But if you really want to understand Armenians, here is what you do: . . you enter an Armenian discussion forum on the Internet and post an honest, objective, and self-evident statement -- something like, say, two plus two equals four, or the sun rises in the East -- and see what happens. I will tell you what happens. You will come face to face with Armenians who believe, as the offspring of victims of massacres, they are justified to verbally massacre anyone who refuses to recycle their favorite brand of propaganda.
What have the Armenians learn from history beside adopting Turks as their role models? You may well ask. Don't get me wrong. We probably have as many moderates as extremists. But like all extremists everywhere, ours too are better organized and loud. So much so that they appear to represent the majority even when they are a minority that suffer from acute verbal diarrhea, which happens to be a common malady among us.
Patriotism & Related Atrocities
Some of the nastiest human beings I have had the misfortune to deal with are or pretend to be dedicated Armenian patriots. I am also personally acquainted with Turks who are more tolerant and civilized that some Armenians. Sooner or later we shall have to come to terms with the fact that collectively we are not as good as we think we are to the same degree that Turks are not as bad as we have been led to believe. Very much like Turks, Armenians are first and foremost individuals and to generalize is to simplify the complexities of reality. Nations and by extension national identity are artificial labels created by ambitious politicians whose central concern is power. Therefore to speak of Turks and Armenians is misleading. We should speak instead of human beings who as a result of factors beyond their control or motivated by the instinct of self-preservation, identify themselves with a group in whose midst they find themselves. This may explain why some of the most patriotic and nationalist Armenian leaders are either the offspring of mixed marriages or see nothing objectionable in intermarriage.
ON TURCOCENTRIC GHAZETAJIS
They are dangerous charlatans
who wallow in massacres and self-pity.
They appeal to our baser instincts
by creating a climate of resentment, hatred, and intolerance.
They refuse to engage in dialogue
with their own fellow countrymen,
let alone the opposition.
They have nothing but contempt for free speech
and fundamental human rights
and by extention, literature and culture.
They at no time admit that
it was a blunder to gamble
with the lives of innocent civilians
by relying on the assistance of the West and Russia –
nations that have themselves massacred their own kind
in the name of political expediency.
They portray themselves as defenders of our interests
and the fact that they are believed
proves only that we are a nation of dupes.
By thinking only in terms of victims and victimizers,
they cover up the fact that
we have been and continue to be
double victims of foreign oppression
as well as domestic corruption and incompetence.
RIFFRAFF
“Bullying: Conduct designed to embarrass, humiliate or belittle someone.”
*
“I don't read you because you are an idiot!” a reader (make it, a non-reader) writes. A clear-cut caste of a bully in action.
*
The memory of all those I offended when I was young, brainwashed, and self-righteous has been a thorn in my conscience. But I have learned from our bullies to be more tolerant of my youthful self. Which proves that, if you are disposed to learn, you may learn even from riffraff.
*
If you think for yourself, you can't be self-righteous because, in thinking, doubts always outnumber certainties. Only the brainwashed assert infallibility, and in doing so they compound problems instead of solving them.
*
There is a type of Armenian who gages your patriotism by how much you hate Turks. “Who is your favorite Armenian writer?” I once asked such an Armenian who also happened to be one of our notorious Turcocentric ghazetajis. “I don't have any,” he replied. “How many have you read?” I asked next. “None!” was his answer. Armenians who are brainwashed to hate avoid ideas because they don't want the purity of their hatred to be contaminated.
*
Knowledge can be a painful acquisition because it may expose our failings and blind spots. Hence the saying: “Ignorance is bliss.”
*
We don't burn books or starve writers. We ignore them. It amounts to the same thing. If they are with us, writers are redundant. If they are against us, they should be silenced or ignored.
*
Ideas are assaults against ignorance. Hence the favorite tactic of the ignorant: “Attack is the best defense.” But how does one go about defending an absence or a vacuum? It can't be done. That's when bullying comes in. When you can't defend your ignorance, attack, threaten, or bully. And if you are a coward -- and all bullies are – try to do so from a safe distance and anonymously. The greater the distance, the better.
MEMO
Whenever two or more readers gang up on me, I feel it is my duty to remind them, if they lie down with dogs they are liable to get up with fleas.
*
QUESTIONS
Can there be progress where there is no respect for fundamental human rights? Can there be free speech in a totalitarian environment? Is dialogue possible with a fascist, a concrete wall, an Armenian?
*
CONTRADICTION
Why is it that the vocabulary of Armenians who preach constructive criticism and love seldom rises above the gutter?
*
A NOTEWORTHY DISTINCTION
A famous French actress who slept with Germans during the Occupation is quoted as having said: “My heart is French, but my ass is international.” A noteworthy distinction that. By contrast, when we sleep with the enemy, we surrender our body as well as soul. Hence such unfortunate phenomena as Armenians under Talaat and Stalin betraying their fellow Armenians.
*
ON A RELATED TOPIC
I wonder how many of my readers, dealers in chauvinist crapola, and holier-than-thou sanctimonious pricks are aware of the fact that until very recently the wealthiest woman in Turkey was an Armenian. When the Turkish government awarded her a prize for paying more taxes than anyone else, her line of work was not known to the bureaucrats. When the master of ceremonies was informed that she was a bordello madam, he wanted to recall the medal, but it was too late. She was no longer in the audience. An obvious case of “arav-pakhav” (grab-and-run).
*
THE MORAL OF THE STORY
To emphasize the positive and cover up the negative could be another definition of propaganda and I leave propaganda to our bureaucrats. I prefer to speak of reality in order to make the blind see. If so far I have failed, it may be because, like most of my predecessors, I am not a miracle worker.
THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL
We begin by lying to ourselves, after which we see nothing wrong in deceiving others. A jihadist believing he will spend eternity deflowering virgins; Hitler believing in the superiority of the Aryan race; the Pope believing in his own infallibility in matters of faith: all lies. One could go as far as saying that faith is the root of all evil. As for money: it too could be the root but only if you believe it can solve all your most important problems.
*
No one can be as dumb as he who believes to be smart. I think of Armenians who believe Armenians like me are the source of all evil. So much so that if I were slightly older they would pin the Genocide on me or wish I had been one of the victims. When told I am a writer, this type of reader becomes even more abusive. If I were to ask these readers to name their favorite contemporary Armenian writer, I have every reason to suspect they would fail to come up with a single name. That's because they have been “educated” to believe by our bosses (believers in their ideology), bishops (believers in God and capital, make it Capital and god), and benefactors (believers in the Almighty $) that dissent or freedom of thought are anathema and anyone who dares to speak against their faith is an enemy of the people, a Turk in disguise, and a liar who is condemned to spend eternity burning in hell, as opposed to deflowering virgins or an equally ill-defined delightful activity. And if you believe that, you will believe anything!
FAMOUS LAST WORDS
“Once upon a time we shed our blood for freedom. We are now afraid of free speech.” After discovering this terrifying truth, Hagop Garabents (Jack Karapetian) spent the rest of his life avoiding it by writing love stories, which made him a darling of our establishment figures. Shortly before he died, he is quoted as having said: “I die alone.”
*
Those who brag about our survival should be reminded once in a while that our best and brightest did not survive. The massacre goes on....
*
We speak of pride to cover up the fact that we have many more reasons to speak of humility.
*
To undertake the impossible is another way of doing nothing.
*
There is something fundamentally wrong in a community where the old are radicalized and the young entrenched in the status quo.
ONE-LINERS
As long as Armenians and Turks are educated by their own historians, justice, understanding and consensus will elude them.
*
Propagandists cannot define good and evil in the same way that compulsive liars cannot define truth.
*
Ideologies and orthodoxies teach us to think that we are thinking.
*
“There are better writers than you here,” a reader informs me. I consider that cause for celebration if only because misery likes company.
*
I have learned about us more from odar sources than our own. So much so that I no longer believe anything I am told by Armenians.
*
Whenever I speak about our failings, I am told all nations have them. With one important difference however. We hate discussing ours, and whenever someones dares to do so we silence him, and failing that, we bury him beneath an avalanche of verbal manure.
*
To prove that he is civilized, an Armenian will behave like a barbarian. He will become intolerant in defense of tolerance and fascist in defense of freedom; and all with the self-confidence and unawareness of an inborn moron who is convinced of his superior intellect.
*
Patriotism means supporting one group against another. The opposite of patriotism is not treason but “all men are brothers.”
*
When Raffi said wealthy merchants are the lowest scum on earth, a wealthy merchant proved him right by hiring a Kurdish assassin.
IT TAKES ONE TO KNOW ONE
Armenians who find me unreadable are my most faithful readers. Figure that one out if you can. My only explanation is that like all perennial losers, they have accumulated so many unsettled scores against the world that they take it out on anyone that is available, provided of course he is defenseless and therefore in no position to retaliate.
*
When asked why I bother writing for readers who hate me, I say, the challenge is not writing for civilized and intelligent readers who may well be ahead of me, but for barbarians who are infatuated with their own limitations. Another reason is that once in a while I receive a phone call or an e-mail apologizing for having been rude to me in the past. Which proves that, like the worst Turks, the worst Armenians are first and foremost human beings and as such not beyond redemption. Besides, it has been the fate of all Armenian writers to be verbally abused by their fellow Armenians. Some of our most celebrated medieval historians, among them Yeghishé and Khorenatsi, have been called hirelings of warlords with dynastic ambitions. Some of our greatest poets and writers, among them Siamanto and Zarian, have been called plagiarists. Accused of nationalism, Charents was betrayed to Stalin's thugs and committed suicide in his cell.
*
There is nothing typically Armenian about this phenomenon. In times of crisis the scum rises to the top and speaks with the approval of the dominant minority. The verbal abuse hurled against such writers as Sartre in France, Thomas Mann in Germany, Solzhenitsyn in Russia, Kazantzakis in Greece, and more recently Pamuk in Turkey, are cases in point that come readily to mind. If giants like these have been maligned and insulted, why should midgets like me be spared? In a way, I am even tempted to be flattered for being singled out.
*
Perhaps I should also point out that not all Armenians hate me or disagree with me. If they are afraid to express their agreement openly it may be because they don't relish the prospect of being targeted by hooligans. Finally, to those who say the reason why I call those who disagree with me losers, barbarians, and hooligans, is that once upon a time I was no better. I have always maintained that as products of the same historic conditions and experiences, all Armenians are brothers under the skin, and all analyses begin with self-analysis. If I understand losers it's because I am one. If I understand resentment and venom, it's because “Bovary c'est moi.”
SECRET PLEASURES
We all have our secret pleasures.
One of mine is needling windbags.
*
In order to reach XYZ
we must begin with ABC
and we haven't yet begun.
*
If in crime it's cherchez la femme
in political blunders it's cherchez the dividers.
*
Why do you think a small island in Europe
was successful in colonizing an Asiatic subcontinent?
Simply because the English were united and the Indians divided.
*
The Holocaust may be traced back to what happened 2000 years ago when the Jewish leaders divided the people into those who believed Jesus to be the Messiah and those who believed him to be a blasphemer.
*
Nations are divided by leaders who cannot reconcile their differences because they speak in the name of God. When God enters in an argument, the Devil is sure to follow.
*
Theology: the science of the Unknown and the Unknowable.
*
For many centuries we were subservient to foreign despots from sultans to commissars. Today we are subservient to the lies of our own propaganda. Vicious circle or downward spiral?
A Turkish Friend Writes...
...things are changing, e.g. 50,000 Armenians are expected to visit Antalya, another popular tourist destination; direct flights have started as well as the first Turkish organized tour visited Armenia & Georgia this past April...
Cheese Diplomacy: Armenian & Turkish cheese producers have come together in Kars to improve traditional cheese making...
A theater group from Yerevan participated in Blacksea Theater festival to perform "Servants" and received standing ovation...and the players applauded the audience in turn...
SITUATION / SHITUATION
Those who know how to think for themselves probably see me as someone who is doing his best to emulate them. It is those who cannot think for themselves that resent me and would like to see me silenced, and if possible, massacred; and they are my most faithful readers. If I ever become a best-selling author, I will owe it to them.
*
I don't write against my critics and detractors. I write against myself when young, naïve, ignorant, brainwashed, self-satisfied, and a loud-mouth smart-ass know-it-all.
*
My sole aim in life now is to be readable. As long as they read me, I have them by the short hair. As for saving the nation: the nation and I swim in the same soup. We are both dependent on the charity of swine. On the day I save myself, saving the nation will be the number one item on my agenda.
*
Whenever a reader makes a specific demand on me, I am tempted to ask: “And how would you like your pizza – with or without anchovies?”
*
If an Armenian disagrees with you, he will not say “I disagree with you.” He will call you a fool, an idiot, and a pro-Turkish bastard who should be tarred, feathered, and driven out of town on a jackass. The trouble with us is not that we don't know how to agree with one another but that we don't even know how to disagree.
*
We like to explain the massacres as politically motivated actions. But what if they are also expressions of visceral hatred, the kind that I seem to provoke in some of my readers, and vice versa?
DELISH!
Anything that's worth saying is worth repeating. I, for one, never get tired of rereading and quoting the delicious lines that follow, if only to remind myself what I am against. Enjoy!
*
From a popular Armenian song:
“One Armenian eats one chicken,
Two Armenians eat two chickens,
Three Armenians eat each other.”
*
Gostan Zarian: “Armenians survive by cannibalizing one another.”
*
Anonymous mantra:
“Mart bidi ch'ellank.”
*
Yeghishé (5th-century historian): “Solidarity is the mother of good deeds, divisiveness of evil ones.”
*
Shahan Shahnour: “The enemy is not theTurk but us.”
*
THE PROBLEM
“The problem of who speaks for the Armenians is still acute,” writes Charles King in his THE GHOST OF FREEDOM: A HISTORY OF THE CAUCASUS (page 11). That may be because our chiefs outnumber our Indians.
*
CONFESSION
Some of my gentle readers tell me I disappoint them whenever I fail to come up with a new or original or creative idea that will save the nation and usher in a new Renaissance or Golden Age. I am flattered of course that they think me capable of performing such a miracle. I am afraid I shall have to disappoint them again by admitting that I am nothing but an overworked and underpaid shit-disturber, and if their desire is to see the nation saved, they should get themselves a messiah, which should not be difficult because Armenian messiahs are a dime a dozen.
ON COMMISSARS AND RELATED ATROCITITIES
The following notes and comments contain coarse language and mature subject matter. Parental guidance is advised.
*
When I speak in the name of common decency and use my common sense, they call it philosophy, and they think the aim of philosophy is to confuse and mislead law-abiding, tax-paying, and patriotic citizens like themselves. They seem to be unaware of the fact that philosophy is a Greek word that simply means love of wisdom, and the alternative to philosophy is therefore philomoronism.
*
Our revolutionaries at the turn of the last century and myself today share similar ambitions: we are both like frogs trying to rape an elephant. The elephant in their case was an empire. In my case it is the lies of propaganda. And of the two, it is hard to say which is the mightier adversary. But then, if I lose, I have only wasted my time. No harm done. Not a single innocent civilian will be lost, and forever after I will not condemn myself to play the blame-game.
*
Whenever I am asked a question, more often than not it is not an honest question but a loaded one, or in legal parlance, a leading one, which in a court of law would be immediately followed by the triad, “Objection,” “Sustained,” “Withdrawn.”
*
Dishonesty comes so naturally to us that even in our search for knowledge and understanding we manipulate reality in such a way as to certify our illusions. So that, if I were to quote the celebrated dictum “Truth shall set you free,” one of our ubiquitous Jack S. Avanakians is sure to stand on his hind legs and bray: “So you think you know the truth?” -- meaning of course “You arrogant s.o.b!” My usual answer to that leading question is: “No, I don't know the truth. Only God (if He exists) knows the truth. But I can recognize a lie when I hear one; and I can also recognize a self-appointed commissar of culture when I see one.”
*
It must be painfully frustrating, perhaps even humiliating to our commissars that we live in a democratic America rather than in a totalitarian USSR, where they would not only be free to cross-examine their victims but also put a bullet in their brain. Unmask these dealers in patriotic slogans and expose an executioner.
OF APES AND MEN
The most effective way to moronize a nation is (a) by brainwashing the people to think they are smart; (b) by introducing nationalism in a multicultural or bastardized environment, and (c) by dividing them into mutually hostile groups or tribes.
*
For biological as well as cultural reasons, the offspring of mixed marriages (which I was brought up to think as bastards) are smarter, healthier, and more tolerant, if only because they are products of two or more worldviews, traditions, and values. But they are also more vulnerable to charges of disloyalty and treason. This may explain why, once upon a time people of the Middle East were the smartest and the most progressive in the world. But gradually and as a result of tribal and religious divisions and power struggles, they allowed themselves to be bullied, brainwashed, and intimidated by power hungry megalomaniacs with the horizons, moral compass, and IQ of apes.
*
We will never have any peace as long as we think we are better than Turks and vice versa. The same applies to all our internecine tribal, ideological, and denomination divisions.
*
The more underdeveloped the brain, the more easily it is brainwashed.
*
I can't imagine anything more cowardly than verbally abusing someone anonymously and from a safe distance. It is no wonder that in Russia Armenians are known as “cowardly.” And I agree with Gandhi when he said, “A coward has no right to identify himself as a member of the human race.”
*
Speaking of cowardly Armenians, you may be interested to know that in Greece Armenians are known as “Turkish gypsies,” and in France as “filthy.” I am now beginning to suspect these offensive labels have as much merit as our own self-assessment of ourselves as smart, progressive, and civilized.
*
If you don't like what I write, stop reading me. I assure you, that's the most effective and civilized way of silencing a writer. To verbally abuse him or trying to silence him because he dares to say things that you don't like reading is to prove him right.
MANY QUESTIONS, ONE ANSWER
We all want the same thing: to improve matters.
We all agree we have problems.
We are unanimous in admitting we need reforms.
It's amazing the number of things we agree on.
It's the solutions we don't agree on.
It's when we start discussing solutions that the crap hits the fan.
Our Turcocentric ghazetajis want to begin by reforming the Turks, which is easier said than done.
Others want to democratize our mafias in the Homeland. Ditto.
Still others want to deliver sermons to our bishops to show them the path leading to church unity.
All these projects boil down to a single word: honesty.
How do you introduce honesty in a dishonest environment?
How do you convince a brainwashed dupe that he is not as smart as he thinks he is? How do you convince a crook that in the long run and for all concerned (including himself, especially himself) honesty is better than dishonesty?
How do you convince a bishop that “a house divided against itself cannot stand”? How do you convince a boss that an ideology that divides the nation does more harm than good?
How do you convince a benefactor that by supporting institutions that legitimize divisions he may not be doing us a favor?
Finally, how do you reform a reformer?
Let me rephrase the question:
How do you teach the value of humility to a megalomaniac with messianic ambitions?
How do you convince a sanctimonious prick that uttering pious platitudes does not make him an admirable specimen of humanity, and that patriotism means love of country as well as fellow countrymen?
To say my solution is better than yours is to imply you have a better chance to succeed where far better men than yourself failed.
What is the answer?
Is there one?
Isn't there anything I can do?
Do I give up?
Hell no!
You begin by reforming yourself.
And that, my friend, is a project that may keep you busy for the rest of your life.
I speak from experience.
THE ROAD TO HELL
Self-interest and ideas are mutually exclusive concepts. Where self-interest enters, ideas exit.
*
I don't judge a man by his nationality or loyalty to a tribe, race, or ideology. I judge him by the degree of humanity he has been successful in defending against the dehumanizing forces of the world and his fellow men.
*
No one can save a man, let alone a nation, that does not want to be saved or is programmed for self-destruction. Only a total ignoramus with messianic ambitions will tell you, if we do this, that, or the other, we will save the nation. And if you were to ask why I go on writing and what is my real aim, the answer to the first question will have to be, “Force of habit,” and the answer to the second question, “If I can convince an intolerant Armenan to be less intolerant, I consider it a major victory.” And if you were to ask next my number of major or minor victories, I would have to say either none or plead an amendment – the one dealing with self-incrimination.
*
According to Charles King in THE GHOST OF FREEDOM: A HISTORY OF THE CAUCASUS, (page 226), constnat talk of genocide “has encouraged a patriotism built on victimhoom,” which has stunted our ability “of confidently looking to the future.” To our Turcocentric ghazetajis I say: “And you thought you were doing us a favor by defending our interests?”
Whoever said “The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” sure knew what he was talking about.
FOOLS, DUPES, AND MESSIAHS
In a commentary headlined “No hope for democracy,” I read: “There is not going to be a revolution in [Mugabe's] Zimbabwe. Half the working-age population lives abroad.”
Are you thinking what I am thinking?
*
There is only one solution to an intolerant community, and that is tolerance. I am therefore suspicious when those who parade as problem-solvers become intolerant in defense of their solutions.
*
When a problem and a messiah meet, the problem is sure to prevail.
*
An average, garden-variety fool is smarter than the smartest dupe. No fool will ever be taken in by a bearded charlatan who promises him an afterlife in which he will spend his time deflowering virgins, unless of course he is also a dupe.
*
When I was a boy I wanted to be a famous writer. Not a good writer or a great writer, but a famous writer. In my old age all I want to be is an honest witness, and I am beginning to suspect being an honest witness among Armenians is a far more demanding undertaking than being a great writer.
*
You can recognize a brainwashed dupe by the fact that he is dead from the neck up.
*
An Armenian's capacity to dish out and/or consume verbal crap seems to be limitless.
*
We survived the Turk. Will we survive the Armenian?
*
The shortest list in the world: that of living Armenian intellectuals.
COPS
After the collapse of the USSR, writes Charles King in THE GHOST OF FREEDOM: A HISTORY OF THE CAUCASUS (New York, 2008), traffic cops in Armenia used to buy their job. There was even a pricing system for the purchase based on which sites were likely to be the most profitable. “For example, a roadblock on the way to a fashionable restaurant outside Lake Sevan commanded the highest price because citizens were reckoned to be carrying a significant amount of cash on their way to those destinations. The officer would then recoup his initial financial outlay, plus profit, through the collection of fines.”
Now I am in a better position to understand why, after a visit to the Homeland, a friend told me, “Everyone wants to emigrate, except cops.” I also remember an American friend saying, “Armenian traffic cops must be just about the ugliest men I have ever seen.”
Again, according to Charles King, drivers of expensive cars were not stopped because they were assumed to be men of influence.
Elsewhere he remarks: “Dysfunctional politics can sometimes serve the interests of politicians themselves even as they lead the people they claim to represent towards certain ruin.”
*
The more talk of patriotism, the more corrupt the state. Hitler was a patriot. So was Mussolini. As for Stalin: he was the only head of state who called World War II “the Patriotic War.”
*
Nothing offends me more than the spectacle of an idiot preaching patriotism.
*
The most effective way of destroying a nation is by lowering its standards, so that every imbecile can parade as a genius, and every dupe as a statesman of vision capable of solving all our problems.
*
All nations have their share of imbeciles, but in our case the imbeciles are either at the top or most likely to get there.
ON MURDER
Of you expose a liar, a rapist, or a murderer, you don't need to deliver a sermon against lies, rape, and murder -- unless of course you are infatuated with the sound of your own voice.
*
You may have noticed that the very same people who demand instant solutions to our problems are themselves part of the problem. It follows, these gentlemen will never be satisfied with any solution that will expose them as dupes or charlatans. And if a reform-minded person were to appear among them, they will dismiss him as an ignoramus or a daydreaming fool, sometimes even an enemy of the people. They will laugh at him. They will insult him. And if he keeps talking they will silence him. What they want, what they really need, is not a reformer but a messiah. And if a messiah were to appear among them, they will crucify him. I am reminded of Antranik Zaroukian's words: “Even as they speak of crucifixion, they nail us to the cross.”
*
Speaking of the murder of Archbishop Levon Tourian in December 1933 in New York, Charles King writes: “The murder cemented divisions within the Armenian diaspora that have remained in place until today, for unlike the many other perpetrators of violence against Armenians – from Ottoman pashas to Soviet commissars – the authors of the twentieth century's most spectacular public murder of an Armenian cultural leader, inside an Armenian church, were Armenians.” See THE GHOST OF FREEDOM: A HISTORY OF THE CAUCASUS (New York, 2008, page 178).
An Interesting Armenian
Biography
Agop Dilaçar was born in ©stanbul, as Agop Martayan, in 1895. He graduated from the Robert College in 1915. In addition to Armenian and Turkish, he knew English, Greek, Spanish, Latin, German, Russian and Bulgarian. He worked as a lecturer of the English language at the Robert College, and of Ottoman Turkish and ancient East languages at Sofia University in Sofia, Bulgaria.
He was invited on September 22, 1932, as a linguistics specialist to the First Turkish Language Congress held in Dolmabahçe Palace supervised by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder and first president of the Republic of Turkey, together with two other linguists of Armenian ethnicity, ©stepan Gurdikyan and Kevork Simkeºyan. He continued his work and research on the Turkish language as the head specialist and Secretary General of the newly founded Turkish Language Association in Ankara. Following the issue of the Law on Family Names in 1934, Atatürk suggested him the surname Dilaçar (literally meaning language opener), which he gladly accepted.
He taught history and language at Ankara University between 1936 and 1951. He also was the head advisor of the Türk Ansiklopedisi (Turkish Encyclopedia), between 1942 and 1960. He held his position and continued his research in linguistics at the Turkish Language Association until his death in 1979.
Publications
Les bases Bio-Psychologiques de la Theorie Güneº Dil (1936)
Azeri Türkçesi (Azerbaijani Turkish, 1950)
Bat¹ Türkçesi (Western Turkish, 1953)
Lehçelerin Yaz¹lma Tarz¹ (Writing Style of Dialects)
Türk Dil ve Lehçelerinin Tasnifi Meselesi (Classification Issue of the Turkish Languages and Dialects, 1954)
Devlet Dili Olarak Türkçe (Turkish as a State Language, 1962)
Wilhelm Thomsen ve Orhon Yaz¹tlar¹n¹n Çözülüºü (Wilhelm Thomson and Encoding of the Orkhon Inscriptions, 1963)
Türk Diline Genel Bir Bak¹º (A General Look at the Turkish Language, 1964)
Türkiye'de Dil Özleºmesi (Language Purification in Turkey, 1965)
Dil, Diller ve Dilcilik (Language, Languages and Linguistics, 1968)
Kutadgu Bilig ©ncelemesi (Research of the Kutadgu Bilig, 1972)
Anadili ©lkeleri ve Türkiye D¹º¹ndaki Uygulamalar (Native Language Principles and Applications Outside Turkey, 1978)
Nazim Hikmet Speaks
The Most Strange of Creatures
Like the scorpion, my brother,
You are like the scorpion
In a terror-stricken night,
Like the sparrow, my brother,
You are like the sparrow
In inconsiderable restlessness.
Like the mussel, my brother,
You are like the mussel
Closed tight and tranquil.
You are terrible, my brother,
Like the mouth of an extinguished volcano.
And you are not one, alas,
you are not five
you are some millions.
You are like the sheep, my brother,
When the butcher dressed in your wool
when the butcher lifts his Staff
you hurry yourself to get back in the flock
and you go to the slaughterhouse running, almost proud.
You are the most strange of creatures, in short,
More strange than the fish
who lives in the sea without knowing the sea,
And if there is so much misery on the earth
it is thanks to you, my brother,
If we are starved, worn out,
If we are flayed till the blood flows,
Pressed like a bunch of grapes to yield our wine,
Will I go so far as to say that it is your fault, no,
But for many it is so, my brother.
SPEAKING WITH A FORKED TONGUE
In a land of instant coffee
they want instant solutions.
Instead of doing what they can do,
they demand that others to
what they don't want to do.
Instead of reforming themselves
they want to reform the nation.
Even as they engage in cannibalism
they speak of solidarity, unity, and brotherhood.
They think of our writers as some species of song birds
who did nothing but serenade the moon.
Gentle reader, if you are one of them
my advice to you is:
Don't believe everything you are told
by those who pretend to know better
because they are better.
Don't be afraid to raise your voice and say
you refuse to be taken in by baloney artists
who speak with a forked tongue.
Beyond that there isn't much you
or anyone else can do.
BULLIES AND YES-MEN
When the men at the top are bullies, the result will be a society of cowardly yes-men.
*
After they convince us we are smart, perhaps even the smartest people on earth, they treat us like idiots. Patriotism, that is to say flattery (“chosen people,” “superior race,” “it takes seven Jews to fool an Armenian”) is one of the oldest and most effective instruments of mass persuasion.
*
The honesty of dupes, like the faith of the brainwashed: what is it worth?
*
Once, at the beginning of my career (if you want to call it that) one of our elder statesmen called me a genius. Shortly thereafter when I wrote something with which he disagreed, he called me an idiot. Easy come, easy go. Sic transit gloria mundi. Or, as the French say, “He who can kiss, can bite.”
*
If our literature were a person, he would be a beggar in rags on the verge of starvation. We treat our literature the way we were treated at the turn of the century in the Ottoman Empire. Now then, tell me: In what way are we different from them?
*
People who know and understand, search for more knowledge and understanding. By contrast, the ignoramus is satisfied with his own ignorance.
CROCODILES
Politics and literature don't mix. Politics, power, and propaganda are inseparable. Where goes one, the others are sure to follow. By contrast, the aim of literature is to understand reality by exposing the inconvenient facts that have been swept under the carpet. Hence Hemingway's definition of a writer as one with “a built-in sh*t detector.”
*
It is a serious blunder to identify a regime with the people and its culture. To do so amounts to saying Hitler is an extension of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, or Chekhov and Stalin share similar aims. Speaking of Chekhov: in one of his letters to a friend (Suvorin, I think) and in an eerily prescient passage, he refers to the next generation of Russian leaders as “crocodiles.” which may suggest that, you don't need supernatural powers to predict the future. (In this connection, see also Dostoevsky's THE DEMONS, sometimes also translated as THE POSSESSED.)
*
“You can't criticize the Homeland if you have never been there,” I am told. With the advent of the computer, I don't feel the need to go anywhere because I receive a veritable avalanche of e-mails by fellow Armenians who have been there, done that, and now sport the T-shirt. Once I even received two books by a retired bishop in which he exposed the corruption within the hierarchy.
*
I have noticed that only Armenians who are in the business – and it is a business – of fund-raising that ascribe all our problems on the war, the earthquake, and the blockade and completely ignore the contribution of our crocodiles and “mi kich pogh” panchoonies to our present malaise.
*
Whenever I run into a smart-ass, loud-mouth, cowardly bully who insults me anonymously and from a safe distance, I have no trouble predicting a brilliant future in politics.
A ROUTINE EXPERIENCE
It might as well be a routine experience with me: readers who assume not only to be better but to know better, and based on that self-serving assumption, they proceed to deliver lectures on patriotism, the kind of nonsense I was exposed to when I was ten. They remind me of our heroic revolutionaries at the turn of the last century who were so sure of their final and inevitable victory that they had a Plan B only for themselves. And like all losers throughout history, they now blame their catastrophic blunder on everyone else but themselves. I once heard one of these revolutionaries (may the Good Lord have mercy on his soul) say, “The chezok [neutral or non-partisan] Armenian is the source of all our problems because he refuses to get involved in Armenian affairs. He is neither hot nor cold. He is nothing.” When Hitler lost World War II and shortly before he had the decency to commit suicide, he put the blame on his fellow Germans, the very same people he had classified as belonging to a superior race. Nothing evil ever dies. Hitler may be dead but his racist ideas continue to live in neo-Nazi skinheads, Putin's ultranationlist Stalinists, and Italy's neo-fascists. I could add our own first-nation-this and first-nation-that propagandists and dime-a-dozen Turcocentric ghazetajis who believe they will usher in a new golden age on the day they corner the Turks into assuming full responsibility for the Genocide, to apologize, and to make financial and territorial reparations. In the meantime they go about pretending there is nothing wrong with us and we are beyond criticism because God and Truth are on our side. It is not that I don't believe what they say, I don't think they believe it themselves.
An Open Letter To People Of Anatolia
turkishdailynews.com.tr 16.6.2008, Vercihan Ziflioglu, Istanbul - Turkish Daily News
Journalist Ece Temelkuran followed the path of curiosity, a principle sine qua non for journalists, and decided to get to know the Armenians, a people to whom she, like many Turks, was largely indifferent throughout her life, consciously or subconsciously labeling them the “other.”
After making this crucial decision, Temelkuran's first step was to pay a visit in 2006 to Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, Turkey's neighbor country beyond the closed border gates. She spent eight days in Yerevan, chatting with locals and experiencing everyday life in the ancient city.
Following her trip to Armenia, Temelkuran decided to also meet members of the Armenian Diaspora, a prominent group in the media known for its firm attitude towards the problems between the Turks and the Armenians. She flew to Paris and Los Angeles where she met with some diaspora members through connections provided by journalist Hrant Dink, the assassinated editor-in-chief of the Istanbul-based Turkish-Armenian bilingual weekly Agos.
Temelkuran told the story of her one-and-a-half-year long journey to Yerevan, Paris and Los Angeles in her book “Agri'nin Derinligi” (The Depth of Agri), which was recently published by Everest Publications.
For Temelkuran, Armenians construct their identity based on their past suffering while Turks construct a future for themselves by not remembering the bitter events of the past. She describes her book as a long letter written to those who once had to leave Anatolia but still feel connected to it from the bottom of their hearts.
Temelkuran said she has received many threats since her book was published, “but this does not make me feel scared. If I set the sail for a purpose, then, I have no chance to feel scared. Some should do some things for reconciliation of the two peoples, the Turks and the Armenians,” she said.
In line with the publication of Temelkuran's book, an exhibition was opened in an old tobacco storehouse in Tophane. The exhibition, where photographs taken by photojournalist Yurttas Tümer of the daily Milliyet are displayed, will be open until June 20.
Inspired by Gabudikyan in finding a name for her book
Soon after she arrived in Yerevan, Temelkuran met Silva Gabudikyan, a legendary figure in Armenian poetry. She interviewed Gabudikyan about Turkish-Armenian relations. Temelkuran named her book “Agri'nin Derinligi” because she was inspired by a remarkable statement Gabudikyan made during the interview: “Madam, ‘Ararat' (The Mount Agri) might be a matter of height for you but of depth for us,” in reference to the profundity of the meaning attributed to the Mount Agri by Armenians.
Shortly after her interview with Temelkuran, Gabudikyan passed away at the age of 86. She was a poet known in Armenia for her dissident identity.
“Before going to Armenia, I had no image in my mind of the people of this country,” said Temelkuran. “Unfortunately, a young Turk whose mind is inculcated with the teachings of the official ideology of the Turkish nation state does not know much about the Armenians beyond his or her feelings of hostility against them.” Temelkuran describes this phenomenon as systemic ignorance, and said, despite her inquisitive spirit as a journalist, she never attempted to search about the Armenians for many years due to a lack of curiosity about the topic.
Questioning Turkish nationalism
“On my way to Armenia, my biggest wish was not to involve in any debates on the events of 1915,” said Temelkuran. “This was because my aim is not to look back, but to focus on the future because I believe constantly revolving around the same debates on the bitter events that marked the past would make no better the both societies,” she noted. Yet, she said she did pay a visit to the museum in Yerevan honoring the alleged Armenian genocide. “The Turkish side in me was fighting with the other half of me. But still, I listened quietly to what was told. And this was really very difficult for me,” she said, pointing to her internal conflict during her visit to the museum.
Loneliness and the feeling of belonging nowhere
“On the way to Paris and Los Angeles I was assuming I would meet some hard nosed people that are called the diaspora Armenians,” said Temelkuran, adding all her thoughts were turned upside down after the trips she made.
“During my interviews, I witnessed that even the most strict French or American Armenians began to sob when we started talking about the lands he or she was born,” she said, noting she overcame all her preconceptions about the Armenians during her experiences in Paris and in Los Angeles. Now, it is time to develop dialogue and compromise; it is just too difficult to live with this cult of pain anymore; we must overcome it, she underlined.
Temelkuran explained her goal in carrying out her study, saying, “My endeavor is to appeal the Turkish youth who hates the Armenians for they do not know about the bitter events that happened in the past.”
OBSERVATIONS
To the dupe, reality is not what he sees or experiences but what he is told, especially when what he is told is carefully tailored to flatter his ego.
*
Better a deprogrammed enemy than a brainwashed friend.
*
In an environment where speechifiers and sermonizers are amply compensated, critics will be seen as nuisances and enemies. The result will be a community swimming in b.s.
*
The certainties of my youth are my greatest sources of embarrassment. I shiver and burn whenever I think of them.
*
It's no use pretending to know better because no one knows everything and we will never know the truth. The best we can hope to do is expose the transparent lies of vested interests and propaganda.
*
The world is a dangerous place where people speak in the name of peace and make war, where they speak in the name of God and do the Devil's work, and where millions of dupes are eager to kill and die in the name of a Big Lie.
A Reader Writes
Today I am sad. Thirteen years ago I decided to leave France, my third homeland, and relocate to Armenia, with the intention to invest in the fatherland, which I did by creating the Le Cafe de Paris. I invested my time, energy, health and resources, so that our little Parisian cafe could illuminate Abovyan Street.
Over time the Cafe has become a favorite place to do business, meet friends and just relax. However my little dream has turned into an unending nightmare. Not wishing to delve into my personal problems, I'd just like to simple note that due to my faith, perhaps misplaced, in my fellow man I gave a loan to a person. This person claimed that he couldn't repay the loan while actually he just refused to do so. When I took this person into my business, out of a sense of charity, I realized that he was periodically stealing from me along with other employees he had won the loyalty of. These employees, like their patron, had become corrupted, one more than the other. I could say that this is a fairly commonplace occurrence that can happen anywhere. But everywhere else there is a system of justice that serves as strong defender of one's rights and interests. The justice system is there to grab the hand of the thief...This is the reality everywhere except in my beloved Armenia where the practice of justice is corrupt to the very core, where compromises are made with the guilty party, where the weak are preyed upon for all they have, the spoils to be split with the powerful, and where money is valued more than the truth. This is the reason for my grief. I am sad that our beloved Armenia, so dear to our hearts, has ceased to function normally. I am sad because in the event that things continue in this way I will be forced to close the Cafe and return to France
SUMMING UP
We cannot trust the solution to our problems into the hands of our dividers. That would be like trust the flock to wolves in sheep's clothing.
*
Turks are not our greatest problem because nations are not killed, they commit suicide.
*
If you are a proud Armenian stay away from Armenian affairs. If you make the mistake of getting involved, you will be tarred, feathered, and dragged through the mud. And if you think the solution to this particular problem is being a humble Armenian, forget it. I have been both and I speak from experience. No matter to who and what you are, if you are honest and mean business, the philistines and commissars will get you and you will curse the day you were born.
*
A bad Armenian can be worse than the worst Turk.
*
Our propensity to create problems far outstrips our ability to solve them.
*
I am fully aware of the fact that discussing our problems may exacerbate them, but it is a temptation I cannot resist. May I also confess that exposing baloney artists is one of the very few pleasures that happen to be within my income bracket.
*
No one can be as dumb as an Armenian impressed with his own brilliance.
WHY I AM NOT A PROUD ARMENIAN
In a world inhabited by proud Greeks, Yanks, Brits, Jews, Turks, and Kurds, I prefer to be a humble Armenian.
*
Greeks are proud of their ancient culture. What they fail to mention or explain is why they squandered their priceless heritage to the point that they are now one of the poorest and most backward nations in Europe.
Jews are proud of being the Chosen People. But the truly great and progressive Jews, among them Spinoza, Marx, Freud, and Einstein dismissed all such claims as infantile illusions. And when Jesus taught us the Lord's Prayer that begins with the words “Our Father,” he meant that all men are brothers.
*
Pride is for people who lack self-esteem. He who has self-esteem does not feel the need to make himself ridiculous by bragging about who he is.
*
Another reason why I prefer to identify myself as a humble Armenian is the proud Armenian who wears his prejudices, ignorance, and arrogance as badges of merit and views criticism and dissent, and by extension, free speech and fundamental human rights, as unpatriotic. Such an Armenian ignores the fact that the function of literature, from Socrates to Sartre, and from Khorenatsi to Zarian, is self-criticism. Take away criticism from Western culture, and the West becomes an extension of Asia.
ONE-LINERS
In our context, financial success and moral failure might as well be synonymous.
*
A routine occurrence among us: the brainwashed trying to convince the deprogrammed.
*
Instead of bragging about what we know, we should be mortified by what we don't know.
*
I could never write a mystery story because I would reveal the contents of the last page on page one. “Cut the crap” is one of my favorite mottoes.
*
Turning the other cheek? That's easy. To stop wanting to murder the bastard. That's different.
*
You can't educate brainwashed hoodlums who are out to educate you.
*
If your answer raises two more questions, you are on the right path.
*
The ambition of every smart intellectual today is to be the secretary of a national benefactor. That's where the money is.
*
In a authoritarian environment the brainwashed are always better organized than the deprogrammed.
ON JUSTICE
When asked, “Recompense injury with kindness. What do you think of that?” Confucius is said to have replied: “With what then will you recompense kindness? Injury must be recompensed with justice, kindness with kindness.”
That makes sense, of course, but what if the injury is inflicted within an unjust social order? What could be more absurd than to speak of justice in a totalitarian or corrupt state?
*
Confucius on the superior man:
“He acts before he speaks, and afterwards speaks according to his actions.”
It follows: Never trust a man who suffers from chronic verbal diarrhea, namely, sermonizers, speechifiers, and anyone else who is in the business of recycling their verbal trash.
*
Our history, as it has come down to us, is less reality and more fantasy; it is, as a matter of fact, a conspiracy of dunces and dupes.
*
Corrupt democracies and authoritarian states have identical goals, namely, to manufacture consent by misleading and moronizing the masses. This may explain why, with very minor exceptions, Turks and Armenians are in complete agreement on their own version of the past.
*
It is the easiest thing in the world to fool those who are willing to be fooled.
*
Anti-Semites do not consider anti-Semitism a prejudice because they don't hate Jews; they just think Jews are hateful. Something similar could be said of them and us. It's astonishing the word-games people play to appear better than they are in their own eyes.
AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE
Warning: Do not read what follows, it may cause irreparable damage to your ego.
*
“I didn't know that!” is not argument but an admission of ignorance. Which raises a number of questions: Why is it that we are more eager to contradict than to learn? Why is it that some central facts about our power structures and establishment figures have been kept from us? Who profits by our ignorance?
*
To solve our problems? Nothing could be further from my thoughts. If we have consistently ignored, sometimes even rejected, all solutions, including those that have come down to us from heaven, what are the chances that we will even bother to consider the solutions provided by a marginal scribbler who may well be an enemy of the people?
*
Who is an enemy of the people? Anyone who refuses to kiss the fat ass of a megalomaniacal nonentity with political ambitions.
*
It is not always easy to tell which part of a yes is prompted by subservience or inability to think for oneself and which by consent.
Some of the most venomous e-mails I receive are from Armenians who tell me I should be more positive.
*
All subservient people harbor deep inside somewhere an imperialist ego.
*
The two most important ideas of all politically ambitious charlatans may be summarized as (one) You are either with me; (two) or against me.
*
What is the difference between a fascist head of state who silences intellectuals and a sanctimonious prick who ignores them?
*
A useful no can be more fruitful than a useless yes.
*
I write one-liners because I don't particularly care for the sound of my own voice.
*
The misunderstood, neglected, and impecunious writers is a cliché and I have such a horror of clichés that I prefer to identify myself as an unemployed and unemployable misfit.
A Turkish Friend Writes
Hello
I am 58 yrs old and I grew up in a cosmopolitan neighborhood of Istanbul;among Armenians, Rums (Greeks-so called because conquered Byzantine lands were Eastern Rome) and Jews.
Next door to us lived an Armenian widow with her two children:Irma and Onnik.There was something called "Istanbul courtesy" then and minorities were addressed as Madam or Monsieur.They were fine people.
At present my pharmacist is a young and lovely Armenian lady whom I like very much.
Believe me, the majority of Turks don't hate Armenians but the majority of Armenians hate us. We are very much annoyed by being incessantly called "deniers" and genocidal maniacs.
Neither I nor my ancestors haven't intentionally harmed anyone. We are Balkan emigrees partly from Macedonia and Bulgaria(of Crimean tartar stock in Varna then) and were trying to save our lives at the time of events of 1914-15.
I believe grave injustice has been done to Armenians.
This is all for now.
Regards and goodnight(at least in our time zone!).
Leyla
An American Friend Writes
Mourat Sebastatsi, an Armenian resistance fighter, waS ORIGINALLY A gYSPY. He died heroically in the battle of Baku. Also the Bagratounis (Israelites) and Mamikon (Indo Chinese) were not originally Armenian not to meention numerous assimilated Greeks under Dikran the great. Nationality in this instance might as well be a joke.
TRYING TO MAKE SENSE
If there is someone out there who has the solution to all our problems but refuses to share it with the rest of us, it may be because he doesn't relish the idea of being crucified.
*
Collectively we are hidebound and ignorant – all dogmatic people are. There is indeed some truth in the popular adage “People have the leadership they deserve.”
*
When a capitalist explains reality or God, he makes sure his explanation will not harm his capital. The same applies to a boss with an ideology and a bishop with an orthodoxy.
*
After dividing mankind into them and us, a nationalist, or anyone who subscribes to a belief system, will proceed to divide “us” into yes-men and dissidents as free speech goes down the drain.
*
If you make sense, don't expect to be understood by fools.
A HOUSE DIVIDED
The sanctimonious patriotic prick who asserts moral and intellectual superiority is a far greater threat to our survival as a nation than all our enemies combined. This type of individual discusses our problems as if he were the first to do so. That's because he has neither interest nor respect for what has been achieved in the past by far better men than himself. His sole aim in life is to project the image of an individual endowed with unique powers of perception and to silence anyone who dares to question his judgment and integrity. In short, he is that most repellent of all creatures: an Armenian with political ambitions.
*
If a problem that has been solved is no longer a problem, it follows we have no problems. What we have instead is a long line of so-called leaders who have consistently obstructed the path of those willing to implement solutions.
*
The more a nation is in need of intellectual and moral guidance, the more intolerant it gets. The Soviet Union under Stalin, Germany under Hitler, China under Mao, Italy under Mussolini, Armenia and the Armenian diaspora today.
*
If you want to understand your fellow men, begin by asking yourself: “What if, instead of being better or the best, I am the worst?” Naregatsi's LAMENTATIONS may be said to be a long-winded but honest answer to this question, and in that sense it is the most unread and misunderstood masterpiece in our literature.
LITERATURE
When our bishops, bosses, and benefactors (or rather, their flunkies) get involved in literature, they do so not to promote it, but to control it. A bishop once asked me to prepare an anthology of Armenian literature. “We have the money,” he said, using the royal pronoun. When I asked if I would have complete freedom of selection, I never heard from him again. In his obituary I read that he had subsidized the publication of over fifty books. “They” had the money, all right.
*
Whenever I am verbally abused by one of our ubiquitous hooligans parading as superpatriots, my first thought: “He must be a bishop or the son of one.”
*
I once asked one of our Turcocentric ghazetajis if he had read a single Armenian writer, he said he hadn't and he seemed proud of the fact.
*
Our Turcocentric ghazetajis have their counterparts among the Turks who blame everything on the degenerate and corrupt West and on Armenian criminal conduct, and whenever a Turkish intellectual dares to think for himself, he is imprisoned or forced into exile. If I am not the inmate of a gulag today it's because we don't have gulags in the diaspora.
A QUESTION OF EMPHASIS
I should like to read an autobiography in which the emphasis is on prejudices, blind spots, and defects. I should also like to read a nationalist historian who stresses not military victories but moral failures. Sartre's autobiography comes close to my ideal. So does Spengler's treatment of the West in his DECLINE OF THE WEST, and Toynbee's treatment of British history in his STUDY OF HISTORY.
*
What propels us to greater knowledge is awareness of ignorance. Some of the most asinine opinions I have been exposed to issued from the mouths of individuals who believed they knew everything they needed to know.
*
To emphasize the negative: that is to me the true meaning of patriotism. All our pseudo-patriots want flattery – first nation this, first nation that – and the more they brag, the more of their backside they expose, and they lack the decency and common sense to see this.
WHAT I KNOW ABOUT FASCISTS
In his memoirs, Elia Kazan writes that ordinary Turkish citizens don't just shake the hand of a political leader, they go down on their knees and kiss it. Our political leaders are different. They prefer to have another part of their anatomy kissed.
*
I have yet to meet an Armenian with political ambitions was not a fascist.
*
As a long-time observer of the Armenian scene, I can recognize a fascist by the fact that he doesn't just criticize, analyze, attack, or insult anyone who dares to disagree with him, he goes further. He adopts the role of commissar and issues guidelines.
*
Hitler was proud of German culture. So are we of ours. Even Armenians who know little or nothing and care even less about culture, like to brag about it.
*
The best argument for an Armeno-Turkish alliance is that most Turks are not Turks, neither are most Armenians Armenians. The only thing that separates them is an incompatible educational system – that is to say, two different sets of brainwashers.
*
An Armenian who hates Turks and a Turk who hates Armenians: take away the direction of their hatred and they might as well be two interchangeable units. I speak from experience. I have received hate-mail from both and I see no difference between them.
*
Fascists excel in solving problems, even if in the process they create many more.
ON COLLECTIVE INFANTILISM
Because I no longer think as I thought when I was ten, I am seen as a hostile witness.
*
If we view our dividers as our leaders as opposed to our gravediggers, it may be because we are afraid to call a spade a spade, and because I refuse to call a spade anything else, I am accused of unArmenian activities.
*
To convince the average Armenian dupe that our bosses, bishops, and benefactors are frauds and charlatans is as difficult today as to convince the average Turk that Kemalism (i.e. dogmatism, paternalism, authoritarianism) is inimical to true democracy and respect for fundamental human rights, and as such closer to fascism and barbarism than to civilization.
*
We share this in common with Turks: we can't recognize fascism when we see it, especially when it wears a benevolent mask.
*
To ask what's positive about our history is the same as asking what's positive about subservience; and subservience, according to Zohrab, corrupts even our virtues.
*
What's positive about our history? Dikran the Great and his ephemeral empire? Dikran the Great was a loud-mouth and undisciplined coward who ran away from a small Roman legion whom he first mistook as ambassadors.
*
There is nothing wrong with our critical faculties. If anything they are highly developed, but they are directed only at the world. Incapable to reforming ourselves, we are eager to undertake an easier project, that of reforming the world, most of which isn't even aware of our existence.
ABOUT KEMALISM
Idols are the surest symptoms of a society’s backwardness. Stalin in Russia, Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy, Mao in China, Fidel in Cuba, and Ataturk in Turkey: of these only Ataturk has lost none of his initial hold on the masses. The average Turk continues to be brought up (i.e. brainwashed) to believe Kemal is the Father of the Nation because he saved Turkey from the brink of annihilation. That may or may not be true, but it is equally true that most of Turkey’s problems today – among them the introduction of nationalism in an essentially multicultural and cosmopolitan environment, the forceful rejection of traditional values, the festering Armenian question, the irredentism of the Kurds, the fiasco surrounding the application for membership in the EU, a junta’s shadowy presence and quasi-veto powers, the rise of fundamentalism, laws that curtail free speech, among other violations of fundamental human rights – may be traced to Kemalist dogmas. Turkey will be born again as a truly civilized, progressive, and democratic nation on the day it discards Kemalism to the dustbin of history the way Russia, Germany, China, and Italy rejected their fascist idols.
*
Why I write the way I do? Am I foolish and arrogant enough to think that I can change anyone’s mind? Certainly not. I write by way of wondering why is it that, that which is clearly visible to me should remain shrouded in impenetrable darkness to others who may well be smarter than I am.
*
It happens in life all the time. A solution that worked in stage one becomes a recipe for failure in stage two.
*
Power corrupts and ideologies decline because they fall into the hands of opportunists who care more about their privileges than the welfare of the people. If Kemal were alive today, would he declare himself a Kemalist?
Kemal continues to be a taboo subject in Turkey. To say anything remotely critical of him is “to offend Turkishness.” which may result in being dragged to court like a common criminal. But since neither Giles Milton, author of PARADISE LOST; SMYRNA 1922 (London, 2008, 426 pages) nor his reviewer, Philip Mansel, author of one of the very best books on Constantinople, are Turkish citizens, they discuss freely and objectively the events surrounding the destruction of Smyrna.
About the so-called mysterious fire, Mansel writes: “Milton quotes eye-witnesses who saw Turkish soldiers pouring oil.”
About Kemal we read: while the burning, looting, raping, and killing were going on, Mustafa Kemal spent days up in a villa courting his future wife Latife Hanim, daughter of one of the many Turkish businessmen who had profited from 'infidel Izmir.'” We are further told that thousands of Greek and Armenian men of military age were deported into the interior “in theory to rebuild villages destroyed by the retreating Greek army: few returned.”
Mansel concludes his review by echoing the very same sentiments I voiced in my recent essay “About Kemalism.” He writes: “Kemal shows that, if nothing succeeds like success, it can also be true that nothing fails like success...If Izmir had retained even a fraction of its cosmopolitan population, it might have helped Turkey's entry into the European Union.” For more details, see THE SPECTATOR (London, 10 May 2008, page 40); or www.spectator.co.uk
ON CHURCH UNITY
Whenever we speak of solidarity and church unity, we should consider the possibility that we may end up with an ayatollah rather than a pope in Etchmiadzin. But even if we are lucky enough to end up with a pope (a remote possibility that one) let's consider the contributions of the papacy to the world and more particularly to Italy: obscurantism (hence the Dark Ages) dogmatism, intolerance, the persecution of dissidents and heretics, crusades, religious wars (one of which lasted a hundred years) and more recently collaboration with fascist regimes and the mafia. I could also mention fornicating Renaissance popes and American cardinals who covered up and thus aided and abetted child molesting priests. All this assuming of course our church will act in complete freedom, as opposed to being subservient to the king, sultan, and more recently to the KGB (Etchmiadzin) and the CIA (Antelias).
If you think I speak as a hostile witness, listen to Raffi: “Instead of an elite or an aristocracy, we have merchants and clergymen. Merchants are trash. As for the clergy: they have always been against individual freedom.” Elsewhere: “Our clergymen preach patience to us thus promoting subservience to the point of slavery.” But “What's done is done. What we must do now is assess the damage and figure out how to avoid the next catastrophe.”
The next catastrophe, which is also a present catastrophe, is emigration from the Homeland and assimilation in the Diaspora, both of which amount to “white slaughter.” And what are our merchants and clergymen doing to combat this scandal? Preaching and promoting “law and order,” that is to say, subservience to authority. The more things change...
*
A final word on solidarity: one must differentiate between the solidarity of a nation that is brainwashed by a supreme leader who may be more dangerous and evil than a serial killer, and the kind of solidarity that unites a nation with a common identity, culture, and purpose. I suggest it is a serious blunder to place our hopes of solidarity on a leader, party, clique, or mafia.
FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
“I am a better writer than you,” an anonymous readers informs me. Anyone can be a better writer than me, provided of course he first learns how to read.
*
If you say anything in your favor, even if you speak the truth, most people will suspect you are lying.
*
To say, “I don't believe in criticism” is criticism. No doubt those who condemned Socrates to death did not think of themselves as critics,
*
The aim of propaganda is to raise a wall between reality and our perception of it. Even when politicians speak the truth, they don't speak the whole truth for the simple reason that the whole truth exists only in the mind of God.
*
A fool preaching patriotism: does he thereby cease being a fool?
*
No one is infallible but some
love to wallow in their own fallibility.
RANDOM THOUGHTS
If your income is ten times that of another, the temptation to think you may be ten times smarter than he can be overwhelming. My advice: resist it. You may be ten times more ruthless, greedy, lucky, or even dishonest (Plato is wonderful on this point) –none of which has anything to do with your or his IQ.
*
If killing in the name of patriotism is right, what about lying? Why should my patriotism be good and my enemy's bad? If love makes us blind to the point of self-deception, what about hate?
*
What doesn't kill you may make you paranoid.
*
If you believe God to be almighty and all-knowing and if He tells you to kill your only son who has harmed no one, would you do it? (For an answer, see GENESIS 22:1).
*
Until very recently, and to some extent even today, many white Americans think of blacks as inferior, and neither the word of God (all men are brothers) nor that of their Constitution (all men are created equal) can convince them otherwise. All of which may suggest that, in a democracy, power may be on the side of the majority, but not truth.
THE POWER AND THE GLORY
If you think I am being too tough on our politicians, I say, no one can be tough enough on them. If I am wrong, sooner or later I will be exposed just as another ignoramus, one among many. But if I am right (and they are wrong) the result may be countless innocent victims.
*
The blunders of politicians are like cities set on a hill: they cannot be hidden. One reason politicians get involved in education is to rewrite history and to misrepresent their defeats as moral victories.
*
Politicians have been persecuting and victimizing intellectuals ever since the trial and execution of Socrates 2500 years ago. Now then, name a single intellectual who has victimized a politician.
*
Since they cannot recreate the world in their own image, politicians try to reshape our perception of reality. And they succeed, but only up to a point. That's because they cannot fool all the people all the time. They may have the power, but they don't have the glory, and that is what makes them intolerant of dissent.
DEATH WISH
Emigration, alienation, assimilation -- to our “betters” and assorted riffraff they mean only one thing: one less malcontent, dissident, or critic. Zarian was wrong when he said our politicians are useless. The situation is worse. Much worse. Our politicians are megalomaniacal mental midgets driven by death wish. They preach survival but practice suicide. Preaching one thing and practicing another – so what else is new, you may well ask.
You need a license to drive a truck. No such requirement to lead a nation. Once upon a time no one saw anything remotely questionable in barbers practicing medicine. When it comes to political leadership, we continue to be at the mercy of executioners parading as barbers, who cannot even give you a shave without administering the death of a thousand cuts.
THE REST IS PROPAGANDA
Combine a passive or apathetic nation with an incompetent leadership and the result will be Armenian history.
*
An incompetent politician may be defined as a lawmaker who has no respect for the law, or a judge who has no taste for justice.
*
When the going gets tough, the smart Armenian emigrates.
*
Buddhist saying: “Foolish friends are worse than wise enemies.” Likewise, incompetent leaders are worse than ruthless and bloodthirsty oppressors.
*
Balzac: “Nature makes only dull animals. We owe the fool to society.”
*
Kant [on the difference between ignorance and stupidity]: “There is no cure for stupidity.”
*
Albert Camus: “Hell is a special favor reserved for those who have asked for it insistently.”
STORIES WITHOUT A MORAL
Earthquakes in China, cyclones in Myanmar, tornadoes in America, and thousands of innocent victims: a story without a moral. Perhaps that's what life is: a story without a moral. What is morality if not the wishful thinking of the powerless? As losers, we use morality to chastise our enemies, but from a position to strength we cover up our own immorality. Whom do we fool? Ourselves and no one else. When it comes to deception, we are our own most consistent, dependable, and faithful dupes.
*
You cannot argue with a man who has somehow convinced himself that (a) he is smarter; (b) he knows better; (c) he is better.
*
Some of my readers are critics because they cannot be executioners.
*
When a reader calls me names and resorts to insults, I cannot help suspecting that what he is attempting to do is drag me down to a place where he will have the upper hand. If I don't reply in kind it's not because I am a good Christian willing to turn the other cheek but because I don't feel at home in the gutter.
Was The Genocide Inevitable? By Ara Baliozian
According to Hagop Oshagan, "our revolutionaries lost because they formed only tiny islands in the Ottoman sea." An old-timer once echoes this sentiment to me when he compared the ARF to a frog trying to rape the Ottoman elephant.
When warned by foreign observers as well as high-ranking Armenian bureaucrats within the Ottoman administration against acts of provocation, our revolutionaries' response was, in effect, "we challenge the sultan to massacre us and risk immediate intervention by the great powers of Europe."
"Some Armenians," writes Philip Mansel in his Constantinople: city of the World's Desire, "hoped for a massacre in the belief that it would provoke the intervention of the great powers."
In his Mandate for Armenia, James Gidney, by no means an ani-Armenian scholar, concurs: "Armenians bear a part of the blame [for the genocide] for their gullibility in assuming that, because the great powers admired them, the great powers would protect them."
Another pro-Armenian scholar, Christopher Walker, calls this "the single most dangerous illusion that the Armenians entertained." Both the Turks and the Armenian revolutionaries, concludes Mansel (mentioned above) "treated the Armenians as pawns, without regard for human life."
When our own Zarian said, "Our political parties have been of no political use to us," he was probably making the understatement of the millennium.
HISTORIANS
Nationalism and historiography might as well be mutually exclusive concepts. What's uppermost in the mind of a nationalist historian is the welfare of the nation even if it means the total destruction and ruin of its enemies. Nationalism reveals more about the mindset of a nationalist and less about the past. Don't get me wrong. We can learn a great deal from nationalist historians -- a great deal except the truth. Great historians like Gibbon, Spengler, and Toynbee, who write about civilizations rather than nations, are invariably critical of their own.
*
How do you go about civilizing a nation? You don't civilize it by repeating over and over again "the first nation to accept Christianity" or "the first nation to experience genocide in the 20th century." You civilize it by detribalizing its political parties, making its institutions more responsive and accountable to the public, and its media more tolerant of criticism and dissent. That's how you civilize a nation.
(Who says I speak of problems but not of solutions?)
*
"You repeat yourself," I am told once in a while by critics. I suspect if I were to write a thousand times "We are the first nation to convert to Christianity," or "the first nation to experience genocide in the 20th century," nobody would complain. And why? Probably because both lines appear to be saying something positive about us, though I fail to see what's positive about being massacred in the 20th or any other century for that matter.
FROM MY NOTEBOOKS
Forgiveness is not something that one gives and the other takes. Forgiveness is a gift that enhances our understanding of our fellow men and our own evil impulses.
*
To question the validity of an assertion is not the same as asserting its contradiction.
*
In everything we write, we confess. In everything that we analyze, we analyze ourselves.
*
One advantage in having a strange name is that telemarketers have trouble pronouncing it so that you feel justified in saying “Nobody by that name here.”
*
Genocide, even the death of a single innocent human being, is too important to be contaminated by propaganda. This may well explain my instinctive hostility towards our Turcocentric ghazetajis.
*
Bertrand Russell: “Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.”
*
William Goldman: “Life isn’t fair. It’s just fairer than death, that’s all.
MORE SHOP TALK
After the Genocide, the greatest calamity that has befallen Armenians is the Turcocentric ghazetaji who can think of Armenians only as victims of Turks. In my view, however, long before Armenians were victimized by Turks, they were victimized by their fellow Armenians, and they continue to be to this day.
*
To allow only one side of the story to be told and repeated again and again for a century is another way of moronizing a nation.
*
You want to play it safe? Be a dupe among dupes and a fool among fools.
*
The real challenge for a writer is not to be deep or original but to deserve and earn his readers’ trust. As for depth and originality: the Bible and Plato have exhausted these branches of literary endeavor.
*
T.S. Eliot: “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”
DIARY
There are three kinds of men: those who think before they speak, those who think as they speak, and those who think after they have spoken. But they all belong to a minority. The majority of men don’t think.
*
Who says we cannot agree on anything? For more than a thousand years now we have consistently agreed to remain divided.
*
In a democracy, truth is not a source of terror because it can be easily buried beneath an avalanche of harmless half-truths and pleasant lies.
*
We will mature as a nation only when we take ideas as seriously as money.
*
Anonymous: "You can always count on a rich man’s head to be as empty as an honest man’s pocket."
*
Galileo Galilei: “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”
FROM MY DIARY
Successful crooks appear more honest than truly honest men.
*
Politicians who profess family values see nothing morally inconsistent in screwing the nation.
*
Jean Rostand: “The persistence of an opinion proves nothing in its favor. Astrologers still exist.”
*
It is a waste of time talking to someone from whom you can learn nothing and to whom you can teach even less.
*
If a little knowledge is dangerous, we all live on borrowed time.
*
Kant [on the difference between ignorance and stupidity]: “There is no cure for stupidity.”
*
For our bosses and bishops, literature has only one purpose: to cover up their lies, and to misrepresent their blunders as triumphs of statesmanship.
A BROTHER
He is that most repellent of all creatures – an ignorant, loudmouth, self-satisfied, smart-ass know-it-all, in short, myself when young. He makes me think of the octogenarian born-again Armenian friend who once told me he hates Turks not because they tried to exterminate us but because they failed to do so. Instead of analyzing our catastrophic blunders, he brags, speechifies, and sermonizes in the name of God and Country—a God he knows nothing about and a Country that he pretends to value more than his fellow countrymen.
*
In a letter from an Armenian poet: "After writing for Armenians all my life, I am beginning to hate the Turks less."
*
Ruben Ter-Minassian: "Our cultural achievements and intellectual abilities may be superior to those of our neighbors, but without solidarity we are bound to be defeated, victimized, and exterminated."
*
Stanislaw Lec: "Only the dead can be resurrected. It’s more difficult with the living."
*
Search for the truth not in order to find it but in order to uncover ten thousand lies.
NOTES / COMMENTS
If we cannot trust experts, historians, religious leaders and politicians on the grounds that they contradict one another, whom can we trust? The answer must be obvious: nobody! Not even our own judgment. We may however mistrust less those who deal in doubts and probabilities as opposed to certainties and dogmas.
*
To be against objectivity is to be for deception.
*
Love of God and Country become pathological aberrations when they find expression only in hatred for the enemy and fellow countrymen who do not share our hatred.
*
Honesty is a career in which the failures outnumber the successes.
*
It’s because they want to silence me that I keep talking. On the day they shut up, I will sing my swan song.
RANDOM THOUGHTS
Chekhov: "Love, friendship, respect do not unite people as much as common hatred for something." Our leadership has known this for some time; hence, their unspoken slogan: "There is no business like shoah business."
*
What divides a nation is neither theology nor ideology but leaders who consider their own powers and privileges more important than the survival of the nation.
*
Where there is an Armenian church you will also find a wealthy dupe with a guilty conscience.
*
A fellow Armenian (a white-haired no-nonsense type) knocks on my door, introduces himself, barges in, and demands to know if I am really an atheist. I tell him, I don’t believe in he god of our priests. He is too puzzled by my answer to pursue the matter. What I fail to add is that, the true atheist is he who uses someone else’s crucifixion to make a comfortable living.
*
If a man is open to ruin, he will be ruined by success as easily as by failure.
SHOP TALK
The trouble with me as a writer is that, unlike our Turcocentric ghazetajis who write about nothing else but massacres, bloodthirsty Asiatic barbarians, atrocities, and unspeakable crimes against humanity, I have an eye only for the dark side of life. I stress the negative in human nature and completely ignore the positive.
*
An Armenian poetess calls to inform me she is donating the royalties of her next book to Etchmiadzin. I don’t have the heart to tell her I have been in this business for a quarter of a century and I have never heard of an Armenian writer who has made two cents from royalties. But I suspect she already knows. Armenians have an amazing gift for pretending not to know the obvious.
*
In a letter from a friend: "If, as you say, Armenian literature is a dead end, why not give up writing?"
I write for two totally non-literary reasons: to fight boredom and to acquire friends; and with every book I have published, I have acquired a new friend; also (alas!) two, and sometimes even twenty-two, enemies.
ASKING QUESTIONS
What do they know of the Genocide if only the Genocide know? To fully understand something, anything, it is necessary to know and understand many other things. Historic occurrences are like plants with deep roots some of which may go back to the beginning of time.
*
Why is it that we never get tired of speaking of what they did to us but we at no time ask, why is it that we made ourselves vulnerable? Is it because we may not like the answer? Is it because if we understood the answer we may no longer be justified in assuming a holier-than-thou stance? And worse, much worse! Is it because if we understood the answer we would also understand that what they did to us we are doing to ourselves? – that is to say, committing our own brand of “jermag chart” (white slaughter) on two fronts – assimilation in the Diaspora and exodus from the Homeland? Why is it that when it comes to our own incompetence, corruption, dogmatism, intolerance, and divisions, we like to speak of “social and cultural conditions beyond our control”? What is the difference between their denialism and our own? Why this stubborn refusal to face facts and accept responsibility? Am I making assertions I cannot prove? No, I am only asking questions.
Ara Baliozian's Book : PERTINENTES
Ara Baliozian
Reader's Review by Sukru S. Aya
It was indeed a pleasure to read Ara Baliozian’s rather long, but very illuminating and irony essay again, and share my thoughts and feelings with someone I have never met in person, and we are expected to be enemies! First of all, I do not want to poke my nose too much in his message heavily addressed to Armenians, but with unavoidable sprinkles to Turks, because diaspora Armenians, “cannot exist, unless they talk of the Turk, the “monster in the attic”, responsible for everything.
I will be sending this message (if posted) to my very sincere Armenian friends in Turkey, because I am sincerely and seriously worried that the “diaspora Armenians are continuously poking the cesspit” and it takes only one or two idiots of Turkish nationality, to do something stupid and shameful for all us. I consider the diaspora Armenians, incurably prejudiced, who cannot live without this fixed idea. However, here in Turkey, despite all the messing and smearing, 95% of Armenians and Turks are deaf to those “charlatans, making money by selling hatred”. I have read every word of the essay, I am not going to write about the abundance of jokes, and dimensions of mental gymnastics, which makes me, feel as in a fitness room, but for brains. So, for whatever I have not remarked, I mean that I am in full agreement with what I read, knowing nothing better.
However, for a few points where the writer seems to have depended on other sources he read, or has not gone in full depth, I would like to add below clarifications. I am in absolute agreement with him that “we should speak instead of human beings who as a result of factors beyond control…”
On a related topic: Matild Manukyan, who operated some bordellos and had several properties, was liked and appreciated by nearly all of the general public, because she was decent, she was a perfect mother to the girls who had to sell their body to earn money. Manukyan proved that “decency, can work even in prostitution by sex” but our dilemma is that “the prostitution of politics is immune to decency”. May be she made “arav-pakhav” only for the prize she deserved, but think of all the bureaucrats making “arav-pakhav”, pretending to be decent!
The root of all evil: On Hitler mentioned here and other part, refer to the remarks at the end of this message!
One liners: There is no courses or texts in school books about hostilities with Armenia or any hatred. Full stop!
It takes one to know: I am amazed how Pamuk can be compared to Solzhenitsyn? Pamuk was no one, until he spoke of 1 million Armenians killed, and Maureen Freely wrote his book in English! Nobel prizes do not always go to those who deserve them!
Shituation and Commissars and the frog: Clear and loud!
Biography, Agop Martayan – Dilaçar: He has been of enormous help to Ataturk in purification of the Turkish language. There were other Armenians working with him: Boghos Kalpciyan, Mihran Apikyan, Bedros Karapetyan as well Istephan Gurdiyan already mentioned. I have a 200 page book on the services of Armenians in top positions in the Ottoman Empire, written by Armenian priest G. Carkciyan, whose father died at Canakkale fighting against Brits in the Turkish army.
A Routine Experience: The subject of Hitler is well explained in Chapter 16 of my book, pages 425-455. Below new documentation brings clarity of how General Dro, was sending Nazi Armenian soldiers into fighting in early 1945, for a War that he knew it was already lost. Now medals of honor are given in his name as if hero!
Open letter and Ece Temelkuran: This young woman writer, discovered the easy way to fame, by going into the Armenian issue and all of the sudden revelation has come on to her. I have been with Armenian friends now for over 65 years of friendship, and I do not remember any friction among any of us, yesterday and today. The last sentence she annexes “my endeavor is to appeal the Turkish youth who hates Armenians…” The youth knows nothing, and have no idea about hating. I leave it to you, to judge is a loud “fart” or big “b.s.”!
Why not a proud Armenian? Simply because I am not a proud Turk , either! I prefer to be a “humble human”!
A Turkish friend writes, I believe injustice done to Armenians: Wait! Who did the greatest injustice? Turks or the Allies who backed Armenians to revolt with great promises and then abandoned them totally? Which victor did any justice to any loser? Childish remarks…at the age of 58!
A house divided: We all know by now that the Armenian diaspora (as he writes down later) makes a business with several collections, and has to market this grudge, to keep on collecting money and become richer!
About Fascists: I have to see yet a Turk who really hates Armenians as a race. The opposite is very visible!
Infantilism: The writer speaks of scenarios trying to smear Ataturk. “Kemalism is not a dogma, it never was!
It is just being wise, educated, evaluating matters by reason and logic, instead of the dogmas of some books”.
Ataturk has been the only good leader of Turks in several centuries…Too bad that all his reforms are now diluted and degenerated by b.s. such as human rights, democracy, all hidden the fundamentalism of Ayetullahs!
Average Turk should know to differentiate “reason and intelligence of the brain” versus the “dogmas of holy books promising paradise, but robbing of all the wealth in lifetime”. The writer, has jumped into wrong conclusions. I do not mess up too much with Armenianism, so he should have stayed away instead of lecturing. We, as Turks already have more than enough trouble and turbulence in our judicial and political system, because some “mild Islamic Party applauded by the westerners is stripping down all the reforms we made with great sacrifices in 80 years. Why do you not mention the scandals and the erosion, corruption in the “democracy” we hide under?
About Kemalism – Izmir Fire etc.: I have not noticed or found the words of Philip Mansel on Izmir Fire, but I challenge all in the world to “read my excerpts in pages 629 – 630” of my book “The Genocide of Truth” and prove that I am wrong. Isn’t enough with these illogic fabrications and smearing Turks, making them as idiot and stupid to burn their own cities? I don’t give a damn to Milton and Mansel, who have not read the sources I am quoting verbatim. It is because of this type and huge lot of “historical b.s.” that I had to do my own compilation in form of a book. Who is correct, Milton, Mansel or Grescovitch, Mac Lahlan and all others. Refer to posting 1228 if my book is not enough! Let facts and authentic documents speak!
On church unity: In Turkey there are over 70.000 mosques for 70 million people. How many people go to mosques, and are they more useful than the schools or hospitals we have a shortage of ? Yes, we are about to end with ayatollahs… We are divided into two halves, fundamentalism against secularism.
Is God and clergy going to save the future generations by praying or reading one story book, or are we all going to learn and keep our spiritual life in the privacy of our sex life! That is the question… Deal all.
(Page 226) “HAYASTAN” German paper in Armenian Language, No. 1(125) Year 1945
Translation and summary of the Armenian newspaper "Hayastan"
The newspaper has three pages
First page
An address to the officers and the soldiers of Armenian volunteers units:
Good wishes for the New Year, accompanied with the assurance of a certain victory and an absolute liberation of the country.
A. Mouradian
Second page
Best wishes of General Sarkisjan addressed to Armenian volunteers.
Congratulations and courage, to the volunteers who for many years, were forced to live far from the country, and those who are dear to them! However, everything depends on volunteers; happiness, as well as the freedom of motherland. It is the trust put in the bellicose ardor and weapons, which will bring freedom and will make possible to celebrate in the liberated country once again.
Armenian wishes to all volunteers!
The New Year will be placed under the signature of the battle, reinforced for the release of fatherland. Our volunteers cannot, receive like other friends, letters or parcels from their relatives who stayed at the home. Our parents and our friends in Soviet Union do not have celebration party; they are plunged in a state of distress, they hope and with beating hearts that we come back as liberators. Here, in Germany, the children have the bright eyes of joy in front of presents and decorated Christmas trees. Our children, in the country, have nothing similar. They are hungry and cold and ask their parents when the liberators will arrive. It is because of them that our primordial duty is to implement everything for the freedom of fatherland. They shout revenge for the injustice, which was made towards them, and towards their parents by Bolshevists and it is our duty to avenge them. The old year is about to end, and a new begins. Something will happen once again! Bolshevism also comes near to its end, and something else will replace it. You, the Armenian volunteers must be the torchbearers of this new order; it is necessary that you must be victorious.
Full of confidence, we enter the New Year. Victory will belong to us! Long live Armenia! Long live Armenian people! Saharuni
A typical case of Armenian political madness: Hitler, Himmler and Henjakistes...
This was not all of H.
Political fanatics of all colors, camps of the political ghosts of Armenians joined the "crusade" of the Nazis against their ancient Soviet confederates, with whom they had just shared in brothers Poland and Baltic countries, to die so for absurd phantasm to give rise by Hitlerian help to a National Socialist Great Armenia under the shade of the Great Germany.
The peak of the absurdity of this alliance was reached when in December 1942, General Armenian Dro (Drastamat Kanajan), who was considered to be the Armenian hero par excellence, and the writer Garo Kevorkian visited to the “leader of the Reich "
Mr. Heinrich Himmler and presented him a book of the pastor Lepsius: "The walk to death of the Armenian people ".
It is obvious to think that this upset neither "Dro" nor Himmler, because they were themselves sending people in death!
Himmler having given orders to kill millions, "Dro" nevertheless to thousands, appearing a priori on the list of death of Russians, and about 30.000 Armenians, who followed on the appeal of Mr " Dro " and affected to the Nazis!
But Dro, had practice and experience to kill without scruples and Himmler was so impressed by him as after a talk of one hour and a half in prisoners' camp east of Berlin, that he made him drive in his own car, so that "Dro" could choose his men there.
He visited Armenian units in the oriental front several times, to impress them by his eloquence.
As he knew the Soviet situation particularly well, he was soon taken for the most important German spy, in Soviet matters.
Precisely for his level of incomparable information, it is unpardonable that he forced his Armenian compatriots literally until the last minute in the battle that was a hopeless since a long time, and had no glory. While he was released already after a short time by American occupying force, thanks to his very good relations in United States and died very esteemed, even loved immoderately by his compatriots and after several world tours, in Boston, where the mighty party of Dashnaks still are in command.
Armenian commitment for the national socialist Germany probably had the purpose to delimit Jews in a very clear manner from the Armenians in territories dominated by the Nazis, though many ignorant, among of those who shared… (Rest is unreadable)
Sukru Server Aya's Book : Genocide of Truth
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