Sunday, April 03, 2005
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It happened twice last week. To settle an argument in their favor, two readers (both parading as authentic and patriotic Armenians) quoted Ottoman sayings, in Turkish too! Figure that one out, if you can.
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Armenianism as it is understood and practiced today is simply Ottomanism by other means – the same unquestioning reverence to mini-sultans (instead of a single Sultan), and the same contempt for the fundamental human right of free speech.
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You either live the way you think or the way someone else thinks. If you choose the second option, make sure that someone else is not your enemy.
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Some readers approach my writings as lovingly as a starving cannibal spicing a fat missionary.
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Commissars and mullahs are philistines, that is to say, killers who adopt an ideology or religion to legitimize their killer instincts.
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In his travel impressions of the Caucasus, Alexandre Dumas pere (of THE THREE MUSKETEERS fame) says something to the effect that, Armenians have a reputation of being untrustworthy. When I first read this a few years ago, I thought, “What an anti-Armenian bastard!” But after being hoodwinked, flimflammed, and bamboozled by a number of Armenian wheeler-dealers, including an archbishop, I have been reconsidering my position.
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Who cares what a minor Armenian scribbler thinks? My tentative answer: Only readers who cling to major lies.
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If I have achieved immortality in the minds of some readers, it’s because I have insulted them. An injured Armenian has the memory of an elephant and the venom of a Turkish viper.
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Monday, April 04, 2005
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Our knowledge is limited and our ignorance infinite. Only fools and fanatics forget this.
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Writing for Armenians sometimes feels like swimming across a Brazilian river teeming with piranhas.
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I am beginning to think of death as liberation. Writing for Armenians may have something to do with this.
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If an Armenian has a choice between reading the lines and reading between the lines, he will invariably choose the latter even if what he reads there has nothing to do with what is written.
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Armenians who say Armenians are smart get on my nerves. I can imagine what they do to odars. Because to say we are smart is to imply the rest of the world is less smart.
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As for being smart in the marketplace, frankly, like most people around the world, I prefer to deal with honest men. I have dealt enough with smart ones to know the world would be a better place without them. And I look forward to the day when Armenians will be known not as smart in the marketplace but as honest everywhere. Call me an incurable optimist. Call me a fool.
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There is a big difference between being the right man at the right time and the wrong man at the wrong time. Being an Armenian writer means being the wrong man at the wrong time everywhere and at all times.
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Tuesday, April 05, 2005
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The first time I met an honest Armenian who made sense, I thought he was crazy. That’s how thoroughly brainwashed I was. It took me a number of years to realize this.
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An assertion and its contradiction are only two steps on a road that stretches to infinity. But in an Armenian context, they might as well be dead ends leading to a cul de sac.
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Armenians may be divided into two camps: the alienated and those who alienated them (fools and fanatics, charlatans, chauvinists, and panchoonies). It is my ambition to alienate the alienators. But after twenty years of trying, I find this uneven battle to be similar to that of a sardine against a school of sharks.
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Intolerance is quintessentially Ottoman. We should teach our children to be intolerant only of Ottomanism.
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Happiness consists in choosing your brand of misery, accepting it as an inevitable fact, and getting used to it.
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Against a dismembered and disintegrating Ottoman Empire, we had Russia, the Great Powers, and God on our side. We thought we were invulnerable. And we were dead wrong! What have we learned from this blunder? After thinking, ‘Who could be more harmless than a minor Armenian scribbler?’ some readers go out of their way to verbally abuse me on the assumption that I am in no position to retaliate.
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We can truly say of the brainwashed: “Forgive them Father, for they know not what they say because they understand nothing and they know even less.”
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Writes Shahan Shahnour in a letter to a friend (I am now translating and paraphrasing from memory): “Blind faith has been the source of our downfall. What we need most today is the kind of common sense that can discriminate right from wrong, and good from evil. What we don’t need is the empty verbiage of partisan rhetoric. In the words of Arpiar Arpiarian, ‘if we can’t be useful to this nation, let us at least refrain from doing it any harm’.”
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The headline of a recent article in LE POINT (Paris, March 10, 2005) reads: “Is Prime Minister Erdogan a successor of Ataturk who wants to make of Turkey the first secular Muslim state, or is he a Muslim head of state who wants to introduce Islam into Europe?” Further down we read: “Of the 2 million Armenians in Turkey, 1,5 million were exterminated in the 1915 genocide. There are no more than 40,000 or 50,000 Armenians left in Turkey today.” The article goes on to speak of the desecration of 5th-century Armenian churches in Kars.
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Wednesday, April 06, 2005
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Every other Armenian I meet these days is convinced he is the only authentic Armenian who knows what’s best for the nation and everyone else is at best a disoriented second-class citizen who should assume a passive stance and follow his guidance. Which is why I refuse to write as an Armenian. Instead, I write as a human being or, to be more precise, as a former Armenian who is trying very hard to recover his humanity. And if you think I am being too critical of my fellow Armenians, I suggest you stop speechifying and start listening.
I have an 81-year old born-again Armenian friend (whose every other sentence is a quotation from the Scriptures) who believes Armenians were massacred because they were evil.
“Now that I have placed a safe distance between myself and my fellow Armenians, I feel much better,” writes another friend from his deathbed.
I could go on, but I rest my case.
And to those who love to quote Ottoman sayings in order to settle an argument in their favor, I ask: “Did you know that the most frequently quoted saying among Armenians is not in Turkish but in Armenian, and it is: “Mart bidi ch’ellank!” (We will never acquire the status of human beings, or, We will never recover our humanity.)
To our partisans (in whose eyes the Party can do no wrong), dime-a-dozen flimflam pundits, and loud-mouth panchoonies, I say: Next time you open your mouth, ask yourself: “Will my words alienate a fellow Armenian?” And if alienation leads to assimilation and assimilation is “white massacre,” please feel free to rephrase the question.
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