,
we seem to lose that particular faculty.
*
One of my favorite Jewish jokes goes something like this:
Two old friends meet on a road somewhere in Russia
and after a brief exchange one of them says to the other:
“You tell me you are going to Minsk
because you want me to believe you are going to Pinsk,
but I happen to know you are going to Minsk:
Why must you always lie to me?”
#
Saturday, October 22, 2011
*****************************************
ON THE ETIOLOGY
OF GENOCIDE
**********************************
“There is nothing more valuable than our honor!”
declared a Muslim in Montreal
after murdering his three teenage daughters
because they had boyfriends.
(It is to be noted that he called it “treachery”).
There it is: the perfect justification
for killing defenseless civilians.
*
After dismissing me as anti-Armenian,
less than mediocre and totally unprintable,
they demand solutions from me.
They must be in deep %#$&
and they expect us to believe
we never had it so good
because we are in the best of hands.
*
Fear of free speech might as well be
synonymous with running away from the truth.
*
Mel Brooks: “Comedy is when you fall down an open manhole.
Tragedy is when I cut my finger.”
This may explain why sadists outnumber masochists.
*
Chinese saying: “The great man is a public misfortune.”
*
Japanese proverb: “A wise falcon hides its talons.”
#

wall st.

2011-10-19T07:36:00.001-07:00

Sunday, October 16, 2011
*****************************************
OCCUPY WALL STREET
**********************************
A single anonymous slogan
strikes me as more eloquent
than a hundred academic analyses
by learned economists.
*
“Wanted: corporate accountability.”
*
“Where is the penalty for financial incompetence?”
*
“I can’t afford my own politician.”
*
And the one that must strike fear
in all presidential candidates:
“We are the 99%.”
*
By the time this thing is over,
there may be enough slogans to fill a volume.
I for one am looking forward to it.
*
As for the Republicans who dismiss the movement
as leaderless (as if that were a liability)
or class warfare:
all I can say is that
no matter how rotten the status quo,
it will have its supporters and defenders.
From Nero and Caligula to
Idi Amin Dada, Stalin, and Saddam:
they all had their supporters and beneficiaries.
#
Monday, October 17, 2011
*****************************************
FROGS AND ELEPHANTS
**********************************
Anyone who decides to depend
on the kindness of strangers
must sooner or later come to terms with the fact that
most strangers are not kind.
*
We cannot speak of the moral failings of a volcanic eruption
or the questionable logic of an earthquake.
Neither can we speak of justice
for victims of massacres.
As far as they are concerned,
what’s done is done and cannot be undone.
As for those who editorialize and speechify endlessly
about genocide recognition:
they remind me of a certain American presidential candidate
who promised “Yes, we can!”
and delivered, “No, I can’t!”
*
What a book one could write
on the promises of politicians!
“When I hear 9-9-9
I want to dial 9-1-1.”
To which I can only say,
“It takes one to know one.”
The good news is,
so far no one has dared to say
“It ain’t 99%. It’s only 98.5%.”
*
They call it class warfare
and hope to win with their 1%?
That’s not optimism.
That’s megalomania run amok.
Reminds me of our revolutionaries
at the turn of the last century:
“A frog trying to rape an elephant,”
to quote one of our elder statesmen.
#
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
*****************************************
WALL STREET
**********************************
Leaderless?
With leaders like them, who needs one?
*
“Incoherent, confused, and self-contradictory?”
What about “LIBERTE, EGALITE, FRATERNITE?”
*
A commentary Headline in the Op-Ed page:
“Ballot is still the best way to bring change.”
Not if the choice is between bad and worse,
or between the gutless and the greedy.
*
“National Media, Corporate PR.”
*
"Against Politics, Bankers, Gangsters.”
*
“Eat the Rich.”
*
“Greed is the opium of the Rich.”
*
“99% of the world unite –
you have nothing to lose but your bloodsuckers.”
#
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
*****************************************
COMMENTS
**********************************
We are told “Thou shalt not kill!”
but we are also coerced into killing
in the name of God and Country.
Power structures and organized religions
are full of #$@% -- if you will forgive my French.
*
You are free as long as you do what you are told?
Try to make sense of that!
*
Can you really know someone
who doesn’t himself?
What about an institution
that contradicts itself?
*
Wars become inevitable only
when we do nothing to prevent them.
#

comments

2011-10-15T07:37:00.001-07:00

Thursday, October 13, 2011
*****************************************
FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
**********************************
Two favorite aphorisms on love and marriage:
Balzac: “The fate of the house hangs on the wedding night.”
Chinese proverb: “The rose has thorns only for those
who would gather it.”
*
In Roger Ebert’s LIFE – ITSELF: A MEMOIR
(New York, 2011, page 226) Lee Marvin is quoted as having said:
“'You ever hear me sing an Armenian song?’
Marvin sang an Armenian song.”
*
A question without an answer:
What prompted God to introduce imperfection
in a perfect world by creating man?
*
A glance is enough to change two destinies.
#
Friday, October 14, 2011
*****************************************
AS I SEE IT
**********************************
Whenever I reply to a critic, I make an enemy;
and whenever I am not diplomatic enough
in my replies – diplomacy not being my field –
I make a mortal enemy.
*
Once when I asked the nationality
of a dazzling beauty – a teenage waitress in the cafeteria
of a department store where I was employed as a stockboy –
she said: "Canadian."
When I asked for more details, she replied:
"Let’s see now, Irish, Polish, German, Cherokee,
French, Italian and Ukrainian.”
*
"We are a wounded nation,"
I am reminded once in a while by our propagandists,
"and you don’t kick someone who is down," – thus
equating truth with a kick in the groin.
But truth is a kick only to those
who prefer to live in a world of lies.
#
Saturday, October 15, 2011
*****************************************
FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
**********************************
On the Tea Party:
The forces of evil know how to get organized.
On the Occupy Wall Street movement:
It never pays to give up one’s faith in mankind.
*
For twenty days – or is it forty? – they were ignored.
Now, everyone is talking about nothing else.
*
Solidarity can move mountains.
Without solidarity,
all solutions will be dismissed as unrealistic and utopian
by the very same people who consider it
their patriotic duty to divide the nation
in the name of this or that orthodoxy or ideology,
thus giving patriotism a bad name.
*
Where there is solidarity
even bad solutions may improve matters.
Where there is no solidarity
even the best solution will be ignored.
*
I have met good, patriotic Armenians
who give up on Armenianism after the first insult.
*
After being insulted ten thousand times,
sometimes I reply with an insult
on the grounds that I have earned the right.
If you disagree with my MO,
you can go to hell!
*
“Help those who need the help,”
reads a headline in the Op-Ed page this morning.
The implied subtext: “Prevent future revolutions.”
#

diary

2011-10-12T07:21:00.001-07:00

Sunday, October 09, 2011
*****************************************
OBSERVATIONS
*************************************
In evil men we see ourselves exposed.
*
To see meaning in the meaningless:
that’s the truest mark of creativity.
*
Forgiving others is easy.
What’s hard, perhaps even impossible,
is forgiving oneself.
*
Never take a whole paragraph
to say what can be said in a single line.
Never take a whole line
when a single word will do just as well.
And never underestimate the power of silence
which can be more eloquent than
the most eloquent speech.
*
Instead of eighty and ninety,
the French say four-twenties and four-twenties-and-ten.
This may suggest that human intelligence or inventiveness
is limited and after a certain point
it becomes inoperative.
*
If in a democracy the majority can be
systemativally moronized,
in what way democracy may be said to be
different from tyranny?
#
Monday, October 10, 2011
*****************************************
A JOKE
*************************************
“One Jew tells another that,
that very morning, he asked a passerby
what he’d think, if the next day,
as was rumored,
they’d kill all the Jews and all the haidressers.
And the passerby answered,
‘Why the hairdressers?’”
*
After reading this joke very early this morning
I wept and laughed uncontrollably
for almost an hour.
#
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
*****************************************
FROM THE MEMOIRS
OF AN UNEMPLOYABLE MISFIT
*************************************
For ten long years I worked for a living
in factories, department stores, and offices.
The work itself i didn’t mind.
What I despised were the men I had to work for
and the subservience of my coworkers.
And because I have always had trouble
disguising my feelings,
I was fired shortly after I was hired.
I don’t know of anyone in my circles
of friends, relatives, acquaintances, and neighbors
who has been fired as often as I have.
Don’t get me wrong.
I am not complaining.
They were right to fire;
so was I in finding all forms of modern employment
repellent.
*
If I am ever hired as a teacher,
one of the very first things I will say to the class will be:
all ideologies and religions have their own propaganda line
that contradicts the competition.
There may be some truth in all of them
but in so far as they divide mankind,
they are big lies.
You may now guess
how long my career as a teacher would last.
#
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
*****************************************
DIARY
**********************************
Watched Chaplin’s GREAT DICTATOR.
His imitation of Hitler speechifying was wildly hilarious.
I couldn’t stop laughing.
To all our speechifiers I say:
“Let that be a lesson to you.”
*
STRANGERS
**********************
You may say whatever you wish about me
or anyone else for that matter
and you will be partly right.
That’s because we are not one but many
and some of them are strangers we may never meet.
*
JUSTICE
*********************
Madame Justice is not blind.
She has 20/20 vision – but only for her friends.
During our Ottoman and Soviet periods,
and today, under our own semi-sultans and neo-commissars,
she has consistently ignored us.
*
FRIENDS?
******************
You don’t have to go out of your way
to make a mortal enemy out of an Armenian friend.
He will see something invisible,
hear something in audible,
and react as if you were plotting his murder.
*
ACTIONS HAVE CONSEQUENCES
*****************************************
So do words.
What if what I write may result in the destruction of the nation?
I am responsible only for what I say.
I cannot be held responsible for what others do.
#

diary

2011-10-08T07:36:00.001-07:00

Thursday, October 06, 2011
*****************************************
COMMENTS
*************************************
With every book I publish,
I acquire a new friend and lose two old ones.
Any day now the number of my friends
will bear a negative sign.
*
I feel most alone when
in the company of my fellow Armenians.
*
William James:
"A great many people think they are thinking
when they are merely rearranging their prejudices."
*
The absence of God
plays a more important role in the life of atheists
than the existence of God in the life of most believers--
judging by the way they live.
*
Is it humanly possible to ignore or forget the truth
after hearing it?
#
Friday, October 07, 2011
*****************************************
COMMENTS (II)
*************************************
As soon as you settle on the answer
of an important question,
you begin to suspect there may be more merit
in its contradiction;
in the same way that after you take a woman in marriage,
all other women appear more desirable.
This may suggest that the world was created
not by God but by the Devil;
and if I am not mistaken
there is an Armenian medieval Christian heresy
that says as much.
*
Andre Malraux: “I am an agnostic.
But you know better than I that
no one can escape God.”
He should have added,
“and the Devil.”
#
Saturday, October 08, 2011
*****************************************
DIARY
*************************************
Very early this morning, on the radio,
a demonstrator in Athens:
“What’s happening today is not about saving Greece;
it’s about saving the banking system.”
*
Obama’s greatest blunder:
to ask men from Wall Street
to fix Wall Street.
Imagine asking predators
to reform the law of the jungle.
*
In a televised press conference
the other day when asked
why he did not prosecture the men
responsible for the economic collapse, Obama replied:
“What they did was immoral; it was not illegal.”
When the same question was asked to an economist:
“Their actions were criminal
and they should have been indicted.”
*
Who would have thought the Arab spring
would influence and shape
the Occupy Wall Street movement in America today?
Yanks being taught democracy by Africans!
What a strange place the world we live in is!
How gloriously unpredictable human beings are!
*
In an Op-Ed commentary this morning, I read:
“Russians say they are often more afraid
of the police than of criminals.”
Elsewhere Putinism is seen as an effort
to revive Stalinism.
What else would you expect from a former KGB agent?
*
Anonymous: “The rotten apple is the first to fall,
and it never falls far from the tree.”
*
A line from a western with Errol Flynn:
“There I was, no ma, no pa, brung up by Comanche Indians.”
*
I am reminded of a line by Updike
to the effect that as a boy
he was more influenced by Errol Flynn than Jesus Christ.
#

things

2011-10-05T07:00:00.000-07:00

Sunday, October 02, 2011
*****************************************
IN LOVE
*************************************
When in his eighties Pablo Casals fell in love
with one of his students and wanted to marry her,
his doctor was against it saying it could be dangerous;
to which Casals replied:
“If she dies, she dies.”
*
READERS
**********************
Some readers resent the fact that
I refuse to reproduce their sentiments and thoughts.
They believe a writer should be like a secretary –
take dictation.
I see that as another symptom of our sultanism.
*
Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821): “I don’t know
what the life of a rogue can be like
since I have never been one;
but the life of an honest man is abominable.”
*
Anything that is not worth rereading
can’t be worth writing.
#
Monday, October 03, 2011
*****************************************
DENIALISTS
*************************************
Denialists have a powerful argument in their favor:
Everybody lies.
*
My aim in life:
to humanize the dehumanized.
Call me a megalomaniac.
*
The arrogance of the half-learned:
I know all about that.
I was there once.
*
Life’s favorite trajectory:
from arrested development
to advanced degeneration.
*
We have been ruled by barbarians
for such a long time that
we don’t mind our own.
Either that or we see them
as the lesser of two evils.
#
Tuesday, October 04, 2011
*****************************************
AS I SEE IT
*************************************
Until very recently,
we, Armenians of the diaspora,
were not allowed to know
the identity of our political leaders;
and now that we know them,
we understand why they preferred to remain anonymous.
*
One of the best things about life is that it’s short.
*
Actions have consequences,
consequences have repercussions,
repercussions have echoes
and so on ad infinitum.
*
Memo to our editors:
silencing writers,
burning books,
burning men,
concentration camps,
gulags:
they all begin with censorship.
*
It is impossible to struggle
against the certainties of ignorance
with the doubts of knowledge.
#
Wednesday, October 05, 2011
*****************************************
ON A VARIETY OF THINGS
*************************************
Some of my Turkish readers are outraged
when I criticize Turks.
Like all dictators, Kemal knew that
the only way to be popular
is to flatter the collective ego of the nation.
Which is why most Turks are convinced
they are beyond criticism.
*
I don’t always write what I think and feel
because I don’t really know what I think and feel.
All my thoughts and feelings contain
their own deviations as well as contradictions.
*
I resent it when someone steals my stolen lines.
I work hard to find lines that are worth stealing.
Let him do the same.
*
Here are some aphorisms by Antonio Porchia (1886-1968),
an Argentine writer of Italian descent
who appears to know all about us:
*
"Truth has very few friends and those few
are suicides."
*
"A door opens to me. I go in and am faced
with a hundred closed doors."
*
"You think you are killing me.
I think you are committing suicide."
*
"Some things become so completely our own
that we forget them."
*
"They will say that you are on the wrong road,
if it is your own."
#

as i see it

2011-10-01T07:32:00.001-07:00

Thursday, September 29, 2011
*****************************************
A TOUMANIAN FABLE ABRIDGED
*************************************
Early one morning when the fox hears a rooster crowing,
he thinks: "Breakfast!"
When he is told by the rooster in the tree
that he is not alone but with a friend,
he thinks: "Lunch too!"
But when he finds out the friend is not
another rooster but a dog,
the words breakfast and lunch are replaced with
"Feet, do your stuff!"
*
BLESSINGS
*************************
An Arab blessing
(as quoted by Flaubert in a letter from Cairo):
"I wish you all kinds of prosperity,
especially a long prick!"
What’s next in line?
"May you deflower a hundred virgins"?
*
While in Cairo, Flaubert is said to have explored
the Armenian community.
I wonder if he discovered anything of interest.
*
PROVERBS
**************************
I love exotic proverbs especially when they are phony.
Example: A Burmese saying (which I just made up):
“You cannot feed a hungry tiger
with the bones of a hummingbird.”
*
CELEBRITIES
**************************
There is a type of minor celebrity
who behaves like a major celebrity
in the hope of being confused with one.
There is also a type of nonentity
who wants you to believe he is a future celebrity.
*
GIDE ON WAGNER
*******************************
“L’Allemagne n’a peut-etre jamais rien produit
a la fois d’aussi grand ni aussi barbare.”
*
ONE-LINERS
***********************
Balzac: “Les moeurs sont l’hypocrisie d’une nation.”
*
Baudelaire: “Life is a disease. Everyone knows that.”
*
Because reality is against us, we say God is with us.
#
Friday, September 30, 2011
*****************************************
ABOUT HEGEL
*************************************
Hegel is not an easy philosopher.
As a matter of fact I have never heard anyone say
“I enjoy reading Hegel.”
Even Hegelians don’t always agree
on what he said or meant.
With one exception:
the Francophone-Russian Kojeve.
Kojeve’s interpretations of Hegel
are readable, accessible, insightful,
and eminently unHegelian.
Some samples follow:
*
“Man, to be really, truly ‘man’
and to know that he is such,
must impose the idea that he has of himself
on beings other than himself.”
*
“Christianity is born from the Slave’s terror
in the face of Nothingness, his nothingness.”
*
“The Christian frees himself from the human Master
only to be enslaved by the divine Master.”
*
“He does this for the same reason that
he accepted the human Master:
through fear of death.”
*
“For Hegel, as for Marx,
the central phenomenon of the bourgeois world
is not the enslavement of the working man,
of the poor bourgeois by the rich bourgeois,
but the enslavement of both by Capital.”
#
Saturday, October 01, 2011
*****************************************
AS I SEE IT
*************************************
If I were to say to my shrink:
"Most of my problems stem from the fact that
I was born an Armenian," he would reply:
"I was born a Jew. Only Turks are after your ass.
The whole world is after ours."
*
Those who violate my human right of free speech
do so because they are convinced
they are better men than myself;
and they are better if only because
they are closer to God and Country.
Some of them may even deliver lectures to me
on good Armenianism.
They seem to be totally unaware of the fact that
only certified morons assume that
God, Country, and good Armenianism
have only one definition: their own.
*
It is a scientifically established fact that
prejudice makes people stupid.
*
Hell is more accessible than heaven.
*
Lovers are mutual parasites.
*
Love and hatred are chains.
So is indifference.
*
Very often all great reformers do
is replace big lies with bigger ones.
*
There is more authority in silence than in speech.
One reason why the dead enjoy more respect than the living.
#

this and that

2011-09-28T06:59:00.001-07:00

Sunday, September 25, 2011
*****************************************
CONTRADICTIONS
********************************************
They fascinate me and I see them everywhere.
AVANIM (Stones) an Israeli film
whose unstated but clearly implied moral is:
Rabbis may be as much of a threat to the survival of Israel
as Palestinians.
*
Search for the enemy within and you will find him.
*
They may talk of God
but the means they employ belong to the Devil.
This is as true of rabbis as it is of imams and popes.
*
They may praise rebirth and resurrection
but what they promote is death of the spirit.
*
DECEPTION
**************************
What could be easier than deceiving children?
And are not adults children is disguise?
Do we ever give up – are we capable of giving up --
childhood illusions?
Are we not our own most gullible dupes?
*
A GOOD ANSWER
**************************
When asked if Cary Grant was homosexual or bisexual,
one of his wives (he had five of them) is reported to have replied:
“I was too busy f***ing him to ask.”
There should be a Nobel Prize for the best remark of the year.
#
Monday, September 26, 2011
*****************************************
REFLECTIONS
********************************************
Most of my life I kept my thoughts to myself
out of fear of offending men in positions of power.
I was a coward but refused to admit it.
I behaved like a fool and thought I was wise.
Nothing comes more easily than to preach heroism
and to promote cowardice
in the name of tradition, law and order,
respect for authority, and countless other
fictional considerations.
*
If you are a fool
do not attempt to share your wisdom
with better men than yourself.
*
Are you wise or brave enough to admit
you are a fool?
*
To the rich, money is the quintessence of all wisdom.
*
Between the virtues of the rich
and the vices of the poor,
which would you choose?
*
The criticism of idiots
is more of a testimonial than an indictment.
*
More important than education itself is
who does the educating.
#
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
*****************************************
NOTES & COMMENTS
********************************************
To know perfection
we must first experience the degradation
of life on earth.
Heaven will not be heaven for me
if I can’t play the Beethoven Sonatas like Schnabel
and Bach like Glen Gould.
*
Anonymity will make a hero out of a zero.
*
Promises are one thing, delivery another.
The two might as well be strangers to one another.
*
Whenever I see an odar
joining one of our discussion forums on the internet
I would like to post the following message:
"Welcome to this forum, dear friend.
Please remember to ignore the hooligans among us.
They represent no one but themselves."
*
It must be obvious by now that
one doesn’t have to be a Turk in order to behave like one.
Nothing comes easier to an Ottomanized Armenian
than to behave like a Turk with the certainty that
he is discharging his duty as a patriotic Armenian.
The same applies to Sovietized Armenians.
#
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
*****************************************
TWO PHILOSOPHERS
********************************************
Once, when after a loud argument,
Socrates’ wife poured a pail of dirty water on his head,
he said: “It generally rains after thunder.”
More recently, while massaging his wife’s neck,
Louis Althusser (1918-1990) strangled her,
he pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.
*
Women disappoint men
because they find men disappointing.
*
The difference between dialogue and Armenian arguments is that
the aim of the first is synthesis or consensus,
the aim of the second is verbal assassination.
*
Gide: “Le plus grand bonheur, après que d’aimer,
c’est de confesser son amour.”
*
Valery: “Combien de gens meurent dans les accidents,
pour ne pas lacher leur parapluis!”
#

comments

2011-09-24T07:35:00.000-07:00

Thursday, September 22, 2011
*****************************************
AS I SEE IT
********************************************
It never ceases to amaze me
the greed with which we cling to the illusion
of our own importance no matter how often
we are exposed as irrelevant.
*
Our genocide?
The West wouldn’t allow it.
The recognition of our genocide?
If we write enough books,
produce enough eyewitness accounts,
and organize enough demonstrations,
the West may finally see the light.
*
Historic lands?
All of America is someone else’s historic land,
so what?
*
Perhaps truth or reality itself is a territory
beyond our comprehension,
and God Himself is the negation of the “I”
and everything connected with it.
*
If Calderon is right and “life is a dream,”
it may not even be our dream but someone else’s.
*
In my younger days our elder statesmen
would seek me out and give me advice – all of it useless.
*
History may become more comprehensible
if you think of serial killers as failed political leaders.
*
What if I am wrong?
I will be dead wrong on the day I assert infallibility.
#
Friday, September 23, 2011
*****************************************
FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
********************************************
If you search long enough for something
you are sure to find a substitute.
*
The more I deal with Turks
the more I like my fellow Armenians;
and the more I deal with Armenians
the better I understand Turks.
*
A writer is someone who has developed the art of speaking
even when he has nothing to say.
*
My mother believed what she read in the papers
except what I wrote.
*
Spengler: “The less one needs others,
the more powerful one is.”
*
My ambition in life when young:
To come to terms with death.
My ambition now:
to die in order to have the final answer
which may or may not exist.
*
There are no questions and answers in reality –
both begin and end in the convolutions of our brains.
*
We are told space must have an end.
We are also told space is being created
with the speed of light.
It follows, no matter how fast we travel
we will never see what’s on the other side of space.
*
Love means being always on the verge of tears.
Love feels as though your insides
were being surgically removed
without anaesthesia.
If you have not experienced love,
you don’t know bliss.
#
Saturday, September 24, 2011
*****************************************
SHRINKS
********************************************
Almost everyone I have been reading about recently
has been analyzed. I have never been near an analyst
and I doubt very much if I ever will find myself
in the same room with one.
What could he tell me that I don’t already know?
And what could I tell him?
Where would I begin?
I am misunderstood and spat upon by hoodlums?
Who hasn’t been?
Homer, it is said, was kicked out of seven villages,
all of which, after he died, claimed to be his birthplace.
To this day no one knows where he was born or,
for that matter, buried.
#

reading

2011-09-21T06:52:00.000-07:00

Sunday, September 18, 2011
*****************************************
THE GOOD BOOK
********************************************
My ideas are subversive and dangerous?
What about the ideas in the Bible?
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
“Without vision the people perish.”
“Thou shalt not bear false witness.”
“Fools despise wisdom and instruction.”
The trouble with our censorship is that
its ultimate aim is to violate
not only my human right
but also God’s divine right of free speech.
#
Monday, September 19, 2011
*****************************************
AS I SEE IT
********************************************
Divisions don’t bother me as much as
the lies that are spoken in their defense.
*
Liars don’t bother me as much as
their efforts to make you believe that
they believe in their own lies
and they expect you to do likewise.
*
I may consider making an effort to agree
with our bosses, bishops, and benefactors
on the day they make an effort
to agree with one another.
*
My answer to those who tell me
if I do this that and the other
I may be more popular:
My obscurity is too well established
to be vulnerable to any kind of
promotional or advertising campaign.
*
I have committed so many blunders
that I don’t deserve to live.
The only thing that keeps me going
is the fact that almost everyone I know
has committed worse blunders
yet nothing could be further from their thoughts
than suicide.
*
Instead of voicing your suspicions
redouble your vigilance.
#
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
*****************************************
OBSERVATIONS
********************************************
He who violates my human right of free speech
is in no position to determine his degree of guilt or innocence.
If it were up to fascists to judge themselves,
they would be unanimous in pronouncing their victims guilty.
*
The sons and daughters of well-known Armenian writers
that I have met or heard from
prefer solitude to the proximity of their fellow Armenians.
That may be because they know something
most Armenians don’t -- namely: to survive
in our environment one must either lie
or be penalized for his honesty.
*
I repeat myself?
That may be because I am a bad writer
and you are a worse reader
for reading a writer who is not worth reading.
*
All problems and solutions begin and end
in the convolutions of our breains – which of course
does not apply to the brainless.
*
Love is the mightiest creative force of all
because it sees somebody in nobody
and meaning in the meanigless.
#
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
*****************************************
READING
********************************************
Gerald Durrell’s memoir MY FAMILY
AND OTHER ANIMALS (1956) contains
a hilarious portrait of Gostan Zarian.
Gerald Durrell: not to be confused
with his better-known brother Lawrence
(THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET)
who also wrote extensively on Zarian.
*
A headline reads:
“Syria blames terrorists for country’s violence.”
The trick here is and it has always been,
to portray yourself as a victim even as you victimize.
*
In detective stories I am more interested in the dialogue
than the plot.
*
If only there were writers
who specialized in rewriting difficult texts –
Hegel rewritten by Chekhov.
*
Dupes hate critics.
They view criticism as enemy action.
*
Poetry, it has been said,
is when two words meet for the first time – as in
“fearful symmetry” (Blake) and “beeloud glade” (Yeats).
*
His handwriting is so bad that
his “morale” looks like “merde.”
*
I am a failure because my readers know better.
If only I could choose a different audience…
#

gandhi

2011-09-17T07:41:00.001-07:00

Thursday, September 15, 2011
*****************************************
NARCISSISM
********************************************
It is narcissism and nothing else
that allows a political leader to think
he is the best thing that happened to his nation…
until he is driven to exile,
or arrested, condemned to death, or assassinated.
There is probably more narcissism in politics
than in any other line of work.
*
It is narcissism and nothing else
that allows Turks to believe
our genocide is a fiction of our imagination.
Likewise it is narcissism of the most primitive kind
that allows us to think
we are smart and progressive
when the historic evidence proves otherwise.
*
It is narcissism and nothing else
that allows the very rich to behave like swine
and to believe they are la crème de la crème.
*
The astonishing ease with which both men and women
confuse an ephemeral infatuation with eternal love.
*
The rule is and must be
anything that flatters are vanity
should be dismissed as a lie.
#
Friday, September 16, 2011
*****************************************
THREE HEADLINES
********************************************
The headline of a commentary in my morning paper reads:
“Canada’s self-image needs a reality check.”
There follows a list of misconceptions and fallacies
that have become common currency in Canada,
a country with a long democratic tradition and a free press.
You may now imagine the number of our own misconceptions
that have been consistently covered up
by our controlled press and authoritarians power structures.
*
The headline of another commentary on the same page reads:
“Is it time to rethink think tanks?”
Can we do that?
Do we have them?
There are 4500 active think tanks in the world,
we are informed here.
My question is:
Is any one of them Armenian?
*
In the section dealing with local news,
another headline reads:
“Region’s suicide rate still high.”
Do you know – does anyone know -- our own suicide rate?
Does anyone care to know?
#
Saturday, September 17, 2011
*****************************************
GANDHI
********************************************
Gandhi was a double dissident –
critical of British colonialism
as well as many facets of Indian life.
In a new biography we are told:
“This made him a rather more balanced nationalist
than the many who remarked on the victimhood of their race
or argued for the superiority of their own culture.”
See Jad Adams, GANDHI:
THE TRUE MAN BEHIND MODERN INDIA
(New York, Pegasus, 2011, page 56).
#

correct me

2011-09-14T07:11:00.000-07:00

Sunday, September 11, 2011
*****************************************
AS I SEE IT
********************************************
All children believe in what adults tell them
especially in matters dealing with God and Country.
The world conspires to make us dupes;
and by the time we realize what happened
we have either killed or died as soldiers, terrorists,
and believers in false gods and big lies.
*
We are not smart – we never were
in things that really matter.
For 600 years we dropped our pants and exposed ourselves
to the Turks.
Tell me, my friend,
how smart is that?
*
The more we try to control events,
the deeper the realization of our powerlessness.
*
The source of all wisdom is within your subconscious,
very much like the Kingdom of God.
*
Strinberg: “Ever since childhood,
I have looked for God and found the Devil.”
Perhaps because they are one and the same.
Either that or our perception of reality is so defective
that we confuse one with the other.
*
The astonishing ease with which blessings become curses.
#
Monday, September 12, 2011
*****************************************
ON FREEDOM
********************************************
Imperial powers prefer to deal with corrupt regimes
because the corrupt are more easily manipulated.
This is as true of America as it is of Russia.
Remember that next time you speak of our big brothers.
*
Freedom in a democratic context
means much more than free elections.
It means freedom from want,
freedom of expression,
freedom of assembly, movement, and faith.
Have we ever been free?
Do we know what freedom is?
Freedom to grow a fat belly – is that
the beginning and end of all freedom for us?
*
During the day they speechify
on freedom and patriotism,
on God and Country,
but at night they engage in wheeling-and-dealing.
Hence their favorite slogan, “Do as I say…”
#
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
*****************************************
CORRECT ME
IF I AM WRONG
********************************************
On man’s inhumanity to man:
If you have ever asked yourself,
How can one human being do such a thing
to another human being?
My tentative answer is:
Some human beings cease to be human
when they join a party or group
that subscribes to a belief system.
*
They oppressed us with fire and sword.
We oppress ourselves with ignorance and intolerance.
The result is the same.
The massacre continues.
*
Even people who act in the name of the Devil say
“God is with us.”
*
To fanatics moderation is treason.
So is reason to the unthinking.
*
Freedom of speech allows the fanatic
to expose himself as a fool.
*
We should have a commandment
or a constitutional amendment to protect free speech
instead of a tacit consensus to violate it.
*
Memo to my anonymous critics:
Democracy and intolerance of dissent
are mutually exclusive concepts.
If I am wrong I can be corrected.
But if those in power are wrong
the damage can be as incalculable as another genocide.
#
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
*****************************************
CORRECT ME
IF I AM WRONG (II)
********************************************
In theory we are all against the massacre
of unarmed and innocent civilians,
but give us a chance and we will gladly even the score
and call it justice.
This is only a guess, of course,
based on how mean we can be in disagreement.
*
To how many of my critics I could say:
“Don’t stop, please! Keep writing.
You are a living proof of everything
I have been saying about Armenians –
narrow-minded, rude, intolerant, ignorant, dogmatic,
self-satisfied, loud-mouth…”
*
God is not in the business of explaining the incomprehensible.
We must either find a meaning in our genocide
or dismiss it as incomprehensible.
By making of it a collective obsession
we accomplish nothing but reinforce our image
as perennial victims and losers.
As for justice: let’s leave that to belly-slitting lawyers –
we can afford them.
*
It was only after observing the ease with which
we are Americanized that I was able to identify
our Ottomanized and Sovietized brothers.
*
A peculiarity of dupes is that
they tend to take themselves and their views very seriously.
*
Let’s make one thing clear once and for all.
They did not divide and rule us.
We divided ourselves.
#

on love

2011-09-10T07:49:00.000-07:00

Thursday, September 08, 2011
*****************************************
ON LOVE
********************************************
In a scientific text I read the following:
“The original purpose of the sense of hearing
was to enable an organism to hear the love song of a wooer.”
Further down:
“The higher forms of life,
and possibly the lower ones as well,
would have become extinct a long time ago
if it were not for the pleasures of love –
which are thus more important
than anything that reason is able to produce.”
*
I think therefore I am?
Hell no!
I love therefore I survive.
*
Let’s reason together?
Wrong!
Let’s make love.
*
Why do you think the memoirs of a bordello madam
will sell many more copies
than a treatise on reason by an eminent philosopher?
*
We are a dysfunctional nation
because we preach love of country
and practice hatred of fellow countrymen.
*
To our leaders the Homeland is a symbol
with which they identify – and when they speak of love
in a patriotic context, it is they who want to be loved
because they know they are unworthy of anyone’s love.
Bugger the old farts!
#
Friday, September 09, 2011
*****************************************
ON LOVE (II)
********************************************
Only an Armenian who has not “known” a Turkish woman
or an Armenian woman who has not know a Turkish man
(in the literal as well as Biblical sense of the word)
is capable of harboring anti-Turkish sentiments.
I will go further and say that
there is no such thing as a Turk
or, for that matter, an Armenian.
National identity is an artificially created label
based on propaganda rather than any other factor.
*
Take a child, any child,
place him in an environment whose educational system
is controlled by individuals who identify themselves as Turks
(or any other nationality you care to mention)
and forever after that child will identify himself as a Turk.
*
It is a statistically and historically established fact
that when they first set foot on Armenian soil,
Turks (or rather, those who identified themselves as such)
were a minority.
It follows, after 600 years of co-existence and concubinage,
they are now very probably more Armenian than Turkish.
*
Wars and massacres are declared and committed
not by nations but by politicians and their brainwashed dupes.
All nations have such criminal gangs
and it would be the height of absurdity to assert
Armenians are an exception.
*
I am not denying the fact that
“Turks” massacred “Armenians.”
What I am saying is that criminals (and their victims)
will use any excuse to justify their actions
and prejudices respectively;
and to ascribe the crimes of a few
on the majority might as well be
a working definition of racism.
*
After writing these lines
I read the following by Ralph Waldo Emerson:
“For what man who is master of himself
does not laugh at a king?”
Likewise, for what man who can think for himself
does not laugh at the likes of Kemal
in whose system of thought
Kurds are Mountain Turks and Armenians Christian Turks,
instead of human beings who happen to be living
in a territory called Turkey today
but was known by another label yesterday
and will be known by still another tomorrow?
#
Saturday, September 10, 2011
*****************************************
NOTES / COMMENTS
********************************************
Between power and wisdom,
who will choose wisdom?
*
Birth is not a beginning
and death is not an end.
We think of them as such
because our perception of reality is limited.
In cosmic time, a lifetime is shorter
than a fraction of a second.
*
From the TALMUD:
“Who is rich?”
“He that rejoices in his portion.”
“Who is a hero?”
“He who conquers his urge.”
*
I like all sentences that begin with the words,
“It has been said.”
*
Lord Byron on Italy:
“They make love a good deal here,
and assassinate a little.”
*
On women:
“My wife is perfection itself – the best creature breathing.
But mind what I say – don’t marry.”
*
Camus on love:
“Loving a human being amounts to killing all others.”
*
“Les seuls paradis sont ceux qu’on a perdus.”
#

dupes

2011-09-07T07:09:00.001-07:00

Sunday, September 04, 2011
*****************************************
FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
********************************************
Overheard: “Corruption in Armenia
is like the weather in America:
everybody talks about it
but nobody does a damn thing."
*
Life is a game in which after you learn the rules,
the rules are changed.
*
Zohrab is right:
in life, those who adopt prostitution as a way of life
outnumber the others.
*
If there is a moral in the Arab spring, it is this:
The status quo may collapse when you least expect it.
I therefore say to our bosses, bishops, and benefactors:
Let that be a lesson to you.
*
Their lack of awareness is such that
they assume their brand of patriotism
(which is no better than treason)
is superior to selfless intellectual labor.
*
Our eleventh commandment:
Thou shalt not apply tribal solutions to national problems.
*
I define a good book as one
that if you haven’t finished it by bed-time
you look forward to next morning
with the impatience and anxiety of a lover.
*
Automatically contradicting what your adversary says
is not an argument but a symptom of entrenched prejudice.
#
Monday, September 05, 2011
*****************************************
REFLECTIONS
********************************************
Armenians are brainwashed to hate Turks.
They learn to hate their fellow Armenians on their own.
*
I question the validity of all miracles
but I keep hoping for one:
figure that one out if you can.
*
It is the height of arrogance for a nobody
to strike a modest pose.
*
Men of power depend on kiss-ass incompetents
much more than on honest critics.
*
Not being a masochist
I don’t consider the death of a thousand cuts bliss.
*
A teenager who wins a chess tournament
and another who is forced into prostitution:
guess who is going to make a headline on the front page.
#
Tuesday, September 06, 2011
*****************************************
ROBLEMS
********************************************
After silencing me
they say they need solutions, not criticism.
And they pretend to ignore the obvious fact that
without free speech and dialogue
there can be no solutions.
*
Don’t let them fool you.
We don’t need solutions.
What we need are honest men
whose number one concern is not number one.
*
There are two kinds of solutions:
authoritarian and democratic.
Authoritarian solutions are based
on the erroneous assumption that authority,
even when catastrophically wrong,
must be assumed to be right.
Which also means,
anyone who dares to question the validity of this assumption
must be labeled an enemy and
silenced, excommunicated, exiled, starved,
burned at the stake or shot.
This is as true of the Kremlin as it is of the Vatican.
*
Labels change but human nature remains constant.
*
We are racists not because we hate Turks
but because we hate our fellow Armenians.
*
If you say my criticism is motivated by self-hatred,
I could say that your rejection of my criticism
is motivated by self-infatuation.
*
If love of mankind means
loving greed, intolerance, prejudice, fanaticism,
cruelty, stupidity, and ignorance,
I want no part of it.
#
Wednesday, September 07, 2011
*****************************************
LEADERS AND DUPES
********************************************
Incompetent leaders can do more harm
than competent enemies.
*
It is an established fact known to all except dupes
that the criminal rate among political leaders
is higher than among ordinary citizens.
*
I understand dupes:
I have been one most of my life.
*
According to Cicero:
“Freedom is participation in power.”
If we are free, ours is the freedom
of ants, birds, and herbivores –
free to be stepped on, shot at, and devoured.
*
Nothing works as planned.
Turks believed they can convince the world.
They now know they can’t even convince their own
except the dupes who will believe anything.
*
Subservience to alien tyrants is understandable.
But subservience to our own?
#

facebook

2011-09-03T07:38:00.000-07:00

Thursday, September 01, 2011
*****************************************
AN EXCHANGE ON FACEBOOK
********************************************
“You have only 400 friends?
I have 5000 of them.”
“Maybe so, but I also have 10,000 enemies.”
“That I don’t believe.”
“If you agree with me that offending an Armenian
amounts to making an enemy for life,
do the math! At one time or another
I have offended sermonizers, speechifiers,
panchoonies, commissars, chauvinists,
Turcocentric ghazetajis, bosses, bishops, benefactors
and all their gigolos and gigolettes…
10,000 may indeed be a conservative estimate. Yes?”
#
Friday, September 02, 2011
*****************************************
AS I SEE IT
********************************************
On the day we succeed in throwing out the rascals
we shall come face to face with the void.
*
Mubarak on trial:
How many political leaders would escape the death penalty
if they had to face justice?
*
Gadhafi urging his supporters to kill the “rats”
even as he behaves like one.
*
Tell me who your friends are…
even better, tell me who your enemies are
and I will tell you who you are.
*
An honest politician?
Only morons believe in oxymorons.
*
All deceivers begin by deceiving themselves.
They are their own first dupes.
*
I have little sympathy for survivors.
All my sympathy goes to the victims who did not survive.
*
Castrating rapists is barbaric
except when the victim is someone I love.
#
Saturday, September 03, 2011
*****************************************
CANNIBALISM
********************************************
The average dupe does not know who and what he is.
Hence his need to identify himself –
as if a label, any label,
be it ethnic, religious or ideological,
will confer on him a reality he does not possess.
He may be – or rather his DNA may be –
5% Armenian or Turkish and the rest
a Russian salad of many tribes, nations, and races,
but in an Armenian environment
he will identify himself as an Armenian
and in a Turkish environment as a Turk.
He will go further and kill and die
in the name of god and country –
a non-existent or false god
and a country that has belonged
and will eventually belong to others.
*
Collective existence is a farce.
There are no leaders,
only pretenders to the throne
whose first and most important project
is not to serve the people
but to obstruct the path of the opposition.
*
Religions and ideologies may preach compassion and justice
but they all end up practicing cannibalism.
This thought occurred to me
after listening to a radio documentary
on female genital mutilation.
*
I wouldn’t be surprised in the least
if a future study of history
from the beginning to our own days
will be titled “The Age of Cannibalism.”
*
A Libyan rebel leader on Gadhafi:
“He called us rats, but he is the larger rat.”
*
Unmask a political leader and expose the rat.
#

as i see it

2011-08-31T07:34:00.000-07:00

Sunday, August 28, 2011
*****************************************
FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
********************************************
We all try to do the best for ourselves
and more often than not
our best turns out to have been our worst.
*
To brag is wrong except when a nation does it –
and they do it all the time.
*
We don’t think unless we are cornered into thinking.
What we do instead is grab the most convenient
or flattering explanation
and hang on to it to the bitter end.
*
The disappointments of success
are as deep as the disappointments of failure.
*
The very same individuals who are against free speech
control our educational system, and with it,
our perception of reality.
*
In politics if you win you brag,
if you lose you lie.
*
To combat the dread of death
we pretend to live.
*
It is in the blood (or collective unconscious) of the strong
to divide and rule the weak,
and it is in the blood of the weak to be divided.
*
To say free speech is our “greatest enemy” (Zarian)
is to imply we are our own greatest threat
to our security and development as a nation.
In that sense, the enemy is indeed us.
*
Plutarch: “But when the body called the Five Thousand –
which in fact were only Four Hundred…”
#
Monday, August 29, 2011
*****************************************
OBSERVATIONS
********************************************
There is a type of Latin-American writer,
I read today, who is convinced
“literature can fend off injustice and ugliness
and redeem the world.”
Once upon a time we too had such writers.
But do we have them today?
If you know of one, can you name him or her?
*
I am constantly urged not to speak about Armenians
as I do on open forums, in the same way that
Turkish writers are urged, nay threatened,
not to speak of Turkish crimes against humanity.
Propagandists on both sides are not interested in facts,
only in figments of their own imagination.
*
How easily are love and lust confused? --
also arrogance and self-esteem.
Search for the worst in the best
and don’t be surprised if you find it.
*
Man is prone to superstition
because he cannot answer the most important questions
and his need for answers exceeds
his love of truth or his understanding of reality.
*
We all love to be loved and hate to consider the possibility
that we may not deserve it.
#
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
*****************************************
HYPNOSIS
********************************************
Knut Hamsun on Hitler’s Germany:
“It’s mass-hypnosis that does it…
Mass hypnosis is an awful thing,
just look at theaters and circuses.”
*
They are hypnotized into thinking
Turks are too civilized to have committed atrocities
and we are hypnotized into thinking
all Turks are bloodthirsty barbarians.
One could say that the aim of all propaganda
is mass hypnosis.
Or, after the subject has been hypnotized,
you can convince him of anything.
*
To the Turks, Kemal is a messianic figure
who raised the nation from the rotten corpse of the Empire.
If only we too had a Kemal of our own.
On second thought, we may be better off without one.
*
One way to explain an alienated Armenian is to say that
he is an Armenian who refuses to be hypnotized.
#
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
*****************************************
AS I SEE IT
********************************************
The older I grow,
the heavier the burden of memories.
Which is why I don’t consider Alzheimer’s
an undesirable condition.
*
Perseverance is a good thing
but not when it comes to digging your own grave.
*
I don’t write to save the nation.
I can’t even save myself from boredom.
*
I drink to drown the Turk in me,
but the bugger is a swimmer with Olympic ambitions.
*
Political leaders of the West were almost unanimous
in their desire to befriend Gadhafi.
Which may suggest the world is ruled by men
whose IQ is lower than that of a backward African mob.
*
The Buddha is right: no one can save another – especially one
who has made up his mind to go to hell.
#

memo to turks

2011-08-27T07:42:00.000-07:00

Thursday, August 25, 2011
*****************************************
SUMMING UP
********************************************
The ideal dupe is he
who doesn’t believe he is one.
*
The true believer is he
who believes anyone who doesn’t share his belief system
is the dupe of a heresy.
*
Mankind is divided between deceivers and their dupes.
As for the silent majority:
they might as well be an absent factor.
*
If we judge an idea by its history,
we shall have no choice but to assert
belief systems are the source of all evil.
*
“Since it was a religious war,
there were no survivors.”
*
If you think religious wars
are a thing of the past, think again.
*
Think again!
A useless, not to say, an absurd suggestion
to a believer who by believing
he declares his inability to think for himself
and must therefore rely on someone else’s thinking – no,
not thinking but believing,
which can also be defined as “not thinking.”
*
And if you believe the age of prophets,
like the age of religious wars
belongs to the irrevocable past,
I for one will not be surprised to learn that
in the eyes of some historians
the 20th century is already known
as the century of false prophets –
Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, Kemal….
#
“Believe those who are seeking the truth.
Doubt those who find it.”
Even better:
Believe only those who are engaged in rejecting lies.
#
Friday, August 26, 2011
*****************************************
WORDS
********************************************
We are told
“The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
We are told
to judge a tree by its fruit,
a man by his actions,
and an idea by its history.
What about religion?
If religion is such a good thing
why has it killed and continues to kill so many people?
Who will believe you if you say
“my religion is the only true one;
all others are heresies?
Not even your co-religionists.
Consider the case of Catholics and Protestants,
Shias and Sunnis, and generally speaking,
all orthodoxies and heresies.
But contradictions don’t end there.
In the Old Testament we are told
“Thou shalt not kill.”
But elsewhere God commands His Chosen People
to slaughter not only their enemies
but also their cattle.
Are we to believe even God contradicts Himself?
Or is it only when He uses words?
#
Saturday, August 27, 2011
*****************************************
MEMO TO MY TURKISH READERS
********************************************
Do you really think
you can run away from justice, like Talaat?
Surely you can’t expect us to believe
that your sources are more authentic
than Pamuk’s, Akcam’s, and countless other
western historians among them Turcophiles like
Arnold J. Toynbee and Bernard Lewis.
Last but not least,
you can’t be serious when you dare to suggest
you know better than Kemal
who at no time denied the reality of large-scale atrocities
and the only reason he didn’t use the word “genocide”
is that it had not yet been coined.
#

ignorance

2011-08-24T07:49:00.001-07:00

Sunday, August 21, 2011
*****************************************
ON IGNORANCE…
AMONG OTHER THINGS
********************************************
More often than not
ignorance is not a result of not knowing
but of not wanting to know.
*
To be a dupe means to place
patriotism and propaganda
above honesty and objectivity.
*
My Armenian and Turkish critics
sound remarkably alike – no doubt
as a result of 600 years of cohabitation
compounded by fear of reality.
*
Dupes come in bunches.
Where there is one there will be another.
They need each other’s warmth
like swine in a cold barn.
#
Monday, August 22, 2011
*****************************************
UNANSWERED QUERSTIONS
********************************************
Because I support the idea
of a united and strong Armenia,
I engage in treason?
And because my critics are for
a divided, weak, demoralized Armenia,
they are patriots?
But the question, the real question,
which nobody cares to ask is:
We survived the Turk,
will we survive our patriots?
*
What if, when it comes to extermination,
our leaders are better at it than
the Sultan, Talaat, and Stalin combined?
What if there is more truth in what we hate
than in what we pretend to love?
What if we serve the Devil
even when we speak and act in the name of God?
*
Because I write in open forums
where even Turks can read me,
my readers take notice of what I say.
Otherwise they would have ignored me.
They would have pretended I don’t exist.
They would have saved their spittle
for their real enemies – the opposition.
*
For more on this subject, see
A FIRST-RATE MADNESS:
UNCOVERING THE LINKS BETWEEN LEADERSHIP AND MENTAL ILLNESS.
By Nassir Ghaemi. 340 pages. The Penguin Press. $27.95.
#
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
*****************************************
THEN AND NOW
********************************************
A hundred years ago
Armenians had to be forcibly driven out from Turkey;
they are now exiting from Armenia on their own.
*
I should like to see a comparative study
of Armenian assimilation rates
in the Ottoman Empire and the United States of America.
*
How many Armenian-Americans can read and write
in Armenian today?
After two or at most three generations in America
assimilation sets in.
But even after six hundred years
in the Ottoman Empire – that is roughly
twenty-four generations – we had a vibrant Armenian literature
in Istanbul.
Name a single Armenian-American writer today if you can.
*
We like to blame Talaat and Stalin
for the slaughter of two generations of our major writers,
but we forget that these writers
were betrayed by Armenians.
*
The only authentic Armenians today
are the skeletons of our 5th-century ancestors
and even the best of them
were odars with mixed blood.
*
Our nationalists may portray themselves as superpatriots
but their true intent is extermination – if, that is,
we judge them by their actions
rather than by their verbally stated intentions.
*
When words and actions don’t match
you may safely discard words as lies – unless of course
you happen to be a certified dupe.
#
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
*****************************************
ON LEADERS (II)
********************************************
In theory, patriotism, even nationalism,
stands for freedom from imperial oppression,
beginning with free speech.
In practice, try to disagree with one of our superpatriots
and see what happens.
There is a hangman in all our nationalists.
*
Only readers who cling to their Ottomanism and Sovietism
confuse my anti-Ottomanism and anti-Sovietism
with anti-Armenianism.
*
The God of the Old Testament
is a jungle chieftain who thinks men
are such ignorant savages that
they have to be told murder is a no-no.
*
The secret ambition of all leaders
is to be almighty and infallible, like God.
This is as true of the Pope as it is of Stalin.
*
Who are our leaders?
In the Diaspora they are faceless Levantine wheeler-dealers
at the mercy of social, political, cultural, and economic forces
beyond their control – in short:
they are in over their heads.
In the Homeland they are dehumanized bureaucrats
accountable only to the Kremlin.
With friends like these, who needs enemies?
#

kemal/5

2011-08-20T07:26:00.001-07:00

Thursday, August 18, 2011
*****************************************
ONEUPMANSHIP
********************************************
Only Armenian writers writing in Armenian
are eager to inform me that I don’t qualify
as an Armenian writer because I write in English,
as if being an Armenian writer
were an honor and a privilege
as opposed to being a curse and sometimes even
a death sentence.
*
About the Genocide and its Recognition:
either Turks are mean as well as obstinate (probably both)
or we are incompetent and stupid (ditto).
*
And speaking of Genocide Recognition:
where would this issue – so dear to all our hearts – be
without the contribution of Armenian writers
writing in odar languages?
*
Our patriotism teaches us to love our homeland
and to hate our fellow men – including Armenians.
As for criticizing Armenians in open forums
accessible to our enemies:
even when completely blind,
our enemies acquire 20/20 vision
when it comes to identifying our weaknesses and failings.
That’s the way of the world and the jungle.
I have every reason to believe
Turks know more about us
than we know ourselves.
I doubt if I have ever said anything
they didn’t already know.
#
Friday, August 19, 2011
*****************************************
WHAT I KNOW
ABOUT OUR BRAINWASHED DUPES
********************************************
They believe to have the rare gift
of judging someone they don’t know
and criticizing a text they haven’t read.
*
Not only do they believe God to be an Armenian,
they also believe His patience is without end.
*
They have a tendency to believe the absurd
and to reject the evidence of their own eyes.
*
They may not be happier than us
But for some incomprehensible reason
they appear to be on better terms with themselves.
#
Saturday, August 20, 2011
*****************************************
ON KEMAL (V)
********************************************
Finally an objective assessment of Kemal
by a Turkish biographer.
After discussing the fallacies Kemal espoused
(scientism, materialism, nationalism, among others),
we are told, he may have been the right man
at the right time and place
but he was not a great man.
“The key to Ataturk’s success lay not
in the originality of his ideas
but in the singularity of the opportunity he seized.”
See M. Sukru Hanioglu, ATATURK (Princeton, $27.95).
*
The trouble with most academics is that
they fall hopelessly in love with their thesis.
*
The most dangerous dupe is the propagandist
who believes in his own propaganda.
*
A brainwashed Turk and a brainwashed Armenian
might as well be twins.
They belong to no known nation
except the nation of the brainwashed.
They are the cattle of mankind.
*
We judge people not by how good they are
but how much they love or flatter us.
To the rest we are indifferent.
#

comments

2011-08-13T08:21:00.001-07:00

Thursday, August 11, 2011
*****************************************
DOUBLETALK
********************************************
They say “We don’t need critics,”
because they hate to be exposed as incompetent fools.
*
They say “We need solutions,”
thus admitting so far they have failed to come up with any.
Imagine an economist saying to a street vendor:
“I need a new fiscal policy.”
*
“We don’t need critics!”
Translation: Shut-up!
*
They say they don’t need critics
because they consider themselves beyond criticism.
*
They say they need solutions
as if all of our literature dealt
with the eternal snows of Mt. Ararat,
nightingales serenading the moon,
and the mutual torments of love.
*
You need solutions?
Read Khorenatsi, Raffi, Baronian,
Odian, Zarian, Massikian…
and if you don’t like Armenian writers,
read Greek, Russian, French, English, and American writers,
because in the end they all speak
against ignorance, intolerance, oppression,
incompetence, dishonesty, and doubletalk.
*
“We need solutions!”
I have never heard a speechifier deliver that line in public.
What I have heard again and again and ad nauseam is
“We need your moral and financial support!” –
an obvious variation of the Panchoonie punch line
“Mi kich pogh oughargetsek.”
#
Friday, August 12, 2011
*****************************************
NOTES AND COMMENTS
********************************************
Just because Turks disagree with us
it doesn’t necessarily follow that everyone who disagrees with us
is a Turk or a Turcophile.
*
If outrage were an argument
we all would be like David Anhaght – invincible.
*
I remember to have read somewhere that
the criminal rate among politicians is much higher
than among ordinary citizens.
If international law were tougher,
most politicians would be in jail.
*
Egocentrism: the misconception that
what we say matters.
*
Turcocentrism: the fallacy that Turks continue to be
in charge of our destiny as a nation.
*
No matter how hard I try
I cannot trust a man who is incapable of speaking
against his own interests.
*
Assad in Syria, Gadhafi in Libya:
the more incompetent and corrupt a leader,
the harder he will cling to power.
Closer to home: how many of our own political leaders
have resigned because they were not equal to the task?
#
Saturday, August 13, 2011
*****************************************
OBSERVATIONS
********************************************
There is a familiar type of loud-mouth
and holier-than-thou superpatriot
whose role models are our revolutionaries
in the Ottoman Empire
who promised heaven and earth
and delivered hell.
That’s the way it is with political leaders,
especially revolutionary political leaders:
the more they promise,
the less they deliver,
and the chances are,
what they deliver is not fit for human consumption.
*
Rhetoric is a euphemism for verbiage
and verbiage is another word for verbal garbage.
If rhetoric were enough,
we could be the mightiest empire in the history of mankind.
*
We have this in common with the Jews:
history has not been on our side.
Their victory over the Palestinians
and ours over the Azeris have been moral catastrophes.
The Jews have been accused of behaving like Nazis,
and we have been accused of behaving like Turks.
*
We should teach our children to say:
“I disagree with what you say,
but I will neither raise my voice
nor go down into the gutter to prove you wrong.”
#

critics

2011-08-10T07:32:00.001-07:00

Sunday, August 07, 2011
*****************************************
CRITICS (II)
********************************************
On the day brainwashed dupes begin to agree with me
I will have no choice but to consider a career move
by applying for a job in the sanitation department
-- which may not be much of a move
consisting as it does in collecting trash
as opposed to exposing it.
*
The right word at the right time and place
can make a difference.
I have no doubt about that.
If so far I have made no difference
it may be because I have not yet found the right word;
or, if I have found it,
I have not delivered it at the right time and place.
This is why I intend to keep buggering on
until I hit paydirt.
In the meantime I console myself by saying
if what I say annoys the hell out of some readers,
I must be doing something right.
*
“What Africa needs,” I read today in a commentary,
“is precisely such transmutations of tribal loyalties
to the larger loyalties of nationhood.”
Which simply means, we have no reason to believe
we are ahead of Somalis, Ugandans, and Zulus?
*
The Tea Party in America reminds me of our partisans
willing to drive the nation to bankruptcy
rather than to compromise for the sake of consensus.
*
Compromise and consensus have become dirty words with us
because God and all those who speak in His name
have no use for compromise.
Our partisans confuse ideology with theology…
“and because it was a religious war,
there were no survivors.”
#
Monday, August 08, 2011
*****************************************
ON BELIEF SYSTEMS
********************************************
When it comes to politics and history,
the average man
(this is especially true of Armenians and Turks)
tends to adopt a dogmatic stance.
His views become an integral part of a belief system
and as everyone knows,
the problem with belief systems
and those who hold them is that
they are never wrong –
very much like the Pope of Rome
(in the eyes of Catholics),
Kemal (in the eyes of Kemalists),
Hitler (in the eyes of Nazis),
Stalin (in the eyes of Stalinists),
Mussolini (in the eyes of Italian fascists),
Mao (in the eyes of Maoists),
and last but not least,
Marx (in the eyes of Marxists –
though Marx himself is quoted as having said,
“I am not a Marxist”).
*
I was brought up as a Catholic,
and as a Catholic it never even occurred to me
to question the Pope’s infallibility.
But I changed my mind
the moment I began thinking for myself --
as opposed to saying “Yes, sir!”
to whatever I was told
by my superiors, whom I now consider
the scum of the earth).
*
The problem with believers is that
they suffer from one of the most dangerous
psychological aberrations known to man,
namely, infantilism.
They hate to grow up.
They hate anyone who dares to contradict them.
Above all they hate to think for themselves,
which means, they hate to use that which happens to be
their most valuable possession: their brain.
*
Believing in gods
(there have been ten thousand of them, we are told)
is bad enough.
Believing in men is infinitely worse.
#
Tuesday, August 09, 2011
*****************************************
WHAT A MAN BELIEVES
********************************************
What a man believes is his own business.
It becomes our business
only when his belief system
promotes intolerance,
legitimizes prejudice,
and issues licenses to kill.
*
A belief system that relies on charlatans to exploit dupes
might as well be a criminal conspiracy.
I am not spinning theories and scenarios
based on abstractions.
I am talking about facts and historical reality –
what happened to our parents in the Ottoman Empire,
to our brothers in the Soviet Union;
and what’s happening today
in the Middle East and Africa.
*
“Yes, sir!” may be said to be
the two most dangerous words known to man.
If it weren’t for these two monosyllables,
we would have no organized religions and armies,
that is to say, wars and massacres.
#
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
*****************************************
WHAT'S TO BE UNDONE
********************************************
We like to believe we are eminently adaptable survivors.
There is some truth in that but also a contradiction.
We are so adaptable in fact that in France
we could easily pass for Frenchmen,
in Russia for Russians,
in Greece for Greeks,
in Italy for Italians,
in Israel for Jews, and so on…and
I have even met Armenians
who could easily identify themselves as Mongols in Mongolia
and get away with it.
As for being survivors:
let us not forget that a great many of us,
especially the best and the brightest,
did not survive – compliments of Talaat, Stalin,
and our Levantine philistines in the Diaspora.
*
And speaking of Levantines:
one of the worst things that happened to us
in the New World is allowing Levantines
to be in charge of our institutions
on the grounds that they are more authentic
and less assimilated Armenians than the average native.
These gentlemen (if you will forgive the overstatement)
have done more harm to the integrity of our communities
than all “social, political, and economic factors
beyond our control” combined.
*
We like to believe we are smart.
Yes, some of us may well be smart,
but only in the marketplace.
Our political I.Q. or the way we conduct our affairs
might as well be negative.
We are as tribal as the most backward
African dysfunctional nation.
Put two Armenians on a desert island
and they will build three churches – the third
being the one they don’t go to.
*
What will save us?
What can save us?
As for as I can see, only prayer –
and I speak as an atheist.
“Our Father who art in Heaven…”
#

more...

2011-08-06T07:24:00.001-07:00

Thursday, August 04, 2011
*****************************************
FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
********************************************
The Chinese said to their poor, “Get rich,”
and they got rich.
The Americans said to their rich, “Get richer,”
and they bankrupted the global economy.
*
You cannot travel on the wrong path
and hope to reach your destination.
*
I know my critics are wrong
when they say what I used to think thirty years ago.
As for critics who speak in the name of God and Country,
they are never right – or they are wrong 99% of the time.
*
Some of the most dangerous criminals
in the history of mankind were political leaders
who were thought of as infallible – or 99% right.
*
Bishops, imams, rabbis:
witch doctors with a college education.
#
Friday, August 05, 2011
*****************************************
FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
********************************************
Both Turks and Armenians share in common
an aversion to reality.
Turks believe all talk of genocide is fiction.
When repeatedly warned of the coming catastrophe,
Armenians reacted with disbelief.
“Zohrab effendi is exaggerating,”
was a typical reaction.
Even after the cold-blooded murder
of our ablest men in Soviet Armenia,
our “chic Bolsheviks” in the Diaspora
went on repeating the slogan
“Russians are our big brothers.”
Closer to home,
when I speak of our reality objectively today,
I am told to “Shut the f*** up!”
#
Saturday, August 06, 2011
*****************************************
CRITICS
********************************************
My critics are my best source of inspiration.
They are my bread and butter.
*
Once upon a time we were a progressive nation.
But we lost that under the Sultans and the Soviets.
*
To say all problems can be solved except ours
might as well be a suicide note.
*
Charlatans will prosper as long as there are dupes;
and honest men will be persecuted
as long as there are charlatans.
*
To be smart and to be a dupe
are mutually exclusive concept.
*
To divide and rule has been the foreign policy
of all imperial powers.
As long as we remain divided
we implement the foreign policy of our enemies.
*
Our dividers are as unaware of their genocidal intent
as Turkish denialists.
*
When I was young I sought the approval of my superiors
until I realized they were the scum of the earth.
*
I cannot change the past;
neither can I resurrect the dead.
No one can.
*
To expose present blunders
is to prevent future catastrophes.
That’s why I prefer to write about our reality today
as opposed to past deeds that cannot be undone.
*

notes/comments

2011-08-03T07:13:00.000-07:00

Sunday, July 31, 2011
*****************************************
ON INFALLIBILITY
********************************************
As the number of blunders goes up,
so do assertions of infallibility.
*
The greatest mistake is to think we are right
and those who disagree with us wrong.
*
Prove an infallible man wrong
and make an enemy for life.
*
Infallible men don’t learn
because they are in the business of teaching.
*
On the Genocide issue
Americans see Turks as reflections of themselves
and Armenians as white niggers.
*
Our political and religious leaders
praise solidarity with words
and bury it with actions.
*
Nothing can be transparently more dishonest
than to expose the crimes of our enemies
and to cover up our own blunders.
*
One of the most important functions
of all educational systems is to identify the enemy.
*
What holds a nation together
is the threatening presence of the enemy.
*
If the enemy dies,
so does the glue that holds the nation together.
*
The unspoken aim of all organized religions and ideologies
is to legitimize double-talk:
to say one thing and do the opposite.
*
I don’t write for the enjoyment of the reader.
Neither do I write to flatter.
I write to point out the fact that
no one is infallible,
we all make mistakes,
and the beginning of all wisdom is acknowledging them.
#
Monday, August 01, 2011
*****************************************
ON COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS
& FALLACIES
********************************************
Readers who know nothing about me
assume just because I criticize Turks
I must be pro-Armenian; or, again,
just because I criticize Armenians
I must be pro-Turkish.
These readers appear to live
in a one-dimensional either/or universe
in which the dominant colors are black and white.
It never even occurs to them that
criticism may be motivated
more by an objective assessment of facts
and less by means of nationalist bias.
*
If you tell me you know and understand
all you need to know and understand,
you give me no choice but to conclude that
your needs must be extremely narrow.
If you tell me reality is an open book to you,
you will corner me into saying
that may be because you read nothing but comic books.
There are more shadows than light in life,
and more shades of gray than black and white.
*
Whenever a historian asserts
he has figured out the past and how it works,
he is immediately attacked by other historians
as well as philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists,
and theologians who inform him in no uncertain terms
that his facts are all wrong,
his assumptions unjustified,
and his conclusions misguided.
*
For more on this subject, see Arnold J. Toynbee’s RECONSIDERATIONS,
volume xii of his STUDY OF HISTORY.
See also the critical fire aimed at Oswald Spengler
by, among others, Toynbee himself in the opus cited above.
*
To my uninformed readers, may I add that
Spengler and Toynbee are two of the greatest historians
of the past century.
May I also add that public opinion is shaped
less by great historians and more
by politicians, propagandists, and ghazetajis
who operate on the assumption that
a nation’s own version of its past is the only true one.
#
Tuesday, August 02, 2011
*****************************************
A TURKISH FRIEND
********************************************
Some Turks appear to be obsessed
with what they did to Armenians during World War I
as surely as some Armenians are.
They are Armenocentric to the same degree
that some Armenians are Turcocentric.
*
I have a Turkish friend
(he may no longer consider me a friend, but I do)
who has written a big book –
the biggest I know on the subject – in which
he attempts to prove that Armenians have
not only invented a genocide and
believed in it for almost a century
but they have also somehow succeeded in convincing
an important fraction of the civilized world,
including one of the greatest historians of all time
and several Nobel-Prize winners
(among them a Turkish one).
*
This friend of mine believes Talaat
was the best friend Armenians had;
and Kemal was a great statesman
who was never wrong (in his own words:
“he was right 99% of the time”).
*
By contrast, I was brought up to believe
Talaat was to Armenians what Hitler was to Jews.
All wrong! my Turkish friend is eager to inform me.
The only reason Talaat did what he did
is that Armenians returned his friendship
by trying to assassinate him.
But since (I assume) he could not arrest the perpetrators,
he took it out on defenseless civilians.
If attempted assassination were sufficient ground for genocide,
we would have genocides as frequently as soups du jour.
*
As for Kemal being a universally admired statesman
about whom even western historians have written
voluminous biographies:
my good friend may not be aware of the fact that
western historians have also written voluminous biographies
of Hitler and Stalin.
*
To my Turkish friends I say,
if I continue to call you a friend it’s because
(one) I don’t consider disagreement sufficient ground for divorce;
(two) I believe with Gandhi that no man is beyond redemption; and
(three) convictions, even belief systems,
are subject to error and change.
So that I for one will not be surprised in the least
if we become friends once more.
#
Wednesday, August 03, 2011
*****************************************
FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
********************************************
Them and us is a misleading classification
because there is a great deal of us in them
and vice versa.
*
To say that a question is unanswerable
is also an answer.
*
To convert to a religion or ideology
is to legitimize one’s status as a dupe.
*
The rich defend their privileges
with the same intensity as the starving search for food.
*
The difference between being infallible and 99% right
is about the same as the difference
between charity and a loan for 99 years.
#

kemalism

2011-07-30T07:59:00.001-07:00

Thursday, July 28, 2011
*****************************************
TURKS, KEMALISM,
& DEMOCRACY
********************************************
Unlike fascists in Italy who believed
“Mussolini ha sempre ragione,”
Turks don’t say “Kemal is always right!”
but they think and live as if he were.
He isn’t! -- if only because Kemalism and democracy
are mutually exclusive concepts.
*
Turks: who are they?
The unvarnished and de-Kemalized answer is:
a bunch of thoroughly mongrelized Mongols
who have been brainwashed to classify themselves as Turks,
in the same way that Armenians and Kurds within Turkey
are classified as “Christian Turks”
and “Mountain Turks” respectively.
I have met many Armenians from Turkey
but none of them has ever identified himself as a Christian Turk;
and I suspect the only time a Kurd identifies himself
as a “Mountain Turk” is when he applies for a job
in the civil service.
*
I live in Canada and I am a Canadian citizen
but whenever I am asked to identify my nationality,
I say “Armenian” and no one sees anything remotely disloyal
or questionable in that.
*
When Armenians build a community center in Canada,
they call it an Armenian Community Center.
What do Armenians and Kurds call
their community centers in Turkey?
But perhaps the right question is:
Are they allowed to build such centers?
*
It seems to me, Kemalist democracy
is more akin to fascism.
#
Friday, July 29, 2011
*****************************************
SOLUTIONS
********************************************
Here are three of them in the form of commandments:
Thou shalt not divide and rule.
Thou shalt not silence dissent.
Thou shalt not speechify and sermonize with a forked tongue.
*
Silencing dissent is a fascist tactic.
Dividing the community is enemy action.
Only deceivers speak with a forked tongue.
*
To my critics I ask:
Which part of what I have been saying
you don’t understand – or rather,
you pretend not to understand?
*
Recent developments in the Middle East suggest
the days of all undemocratic regimes are numbered.
*
That which is whispered today by a single dissident
shall be shouted by a chorus of enraged millions tomorrow.
*
Because we don’t know our history,
we don’t know when we repeat it.
#
Saturday, July 30, 2011
*****************************************
SEPARATING FACT FROM FICTION
********************************************
Nationalist historians, religious leaders, and
a politically controlled educational system conspire
to create not human beings
with the ability to think for themselves,
but dupes who parrot lies
and are willing to kill and die
in the name of God and Country.
And when someone comes along
and exposes this simple fact,
he is labeled an enemy of the people
who fully deserves to be insulted, exiled,
jailed, silenced, or starved.
*
Some of my critics are convinced that
I am a pro-Turkish and anti-Armenian pornographer.
All because I deal with facts as opposed to fiction,
and I speak of reality
as opposed to recycling propaganda.
*
Among fanatics moderation is a risky business,
and among crooks honesty is a capital offense.
*
Sooner or later all belief systems and ideologies
are corrupted by ruthless and power-hungry mediocrities
who tell the people what they want to hear
and do what they want to do
even when what they tell the people is a lie
and even when what they want to do is criminal.
#

2011-07-27T08:27:00.001-07:00

Sunday, July 24, 2011
*****************************************
ON POWER
********************************************
Power means first and foremost
the power to justify that which cannot be justified –
from dividing the community
to committing genocide.
*
Power allows the insane to accuse the sane of insanity.
*
My answer to those who question my habit
of posting critical comments on open forums:
If I am wrong, they can correct me.
If they are wrong, they should correct themselves.
*
Power means to view disagreement as a capital offense.
*
The first and most important measure
of all powerful men
is to convince their adversaries that
the best defense is subservience.
But I believe Dostoevsky when he said
even the weakest man
has unimaginable reserves of power within him.
*
There are no new ideas.
All we can do is to mention the forgotten,
to emphasize the marginalized,
and to expose the absurd.
#
Monday, July 25, 2011
*****************************************
THE LESSONS OF OSLO
********************************************
Life is unpredictable and trying to predict it
is a waste of time.
*
Never underestimate the barbarism of the civilized.
*
Sometimes our worst enemy is one of us.
*
There is a Turk in all of us –
and Norwegians are no exception.
#
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
*****************************************
COMMENTS
********************************************
How to win an argument Turkish style:
Make yourself so absurd and repellent that
your adversary will give up in disgust.
*
I look forward to the day
when I will be objective enough to view Armenia
as a foreign country and my fellow Armenians
not as my brothers but as foreigners.
*
“He doesn’t believe what he says”
is better than “he believes what he says.”
I’d much rather deal with a liar
than with someone willing to kill and die
in the name of a belief system –
that is to say, a Big Lie.
#
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
*****************************************
THE LAW OF THE JUNGLE
********************************************
When asked why he hates Germans,
a Jew is reported to have replied:
“I have seven million reasons.”
We may not have as many reasons,
but we have another: we are called liars
because we dare to speak the truth.
*
Talaat appears to be the role model of all war criminals.
First they run away to a foreign country
(as I write there are thirty of them in Canada alone)
and when they are identified, arrested, and brought to justice,
they plead not guilty.
They see themselves as patriots, not killers.
Like wolves, they view the slaughter of sheep
as an inevitable result of evolution.
#

riff-raff

2011-07-23T07:45:00.001-07:00

Thursday, July 21, 2011
*****************************************
TWO QUESTIONS,
ONE ANSWER
********************************************
Can you name a country
whose most profitable export has been war?
*
Can you name a country
whose greatest source of wealth has been
the indiscriminate slaughter of unarmed civilians?
*
The trouble with brainwashing people is that
you may be successful only with your own.
*
One reason Kemal has acquired heroic stature in Turkey
is that his predecessors were infinitely worse.
*
Wilkie Collins: “Nothing in this world is hidden forever.”
*
Sooner or later all Big Lies are exposed.
*
There are no hiding places from the truth.
#
Friday, July 22, 2011
*****************************************
RIFF-RAFF
********************************************
In my youth I was so abysmally naïve
that I believed I could count
on the support, friendship, and understanding
of the very same individuals
who were in the business of oppressing the people.
But then, in what way was I different from Zohrab,
one of the smartest Armenians that ever lived,
who thought he could count on Talaat’s friendship?
*
Man will always invent an ideology or belief system
that will justify criminal conduct.
Which amounts to saying,
he will find a way to speak in the name of god
and do the devil’s work.
#
Saturday, July 23, 2011
*****************************************
RIFF-RAFF / II
********************************************
A headline in my morning paper reads:
“James Murdoch on hot seat.”
And why?
Because he may have lied
when he testified before a parliamentary committee.
So what else is new?
Everybody lies – from muggers to presidents.
If everybody lies, it follows,
nobody sees anything wrong in lying to liars.
That’s why Turks have been lying for a hundred years
and they will continue to lie to the end of time.
#

ideas

2011-07-20T07:40:00.000-07:00

Sunday, July 17, 2011
*****************************************
IDEAS
********************************************
There are synonymous ideas as surely
as there are synonymous words.
Case in point:
Saint-Simon: “My self-esteem has always increased
in direct proportion to the damage
I was doing to my reputation.”
Tolstoy: “The higher I rise in the eyes of the world,
the lower I sink in my own.”
*
People with money assume they are wiser
because if they don’t know or understand something
they can always hire someone who does.
*
I have two kinds of critics:
those who say I am wrong when I am right,
and those who tell me I am useless
and reading me is a waste of time.
Both agree on one thing:
I should be more positive by adopting them
as my role models.
#
Monday, July 18, 2011
*****************************************
NOTES & COMMENTS
********************************************
LIES
***************
The easiest lies to expose
are the ones we have ourselves professed in the past.
*
MACHO ETIQUETTE
*****************************
Hemingway’s last wife writes in a letter that
whenever she wanted to talk to him about a problem,
he would say: "I haven’t got time.
I have to go shit now."
*
HONESTY
**********************
If you decide to be honest
be prepared to acquire mortal enemies.
*
KNOWLEDGE
****************
Compared to what we don’t know,
what we know is such a tiny fraction that
we might as well be blind, deaf and dumb.
When Socrates said "The only thing I know
is that I don’t know," he was not being ironic,
he was stating a fact.
#
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
*****************************************
HUBRIS & NEMESIS
********************************************
Nemesis has finally caught up
with Robert Murdoch’s hubris.
We can now look forward
to the disintegration of his media empire
as fervently as the civilized world looked forward
to the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire
in the second half of the 19th Century.
*
My Turkish readers may not be aware of the fact
that at one point their diplomats
offered to apologize for their crimes against humanity
(i.e. the Genocide) provided
no further demands were made on them.
The Armenians rejected the offer
on the grounds that it would allow the Turks
to get away with murder.
*
If a World War III is ever declared,
I have every reason to suspect
the Turks will do to the Kurds
what they did to the Armenians during World War I.
That’s the problem with people
who get away with something.
They invariably come back to get away with more.
Which is what happened within Murdoch’s empire:
first they bribed a lowly cop or bureaucrat
and when they got away with it,
they went all the way to the top --
the head of Scotland Yard and the Prime Minister.
#
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
*****************************************
COMEUPPANCE
********************************************
If Talaat was innocent,
why did he run away to Berlin
where he met the fate of a mad dog?
*
As for Kemal: he died as an alcoholic,
which amounts to saying,
he condemned himself to death
by self-administered alcohol poisoning.
*
If some Turks hate Armenians
it’s because “it is characteristic of the human mind
to hate those he has injured” (Tacitus).
*
If “I think therefore I am,”
it follows
“If I don’t think therefore I am not”
or I exist only on a subhuman level,
which amounts to the same thing.
#

notes/comments

2011-07-16T07:14:00.000-07:00

Thursday, July 14, 2011
*****************************************
ON KEMAL (III)
********************
In asserting the reality of the Armenian genocide
I am not relying on Armenian historians and
eyewitness accounts by foreign diplomats and observers,
but Kemal’s own treatment of the perpetrators.
So that when brainwashed Turks call Armenians liars,
they unknowingly also apply the same label on Kemal,
who may indeed have been one
but not in his treatment of the Ittihadist criminals.
The only other alternative is accusing Kemal
of gross incompetence, not to say criminal conduct,
in his persecution, prosecution, and execution
of high-ranking military and political leaders
whose actions were based on the firm belief that
they were following orders and acting
in the best interest of the nation.
Because if these gentlemen were innocent,
as Turkish denialists maintain,
then it goes without saying that
Kemal got away with murder.
#
Friday, July 15, 2011
*****************************************
NOTES / COMMENTS
******************************
Every day something happens to remind me
that I am not the center of the universe
and every day I choose to ignore the evidence.
*
You may have noticed that
people are more willing to help you
if in the process they can also help themselves.
*
Originality: to be unpredictable and inevitable at the same time.
*
Everybody wants to be rich and famous.
I have come to terms with my own obscurity and poverty
because I see no merit in being like everyone else.
*
The ambition of all authority figures is
to appear infallible in the same way that
the ambition of every scarecrow is to terrorize.
*
Freud's grand-daughter is reported to have said:
"The 20th Century produced two major charlatans:
Hitler and Freud."
My first thought:
Her legal claim on the Freud estate
and a fraction of his royalties must have been rejected
by a court of law.
(In this connection see also Aram Saroyan's memoir
of his father, LAST RITES).
#
Saturday, July 16, 2011
*****************************************
RE-READING TOYNBEE
********************************************
ON OUR FAVORITE SPORT:
THE BLAME-GAME
**********************************
“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.”
*
ON UNDERSTANDING
*********************************
“Comprehension sometimes consists in just a correct understanding of questions that are unanswerable.”
*
CONNECTIONS
********************************
“Every human being now alive has links, however tenuous, not only with every one of his contemporaries, but also with every other human being that ever lived.”
*
“In this sense human history is one single seamless web, and any dissection of it is an arbitrary misrepresentation of Reality.”
*
ON WAR
*******************
“It is part of the nature of war, once started, to get out of hand; and many belligerents who have made war ‘justly’ at the start have drifted into commission of injustice before the end of the story.”
*
ON REFORM
***********************
“I do not know of any human society in which drastic social reform has not been overdue at every stage of its history.”
*
ON IRREVERANCE
******************************
“I am convinced that irreverence, where irreverence is due, is one of the cardinal virtues.”
*
ON DEATH
*****************************
“Death limits life’s liabilities. This boon that death confers is supremely valuable, and ought therefore to be immensely consoling.”
#

2011-07-13T07:07:00.001-07:00

Sunday, July 10, 2011
*****************************************
POLITICS
*******************************
You tell them what they want to hear
and when things don’t work out as planned,
you blame it on the opposition
or factors beyond your control.
If you promise them heaven
and you deliver hell,
you can always blame it on God – if, that is,
you run out of unpredictable hostile factors;
or, in the words of Louis XIV:
“Has God forgotten what I have done for Him?”
*
Everyone has his way of judging people and nations.
I judge them by the manner in which they treat writers.
History provides us with many precedents,
the most recent being Talaat’s Turkey
Stalin’s Soviet Union,
and our own faceless flunkies
who operate anonymously
from behind closed doors.
*
Being an Armenian writer
amounts to being a shoemaker in a country
where everyone prefers to go barefoot.
#
Monday, July 11, 2011
*****************************************
DESPAIR
*******************************
Edmund Burk:
“Do not despair,
but if you do,
work on in despair.”
*
Separating a nation from its myths and propaganda
is harder than separating Siamese twin –
an operation that requires a team of expert surgeons.
I can’t even stand the sight of blood on TV.
I apologize whenever I step on an ant.
*
If I cannot convince Armenians to do
what’s in their own best interest,
how can I, or anyone else for that matter,
convince Turks to do what’s against their own interest?
*
To Turks we are no better than “Indians.”
To our own leadership, we might as well be “white niggers.”
*
They control the media, the educational system,
the church, and the community centers.
What do I have in my favor?
Only a touch of common sense – the least common
of all faculties, it has been said,
and so it appears to be.
*
Our tribal chiefs agree only on one thing:
to silence dissent.
*
A hundred years ago we were slaves.
We are now slaves of former slaves.
#
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
*****************************************
PATTERN
*******************************
When Hitler lost the war,
and shortly before he committed suicide,
he blamed it on his people,
the very same people he had brainwashed to believe
they were la crème de la crème.
*
Like most Armenian children
who had an Armenian education
I too was brought up to believe
we were just about the smartest people on earth.
I know now that the very same people
who brainwashed us to believe that
have been and continue to be
the instruments of our destruction.
This to me is now as clear as daylight
and as inevitable as night follows day.
#
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
*****************************************
WHY I LOVE
BERTRAND RUSSELL
*******************************
ON ENVY
********************
“Instead of deriving pleasure from what he has,
[the envious person] derives pain from what others have.”
*
ON MARRIAGE
*********************
“Often and often, a marriage hardly differs from prostitution,
except being harder to escape from.”
*
ON SERMONIZERS
****************************
“The human race has not hitherto discovered
any method of eradicating moral defects;
preaching and exhortation only add hypocrisy
to the previous list of vices.”
#

observations

2011-07-09T07:22:00.000-07:00

Thursday, July 07, 2011
*****************************************
OBSERVATIONS
*******************************
Sometimes understanding consists
in the sudden realization that
those you trust and respect most
are the least worthy of your trust and respect.
*
More often than not the least trustworthy people
are those whose honesty you are not even allowed to question.
It is not that they are as bad as you
as that they are infinitely different and worse.
*
An exposed lie reorganizes the world.
*
I respect both Marx and Freud
as pioneers in their respective fields of inquiry,
but consider their differences:
Marx would have accused Freud
of using a pseudo-science of his own fabrication
to adjust the individual to an unjust,
dehumanized and essentially evil social order.
In his turn, Freud would have accused Marx
of Jewish messianism and a total inability to predict
the consequences of his own theories
which were fated to be far more dangerous,
lethal, and evil than all the abuses of capitalism.
And the irony is that both would be right.
#
Friday, July 08, 2011
*****************************************
DANCING WITH THE DEVIL
*******************************
There are dead-end situations in life
that one ignores at one’s own peril.
Two cases in point:
our position in the Ottoman Empire,
and our present malaise
(divisions, alienation, intolerance of free speech…
among other aberrations).
It is a cowardly illusion to think that
if a dead end situation is ignored,
it will go away.
*
I can recognize a dead end situation when I see one
because I have been in one for a good number years –
since 1975 to be exact, that’s when my firs book,
titled THE ARMENIANS, appeared.
My only consolation is that so far
my failure has harmed no one but myself.
*
How to explain the collapse of the Soviet Union?
Some say it was the Polish Pope.
Others name Reagan.
My own preferred candidate is Gorbachev and his glasnost.
One reason I prefer Gorbachev is that
I believe empires and power structures in general
are not killed, they commit suicide.
Which is what we have been doing –
death by a thousand self-inflicted cuts.
#
Saturday, July 09, 2011
*****************************************
OBSERVATIONS
*******************************
You want to know what Turks are really like?
Be an Armenian.
You want to know what Armenians are really like?
Be a writer.
*
Divisions?
There are divisions everywhere;
also sermonizers preaching “All men are brothers.”
*
We shout our certainties in public
but we whisper our doubts
in the solitary confinement of our souls
even when there is more truth in them.
*
Memo to a reader:
Either read me with an open mind
or don't read me at all.
And remember, the first victim of a closed mind is yourself.
*
If wrong, I can always rely on my readers to correct me.
I can even rely on them to correct me when I am right –
especially when I am right.
#

comments

2011-07-06T07:08:00.001-07:00

Sunday, July 03, 2011
*****************************************
FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
*******************************
ON PATRIOTISM
************************
Love of homeland should never be confused
with loyalty to a regime,
or its propaganda, that is to say, lies.
*
ON WORDS
******************
As a medium of communication,
the spoken or written word is better equipped
to expose lies than to assert truths.
*
ON BS
*********************
It is only very recently that a friend pointed out to me
that both belief system and bull sh*t have identical initials.
*
ON CONTROVERSIES
*****************************
In all controversies there is a natural tendency
to go to extremes with the inevitable result that
moderation and objectivity are seen as treason.
*
ON METAPHYSICS
*******************************
To exist and to imagine non-existence
is as difficult as to non-exist and to imagine existence.
*
ON WOMEN
***********************
Women have played a very important role in my life.
The reason I don’t write about them is that
the wounds are too deep.
*
ON DEATH
************************
Death is a privilege reserved only for the dying;
all others are condemned to live.
*
ON PHILOSOPHY
**********************************
Everyone has a philosophy (in American parlance)
only when the line that separates philosophy (love of wisdom)
from philomoronism is either blurred or deleted.
*
MORE ON WOMEN
****************************
Freud said he had no answer to the question:
"What do women want?”
Shaw said women want the same things as men.
Neither Freud nor Shaw, or for that matter,
neither men nor women know what they really want
and what to do with it when they get it.
#
Monday, July 04, 2011
*****************************************
ON JUSTICE
*******************************
A headline in today’s paper reads:
“Turkey officially recognizes Libyan rebels.”
A hundred years ago they massacred their own.
They now recognize and support someone else’s.
*
Has anybody ever said,
“I plead guilty to the charge of genocide?”
Talaat was assassinated.
Stalin died in bed.
Hitler committed suicide.
Genghis Khan openly declared:
“My great pleasure is killing my enemies
and raping their women.”
Had they been arrested and tried,
would they have admitted violating anyone’s human rights?
In their own eyes they were statesmen of vision
who deserved universal respect and admiration.
*
If you have the power to rewrite history,
you also have the power to find the guilty innocent
and the innocent guilty.
Why should we be surprised if
after a century of trying
we have not yet seen a single red cent
or a single square inch of soil in reparations?
#
Tuesday, July 05, 2011
*****************************************
THAT WHICH WE SHARE
*******************************
To begin with, we share 600 years of coexistence.
*
They silence their dissenters.
So do we.
*
They confuse patriotism or love of homeland
with loyalty to a regime or ideology,
that is to say, a propaganda line
adopted by wheeler-dealers whose central concern
is neither consensus nor the welfare of the people
but their own powers and privileges.
Can we really say we are different?
*
They deal with controversial issues
by adopting a dogmatic stance.
So do we.
*
They are tribal.
So are we.
Don’t take my word for it.
Listen to Nikol Aghbalian (1873-1947),
an eminent statesman, literary scholar, and educator:
“We Armenians are products of the tribal mentality of Turks
and Kurds and this tribal mentality remains stubbornly rooted
even in our leaders and elites.”
*
We accuse them of crimes against humanity.
So do they.
*
On a personal level:
the insults leveled at me by both Armenians and Turks
have been so similar that they might as well have emanated
from the same source.
*
They rewrite history.
So do we.
If you have any lingering doubts on the subject,
have a casual conversation with a Catholic, Protestant,
Anteliassagan, Etchmiadznagan, and an atheist.
*
They brainwash their children.
So do we.
*
They cover up their crimes.
We cover up our blunders.
*
If the Ottoman Empire had been an Armenian Empire
and the Turks within it one of the minorities,
I have every reason to suspect
we would have done to them what they did to us.
#
Wednesday, July 06, 2011
*****************************************
OBSERVATIONS
*******************************
Our greatest problem:
our refusal to forget what we have learned
from our former masters and role models.
Collective amnesia or Alzheimer’s may well be
our only salvation.
*
We were sheep;
they were wolves;
and we didn’t see it coming?
Figure that one out, if you can.
*
Were we blind?
Can we really say
our sight has been restored?
#

2011-07-02T07:28:00.001-07:00

Thursday, June 30, 2011
*****************************************
TWO OBSERVATIONS
************************************
ON LIMITATIONS
*********************
We all go through a period in our lives
when the sky is the limit.
But sooner or later
the painful realization sinks in:
we can’t even reach the ceiling
of our solitary confinement.
*
CRITICS
*********************
It makes no difference whether you are
a failure or a success,
the number of critics will remain constant.
What may change is their caliber.
As a failure you will be trashed by trash.
As a success you will be trashed
by a better class of trash.
#
Friday, July 01, 2011
*****************************************
FREEDOM
*******************************
According to Kant,
freedom “enlarges the usefulness of other faculties.”
It follows, where there is no freedom of speech,
powers of perception and understanding of reality
are damaged.
*
To classify ourselves as civilized,
we compare ourselves to barbarians.
The question is:
has a barbarian ever classified him as a barbarian?
*
The Turks now have a dissenting school of thought.
Where is ours?
What happens on the day barbarians overtake us?
*
A hundred years ago
we were faced with extinction
not because we rebelled against tyranny
but because for 600 years we were subservient to scum.
*
As for our so-called heroic revolutionaries:
their remedy was worse than the disease.
Beheading is not a cure for a headache.
*
For 600 years we were at the mercy
of bloodthirsty barbarians.
We are now afraid of scarecrows.
*
Our reality is a nightmare
from which we refuse to wake up.
#
Saturday, July 02, 2011
*****************************************
FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
*******************************
In Turks I see all our failings magnified.
*
To the average dupe,
silencing intellectuals is a concept of such irrelevance
that it doesn’t even register on his consciousness.
*
I am fully aware of the fact that by writing about idiots
I endow them with a dignity they don’t deserve.
*
The unspoken slogan of all fascists and criminals in general:
“If you can get away with it, do it.”
*
“Treason and betrayal are in our blood,” said Raffi.
So is fascism.
*
According to an international watchdog group,
political parties and the media
are two of the most corrupt institutions in the world.
To put it more bluntly:
our "betters" are the worst scum on earth
and anyone who defends them
is either a brown-nosing dupe
or a brainwashed pervert.
#

observations

2011-06-29T07:06:00.001-07:00

Sunday, June 26, 2011
*****************************************
TWO OBSERVATIONS
************************************
The most convincing evidence of their guilt
is the fact that they have developed a propaganda machinery,
an educational system,
and a legal apparatus denying the charge of genocide.
Who believes them?
Not even Turks, except the brainwashed, of course,
who will believe anything if only because
they have no choice in the matter.
*
If Hitler had won World War II
there would now be an entire generation of Germans
committed to the belief that
he was a great statesman,
a progressive and civilizing force,
a man of vision,
and a warrior equal in stature
to Alexander the Great, Caesar, and Napoleon.
In short, he would be to Germans
what Kemal is to the Turks today.
#
Monday, June 27, 2011
*****************************************
WAS KEMAL A DENIALIST?
************************************
Not only was he not a denialist,
he also had some of the perpetrators
arrested, tried, and executed.
*
For more on this subject,
see THE COURT MARTIAL PROCEEDINGS
OF THE MILITARY TRIBUNAL 1919-1922,
compiled by Vahakn Dadrian and Taner Akcam
(Istanbul: Bilgi University Press, 733 pages, 2010).
*
This much said let me add that
Kemal’s motives may not have been
love of justice or sympathy for the victims.
It is reasonable to assume that
like all men of power
his main concern was to keep and increase his power
and the only way he could do that
was by eliminating his Ittihadist competition.
#
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
*****************************************
NOTES & COMMENTS
************************************
Never say “I was deceived.”
Say instead “I allowed myself to be deceived.”
*
To need something badly
is to make oneself vulnerable to deception.
*
Nations make mistakes as surely as individuals
if only because they are ruled by individuals.
*
What matters is not how big your mistakes are
but what you do with them.
*
To behave like bloodthirsty barbarians
and to pretend to be civilized
is to compound the felony.
*
The shortest distance between ignorance and wisdom
is a painful blunder.
#
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
*****************************************
DR NOOBAR JANOIAN SPEAKS
************************************
In his TRAVELS IN TIME AND SPACE
Dr Janoian speaks of a conversation he once had
with a Vietnamese patient.
When asked what was it exactly
that made North Vietnam resist
and ultimately defeat a military colossus
like the United States,
his patient explains that Vietnam
has always resisted and defeated all occupiers,
among them the Chinese, the Japanese, and the French.
The difference between the South and the North,
he goes on to explain, is that
the leaders of the North were
men of principle and ideals,
unlike their counterparts in the South,
who were no better than thieves and bandits.
An honest and dedicated leadership
inspires solidarity and self-sacrifice in the people, he adds,
and a corrupt leadership promotes
divisions, disloyalty, opportunism, and treason.
*
We may now have a free and independent homeland,
the good doctor reflects in the final paragraph of the story,
but our leaders are less like the leaders of North Vietnam
and more like the leaders of South Vietnam –
no better than thieves and bandits.
#

notebooks

2011-06-25T07:48:00.000-07:00

Friday, June 24, 2011
*****************************
THEM AND US (III)
*********************************************
As long as there are Armenians,
Turks will never be able to convince the world
they are a progressive and civilized nation
incapable of behaving like bloodthirsty Asiatic barbarians;
and as long as there are Kurds,
democracy and Turks will be perceived as
mutually exclusive concepts.
*
Americans will never use the word “genocide”
in reference to Armenians so long as Turks tell them:
“We did to our Armenians
what you did to your Indians.”
*
Tell me your favorite sport
and I will tell you who you are.
What’s ping pong to the Chinese,
hockey is to Canadians,
baseball is to Yanks,
massacre is to Turks,
and the blame-game is to Armenians.
*
Silencing dissent is a band-aid solution.
*
“An insult unanswered is the parent of many others.”
*
Cicero: “Do not hold the delusion that
your advancement is accomplished
by crushing others.”
#
Saturday, June 25, 2011
*******************************************
FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
*******************************
I understand Turks
because I understand Armenians,
and I understand both
because I understand myself.
As for Armenians and Turks:
they understand only the misdeeds of the opposition.
*
Because they want to forget what I say,
they tell me I repeat myself.
*
When asked what had been
the most important day in his life,
Napoleon is said to have replied:
"The day of my first communion."
My own first communion was such a forgettable event
that the only thing I remember about it
is the above quote (probably apocryphal) by Napoleon.
#

comments

2011-06-22T07:05:00.001-07:00

Sunday, June 19, 2011
*****************************
THEM AND US (II)
*********************************************
We are brought up to believe
we are better than Turks,
in the same way that Turks are brought up
to believe they are better than Armenians.
In our treatment of intellectuals, however,
we might as well be identical twins.
They massacred our intellectuals
in time of war; and in our Soviet phase,
we massacred intellectuals in time of peace.
*
Why target intellectuals?
Because the only way to deceive and mislead the people
is by silencing intellectuals
who collectively suffer from a neurotic compulsion
to speak the truth even if doing so
may spell their total ruin and destruction.
*
Another thing we have learned from Turks
is to blame others for all our problems
even if in the process we may run the risk
of abdicating our humanity.
I therefore feel justified in maintaining that
deep down somewhere we (Armenians and Turks) are one and the same –
a fact that may become a certainty
when our respective DNAs are compared.
*
We either come to terms with this reality
or we continue to project that which is evil in us
on the other thus implying
one should not mess around with perfection –
an implication that has the double demerit
of being both absurd and ridiculous.
#
Monday, June 20, 2011
*****************************
FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
*********************************************
A reasonable Armenian is as rare
as a Turk who has not beem brainwashed.
*
Tolerance: the ability to see some truth even in lies.
*
Anyone with the brain of an ape
and the tongue of a parrot
can recycle propaganda.
*
I don’t believe everything I write
but I wish I did.
*
I wear the insults of anonymous cowards like a badge.
*
There are no happy endings in life.
For everyone who preaches love
there are ten who preach hatred
and a hundred who practice it.
*
Noobar Janoian: “The opposite of fear is love.”
*
Italian saying: "Fratelli, flagelli."
(Free translation: "The wrath of brothers,
the wrath of whips.")
*
Flaubert: "Stupidity is something immovable,
you can’t try to attack it without being broken by it."
#
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
*****************************
FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
*********************************************
When they say it was Armenians who massacred Turks,
what they really mean is that
a single Turk killed by Armenians
matters much more to them
than a thousand Armenians slaughtered by Turks.
That’s because they view the slaughter of infidels
not as a crime against humanity
but as a patriotic as well as a religious duty.
*
When I was a child in Greece we used to say,
“Do you take me for an American?” – meaning,
“Do you take me for an idiot?”
It was only on the day they elected Nixon as president
that I realized there was more to Yanks
than Yankee-Doodle-Dandy.
Likewise, it was on the day they awarded
the Nobel Prize to Pamuk that I realized
there was more to Turks than massacres.
*
I have said “Yes, sir!”
and I have said “No, sir!”
and No, sir! is more fun.
There may be no money in it, granted,
but I’d rather be dirt poor and free
than a slave, a dupe, and a brown-noser
with a regular income.
#
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
*****************************
FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
*********************************************
The phoniest line in the world:
“Your call is important to us.”
*
The ugliest words in the English language:
“Press one…press two…press three…press four…”
at which point I hang up.
*
To cover up his true status
“Homo ignoramus” classifies himself
as “Homo sapiens.”
*
If some people have no interest in knowing themselves
it may be because they already know enough to know
that they are not worth knowing.
*
Why is it that some very smart and learned Armenians
confuse anti-charlatanism with anti-Armenianism?
Why is it that some very cunning Armenians
in their defense of their own selfish, narrow interests
will voice reasons worthy of an inbred moron?
*
A problem is like an illness.
The first step is to diagnose it correctly.
But if you choose to ignore it,
you may promote it from a minor nuisance
to a terminal affliction.
#

comments

2011-06-18T07:48:00.001-07:00

Thursday, June 16, 2011
*****************************
FASCIST PHOBIAS
*********************************************
Genocide: they relished the action
but are afraid of the word.
*
If you think we are different, think again.
We trusted Talaat, Stalin, and Hitler
but we silence anyone
who dares to question our judgment.
*
My most faithful readers are readers
who find me unreasonable, unbearable, and unreadable.
*
We are all entitled to make two big mistakes,
the first of which is being born.
#
Friday, June 17, 2011
*****************************
ON FAITH
*********************************************
A Turkish Kemalist writer
has published a book of nearly 900 pages
(copiousy footnoted and annotated)
in which he proves to his satisfaction
that the Armenian Genocide is a pack of lies,
it never happened.
Which at least proves one thing:
one can prove anything
by quoting passages from carefully selected sources.
*
There are lines in the Bible
that justify war, massacre, and genocide.
Eery jihadist and terrorist is convinced
God to be on his side.
Any Catholic theologian could easily produce
a tome of a thousand pages proving
all other religions to be heresies
and inventions of the Devil.
*
This may suggest that faith
is the most dangerous obstacle
to reason, common sense and decency,
and to subscribe to a belief system,
any belief system,
is the first step to becoming a dupe,
and worse, to applying for membership
in a criminal gang.
*
To trust the judgment of another –
as Germans did under Hitler,
as Russians did under Stalin,
and as Turks did under Kemal --
is to abdicate one’s humanity.
#
Saturday, June 18, 2011
*****************************
FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
*********************************************
Truth is a lie you believe in.
*
This morning on the radio
I heard a politician use the word “dichotomy”
and I remembered Mark Twain’s definition
of cauliflower:
“A cabbage with a college education.”
*
We mourn our victims
and we brag about our survival:
am I the only one who see a contradiction here?
*
The disrepute of our political parties is such
that smart partisans pretend to be non-partisan –
like wolves in sheep’s clothing.
*
Never say I have a dream
when what you have is a nightmare in the making.
*
We use our brain to demolish our adversaries
and our gut to justify ourselves.
*
Why is it that dogs that kill
are invariably described by their owners as "friendly,"
and serial killers are described
as "nice" by their neighbors?
*
Being an Armenian writer
amounts to being a shoemaker in a country
where everyone prefers to go barefoot.
#

on turks

2011-06-15T07:05:00.001-07:00

Sunday, June 12, 2011
*****************************
TRAVELS IN SPACE AND TIME
*********************************************
That’s the title of a book by Dr. Noubar Janoyan:
(Jamportoutiun Jamanagi yev Daradsoutian michov).
Does anyone know him?
I would like to have his e-mail address
in order to let him know how much I am enjoying it.
The book was published by Grakan Etalon in Yerevan.
It’s a collection of stories, anecdotes, and encounters
with fellow Armenians in the Homeland and the Diaspora.
It does not shrink from exposing the dark side
of our collective existence.
It is written in East Armenian.
I suspect Dr. Janoyan had it translated from his West-Armenian
(he was born in Iraq and now lives in Glendale).
The prose is eminently readable and accessible.
It deserves to be a best-seller.
#
Monday, June 13, 2011
*****************************
IDEAS THAT HAVE ENHANCED
MY AWARENESS OF REALITY
*********************************************
The following quotations are from Toynbee who was a historian as well as a metahistorian – that is, a philosopher of history.
*****************************************************
*
“…authorities are not to be taken at their word, as if they were infallible oracles of gospel truth.”
*
“Society is the total network of relations between human beings. The components of society are thus not human beings but relations between them.”
*
“When prophets disagree, are we to give credit to either of their opposing voices?”
*
“When top-dog sees a heaven, under-dog will see a hell.”
*
“…the orthodoxy that they idnetified with their own faith and a heresey that they identified with the ideology of their adversaries.”
*
“The apotheosis of the community spells slavery for individual beings.”
*
“Man is not an angel, and in seeking to be one, he deprives himself of something that is essential to his being.”
*
“A monument in a museum is one that has been desecrated and sterilized.”
*
“A reputation for scholarliness is expendable, and it is a scholar’s duty to risk it.”
*
“In art, in illuminating antithesis to practical life, there is more to be made out of failure than out of success.”
*
“There is no such thing as a human organization that can be established securely through being made weather-proof against the all-disintegrating action of time.”
#
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
*****************************
CORRECT ME,
IF I AM WRONG
*********************************************
Monkeys, we are told, have three enemies:
pythons, leopards, and eagles;
and according to recent studies,
they have a distinctive alarm call for each.
Men, by contrast,
have developed a much more sophisticated communication system,
but they have lost the ability to recognize an enemy
when they see one.
*
Murder in one dimension
means suicide in another.
By committing genocide,
Turks lost the ability to tell the difference
between truth and lies,
right and wrong, and
democracy and fascism –
hence, their apotheosis of Kemal.
*
In a recent commentary
I incorrectly stated that Turks
outnumbered Armenians 40 to 1.
One of my gentle Turkish readers
took it upon himself to question
the accuracy of my math and
even the existence of my sources.
I am now willing to reconsider my figures.
*
If we take into account
only Armenian revolutionaries
versus the perpetrators of the Genocide
(namely, the regime and the regularly army
augmented by Kurds and criminals
released from prison for the occasion)
the ratio would be closer to 400 to 1.
I say this because no one,
not even the most loyal and fanatic Turkish nationalist
would dare to suggest that unarmed civilians –
women, children, and old men –
could be thought of by any stretch of the imagination
as posing a threat to the terrirotial integrity of the nation
or the stability of the regime,
which was the rationale for the Genocide
as well as the context in which
the 40 to 1 ratio was stated.
Correct me if I am wrong.
#
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
*****************************
THEM AND US
*********************************************
We may never succeed in convincing Turks
that they are guilty of genocide.
We may, however, have better luck
in convincing them that
there is no such thing as a Turk
and that many so-called Turks
have Armenian blood.
One reason this aspect of their identity
has been ignored or not emphasized enough is that
it is repellent to both them and us
who like to proceed on the false assumption that
explanations are good
only when they flatter our collective ego.
*
The discovery of DNA is the most convincing argument
against nationalism.
*
All talk of pure blood is impure nonsense.
*
Translation is a difficult art to master
because every culture creates its own semantic atmosphere
in which words carry their own baggage.
#

on turks

2011-06-11T07:37:00.001-07:00

Thursday, June 09, 2011
*****************************
ON TURKS (I)
*********************************************
Armenians are not Christian Turks.
Neither are Kurds Mountain Turks.
Armenians and Kurds have been around much longer than Turks.
And the chances are they will be around long after.
*
Freedom is a fundamental human right.
It is the right and duty of all oppressed people
to rise against their oppressors.
Which is what the Kurds are doing today;
and which is what Armenians
and Turks themselves did
(together with several other nations)
at the turn of the last century
in the Ottoman Empire.
*
At a critical point in their history, however,
Turks made the wrong decision by adopting the slogan
“Turkey for Turks,” which in reality meant
sultanism without the sultan,
fascism instead of democracy, and
massacre instead of compromise.
*
Had the Turks chosen multiculturalism
as opposed to monoculturalism,
they would now be a superpower
and a dominant force in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
Because they went in the opposite direction
they are now vulnerable to Kurds
who will eventually bleed them to death
so that even a kick will be enough
to scatter the bones of the Ottoman skeleton.
*
Kemal may be the Father of modern Turkey
but he is also its gravedigger.
*
Moral I: Every idea has its contradiction
and sometimes the contradiction is closer to the truth.
*
Moral II: Free speech matters because
it exposes fallacies and it doubles our options,
thus allowing us to make the better of two choices.
*
Moral III: Even the best ideas become destructive
when implemented in the name of consistency.
*
Moral IV: Tolerance and flexible moderation are preferable
to inflexibe fanatcicism and intolerance.
#
Friday, June 10, 2011
*****************************
ON TURKS (II)
*********************************************
Because they betrayed us,
they accuse us of betraying them.
Because they massacred us,
they accuse us of massacring them.
Who believes them?
Only their own brainwashed dupes.
*
At the turn of the last century
both Turks and Armenians agreed on the fact that
Sultan Abdulhamid II was neither
a representative of Allah on earth
(as he pretended to be)
nor a benevolent dictator,
but a ruthless, degenerate tyrant
who oppressed Turks
and subjected Armenians
to successive waves of massacres.
*
With the full agreement and cooperation
of the Armenian political leadership,
the Young Turks deposed and exiled the Sultan,
after which they betrayed the Armenians
by adopting and implementing a policy of extermination
on the grounds that Armenians
(including unarmed women, children, and old men)
were a threat to the territorial integrity of the Empire.
*
Now then, go ahead and accuse Armenians
of betrayal and massacre,
and while doing so try to keep in mind that
Turks outnumbered Armenians forty to one.
#
Saturday, June 11, 2011
*****************************
ON TURKS (III)
*********************************************
Has anyone ever bothered to see
how many times the expression "human rights"
or "free speech" occurs in the many speeches
delivered by fascist leaders?
*
If you think today
what you thought ten years ago,
or if you still believe everything
your schoolteacher or imam taught you,
you can be sure of one thing:
the last ten years of your life
have been a waste of time
because you have learned nothing.
*
Where disagreement and dissent
are classified as criminal offenses,
the men at the top will be serial killers.
*
Wars, revolutions, and massacres
are also expressions of dissent and criticism.
*
The insane outnumber the sane
because reasonable men are in no position
to violate anyone's human right of free speech.
*
Where indoctrination is identified with education,
recycling propaganda will be identified with thinking.
*
No matter how corrupt, incompetent, and stupid,
a power structure will always have
its defenders, supporters, and dupes.
*
Whenever I am criticized by a brainwashed dupe,
I can only think of the Turkish expression:
“Yedii boka bak!” – if you will forgive my French.
#

miracles

2011-06-08T07:39:00.001-07:00

Sunday, June 05, 2011
*****************************
FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
******************************************
To a sensitive person
life is a traumatic experience.
*
A line from a film
(I no longer remember which):
“Mortal wounds don’t hurt.”
*
Three arguments against nationalism:
(1)“I only know the skin of the earth /
And that it has no name” (Pablo Neruda).
(2) If God is our Father,
all men are brothers.
(3)The alternative to nationalism is war
and the massacre of defenseless civilians.
*
Because I refuse to say “Yes, sir!”
they call me arrogant.
It never even occurs to them
to consider the possibility that
arrogance may also be defined as a need
to hear the words “Yes, sir!”
when the more appropriate response would be
“No, sir!”
*
Just remembered the source of the line
about mortal wounds: Otto Preminger’s EXODUS.
#
Monday, June 06, 2011
*****************************
ON LEADERSHIP
*****************************
Where others say “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition,”
we say “Lord have mercy and drop your pants.”
*
If the majority rules and the majority is dumb –
I will let you draw your own conclusions.
*
The regime in Yerevan cannot be toppled
because it has Russian support.
The regime in the Diaspora is so diffuse and fragmented
that it survives as a shadow – visible but untouchable.
*
Like all authoritarian structures,
both regimes share one important feature in common:
they are intolerant of dissent.
They have systematically alienated and silenced
the intellectual class to such a degree that
even the Turks are ahead of us in literary achievements.
*
Even the Turks!
I can’t imagine a worse insult to our diginity as a nation.
As for our foreign policy:
it can be summed up in three monosyllables:
Turks, Turks, and Turks.
*
Speaking of leadership:
The stupidity of Turkish leadership
is surpassed only by its cruelty.
*
Turks deny the reality of the Genocide
even as they violate the human rightrs of the Kurds.
And having done so
they expect the European Union to believe
they are a democracy.
Which may suggest either their IQ is negative
or they don’t know the meaning of the word.
#
Tuesday, June 07, 2011
*****************************
THE MOST IMPORTANT QUESTION
*********************************************
In the Old Testament, God orders the Jews
to exterminate not only their enemies
but also the cattle that belongs to them.
(For more on this subject,
see Bertrand Russell’s WHY I AM NOT A CHRISTIAN.)
*
After agreeing that God is our Father,
“people of the Book”
(Jews, Christians, and Muslims)
proceed to massacre one another
in the name of God.
Explain that to me, if you can.
*
Peguy was a devout Catholic
and Sartre a dogmatic atheist.
I love both for their honesty.
Honest men can also disagree
and even contradict one another.
*
Chekhov said he did not know the answer
to the most important question,
and if he said he did
he would be fooling his readers.
*
Talk of God or gods has been around
for much longer than organized religions,
all of which assert a monopoly on the subject.
*
Nietzsce said organized religions are based on myths
very similar to those of ancient civilizations.
*
“Men cannot create a single worm,
yet he has created ten thousand gods.”
I no longer remember the source of this quotation
which I consider to be one of the most insightful observations
on the subject.
*
A thousand Gothic cathedrals
and as many golden-domed mosques or temples
do not and cannot prove the existence of God,
only the powerful hold that myths have
on the minds of men, and the overwhelming need
to unbderstand and explain
that which is destined to remain incomprehensible
*
Myths are neither lies nor truths.
At best they may be said to be half-lies or half-truths;
and in that sense they are an expression
of man’s insatiable hunger
and blind acceptance of propaganda.
#
Wednesday, June 08, 2011
*****************************
ON MIRACLES
*********************************************
As children we are brought up to rate
tribal loyalty above honesty,
and bias above objectivity.
Who believes what a Turk says about Turks?
Only another Turk.
Who believes what an Armenian says about Armenians?
Only another Armenian.
To an Armenian,
a Turk appears as the offspring
of bloodthirsty Asiatic barbarians.
To a Turk,
an Armenian appears
as the lowest form of animal life.
To expect or hope that some day
Turks and Armenians will come to terms with one another
is to believe in miracles.
I write as I do because I believe in miracles.
I believe both Turks and Armenians
are capable of rating truth over lies,
honesty above dishonesty,
loyalty to the human race above loyalty to the tribe,
and justice over injustice.
It may take a thousand years
but it will happen.
It will happen if only because
peace is better than war,
and life is better than death.
#

on turks

2011-06-04T08:01:00.001-07:00

Thursday, June 02, 2011
*****************************
MEMO TO MY TURKISH READERS
******************************************
It doesn’t take much courage
to massacre defenseless old men, women, and children.
But it take courage to admit it.
Not only Turks have failed on that score
for nearly a century
but they could also qualify as just about
the most cowardly people on earth.
*
At all times and everywhere dupes outnumber those
who can think for themselves.
That’s because as children
we are brought up to believe
what our elders and betters tell us.
But you are no longer children.
That extenuating circumstance
is no longer available to you.
*
The aim of all slogans is to simplify complexities
in order to convince the simple-minded.
The slogan “Turkey for Turks”
immediately raises the questions:
Who is a Turk?
Does he exist?
Take a good look at yourself in the mirror:
if you don’t look like a Mongol you don’t qualify.

You don’t have to be a historian or a genealogist
to know that your family tree
has representatives of as many races, nations, and tribes
as your ancestors vanquished and raped.
You are probably more Kurd, Arab, Greek,
Serbian, Albanian, Egyptian, Hungarian,
Assyrian, and Armenian than Turk.
No need to take my word for it.
Have your DNA checked.
*
If Europe were to adopt the slogan
“Europe for Europeans,”
Turkey would be saddled with many more garbage collectors
than it needs; and providing for them
would probably bankrupt your economy,
assuming it is not already bankrupt.
*
All is not lost however.
You have a choice between being an authentic human being
or a bastardized phony Turk
and a dupe who believes what he is told
by politicians, nationalist historians, and propagandists,
that is to say professional charlatans
whose first and more important priority is their own power.
#
Friday, June 03, 2011
*****************************
A CITY SET ON A HILL
******************************************
These days no one pleads guilty to murder one.
Instead they plead “not guilty” by reason of insanity,
or even self-defense and
a myriad other extenuating circumstances.
Faced with a charge of genocide,
Turks go one better by accusing their accusers
of the very same crime
on the grounds that they may succeed
in raising a reasonable doubt in the mind
of a single member of the jury
who may well be a Turcophile
or even a murderer.
So far this tactic has worked.
The question is: can it work forever?
At this point three apposite quotations come to mind:
“No banquet under heaven is endless;”
“You can’t fool all the people all the time;” and
“A city set on a hill cannot be hidden.”
#
Saturday, June 04, 2011
*****************************
THE MORE THINGS CHANGE…
******************************************
When I posted comments critical of Armenians
I acquired several Turkish readers and friends.
When I gave the Turks the same treatment
I lost all of them.
Easy come, easy go.
*
When we served Turkish interests,
we were their “most loyal subjects.”
When we asserted our human rights,
we became their mortal enemies
and were targeted for extermination.
*
Today they abuse the human rights not only of Kurds
but also Turks -- among them
Pamuk (a Nobel-Prizer winner)
and Akcam (an internationally respected historian),
all in the name of Kemal Ataturk,
thus exposing him for what he really was –
a typical product of his time
and a fascist no different from Mussolini and Hitler.
But whereas Italy and Germany have renounced their past
and are now democracies,
Turkey continues to cling to its moreally bankrupt
and criminal values, principles, ideology, and methods.
The fez and shalvar have been outlawed
but Ottomanism continues to rule.
The Sultan is dead.
Long live Sultanism.
Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme sh*t.
#

how to reason with a turk

2011-06-01T07:00:00.000-07:00

Sunday, May 29, 2011
*****************************
LET US REASON TOGETHER
******************************************
Nations and empires need dupes more
than they need dissidents.
*
If “the Kingdom of God is within you,”
it follows loyalty to a power structure or regime or authority figure
is treason.
*
To “give unto Caesar” does not mean
to trust or to believe in Caesar.
*
If to expose our contradictions is negative,
does that mean to speak of massacres is positive?
#
Monday, May 30, 2011
*****************************
LIES AND LIARS
******************************************
Until he was ousted by the Young Turks,
the Sultan was the supreme religious leader
of the Muslim world as well as
the political leader of the Ottoman Empire.
He thus combined the power of the Pope
and that of the President of the United States.
Now then, imagine if you can,
a pope or a president saying
he needs a harem of a thousand concubines
to better serve God and the people.
Why should we be surprised if Turkish denialists believe
all politicians lie except their own,
all academics are for hire except their own,
and all propagandists deceive the people except their own?
*
Turkish children are brought up to believe in lies
for the simple reason that if they admit the facts,
Turkey stands to lose
several Armenian provinces,
billions of dollars in repratations,
and their mask as a civilized and progressive nation.
The threat of even one of these three prospects
would make a compulsive and a habitual liar
out of an honest man.
*
Because the Serbians arrested Ratko Mladic,
a war criminal who massacred 8000 Muslims,
“the European prospects of Serbia are now brighter than ever,”
according to a WASHINGTON POST editorial.
To my Turkish readers I say:
Let that be a lesson to you.
#
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
*****************************
HOW TO REASON WITH A TURK
******************************************
It can't be done.
Don't even try!
It's a waste of time.
*
A Turk believes he can defeat
reason, common sense, reality itself
with the same daring that his ancestors
defeated their adversaries.
He chooses to ignore the fact that
the Ottoman Empire is dead, buried,
and cannot be resurrected.
*
There are two easy ways to win an argument alla Turca:
by ignoring the arguments of the opposition,
and by repeating the same argument
even after it has been exposed as
untenable, outgrageous irrational, and absurd.
*
It is a mistake to think that Armenians were punished
because they revolted against the Turks.
The undeniable fact is,
the central authority was so rotten
that everyone within the Empire,
including Turks themselves,
revolted against it.
*
Armenians were selected for speciasl treatment
simply because they were there
and they made themselves an easy and convenient target.
*
To disagree with a Turk
is to understand where Armenian fanatics come from.
*
Kemal’s fallacy:
The idea that by eliminating the fez and the shalvar
The Turk could be de-Ottomanized.
Which amounts to saying,
what goes on inside a man’s mind
is an extension of his wardrobe.
No psychologist has ever dared to advance
such an insane theory.
If he did, he would be exposed as a charlatan and
his licence would be immediately revoked.
#
Wednesday, June 01, 2011
*****************************
NOTES AND COMMENTS
******************************************
We befriended the Turks under Talaat
and we called the Russians our big brothers under Stalin.
Now then, go ahead and say something positive
about our leadership.
*
If you have the majority on your side,
it makes no difference whether you are right or wrong.
This indeed is the rock on which stand
both democracy and fascism.
*
Nothing can be more fragile and unpredictable than life.
And yet, we take its permanence for granted.
Something similar could be said of the infallibility
of authority figures who are more prone to error
than the rest of us; and I don’t means errors
like marrying the wrong partner
or making a bad investment.
I mean errors in which thousands and millions die.
*
They massacred the Indians,
they enslaved millions of Africans,
they murdered one another
in one of the bloodiest civil wars in the history of mankind,
they allowed the rich to exploit the poor mercilessly,
they went to war and killed countless natives
in all four corners of the world,
and now they educate their children to be proud Americans.
*
I have been deceived so many times
that I no longer trust even my own judgment.
#

2011-05-28T07:34:00.001-07:00

Thursday, May 26, 2011
*****************************
FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
***************************************
I am predictable?
So is our propaganda.
On the day our propagandists become unpredictable,
so will I.
However, if your aim is to silence me,
I suggest you come up with a less predictable line.
*
Shahnour was a photographer,
Hamasdegh a shoemaker,
Oshagan a schoolteacher,
Nartuni a doctor…
and they were the lucky ones.
Many others were betrayed to the authorities and slaughtered.
By contrast, our academics make a comfortable living
and our imams are millionaires.
Who says crime doesn’t pay?
*
All that talk about cultural, political, and economic factors
beyond our control is hogwash.
We are control freaks
and we have been brainwashed to dig our own grave.
*
We are told “Earthquakes don’t kill people, buildings do.”
Question: How many of our masterbuilders
were charged with manslaughter?
*
We are told “Treason and ebtrayal are in our blood” (Raffi).
If so far none of our traitors
has been arrested, tried, found guilty, and hanged,
it may be because they continue to be in charge of our institutions,
including our justice system.
#
Friday, May 27, 2011
*****************************
WHAT MOTIVATES REVOLUTIONS
******************************************
To understand history
one must deal not only with the visible
but also with the invisible world –
that is, what goes on inside the human mind,
which is the source of all conflict and violence.
Historians now know that to understand history
It is not enough to know what happened.
It is also important to know “the unstated
(and sometimes unrecognized) reasons why
people do the things that they do.”
(HISTORY: A BRIEF INSIGHT by John H. Arnold, page 132.)
*
What did Armenians want at the turn of the last century
in th Ottoman Empire?
Respect for their fundamental human rights,
which the Turks took for treason – a crime punishable by death.
To say that Armenians were punished
because they made territorial demands is nonsense.
Revolutions are not fought out of greed for more acreage
but for human rights – case in point: the Arab Spring today.
*
And speaking of territorial integrity and Homeland:
Today even Turks are more than willing
to abandon their birthplace
and live abroad where they are allowed to work
and make a living
(which is also a fundamental human right);
in the same way that many Armenians
are more than willing to emigrate (some even to Turkey)
for the same reason.
#
Saturday, May 28, 2011
*****************************
FANATICS
******************************************
Call me a human rights fanatic.
I’d rather live in hell where my human rights are respected
than in a fascist paradise.
*
There are three kinds of writers:
pro-establishment,
anti-establishment,
and academics who write about subjects like
grammar, village life in the 18th-century, and the Middle Ages.
In that sense they may be classified as
the mules of our ecology.
*
One of our most dangerous misconceptions:
the idea that divisions in the name of tribal loyalty
are motivated by patriotism.
*
To those who say I have been silenced
because my ideas are subversive and dangerous, I say:
So were the ideas of our revolutionaries a hundred years ago;
so much so that they claimed 1,5 million victims.
*
Only in an Ottomanized and Sovietized environment
talk of human rights is seen as unpatriotic or subversive.
*
Tell them what they want to hear and they will agree with you.
Prove them wrong and they will tear you to shreds.
*
How easy it is to deceive millions.
How hard it is to reason with a dupe.
#
MEMO TO A DENIALIST TURK
********************************************************
like all brainwashed chauvinist dupes
you like to believe in the infallibility of your leadership.
which is a belief not shared by your own leaders.
that's why the Young Turks overthrew the Sultan;
that's why Kemal overthrew the Young Turks;
that's why Kurds hate you today;
that's why many Turks have left Turkey and survive as garbage collectors in Europe; and
and that's why you don't qualify as members of the EU.

answer

2011-05-21T07:37:00.000-07:00

Thursday, May 19, 2011
****************************************
ANSWERS
************************************************
The only way to make progress in one’s thinking is
by constantly questioning one’s most fundamental assumptions.
It’s because most Muslims, Hindus, Jews, and Christians
assume their belief system to be the only true one
that they feel morally justified in massacring the competition.
*
Reality has countless layers of meaning.
By carefully selecting a handful of them
one can prove anything.
*
After we die we shall have all the answers,
provided we consider the total absence of answers
also an answer.
#
Friday, May 20, 2011
****************************************
NOTES AND COMMENTS
************************************************
A fatally flawed assumption:
If God knows everything, it follows,
those who speak in His name know better.
*
All men of authority lie when they pretend to know
that which is unknowable.
If believers outnumber non-believers
it's be because crooks outnumber honest men.
*
Those who disagree with us are not always wrong.
*
To be powerless is an open invitation to abuse.
*
The more ignorant the people
the more authoritarian and blind the leadership.
*
The longer I live the more truth I see in the saying:
“Once upon a time we were slaves.
We are now slaves of former slaves.”
*
Even the Turks are ahead of us
if only because they have internationally recognized dissidents
and all we have are Turcocentric ghazetajis by the dozen
who know how to break eggs
but so far have failed to serve a single decent omelet.
#
Saturday, May 21, 2011
****************************************
FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
************************************************
The Arab Spring must be a source of dread to our leaders.
It can’t be pleasant to contemplate one's own demise.
You can’t fool all the people all the time.
No banquet under heaven is endless.
*
Speaking of funerals:
My favorite funeral marches are
the slow movement of Beethoven’s Eroica,
the first movement of Mahler’s 5th Symphony,
and Siegfried’s funeral in the final act of Wagner’s RING
(which was also Hitler’s favorite) besides which
the orgasmic crescendo in TRISTAN UND ISOLDE
is sentimental hogwash.
*
One of the most unforgettable lines in Italian poetry
is Ungaretti’s “Ed a subito sera”
(And suddenly it’s evening)
meaning, old age and death.
*
It has been observed that
what holds us together is the Genocide.
Does that mean on the day the Genocide is recognized
the glue that holds us together will dry up?
#

nobody's bitch

2011-05-18T07:27:00.001-07:00

Sunday, May 15, 2011
****************************************
NOBODY’S BITCH
***************************************
A writer is nobody’s bitch.
*
It could be said of us that
the best stay away
and the worst stick around;
and if I stick around
it’s because we deserve it.
*
People who say “I don’t read fiction,”
fail to realize that the greatest fiction of all
is their conception of reality.
*
Democracy is not just a political system
or power structure;
democracy is a way of life.
*
To spend a lifetime serving an arrogant and cruel master
means to assume that both arrogance and cruelty
are not only an integral part of the human condition
but also desirable qualities in a man of authority.
*
It is a writer’s duty to remind those
who speak in the name of God and capital
(make it, Capital and god)
that they are first and foremost
public servants.
#
Monday, May 16, 2011
****************************************
THE PROSTITUTION OF THE PRESS
************************************************
If an Armenian is dumb enough to think
he can survive as a writer,
he must be in need of advice,
or so I have been given to understand
by concerned “friends” and elder statesmen
on more than one occasion.
What kind of advice?
Elementary, my dear Watson.
Instead of kicking ass,
he should learn to kiss it.
The penalty for refusing to do so
is alienation and unemployment.
*
Once upon a time
our vodanavorjis wrote odes to the Sultan.
It is an illusion to think that the Sultan is dead.
*
A hundred years ago Krikor Zohrab spoke
of the prostitution of our press.
Our bosses and benefactors rely on the press
to publicize their good deeds
but are too dumb to see that by prostituting it
they foul their own nest.
*
We may think we live in America
but in reality we continue to be subjects
of the Ottoman Empire.
Have I said this before?
Never mind.
If anything is worth saying
it’s worth repeating.
Besides, I happen to be an addict of reiteration
and habits are easier to keep than to give up.
#
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
****************************************
THE SCUM OF THE EARTH
************************************************
It is not the best who seek power, privilege and prestige
but the worst.
Elites are the scum of the earth.
*
My targets are not Armenians
but dupes of all nations.
*
There is no business like the brainwashing business
compared to which organized crime
is an amateur enterprise in addition to being
a risky proposition.
*
One reason why Turks are a popular subject in our press
is that they can be discussed without reference
to our bosses, bishops, and benefactors.
But discussing Armenians without mentioning
bosses, bishops, and benefactors
is like discussing the Napoleonic wars without Napoleon.
*
Only people who say nothing don’t repeat themselves –
but then, one would be justified in asserting that
nothing is what they repeat.
*
Make no mistake about it:
there is a Ben Ali, Mubarak, Assad, and Gadhafi
in all undemocratic leaders,
including our own.
#
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
****************************************
A DANGEROUS ILLUSION
************************************************
To cover up a crime is a crime.
To repeat a lie is a lie.
To be afraid of free speech is cowardice.
*
During the televised Watergate hearings
I remember the following exchange with a Soviet citizen:
“What’s Watergate about?”
“The president lied.”
“So what? They lie to us all the time.”
*
Some of my most devastating lines –
lines like “There is a Turk in all of us.”
“Some of our leaders are Turks.”
“Subservience is in our blood.” –
are not mine but verbatim quotations
from our elder statesmen.
*
Secrecy is totalitarian.
The concentration camps under Hitler
and the Gulag under Stalin were exposed
long after the damage was done.
And when I say damage I have in mind
both the suffering inflicted on the victims
and the disintegration of the regime.
*
It’s a dangerous illusion to think
we can solve our problems
by brainwashing the next generation
and suppressing dissent.
*
Sometimes I am accused of hating Armenians and myself,
when in fact I hate only cowards
who are afraid of free speech;
I loathe only fools who pretend to know better;
and I have nothing but contempt for dupes
who believe everything they are told.
#

from my notebooks

2011-05-14T07:21:00.001-07:00

Thursday, May 12, 2011
****************************************
FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
***************************************
“Be more positive,” means
“Cover up the negative.”
*
We all have doubts except the brainwashed.
*
Every boss, bishop, and benefactor is for solidarity
but only under his own leadership.
*
In our environment you can tell how honest a man is
by the number of crooks that are ganged up against him.
*
One man’s arsenic is another’s elixir.
The absence of financial and institutional support
may paralyze others but it stimulates me.
*
In his novel, A PARTISAN'S DAUGHTER (New York, 2008)
Louis de Bernieres writes about “an emperor
who blinded all his prisoners except for one in every hundred,
who was supposed to lead the others home,
and when the opposing king saw what had happened to his troops,
he died of the shock.”
What he doesn't say is that both the emperor
(Basil II Bulgaroktonus [Bulgar-slayer])
and the Bulgarian king (Czar Samuel)
were of Armenian descent.
For more details, see my book,
THE ARMENIANS: THEIR HISTORY AND CULTURE
(New York, 1981).
#
Friday, May 13, 2011
****************************************
FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
***************************************
Nothing is more alien and incomprehensible to an Armenian
than his own identity.
*
It would have been nothing short of a miracle
if after long centuries under ruthless tyrants
we had maintained a single trace of our original identity.
*
Our ancestors are as distant from us
as Zulus and Neanderthals.
*
I say things that thirty years ago
I would have been afraid to think.
*
After they make enough money
they think they can buy immortality
as if it were a product on the market.
*
“I am a very serious man,” Donald trump asserted
in a recent televised interview.
I can’t imagine a serious man making such a claim.
*
A man with heart problems to his cardiologist:
“Why do you always insist on speaking about my heart?
What about my stomach, liver, lungs, and pancreas?
Why don’t you emphasize the positive for a change?”
#
Saturday, May 14, 2011
****************************************
FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
***************************************
Everybody can be brainwashed.
A high IQ is no defense.
It is almost as if evolution had instilled in us
a predisposition for lies.
*
The brainwashed are unreachable.
Their first instinct is to brainwash you – that is to say,
to re-create you in their own image.
*
At the root of all deception is the absurd idea
that we are the center of the world.
*
If no one deceives us,
we deceive ourselves.
*
Am I saying we are as bad as Turks?
No.
What I am saying is:
Let us not confuse military inferiority
with moral superiority.
#

guess

2011-05-11T08:31:00.001-07:00

Monday, May 09, 2011
****************************************
WHAT IF?
***************************************
What if I am wrong? That is always a possibility. On the day I assert infallibility, then I will be not just wrong, but catastrophically wrong!
*
If you like to speculate, here is another “what if” question that is much more serious and universal: What if the comforts organized religions and faith provide are exposed as empty illusions?
*
After centuries of oppression and authoritarian rule millions of Arabs in the Middle East and North Africa have suddenly discovered the benefits of democracy: Would anyone dare to ask “What if they are wrong?” Because in the final analysis that’s all I have been asking for my fellow countrymen: democracy, free speech, and respect for human rights.
*
Here is another “What if”: What if the incompetence and dishonesty of our own leadership have done as much harm to the integrity of the nation as the criminal conduct of our former alien masters?
*
About free speech: it can be abused, yes, certainly. So can censorship, the manipulation of the media and the educational system.
#
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
****************************************
GUESSES
***************************************
Some questions don’t have answers, only guesses.
*
Even when writers realize they can change nothing, they continue to write. Why?
*
If a pebble can start an avalanche, why can’t the right word at the right time and place start a revolution?
*
If they can lie for no good reason at all, why can’t I speak the truth for a good reason?
*
Why did God create the world? To break the monotony of silence, boredom, and nothingness?
*
If they know what must be done, why don’t they do it
*
Do they hate to admit they have been wrong out of fear they may not be forgiven?
*
Unlike Raskolnikov, not all murderers go down on their knees and confess – this is especially true of career criminals and
If they can get away with it – and so far they have – they will continue to lie, abuse, mislead, and deceive.
#
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
****************************************
FASCISTS
***************************************
Authoritarian rulers – fascists for short –
view free speech as a crime against humanity
and state-sanctioned murder of defenseless civilians
as law and order.
*
Fascism may also be defined
as a declaration of war by a regime
against its own people.
*
In a fascist environment
intellectuals are like canaries in a mine.
Where there is a scarcity of canaries
there will be an abundance of chickens, toads, and rats.
*
Turks are the favorite subject of our editors and academics.
Our leadership is a subject they avoid discussing
perhaps because it is not easy speaking of a bordello madam
as if she were a virgin.
*
It is safe to assume that the number of moral victories
in a nation’s history is equal
to the number of military defeats.
*
Where criminals are in charge
the law of the jungle will be
the law of the land.
#
Message flagged
Sunday, May 8, 2011 11:56:48 AM
Sunday, May 08, 2011
****************************************
TRUE OR FALSE?
***************************************
Organized religions teach us to believe
there is more life in death.
*
A heroic death is infinitely more admirable
than a degraded life.
Remember this next time you brag about survival.
*
The world is too preoccupied
with its own welfare and survival
to care much about our own.
I doubt if the death of the last Armenian
will make a single headline anywhere.
*
Lenin and Stalin served as role models
to many more Armenians than Tolstoy and Solzhenitsyn.
There is more Sultanism in our leadership
than Armenianism.
*
For every Armenian who knows better
there will be at least two who know best
and four who know all there is to know.
In such an environment,
writers will be useless
and literature irrelevant –
except for such trashy lines as
“Forget your mother /
But do not forget your mother tongue.”
(I did not plan to quote this line on Mother’s Day.
Call it pure coincidence.)
#

god & country

2011-05-07T07:23:00.000-07:00

Thursday, May 05, 2011
****************************************
GOD AND COUNTRY
***************************************
I am not in the business of changing anyone’s mind,
only expressing agreement with those
who have already changed theirs
by successfully discarding their prejudices and superstitions.
*
God and Country:
if we judge a tree by its fruit,
why is it wrong to judge faith and patriotism
by their number of innocent victims?
*
To be honest in our case means
to reject all assertions that flatter our collective image.
*
Anyone can change water into wine
if he waits until the guests are so drunk
that they can’t tell the difference between one and the other.
Likewise, anyone can change military defeat to moral victory
if he first convinces the people that
God is on their side and God is invincible.
*
When military and religious leaders speak
in the name of God and Country, they lie.
*
We understand many things
but not everything, especially not
the most important things.
*
To expose lies is not the same as to know the truth.
*
A lie is a lie and dying for it will not make it less of a lie.
*
There is nothing new under the sun.
Everything I have said so far has been said before
if not by Greek philosophers than by Zen masters.
#
Friday, May 06, 2011
****************************************
VARIATIONS
ON A FAMILIAR THEME
***************************************
Because we have nothing to brag about
we brag about our survival.
We have survived, yes.
So have our divisions
and divisions are weapons of mass destruction.
*
Dinosaurs perished but scorpions survived.
The only reason they don’t brag about it is that
they are not brainwashed to do so.
*
How do you deprogram a nation?
You can’t!
Our writers have been trying for fifteen hundred years
and they have failed.
*
Between literature and propaganda
we have always chosen propaganda
for the same reason that a fool
prefers to believe he is smart.
*
A long series of defeats, massacres and
centuries of subservience to alien scum
have taught us nothing.
Even on the eve of the Genocide our leadership was divided.
*
Our leaders are our gravediggers.
*
Solidarity is not in our DNA.
Which is why we must be born again
as a different species – namely, human beings.
*
You think I am wrong and you are right?
You may have our bosses, bishops, and benefactors on your side
but I have fifteen hundred years of our literature on mine.
#
Saturday, May 07, 2011
****************************************
HUMBUGGERY
***************************************
Free and independent Armenia is a hoax
and as empty an illusion as the brotherhood of nations
under the Soviets.
*
Under the Soviets undesirables were sent to Siberia.
Today they lead an anonymous existence
in a suburb of Paris, Los Angeles, and Istanbul.
The more things change…
*
Our editors publish an endless series of anti-Turkish polemics
that so far have produced not a single red cent in reparation
or a single square inch of our historic homeland;
and they refuse to publish me
on the grounds that I write “polemics,”
and publishing polemics, they tell me,
is against their editorial policy.
*
The captain goes down with the ship?
Not always.
In our case the captain is the first to abandon ship.
#

reflections

2011-05-04T07:30:00.001-07:00

Sunday, May 01, 2011
***********************************
LEADERS
************************
The difference between
a democratically elected leader
and an autocratic one is that
the first are endlessly cross-examined
by the press and the opposition,
and the second surrounds himself
with yes-men and brown-nosers.
*
Freedom to an autocratic leaders means
the freedom to oppress, silence, and murder
defenseless civilians.
*
Closer to home:
our leaders divide the nation
not because they are men of principle
who place ideals above the interests of the people;
they divide because they love their own powers and privileges
above all else.
*
If we have leaders who lie to us,
why shouldn’t we have writers
willing to speak the truth?
I am not saying all writers are honest men.
What I am saying is that
most of our ablest writers
were murdered, exiled, and silenced
by autocratic regimes.
*
Leaders behave like criminals because
they can get away with it, or rather,
because the people allow them to get away with it.
*
Most of our misfortunes are rooted in subservience.
Dissent increases independence in others.
Dissent is positive.
Subservience is negative.
#
Monday, May 02, 2011
****************************************
TO MY SWEET ARMENIA
******************************************
When his genocide book was unanimously ignored
by our academics, a friend (a career diplomat)
referred to them as “our Genocide mafia.”
Who would have thought that some day
the Genocide would become a “territory”
(in organized crime parlance)
and anyone who dares to muscle in it
would acquire the status of a non-person.
*
I am a stranger in a strange land,
and I feel more so among my fellow Armenians.
Last time I visited an Armenian community center
I promised to return in twenty-five years.
Now I have another reason not to live that long.
*
When the USSR collapsed
and Armenia’s borders opened up,
Armenians poured out by the thousand
and by the million.
*
“Yes im anoush Hayastani…”
It is not generally known that
Charents wrote that line
inspired not by Armenia’s "sweetness"
but by a similar poem on Russia by Pushkin.
#
Tuesday, May 03, 2011
**********************************************
REFLECTIONS
**************************************
No French king or Russian czar or Bolshevik commissar or fascist dictator, or pope, imam, and rabbi has ever declared publicly that he is in the business of moronizing innocent civilians. Don’t expect our own leaders to do so.
*
Did any one of our revolutionaries at the turn of the last century ever ask himself the following question: “If we carry on as we have been, what are the chances that the people may suffer?”
*
The only reason Osama bin Laden did not behave like Genghis Khan, Hitler, and Stalin is that he didn’t have their power.
*
Solutions are not inventions or discoveries like the theories of Newton or Einstein that revolutionized physics and cosmology. Solutions begin with the realization that we have been on the wrong track; and we can solve a problem only when we understand it; and it is up to us whether to use our brains or to run around like a chicken whose neck has been cut off.
*
All you need to do is allow reality to be your guide, not the empty rhetoric of speechifiers and sermonizers.
*
A kind reader once called me a philosopher. I am nothing of the kind. I am only a scribbler. You don’t need a Ph.D. to be honest with yourself and your fellow men.
*
The idea that we are few is linked to the fact that most Armenians do not care to be identified as Armenians.
#
Wednesday, May 04, 2011
*************************************
AS I SEE IT
**************************
Several friends have urged me to change my name.
I have not done so because I don’t think of myself
as a commercially viable commodity.
*
What shapes our worldview is less
an objective study of reality and more
the educational system within which we were brought up.
*
Literature is a waste of time.
No writer has ever changed a damn thing.
Marx?
If he did change things he made them worse.
The same could be said of all prophets and reformers.
*
What has our literature changed?
As long ago as the 5th century AD
our writers (among them Khorenatsi and Yeghishé)
exposed the dangers inherent in a divided kingdom.
A millennium and a half later,
After many military defeats,
and a series of massacres and a genocide,
we continue to stand divided.
*
Why do I write?
The more relevant question is:
Why do they divide?
*
I share my ideas
the way a beggar shares the few crusts of bread
cast in his direction by fat men.
#

wisdom

2011-04-30T07:29:00.001-07:00

Thursday, April 28, 2011
*******************************************
NOTES & COMMENTS
***********************************************
Because I try to understand Turks as human beings
as opposed to bloodthirsty Asiatic barbarians,
I am accused of justifying the Genocide.
Nothing and no one can justify
the murder of a single innocent human being.
To understand and explain is not to justify.
If an Almighty and All-loving God
allows such a murder to take place,
it is up to us to understand it.
*
Arabs today are as angry with their own
corrupt, autocratic, and incompetent leaders
as with their own past subservience and cowardice.
My dissent has similar roots.
I write less against our leadership
and more against my own cowardly conformism.
*
Nations lie as surely as compulsive liars.
*
Nationalist historians rewrite history
to cover up past blunders and
to legitimize future ones.
*
Wars represent the triumph of the gut over the brain.
#
Friday, April 29, 2011
*******************************************
WISDOM
***********************************************
True wisdom begins on the day you say to yourself:
“I thought I understood everything.
I know now that I understand nothing!”
*
To understand politics,
read a book on organized crime.
*
Politics has created more criminals than the Mafia.
*
If brainwashing were declared a crime against humanity,
as it should be,
which one of our speechifiers, sermonizers, and ghazetajis
would escape hanging?
#
Saturday, April 30, 2011
***************************************
ENEMIES OF MANKIND
*****************************************
We have inherited two sets of contradictory ideas:
the ideas that animate our literature –
from Khorenatsi and Naregatsi to Raffi and Zarian -- and
the ideas of our dividers,
namely sermonizers and speechifiers
who speak in the name of God and capital
(make it Capital and god).
*
Our bosses, bishops, and benefactors
make a comfortable living, thank you very much.
Our writers are unemployed and unemployable misfits.
*
Our writers maintain unity is strength.
Our dividers agree but only during the day;
at night they turn into grave-diggers.
*
Once during a heated argument
with a self-righteous member of the party,
I heard him say:
“Mistakes? Sure we have made them.
We don’t claim to be infallible.
We are human beings.”
What he failed to add is that
like all human beings
their first instinct is to cover up their mistakes
and to silence anyone who dares to expose them.
*
Talk of God has been around for millions of years,
but it is only recently that popes, imams, and rabbis
assert monopoly on the subject, and doing so
they divide mankind as surely
as our leaders divide the nation.
Some day all dividers will be seen
as the true enemies of mankind.
#

comments

2011-04-27T07:01:00.001-07:00

Sunday, April 24, 2011
*******************************************
HERITAGE
***********************************************
The Turkish take on the Genocide:
“We taught them a lesson they will never forget.”
A crime against humanity?
Hell no!
An exercise in promoting wisdom?
Damn right!
*
What a book one could write
on the dangers of self-assessment!
*
Another case in point:
They view Ottomanism as a progressive and civilizing force
even after they themselves rejected every aspect of it –
from the fez and the shalvar
to the alphabet and the power structure.
That’s the trouble with all brainwashed dupes:
they can’t tell the different between making sense
and making asses of themselves.
*
We share with them
an intolerance of dissent and contradiction –
an obvious part of our common heritage.
*
It is easy to remove the tangible;
much more difficult to reform the invisible.
#
Monday, April 25, 2011
*******************************************
REFLECTIONS
***********************************************
The more I write
the less I hope to change anything.
*
The USSR did not collapse
because of what Solzhenitsyn,
among many others, wrote,
or because of what the Pope of Rome or
President Reagan said or did.
The USSR collapsed because it was rotten.
Nations and empires are not killed,
they commit suicide.
*
The Albanians have survived
and very probably will continue to survive.
That’s not what matters.
What matters is, who gives a damn
whether they survive or not?
The Albanians maybe, but who else?
*
A nation is judged not by its past but by its future;
and more precisely,
by what it can contribute to mankind.
#
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
*******************************************
NOTES & COMMENTS
***********************************************
There are two kinds of people:
those who help you to live
and those who help you to die.
*
When the Turks first set foot on Armenian soil
they numbered less than 140,000.
*
Only one Armenian in ten thousand knows our history
and we meet him every day.
*
Nationalist historians adapt facts to their ideology.
A fact that cannot be adapted is discarded.
*
A midget can defeat two giants
if the giants are divided; all he has to do is
wait until the giants wear each other out
and bleed to death.
*
Question: Do I have to read ten thousand books
in order to know all there is to know
about our history and culture?
Answer: No. Just take a good look at yourself in the mirror.
*
If you are kind, they will love you and ignore you.
If you are mean, they will hate you and remember you.
If you are honest, they will crucify you,
#
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
*******************************************
NOTES & COMMENTS
***********************************************
It should be obvious by now that autocratic rulers
don’t have much respect for their subjects.
It would be even more accurate to say that
they don’t give a damn about them.
*
The trouble with our brown-nosers is that
they wear the brown on their nose
as if it were a certificate of loyalty
and a badge of honor.
*
Do you have to be brave to be a hero?
No, just honest.
*
If Armenia is a puppet of Russia today,
it is up to our leadership to convince the Russians
that a free and independent Armenia
will be in a much better position to make a contribution
to their welfare.
*
The real scandal is not that Armenian political parties
have no respect for free speech
but that no one, not even our pundits and academics,
who ought to know better, give a damn,
as if it were fire on the other side of the river.
*
You spend half a lifetime to figure out your fellow men
and the other half in avoiding them.
#

being positive

2011-04-23T07:46:00.001-07:00

Thursday, April 21, 2011
*******************************************
POLITICIANS
***********************************************
To say, “Our politicians don’t lie”
is as transparent a falsehood as saying
“I owe my birth to immaculate conception.”
Even if you believe it,
you may have some trouble convincing others.
*
Reality (or God) tells us all men are brothers.
Politicians tell us the only good enemy is a dead enemy.
*
Even those who agree that all politicians lie
see nothing wrong in allowing them
to control our educational system.
*
The average dupe – and it makes no difference
whether he is Russian or Prussian,
Hottentot or Patagonian, Armenian or Turk –
would rather go to war and kill or die
rather than give up his infantile beliefs.
This may suggest that all wars
are clashes between two figments
created by habitual liars.
*
Where God and patriotism enter,
reality exits.
*
To be against free speech is to be for liars.
*
Two synonymous sentences:
Once upon a time barbers were surgeons.
Once upon a time politicians led nations.
#

Friday, April 22, 2011
*******************************************
DO THE MATH
***********************************************
Did you know that there are more Armenians today
than there Mongols, Libyans, and Icelanders combined?
– and I am not counting half of Turkey
which is half-Armenian.
You don’t believe me?
Look it up and do the math.
*
Solutions?
We have no use for them.
What we need – what we really need today
is not solutions but someone with Kemalist ambitions.
Solving problems is a language we don’t speak.
*
To justify our unwillingness to solve our problems
we count our liabilities the way others count their assets:
we are few,
we are landlocked,
we are surrounded by bloodthirsty barbarians…
As for political and religious dogmatism,
intolerance, divisions, censorship,
violations of human rights, corruption, and incompetence:
we ignore them as if they were irrelevant factors
beyond our control.
*
The Armenian character is not a poorly defined abstraction
but an expression of how we treat one another.
#

Saturday, April 23, 2011
*******************************************
ROLE MODELS
***********************************************
Where would Christians be without Jesus,
or Muslims without Mohammed,
or Communists without Marx,
or Catholics without the popes,
or Protestants without Luther?
The men at the top matter.
A divided leadership will spawn a divided community.
Where the leadership is mediocre,
excellence will be outlawed.
Under a dishonest leadership,
charlatanism will be the common currency.
*
“You are consistently negative.”
All criticism and dissent is – including your own.
There are ten negatives in the Ten Commandments.
If I am negative it may be because
I have the Good Lord as my guide and role model.
But if you prefer positive,
read my book on Armenian history and culture
which could be subtitled “A Thousand and One Positive Things
About Armenian History and Culture.”
*
“You repeat yourself!”
So do Panchoonies:
“Mi kich pogh oughargetsek”
(Send us a little money).
Even the Good Lord repeats Himself:
“Where there is no vision the people perish.”
“Where the blind lead the blind,
both shall fall into the ditch.”
#

positive

2011-04-20T06:59:00.001-07:00

Sunday, April 17, 2011
*******************************************
TRUST
***********************************************
True patriotism consists in being honest
with oneself and one’s fellow countrymen,
not in saying “Yes, sir!” to those who pretend to know better
but who have been consistently wrong in the past.
A citizen is not a soldier.
But after World War II even soldiers
are not compelled to say “Yes, sir!” to all orders.
*
Politics is not an exact science.
In a democracy, everything a politician says
is open to criticism and contradiction.
That is why for every politician who says one thing
there will be another who will say the opposite.
*
Readers who accuse me of hating
my fellow Armenians and myself
never mention the deep contempt they themselves have
for anyone who dares to disagree with them.
Do they speak of hatred because they feel unloved?
And if they are unloved,
do they ever ask whether or not
they deserve anyone’s love?
*
All our misfortunes may be traced to misplaced trust.
We trusted the Turks as our masters for 600 years.
We trusted them so much that
they called us their “most faithful millet [ethnic minority]”
That “most faithful” bothers the hell out of me.
Why couldn’t we have been like all the others –
Greeks, Arabs, Jews, Assyrians, Bulgarians,
Albanians, and Kurds – among others?
Why did we have to be their “most faithful” bitch?
We trusted Talaat, Stalin, and Hitler.
We trusted the Great Powers of the West
as we trusted our own leaders
who were not there when we needed them most.
They had a plan B only for themselves.
*
In America today we trust any presidential candidate
who promises to recognize the reality of our genocide
even when after they are elected they refuse to use the “g” word.
And now, our leaders expect us to trust them again
when they rewrite history and represent themselves
as statesmen of vision who can do no wrong.
#
Monday, April 18, 2011
*******************************************
A COMEDY OF ERRORS
***********************************************
When the USSR collapsed
Stalinists were unanimous in blaming it on Solzhenitsyn,
as if a single or, for that matter,
a thousand unarmed civilians
could challenge and defeat a military colossus.
*
The USSR collapsed because
the lies of the Kremlin were exposed;
and when lies are exposed,
the reality principle asserts itself.
*
If so far we have survived
it’s because the lies of our enemies
are bigger than our own.
We have nothing to brag about.
God is not on our side.
We are not as smart as we think we are.
Our history is a disaster area and
our leadership is a farce.
#
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
*******************************************
ANOTHER WITNESS
***********************************************
If you think I am an eccentric with whose opinions
very few responsible Armenians would agree,
allow me to quote a witness that may well be
less vulnerable to similar charges.
“Our teachers are self-satisfied ignoramuses.
Our clergy love commerce more than learning.
Our leaders behave more like wolves than shepherds.”
I am paraphrasing from memory
a few lines from the “Lamentation” of Khorenatsi,
a historian of the 5th century
when Armenia was at the apex of its Golden Age
as opposed to the nadir of its decline and disintegration.
*
More recently, a friend writes:
“Our community is dying.
It’s a case of cold-blooded murder
and the killers are the very same individuals
who parade as our saviors.”
*
Another correspondent informs me:
“Ours is a case of terminal cancer.”
*
If you say, “We survived Khorenatsi
and we will survive you and your
gloom-and-doom friends and correspondents,”
all I can say is:
Yes, in the Ottoman Empire we survived as slaves
for 600 years; and we are surviving today as dupes.
I call that kind of survival worse than death.
#
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
*******************************************
BEING POSITIVE
***********************************************
Turks and Armenians disagree on many things
but they agree on one thing – that the other
is an infidel dog.
We could build on that!
#

friends

2011-04-16T07:12:00.001-07:00

Thursday, April 14, 2011
*******************************************
FRIENDS AND ENEMIES
***********************************************
If we define friends as those who agree with us,
and enemies as those who disagree,
we shall have to conclude that
some of our best friends are Turks,
and some of our worst enemies are Armenians.
*
Our greatest enemy is not the Turk
but free speech.
*
Where free speech is the enemy
there will always be men at the top
who pretend to know better.
They may not be historians, economists, or philosophers,
but they will pretend their understanding
of history, economy, and philosophy to be superior
to anyone else’s, and there will always be others
willing to agree with them.
*
Even mighty empires are afraid of words.
*
Tyrants rule by inspiring fear in others
but they are themselves afraid of words.
*
In undemocratic environments
men are ruled by cowardly fools.
#
Friday, April 15, 2011
*******************************************
THREE QUESTIONS,
THREE ANSWERS,
& TWO MORALS
***********************************************
If the Americans refuse to recognize the reality of our genocide,
what are our chances of some day convincing the Turks to do so?
My guess is:
1 in 1,5 million.
*
If Americans who like to identify themselves
as champions of democracy, free speech and human rights
are afraid to use the “g” word,
what are our chances that some day
in the near or distant future
the Turks will include that word
in their dictionaries, encyclopedias, and textbooks?
This time I will let you do the guessing.
*
Third question:
What do Americans stand to lose in this context?
A friend in the Middle East?
What about Turks themselves?
What do they stand to lose?
The obvious answer is:
billions in reparations (money they don’t have)
and an important fraction of their real estate
which they stole from us 600 years ago
as, more recently,
Yanks stole America from the Indians,
“fair and square.”
*
At the turn of the last century,
our revolutionaries promised freedom and historic Armenia
but delivered death and pestilence.
*
Moral I:
If you make a promise you can’t deliver
your credibility is bound to sink lower
than a snake’s belly full of buckshot.
*
Moral II:
You fooled me once, shame on you.
You fooled me twice, shame on me.
*
You find what I say depressing?
Don’t blame me.
Blame reality.
I deal in facts, not fiction.
If you prefer fiction,
read romances with happy endings.
#
Saturday, April 16, 2011
*******************************************
IS GOD A FASCIST?
***********************************************
Who hates writers?
Fascists.
Where fascists enter
writers are silenced.
If you don’t believe me
it may be because you suffer from amnesia.
I suggest you refresh your memory
by reading a book on fascism
or a history of our literature.
*
In both the Ottoman Empire under Talaat
and the USSR under Stalin
our writers were the first victims.
And if you say,
“So you dare to think of yourself as a writer?”
I will reply:
“I don’t speak as a writer.
I speak as a witness
who refuses to be a dupe
and to recycle the propaganda
of our bosses, bishops, and benefactors
who speak in the name of God and capital
(make it, Capital and god);
and I speak as I do
because I refuse to believe God is a fascist.
Fascists are afraid of free speech
because they want everyone to believe
they are infallible and
they hate to be exposed as frauds.
God, by contrast, is afraid of nothing.
This may suggest that God,
unlike the god of popes, imams, and rabbis,
is neither a fascist nor a fraud,
and because I say so
it doesn’t necessarily follow
that I am in league with the Devil.
#

2011-04-13T07:22:00.001-07:00

Sunday, April 10, 2011
*******************************************
HOW TO JUDGE
A POLITICAL LEADER
***********************************************
In John Buchan’s GREENMANTLE (1916)
the Young Turks are described as
“a collection of Jews and gypsies.”
True or false?
I don’t know and I don’t care.
What matters here is not their family tree
but the fact that some of our greatest intellectual
and political leaders trusted them.
*
It is not my intention to convince anyone
to think as I do, but only to show that
(one) recycling enemy propaganda
is not the only way to think, and
(two) just because someone speaks in the name of
patriotism, nationalism or some other noble cause,
it doesn’t necessarily follow he is right.
*
All enemies of democracy
speak in the name of an ideology.
No fascist has ever declared himself
to be anti-nationalist or anti-patriotic.
On the contrary,
*
some of the most celebrated proponents of patriotism
have been foreign intruders and outsiders.
Napoleon was not a Frenchman,
Stalin was not a Russian,
Hitler was not a German,
and one of our greatest symbols
of patriotism and heroism,
Vartan Mamigonian,
was not an Armenian.
*
Moral of the story:
what matters about a political leader
is not his dedication to a noble cause
but his respect for human rights, free speech, and democracy.
The rest is enemy propaganda.
#
Monday, April 11, 2011
*******************************************
IN AN UNDEMOCRATIC ENVIRONMENT
THE SCUM RISES TO THE TOP
***********************************************
“If you speak
you are kesh.
If you don’t speak
you are esh.”
*
I came across this charming haiku
in an Armenian website the other day.
I have been called both kesh and esh by readers
Who have somehow managed to convince themselves
they are better and wiser.
*
With age comes wisdom,
except when your aim is power,
in which case with age
comes more greed, prejudice,
ignorance, and intolerance.
*
We tend to look up to our bosses, bishops, and benefactors
on the grounds that they have more money and power.
In this context we consistently avoid asking the question,
What have these gentlemen done for us so far
except to divide, deceive, and lead us
to massacre, exile, and subservience?
*
Now then, I ask you ladies and gentlemen
(if you will forgive the overstatements)
what have our dissidents done
except trying to enhance our solidarity
and share their understanding with us.
Why should solidarity, tolerance, and understanding
be treated as failings or vices
and divisiveness, dogmatism, and intolerance
as desirable patriotic duties and virtues?
*
What makes you think your bishop
knows better than someone else’s pope, imam, or rabbi?
*
God is with us?
That was one of Hitler’s favorite slogans too.
Why is it that where God enters
intolerance follows, and with intolerance,
heresies, persecution, and death? –
the death of the spirit if not the body.
*
The scum rises to the top
even in democratic environments.
That’s because, as Plato explains somewhere:
honest men will use only honest means
to achieve their goals,
unlike crooks
who will use both honest and dishonest means.
#
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
*******************************************
SYSTEMS
***********************************************
We are brought up to think
all belief systems are wrong except our own.
All politicians are crooks except our own.
All historians lie except our own.
Terrorists?
We never had them.
Ours were freedom fighters.
All our wars were defensive wars.
All our defeats were moral victories.
This may suggest that
the aim of propaganda is not to inform
but to brainwash,
and the aim of educational systems
is not to educate but to moronize.
#
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
*******************************************
MEMORIES AND REFLECTIONS
***********************************************
As a child I thought of war, starvation, and homelessness
(all of which I experienced)
as inevitable facts of life.
I was brought up to believe in God
who in His infinite wisdom had a plan for me.
What exactly had been His plan
for those who did not survive?
That was a question I did not ask.
In my infantile eyes Almighty God made the decisions
and men had no choice but to say “Thank you, Lord!”
*
When as a teenager I met an adult
who spoke as I write today,
my initial impression was that he must be nuts.
How dare he question God’s wisdom?
I know now that what he was questioning
was not God’s wisdom or even His existence
but the judgment of those who speak in His name –
popes, imams, and rabbis
who in another era would condemn one another to death
as frauds, heretics, and blasphemers.
#

the ugly armenian

2011-04-09T08:06:00.001-07:00

Thursday, April 07, 2011
*******************************************
FRIENDS
************************************
The tribal Muslims of the Middle East and North Africa
are ahead of us.
They have finally discovered that
their greatest enemies are neither Jews nor Americans
but their own corrupt, incompetent, and authoritarian leaders
who portray themselves as father figures and role models.
*
For daring to say as much a few years ago,
I lost several close friends from the Middle East.
This may suggest that even well-educated Armenians
are predisposed to believe recycled enemy propaganda
and reject the judgment of a brother.
*
I call Muslims our enemies
if only because after a thousand years of coexistence
they have contributed nothing but misery
to our collective existence
and blind subservience to authority
to our character as a nation.
#
Friday, April 08, 2011
*******************************************
WHY DO YOU WRITE?
************************************
When asked that question,
I make it short and harmless by saying
writing has become a habit
and habits are easier to keep than to give up.
*
Why do I write?
I write because as a teenager
I fell in love with the 19tn-century Russians.
I write because I like to share
my understanding of reality.
I write to expose deceivers.
To achieve immortality?
Why should I care what happens to me
after I am dead and buried?
*
Why do I write?
There may be many other reasons.
There is always a difference between what we say
and what we really think.
I write because I cannot do anything else.
I write because I have done many others things
and I have failed in all of them.
I write because I hate to work for money.
#
Saturday, April 09, 2011
*******************************************
THE UGLY ARMENIAN
************************************
We have many problems which we will never solve
if we don’t teach ourselves to separate fact from fiction.
Like the rest of mankind
we are not as lovable as we think we are.
Saroyan’s “stylized” Armenians (his own qualifier)
may be cute and lovable
but according to the published memoirs of his wife and son,
Saroyan himself was far from lovable.
To the Russians we are known as “cowards.”
To the Greeks as “Turkish gypsies.”
To the French as “filthy.”
To the Italians as smarter than Jews – meaning,
worse than Jews and thus to be avoided in the marketplace.
To the Americans, as Middle-East variants of their native Indians.
*
The truth is, as poor and homeless displaced people
we were welcome nowhere, including our own homeland.
Armenian survivors of World War II who repatriated
were not only called “aghber”
but also treated like garbage.
Not that our Sovietized brothers and sisters
treated one another more humanely.
If they had, several generations of our ablest men
would have survived successive waves of Stalinist purges.
*
When I am expected to believe
Arabs of the Middle East welcomed survivors
of the Genocide with open arms,
forgive me if I find that hard to believe.
We are told many Armenian orphans were adopted
and treated kindly by their new parents.
What we are not told
how many of them were abused and raped.
We are told 97% of the population in Armenia is Armenian.
What we are not told
Why is it that minorities are practically non-existent there?
Is it because we are intolerant, unfriendly, clannish,
tribal, and hostile to all outsiders?
I will let you answer that question.
And if you think I write as I do
because I am driven by self-hatred,
please don’t tell me you are one of those
narcissistic Armenians who have been brainwashed to believe
since we are beyond criticism we can do no wrong.
#

reflections

2011-04-06T07:46:00.001-07:00

Sunday, April 03, 2011
*******************************************
GRAFFITI
************************************
If anyone out there is planning to publish a volume of graffiti,
I submit the following candidates for his consideration.
*
“Stay in school and learn to read and riot.”
*
“Aunt Jemima is an Uncle Tom.”
*
“No Easter this year – they found the body.”
*
“Old soldiers never die -- just young ones.”
*
“Hugh Hefner is a virgin.”
*
“War is good business – invest your sons.”
*
“Be realists, demand the impossible.”
*
“Watch out, ears have walls.”
*
“Chastity is its own punishment.”
*
“Support free enterprise -- legalize prostitution.”
*
“Wear contraceptives – the unborn will bless you.”
*
“James Baldwin eats watermelon.”
#
Monday, April 04, 2011
*******************************************
HEROES
************************************
Every nation has its heroes
who are invariably outnumbered by its cowards,
and we are no exception.
*
Speaking for myself:
I have at no time identified myself as a hero.
On the contrary, on more than one occasion
I have declared myself to be an orthodox coward.
*
To those who insult me anonymously
and from a safe distance, I say:
Why do you hide your identity?
Is it shame or cowardice?
Shame of who you are?
Fear of retaliation?
If fear, I assure you, you have nothing to fear.
I have no interest in harming anyone.
I am not your enemy.
Harming you would amount to killing someone
who is committing suicide.
I suggest you have more reasons to fear yourself
because by behaving as you do,
you expose yourself as a shameless coward.
*
Zarian once said,
“An Armenian’s tongue can be sharper than a Turk’s yataghan.”
With one difference:
whereas Turks use the yataghan against their enemies,
we use it against ourselves.
As for those who expect me to believe
those who insult me are motivated by patriotism
and nothing else, I ask:
What could be more useless
than the patriotism of a shameless coward
who is afraid of his own shadow?
Why can’t we see this as clearly
as anyone with an average IQ?
The obvious answer is:
Because our average collective IQ
hovers somewhere between single-digit and negative.
*
Finally, allow me to share a professional secret with you.
The most lethal wound a reader can inflict on a writer
is not reading him.
#
Tuesday, April 05, 2011
*******************************************
DIARY
************************************
Saw a classic of French cinema,
Robert Bresson’s AU HASARD BALTHAZAR.
Most of the characters in it are nasty, even sadistic,
the acting is wooden,
the script clumsily put together,
the camera-work average.
What makes the film memorable are the central character
(a donkey, that after being repeatedly abused
is hit by a stray bullet and bleeds to death in the middle of nowhere)
and the music (Schubert).
*
I see so many parallels between Balthazar’s life
and our history – with one significant difference:
Balthazar is an adorable, saintly creature…
Which may suggest that survival comes at a price,
and it is not always the best that survive.
*
A system that develops a bureaucracy
is a system on its way to the devil.
That’s because in all bureaucracies
it is the ruthless and the cunning – that is to say,
the scum – that rises to the top.
*
The aim of comedy is to make us forget that
life is a tragedy.
*
“I love to read but I don’t have the time.”
The words of a self-satisfied imbecile
infatuated with his own ignorance.
*
Old age replaces desire with guilt.
#
Wednesday, April 06, 2011
*******************************************
WRITERS AND EDITORS
************************************
When asked why he no longer publishes me,
one of our partisan editors is quoted as having said:
“Because he writes garbage.”
*
I write about life as I have experienced it.
I write about my fellow men as I have known them.
To do otherwise –
to speak of my feelings and thoughts
based on what others have seen, experienced, and understood,
would be derivative and, in my view,
inadmissible because based on hearsay.
*
It is different with editors.
All editors have an editorial policy
set by the publisher or
whoever happens to be in authority.
If our bosses, bishops, and benefactors are unanimous
in thinking I write garbage,
an editor has no choice but to echo their views.
There are dissenting writers.
There are not and cannot be dissenting editors.
*
Nations that have won or lost wars
think victory and defeat have taught them valuable lessons.
In reality all they have learned
is either arrogance or subservience:
arrogance towards the defenseless,
subservience towards authority figures.
*
Am I saying anything you don’t already know?
I doubt it.
#

notes

2011-04-02T07:41:00.000-07:00

Thursday, March 31, 2011
*******************************************
OBSERVATIONS
************************************
The hardest thing in writing
is the search for the simplest words.
*
A lie that flatters
will be more popular
than a truth that hurts.
That’s why propaganda
is more popular than dissent.
*
It took me thirty years to realize
I had been brainwashed.
*
If you don’t think you have been brainwashed,
you have been.
#
Friday, April 01, 2011
*******************************************
COWBOYS AND INDIANS
************************************
Today’s champions of human rights,
Americans were yesterday’s champion violators
who probably claimed more victims
than Genghis Khan, Suleiman the Magnificent,
Talaat, and Stalin combined.
As for their victims (both Indians and Africans):
in their endless tribal wars and massacres
before the white man appeared on the scene,
they were champion victimizers in their own right.
*
History is not written but rewritten and
it is not white man alone
who speaks with a forked tongue.
*
Speaking of the European conquest of America,
Toynbee writes:
“As soon as they had accomplished their murderously romantic historical mission of clearing the North American barbarians out of the way, they themselves were swiftly sucked back into the prosaic Main Street of a pullulating Middletown. The culture of this Middletown had lapsed into a conspicuous vulgarity and barbarism in the realm of Art.”
*
When two sets of barbarians clash, the result will not be a new civilization – though historians will be assigned the task of misrepresenting it as such.
*
Turks rewrite history?
Don’t we?
We do worse:
We pretend to care about the past to the point of obsession
in order to avoid thinking and assessing our present and future.
We have replaced Ottomanism with Turcocentrism.
What’s the difference?
Don’t ask me because I don’t know.
*
A question that our historians consistently avoid raising:
What has been our contribution to our own history --
besides providing victims to victimizers?
#

2011-03-30T07:31:00.000-07:00

Sunday, March 27, 2011
********************************************
WE NEVER HAD IT SO GOOD!
************************************
An article in the travel section
of our local paper informs me
that Estonians now have a museum
dedicated to the atrocities committed
against the people by the Soviet regime.
Do we have one?
If no, when are we going to have one?
Can we be really “azad” and “ungakh”
-- free and independent -- as long as
we are ruled by two sets of former KGB agents
– theirs and ours?
#
Monday, March 28, 2011
********************************************
WE ARE IN GOOD HANDS
************************************
God has given us a brain
but our educational system teaches us not to use it.
*
A system may be foolproof but not crook-proof.
*
Our endless controversies and divisions
have nothing to do with right and wrong,
or orthodoxies and heresies.
If they disagree it’s because permanent disagreement
is to their advantage and the only way they know
how to defend and protect their powers and privileges.
As for the people they are meant to serve:
Let them eat cak(e).
*
The Arab revolutions that we are witnessing today
are organized and carried out by the young.
An Arab-style revolution in Armenia is unthinkable
because the regime in Yerevan encourages the young to emigrate,
and the young have done so by the million.
The buggers think of everything!
*
If an Armenian works for a boss, bishop, or benefactor
it goes without saying that he will be critical only of Turks.
Shaw is right: it’s a waste of time
arguing against a man’s source of income.
#
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
*******************************************
IN THE NAME OF PATRIOTISM
************************************
Patriotism does not mean love of homeland
and everything in it,
including the regime, the secret police
and its violations of human rights.
*
To accept the status quo as an inevitable fact of life
might as well be synonymous with treason
if only because it supports the victimizer
and ignores the victim;
in the same way that those who deny the Genocide
do so in support of the victimizer
at the expense of the victim.
*
There is an executioner in every dedicated patriot.
*
Unmask an Armenian and come face to face with a Turk.
*
It has happened to me more than once
that I became irrationally angry at the sight of someone
who reminded me of someone else
though I could not remember who.
This may suggest that the gut
has a longer memory than the brain.
*
There is a great deal that is hidden from us.
*
We are encouraged not to think for ourselves
on the ground that our “betters” are paid
to do our thinking for us.
The question is:
Who pays them to think as they do?
*
Under authoritarian regimes
to think is defined as not to think.
Remember Napoleon’s dictum:
“A man with an idea is my enemy.”
*
I repeat myself, granted.
But never as often as propagandists
who not only repeat themselves
but also brainwash other to do so,
and all in the name of patriotism.
*
Dissent is useful if only because
it makes us aware of the fact that
not everyone thinks alike,
and where everyone thinks alike
no one thinks.
*
Some days I receive so many hostile emails
that I have no choice but to conclude
my most faithful readers are my critics.
#
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
*******************************************
THE REST IS PROPAGANDA
************************************
Like every Armenian dead or alive
I too have experienced on my own skin
the inhumanity and contempt that an Armenian has
for another Armenian.
No one can convince me that
we are civilized, intelligent, and compassionate.
It took history a thousand years to shape our identity
and it may take another thousand for us
to be born again as human beings.
What matters, however, is not our destination
but the road on which we choose to travel.
In the meantime it is important that we keep in mind
some facts about ourselves:
We are our own worst enemies.
There is more fiction than fact in our history books.
The higher an Armenian rises
the deeper his contempt for his fellow Armenians.
We are a Christian nation in name only:
unmask an Armenian and expose the Turk
or the atheist for whom democracy and human rights
are alien and degenerate verbiage.
The rest is propaganda.
#

comments

2011-03-26T07:39:00.001-07:00

Thursday, March 24, 2011
*******************************************
LAMENTATION
******************************************
Let others recycle propaganda.
I will continue to use my reason and common sense
because I believe them to be valuable tools
even when they make me vulnerable
to charges of treason and betrayal
by Ottomanized and Sovietized dupes.
*
If the scriptures,
to which we all pretend to believe
to be the word of God,
clearly and unequivocally states
“A house divided against itself cannot stand,”
I shall have no choice but to call our leaders
the architects of our own destruction.
And if you say,
all rules have exceptions,
I say, greed for power, incompetence, stupidity, and corruption
that lead to defeat, massacre, and dispersion
are consequences not of rules but of aberrations.
*
No one is perfect?
I suggest, that idea does not justify dishonesty.
As imperfect beings
we have made our share of mistakes,
granted.
Let us therefore begin
by being honest enough to admit them,
instead of brainwashing generations of children
to believe we never had it so good
because we are in the best of hands.
*
Best of hands?
I have every reason to suspect,
it’s the worst of hands:
bishops who fornicate,
bosses with secret fascist agendas,
benefactors who harbor royalist ambitions,
and academics willing and eager to kiss
any posterior for a regular income.
Amot!
#
Friday, March 25, 2011
*******************************************
LAMENTATION / II
******************************************
“We have the leaders we deserve.”
“We are ungovernable.”
“Where there are two Armenians
there will be three opinions.”
*
We are all familiar with the story
of the two shipwrecked Armenians
on a desert island
who build three churches.
When asked by their rescuers
why a third church, they reply:
“That’s the one we don’t go to.”
*
I am not convinced.
To blame the people
is to victimize the victim all over again.
Solidarity is a function of the leadership
not of the masses.
If we remain divided today
it’s because there are among us deceivers
willing to place their careers
above the welfare of the nation.
To that end
they fabricate ideological and theological reasons
(reasons that most Armenians neither know nor understand,
and if they know and understand, they don’t remember)
and call their opponents heretics or infidels.
*
Mighty empires begin as a collection of tribes.
It takes a charismatic leader with vision
to unite them into a single force.
This is as true of the Athenian Empire
as it is true of all empires
from the Roman to the Ottoman.
*
Even our monastic orders
with identical belief systems and aims
like the Mekhitarists are sooner or later divided
and consigned to the dustbin of history.
*
It was Raffi who once described us
as a flock without a shepherd.
It would be more accurate to say
we are several flocks with as many wolves
as shepherds – wolves in sheep’s clothing.
“Mart bidi ch’ellank!”
#
Saturday, March 26, 2011
*************************************
WRITERS
******************************************
A reader writes:
“When someone speaks plainly
I sort of go into shock and
get somewhat disoriented.”
If I write plainly it’s because
I want to be honest, objective, and accessible.
I have nothing to hide,
no interests to defend,
and no prejudices to legitimize.
Our writers today cater
to a variety of readers
with specific demands.
They treat bishops as men of God
(therefore untouchable),
bosses as infallible
(therefore beyond criticism),
and benefactors as sacred cows
(therefore gifts from god).
As for objectivity and honesty:
they might as well be skunks
at a garden party.
#

tell me!

2011-03-23T07:03:00.001-07:00

Sunday, March 20, 2011
*******************************************
TELL ME SOMETHING
I DON’T KNOW
******************************************
You don’t like criticism and dissent?
Get over it.
Get used to it.
Get real.
Even God has His share of critics and dissenters.
You prefer yes-men?
May I remind you that all power structures,
including the most corrupt and criminal,
rely on yes-men.
Hitler and Stalin had them.
So did Genghis Khan and Timur the Lame.
Massacres and genocides are unthinkable without them.
And if, like every Tom, Dickhead and Harry,
you say you prefer those who are with you
to those who are against you,
may I ask in what way are you different
from the rest of mankind?
Tell me something I don’t know.
So what else is new?
What matters is not on whose side we are
but how we define good and evil.
When asked to define good and evil,
an African tribal chieftain
is quoted by C.G. Jung to have replied:
“When I steal my enemy’s wives, it’s good.
When he steals mine, it’s bad!”
If, on the other hand, you say
you prefer patriots to traitors,
consider what happened to German patriots
when Hitler lost World War II,
and what will happen to Gadhafi and his henchmen
after his regime collapses.
Today’s patriot may be tomorrow’s traitor
and today’s dissenter may be tomorrow’s hero
and role model. And if you think
you are never wrong in your judgment of your fellow men,
I say, every misguided fool thinks so too.
#
Monday, March 21, 2011
*******************************************
SELF-DECEPTION
******************************************
“My people love me!”
declared Gadhafi the other day
even as he was slaughtering a fraction of them.
Did he believe in his own lie?
The more relevant question is:
Can power and honesty coexist?
*
If Gadhafi is a compulsive liar,
what about popes, imams, and rabbis?
What could be more absurd than to say,
all political and religious leaders lie except our own?
*
Because truth is beyond men’s reach,
they will believe in a thousand lies
even after these lies have been exposed.
*
Mine is not a David-and-Goliath confrontation
but rather that of a horse-fly and a horse – make it,
a jackass.
#
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
*******************************************
ON ARMENIAN ANTI-ARMENIANISM
******************************************
All our problems have solutions.
If we pretend otherwise
it’s because we have no use for them.
What we want,
what we need more than anything else is revenge.
It’s understandable.
What motivates a nation
that has been degraded, abused, and slaughtered
throughout most of its historic existence
is not reason but thirst for blood.
What drives us is not what’s good for us
but what’s bad for our enemies --
beginning with Armenians who disagree with us.
If only because these Armenians,
unlike our real enemies,
are within reach, defenseless,
and in no position to retaliate.
*
Armenian anti-Armenianism:
not exactly an original insight that one.
Granted.
Rather, it’s an idea as old as Khorenatsi and Yeghishé
(historians of the 5th century).
According to Zarian, a more recent witness:
“Armenians survive by cannibalizing one another.”
And in case you ascribe that view
to an isolated and non-representative intellectual,
allow me to quote the lyrics of a popular song:
“One Armenian eats one chicken,
Two Armenians eat two chickens,
Three Armenians eat each other.”
*
As for our political parties
whose job it is to solve our problems:
all they do is legitimize dogmatism, intolerance,
and ultimately cannibalism.
After which they voice one of their favorite mantras:
“What we need is not criticism but solutions.”
And if you believe that,
you’ll believe anything!
#
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
*******************************************
“YOU REPEAT YOURSELF”
******************************************
We all do.
There is nothing new under the sun.
Why single me out?
Am I saying something you don’t want to hear?
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
“Of the gods we know nothing!”
I wonder why is it that the charge of repetition
is never leveled against propagandists
who repeat not ideas – because they have none –
but slogans, clichés, inanities, and lies.
What drives them?
A thirst for justice?
What about the injustice of violating someone’s free speech?
*
Nothing works as planned.
They must have known this.
Why else did they have a Plan B only for themselves?
Their heart was in the right place?
What about their brain?
Where was their brain?
Out to lunch?
#

q/a

2011-03-19T07:36:00.001-07:00

Thursday, March 17, 2011
********************************************
THE NATIVES ARE RESTLESS
******************************************
…And this is of great concern to the West
because where there are Arabs there is oil.
Where there are Armenians, however,
there are only rocks and unsettled scores.
We are less than useless to the West;
we are a nuisance.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there are pundits today
who think Turks should have done
a more thorough job on us.
I once met a born-again Armenian in his eighties
who said as much, adding
the Genocide had been God’s way of letting us know
that we don’t deserve to live.
*
And speaking of God:
The side with bigger guns in Libya is winning.
This may suggest that God doesn’t like to interfere
in human affairs.
*
We say God is great
in the hope He will be flattered and manipulated
into supporting our cause.
*
The status quo does not represent the will of God.
The reason Ben Ali and Mubarak fell
is that no regime is endless.
The regime in Yerevan will last
for as long as the regime in Moscow does
and no more.
*
We know and understand a great deal
except what is unknowable and incomprehensible
beside which what we know and understand
might as well be as nothing.
#
Friday, March 18, 2011
********************************************
CORRECT ME,
IF I AM WRONG
******************************************
After every comment I make, I would like to add:
“Correct me, if I am wrong.”
*
In a world where everyone is proud
to be a Turk, Kurd, Jew, or Armenian
I prefer to be a humble human being
if only because humility is a virtue
and pride leads to arrogance.
*
A reader writes:
“The only thing I know about Armenian history
is that we were a great nation
and God was on our side.”
*
Insults are verbal massacres.
To insult a fellow Armenian or
anyone else for that matter
is to use words as yataghans.
*
Tell me who brainwashed you
and I will tell you who you are.
*
To our superpatriots I say:
Patriotism and respect for human rights
are not mutually exclusive concepts.
Homeland is where a man is allowed to work
and express his views freely.
I have nothing but contempt for the kind of patriot
who treats free speech
as an invention of the corrupt and degenerate West.
That’s not patriotism
but Ottomanism, Sovietism, and fascism.
#
Saturday, March 19, 2011
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QUESTION / ANSWER
******************************************
Criticism is not enemy action;
dissent is not a capital offense;
human rights are not inventions of the degenerate West.
Question: Why is it that I was not taught these truths?
Answer: Because I had an Armenian education.
*
I was not brainwashed.
I was trained like a parrot.
*
Dehumanization comes naturally to a nation
that has lived under brutal regimes for a thousand years.
#