Sunday, July 29, 2007
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A PROBLEM AND ITS SOLUTION
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Everything I write is a confession. When I speak of Ottomanized Armenians I speak of myself. When I speak of Turcocentric ghazetajis I speak of myself too. For more than two decades I reviewed only books (sometimes as many as three a week) that had something positive to say about Armenians or something negative to say about Turks; and needless to add, most of the lines I quoted dealt with atrocities, massacres, and genocide. Half of my first book, THE ARMENIANS: THEIR HISTORY AND CULTURE – A SHORT INTRODUCTION (Toronto, 1975), was not about Armenians but about Turks. It took me more than twenty years to start de-Ottomanizing myself – a painful process and a work in progress.
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My critics tell me I write about problems but I don’t provide solutions. Here is a solution for this particular problem: the establishment of research centers and educational programs for both adults and children that will liberate us from our Ottoman chains and allow us to recover our humanity. We should teach our children civics – the meaning of democracy and human rights. Before we try to civilize “barbarians,” we should try to civilize ourselves. Something we will never succeed in doing as long as we allow our ghazetajis to run amok in our press, blogs, and Internet forums.
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What to do in the meantime? Easy. No sweat. Send an email to our editors and moderators and keep sending it until you get a reply, an explanation, a promise, or a change in editorial policy. Miracles happen. I don’t believe in them but statistics suggest that if they happened two thousand years ago, they may happen again.
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What to say in your email to our editors? Make it short, sweet, and to the point.
Sample #1:
“Dear Sir” or even better, “Your Excellency: When I read an Armenian weekly, I prefer to read more about Armenians and less about Turks. I do hope you don’t consider my request extravagant, unArmenian or unpatriotic.”
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Sample #2:
“Since you write more about Turks than Armenians I suggest you call yourself THE TURKISH REPORTER, or THE TURKISH OBSERVER, or THE TURKISH WEEKLY, or THE ISTANBUL COURIER.”
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Sample #3:
“Is your readership going up or down? If down, it may be because there is too much prejudice and hate in it. Please consider a radical change in your editorial policy. Thank you.”
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Monday, July 30, 2007
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ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE
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With their customary Ottoman tact, some of my gentle readers do not hesitate to call me, among other things, a mediocrity, a failure, and a traitor. Why would they, why would anyone for that matter, take the words of a mediocrity and a failure seriously enough to lure them into the gutter? If I recycle the ideas of our writers, does that mean the central ideas of our literature are products of mediocrities and failures? Two of our most revered historians of the 5th century, Khorenatsi and Yeghishe, lamented our divisions. And yet, we stand divided to this day. What has changed? If 600 years if Ottoman subservience, a series of massacres, and a genocide have taught us nothing, what are our chances of acquiring wisdom or being receptive to ideas – as opposed to the lies of propaganda? If we are a failure as a nation, who is to blame, our political leadership or our literature? Who are our real traitors – our dividers or our writers who promoted solidarity?
On a more personal level: I may be a mediocrity and a failure in the eyes of some, but it seems to me, I have every right to consider myself as one of the luckiest and most privileged Armenian writers that has ever lived. Think of the fate of some of our greatest writers in the last two centuries: if they did not die in their early twenties or thirties of tuberculosis, they were permanently silenced by the likes of Talaat and Stalin, both of whom enjoyed the support and cooperation of our dupes. The very few who survived, like Zarian and Massikian, were neglected, ignored, and eventually silenced. So much so that, in his deathbed in Yerevan, Zarian was convinced he had been the victim of an attempted assassination (he had had a bad fall; he said he was pushed); and Massikian, a successful lawyer in Egypt, when asked in his deathbed by community leaders to bequeath his considerable wealth to Armenian educational institutions, replied by saying, in his view the inmates of a Cairo bordello would be more deserving recipients of his generosity.
Who are the successful Armenian writers? Only those who wrote for odars – Arlen, Saroyan, Troyat, Berberova. The truth of the matter is, we, or rather our political leaders, have no use for writers. Brown-nosers, yes. Writers, no! In what way are we different from “bloodthirsty Asiatic barbarians” who have forced into exile their only Nobel Prize winner? And as our mafias in the Homeland prosper, our writers are forced into exile too. And what happens to them in the Diaspora? Can anyone on this forum name a single one of them? And when our self-assessed superpatriots speak of nationalism, they are too ignorant to see that what they really mean is tribalism.
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In our local paper this morning I read a list of the four factors that go into the making of an opinion: the media, the double-talk of politicians, the lessons of history, and one’s personal value system. Which makes me wonder: what happens to a community whose press, schools, historians, and value system are shaped and controlled by the double-talk of politicians? Answer: critics are called traitors and politicians are looked up as statesmen of vision who fully deserve our unswerving subservience. The Sultan is not dead. He lives!
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Barry Sonnenfeld: “Some people see the glass half empty. Some see it half-full. I see half a glass of poison.”
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Tuesday, July 31, 2007
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QUOTATIONS FROM RAFFI
(HAGOP MELIK-HAGOPIAN: 1835-1888)
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ON OUR LEADERSHIP
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“We don’t have an aristocracy. We have no elites and leaders. What we have are merchants and clergymen. Merchants are trash. As for the clergy: they have always been against individual freedom.”
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ON FREEDOM
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“Where there is oppression there will also be cowardice, ignorance, and sloth. A man needs freedom to discover the benefits of freedom.”
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CHERCHEZ L’ARMENIEN
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“Where Armenian blood flaws, look for an Armenian hatchet.”
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ON LIES
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“Self-deception is a one-eyed monster that sees only the positive and ignores the negative.”
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ON TREASON
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“Our past is filled with countless instances of betrayal and treachery. Whenever we have been invaded by Persian, Greek, Arab, Seljuk, or Mongol armies, these armies have advanced under the command of an Armenian. Armenians have always fought side by side with the enemy against their own people.”
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PORTRAIT OF AN ARMENIAN
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“Mutual intolerance, divisiveness, envy, betrayal, and a thousand other vices have built permanent nests in our hearts.”
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ENEMIES
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“An Armenian’s worst enemies are not odars but Armenians.”
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MORE ON LEADERSHIP
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“Those who are responsible for our safety are themselves a gang of criminals.”
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Wednesday, August 01, 2007
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MORE ON RAFFI
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One reason I quoted Raffi yesterday is that I recognized myself in what he says. If you think you are better, obviously Raffi’s observations do not apply to you. But I would invite you to consider the remote possibility that you may only think or believe you are better because, in Raffi’s words, you have a highly developed sense of self-deception; or as Sartre says somewhere speaking of belief systems: “We may believe that we believe, but we don’t believe.” People don’t judge us by what we say we believe, especially if we say or imply we are better than they. On the contrary. People tend to be suspicious of self-satisfied holier-than-thou phonies.
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Another reason I quoted Raffi is that I wanted to point out the fact that my ideas are not mine. They are to be found in our writers; the rest belong to world literature. I have consistently denied being an original writer. It has been said that there are only a limited number of ideas and all of them are to be found in the Bible or Plato. Everything else consists in deviations, expansions, and footnotes.
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Paul Valéry once asked Einstein if he carried a notebook in which to jot down ideas as they occurred to him when he was not at his desk. Einstein explained that ideas didn’t come to him frequently enough to adopt that method of annotation and that he would consider himself very lucky if an idea came to him once every twenty or thirty years.
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Finally, if Raffi’s remarks came to you as a shock, it may be because our ghazetajis and academics have conspired to hide the truth from us by harping constantly on Turks, massacres, and atrocities thus hoping to distract us from our real problems. If the Kingdom of God is within us, so are the fires of hell.
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