April 4, 2010
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LAMENTATION
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“You are consistently negative,” I am told again and again by the very same readers who are the cause of my negativism.
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We speak as though our problems need solutions.
We speak as though generations of our writers lived, worked, and died in some other dimension inaccessible to us.
Poor Armenian people!
Poor Armenian writers!
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Poor Armenian writers.
After we bury them, we re-bury them again and again whenever we ignore their works.
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We have been so thoroughly dehumanized that ideas mean nothing to us.
Money, yes!
Ideas?
Who gives a damn?
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Jesus died for our sins, we are told.
Generations of Armenian writers died to save us but we continue to wallow in ignorance, apathy, materialism, envy, intolerance, and arrogance.
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I work for nothing.
I write for readers who know better.
Writing for Armenians is akin to mating with a shark.
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We speak of nationalism because we have been de-nationalized as thoroughly as we have been dehumanized.
Our own backyard comes first.
As for the nation – who gives a damn?
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Oppressors don't want the oppressed to have ideas. What they want is subservience. In their eyes, freedom is a dangerous commodity. As for ideas...in Napoleon's words: “A man with an idea is my enemy.”
It is the same with our bosses: all they want from us is subservience.
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After the Sultan, Talaat.
After Talaat, Stalin.
After Stalin, our bosses and their assorted hirelings of Jack S. Avanakians and “mi kich pogh” Comrade Panchoonies, and communities whose favorite words are “Yes, sir!”
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Even when we speak of others, we speak of ourselves. Think twice before you say another word on Turks.
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April 4, 2010
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FROM DUST TO DUST
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Confucius: “Let us leave the spirits aside, until we know how best to serve men.”
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Our parish priest (Anteliassagan) refused to bless my mother's grave on the grounds that she had been cremated. “We don't believe in cremation,” said he.
I wonder, was he trying to obstruct her path to heaven?
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According to N.T. Wright, a contemporary theologian: “People are so preoccupied about who gets into heaven that they forget that much of the New Testament is about how we conduct our lives in the here and now.”
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They lead us like sheep not to green pastures but to a den of wolves.
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What makes me to repeat myself is not senility but the conviction that a truth should be repeated as often as the lies of our Jack S. Avanakians and “mi kich pogh” Panchoonies.
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More quotations from Confucius:
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“Respect spiritual beings but keep them at a distance.”
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“Only the wisest and the stupidest of men never change.”
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“The path to duty lies in what is near and men seek for it in what is remote. The work of duty lies in what is easy and men seek for it in what is difficult.”
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“When you see a good man, think of emulating him; when you see a bad man, examine your own heart.”
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April 5, 2010
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READING RAFFI
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We sent Khrimian Hairik to Berlin, and Sylva Kaputikian to Moscow.
Diplomats and revolutionaries: where are they when we need them most?
Raffi's answer:
“We are like sheep without a shepherd...We don't have an aristocracy. We have neither elites nor leaders. What we have are merchants and clergymen [and vodanavorjis, he could have added]. Merchants are trash. As for the clergy: they have always been against individual freedom.”
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“Where there is oppression, there is cowardice, ignorance, and sloth. A man needs freedom to discover the benefits of freedom.”
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“What's done is done. What we must do now is assess the damage and figure out how to avoid the next catastrophe.”
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“War, bloodshed, massacre: they will be with us so long as the principle of Might is Right prevails.”
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“The prevalent mentality among us is, every man for himself. As long as I can take care of myself, why should I give a damn about anyone else?”
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“Those who are in charge of our destiny are themselves a gang of criminals. What are our options? Who can help us? Not even God, it seems, perhaps because we have too many sins on our conscience.”
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“Our capitalists are the most corrupt and degenerate members of the community. Nothing good can come from them. They are men without a country. They worship only money. Profit is their only homeland.”
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In what way are our national benefactors different from Raffi's capitalists if they allow their flunkeys to behave like commissars of culture and to subsidize ghazetajis whose obsession with Turks far exceeds their concern for fellow Armenians? And what about our fornicating bishops and bosses who so far have delivered nothing but empty verbiage? Has anything changed during the last 150 years? Once upon a time we were slaves. We are now slaves of former slaves.
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Here is Raffi again:
“No power on earth can deprive you of your freedom. No one can enslave you if you refuse to be enslaved. Where there is slavery there are also men willing to assume a passive stance. Oppressors know this and they count on it.”
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April 6, 2010
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PATRIOTISM
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Nationalists begin by asserting a superior brand of patriotism and end by committing massacres.
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All genocides are committed in the name of nationalism, and sooner or later all nationalists are exposed as fascists.
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I have yet to meet an Armenian who thought his own brand of patriotism to be inferior to someone else's.
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If I have been silenced, it's because our fascist editors and publishers have been successful in convincing their readers that I am an enemy not of fascism but of the people and the fatherland.
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They accuse me of emphasizing the negative, whereas they are in the business emphasizing the positive; and emphasizing the negative means “corrupting the young” and “undermining the authority of the gods,” which happen to be the charges leveled against Socrates and against all dissidents in general.
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To be a dupe of propaganda means supporting fascists whose ultimate aim is the destruction of the state, or so history or reality tells us.
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Patriotism is a mask that hides killers, and killers not only of the enemy but also of their fellow countrymen.
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Patriotism appeals to the emotions, and “emotions are judgments opposed to those arrived at by reason” (Epicurus).
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There is nothing new under the sun. What I have been saying was said by Greeks more than two thousand years ago.
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April 7, 2010
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WHY MEN DISAGREE
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If we disagree, it may be because we speak in the name of Reality (whose complexities are infinite), Truth (which is accessible only to God) or God (Whom we are not equipped to know or understand).
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When we speak, we select and emphasize a single aspect of Reality that has an infinite number of them.
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Speaking and writing consists in selecting and emphasizing a perspective or point of view which proves a pet theory or justifies our interests. Which is why I trust more a man who speaks against himself.
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Our brains' ability to perceive Reality is limited. Scientists tell us space is not infinite. Which means at a certain point it ends. But our brain cannot perceive or imagine what it is that stands between space and non-space, or between existence and nothingness.
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No subject has created more disagreements, intolerance, persecutions, wars, and massacres than God, Who, we are told, is love mercy and compassion.
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Man hates in the name of love and sees no contradiction in it. Figure that one out, if you can.
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We are, or rather our history is, a succession of contradictions which we can only pretend to resolve and understand.
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Our belief systems are houses of cards in a storm. To say “I believe” is to assert faith in the incomprehensible and the inconceivable.
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When I say “Let us pray,” I express a desire to direct my words to a Being who has consistently ignored the voices of those who need Him the most – the enslaved, the downtrodden, the starving, the dying, and the innocent victims of massacres.
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“Our Father Who art in heaven”? Any father who would witness the rape and murder of his young daughter when he was in a position to stop it, would be in jail for aiding and abetting a man guilty of a capital offense.
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May God (if He cares to hear me) have mercy on my soul (if I have one).
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April 8, 2010
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READING ZARIAN
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Or rather, “re-reading” him, because so far all I have been doing is either quote or paraphrase him.
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G.B. Shaw once said that even after he had solved all of mankind's problems people kept asking for solutions. Something very similar could be said of Zarian and our problems. It can be said that Zarian is to Armenians what the Old Testament is to Jews, and what the New Testament is to Christians.
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“What matters in life is not a multiplicity of ideas but a certain quality of attitude, action, responsibility, and commitment.”
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“Morality is not the same as religion.”
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“We don't have critics. Not in the true sense of the word. What we have are semi-educated meddlers with derivative criteria gathered from here and there – amateurs who have made of criticism an arid field of dismal mediocrity.”
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“An Armenian's tongue can be sharper than a Turk's yataghan.”
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“What are we but a handful of persecuted and displaced people at the mercy of the wind. Like dust we cling to stones on dirt roads and assume their shapes – grateful whenever we fall on a vegetable planted by others.”
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“Our communities in the Diaspora are dominated by shopkeepers, pseudo-intellectuals, and priests. A miscellaneous crew of rascals with fat bellies and swollen egos. There you have the nucleus around which our collective existence revolves. This indeed ought to be the central issue of our literature today.”
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“Our devils come in many disguises. In our own days they appear as clergymen, activists, hired scribblers, schoolmasters. They have beady eyes, loose lower lips, deep voices, and mangled features. They are termites, toads, and sometimes vipers. Pretense, envy, treachery...”
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“We survive by cannibalizing one another.”
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“Writing for Armenians is a waste of time. We are in a vegetative state. We are interested only in matters dealing with our survival. We carry our identity like a heavy weight on our shoulders. If I write, it must be in either French or English.”
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“The Armenian nation is like a family whose members devour each other because of conflicting interests. And because they are absorbed in personal feuds, they are blind to spiritual greatness. For the average Armenian, Armenia is nothing but a piece of real estate.”
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I could go on quoting Zarian for many more pages, but I will stop here on the grounds that “No banquet under heaven is endless.”
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I may stop quoting him now but I will go on paraphrasing him in future installments.
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April 9, 2010
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SUMMING UP
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By quoting others my aim is to point out the fact that the difference between my critics and me is that I rely on thinkers and they recycle the slogans and clichés of Panchoonies and Jack S. Avanakians. As for new or original ideas: there are none. They don't exist. Marx was against exploiters. So was our Lord when two thousand years ago he spoke about camels and the eye of a needle.
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I am against dividers because I believe “all men are brothers” (and I don't mean like Cain and Abel); and when I say “all men” I include Turks. It is a mistake to think of Turks as Turks. I doubt if there is a single Turk alive today. Turks are a mixture of Greeks, Albanians, Macedonians, Bulgarians, Assyrians, Iranians, Arabs, Jews, and Armenians, among others. Something similar could be said of Armenians. As for Armenians who claim the Bagratunis and Mamikonians as their ancestors: Bagratunis identified themselves as Jews, and Khorenatsi identified the Mamikonians as Chinese. Speaking for myself: I have at no time hidden the fact that, on a good day, I can trace my ancestry all the way back to my father.
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To hate Turks is to hate the wrong enemy. If we are going to hate, let's begin with fascists, beginning with our own.
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“History of Armenian diplomacy” -- if one of our academics were to produce a monograph on the subject, with separate chapters on Zohrab in Constantinople, Khrimian in Berlin, Mikoyan in Yerevan, and Sylva Kaputikian in Moscow – the subtitle will probably read, “Anatomy of Incompetence and Treason.”
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My critics accuse me of being anti-Armenian and of projecting my self-hatred on the nation, thus implying there is nothing wrong with us. So much so that, we might as well be a role model to all other nations. To which I can only say, “Self-satisfied bug*ers!”
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It has been said “nothing fails like success.” If the opposite were true (“nothing succeeds like failure”) we should be on our way to being one of the greatest nations on earth. Now then, I dare anyone to call me a pessimist!
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