Professor Hovhaness Pilikian

Event at Britain’s Parliament -Hrant Dink’s Memorial at the House of Commons

2007-02-06T05:40:00.000-08:00

Event at Britain’s Parliament -Hrant Dink’s Memorial at the House of Commons by Edwina Charles [Exclusive to GIBRAHAYER.cyprusnewlsetter.com]

On January 30th 2007, at the House of Commons, the Great old Britain’s neo-gothic Parliament building, a most prestigious commemoration was held for Hrant Dink’s untimely death. The event was organised by Eilian Williams of Armenia Solidarity and supported by the London Nor Serount Cultural Association. A select group of people including Lord Avebury, gathered at 1 pm (London time) for a vigil at Parliament Square, led by the famous defender of Human Rights from the House of Lords. The proceedings inside the Commons (committee room 8) opened, with the reading of a special message sent by Tony Simpson, an Editor of the Quarterly The Spokesman, from Professor Ken Coates, Chairman of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, answering a call from his cherished friend, Professor Khatchatur Pilikian, who took the floor to pay his tribute to Hrant Dink, with consummate dramatic skill and poetic panache, holding the audience in spiritual turmoil. An original poem dedicated to Hrant Dink followed, written and read by the authoress herself, Ms Seta Cox. The second main Speaker was Professor Hovhannes I. Pilikian. He captivated the guests with his biting humour, and scholarly references. With the cold eye of an historian, Professor Pilikian made plain that there were harsh lessons to be learnt from what he saw as the cold blooded political murder of Hrant Dink, his personal friend. He spoke fondly of the memories of his friend sitting behind his dingy desk in a dark and dank newspaper-office (of the AGOS Hrant published) in the European section of Istanbul … Unlike a post-modern Western news-media Mogul, Hrant hadn’t made a penny out of his popular newspaper, still on shoe-strings, after a decade of existence! Respectfully, Pilikian described Hrant as the pure ‘poor’ traditional intellectual, totally disinterested in sordid money-making; Hrant was a pioneer of Armenian Turkish reconciliation and it is for this reason that Pilikian found his assassination an act of impure politics and sheer stupidity. Pilikian spoke movingly and passionately, wanting his captive audience to understand that Hrant’s unlawful death need not be in vain. “There are four important lessons to be learnt from this” said the Professor addressing the audience directly. As Lesson No.1, Professor Pilikian mourned the waste and sheer stupidity of political assassinations – he drew a parallel with the ex-Israeli PM Ariel Sharon’s self-declared assassination – with approval from the American government – of the Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, who throughout his life had made every possible concession to … Israel, finally delivering the much derided Oslo Agreement … securing Israel’s interests for good! In Lesson No. 2 we learnt of the abuse of the Armenian question from the moment of its invention by the Western imperialist powers – Britain, Germany, Tsarist Russia etc. In their need to control their Muslim populations, they used the stick of the Christianity of the Armenian people to beat the Ottoman Sultanate with, to plunder its economy and finally divide up its vast colonial spoils. Professor Pilikian proved exhaustively that the genocide of the Armenians was never caused by a religious war, as even the German Kaiser, Queen Victoria’s grandson and a prime culprit of the First World War, had intended. A pamphlet in Arabic published by the German Embassy in Syria had survived calling on the Muslim Arabs (the co-religionists of the Ottoman Turks) to declare jihad=Holy War upon the Armenians. Not only the true Muslims, the Arab peoples of the Middle East failed the Imperial German efforts, they moreover ultimately rebelled against them (the Arab Revolution led by Shariff Hussein), and received the Armenian survivors of the Ottoman genocide with open arms in the Middle East. Today, Euro Christian fundamentalists (perhaps led by the Vatican itself) endanger the safety of the Armenian communities in the Arab countries by cynically exploiting the “Christian Armenian” card to keep Turkey out of the European Union, not because it is ruled by a fascist military political elite, but because it is a … Muslim country! Professor Pilikian labelled this “the racist pornography of genocidal politics”. Lesson No. 3 consisted of the similitude between the Jewish Holocaust and the Genocide of the Armenians, which served as the paradigm for the Nazi genocide of the Jews. Referring to the pioneering work of the Sociologist Professor Vahakn Dadrian, Professor Pilikian emphasized the fact that the national archives (in Bonn) of the German governments is awash with the eye witness reports of the German imperial functionaries in Istanbul at the time of the genocid, some, with notes on the margins by the hand of the Kaiser himself! Two thousand officers of the German imperial army commanded the Ottoman armies in situ … and later became the Nazi hierarchy, including Hoss, the Commandant of Auschwitz. The Jewish- American Ambassador in Istanbul, Morgenthau frequently made the point in his famous Memoires, that if the German Imperial Government wanted to, could have instantly stopped the genocide of the Armenians let alone guide its execution. The audience sat in hushed silence awaiting for the final Lesson No. 4; the revelation of what Professor Hovhanness Pilikian labelled as “the grand secret of the British Empire” – complex socio-economic ideological factors that resulted in setting the British imperialist mindset, secretly provoking genocides, for world-domination. Similar views are well-established by the work of the American Professor Noam Chomsky, concerning the attempts at world-domination by the American political elite. What was highly original in Professor Pilikian’s own theorizing was the extraordinary fusion of well-rehearsed historical facts – the Malthusianism of British politics still active today in the Thatcherism of the New Labour – blaming the poor for their lot, and wishing to control their fertility ; The birth of the grotesque Eugenic movement in Britain, with modern echoes in the US perpetrated by Ku Klux Clan-type organizations ; He spoke about Social Darwinism which advocated the Superiority of the Western Christian race – meaning of course, the Victorian British – entirely grounded on Darwin’s pseudo-scientific Origin of the Species, the original First Edition (1859) title of which is nevermore published (thank god!). It reads (incredibly for modern tastes) – “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the preservation of favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”. In that use of the conjunctive “or” – Professor Pilikian pointed out, hangs a genocidal tale … It manifested the British imperialist Establishment’s ‘secret’ intention to find a respectable ‘scientific’ theory to justify causing global wars (and two world wars did follow… in obscene frequency) for ‘the survival of the fittest’ “Favoured Race” to emerge as a ‘naturally selected’ ruler of the world … Professor Pilikian’s contention was that the Industrial economic Revolution created in Britain was evolving (in a Darwinist manner) into the 19th c British imperialism, with voracious appetites for global markets – very much the case, he felt, of present so-said Globalization. Britain let rip the First World War led by Queen Victoria’s grandson, the German Kaiser who considered himself to be the better … British! And the trigger for this murderous Darwinian “laboratory”exercise was the genocide of the Armenians in 1915! Siegfried Sassoon, an Establishment figure (like Darwin), but an active war-poet, had “almost” worked this secret out, when he had accused the British government of deliberately prolonging the first world war for imperialist greed. As a punishment, the British Establishment disgraced Sassoon labelling him as mentally ill. Professor Pilikian concluded his historical analyses with an astounding conclusion; that these ideas were not in the past, but in fact very active today in Anglo-American global politics. He referred to British Prime Minister, Tony Blair’s recent much-trumpeted speech advocating global warmongering. Mr Blair had successfully destroyed all the distinctive Socialist traditions of the Labour Party, except one – its Pacifism. The Prime Minister now wanted to ensure that before he resigned, he “could genocide” that last Socialist survivor of Old Labour… The stunned silence of the distinguished audience was broken by the woman MP Nia Griffith, fixing Professor Pilikian with a warm stare and thanking him for all she had learnt today. Turning to the guests, she added that the stream of information passing through an MP’s office is unimaginable, and that the process of learning is slow but worth it, when it is properly organized by constituents as effectively as today. Ms Griffith herself had put down a Parliamentary Motion recording Hrant Dink as a campaigner for the Recognition of the Genocide of the Armenians by Britain. Among the guests were Lord Rea (with Lord Avebury) very well-known for his defence of Human Rights issues in the House of Lords; Dr. Fariudin Hilmi, ex Cabinet Minister of the first government of Kurdistan in Iraq, who was invited by the Chair Eilian Thomas to pay his own personal tribute ; Paddy Tipping , MP, member of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Armenia ; David Howard, Liberal Democrat MP ; Martin Short, famous author and documentary film-maker (Inside the Brotherhood on modern Freemasonry, Crime Inc. on the US Mafia etc.) ; Vaughan Pilikian, award-winning film-maker, Sanskrittist Editor and Translator of Clay Sanskrit Library (of a Hundred Volumes) ; Artour Oshakantsi – the renowned Painter from Armenia, regarded as the Founder of ‘Abstract Naturalism’; Ms Estella Schmid, an excellent orator, the very well-known London activist and the long-battling fighter for Kurdish Rights ; the distinguished Turkish human Rights journalists Koray Duzgoran, his wife Arman, and Mustafa Yasacan, who paid tribute in the name of progressive Turkish journalists, and spoke movingly of his personal prediction of the murder a whole year before it happened … The guests parted company on an intellectual high … while congratulating Professor Hovhanness I. Pilikian for his radical insight into the genocidal politics of the British Empire framing the genocide of the Armenians as the first of its kind, urged him to write down his speech, and dispatch copies by e-mail … for further circulation on the world-wide Net.

“Türk halkı bizim düşmanımız değil” - Responses

2007-02-06T00:48:00.000-08:00

Londra’da yaşayan ve Türklere yakınlığıyla bilinen Ermeni tarihçi ve sanat eleştirmeni Prof. Hovhaness Pilikian, 'O tarihte yaşanan olayları, ister soykırım, ister katliam, isterse etnik temizlik olarak değerlendirin, ne olursa olsun ortada yaşanan bir durum var. Ancak ben bunu bir tarihçi olarak değerlendirdiğimde, bunun arkasındaki asıl planlayıcı güçlerin İngiliz ve Alman emperyalizmi olduğunu gördüm' dedi... Anadolu kökenli Prof. Hovhaness Pilikian ile yazarımız Ali Keskin sohbet etti...

- Hrant Dink’i tanır mıydınız?- Evet. Kendisiyle İstanbul’da Agos gazetesinde ziyaret ettim... Kendisini iyi tanırdım... O bozulmamış, tertemiz bir insandı. Türkiye’yi seven, Türk halkının ve Ermeni halkının diyalog kurmasına köprü olabilecek, Türk-Ermeni sorununun çözülmesinde olumlu rol oynayabilecek bir aydındı. O’nun bir cinayete kurban gitmesine çok üzüldüm. Bu cinayette tüm cinayetler gibi aptalca bir eylem, aptalca bir hareket olmuştur...

- Evet hepimiz gerçekten üzgünüz...- Düşünceleri ne olursa olsun, bir insanın öldürülmesini, vahşice bir cinayete kurban gitmesini kimse onaylayamaz. Bu cinayeti işleyen o genç çocuk için de çok üzgünüm. O bu olayda sadece kullanılmıştır. Zaten katilleri her zaman psikolojik sorunu olan, zavallı insanlardan seçiyorlar. Onun sadece bir maşa olduğunu unutmamalıyız. Bunun arkasındaki asıl güç istihbarat servisleridir. Yıllar boyunca sistem tarafından yaratılan milliyetçi, ırkçı atmosferdir. Tüm baskılara rağmen 301’in kaldırılmamasında ısrar eden hükümettir...

- Cinayet, Türkiye- Ermenistan ilişkilerini nasıl etkiler?- Sanırım olumsuz etkilenir... Ermeniler zaten Türklere güvenmiyor ve Türklerin değişebileceğine inanmıyor. Hatta tanıdığım bazı Ermeniler Türklerin dükkanlarında alışveriş yapmayı bile reddediyor. Ancak Hrant gibi düşünen, benim gibi düşünen, hala Türklerle barışı savunan insanları yok ederek, onları öldürerek bir kazanç sağlanamaz.

- Türkiye ve Ermenistan arasında yaşanan “soykırım” tartışmaları hakkında neler söyleyeceksiniz?- Benim ailem Anadolu kökenli. Babam 1915 yılında Adapazarı’ndan göç etmek zorunda kalmış. O tarihte yaşanan olayları, ister soykırım, ister katliam, isterse etnik temizlik olarak değerlendirin, ne olursa olsun ortada yaşanan bir durum var. Ancak ben bunu bir tarihçi olarak değerlendirdiğimde, bunun arkasındaki asıl planlayıcı güçlerin İngiliz ve Alman emperyalizmi olduğunu gördüm. İngilizler ve Almanların fikir hocalığını yaptığı Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa tarafından örgütlenen çeteler "Ermeni Soykırımı”ndan sorumludur... Yaşananların sorumlusu olarak Türk halkını özellikle de bu günkü Türkiye halkını göstermek doğru değil. Halkların birbirine düşmanlığı olamaz. Babam bana bunu öğretti.

- Aileniz soykırımdan söz eder miydi?- Babam hiçbir zaman Türk halkını yaşananlardan sorumlu tutmadı ve bazı Türklerin de kaçmalarına yardımcı olduklarını anlattı. O zaman yaşananlardan tamamen o zamanki yönetici sınıf sorumludur... Her şeye rağmen Ermeni ve Türklerin diyaloğundan ve yakınlaşmasından yanayım... Çetelerin sorumlu olduğu katliamı Türk halkının reddetmemesi önemlidir...

- AB'yi ve Türkiye'nin üyelik sürecini nasıl değerlendiriyorsunuz?- AB'yi Hristiyan Kulübü olarak algılayan Avrupalıları ve Türkiye’nin AB’ne girmesine karşı çıkan Ermenileri eleştiriyorum. Türkiye’nin AB’ne girmesini kesinlikle destekliyorum. Bu Türkiye’nin demokratikleşmesi için bir kazanım olacaktır. Hem Ermeni, hem de Türk olarak bugün dünyamızda yaşanan sorunlara duyarlılık göstermemiz gerektiğine inanıyorum. Dünyamız çok ciddi sorunlarla karşı karşıya. Emperyalizm, dünyamızı yaşanmaz hale getirdi. Savaşlar yüzünden her gün yüzlerce insan ölüyor. Küresel ısınma nedeniyle dünyamız yok olma tehlikesiyle karşı karşıya. Bu gün içinde bulunduğumuz sorunlar yüzünden dünyamızın sonunu hazırlıyorlar. Bunları düşünürsek, Ermeni olmanın, Türk olmanın bir önemi yok aslında...

Hitlerite Blitzkrieg and Nazi Atrocities in the Lebanon - Committed by Proxy by the US Neo-Cons

2006-08-01T22:55:00.000-07:00

Preamble

After months of thinking and research, I was preparing to review the US Jewish Professor Norman Finkelstein’s extremely important books on the Arab-Israeli conflict – he is a modern Prophet of ancient Israel, true son of true Holocaust- survivors, yet much reviled and denied in modern Israel. Why? – For speaking the truth, and nothing else but the truth.

And now this senseless, mindless, pointless, vengeful, unfair, unjust, O so stupid were it not so despicably criminal Hitlerite Blitzkrieg on the Lebanon – blowing up a sweet defenceless baby-mouse with a cannon!

I mourn the Innocent – dead in the Lebanon, and Israel.

I mourn the death of Israel’s Socialist Soul – the Jewish State, with its classical tradition of Judaic Humanism could become a beacon for the rest of the world, of civilized culture and civil society, liberating the oppressed – 90% of the world – from murderous governance, saving the planet with its scientific genius from the world’s Number One polluter and compulsive warmonger – the USA.

Instead, Israel’s State has allowed itself to become the neo-Nazi lap-dancer of the US old-Nazi neo-Cons, doing their dirty business, committing sheer Nazi atrocities whenever, wherever…

Together, lap-dancer and US master, they deny (for example) the genocide of the Armenians by the Ottoman Young Turks, against other nations like the French, the German, and the Russians who acknowledge it as a despicable paradigm of the very Holocaust itself – it is now established beyond any reasonable historical doubt that the Nazis perpetrated their attempted genocide of the European Jewry following the Young Turk state-terrorist acts as a text-book example – the Nazis created the Einsatzgruppen with the sole purpose of murdering Jews, concerned that even their Gestapo hyenas may not want to cannibalize the Jews they had dehumanized, just as the Young Turks had trained teshkilat mahsusiye (= ‘special groups’) knowing full-well that their own ordinary Turkish citizenry would reject any demands of mass murder of their Armenian neighbours.

I do not believe the polls in Israel – supposedly most of its citizenry approve of the Hitlerite Blitzkrieg on the Lebanon – “Widespread support for war among Israeli public”(1)
Bloody Lies, I say, we in Britain are the world’s greatest masters of lying-through-statistics. One of the great British imperialist Prime Ministers, the Jewish Disraeli (1804-81) who, determined to deny his Jewishness (added D- on “Israel” to reject it), pretended to be a classical English Dandy, and defined it most memorably – “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics” [quoted in the classic Penguin book titled “How to lie with Statistics”, by Darrell Huff, 1991].

We have even coined a post-modern porno word for it – “massaging figures” – the Prime Minister Mrs Thatcher was a past master of it, her understanding of economic theory was bounded by her fame as the notorious masseuse of unemployment figures, dumping some onto sickness-benefits, others unto disability welfare, in a few months, miraculously, 2 million unemployed had disappeared into the nooks and crannies of other Statistics…

It is a great Nazi lie that the Israelis are all mono-ethnic Jewish – Jews themselves are one of the world’s most multi-ethnic mixtures; many Soviet citizens of all ethnic hues cheated the system by immigrating to Israel as Jews… Desperate to displace the Palestinian Arabs, the State of Israel happily perpetuated the lie.

Israel the Beautiful Bride

There is an Israel rising from the dark-blue sea as beautiful as a Boticelli Venus, with its divine head in the mountains, where the air she breathes is healthy and wholesome, milk and honey and fruits aplenty – heaven on earth – Zirkon Yakov, for example – protected by the natural boundary of the Mediterranean Ocean, safe and secure, ancient ruins at its feet (Ceasarea), of incalculable world-historical heritage-wealth, letting Israeli archaeologists reconstruct mankind’s past slowly and surely.

That Israel, entirely built from absolutely nothing in only 50 years is a miracle of human endeavour and achievement, the whole world should know about. Yet, the world knows only Tel Aviv built on sand… sordid and sickly, Jerusalem – a brutal and brutalized city, the ugliest I have seen, perpetuating religious lies after lies under Vatican’s gaudy and camp ornamentation of rocks in caves… People argue over a Da Vinci fantasy code, whether Jesus was married or not, as if Jesus himself was a historical figure… US tourists rent a crucifix from the Church of Ascension, to walk the Via Dolorosa, thinking they’ve become Jesus Christ, ready to vote for President Bush!

The Beautiful Israel needs no polluted Jerusalem or West Bank to disgrace its name. It is there – for me the most beautiful country in the world with god’s plenty of all the necessities of life – the spirit of the mountains emerging from the body of ancient ruins.

God named Jacob “Israel" in acknowledgment of his struggle with god’s Angel – look at Jacob Epstein’s sculpture of it in London’s Tate Britain to understand the love between them. They did not murder each other like the Roman Gladiators had to do. Israel’s power in history was always defensive, never offensive and genocidal as that of its post-modern American slave-masters. By turning itself fascist-Nazi, the state of Israel has become a disgrace to its god-given name.

When Ariel Sharon over a decade ago genocided the Palestinian innocents in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps of Beirut using as proxy the Lebanese “Christian” (my foot!) fascist-Phalange cut-throats, the world was stunned into silence, because the American government protected him.

Encouraged, Sharon then asked openly and received cheekily permission from his US puppeteers to… murder the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. And he did. Arafat was poisoned overnight, in full view of the world. Yet again, the world was raped into silence.

Is it any wonder then, that today, the old-Nazi neo-Cons of the ‘same’ government let their Rottweiler Ehud Olmert trained by Sharon loose in the Lebanon?

The indiscriminate bombing of the Lebanon even on the TV screens looks no different from the US bombardment of Baghdad – the concept of massive aggression without any regard to the non-combatant innocents (children and women, old men) was the only contribution to military history Hitler’s diseased brain could spawn – now very much the fashion adopted by the US/Israeli military.

Check out the results of their war crimes on http://www.beirutlive.blogspot.com and especially http://fromisraeltolebanon.info if you’ve got the stomach for it – such depravity and atrocities can only be compared with pictorial Nazi documents – frankly, even worse than theirs, as war-technology was in its infancy then.

If this is what God’s chosen people can do to gratify the bloodlust of a US Presidency, then God help … America!

Another US President (the 28th ), Thomas Woodrow Wilson, who tried (and failed) to dismantle the Old World (European) imperialism after the genocidal horrors (perpetrated upon the Armenians) of the First World War, promising all nations their right of self-determination, must be spinning in his grave in total shame and anger.

The Neo-Cons’ Nazi Lap-dancer and, who’s war is it truly?

The Nazi destruction of the Lebanon has nothing to do with Hamas, Hezbollah, Amal, Islamic Jihad or any other … Arab children’s army you care to mention. Suddenly forgetting Hamas and their Palestinian-problem, the Israeli Military publicly announced that they intended to put Lebanon back 20 years… In the words of a professor at the Hebrew University, “the Israeli army is hitting Hizbullah”(1).

The truth of the matter is that Hezbollah is the one thing not being hit in the Lebanon – everything else is, especially children – nothing can explain away or justify the King Herod’s massacre of the children in the Lebanese village of Qana, on Sunday, 30th July, 2006 – even the hard pro-Israeli-nosed Jeremy Paxman of the BBC Newsnight programme was shaken on Monday, and would not let heartless Israeli apologists off the hook.

I had seen a week ago a fellow Armenian, Sarkis Shekherdemian (in another BBC Newsnight report) shattered amongst the ruins of his… bottle-making factory in the Bekaa valley – as an Armenian, the poor guy could not be a Hezbollah by definition, even if he wanted to…

I feel very proud of my people in Beirut, who have opened their Christian quarters to the Muslim refugees from the South – not only their public buildings like schools and youth clubs, but even their private homes to accommodate shattered Arab families – the most efficient and best organized Armenian political party in Beirut, the Tashnak have done a magnificent job the British NGOs could learn from www.hairenik.com/hairenikTV//HA_TV_clip25.htm .

In a heartrending letter to the Editor – Simon Aynedjian – published by him in http://gibrahayer.cyprusnewsletter.com a schoolteacher from Beirut Sarine Khatchikian gives her own eyewitness account of refugee life under bombs and in abject deprivation, and asks most memorably a simple question to drive home man’s inhumanity to man in the fabricated context of genocidal violence – “Do we really know what it means to have 200 people use 4 toilets and not have a single drop of water to flush it?”

My own much genocided parents had found safe haven in Mosul – Iraq. I spent my youth in Beirut – Lebanon; both countries now devastated by the American Generals. The only reason I do not hate the Americans, is not because of my liberal education at the American University of Beirut, but because of my Marxist understanding of History, and Leninist disbelief in terrorism as an inadequate means of solving political problems.

Terrorism only feeds the vicious circle of violence that feeds excuses to the organized imperialist states (like the US) promoting terrorism for world domination via organs of violence (the CIA) created for the very purpose. The US government should promote… Leninism to halt the global spread of violence, instead of the Taliban to fight the spread of Leninism! Every survivor of Israel’s destruction of the Lebanon shall become an America-hating Hezbollah fighter – the only antidote would be Marxist-Socialism…

In a hilarious speech immediately after the destruction of the Twin Towers, President Bush was desperately seeking the name and address of the world’s greatest terrorist state that was responsible for it … I was saying to myself – look no further than in your backyard mate – the whole world knows CIA to be the world’s greatest terrorist organization.

There cannot be ‘good’ imperialists – something President Roosevelt, and now the British Prime Minister in waiting, Gordon Brown fantasize about. Imperialism, by definition, is the crude desire for Domination, by enslaving others. You cannot dominate without oppression and enslavement. And you cannot oppress and enslave without being a despicable racist, of skin-colour, or gender. Genocide is the modus operandi (and vivendi) of Imperialism – inhuman man’s most evil invention, the great shame of mankind.

The British wife of a Muslim preacher not allowed to return home says sweetly and naively: “if something terrible happened [to her husband] then Tony Blair would have blood on his hands”(2) – in fact the devout Catholic Blair is… swimming in blood, and “shoulder to shoulder” with the fundamentalist Christian Bush performing daily American girlie synchronized dancing in blood, for the whole world to see, from Yugoslavia, Afghanistan to Iraq and now in the Lebanon.

This latter war was obviously planned and packaged at least a year ago when the peaceful Syrian army was pushed out of the Lebanon… we, ordinary mortals could not work out then the conspiracy. The taste of the pudding is in the eating – now anyone can see that the purpose was to stage-manage today’s Nazi atrocities upon a defenceless Lebanon freed from Syrian protection – an easy prey for the proxy of the American military bogged down in Iraq – it has nothing to do with propaganda icons – Hezbollah this, Hamas that, or even Jews and Arabs in general – it is Bush’s and his Nazi Neo-Con gang’s war by proxy against Syria and especially Iran.

The London Independent (18 July 2006) provided the hard-core evidence by publishing on its first page the Bush/Blair conversation “overheard at the G8”– in porno lap-dance foul language, President Bush puts it on the line for the whole world to hear;

“You see, the … thing is what they need to do is to get Syria to get Hizbollah to stop doing this shit”

I personally do not believe that the casual conversation was “accidentally broadcast”, but meticulously stage-managed, including the President’s munching-on-food-with swear-words, to prove that Bush is … human – because post-modern Hollywood theory of aesthetics dictates that artistic truth be revealed by showing people eating and shitting, at least verbally (3).

The published dialogue provides even more revelatory gems not-picked on by the international news-media – the British Prime Minister’s remarkable, inexplicable, unnecessary and embarrassing servility to President Bush that had earnt him the sobriquet of a “lap-dog” – Tony Blair offers himself as a poodle to the US interests, inviting himself to the Middle East, saying; “I can go out and just talk” – the confession provides a unique insight into the corrupt ways of modern politics – go there, on a gravy train, enjoy the freebies, to merely talk and talk and get nothing done!

Then comes the homoerotic reference to someone nobody knows who – another lapdog? The Independent thinks it is Kofi Annan, the UN general Secretary, another talker and no-doer; “Bush : Yeah, yeah, he is sweet.
Blair: He is honey.”
And gosh, how sickening this pillow-talk, when the Lebanese multi-ethnic people are bombarded on public roads the Israeli army ordered them to take…

The porno shamelessness of post-modern Politics

There was a time when political leaders strived to assume a public image of morality and peacemaking. Morality flew out of the White house window when President Clinton was caught smoking cigars with Ms Lewinsky in odd places… politicians in the West today take pride in blatant immorality and warmongering.

A day after The Independent’s revelation, the London Guardian (19 July 2006) headlined on its first page the most shocking genocidal fact of the story so far, in one of the most incredibly shameless confessions of war crimes – “United States to Israel: you have one more week to blast Hizbullah – Bush ‘gave green light’ for limited attack, say Israeli and UK sources”.

And what would an unlimited attack entail? Israel’s nuclear bomb which would eliminate Israel too out of existence, to make Hitler orgasm beyond the grave!

After the massive defeat in Vietnam, the US Generals thought they could do a Hitlerite Blitzkrieg in Afghanistan, and Iraq – two minute jobs, in and out quickly! That’s what Hitler thought when codenamed Barbarossa = Red-Beard, he rolled his ‘Israeli’ tanks into the Soviet Union.

Ignorant it seems of Hitler’s fate, having already forgotten even the lessons of recent Vietnam, the arrogant US military never reckon with the global opposition to their crimes against humanity.

Worse, they are so inefficient that they always get bogged down by their fast-food Hmburger-styled battles – still jerking in Afghanistan and Iraq, unable to sustain a third front against Syria and Iran, they abused the willing Israeli government to realize their fantasies of world-domination, especially that they have to live up to the image that their lap-dogs flatter them as the world’s most powerful nation… that cannot even repair the damage done by a hurricane in New Orleans!

Childish arrogance is one way of papering over un-intelligent failure in adults of which the US military suffers aplenty – they have used the British aerospace not only for transporting Muslim prisoners to ex-East European countries for inhuman torture, but also to replenish the genocidal armaments currently used by the Israeli state on Lebanon. The Brits made some brouhaha pretending ignorance, and Bush made some noises of apology about not informing his partners of crime about the nature of the Airbus A310 cargo planes refuelling at Glasgow’s Prestwick airport. But not even the anti-war Independent would make headline news, or protest about the even more shocking news for the British peace-advocates, mentioned in a small print somewhere; “The value of arms exported to Israel from the UK in the past 18 months is £25m.”(4)

The great Mao (Zhedong) had the more apposite metaphor for the British media’s camp claim nowadays of ‘the world’s most powerful nation’ – a “paper Tiger” that could be burnt with a matchstick – a giant with the feet of clay, as the Nazis turned out to be after conquering all of Europe stretching to… Moscow!

What else did the Nazis do?

They targeted an innocent victim group – the European Jews, dehumanized them by name-calling – a habit much practised by the Murdoch-press (The Sun Newspaper) in London – to eliminate them out of existence.

And what have the neo-Cons done? They have targeted Hezbollah, turned them into anti-Christian ogres – only to try and genocide them – in fact, compared to the Israeli army, Hezbollah is a ‘children’s army’, full of televisual bravado that titillates Western news media, and who are best at killing their Sunni brothers, and even better at killing themselves…

Max Hastings, one of the great right-wing intellectuals, sometime editor of the bastion of old-world imperialism, the Daily Telegraph newspaper, recently seems to be suffering from pangs of conscience causing a desire for truth-speaking, of all places in the Daily Mail, a lap-dog of the above mentioned Telegarph. The whole of the introductory paragraph of a recent article by him is worth quoting, as it would horrify his younger alter-ego and the present egos of Bush and Blair partners in war-crimes;

“Just before leaving for my first trip to Vietnam in 1970, I telephoned a veteran correspondent for advice. ‘Just remember,’ he said, ‘they lie, they lie, they lie.’ By ‘they’ of course, he meant American politicians, diplomats and commanders, and he was absolutely right.”(5) And it has taken Max Hastings 36 years to reveal this truth – not the case of Robert Fisk, the most distinguished journalist of The Independent, who writes nothing else but the truth on the dot, revealing it at every corner “the vast packs of lies that have characterized this filthy war [on Lebanon]” (6).

Another truth-speaker of that vanishing species in British journalism, Martin Short, the brave documentary film-maker of many bold subjects – on the US mafia, and the British Freemasonry among them – hits the nail memorably on the head that may have terrorized many an intellectual from being falsely charged by New York Jewry as anti-Semitic; “Israel was largely created through terror.”(7)

The Independent has published a letter by Richard Skellington, the editor of Open University’s Social Science journal [comment.independent.co.uk/letters/article1199331.ece] where among many excellent points one says “that our government has consented as Israel has pursued its ethnic cleansing in Lebanon brings shame on Britain” – worse, partnership in Nazi war crimes.

What else did the Nazi’s do?

While Hitler’s diseased little brain invented the concept of the Blitzkrieg fought by the US General Schwarzkopf in the first Gulf war, Hitler’s footman Goebbels, of the lame foot and brain, re-invented the Machiavellian political Big Lie – very much the norm of daily political life now in the USA and Britain. If you want to know the Truth about international situations (and not only China), forget CNN, New York Times or any other Times… subscribe free to People’s Daily Online – http://english.poeple.com.cn it gives you clear brief factual accounts on every significant subject under the sun, and minus pornography of course.

That Lying is becoming the pandemic infecting the political life everywhere else in the Western world is no consolation, especially that they are merely imitating the Anglo-US paradigm. It works like this; Speak of freedom when you butcher human beings. Babble of democracy, when you practice genocide. Declare the halt of bombardment, while continuing it relentlessly… Hitler had signed a pact of non-aggression with Stalin, when he unleashed his barbaric blitzkrieg packs of Barbarossa.

Even better, let your country … dance in the streets while you give the green light to the Israeli military to bomb Lebanon into a rubble – On the 22nd of July (2006) the whole of Britain was made to dance in the streets via the London Mayor and the Arts Council of Great Britain and the BBC – the Trafalgar square was converted into a stage with blazing colours – cogs in the wheel of a government led by a Prime Minister who together with his US presidential mate had given the green light for the Nazi atrocities to be committed by a prime minister of Israel.

The Israeli army dropped a million leaflets from the air telling the local people to leave, to escape the Israeli bombs made in US – the best in the world!

How Goebbels-like caring – why should people leave their ancestral homes and land? And to go where? To make room for the Israeli army, behind the great Litani River…Lebanon’s only water source, so that Israel can yet again steal its waters as it had done for two decades…

Remember Hitler’s Lebensraum? – making nice living space for the German murderers in Poland and Russia, ultimately the whole world really…

And you won’t read in our British press, not even in the ‘lefties’ that the leaflets printed in Tel-Aviv Arabic are obscene, with the kind of caricatures that inflamed European capitals some months ago… to see them, go to http://www.beirutlive.blogspot.com .

You cannot read in our free British press that Israel has used poison bombs, just like Saddam Hussein when he had approval from then his masters in the US and Britain to genocide the Kurds of Halabja… go to www.fromisraeltolebanon.info to see the raw evidence – children’s bodies – not Hezbollah ‘fighters’ – turned to a butcher’s window display – it shall make you sick, you need a swine’s stomach for it.

What else did the Nazis do?

They corrupted the souls of innocent children – Hitler did not hesitate to abuse them as soldiers in the last days of his empire, before he shot himself as a rat trapped in his bunker.

The American mother’s boy who dropped the A-bomb on Hiroshima had scribbled his own mother’s name – “Enola Gay” on his aeroplane.

See the photographs of the child-abuse of the prettiest sweetest Israeli children of Kiryat Shmona scribbling messages on the massive bombs to be dropped on the Lebanon.

Those who abuse Jewish children like that should be arrested as dangerous paedophiles – like the Sado-Masochist Nazi Dr. Mengele was, who used to smash the heads of babies on the walls of his laboratory.

All Religious Fundamentalists are the same

As an atheist intellectual, I consider Religion to be no more than emotional madness – the fundamentalists, madder than the mad... whether Arab, Jew, US-Christian, they all need their heads examined. To name a political party as “God’s Party” (=Hezbollah) presents a prima facie case for psychiatric treatment. I would not be surprised at all if one day it is discovered to have been created and trained by the CIA lunatics, just like the Taliban, and Bin Laden’s followers were.

Is not the US occupied and sustained Saudi Arabia the country where even today its citizens are graced with the public entertainment of enjoying weekly beheadings by the sword… When will President Bush, with his British dog in the lap, and Condi on his side, finally go and witness with his own eye-holes such a beloved Saudi entertainment!

A Dr. Mamoun Faudy, on 24th July, reassured us, BBC Newsnight watchers, that he had just had a chat with several of the Saudi ruling Royalty, who all told him without exception that they are delighted with the Israeli attempt to genocide Hezbollah – something they themselves wanted to but were unable to do. And they were certain the Egyptian and Jordanian governments embraced similarly the Israeli dogs of war.

The US Neo-Cons – the political wing of the Christian Fundamentalists who believe their Lord God created the world 4000 years ago – the older Pyramids, and the Chinese? Satan’s work! – are so fed up waiting and hoping for Armageddon, and getting their predictions wrong about the exact date, that they are determined to cause it. The Internet is awash with such US fundamentalist sites preparing the world for the end of the world, abusing the Bible, even the quatrains of poor old Nostradamus.

Pat Robertson, the notorious lunatic and spiritual mother-father of President Bush, thinks that the whole event should kick-start with the formal overt public murder by the US government of Hugo Chavez, the saintly President of Venezuela – the saviour of the poor of his country that love and adore Chavez...

The danger to the rest of us in the world is that the Bush-lunatics are convinced they will not only survive Armageddon, but constitute the chosen few that shall live for-ever as promised in the Book of Revelations – they believe it with the same absolute conviction and certainty as the Hezbollah suicide bombers who prefer to go to Paradise full of a thousand concubines for each, waiting …

Impotent old Pat Robertson, with his gang of cronies at Death’s door, think they shall live forever if only they could make Armageddon happen while they are alive … thence the urgency and the rush to the neo-Cons and next year in Jerusalem before even their Boy Bush completes his last term of office! They cannot risk a Democrat president coming to free scientific cell-research, and re-liberate the liberated Gay and Lesbian San Franciscans…

Modern Warfare as a Dangerous Pollutant causing Climate Change

Ancient warfare, one-to-one battle had a beneficial side – the dead fertilized the earth! Modern technological warfare of aerial bombardments and poisonous bombs is a thousand percent pollutant of the atmosphere we all breathe. It is sheer madness for our politicians to buy-and-sell Carbon quotas, while allowing warmongering on Afghanistan, Iraq and now the Lebanon – those fighter aeroplanes pollute hugely, unimaginably, massively the world’s atmosphere, their bunker-busting, uranium bombs destroying the ozone layer etc.

There is alas no scientific consciousness of this fact, let alone any research undertaken to assess the irreparable damage done to mankind’s global health and warming by the US-British-Israeli warmongering.

I appeal to Greenpeace and the Friends of the Earth, Amnesty International, and to all other campaigning organizations globally to raise the alarm upon this matter. The governments of our countries have perhaps done as much damage to global warming as all the cars in the world for a decade!

Genocides cause plagues

I personally have no doubt that the so-said ‘mysterious’flu epidemic of the First World War was the direct result of the attempted genocide of the Armenians by the Young Turks, when a million people were put on a death march of starvation and thirst – a total breakdown of even minimal hygiene.

It is naive science to think that because the outbreak showed itself first in the US among the soldiers returning from the European theatre of war, or that the first European outbreak occurred in a pig-farm in France, therefore it had nothing to do with the 1915-events of the genocide of the Armenians in the Syrian deserts of Deir-Zor.

Again, the most feared bird-flu epidemic producing nightmares at the World Health Organization (WHO) I think has everything to do with the US destruction of Vietnam, where every imaginable filthy bomb was dropped by the US military masturbators to defoliate even the very Nature in Vietnam… the fact that the dreaded symptoms of H5N1 are emerging only recently in the whole of South East Asia among the chicken of Cambodia, Thailand, Indonesia, Laos and the Hong Kong … must be no consolation to the US-British-Israeli warmongers. Time is not a significant factor in the evolution of plagues directly caused by dirty warmongering.

Western archaeology, ignorant of lost ancient history, still perpetuates a romantic, touristy and a fraudulent image of ancient Egypt – the Old Testament record of the 7 most terrifying plagues are evidence of Pharaonic imperialist US style warmongering in the ancient world.

Atmospheric pollutants from modern technological air-mongering destroys human immunity that produces all manner of horrendous incurable illnesses – AIDS should serve as an example of a cluster-of-diseases, the first time such a phenomenon occurred in known human history. Nobody can predict what new clusters shall arise in the Middle East, even perhaps in Israel, as a direct result of the US-British-Israeli cluster- and uranium-bombs.

Inner/Outer Causality

Imperialist nations could never grasp the inner, deeper, dialectical causality. Obsessed with world-domination, their blinkered mindset could only stretch to the outer, superficial, mechanical causes. They forced historical results through mechanistic interference, by the use of force, raping nations (as they raped their women at home) into submission.

The same imperialist idiocy still forms the mindset of Western governments – they think that if they genocide the Lebanese Hezbollah (or the Palestinian Hamas) mechanistically with Israeli aeroplanes, tanks and what not, they will succeed in winning the game – for them, all is a game, and the infantile US games-theory at that, of winners-and-losers, cowboys-and-Indians…

G-8 governments shall never understand that nobody can eliminate profoundly inner, dialectical causes. Only Karl Marx and Engels understood this profound causality they developed from its roots in ancient classical Greek thought (especially Aristotle) via Medieval philosophy based on Christ’s wisdom – evil contains its own seeds of destruction – capitalism bears the seeds of its own destruction, just as a pregnant mother carries a child that shall manifest his parents bad or good, and the tiny oak-seed becomes the massive tree (Aristotle’s famous example).
Newtonian physics understands only external causality – the imperialist mindset. Quantum physics on the other hand manifests inner dialectical causes as effects, and a Marxist training may do US Quantum physicists much good…

The grand US stupidity of the 20th c. was the rise of Joseph McCarthy and his blind and mentally blinding anti-communism causing much of the grief of our times.

If the CIA had not invented the Taliban monster that bit its head, communist Afghanistan today may have become the envy of … Pakistan that partners the USA in mafia corruption.

If the US neo-Cons could even succeed in genociding the Hezbollah, a thousand more shall be born as a direct result of that genocide. The Young Turks were fearful, that even if half-an-Armenian would be left, he would spawn a million to avenge their crime.

Science rid the world of TB, which is returning even more virulent… not because its elimination was delusional, no, but because the circumstances (of abject mass poverty, bad housing, lax hygiene etc.) which gave rise to it in the first place has also returned to the Western countries.

A great Conspiracy of Modern Times

Look at the mess today’s world is in – the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Kashmir Pakistani-Indian problem, the need for Reparations arising from the acknowledgment of the genocide of the Armenians, The South African Apartheid – although dismantled, but still keeping the South African people in abject mass-poverty etc. etc.

Every problem in the modern world is a left-over from British imperialism. Today’s world was invented by the British imperialists. Divide-and-Rule – they deliberately created in white-halls black-holes – ‘insoluble’ problems based on religious-national emotionalism that plunges individuals into emotional turmoil, and engages their ethnic groups in genocidal hatreds, forcing them into an endless cycle of violence.

The British imperialists thought they were for-ever, and would forever be the globe’s Policemen – they did not reckon with the awakening of self-respect-and-reliance, a side-effect of the Feminist Revolution, for example. The British imperialists in partnership with their American brethren operate still in that time-warped mindset with still some success, alas, however much it may be Nazi-inhuman.

The Hebrew Torah – the sacred book of the Jews, which is the oldest section of the Old Testament – makes it abundantly clear that Abraham fathered both Ishmael (the progenitor of the Arabs) and Itskhak (the progenitor of the Jews).

I have sat in conferences where the intelligent Arabs have proudly referred to their Jewish colleagues as “Cousins”, while some Orthodox Jews among them have referred to their Arab cousins in my hearing distance as “Hamor”=Donkey.

The Torah makes it also symbolically clear that the Arabs are the older ones, probably by at least a thousand years – Ishmael was 13 when Isaac was born. His mother’s name, “Hagar” (=Stone) sounds right even in the modern Egyptian dialect of Arabic, where “j” (as in ‘jar’) is pronounced as “g” (as in ‘garden’), Gamal Abdel Nasser (=Beautiful Slave of Victory)] instead of Jamal.

By this account in the Torah, Hebrew is undoubtedly a dialect of Arabic – which would be anathema for the Orthodox Jews to accept – they have no doubt whatsoever that Hebrew was what God spoke, as all Arabs firmly believe that Allah spoke in the Arabic of the Koran.

When the anglophile wealthy Armenian capitalist Calouste Gulbenkian led the British imperialists to the oil-wells of Iraq – in Kirkuk … he was happy to receive a 5 percent interest for himself, letting the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) get the 95, leaving nothing for the multi-ethnic Iraqi people, with huge Jewish and Armenian communities, Kurds, Sunni Muslims etc. And the British government owned IPC guzzled and guzzled and guzzled the Petrol, counting on the loyalty of the local anglophile workforce – one of them was the husband of my cousin, an engineer, so loyal to the British and loving of the British, that one day, he climbs up one of the massive tanks to fix a problem and falls in it… IPC’s operational capacity came first!

If Jews and Arabs, as cousins, would unite, creative genius and the world’s petrol in their bowels, they could easily smash British imperialism to smithereens, let alone dominate the world as a consequence – something possible even today.

What better prevention of this than the creation by the foxes of British imperialism of the Arab-Jew hatred seeded in Palestine, the heart of the vast Arab lands split up into many fraudulent nationalities, like Egyptian, Syrian, Iraqi, Lebanese… most people in the world do not seem to know that they were all Arabs, before the British imperialists invented them artificially in our own lifetime, as a means to dominate them and steal their petrol, only to see it stolen by the new American thieves…

The war in Iraq is really a return to the days of British petrol-thieving now on the hump of the Americans – no wonder the British Prime Minister won’t get off his ride!

Notes

(1) Title of an article by Rory McCarthy, The Guardian, July 19, 2006, p. 6.

(2) ‘Wife of hate preacher begs: Bring him back from Beirut” by Robert Mendick, Chief Reporter, Evening Standard, 21 July 2006, p.5.

(3) American Presidents are notorious with their habit of using filthy language – Richard Nixon was the worst offender, to be followed by John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson. The present lot at the White House of the neo-Cons surpass even Nixon – Dick Cheney, the Vice President, is such an arrogant fool, who thinks nothing of shooting his hunting mate on a duck shoot, is reported to have barked at the Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy; ‘go fuck yourself’– cited in “A telling insight into the one-sided relationship with Bush” by Rupert Cornwell, The Independent, 18 July, 2006, p. 2.

(4) The Independent, 26 July, 2006, p. 7.

(5) “Bloody Betrayal – In this furious denunciation, military historian MAX HASTINGS argues that ministers have contemptuously lied about Afghanistan – leaving our desperately undermanned Army to make good Blair’s bad cheques in blood”, Saturday Essay, by Max Hastings, Daily Mail, July 8, 2006, p.16-17.

The author’s and the Daily Mail’s bellyache is not that Britain has no place in Afghanistan, he scolds “Great nations such as Germany and France” for having “turned their backs on Afghanistan” – Nay, Hastings and his right-wing Rottweilers want a better British fighting machine in Afghanistan – better armed, more lethally equipped, with all the paraphernalia of professionalism in murder capability about which the British governments brag frequently.

(6) “Blow up my city and I’ll blow up yours” by Robert Fisk in Kfar Chim, Lebanon, The Independent, 18 July 2006, p.3.

(7) Letters to the Editor, under the general heading “Terrorism and the origins of the conflict in Lebanon”, The Daily Telegraph, July 25, 2006, p. 23.

*

An Afterword

I had just completed my article when my much educated son Vaughan – a first class graduate of 3 of the world’s leading universities Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard – e-mailed me some website references.

I was overwhelmed to discover that my logical analysis and conclusion about the Israeli massacre of Lebanon being long-time coming was fully correct – according to an article in San Francisco Chronicle, 21 July 2006 “Israel set war plan more than a year ago etc.”; see http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/07/21/MNG2QK396D1

It seems there was a long-standing US government plan (others may call it a conspiracy) titled the Greater Middle East Initiative (GMEI), conceived “in late 2003” and presented to the G-8 for imperialist priming – massaged into even a bigger catchments-area, re-titled as the Broader Middle East and North Africa Initiative (BMENAI)… http://www.meib.org/articles/0407_me2.htm.

Lebanon with its unique entertainment facilities from sea to snowy mountains could be converted into a nice brothel for the US personnel, just as the whole of Thailand was designated to be so for the exclusive use of the US Army fighting the Viet Cong … Thailand of course never recovered from the US porno transformation – has now evolved into the paedophile sex capital of the whole world!

Many of my friends and colleagues are puzzled by Israel’s hatred of Hezbollah, as the latter have nothing to do with the Palestinian issue… on the same above-mentioned website www.meib.org/articles/0407_12.htm is an eye-opener never even hinted at in the so-said very well-informed British press, titled “Hezbollah and the West African Diamond Trade” – my Black humour joke that Hezbollah may even be a CIA trained force seems to have had some kind of a hunch in it as the article speaks of the Lebanese traders being the dominant conduit of the diamond downloaded onto the global markets from the Sierra Leone mines, and the “flow of Hezbollah financing from smuggling networks in the United States”!

And here comes the coup de foudre that explains Israel’s compulsive hatred of Hezbollah and its Old Testament god’s vengeance ordering the genocide of the Lebanese – “Joseph Momoh [the president of Sierra Leone]… sought to cut his regime’s ties to Lebanese merchants by inviting Israeli diamond traders into the country.” There it is – the full sickening capitalist truth – behold the naked emperor, for whose glory the Lebanese children of Qana were massacred by the diamond-crazed Israeli chiefs…

And finally, the most ludicrous news yet of this obscene war of diamond-whores – A lunatic US Attorney Yehudah Talmon, with a gang of similar cynical idiots of his profession, intends to sue the Lebanese government for … war damage and compensation – check out http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3278932,00.html.

Imagine if the German government at the end of the Second World War had taken the emaciated walking ghosts that were the concentration camp survivors to court, to charge them with the destruction of German cities… Such stupidity frankly can only occur in America where most people believe in alien abduction…

Or could it be that Yehuda Talmon is really a super-intelligent communist-under-the-bed… trying to make America and Israel the laughing stock of the world, even teaching the Lebanese a perverted lesson to actually take Israel to court for war damages and reparations…which then of course will have to be paid for by its US pimps? If so, then Mr Talmon deserves a Nobel Prize!

Re-Discovered: A Sensational 2,000 Year Old Masterpiece Neglected by Art-Historians A Radical Iconographic Analysis

2006-04-27T13:17:00.000-07:00

This is a most powerful piece of a Roman wall-painting found in Pompeii, now preserved in the National Museum of the city of Naples (Italy), believed to be 2,000 years old (from the first century AD), representing Medea, moments before the killing of her own children. As the pictorial visualization of an emotional psychological moment of immense tension and pressure, it is unequalled in the world’s history of art – the madness in the eyes, engulfing her whole visage is clearly captured.

What is even more extraordinary and unique is the ultra-eroticism of the picture’s iconography, and the most shocking sexual messages encoded by the unknown painter, enlightening the socio-philosophical dimensions of human sexuality, two thousand years before our own Freudian post-modernism.

Medea is holding a kind of super-long ‘meat-cleaver’, with a broad blade (faded out into the background) stuck on a phallic head, the handle of which – seen in the reverse direction – plunges into Medea’s cupped hands – and there’s the rub!

Medea’s hands, with thumbs just touching, form a most blatant opened-up vulva. Computer technology offers a miraculous opportunity to art historians and critics for the very first time in history to demonstrate (make explicit) their implicit interpretative insights – and here is how ; by stretching the above close-up of Medea’s hands, one gets a graphic, almost a pornographic thumbnail image of the vagina, with the ‘sword’ handle inside giving it an extraordinary perspectival depth, five hundred years before such experiments were undertaken by the Renaissance painters (like Masaccio, for example, foreshortening figures). Additionally, the dagger-handle gives the vaginal cave-like opening the appropriate textured walls almost photographically, as a physiologically true close-up. Now rotate the thumbnail close-up 360 degrees, and the photogenic eroticism becomes almost intensely photo-realistic… The female plumpness of the hands display a ‘naked’ ‘clean-shaven’ Mons Veneris (the pubic triangle labelled in antiquity as the Mound of Venus, frequently depilated among the aristocracy), the triangular shape of which (five hundred years later identified as Leonardo Da Vinci’s compositional trademark) is emphasized and re-emphasized several times in connection with the naturally curved arms – triangle, within a triangle, within a triangle, like a Chinese box.

Medea, thus (on the verge of child-murder) is portrayed as a woman with a phallic dagger plunged right into the wide-open orifice of her very genitals (almost ready for child-birth) – Jason’s action (of neglecting his ethical duty towards his Wife number One – see my article preceding this, titled ‘The Much Misunderstood Medea’) has stabbed her in her, not heart, but over-excited cave-like (because not a ‘civilized’ Greek) vulva!

The classical Greeks (on Vases and Drinking Vessels) portrayed over-sized genitals as symbols of sexual animalism in human beings, usually on Satyrs (with animal hoofs), Bacchic revellers and … Foreigners. The latter as a social class were considered to be ‘uncivilized’, hence ‘barbaric’, identified with uncontrollable animal sexuality with large genitals.

In this Roman portraiture heavily clothed, the painter succeeds with extraordinary subtlety and painterly skill in painting a naked Venus-mound – smooth-skinned plump hands (in the absolute foreground of the painting), highlighted by the layered background of the heavy clothing – a most remarkable iconographic achievement in the world-history of painting.

Medea’s abundantly bejewelled right arm criss-crosses the folds and the patterns of the heavy fabric of the clothing, creating the visual illusion of a tiger and/or a lion skin, Medea’s chest being its head…with dark-blood red nipples as the fiery eyes. Moreover, the latter, has more in it than meets the eye – the painter’s iconography
(1) Underlines conceptually the tragic ambiguous intensity of Medea’s
Emotional state, sprouting blood instead of milk and
(2) In terms of sheer painterly craft, skilfully indicates a transparent blouse for the nipples to be seen (and bleed) thus.
It remains to be aware that the milk-white sunlight (the Milky Way was known to the classical Greeks) falling on her chest is a reference to Helios – the sun-god, who was Medea’s divine grandfather, and saviour of her skin from the unforgivable act of murdering her own children, only and only and for no other reason but to deeply and mortally wound their father, Jason, because he loved them infinitely – obviously, she didn’t, because she could kill them for sheer power-games – and all because she felt deeply insulted, stabbed and wounded in her c*** as uniquely illustrated in this most extraordinary masterpiece screaming down the millennia that All is sexual, and Sexuality is All.

The Much Misunderstood Medea of Euripides Radical new interpretations of ancient Problems

2006-04-27T12:41:00.000-07:00

Prolegomena

I contend that Sexuality is all, and all is sexual.
This definitional concept of Life usually linked with Freud’s name, has really nothing to do with him, and is as old as wo(man)kind and her/his first consciousness of it. It is definitely the first principle, grounding the Hebrew Old Testament, classical Greek Drama, and Plato’s Philosophy that followed it. It is there, the cornerstone of the arch that subtends the life of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus that begins on the theme of its failure – the decimated fertility of all, the land and its people, in search of an urgent cure. It is the fulcrum upon which Euripides’ play Medea balances, with the mythical Aegeus, father of the mythical Theseus, trying desperately to procreate… with the promise of help from Medeanic sexual therapies! [vide, my article following this one, titled ‘Re-Discovered, A Sensational 2,000 years old Masterpiece etc.’]

A Promethean Box vs. Pandora’s

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) discovered a Pandora’s Box of subliminal sexual forces at work throughout human history. He didn’t know what to do with it – he struggled to open the box fully, but couldn’t manage, he frequently jammed the lid, and some of his own mental illness caused by decades of cocaine snorting (Wilson and Zarate 2002) was stuffed through the holes of the punctured box already full of unknown diseases… While awarding him the status of a pioneer, we shall not deal with Freud’s pornographic fantasies; paedophiliac child-sex interest, female penis envy, male Oedipal incestuous desire for own mother, sexual jealousy cum hatred of own father, homoerotic friendship amongst the male of the species (Freud-Fliess correspondence) etc. all of which gained public respectability in an age of private hypocrisies.

Ours is the discovery of a ‘Promethean Box’ of secrets of healthy evolutionary developments that have forged human history via the power of natural heterosexuality.

One of the first such secrets revealed here for the very first time shall be the profound observation that human cultural history has been the product of the enormous tensions arising from the massive forces of the Polygamous social structure defending itself in diametrical and dialectical opposition from the equally powerful force – a tidal wave of Monogamy threatening to engulf globally all human social relations, under pressure from Western Christianity. Today, what American and English sociologists misunderstand childishly as a political “clash of civilizations”, I would define as a titanic World War between the socio-sexual forces of the polygamous Islam, and Africa, collapsing under the effective hypocrisies of monogamous Christianity. Political causality apart, suicide-bombers firmly believe in the reality of the fantasy of entering heaven to be instantly awarded with endless courtesans and concubines… their political masters merely exploit the youth’s (no OAP-bombers here) pent-up heterosexual frustrations within the strict Islamic context of sexual mores prohibiting sex-before-marriage. As for the permissive African heterosexuality – the AIDS virus came to devastate whole economies, the long term effects of which are still incalculable.

Christian monogamy in the West, after 2000 years of theoretical definition, still has not won the day from mankind’s natural state of heterosexual polygamy – instead, Christian institutions, including the religious ones, have turned hypocritical, harbouring vicarious vicar-ly perversions like Paedophilia.

Many are the ways of human ingenuity that subvert the monogamous strictures of Western Christianity that needs further research. A common way, for example, has been the ‘homosexual marriage’ of convenience – Hollywood stars acting as heterosexual camouflage. Secretive male homosexual liaisons, until the success of Gay Liberation, were the acceptable polygamous alternative for the ‘happily’ married Christian wife to tolerate. Open Homosexuality itself, by definition, cannot be monogamous (of course there are exceptions – exceptions do not make the rule) – it blossoms and thrives ideally within the Christian monogamous matrix as an alternative dialectical polyandrous sexual practice.

Although in a definitional sense Monogamy was invented by St. Paul who constructed it on a dictum of Jesus about ‘man and wife becoming one flesh and blood’ (symbolized by the Christian marriage ceremony), the seed of evolutionary monogamy arose in nature, and developed very slowly, almost invisibly in all ancient cultures through the individual female’s need for exclusive security of survival for her own progeny.

Those seeds are detectable and come to sudden blossoming in a play like Euripides’ Medea to such an extent that in the hands of Christian commentators – historically the whole of the Western culture, whether atheist or not, people brought up in the monogamous tradition – it overrides the evidence of polygamous social infra structures, which are then drowned in the mire of ‘Christian’ scholars’ intellectual super-structures, distorting the original meanings of the play some of which (more would need a book!) we shall attempt to recover and re-discover.

Massive amounts of misinterpretations in endless treatises have treated the entirely misplaced ‘problems’ of Euripides’ play – Why does Medea kill her children? Must she become mad (maddened by ‘love’ = sex, really – see, my article following this one, titled ‘Re-Discovered A Sensational 2,000 years old Masterpiece etc.’) for such an act to follow? She wants to hurt her ‘husband’ – a Christian notion this – if the Greek word is ‘aner’, it means merely ‘a man=the male of the species’ – and, why hurt herself too as the Chorus warns her?

You may become the most miserable woman
(Loeb classical Library, No. 12, line 818, in my own translation from the original Greek).
The sentence is definitely multiple-meaning, equally valid grammatically to translate as the most miserable of all women).

And then, Medea gets away with murder, literally, as Euripides allows the oldest Sun-god (an aspect of the God of Gods under whatever guise – in this play it is Helios, although a divine name, the word also literally means sun) be Medea’s grandfather, thence protector, and saviour. Why should that be? And of course the whole paraphernalia of Christian-monogamous nonsensical interpretations, accrued over centuries of misunderstandings – that Jason broke his marital bond, commitment, faith, and what not…Christian problems all.

The most reasonable, rational, and compassionate Jason is universally abused, mocked and ridiculed by post-modern feminists as a sexual weakling and a fool, an uncaring father and a paedophile pervert chasing young skirt! Etc.

The golden key to the absolute truth of the play (buried under centuries of monogamous Christian hogwash) – and it is here revealed for the very first time – is in 5 lines from the dialogue between Medea and Jason (ll. 585-90).

I shall forego examining the original text in classical Greek, only because their translation does not present cruces in terms of the points I shall make. Let me quote here two different translations (for the non-Greek scholars among the readers) to show that they more or less agree in terms of the overall content; first the banal outdated translation by Philip Vellacott (1963);

Medea: One word will throw you: if you were honest, you ought first
To have won me over, not got married behind my back.
Jason: No doubt, if I had mentioned it, you would have proved
Most helpful. Why, even now you will not bring yourself
To calm this raging temper.
Medea: That was not the point; (ll. 587-91)

Now for an excellent ‘translation’ by Eleanor Wilner, who I think does not know Greek (with Ines Azar, I think the Greek scholar in the partnership) (from Slavitt and Bovie 1998);

Medea
A single point destroys your case –
if this marriage were so advantageous to us all, you would
have asked for my consent before you made it, and not
gone sneaking out to wed behind your family’s back.

Jason
And a fine support you would have given had I brought
you this proposal before the fact; had I asked for your
approval of a marriage, which even now, being done,
has set a raging fire in your heart – a fire which neither
reason nor good counsel can persuade you to put out. (ll. 629-37)

Revealed here for the First time

A large bracket here necessary to explain some of the innovative discoveries researched for this essay to validate the further points in the forthcoming argument – Never captured hitherto by classical scholars, a Euripidean sardonic pun on the name of the King (Creon) in this play is the word khreon=prophecy, an ancient prophet-king so short-sighted as not to predict Medea’s plots unravelling under his nose – what is already known to the Chorus, the King’s very own subjects!

One of the most widely used puns of the cognate verb-forms khreomai / khraomai is the extension into the sexual meaning for intercourse, throughout Herodotus, for example – khresthai gunaiki means nothing else but to f*** (a woman in this case), with precisely the same connotations as in English (rarely understood by ordinary folk) of sexual use meaning abuse. Even the Homeric non-sexual use of the word (attack, assail, be eager) indeed includes violence and desire, the basic components of sexual lust. Another ancient cluster of presumed non-sexual meanings (perhaps even contemporary with Homer) is to scrape, graze, wound – yet all cognate with the violence/thrust of the male sexual act.

Aristophanes, history’s greatest writer of comedies, used abundantly the different forms of the verb khrao as a deliberate pun on its extended meaning of f*** and nothing else.

What has never been understood hitherto by the grand Anglo-German conglomerate of Christian classical scholars of Greek Drama is that the Aristophanesian pun is indeed very active and alive in all of Euripides, and possibly is the source of Aristophanes’ own inspiration.

Incredibly, this point is ‘discovered’ in this essay for the very first time – why are we so certain?

Because it could never occur to any ‘respectable’ German or Victorian Oxbridge classical Greek scholar (Gilbert Murray et al.) that so-said ‘obscene’ language, even camouflaged as puns, could ever be used in grand Greek Tragedy – their imperialist racist purist conceptual framework would never permit such ‘filth’ in noble Greek Drama – the source of Wagnerite myth-making for the delectation of the upper classes. Of course they could not and would not deny its existence in the ‘lesser’ medium of Comedies written for the rabble by Aristophanes.

They could hardly speak of the Satyr plays (with massive ‘mechanical’ phalli worn by the actors as part of their standard costume – profusely in evidence on Greek vases), performed in honour of the Dionysiac phallic cult, even though, they could not deny the uncontroversial archaeological fact that a priapic statue (=with massive outsize erection) of Dionysos, the god of drama (and wine, and female wild sexuality, and Transvestism etc.) would have been placed as an altarpiece in the Orchestra before any theatrical performance.

Euripides’ Medea (pre-dating Aristophanes) using abundantly the different forms of the verb khrein / khraomai throughout the play, puns each time saying to Jason ‘literally’ you’re f***ed! Another instance of the same pun occurs for example, when Medea is complaining to the sexually-stressed-obsessed Aegeus, who has been unable to impregnate women, and is on his way to consult a friend about the Oracle of Delphi he has visited for a cure, that Jason has been adikei=unjust to her (line 691) – a great barbaric insult this, because dikeh=justice was synonymous with civilized citizenry, Aegeus asks with a naughty Euripidean pun; “What necessary [khrehma] has he done?”(line 693) – the pun translates absolutely as post-modern as in a Tarantino US film – “what the f*** is he doing?”

Yet another First

The Anglo-German Victorian ‘imperial’ dogmatists fixed once and for all (or so they thought), for all eternity, the meaning of the label orchestra as the spatial place in the Greek classical theatre where the Chorus dances… deriving the noun from the verb orcheomai = to dance, which produces a cluster of cognate meanings – orchestes = a dancer, orchesis = a dance, etc.

No ‘noble’ classical dogmatist could allow himself to grasp that the Greek orchestra has everything to do with the (ironically feminine) word orchis meaning literally and nothing else but testicle!

Thus, the orchestra in the classical Greek theatre, the temporary home of the Greek Chorus – one of the most astounding inventions in the history of theatre – was actually conceived of as a seed-bed of fertility – ‘the place of the testicles’… To combine both the traditional and the new meaning herein suggested for the first time ever, let us say succinctly that the classical Greek orchestra was the playing field area reserved for the dancing testicles – a woman’s body as a field to be sown with male seeds is a commonplace metaphor in all of Greek Drama (and Comedy) – upon which depended the fertility and the very life of a society and its city-state.

It is precisely where Sophocles, the second of the triumvirate of the greatest Greek dramatists the world has ever seen, takes up the story of Oedipus Tyrannos, history’s most famous play – it begins on the plight of a society in meltdown, because the fertility of its people and their sustenance-providing animals is decimated for a mysterious reason not even the Oracle at Delphi is able to clarify.

The plight of Aegeus desperately seeking fecundity in Euripides’ Medea is a mini-caricature of Sophocles’grand Oedipean theme (made the paradigm of all Tragedy by Aristotle in his book the Poetics, the first book of literary, and art-criticism in general, in history) – the name of Creon, Oedipus’ uncle, surfaces blatantly un-altered in Euripides’ play, for no other conceivable reason – there is, for example, no known king of Corinth bearing that name! Close the bracket.

Medea’s (both play and Character) true problem hitherto not-understood

But what is the significance of all the above in terms of the play’s central meaning(s)? Having explained some of the true meanings of the original Greek, we can now state with confidence that the passage (quoted above at length in translation) contains the throbbing heart of Euripides’ immensely complex, historical world of socio-cultural, psycho-sexual multiple-meanings hitherto un-discovered – a mirror held to the strictly ‘hieratical’ hierarchical social stratification of polygamous social relations, the single focal seminal rule of which – its cardinal law – is the consent of the 1st wife to the taking of a 2nd wife, and so further on sequentially down the line, viz. the consent of the 1st and the 2nd wives must be obtained absolutely by the patriarchal alpha male (‘husband’) for the 3rd etc.

This archetypal grand rule of polygamy is still preserved in all African polygamous societies still extant in our own times, and is fundamental to the Koranic shariah law in Islam (which limits the number of wives to 4, and de-limits the number of ‘concubines’ ad infinitum – hence the total elimination (for the male) of any potential for illicit adultery. If the latter would still occur… then it can only be regarded by the Sacred Law as the result of sheer lunacy and/or defiance of it, hence meriting death by stoning!

Of course the problem for the female should not even exist, as theoretically, in patriarchal law globally – also in ancient China, and not only in Islam – the woman’s sexuality is defined and identified exclusively in relationship with the male.(*) The female lacks any autonomous sexual definition outside her relationship with the alpha male. This cardinal seminal law of polygamy ensures and identifies progeny, as a necessary evolutionary change in human social relations different from the animal kingdom, where other more violent mechanisms are at play – the alpha lion of the pride for example, kills the babies of all the females he takes over from the male he topples, to impregnate them afresh!

Demosthenes (384-322 BC) has preserved a record of the survival of this (Sabben-Clare and Warman 1978, p.34), almost a thousand years before the appearance of historical Islam;
Living together, means producing children, enrolling sons among clansmen and
demesmen and giving away daughters as one’s own to husbands. Courtesans we
have for pleasure and concubines to satisfy our daily bodily needs, but wives to
produce true-born children and to be trustworthy guardians of the household.

Extraordinary functional distinctions of the female are refined within this terse text – ‘wives’ ensure the certainty of the paternal progeny (hence family wealth), and once inseminated are taken out of the male sexual-needs formula altogether – they are used to sustain power relations for aristocratic alliances, while countless numbers of females service “the daily” male sexual needs – the distinction between these as courtesans…for pleasure playing music, reciting poetry, conversing intelligently, and concubines to satisfy…daily bodily needs surfaces a thousand years later in Islam almost verbatim.

Thus, it is that cardinal seminal law of polygamy, with its profound evolutionary socio-economic repercussions, that Euripides’ Jason is breaking, as evidenced by the hugely important 5 lines/passage discussed above in two translations.

Medea is absolutely entitled to her archetypal single grand right of consent to Jason’s choice of a new heterosexual relationship (‘wife’ in the Christian sense). It is precisely what Medea is accusing Jason of – not seeking her consent – but doing it stealthily behind her back.

Euripides’ Jason’s thunderous reply comes as a sardonic classical Greek ‘post-modern’ mockery of the whole socio-political structure of Polygamy, decrying the absurd contradiction of its socio-sexual relations grounded on the grand rule of the 1st wife’s consent, which dis-empowers the alpha male within the context of volcanic female sexual jealousies – in evolutionary terms, female sexual jealousy guards the security of exclusive access to male resources – while simultaneously empowering him in the patriarchal social sphere…

Euripides is thus converting Jason into the post-modern ‘new’ man of his day – causing shock and horror to the expectations of the ‘traditionalist old guard’ – the aristocrats among the audience, while at the same time winning the gleeful admiration of the ‘new’ young citizens of his day – Euripides, like Socrates, was accused of corrupting the young…

I have no space here to analyze further the enormous ramifications of the sensational discovery revealed above in terms of the rest of Euripides’ play.

Suffice it to conclude that Sexual liberation for both genders has never been complete, or without volcanic consequences – human sexuality still remains the most powerful force in Nature forging history – one could even reinterpret the military-industrial complex responsible for the wretchedness of the world as no more than a pathological aspect of it – military personnel exposing themselves to the rest of the world seeking macho admiration for their perverted tools…

Notes

(*) In the Chinese grammar, there is no gender. Traditionally, in the patriarchal Chinese culture, down to the days of Mao’s wife’s political power, ‘the woman’ did not exist – she was there all right, but the Chinese would not notice ‘her’, so much so that, unlike in the West, vicious misogyny is completely absent from Chinese literary documents. One of the worst practices of Imperial China was of course female baby foot-binding, whereby the adult female would develop stunted baby-feet for sexual purposes pleasuring the male – but this had no conscious evil purpose in it (as the burning of the witches in the West), rather was the product of ignorance and stupidity.
It is only in our own days that ‘the woman’ is finally ‘surfacing’ in China, but unlike in the West, without any baggage of misogyny hindering her appearance and progress.
The Chinese language today reflects and documents this huge sociological phenomenon in a most fascinating manner – The most interesting linguistic evolutionary phenomenon witnessed today in current Chinese use is the case of the genderless ‘character’ for the third person pronoun ta=he/she, which is being differentiated for the very first time in the Chinese language today by the pre-fixal addition of the character for woman=nu signifying altogether she, and the radical for the ‘standing man’ to signify he, even though these additions do not amount to gendering the pronunciation of the differentiated characters, they are still pronounced in both cases as the traditional genderless ta.

Bibliography

Loeb Classical Library, Number 12, Euripides, Cyclops, Alcestis, Medea, Bilingual edition by David Kovacs, 1994//2001, Harvard University Press.

Sabben-Clare, J. P. and Warman, M. S. (eds) (1978) The Culture of Athens, LACTOR 12, Lact Publications, Text CA92, p. 34.

Slavitt, D. R. and Bovie, P. (eds) (1998) Euripides, 1 – Medea, Hecuba, Andromache, The Bacchae, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press.

Vellacott, P. (1963) Euripides, Medea and other Plays, London, Penguin Classics.

Wilson, S. and Zarate, O. (2002) The Freud Wars, Icon Books UK + Totem Books USA.

The Sea Scene on my Mother's Day

2006-04-03T03:22:00.000-07:00

For Clarice who read this first

I do not know if all men and women die the same way

Waiting and hoping she would be coming home
I was certain the doctors were entirely wrong

She lacked any signs of a wasting disease
She’d never smoked – a teetotal almost by birth

She looked so healthy and Confucian wise
Only a little old

Mah-mah Ho-kiss * used to banter with me
Pour frequently freezing water over my magisterial confidence

“ Son, tell me, now!
At this very moment, what’s in my heart?
How would you know it? ”

Her mind was in her heart – that much I knew
“ Who can tell what’s in anybody’s mind? ”

As on earth, so in their vision of the Underworld
The ancients thought of the Sea and its shore as a metaphor
The dreaded Charon transported the dead souls ‘to the other shore’

Little did I know how right and true the old Greeks were!

I had feared death mortally
Would change my path to avoid
A funeral cortege on its way to the seaside…

“ When do you think I can take her home, Nurse?
Shall we call for a taxi? ”

“ Will you not understand, good Professor
Your mother is dying, No! She’s not going home! ”

The Irish male nurse burst the shores of his temper
Flooding me with furious oceanic anger

“ No, Prof., you won’t be taking her home ”
He repeated and rubbed tons of sea-salt in my just-wounded soul

I trusted my sister alone and she was dead silent…

Okeanus the classical Greek Titan
Encircled the known world like a belt
Overhanging a fat man’s beer belly

The father of all earthly water was a mother too…

My sister Ar-sineh of Montreal thought I was mad
Cracking camp jokes, babbling of ancient Greeks

Mah-mah Ho-kiss was gasping for breath through an oxygen mask

It was the evening of a long day watching over her hospital bed
And I wanted to make her laugh

“ Mah-mah, Ho-kiss, tell me
What’s in your heart now? ”

Leaning over out of a fearful boredom
I whispered right into her ears my face very close to hers

In the past our cue for a Confucian joke…
But she was not laughing this time

Dead worried I repeated my Armenian catchphrase
Mah-mah Ho-kiss in-dzi ehs-say +

“ I’ve nothing to say ”

The fury of all the fifty Furies chasing Orestes in Aeschylus
Etched suddenly on her visage through the transparent mask

Suddenly
She gulped
And choked on air

Mah-mah Ar-sineh Ho-kiss hold her Nurse help pull her up
She’s sinking in the sea

And the last bubbles of her universal breath
Slowly one by one surfaced from her unfathomable soulful seaful depths

Luce-tania she was and Titanic

The fiery chiaroscuro sun-disk at dusk
Floating like a feather down into Turner’s depths of an infinite sea
Seeworthy

I and Ar-sineh left orphans on the shore
Dumb, dead, and broken hearted
Soul destroyed

How and what shall we could we must we tell Israel our father
Ninety years ago he’d seen his people a million massacred by the Young old Turks

What and how might we must we will we tell our absent siblings
Kha-tchik in Hounslow, Mar-karid in Paris, Mari-noss in Toronto

Suddenly
A gust of gentle wind
Her soul I think on the way out of Golgotha
Breezed through the hospital sea shore
Banging doors and blowing the ward windows wide open
Flapping

Suddenly
A quiet rumble alighted in a quick flash lightning
Rain fell painfully on the panes outside for just a few moments

Was my mah-mah ho-kiss Christ’s sister?

The fear of death had almost killed me
Until the day I saw the scene of my Mother’s Day
When the titanic Okeanus sank my mother’s ship

Death the Reaper rapes all life before it

Do not avoid your parents’ death my child

Witnessing their passing away at life’s seashore
Shall give you the courage you need

To survive in sanity in a world harvested
Regularly by God’s own very Rapist

* Armenian, translates my mother, my soul

+ Armenian, translates my mother, my soul, tell me! – The Indo-European root of the Armenian verb “ehs-say-l” (infinitive form) is indeed cognate precisely with the English verb to “say”.

Who needs love? The New-Millennial Search For Emanuel Swedenborg – the Last Sage of the World

2006-02-25T22:28:00.000-08:00

(The text of the millennial Public Lecture, delivered to the London Swedenborg Society, on 30th January, 1999, in celebration of Emanuel Swedenborg’s Birthday)

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) was a Swedish scientist turned mystic and sage. Prof. Pilikian calls him the world’s last sage. There is in London a venerable old institution established in 1810 - The Swedenborg Society, housed in its own sumptuous premises in the heart of central London’s renowned Bloomsbury area. At the dawn of the new millennium, Prof. Pilikian was invited by this Society to deliver the millennial public lecture, in celebration of the Sage’s birthday, 29th January (1688). With enthusiastic co-operation from Stephen McNeilly, Editor and Head of Publications at the Swedenborg Society, Prof. Pilikian staged a micro-cultural-festival for the packed house – his brother, Khatchadur Pilikian, Bel-Canto trained opera-singer from Italy, delighted the audience with a classical concert, while Armenia’s contemporary painter, Artur Oshakantsi had unveiled his masterly portrait of Emanuel Swedenborg for the occasion, preceding Prof. Pilikian’s lecture, the text of which is published herein for the very first time.

It shows the Professor as a master of philosophical discourse, rooted in the practical matters of our politics-ridden daily lives. Richard Lines, the distinguished lawyer, past president of the Society and present Secretary had pronounced the words of the Society’s appreciation. The Professor’s predictive words and critical analyses are as fresh and valid today, perhaps even more so! His description of Swedenborg as the world’s Last Sage may even be a tad ambiguous, if we wish to create some elbow room for our own Professor! – Simon Aynedjian, Editor, GIBRAHAYER Internet Magazine.
I love Swedenborg. And I am very grateful to the Swedenborg Society for this opportunity to share some ideas with you.

The reason I love his works so much is because I consider Swedenborg to be a man of… the future. And in our age of disposables, there are very few such great minds left. Swedenborg's time has not come yet.

I am not in the business of predicting the future, but I have learnt (from the British Establishment) to anticipate trends, with the fond hope of being able to influence some. The purpose of my lecture is to humbly suggest that the next millennium may be Swedenborg's time, hoping that the Swedenborg Society in London readies itself for such an eventuality.

May I briefly outline Swedenborg's biography for those of you who have not even heard of him (Swedenborgians predictably forget that the subject of their love is unknown to others, and one must not tire of introducing him every time. Moreover, a speaker's choice of highlights will already reveal much of his own intended message. I am aware of this and I intend it to be so).

Swedenborg was a Swedish Scientist of the 18th century, who in mid-life (feminists would argue for a male menopausal cause) decided to chuck it all in, and dedicate the rest of his life to writing about spiritual matters, primarily the Bible. This of course puzzled and still does all those who dealt with his massive encyclopaedic output. The puzzle resolves itself if one remembers that until Darwin's Origin of Species a hundred years later, Religion and Science were almost one, rather complimentary, at least not in total dialectical opposition as today. However, I am not forgetting at all the horrors the Vatican had perpetrated against the likes of Galileo. In fact, I shall go further and suggest in virulent defence of the scientists, that the formal Church is itself wholly responsible (and no pun intended) for the situation arising in our own times whereby Science had to turn wholly a-moral to liberate itself from the shackles of the murderous Inquisition, the first genociders in post-Renaissance history.

It is a shocking fact that hitherto the Catholic Church has not found the moral courage to denounce its Inquisition, and apologise for the genocidal deaths of millions of innocent European peasantry. Until such time, frankly, the Church does not deserve the respect of Modern Science, although I suggest that the latter desperately needs a truly holy and spiritual Swedenborgian-kind Church for moral guidance, sooner rather than later ..We all know what un-holy acts modern scientists are capable of. And it is a great pity. It does not have to be like this. With Swedenborgian ethical values, Scientists, not fornicating politicians could lead the way to happier times.

Swedenborg loved London. He even died here.

Isaac Newton was young Swedenborg's ideal scientist. Newton too, had spent most of his days deciphering Biblical mysteries, a biographical fact which was heavily camouflaged by later post-Darwinist scholars of science.

As a preamble to some of my future references, which some of you may find provocative, I would like to articulate a few basic post-modernist credentials.

I believe in total and absolute democracy, humility and enlightened social tolerance, for a very good philosophical reason – the basics of Being and Becoming are still such a mystery, that all arrogance whether scientific or religious-fundamentalist, render power-obsessed people totally ridiculous.

To me, the mystery of Life is not in some grand remote conceptual scheme to be cracked by scientists one day, but in the fact (emphasised by Swedenborg) of second-by-second Breath-taking (not to say Breathing), which people usually forget. Life is so delicate, on such a knife-edge, it takes very little, and just a second's choking, to extinguish it instantly (which of course all murderers and political torturers know well).

One needs life every second of one's life, for which reason I think this mystery (of Why Life at all?) shall remain so for-ever, as no amount of scientific cracking of the genetic codes shall ever be able to explain (I am not of course referring to the usual mundane explications of Oxygenation etc.).

Swedenborg's beautiful spiritual theory, as an Influx of Life directly from God into every particle of every living thing, every milli-second, sustaining it at all moments throughout its life span, while a heart-warming concept, I find it to be unsatisfactory to my own perhaps hopelessly spoilt scientific tastes, and which serves as an occasion for me to declare that my love of Swedenborg is not sycophantic or religious, but reasoned, rational, scientific and Spiritual. I consider Religion to be a matter of Spirituality rather than the other way round. I love reading Swedenborg for its scientific rationality even about spiritual matters.

A second good reason for democracy and social tolerance is phenomenological. To appreciate it, one has to go back to the Pre-Socratic Greeks. One of the greatest discoveries they made was the observation that Everything Is and Is not. There are several variations on this very broad theme. Heraclitus put it in the most perceptive and poetically beautiful way – you can never step in the same River twice, as the waters are in a constant flux in a flowing river.

Another variation lies in the concept of the monetary coin. According to Herodotus, it was invented by the Lydians in ancient Armenia. Remarkably, it went out of use for a millennia (plunging Medieval economy into the Barter-system), before it re-surfaced in Renaissance Italy.

Conceptually, the two-sided monetary coin (compared with the flat-surfaced single-dimensional medallion) I think manifests a most stunning philosophical awareness – the Hegelian dialectical opposites. I personally think that it had to do with the invention of the Wheel (acknowledged by historians of Technology to be the first most important discovery of Man, after Fire).

The monetary coin iconographically is a mini-wheel, letting an economic transaction roll on smoothly. In terms of philosophical Logic, it manifests the two equally valid sides of any truth-proposition. Conceptually, it shows the two contradictory sides of an argument. For example, it is quite perturbing for un-trained minds to note that any affirmation stated verbally, immediately produces its counter-factual, even its exact opposite. Suppose I say, the sky is blue. You can immediately state with equal validity that No, it isn't (it never is in Britain anyway! And, most interestingly, the Victorian Pantomime seems to be based on such a relationship with its audience. I am referring to the audience members heckling usually the evil ones on the stage).

One of the greatest laws of the Universe is not found necessarily in the gravitational forces of the Newtonian mechanics, but I think in this, that to every Rule there is an exception (because everything is and is-not). Hence, I suggest philosophical Logicians waste their creative energies trying to locate exceptions. I contend further that one can define a Law valid for the whole universe, thus – No universal law can be valid universally without at least one exception. I name this – the First Law of Universal Being and Becoming.

This is proven by Quantum mechanics, at sub-atomic plane of particle-being and becoming. Being cannot become, without such a singularity. Being becomes, through the exception. It cannot be otherwise. Becoming can only be, via the possibility of its exception. Thus everything is, and is not, subversively referred to by Shakespeare's Hamlet as "To be or not to be" – we are dead while being alive. We carry an immense amount of dead cells in us, upon us (dead skin, for example). Equally, a dead body carries an equivalent amount of live bodies in and out – live bacteria and viruses which act to disintegrate the dead body.

The single most vital and essential fundament of Swedenborg's thinking is from the Biblical metaphor which conceptualises God manifested in Jesus Christ as Life itself. This in turn is the meaning of the Hebrew Tetragrammaton, most sacred, YA(H)WA, which derives from a Hebrew root meaning "To Be", hence Jehovah's declaration to Moses, etymologizing his own name, "I AM THAT I AM".

Swedenborg elaborates philosophically on this linguistic derivation to make it the conceptual framework of his whole philosophy; that God being Life, is alone alive, all else, the whole universe is dead. However, therefore, all, the whole universe and everything in it (including the Angles, no exception made of them) receive their lives as an influx directly from God himself. And God does this out of Love and Wisdom, which is equally in turn the rational proof that God is in fact the very essence of his love and wisdom, consequently, Life itself emanating directly from Him is, can be nothing else but the great universal It – Life and Wisdom.

The second most important intellectual force in esoteric literature belonged to Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. Her monumental masterpiece, the Secret Doctrine, appeared in two massive volumes in 1888. She knew and was influenced by Swedenborg's work, reversed it into its dialectical opposite (the other side of the coin, the is-not), arguing that in fact All is alive, even when commonly thought as dead. For Blavatsky, there is no dead matter. Matter is alive at all times by the dynamic energy and motion of its constituent atomic particles. Most remarkably for a non-scientist, she saw the equivalence of Energy and Matter, one of the greatest discoveries of all time credited to Einstein (it made the production of nuclear energy possible).

Einstein's formula, one of the most famous in the History of Science, E=MC2, where C is the speed of Light (Swedenborg's Divine Light of Wisdom), I would argue is the non-formula of all time, entirely tautological, as the speed of light raised to its second power is so large that anything multiplied with it will simply vanish into it. Einstein’s formula then is no more than E=E (a tautology).

And few people know that Einstein carried Madame Blavatsky's book (“Secret Doctrine”) as a constant desk top companion throughout his life. I therefore suggest that Einstein's equivalence of Energy and Matter is entirely owed to Madame Blavatsky's remarkable insight, inspired from Swedenborg's Nebular Theory of Creation of Matter, which alas, I cannot elaborate here further.

That everything is and is not should make us all weary of inhumanity, racism, political tyranny, and all forms of evil. It is my argument for absolute democracy and social tolerance. No one knows best. No one can know best. Those who think they do, whether arrogant scientists or lunatic American fundamentalists, are merely "whistling in the wind", in the immortal obscene joke by Shakespeare's Goneril, King Lear's Gonorrhoea-infected daughter.

We need more democracy, never less. Incredibly, even our democratic governments constantly and continuously attempt to rape our democracies to which they merely pay lip-service.

I intend no offence to any individual (even though I shall never give up my right of free speech), for the simple existential reason, that so long as all men and women must die unable to take anything with (although the ancient Egyptians, much trumpeted for their esoteric wisdom, foolishly tried to do so), so long as women and men must be born naked from the woman's limbs (not Adam's ribs or Zeus' head), let no man or woman think he or she is better than another.

However, the problem of Evil remains always ultimately the soul-destroying touch-stone testing one's democratic faith in social tolerance. For example – Could I (or Swedenborg for that matter, who despised un-truth in any shape, of lies, hypocrisy, fornication etc.) forgive a murderer like General Pinochet, or his bosom friend Mrs Thatcher who almost succeeded in destroying our own country, or a fornicator like President Clinton? My answer lies in another question – Have you noticed how pathetic and sad figures tyrants cut in their old age ? Of all people Hitler knew this very well, and committed suicide knowingly in his Bunker to die young-ish, not to look pitiable as a captured dog.

I think I personally could forgive even Hitler as a wheelchair bound incontinent old man, and would happily pay from my taxes for a nurse to look after him. But I perfectly understand the victims who may wish old Hitler to be thrown to Rottweilers, first bred by the sado-masochists of his Gestapo.

People may be forgiven as sad human beings, but never their acts of evil consequences. In these days of a flu-epidemic, more than ever the thatcherite destruction of our health service is tragically obvious even to the former ardent Thatcherites. One of the main news-media supports of that destructive regime, the Daily Mail, today eating the words of its past headlines, runs a campaign to recruit nursing staff for the National Health Service (NHS), when for almost two decades they lied babbling of overstaffing, forcing deep cuts onto the service, with the purpose of making it attractive for privatisation; according to a small print in the January 23rd issue ("Blair's £4m bid to recruit nurses", p. 9), Blair's Government needs "to attract 15,000 new nursing recruits into the NHS ... adverts will target the 160,000 nurses who are qualified but are not working in the profession."

How could one ever over-staff Health and Education, when the ideal of both is one-to-one (not something unattainable, as official government propaganda would have you believe, when for example such a perfect ideal is already practised in Education at the elitist Oxbridge level).

It is criminal that our children are taught in classrooms of thirty and more, when any reasonable decent human being (no need for left-wing educationists much reviled by the Daily Mail's and the Telegraph's) would know that even ten in a classroom is too many for overwrought teachers.

I cannot of course discuss all of Swedenborg's interesting theories even though his work is one of a piece, like a Roman mosaic, constructed with a consummate skill. He is Plato and Aristotle harmonised, the whole of the Bible (Old and New Testament) re-invented, with the integration of what was regarded by the official Church as heretical elements, like Gnosticism, the Eastern Orthodox Church, then additionally the Koran of Islam, the Jewish Qabbalah, the Masonic sun-cult etc. And of course, Newtonian Science, which Swedenborg had devoured. Herein lies my first port of call on the way to the next millennium, to declare Swedenborg as the paradigm of the future scientist.

Immoral scientists

For too long now scientists have denied the existence of the Spirit. A groundswell is building up within modern hard-core science for the recognition of the Soul (Einstein's Blavtskean infinite Energy? Definitely, the Subconscious in Freud, or the massive Consciousness of Psychology), which is bound to lead to the eventual acknowledgement of the Spirit, the classical Hindu notion of God's essence permeating all Being, thence the unity of all existence, being and becoming.

A-moral science (a-moral anything) I contend is a form of immorality, hiding cowardly behind neutered safety.

A leading biologist (from the University College, London) whose name I shall not pronounce because it is not his person I wish to aggress but his grotesque ideas which are not beyond ridiculous stereotypes, frequently expressed by other inarticulate scientists regurgitating each other, states "Science has absolutely nothing to do with morality. It is value-free and has no moral or ethical questions" ("In defence of scientists", an interview with "leading Biologist Wolpert", Camden New Journal, 14 January, 1999, p. 15).

That science is value-free is a lie most social scientists would prove easily. The leading biologist then goes on to make a most astonishing statement, which I am glad to acknowledge is nothing if not moral – he says in self-damning self-contradiction; "when scientists uncover dangers, for example the BSC scare [the Mad-cow disease], they must behave as 'accountants who uncover corruption' and blow the whistle. 'Scientists must not become unquestioning tools of government or industry'". Absolutely! But what better moral task for Scientists, with a social conscience.

My only disagreement here is that the leading biologist gets his metaphors morally confused, accountants being notorious for their a-morality and tax-avoidance schemes, and cover-up of corruption rather than its revelation.

The leading biologist then protests that scientists "are always portrayed as mad, bad and soulless", which is precisely what they are by their own admission of disbelief in the soul!

Scientists do become bad and mad when they have "absolutely nothing to do with morality", for which reason they are portrayed as such!

Here is what Swedenborg has to say in a tiny book about such scientists; ".. it is evident into what blindness, darkness, and stupidity those may fall who know nothing of the spiritual world and its sun [God]: into blindness, because the mind, depending solely upon the sight of the eye, becomes in its reasoning like a bat, which flies by night in a wandering course, and sometimes against linen clothes which may be hanging up; into darkness, because the sight of the mind, when the sight of the eye is flowing into it from within, is deprived of all spiritual light [lumen], and becomes like that of an owl; into stupidity, because the man still thinks, but from natural things concerning spiritual, and not contrariwise; consequently, idiotically, foolishly, and insanely." (“The Intercourse of the Soul and The Body, p.ii/4).

In a most ridiculous conclusion, our leading London biologist protests, "The problem is ignorance. We seem to fear chimeras, of mixing organisms." But we must indeed, absolutely, the Species Barrier whereby reproduction across species is prevented, is one of the crucial levers of Darwinian evolutionary mechanism, which mad, immoral, frankly perverted scientists must be prevented from destroying even by Law if need be. Would the leading biologist like to mate with an ass and produce mules as his children?

The Bad news is that there are horrible things going on in the world; institutionalised racism, governmental corruption, scientific immorality, political genocide, etc. etc.

I feel uncomfortable sharing a moment of joy with you in remembrance of a Spiritual giant like Swedenborg, when I remember that a sweet young man Stephen Lawrence was murdered in cold blood by a pack of rabid youths simply for not sharing their skin-colour. The murderers were publicly identified by the Daily Mail a year ago, and five years after the murder they are still at large, the victim's family still unable to get the justice they, and all of us as a civilized society, need.

The European Union bureaucracy is cancerously corrupt to the core, almost like the Ottoman Empire a hundred years ago labelled as “The Sick Man of Europe”, ending with the genocide of one and a half million Armenians (in 1915). The European Parliament which accepted the corruption (as if they didn't know, we have been frequently informed of the MEP's gravy train for at least the last decade), immediately covered it up yet again, with a vote of confidence.

The MEP (Member of the European Union Parliament) who was strangely both instrumental in the revelation and subsequent cover up of it (another case of scientific factual amorality?) confesses cheekily, confirming even more horrors, that "the Common Agricultural Policy, which accounts for nearly half the EU's budget and where fraud is proven". ("Euro Talk, London North MEP Pauline Green gives us her view from the centre of the storm", Times Group Newspapers, 21 January, 1999, p. 10).

And pray, what is she or anyone else in the European Union doing about it? – Obviously nothing, for at least twenty years now.

I feel uncomfortable to remember John Pilger's documentary on East Timor (shown a few days ago on the British ITV channel) where the Indonesian government has been murdering at least quarter of a million East Timorese with arms supplied by the British thatcherite governments and now by New Labour, which had professed otherwise. Foreign policy is made by a Robin Cook, who is so awkward in human relations as to break the news of his decision to divorce his wife, according to his ex-wife's memoirs, at just the moment when she was devastated "because her beloved horse had been put down." In one of the most hilarious moments of human stupidity I have come across, Mr Cook is reported as saying, "I think, though, since you are obviously so upset [about the horse] I may as well tell you some other bad news. As you suspected, I've been having an affair." ("Delicious revenge of Margaret Cook", from extracts published from her book and an accompanying Sunday Times interview, Daily Mail, 11 January, 1999, p. 6).

In Islamic countries (Pakistan, Jordan etc.) thousands of women "are killed annually because of alleged immorality. ("Queen in 'honour killings' campaign" – The Times, 21 January, 1999, p.17). Meanwhile, in our own civilized Britain, "Abusive parents are getting away with murder because of the willingness of pathologists and coroners to settle for a cot death verdict without sufficient investigation when a child dies unexpectedly, according to a leading paediatrician – “.. Nearly all the killers were the mothers, who usually smothered their children.” ("Doubt cast on cot death verdicts" – The Guardian, 7 January, 1999, p.1).

The Good news is (and I cannot say how good you may think the news to be) mankind's history has never been otherwise but full of incredible evil.

There is nothing new under the sun. Mothers smothering their children has a long 'respectable' Victorian tradition in Britain, stretching back to the Middle Ages of all European countries, when children were openly ritually murdered, following the Herodian paradigm in the New Testament, in turn replicating the Pass-over act of God himself murdering the first-born of the Egyptians to punish them for injustice against the Jews. Medieval Christians then reversed this biblical given and accused the European Jewry of regular child-murder and blood-drinking to cover-up their own paedocide.

There is no period of human history which could compare in murderous depravity and criminal perversion with the last days of the Roman Empire, when anything and all was possible literally, a liberal model which seems to be the longing of the post-modernists in our own times.

I hope such a day never returns. Yet even earlier than the Roman times, Herodotus two thousand five hundred years ago reports encountering a tribe "who do everything in public that others do in private and vice versa "… presumably mating sexually in full view of their society. Judging by some of the Channel 4 programming standards, we do not seem to be far off those times.

The Library of the Holy See of the Vatican contains the world's largest collection of Pornography. The official historian of the Byzantine Empire, Procopius, had also written a Secret History (which has survived and can be bought in a Penguin edition) about the rulers of Byzantium in the 6th century, where the great Queen herself, Theodora, would think nothing of displaying her sexual organs in public. Times have changed, or have they? Everything is and is not.

What has evolved is the tragic fragmentation of the human being. The mind responsible for this spiritual nuclear explosion belonged to Plato. Two thousand four hundred years ago, the father of Philosophy split the Body from the Mind, and since then, Western man has failed to join them together as a whole again. We are still suffering from the nuclear fall-out of Plato's massive explosion. Descartes, in the 17th century, regarded as the father of modern philosophy, while wishing to achieve the reverse, in fact caused unwittingly a further minor explosion increasing the gulf between the Mind and the Body.

The advances in Genetic engineering may produce the third major and even more dangerous explosion, this time on perhaps the quantum level. For the first time in human history there is the possibility of eliminating human sexuality altogether, specifically the heterosexual intercourse, which many people may think no bad thing at all, as all evil seems to have begun, at least biblically through the heterosexual knowledge.

The Histories of Herodotus start with a Big gang-Bang, the sailors of a visiting Phoenician ship rape the daughter of the King of Argos, causing all subsequent world wars produced by the pressure of necessary military training and alliances. The easy and free proto-feminist Phoenician princess had gone to the beach with her girl-friends for a bit of fun, guessing little what sex-starved Greek chauvinist dogs could get up to.

The physical elimination of human sexuality may be a god-sent technology for evil governments seeking total population control.

Births in controlled numbers can be ordered like groceries from national incubators. Sex-for-fun (inclusive of homosexuality, sado-masochism, Bestiality, paedophilia, all, unlike the biblical dictum of heterosexuality-for-procreation) can be provided with virtual reality porno-computers. The totalitarian government can then precisely quantify the needs of Economy, Health and Education for the foreseeable future. All unpredictable exceptions will be eliminated.

The World’s Last Sage

If however, on the positive side, the elimination of the human physical sexuality will produce finally the ideal monogamous spiritual erotic relationship, then Swedenborg may yet be greeted as the greatest human mind ever.

One of his major works is titled "The Delights of Wisdom Relating to Conjugial Love followed by the Pleasures of insanity relating to Licentious Love". It is great fun to read, and I recommend it universally.

The greatest single contribution of the New Testament dogma to the world's intellectual history, I consider it to be the concept of the Monogamous marriage for life, which is then raised to the highest possible plane of sacredness, by the implication of Divine involvement. Monogamy is sacred to God himself. And the only great book on the subject is undoubtedly Swedenborg's.

This idea that All – the whole universe – is born of Love (Eros) is very ancient in Greek thought. Greek Scholars are unanimous in accepting it as actually the most ancient concept ever.

It is millennia later that other ‘gods’ develop, and Eros is reduced to becoming Aphrodite's child from her fornicatory union with Aries, the god of War (Aphrodite was formally married to Hephaistos, the god of craftsmanship and artistic creativity). The modern equalisation of Love with Sex was a very gradual process of reductionism from being All, the very cause of the whole universe coming into being, to meaning no more than coital sex lasting minutes.

Saint Paul, the great discoverer and formulator of the sacred Monogamous marriage, undoubtedly knew of the original Greek concept of existential causality, and may have unwittingly used it as his source of inspiration. But his discovery and definition of monogamous love I consider being one of the greatest achievements of the human mind and totally a scientific concept, because it is quantifiable and testable.

Where it occurs in 1Cor13 is some of the most unique words ever written, and here it is in the New International Version; "Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, and it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, and always perseveres. Love never fails. ... these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. "

Patience, kindness, humility, non-judgmentalism, rejection of evil deeds, delight in truth, are all quantifiable traits in psychological methodology. One could devise psychological tests of modern sophistication to produce measurements for Saint Paul's observations, and arrive at a mathematical formula defining monogamous Love precisely, what has been hitherto regarded and I think mistakenly as the greatest indefinable.

As defined by St Paul and later elaborated and developed into new rational heights by Swedenborg and labelled by him as Love, monogamous love needs absolutely the total context of truth-speaking and absence of pornography to exist, let alone survive.

Lying and fornication completely submerge and eventually kill off the possibility of such love, cause social deterioration producing a life of crime and warmongering, for which reason Swedenborg was convinced that his paradigm of Conjugial Love did not and could not exist in the times he lived, as people were corrupted through Lying and fornication. He therefore hoped that what he was constructing as a model inspired by New Testament monogamy was one for the future. Three hundred years after Swedenborg, it is still the case, alas.

Here are the very first words upon which Swedenborg begins his book, The Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom; “There is but little comprehension in the world as to what Love is, and yet it is man's very life. This is evident from its being frequently asked, What is Love? The reason for this ignorance is that love is not apparent to the sight of the Understanding etc. etc. love is the very soul or life of thought, therefore thought, if deprived of love, grows cold and lifeless, like a flower deprived of heat; for love kindles, enlivens and animates thought ...love is the life of the Understanding, and so of the thought; and being the life of the Understanding and so of the thought, it is also the life of the whole man; for it is the life of all sense and of all motion, thus it is the life of the organs by means of which sense and motion come into existence; that it is also the life of the other viscera will be seen below. Etc."

In sheer Swedenborgian terms of Truth being predicated to God's very being, cognate simultaneously and interchangeably with Goodness itself ("Indeed, they are the Lord, for He is Divine good itself and Divine truth itself." CL, para. 84 / 1), the unforgivable crime of the thatcherite governments was to make Lying socially respectable, even desirable – suffice it to refer to the Scott Report, published by Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, London, on the Iraq-Iran war whereby one million people were killed, with armaments supplied to both sides by Mrs Thatcher's government under the cover of ministerial lies to the House of Commons etc.

Even now as a direct result of the socio-political developments from the thatcherite days of President Reagan, frightening new corruptions are pouring out of academic America advocating Lies as an acceptable socio-evolutionary biological mechanism enhancing the interests of the Selfish Gene – the title of an influential book by a proudly thatcherite Oxford Don, Professor Dawkins. BBC Nature programs frequently show you how Fishes, Birds, Monkeys lie and cheat for food and sex.

John Updike, one of the best known American novelists of fornicating Couples, produced a thick tome of essays at the height of thatcherite Reaganism promoting the idea that all art is no more than the art of lying, and it is better for it. Not only that it is so, for Mr Updike, but that it must also be so!

Updike was of course re-hashing the old Platonic objection in the Republic, with the difference that Plato would not wish it to be so. Aristotle wrote one of the greatest books of all time, his Poetics, to try and correct his old teacher's misunderstandings of the craft of the poet's art. Aristotle, unlike Updike, was actually pointing out that Poetry (hence all Art) is based on Truth, its own internal truth of the imagination, which is very different from the external factual truth Plato mistook for a lie, because of poetic license.

Truth-speaking, not lying, as the Essence of Social life

Like Swedenborg, who believed in the New Testament dictum of Satan being "the Father of Lies", I consider truth-speaking to be monumentally essential for a humanly decent society. Lying, on a personal level would ultimately render all social relations murderous.

How could a spouse sleep in peace with a marital partner at night, if that partner would be a liar, who could then acknowledge no moral boundaries of any sorts, who would then have no hesitation in stabbing that partner in sleep or poisoning his food when it shall serve her purpose, something already it seems commonplace in post-Reaganite America.

Do you remember that notorious British TV shot of Jonathan Aitkin, one-time boy-friend of Mrs Thatcher's daughter, John Major's Minister of Arms-procurement, staring haunted at the cameras splurging dramatically metaphors of being a Knight in shining armour of Truth preparing for battle to fight news-media lies... To-day he stands convicted of Lying and worse, corrupting his spouse and innocent child into doing the same for him.

According to a news report, "He has been seeking salvation among the 'happy clappers' of Holy Trinity Brompton church in Knightsbridge, where he makes newcomers welcome and hands round coffee." (G. Levy, "Slain…by the sword of truth", Daily Mail, 20 January, 1999, p.7). Unlike Swedenborg, most men seek salvation after, not before. If Mr Aitkin had done his coffee rounds while dating Mrs Thatcher's daughter, perhaps he could have taught Mrs T a few truths, and saved Britain’s National Health Service.

As for the famous truth-seekers of The Guardian newspaper who would not let a day pass without branding the liars in huge headlines, it seems they had offered via Lord Saatchi (another professional Thatcher-favourite) "a secret deal ... which would have allowed [Aitkin] to walk away from the case with a sizeable dent in his bank account but his reputation intact." (Daily Mail, 20 January, 1999, "The rejected peace deal", p.6) – So much for the truth seekers of thatcherite Britain!

While the Soviet System fed on public Lies, privately individuals were deeply, suicidally ashamed of possible revelation. Post-Thatcher / Reagan, the Soviet Union nicely eliminated, we are told the polls prove that the American people approve of their President Clinton (accused of Lying) as they consider lying to be an acceptable part of the modern American way of life...which was the hidden way in Soviet life.

President Clinton went one further; he made Pornography respectable, which would be anathema to Swedenborg's very concept of ideal society, based in Swedenborg on monogamous Conjugial Love.

But I wonder if even all that pornography is not a dumbing-down of the American people, covering-up even more horrifying truths – According to a short piece by Trevor Kavanagh of The Sun newspaper ("Did he rape a nurse and run cocaine?", 10 September, 1998, p. 4), " [Clinton's] brother Roger, jailed for drug dealing, is quoted on police tapes saying Bill [Clinton] had a nose for cocaine "like a vacuum cleaner". There are tales of cocaine runs to Colombia and money laundering. ..Some of those who made the claims have been shot dead or disappeared, including eight investigators, nine witnesses and four Clinton associates."

This is the man our own prime minister, Tony Blair loves. What hope then of Tony Blair's anti-drugs policies? To-day's New Labour Britain leads statistically the European league of youth drug-taking, in honour of President Clinton perhaps?

But then is Mr Clinton any worse than any of his predecessors, who could simply get away with it – President Kennedy responsible for Marilyn Monroe's death, President Bush, the partner of the notorious drug baron General Noriega, President Johnson napalming Vietnam etc. God-blessed America seems to be cursed with a string of common criminals as Presidents.

And yet I felt very sad and sorry when Mr Clinton was shown as a bumbling old man trying to preserve some dignity, whatever little of it was left to him.

Swedenborg's concept of Love, nurtured within the context of truth-speaking and Monogamy seems to me to be the only hope for a holistic future.

Love alone as the very life of God flowing into men and women is the divine elixir, the super glue that can cement all aspects of the fragmented and alienated modern individual together. The alternative is virtual reality robotization and madness called ‘Globalization’, which I call ‘Hamburgarization’…

In spite of rampant evil, there seems to be an archetypal universal desire in man of all times and places for, Truth, Justice and the right action, something which no scientific theory shall be able to explain, as it involves none of the necessary and sufficient conditions of the neo-Darwinist evolutionary theory, like Reproductive Success, Parental Investment etc.

Aristotle was convinced that no man does evil knowingly, evil action being entirely the product of the ignorance of the consequences that act may result in.

Most philosophers have constructed theories concerning their solution for the discovery of means whereby one can predict the righteousness of the intended action. The best known of such theories is Kant's Categorical Imperative, not much different from Jesus' dictum of "Do to others as you would have them do to you." (Luke 6:31). Religious people of all denominations would recommend the constant reading of the Bible as a means of finding answers to the puzzles of right action, in readiness for such a need as when and if it would arise.

I call my own theory the Categorical Imperative of the Third Dimension. Dual human heterosexual relationship manifests immense egocentricity and power-obsession. Tying it down to a third dimension may create a possibility of compassion and altruism. The hypothetical child is that dimension. The individual must place that child at the centre of his Life's interest. He must do nothing that could harm the child's well-being whether physically, psychologically or intellectually. One must learn from children, not try to teach them. Compassion would be the first lesson the child would teach adults. But therein is contained a very long Swedenborgian story that needs to be told in detail at some other time.

*

PS. Unlike instantaneous revolutionary change, evolutionary social change takes many decades to unravel its consequences – Nazi medical practices, for example, begun in Britain under the premiership of Mrs Thatcher, predicted and denounced in my lecture, have indeed infected tragically today Britain’s money-mad body-politic so inhumanly, viciously and cancerously, that, according to a recent Daily Mail first page headlined report (February 24, 2006) “Doctors say heart attack victims should not be revived because money could be better spent elsewhere, Let Old Folk In Care Die, elderly patients [are] starving in care homes, with one in five seriously underfed…”

In the very same issue – a snap-shot of post-modern Britain – the horrendous bloodshed in Iraq caused by Blair-Bush coalition (p.13); the British Gas rip-off “record £1.5 billion profit as [household] bills soar” an indecent 22 per cent (p. 9); a martial arts obsessed son most tragically “slaughtered his parents” (p. 9); “Lover asked me to ‘crack her husband over the head’”(p. 42); and a feminist author “describes her bitter realisation, at nearly 40, that she’ll never be a mother. And reveals her fury over succumbing to the modern mantra that a career and casual sex were her rights as a woman – and that children are for drudges…”(pp. 22-3) etc.

It is Mrs Thatcher’s Britain still evolving into a Nazi monster, and reported by no other than one of her greatest bastions – the very same Daily Mail!

Will the State of Israel Survive Its Zionist Policies ?

2006-01-23T05:13:00.000-08:00

Prolegomena

Our understanding of the ancients (History, philosophy – all) needs a complete intellectual overhaul – we admire them for the wrong reasons, and here is a case in point – the great achievement of Judaism is not its concept of monotheism, which it lacks entirely, but, for the very first time in recorded history,

(1) Preserving the self-critical, conscience-building texts of a culture in barbaric turmoil,
(2) Struggling to create Civil Society obeying laws, laws that attempt to humanize the violent beast that man is –
(3) Preserving even the very record of the failures of those who tried their damnedest against all the odds, of the Sodom and Gomorrah, where even the children were corrupted beyond redemption – they too demanded sexual intercourse with the Angels sent by Jehovah to deliver Lot and his family…

In a sense, there is no ancient civilization in the true meaning of this word. All of them perpetrated and institutionalized Slavery – the worse of humanity – the pits of inhumanity!

The Pyramids, and the Parthenon, and the Wall of China were built by enslaved people – I am aware of foolish recent theories pretending otherwise – some airy-fairy historians even romanticise the lot of the Roman slaves, because the latter could theoretically (one in a hundred thousand…) get rich enough to buy his (never her!) freedom.

No ancient ‘civilization’

Historians confuse technology with civilized behaviour. Today, the US and Russian Mafia pornographers live in absolute luxury, exuding the impression that they possess any other culture but violent crime. Sometime Russia’s drunk President Yeltsin sold the country’s natural gas wealth to Yukos Company-mates for perhaps a bottle of Whisky… from the country of the other of History’s famous drunkard, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, whose famously slurred speech broadcasts during the second world war was not because it was his natural trademark rhythm, but because he was drunk most of the time…

The ancient Egyptians could build the Pyramids, but their aristocracy lacked the civilization of not-marrying their sisters. The ancient Chinese could invent silk from nature, but their aristocracy lacked the civilization of not-binding the feet of their women folk – they desired women with the feet of 3 year-olds… they then castrated big-men for eunuchs to carry their small-feet women around, like Barbie-dolls…

And the great wise Confucius said – “One hundred women are not worth a single testicle”. Gay men today may fully agree with Confucius, but any man that confused about women – their mothers and sisters – can never hope to achieve any degree of civilization.

I define Freedom, Peace, and Compassionate-living as the 3 pillars of a civilized society. If so, and other factors being well (like no global destruction because of the Climate change), then present-day mankind shall need another 10,000 years to get finally civilized… At the beginning of the 21st century, with the genocidal 20th c. behind us – the most violent yet in human history with 2 World Wars, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Vietnam etc. – we have not even begun yet to build ANY civilization…

The Multi-ethnic Secret of History revealed here for the very First Time

One of the greatest errors, whether by design or as a result of sheer ignorance by the so-called experts is the concept of nations as ‘pure’ this and that; German, English, Italian, Armenian, Jew, Greek… There never was such an exclusive ethnos – the perversion of this historical fact has produced the great fraud of ‘pure race’ or homogenous ethnicity, something experts would do well to begin to finally understand and put to rest, after the massive genocidal harm 19th c. nationalism caused as a result of it

The Founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, whose parenthood is still questioned (he had blue eyes…), forged ‘pure Turks’ from the Ottoman… melting pot, inventing the myth of a dozen Turkish medieval forefathers, like Genghis Khan, Hulagoo, Alparslan etc. whose busts can be seen in a public Park in Istanbul – the hilarious thing is that all the statues look alike, as they are born out of a sculptural fantasy… Today, there are ‘pure’ Turks who do not know they are mixed Armenian, Greek, Jewish, Kurdish, Black African – I know a most charming Black African lady in London, born and bred in Istanbul – she considers herself to be a Turk, and assures me that there is indeed a centuries-old black Turkish community in Istanbul – I was surprised the Grey Wolves of modern Alpaslan have not massacred them…yet!

Because all the Chinese look the same to the eyes of the white racist historians in the West – “slitty-eyed” in the immortal phrase of Britain’s Duke of Edinburgh – they never bothered to discover that China was one of the first multi-ethnic, multi-cultural melting pots the ‘civilized’ world had begun with. A Chinese can be any one of a hundred inter-mixed nomadic tribes.

One of the great proto-Nazi perpetrators of the pure race concept – the British Eugenicists (of which Winston Churchill was an ardent supporter – he wanted to eliminate, never mind the horribly labelled “mental defectives”, but even people with migraine!), who served as paradigms for later Nazi purifiers, could not grasp that the English were from the ‘compoundation’ of Normans, Angles, Saxons, Vikings, Celts, Armenians – according to the Preface of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, Romans – nothing could be more multi ethnic than the Roman armies and their camp followers teeming with breeding women – Germans, Greeks, Africans – post-slavery ethnically absorbed – their skin-colour vanished through mixed marriages – via the Victorian lower classes.

It is outrageous that in pursuance of infantile American models, Britain’s Chancellor of Exchequer, and a Prime Minister-in-waiting, Gordon Brown, a Scotsman himself, who every now and then comes up with the worse of right wing idiocies – last year on a visit to Africa, he glorified British Imperialism… and now wishes to go “unashamedly patriotic” as if there ever was a pure British race – like the ridiculous Americans trying to fantasize a pure American nation with flag-waving and wolf-whistling and balloon-flying at party conferences, which have become the laughing stock of the political world! (see newspaper article, ‘Gordon’s Flag Day – As Premier of patriotism, Brown will encourage us to celebrate our great nation’, by Benedict Brogan, Political Editor, Daily Mail, January 14, 2006, p.10).

No wonder Chancellor Brown delights the lower guts of every Great-Britain Daily-Mail nationalist creep in the land – “He will urge an American style move towards more open expressions of nationalism – including a flag in every garden”, Mr Brogan continues joyfully, “he has explicitly defended the achievements of the Empire”, and here comes the punch-line, the horrible truth in the small-print, in the concluding paragraph – Britain’s future Prime Minister really truly is only after creating the next generation of cheap slave-labour force – “Mr Brown will call for the creation of a British national community service, based on an American model and aimed at young people from poorer backgrounds.” The wealthy young people can inherit the Banks… and the cocaine ‘service’.

The above example of Mr Brown’s Don Quixotic antics on the theme of racist nationalism is enough evidence that historians have not yet grasped the multi-ethnic nature of the rise of ancient ‘nations’.

In spite of all Nazi attempts at modern nation-building via racial purity, the British of today are an excellent example of multi-ethnic identity – I, an Armenian, came to London from the Lebanon. I married my first wife, a Celtic flame-haired American surnamed Rademacher – of Dutch, Jewish, German and English mixture. We produced three British Armenian Dutch German Jewish English children. I married a second time, my present wife surnamed Stephens – an English rose, of Jamaican African parentage, born and bred in Derby – a heartland of English pure… we produced three children of British African Armenian Jamaican English descent.

Armenians were Hai (from ‘King’ Haik), Armens and Arameans (from ‘King’ Aram); Achaeans, Achaemenians, Hittites – these called themselves Khatti – ‘Kh-ai’ in the Van dialect of Armenian (= ‘Armenian’) is the phonemic root of also A-chae-ans and A-chae-menians, all descended from Armenia’s region around Lake Van; Phrygians – Herodotus considered the Phrygian language to be Armenian; Lydians, Celts – Herodotus brings them out of Anatolia, ancient Armenia; Urartians (= Ararat-ians); Parthians – the Parthian King Mithridates was married with the sister of Armenia’s King, whence he also found safe haven escaping the Medes; the inventor of no less than the Armenian alphabet Mesrop Mashtots was Parthian; Persians, Medians, were Assyrians and Babylonians – the Armenian legend of Shamiram, the fertility Queen of Babylonia… Ionians – the phonemic root is Ai =Armenian in literary Armenian language, became Etruscans in ancient Italy – a rare copy in the British Library of a book published in London 1841, titled The Armenian Origin of the Etruscans, by Ellis.

Armenians were even … Chinese – according to the 5th c. historian, Movses Khorenatsi, the Armenian aristocratic house of the Mamikonians that had the sole duty of defending the Medieval realm of Armenia was founded by the Chinese nobleman Mamkun, who had reached Armenia in search of a safe haven escaping the endless internecine wars in China!

And Jews – the ‘national’ legend of Noah and his Ark saved (from a global disaster of climate-change producing the Flood) on the peaks of the Ararat Mountains – later sanctified as the Ark of Covenant containing the sacred Torah which records the Genesis of the legend itself – leaves no doubt whatsoever that it is a historical record of the Jewish origins in the heartland of Armenia. To deny this, as Zionists have done, is an act of ‘national’ masochism or self-immolation!

From Armenia back to Armenia, with love…

When the Armenian King Tigran (referred to as King Tiridates in Greco-Roman sources) created his Empire matching the Roman – a century before the Romans sacked Jerusalem, Tigran had transported a whole community of Jews from Palestine he had captured, to populate a new capital city he built in the heartland of Armenia and named after himself; Tigran-a-kert = gloriously-built-by-Tigran.

It was a homecoming for those Jews – mentioned nowhere else but in the 5th c. Armenian “History” by Movses Khorenatsi (= Moses of Khoren). According to the same Khorenatsi, the Medieval Armenian aristocratic house of the Bagratuni that ruled the famous city of Ani with its one-thousand-and-one churches was progenitor-ed by a Jew named S-mbat (perhaps a linguistic derivation from Hebrew ‘shabbat’ – also the Armenian name for ‘Saturday’ – the week-day).

I love those ‘Jews’ of the Bible, and Jesus Christ first of all – in my own father’s immortal Armenian ashkharhi arachin isgagan hamainavereh = the world’s first true communist – who taught man’s barbaric world lost deep in the Jungle the rules of Socialist humanism, compassion, love for the neighbour (though not his wife…) – all that makes a human being humane, and not a mindless senseless thug, despite and, perhaps even in spite of, the most horrendous foul deeds the mindless racist world did to each other.

My father was such a one – appropriately named Israel… as a child of ten, he was deported with mum and dad and the relatives from his hometown in Adapazar (present day Turkey), had walked for three years to Kirkuk (in present day Iraq), had buried his younger brother of five under a few stones in a ditch on the road to the river Khabur (in Syria), had seen his younger sister snatched by a Turkish soldier, gone for-ever… {Is there any new Turk on the Internet with an Armenian mother snatched out of genocide in Kirkuk? They’ll be my cousins I would love to hear from).

Israel, my Dad, had supped full of Satan’s Last-Judgment bloody deeds, and yet he suffered no hatreds, bore no vengeances, would wish no one ill, helped all he could anyone, but anyone, in need … he had lost several fortunes doing so, having made them in the first place through sheer honest work in Iraq and Lebanon, and until his last days in London aged 95, my father Israel could not understand at all the mind of those set on Revenge.

I love the Old Testament Prophets, and Moses first of all – History’s greatest… Bastard – literally, not metaphorically – suckled by an Egyptian princess – perhaps her first healthy child born outside the incestuous sheets of the Egyptian aristocracy.

I love Isaiah and Jeremiah who braved the ‘Zionist’ evils of their own people to teach them self-esteem via self-criticism – the foundation stone that gave rise to human conscience – the single trait that distinguishes the humans from the animals that altogether lack even the possibility of building up Conscience, because conscience needs self-analytical linguistic skill animals cannot develop. And without the emergence of Conscience, there can arise no civilization.

I love the post-modern prophets of old Israel, the two Jewish American professors, Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein – the sole well-known truth-speakers in the whole of America, and every member of the heroic B’Tselem – the Israeli human rights organization watching and screaming like a hawk over the Zionist state-crimes perpetrated upon the Palestinian Arabs. Together, they stand proud like the Ararat Mountains, shielded by their sheer truth against the fascist lies of Zionist Israel – or is it the Zionist lies of modern fascist Israel?

The problem of Jewish identity (who is a Jew?) is as complex as identifying the multi-ethnic strands constituting the identity of any one of the ancient peoples. As shown above, historians hitherto have lacked even the intellectual framework to begin pulling the strands of the multi-ethnic ball of wool to knit the true tapestry of ancient history.

The label ‘Jew’ in English signified no more than a linguistic equivalence to refer to ‘people from Judea’, which is a geographical appellation of a region filled to the brim with multi-ethnic people – Phoenicians, Canaanites, Arameans, Armenians, Amorites, Arabs, Persians, Philistines, Bedouins, Ethiopians – Queen Sheba visited King Solomon (as much a Jew as Moses…) born of King David’s Hittite wife – not even Solomon’s mother was Jewish… and Solomon kept a harem of several hundred women from all ‘nations’…

I have met Orthodox Jews in London’s Golders Green who think they are the ‘pure Jews’, their Rabbis descended directly from Moses… They don’t consider Reform synagogues to be Jewish at all. And they label the rest of the world including the Ashkenazim – in their books non-Jews – as Goi-im = cattle! When the Nazis dehumanized their Jews as ‘vermin’, they were really following suit…

But will the Jewish state created at the heart of multi-ethnic greater Palestine survive the extra-Zionist act of historical…poetry?

That the State of Israel MUST survive is a global wish, but the question remains, can it? Those who would be puzzled by the very question must remember that Israel has been locked in literally a daily battle of survival from the very first day of its birth fifty years ago.

In pre-historical times, city-states were created by mythical heroes. Theseus was presumed to have been the founder of Athens, Romulus founded Rome; Haik of the ancient Armenians founded the H-Ai of the Old Testament.

Few people can appreciate today that, unlike the old semi-mythical heroes, the creation of the Jewish State was an act of great utopian… Poetry, written by the Austrian-German journalist-playwright Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), who conceived of it first on… paper [published as a book titled The Jewish State (1896)], and died before he could witness its actual physical birth by violent-Zionist midwives.

The almost-fascist Zionists turned the newborn State of Israel immediately into the Whore of Babylon for Anglo-American imperialism, as the only path they could see for self-defence and survival. That less genocidal alternatives did exist is a fact, although contingent historical acts (and the facts about them) cannot be altered, and may be regarded as evolutionary accidents of mankind’s overall history. Although the past cannot be changed, the present can, for a better future.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, under American tutelage and pressure, came to convert whatever of Democracy for the Palestinian Arabs was left in Israel into an oppressive fascist state. His most despicable act, and the final clinch onto the body of genocidal fascism was the secret military treaty he signed with the other great fascist state in the area, Turkey – a desirable Anglo-American NATO ally (I would say a whore of Nato) blatantly and brutally genociding the Kurds under our noses.

Ehud Barak’s landslide victory at the dawn of the new millennium (1999) signposted the final stage of the cancer festering at the heart of the Israeli state, manifested by the murder of Rabin by no less than an Orthodox Jew.

Barak I think understood that the Israeli electorate gave him the mandate to cure the cancer by re-democratising the Jewish state, as the very Soul of Israel itself, is on the verge of extinction (ancient Egyptians were certain that Souls too may become mortal). Barak, whether by subtle design or political impotence, alas, failed, and worse, turned an international liar, going around Anglo-America telling TV companies that as prime minister he had offered everything the Palestinian Arabs had ever wanted, but that their leader Yasser Arafat had turned him down.

Modern Israelis may be free themselves, but they are treating their Arabs as Old Testament slaves, and like all slave-masters are turning Nazi. We all know what happens to the Nazis – they die like rats in bunkers.

The Threat to the Jewish Soul – Danger to World Peace

It is not the Jewish soul as such that is in danger of mortality, nay, the vitality of the Jewish Diaspora communities is more alive and powerful than ever before at any time in the last thousand years of human history.

But no amount of vivification from the Jewish Diaspora can save the Zionist dehumanization of the Israeli soul, without the latter’s own democratic internal revitalization. Israeli people are in a desperate state (and I intend the pun!)

And all the Judophiles in the world must do all they can to help save Israel’s soul from Nazi concentration camp commandants like Ariel Sharon, who, because of full US support for his genocidal actions at the Palestinian Sabra and Shatila camps in the Lebanon, dared do the same in 2002 at Jenin, this time at the heart of Arab Palestine.

It had taken Western Christianity two thousand years to finally officially and formally forgive the New Testament ‘Jews’ for what they had done to Jesus Christ. Ariel Sharon had the cheek to turn back history, threaten with tanks the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem, and that on the day of Easter Resurrection, spitting metaphorically at the Soul of Christendom, just like the Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem gang up regularly literally to spit at the Christian churchmen during formal public processions – our own saintly Patriarch in Jerusalem, Archbishop Torkom Manoukian, the most beatific of holy men imaginable, and a great classical poet in Armenian literature, has even suffered physical attacks by the Orthodox lunatics in Jewish Jerusalem – yet the Christian fundamentalists of the USA kept silent, and the Pope said nothing!

If not restrained by the sane world (hopefully by the Chinese government, as the only power balancing an America gone mad, while Russia is being converted into a drugs-brothel by its dollar-gobbling Mafiosi), an Ariel Sharonite would dare genocide the whole of Arab Palestine, which has been deliberately turned into a heavily guarded concentration camp over the last decade by the Israeli State ready for such an eventuality.
The greatest danger today to world peace are not the Saddam Hussein-type Don Quixotes, full of hot air – Saddam was threatening Armageddon in Kuwait, and his much feared Republican Guards laid down their tanks in the sands, kissed the boots of the American soldiers, and sobbed for their mummies in Baghdad, while another Nazi madman like Sharon called appropriately in German a “Black Head” – General Schwarzkopf – bombarded them to smithereens from the air. How can that General Block-head sleep at nights, decorated for his inhumanity?

The greatest danger to world peace today are Israeli prime ministers in the image of Ariel Sharon, who has the Bomb (Saddam carried a hunting rifle!), and would not hesitate to use it, as my friends in Tel Aviv have told me frequently, just to kill Palestinian Arabs, even if it also meant Israel’s death. It will be the greatest suicide bomb of all time, exploded not by a sad Palestinian stone-throwing Arab child, but by a Jew, the likes of whom killed Rabin, the peace-maker, whose bosom-friend Shimon Perez, sometime prime minister too, blessed Sharon’s every madness – no wonder, he is also the greatest Israeli denier of the Turkish genocide of the Armenians!

The sane Voice of British Jewry – the Only Hope

Forget the American Jewish elite – Israel is their violent hobby. Ariel Sharon went to President Bush to seek approval, and got it, for his murderous intention to literally kill Yasser Arafat, his Arab cousin from the seed of Abraham – incredibly, lunatically, Sharon announced it globally, proudly – an act for which he can only be forgiven ironically in heaven by the New Testament God of Love he hates – for which he could never be forgiven by the Old Testament God of universal Justice acting in this world.

But the sane voice of British Jewry is (finally!) speaking out – Gerald Kaufman, MP an ex-Labour minister, the Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, a superb intellectual and a scholar, are supporting the rational voices heard in Israel itself, like former minister Yossi Beilin, Prof. Ilan Pape, Yehoshuya Leibovitz, the true Jews of B’Tselem, etc. and most heart-warmingly the wise group of young Israeli soldiers refusing to kill in the Palestinian Arab territories.

What are the choices offered to Israel by History here and now?

They are three:

(1) The strong-arm power-obsessed dominating-master option the Zionists perpetrate, which one would think had vanished and written out of history with the mad Roman Emperors like Nero – who burnt down Rome to sing a song, and Caligula who declared his horse as co-emperor… The master-slave politics is still very much the guiding principle of Anglo-American foreign policy, alas, imitated the world over by every pathetic government fantasizing about acquiring global power.

Power-based and obsessed politics is inherently imperialist, racist, warmongering and genocidal. It succeeds only temporarily because of the use of military violence. Ultimately, it always fails, thank God.

The greatest evidence of my theory is the absolute fact of the universal collapse of all empires throughout human history. There is not a single exception to this global historical rule, that genocidal violence and all wars to sustain empires always ultimately end in the annihilation of the very empires they foolishly conspire to eternalise.

The beginning of the end of the Catholic Church, for example, came when, by the eleventh century, the Pope had become a…American President of today – the most powerful man of the medieval world, a wholly power-crazed politician, that evolved into the anti-Christ when in the name of Christ the Popes gave birth to the Inquisition that butchered a million Europeans…

The latest proof of this almost mysterious law of human history was the collapse of the all-powerful Soviet Union in our own lifetime, overnight, like a pack of cards. It is a pity that the present super-powers (America and Britain) still persist in their childishly hysterical power-obsessed view of the world, having learnt nothing of the lessons of History. Power-games are infantile (and most dangerous) when the adults play them.

The Prof HIP Law of History

Like a mantra, let us not weary from repeating endlessly this iron rule (and may I call it ‘The Prof HIP Law of History’), as foolish governments seem to always forget it – if human Hegelian ‘Spiritual’ History has one single lesson to teach mankind, it is precisely this;

Crude brutal barbaric force, military power and genocidal inhumanity, shall never survive global compassion and humanism, proven ad nauseam by the passing of all empires, the Babylonian, Persian, Chinese, Japanese, Roman, British, you name it.

The State of Israel can be no exception. As a military fascist state, it will surely die, like all such states before it.

For the State of Israel, fifty years of whoredom to Anglo-American militarism, the acquisition of the atomic Bomb itself, and the pocketing of the corrupt Arab leaders with US dollars, proved useless against the stones of the Palestinian Children (Intifada). The mere pebbles of the poor and the meek of the Arab youth could stone to death the fornicating fascism of the NATO whore in Israel.

Now, only the road to Peace with the Arab peoples may yet save Israel physically and spiritually, something the numbers belonging to the Israeli Peace movement have grasped. If the State of Israel will continue on the Netanyahu-Sharon track, its trains will self-destruct and make the heart of Hitler laugh in Hell.

Of all nations, especially Israel is nothing without the humanist (I would say Socialist) soul at the heart of Judaism. Unlike America, Israel cannot survive on a diet of military garbage – it is even questionable as to how long the US paradigm itself led by porno-presidents can go on feeding on its mafia-infested sewage.

Could Israel survive

(2) as a peaceful but separatist ethnic unit in the sea, nay, ocean of Arab peoples? The answer is a simple Yes, as already wealthy Jewish communities did exist throughout the Arab world pre-dating the Zionist madness.

No amount of stealing Armenian Patriarchate land in Jerusalem can help the Zionist state, building ridiculous walls of racist exclusion, when the worst wall of them all – the Berlin Wall – tumbled down proving the Prof HIP Law of History yet again.

Walls may keep the undesirables out, but also keep the walled ones in… the Master that needs the Slave is as much enslaved! No amount of deep blue sea shall liberate the Israeli Soul from its back to Sharon’s Wall.

The Arabs gently and naturally absorbed the Armenian survivors of the genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Turks in 1915, when thousands of Armenian ghosts found haven in the bosom of the Arab peoples, whose co-religionists were the Turkish proto-Nazi Young Turks. The Arabs, by their compassionate hospitality and warm humanism, put paid to the fascist fantasies of religious fundamentalists, who always instigate genocidal wars while babbling of religious hocus-pocus.

The Young Turks in the pay of the German Kaiser Wilhelm (a grandson of the British Queen Victoria) who led the world into the first global war, had no doubts that the Arabs, in the name of Islam, would participate avidly in their attempt to genocide the Armenians. A book in Arabic published… in Berlin by the German government, called on the Arabs to declare Jihad. Not only the Arabs did not, in fact led by Sheriff Hussein, the Keeper of Holy Mecca, they rebelled against the Ottoman Turks – their Muslim “brothers”.

As the Arabs, horrified by the crime of their Turkish co-religionists, housed and fed and nurtured in their midst the Christian Armenians, there is not the slightest historical doubt that the Arabs would happily have accommodated the Jews too, historically their first cousins anyway, if the latter had not come as Zionist usurpers and cut-throats, whose first major achievement was the genocide of the Deir-Yassin Arab village in Palestine.

There were already vibrant Jewish communities in the best locations throughout the Arab world (and still in Arab North Africa), not persecuted, well respected and cherished. Suddenly, guided by the fascist lunacy of Zionism, overnight, Arab Jews began selling their properties to the locals who were too poor to afford them for more than tuppence, pulling apart their own communities, astounding their puzzled neighbours including the Armenians, leaving them aghast at the sheer inexplicable madness of it.

Without the Zionists, Israel could be built up gradually, peacefully, without wars or genocidal crimes, multiplying of itself healthily and naturally, without the frightening stupidity of Zionist importation of millions of immigrants losing their famed fertility meanwhile, under the unnecessary pressures of fending for themselves in artificially created hostile environments – today Israel has the lowest fertility amongst the well-to-do nations, which brings us to the third and perhaps only option left for Israeli survival – as a distinctive state of multi-ethnic Jewish people;

(3) A multi-ethnic federal state with the Arabs. Such an act could become a paradigm to imitate for all other nations desperately seeking peace. In an age of cheap travel, Internet, global village-making, consciously and passionately desired and intended multi-ethnicity is the future of mankind, and it is incumbent on Israel to lead the way for the rest of the world to follow.

Israel, must stop stealing Arab and Armenian land in the West Bank, for its own sake, must create an Arab Palestinian State, to unite with in a federative form – the sooner; the better. Postponement of such a realization will only cost more lives, spill more innocent blood, and ultimately fail miserably, finally killing not only the Arabs but the very Soul of Israel itself.

There is already a beautiful Israel built in the ‘East Bank’ – a miracle of the 20th c. the world knows little about and which is being foolishly walled-off. That Israel does not need any of the West Bank or the Gaza desired only by the Zionists purely for American regional mischief making.

If Israel must survive further in its present form of a fascist state, it can only count on the Bomb, and will surely self-destruct by exploding it.

The Arabs, just as the Diaspora Jews, can undoubtedly survive a nuclear explosion (in terms of sheer numbers), but Israel itself shall be no more. And that would be the greatest pity of all time.

Nota Bene

When a primitive version of the above article was first published in a small London Magazine in 2002, Jewish friends from the vibrant Manchester community pleaded with me to publish it more widely, in a national newspaper of global significance.

I found it impossible to mitigate my horror at the murderous deeds of prime minister Ariel Sharon. Any human being in distress, especially vulnerable children and old people are a heartbreaking sight. If Hitler was alive today and drooling in a wheel chair, I would have felt sorry, as I did seeing the Chilean Hitler, the doddering old fool General Pinochet on TV. I hope I do not see Sharon in coma. Even if one does not seek it, global news media have a way of forcing it down peoples’ throats.

The Judge of History cannot be compassionate – the Hindus had grasped this since time immemorial by defining the Law of Karma – the equivalent of the Old Testament Hebrew Law of Jehovah. It is a pity that neither the Hindus nor the Hebrews in Power care to practice what they preach – when in good health, they abuse it to control their underlings, not themselves – they forget their mortality.

A final thought about a Sane Solution to the Israeli-Arab Conflict

Israel was the name God in the Old Testament gave to Jacob – its etymology, as in all cases of ancient nomenclature can never be finally settled – the accepted dogma gives it the meaning of “(Is’ra-el) [Contender (Perseverer) With God; or, God Contends]” (Insight, On the Scriptures, volume 1, p. 1228, col. 1, Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania, USA).

I myself derive the meaning of Israel from the Hebrew word Eish = man, Ra = the most ancient god of all, the Egypitan sun-god, El = god, altogether delivering the meaning of ‘A man of the sun-god’, or, ‘Sun-god Man’, or, ‘the first human form/manifestation of the Sun-god’, or, ‘the epiphany in human form of the most ancient of the gods’ etc.

‘Israel’ thus, can be my father’s name, and my own second name, but does not have to be the name of a country. What is in a name, as Shakespeare’s Juliet asks, if it be full of enmity and hatreds.

As it is, the Zionists with their genocidal treatment of the Palestinian Arabs soiled Jacob’s god-given name so irreparably, that it needs to be abandoned as atonement for peace. The great Theodor [incidentally, a Greek name = God’s gift] Herzl usurped by the Zionists did not label his dream ‘Israel’ – but the ‘Jewish State’!
A federative State in Palestine can revert to its original name, and apply to the United Nations as the country of Palestine – constituted of the simply descriptive The Jewish State, and The Arab State – it sounds and smells wholesome, like freshly baked bread, and cleansed with a flick of the pen of all horrendous memories of foul deeds and murderous Zionist preservatives...

The Genocide of A thousand Armenian Souls by the Madmen of Azerbaijan

2005-12-31T18:06:00.000-08:00

Nakhichevan is a stamp-sized territory – hardly 5,500 sq km, with a population of 293,900 (in 1989). It has never been anything but part of Armenia, ‘given’ in 1922 by the Soviet lunatic Stalin to ‘comrades’ in Azerbaijan, with which it has no common borders … Just as the British Prime Minister Chamberlain was to ‘give’… Czechoslovakia to Hitler presumably to stop, in fact to start the Second World War.

Such hollow diplomatic gifts were much prized by imperialist fools. Nakhichevan was famous with its ancient Armenian monuments, churches and cemeteries forested by stone-cross memorials, all of which the Azeri state tried to genocide systematically. As late as 1998, only protests from UNESCO could halt the ‘final solution’ of the state-organized cultural genocide. To-day, the genocide is complete – the last standing stones of the Armenian Soul are razed to the ground – a million and a half bits dumped into the river Arax winding its way nervously nearby.

It is a measure of Azeri government intelligence, and thank god they are so stupid, that they never thought of changing the Armenian name of the region – its historical passport of identity.

I was working on the English translation of an immensely interesting (forthcoming) book by Artsvi Bakhchinyan, on the activities of the Armenian merchants of New Julfa (a 'suburban extension' of Isfahan in Persia, modelled on the ancient city of Julfa in Nakhichevan) four hundred years ago, opening up trade routes with Russia, Scandinavia and Europe generally, supplying the courts of Western Europe with luxury silken goods etc., and by a most amazing coincidence, news came from my Scottish friend (an architect), Steve (Sim) that Azerbaijan is intensifying its massacre of the historical Armenian monuments of Nakhichevan, as a matter of State genocidal policy, to eliminate all Armenian identity from the territory – then, the evidential pictures from Armenica.org were broadcast …

As a total pacifist, I could still cold-shower my boiling fury – and now the Internet Magazine, GIBRAHYER – 27 December – contained the link http://www.hairenik.com/ where you can actually see with your own very eyes what you have never seen anywhere in the world – Azeri men, captured on film, mad, insane, hacking with heavy hammers, centuries old standing stones… a most incredible sight!

I would love to know what those pathetic barbarians were thinking while doing their job, obviously under neo-Nazi orders – but what were they actually thinking they were doing, and for what, to what end? Do idiots have thoughts? – They must have, as even animals have feelings that go into constituting human thoughts at its most uncivilized, violent level… so, what were those donkeys thinking doing their military duty?

Then, they loaded in army trucks the heart-broken stones, some with enormous cranes, smaller bits carried by them like mules – the stoned souls of Armenians as old as Noah – unrepeatable, hand made unique memorial records of immortality, finally murdered to smithereens by Azeri lunatics – children of Father Stalin!

Numb with despair at the sight of barbaric stupidity, let alone inhumanity of such hyenas littering the world around us – the wretched polluted of the vicious polluters of our planet – I asked my non-Armenian wife watching the hairenik.com video with me, – what would she feel if she were in my place – she said, they are killing your souls… Massacre by proxy!

The world-historical significance of Nakhichevan - Link with ancient Egypt

The Armenian stone-cross = khachkar is a unique cultural invention that had evolved as a Christian artefact during the middle ages, used to commemorate, hence immortalize, memorable occasions – public (like the consecration of a Church), and private – as a grave-stone, immortalizing the soul of the beloved dead.

Its origins stretch back to man’s first attempts at recording history – creating permanent ‘archival’ records of historical facts, structures labelled in archaeology as stelae – flat stone-boards, for inscriptions, with or without a curved top as an aesthetic feature.

Its erect posture unavoidably merged with ancient phallic cults, producing obelisks, topped either with penetrative pyramidal or indented conical heads – both a definitive visual representation of the glans. There is (now, alas, there was) in fact such a unique obelisk (with the conical indented head) among the ten thousand now totally destroyed that proved the historical link of the khachkars with the pre-historical Armenia, now gone for-ever – the loss is incalculable to understanding mankind’s cultural evolution still full of mysteries …

N(o)akh-ichevan (in old Armenian pronunciation) is one of the most ancient territories in ancient Armenia. The two cemeteries the Azeri military idiots have razed to the ground were landscaped very much like the ancient Egyptian Valley of the Kings. You need no eyes of the expert archaeologist to note the similarity – simply look at the photographic evidence. There is very little doubt that they are conceptually linked. I have a traditional archaeologist’s hunch that one day the Armenian Valley of the Kings will deliver its own ‘Egyptian’ funerary mysteries, proving that the Armenian variant served as a paradigm for the ancient Egyptian ruling elite.

During a seminar (before Christmas) at the London University, I was conversing with both Professors A.R.George – a leading Assyriologist, and J. David Hawkins, an authority on the extinct Luwian language. Prof. George accepted the Old Testament reference concerning Sennacherib’s sons killing their father and escaping to the Ararat Land (2Ch 32:21; Isa 37:37-8) as being Armenia – once upon a time even this was disregarded by experts! I remember the desperate efforts of Raphael Ishkhanian in Soviet Armenia trying to convince his own Soviet-Armenian scientific community that the Biblical record of the land of Ararat could mean nothing else but ancient Armenia, pre-dating foolish notions of Armenians not having appeared in history yet... Prof. Hawkins was perturbed by my suggestion that Armenian history stretches back to millennia long before even Sennacherib. He kindly gave me his card, in case I publish my ideas and would send him a copy.

The dogmatic opinion of non-Armenian speaking so-said experts on the* Armenians, and their Armenian followers imitating them, which badly needs a complete conceptual over-haul, is that the Armenians appeared in history about 7_ 8th c. BC, and ‘emigrated’ from… the Balkans.

Knowing full well Hitler’s ‘plans’ for Soviet Armenia – Hitler on several occasions mentions the Armenians among the untermensch = under-people, a Nazi euphemism for animals, the equivalent of what Orthodox Jews label non-Jews as goiim = cattle – Armenian political elites rushed into internalizing and confirming the foolish dogma about the Armenians-from-the-Balkans theory, trying to plead with Hitler not to do us in, as the Young Turks before him had done, and which Hitler was imitating.

The semi-literate idiot from Austria with the tooth-brush moustache, would not know what a distinguished Armenian Armeniologist – Aivazian – from Yerevan pointed out to me two decades ago that even the appellation ‘German’ could be shown to have derived linguistically from Herrman = Arman/Armenian. I myself could further point out that if Herr-mann = Lord-of-the-manor, it is exactly a meaning of Arman = nobleman (in Armenian).

Aivazian had already published a scholarly article demonstrating that the famous invaders of ancient Egypt, called by the Historian Manetho the Hyksos, that ruled Egypt for about 150 years and were eventually absorbed into the peoples of the region, had descended from historical Armenia – the very name Hyk-sos = the Hai, in plural form, ‘Haik’ in ‘krapar’ = classical Armenian (-sos- being a Greek particle = of, sons/seeds of; -k is the Armenian particle denoting the plural form, which leaves Hy = what the Armenians call themselves in their own Armenian language).

I myself shall go further and note that the classical Greek appellation of Egyptians is Ai-guptoi, as that of the Ethiopians is Ai-thiopoi. The mutual influences of both cultures on one another are still a matter of much ignorance, not to say study or debate. A valuable linguistic indication is that both names – and ancient nomenclature preserves the fossils of the bearers’ identities – are variants of the phonemic nucleus Ai – that of the Armenian identity in the Armenian language (it is the non-Armenians who call us ‘Armenian’ = sons/children of Aram – the patriarch ‘Abraham’ of the Old Testament that fathered both the Arabs and the Jews was one of them!)

Re-discover pre-historical Armenian Origins

Because hitherto Armeniologists have been searching for the ancient Armenian identity through the non-Armenian linguistic label of ‘Armenian’, they have missed completely the countless mentions of the (h)Ai and its derivatives, like in the feminine forms in classical Hebrew as Ai-ath, and Ai-ja (Isa 10:28; Ne 11: 31) – and this point is made and published for the very first time here, in this article in Gibrahayer – one of the most important hitherto never grasped being the name of the royal city of the Canaanites mentioned in the Old Testament (Jos 7:2; 8:11) – in King James Version, it even receives its Hebrew transliteration as Hai!

Abraham pitched his tent “with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east” (Ge 12:8; 13:3) {in the perfect literal translation of the Bible, by the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania, USA}.

One of the most powerful and mysterious figures of ancient Egyptian history was the grand Vizier of Akhnaten, equally instrumental in promoting the monotheism of the sun-cult, who also saw through the reign of Tutankhamun. He seems to have been the father of Nefertiti, the wife of Akhnaten. These relationships are still a matter of debate in Egyptology, but what is unquestionable is his name – And he was called literally Ai, obviously a (h)ai, as much a Hai-Armenian as Ay-nedjian, the great editor of this magazine!!

Taken the mention of historical Ai’s into account, the conclusion is inevitable that it is not only a single waive from ancient Armenia that has dispersed into the other parts of the ancient world, but wave after wave over many millennia.

The Armenians were not the Balkan migrants, immigrating into the lands of ancient Anatolia-Armenia, but were the autochthonous native people of the region, surrounding the Ararat Mountains, emigrating to other parts of the world, for many historical reasons not yet fully identified – including the volcanic activity in their land of a mountainous plateau.

The Pyramids of ancient Egypt were dedicated to the worship of the oldest god of the Egyptian pantheon, the sun god Ra – the Semitic inversion of Ar, which is the root in the Armenian word meaning the sun =Ar-ekag.

To me it is beyond reasonable doubt that thus, the Egyptian Pyramids were built as a commemoration of the Mountains of Ararat, on flattened earth, by a people who considered their origins to be from that region in ancient Armenia (remember their Greek-given name Ai-guptoi) – and the Ararat mountains to be the cult-object, viz. the most sacred manifestation of the god itself, of the sun-worship, hence its man-made ‘epiphany’ in ancient Egypt.

Link with biblical Noah

The appellation of N(o)akhichevan is a linguistic fossil of immense historical significance – I do not know (and do not care) how the ridiculous theorists of the Nazi-scared Balkan-origin of the Armenians think – it is crystal clear to me that Noakh is the true Hebrew appellation of Noah, preserved nowhere else (besides the Bible) but in the Armenian language here, signifying the pre-historical record of Biblical Noah’s descent from the Mountains of Ararat into this region of ancient Armenia – itchevan (in classical Armenian) = arrival-and-stay, it is where some Homo sapiens, perhaps Homo Sapiens sapiens re-started mankind post a major global crisis = the Flood – perhaps a major climate-change!

In Hebrew, Noa(k)h's name itself is eponymous, and literally means Hai-Armenian thus; reversing the Semitic form to its Indo-European equivalent produces the root (k)Ha(o), which is the Van dialect pronounciation of Hai - an Armenian from the Van region would pronounce Hai, as kh(o)ai. It indicates that the Armenians of Nakhichevan originated from the Armenian people in the Van region, spreading out of the Ararat mountains.

According to Dr.s Armen Haghnazarian, and Dieter Wickmann (www.international .icomos,org – ‘Destruction of the Armenian Cemetery at Djulfa’, 27/12/2005);

“Alexander Rotes mentions this cemetery in his description of journeys in 1648 and reports of 10.000 fully decorated cross stones. In 1605 the Armenian people of Djulfa were forced by Shah Abbas to settle in Persia in order to have trade and commerce developed by them in his country. He destroyed the town to prevent their return, however left the cemetery untouched. At the beginning of the 20th century, 6000 reclining and standing Katchkars were still counted.”

According to Gayane Mktchyan’s article (www.armenianow.com – ‘Monumental Effort: Scotsman [Steve Sim] wants to prove Azeri policy of cultural destruction in Nakhijevan’, September 02, 2005);

“In 1903-4… there were 5,000… [by] 1928-9, there were up to 3,000… in 1971-3, only 2,707 were preserved…”, and now there are literally none – all broken up and dumped by enormous trucks in the river Arax flowing nearby like Egypt’s Nile…

A case for Freudian analysis

As psychologists, neither my wife, nor I are Freudian psychoanalysts – although we acknowledge the profound insights it may occasionally deliver if properly conducted. To me, what the Azeri military state has perpetrated may serve as a classic case for psycho-history, using Freudian insights to unravel the onion peels covering the hidden truth – the true intentions lying behind the bizarre human behaviour, by analyzing the behavioural patterns interacting with the metaphors of historical symbols.

As there can be no doubt that the medieval Christian Armenian stone-cross (not unlike the usual equivalent of ordinary grave-stones say in modern Britain) placed on the grave represents the dead person’s immortal soul, it is also a visual display of God’s omnipotence, his divine fertility, which in Freudian terms is the priapic phallus of the patriarchal god = the permanently erect, hence fertile, divine sexual organ.

By massacring these, the Azeri military donkeys were obsessively and homo-erotically hacking at the Armenian nation’s fertility, which can only mean one thing – genocidal intent, and perpetration by proxy. They could not murder the Armenian bodies in the neighbouring Republic of Armenia; hence, they transferred their murderous sado-masochist homo-erotic desires onto the phalli of the Armenians, violently stabbing at the very souls of the Armenians globally, and not only in the neighbouring Armenia.

Was Britain’s Baroness Cox right?

A few years ago, Baroness Cox, the Deputy-speaker of Britain’s House of Lords – one of the very few decent politicians left in the world, and a politician of sheer Christian decency – addressed an Open Letter to the Armenians of the Diaspora – to warn them of an impending 2nd genocide to be perpetrated by the same forces that attempted the first.

Ordinary Armenians – most of the Armenians – were stunned. They did not know what to do. I asked my MP, Sir Sydney Chapman, to seek out the truth from the government of Prime Minister Blair. His minister responsible for European affairs was Keith Vaz, MP, who naturally denied it, and decried it.

The Ministry of the Foreign Affairs in the Republic of Armenia meanwhile, that should have known better, was pretending to being staffed with world-class diplomats, submissive to British-US interests. They reprimanded Baroness Cox for being an alarmist, though about what, they did not know. And the clever-dick Keith Vaz, in a great vicious circle, was cheekily quoting in his letter to my MP Armenia’s own Foreign Minister to cold-shower Baroness Cox… only to himself resign a few months later for lying corruptly to the British parliament and people!

Ordinary sweet Armenians took comfort that after all the Coxian prophecy was not fulfilled. And now, the equally horrendous massacre of the Armenian Soul-stones seems to me to be vindicating the Lady’s prophecy … alerting the Armenians once again of an impending genocide that they may be ignoring at their peril.

Enough is enough – and is letter-writing protests enough?

I joined the peaceful computer protesters of hairenik.com – they had composed a very nice civilized letter to Secretary Rice of the Bush Administration. I wrote my name and address – on the computer-provided list, I had a difficult time finding my country, which used to be called Great Britain, England, a small Britain? Finally I located it as United Kingdom, and clicked it – the British, like insecure children, always gather around their Daddy King or Queen Mummy in times of crisis…but lo and behold, for some strange reason the computer converted my country to…Uzbekistan.

I wonder what Condoleezza Rice is going to think about this – Pilikian, London, Uzbekistan! As if she is going to read it… The letter to which I subscribed makes the sweet assumption that the Bush government knows nothing about the Azeri state-organized genocide of the Armenian Souls (“calling upon you …. To investigate, protest, and halt the Azerbaijani government’s ongoing destruction…” indeed!)

Poor, honey-sweet, naive Armenians, like the priestly looking journalist reporting the event on hairenik.com, and sweetly, impotently, raging and cursing in the name of God the Azeri soldiers, while filming their murderous deeds… then, having run out of polite curses ends up playing soul-enhancing Armenian Church music…

With Azeri Baku-oil, guzzled down the gullets and pockets of the Bush administration, they probably pricked the Azeri donkeys into genocidal action.

The letter goes on to flatter old George’s old Condie – “Knowing of your commitment to tolerance for religious diversity and your appreciation of the need for adherence by all parties to the UNESCO World Heritage Convention etc.” And I signed under this lie without even having read it – commitment to religious diversity… murdering thousands of Iraqis everyday, with a single commitment to oil-robbery!

What the Armenians can do

Option (1) Full Spectrum Dominance Armenian Style

The Armenian Military (and government) as a US ally (in Iraq for example), can follow his Master’s Voice, and have the honour of being the first member of the United Nations to adopt the US government’s paradigm and imitate its pre-emptive military action by invading Nakhichevan, which is an extension of Armenia, while lacking completely in any congruent boundary with Azerbaijan… Armenia has every reason under the sun to claim legitimacy, and legality in international law, while America had none to invade Iraq.

(a) The American and British governments lied, to create a casus belli = Roman Empire trickery to start a war of aggression. There never was any WMD, let alone their activation in 45 minutes… The Armenian cameras do not lie, and the grotesque evidence of intended genocide by the Azeri military is for the whole world to see – enough truth to take –

(b) Military action in self-defence – The Armenian souls are being massacred in physically congruent geographical territory, while neither America nor Britain were physically attacked by … a thousand mile away distant Iraq.

(c) The whole essence and definitional identity of the United Nations was decimated by the attack on Iraq. The UN’s definitional charter outlaws aggression on a member country, endorses military action only in proven self-defence. The American and British governments committed a horrendously, unforgivably illegal, and entirely criminal act by attacking Iraq. It is the equivalent in the individual, of rape that can never ever be legally exonerated, let alone justified.

(d) The Armenian government on the other hand, will be acting precisely in self defence, not as an aggressor, in full protection of the UN charter, as the fact of the massacre of the Armenian soul-stones is incontrovertible, hideously proven, precisely like a rapist’s murderous act caught on public TV cameras.

(e) Unlike the vicious military destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure, and the murder of hundreds of thousands of innocents, the Armenian government shall not need to employ heavy military equipment – as the whole territory of Nakhichevan is sparsely populated. As for the Azeri military – they probably know that the Armenian public has the Bomb.

Does the Armenian Republic have the nuclear Bomb?

Of course I do not know. A mere intellectual, who am I to know?

But perhaps it is safe to assume with the Azeri military that Armenia indeed has the Bomb, and admire its administration’s wisdom not to play with fire.

Armenia has been running a nuclear reactor to generate electricity for at least two decades now, even at a great cost to the health of its citizens in the vicinity, and worst – built on a geological fault line, it is only a matter of ‘divine’ good fortune that it has not exploded hitherto in an earthquake…

During Perestroika, I asked my MP, then Prime Minister Mrs. Thatcher to personally negotiate its closure with President Gorbachov of the Soviet Union. It was shut down and stayed shut for several years. Unfortunately, the combined massive stupidity of Turkish and Azerbaijani governments’ economic blockade of Armenia later, forced the Armenian government to re-open it.

It is therefore hugely unlikely, that after so many decades, and genocidal threats from its Tukic neighbours, Armenia would lack the ability to produce the Bomb, when moreover; Armenia was a much valued first class centre of scientific achievement in the Soviet Union.

I thus conclude, by sheer philosophical logic, that Armenia must have the Bomb, as not to, would be a sign of congenital stupidity which is not at all the historical case of the Armenian people. The same Minister of Foreign Affairs, who questioned the veracity of Baroness Cox’s warning, playing super-duper diplomacy, will honour me, I am certain, by denying the truth of Armenia’s Bomb.

Option (2) the Ukrainean Orange Path

There is no just war. As a total pacifist, I advocate no war at all – I support wholeheartedly the Anglican vicar Bruce Kent’s movement to abolish war itself, its very abhorrent and inhuman concept and contexts.

It is ridiculous that some (even the Archbishop of Canterbury) categorize last-resort self-defence action as a form of war. It is not at all – it is the life-force, the survival instinct empowered. Gandhi’s peaceful mass-resistance defeated one of the greatest military powers in history – the British Empire. And as recently as last year, the Ukrainian masses achieved their revolution without a drop of blood spilt.

A million Armenians from Armenia, unarmed, can drive in buses into Nakhichevan on a Sunday, under the protective shield of the Armenian military, and once and for all re-take what has been theirs since time immemorial, viciously torn from their bosom not even by military force, but in mere communist brotherhood – the Armenian communists had voluntarily accepted the donation of their land to their Azeri fraudulent-communist false-brothers, to cement Stalin-sponsored lunatic policies.

Are there other options? – a lot, like writing letters to President Bush, and the New York Times, that denied the 1915 genocide of the Armenians for decades, and the Time magazine which even a few months ago distributed with its European edition a Turkish sponsored DVD denying the same…

The first two options mentioned above remain the only effective options. Failing those, Baroness Cox’s prophecy shall be the last option.

P.S. As I finished writing my last sentence, by a puzzling coincidence, news arrived that my 25 years old daughter Thea Pilikian’s close friend, Rachel, has… killed herself – a sensible girl, sporty, full of life, adventurous, parachutist, decent loving parents, she has walked out on Christmas day after a joyous family lunch, she has gone onto a bridge overlooking car traffic, and thrown herself onto the harsh tarmac… I shed a thousand tears, incredible news, at an incredible time, Jewish holocaust, Armenian genocide, what life, so sad, so…

Post-Modern Turkish Cinema - Article II

2005-12-09T23:19:00.000-08:00

The other day, my beautiful Turkish friend Asli asked me if I knew when the next Turkish film Festival would take place. I said I was hoping it would be soon, before the year ends, to preserve the record of its unbroken annual continuity. My wife Clarice (psychologist and philosopher) had attended it with me last year, and could hardly wait to see the crop of the best Turkish films this year. I then told Asil about Vedide Kaymak, a remarkable woman who is the founder and artistic director of the said Festival based at the Rio Cinema (107 Kingsland High Street, London E8 2PB) since its inception 12 years ago – she has an impeccable sense for selecting quality films, upon which as a film-critic one can rely without any hesitation.

The man behind the throne, her Duke of Edinburgh as it were, is Charles Rubinstein, the General Manager of the Rio, who has been consistently sustaining Ms Kaymak’s heroic non-commercial, and non-mercenary, noble efforts in the heartland of the London Turkish community in Stoke Newington (Dalston). Together, they gave creative London its best New Year’s present in 2004 deserving post-facto a detailed critical analysis – exciting, meaningful, stunningly photographed films both from mainland Turkey, and Diaspora Turkish communities of the European Union countries.

In this too, Turkish cinema is making a unique contribution to world culture – its creative forces are emerging everywhere. German cinema (for example) seems to be quite dead in the water – some may disagree with me, but the only interesting sign nowadays of German cinematic life being shown seems to appear in… Turkish films subsidized by Bavarian capital – one could say without much hesitation that the best films of German cinema today seem to be directed (and acted) by an entirely Europeanised Turkish creative talent, lock stock and barrel, producing even a rich juicy dosage of rampant foul language surpassing the sewage-mouthed Tarantino, the American film-director whose linguistic post-modern Americana document a lamentable case of inarticulate idiocy.

The swearing in director Fatih Akin’s German-Turkish films are as colourful as his cinematography, and perhaps a source of great outrage for the fundamentalists of Turkey’s Prime Minister Erdogan’s ruling party, to use as evidence for the Western corruption of traditional Turkish social values – not that, mind you, the religious fundamentalists do not swear, just that they would not in public (and never in the presence of women!) In Turco-German Akin’s films everybody swears all the time, and beautiful women worse of all…

In this matter, I personally find myself in reluctant agreement with the Fundamentalists – I think outrageous social behaviour (drunkenness or binge drinking to the degree of public vomiting, drug addiction causing crime, incontinent use of foul language etc.) is unforgivable in life generally, let alone in films, but of course I would not then want to censor it, nor imprison people for it, or kill them for any reason – I can think of no conceivable reason as to why any human being, let alone a religious one, should want to kill, let alone for God...

More than anything, I feel sad and sorry for decent human beings suffering from a need to use foul language – a horrendous social self-degradation in capitalist societies. Those who think Karl Marx is finished – they do not understand that those social ills (yes, indeed the abundant use of ‘Fuck-shit’ category of expletives Hollywood style) have their true classical diagnosis in Marx’s theory of Alienation caused directly by the unjust inequalities of the capitalist relations of economic production.

What happened in Russia and Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union is proof enough that Globalisation is the worst of capitalist imperialism – also a theme in post-modern Turkish cinema, as the Russian prostitutes have flooded the back streets of Istanbul.

If only Russia and its earlier Soviet satellites could show anything decent replacing their former regimes, one could have doubted the potential of Communism – but never, in view of what these countries have fallen into – the rape and murder of whole nations, where drugs and prostitution are the only commodities the ruling local mafias webbed to the American Mafia, are producing…

There were three additional strands to the main features of the usual Festival fare – Documentaries specifically tackling the problem of Cyprus, a tribute to Fatih Akin, and in search of new talent among a massive programme of shorts spread over 3 afternoon sessions.

Karpuz Kabugundan Gemiler Yapmak [Boats out of Watermelon Rinds]; Dir. Ahmet Ulucay, 98m, Turkey 2004.

A strange choice for the Gala opening night of the festival – the weakest film of the season, it beggars belief that the artistic directors could have given it the great publicity it did not deserve. The work of an obviously inexperienced director, an overextended short film, the director could have been hailed as a great potential talent if this film was no longer than twenty minutes.

Obviously derivative in its main theme from a minor theme in Fatih Akin’s Solino (2002), Ulucay’s film deals with the sweet travails and tribulations of two village boys wanting to build a film projector. They are teenagers (14 years old?), surely old enough to know that they cannot pull a film manually with their own bare hands through a torch lens to expose it on a screen… this overstretched gentle joke produces furtive walks in the night, through unlit streets, haunted by shadowy figures, ending in what looks like a scene from the three witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, burning their film in a massive cauldron with other unwanted garbage from the village…

This village they call it a “town” in the subtitles of the film, counts hardly more than a few streets, revealed when one of the boys chases two sisters down the lanes, going presumably non-existent supermarket shopping… Their mother, a widow, takes one of the boys (apprenticed to a watermelon seller, hence the title) to her heart and hearth, infuriating her elder daughter who wishes to be posh, and looks down her nose at everybody else calling them “gypsies”!

The boys (and the men) with their western clothing look blaringly modern against the women in medieval Sufi shalvar albeit brilliantly coloured, spic-and-span laundered and ironed – it gives the film a discordant pitch, making it obvious that these are posh Europeanised Istanbul actresses thrown into the deeper end of the Turkish medieval village life, entirely out of their own depth, and it shows.

I am no expert at the swearing habits of Turkish villagers, but I find it highly unlikely that the women would utter “fuck off” under any circumstance, not even to a boy!

I think it inconceivable that a mature woman could be found going to the fountain in the village square well after… midnight, hazarding a walk through unlit winding streets, with pales of water, and moreover, chat to a teenager…

Something is quite not right with this film, in fact something fundamental is quite wrong, and I think it is this – such cinematic projects need the Italian neo-realist competence of handling non-actors in their natural environments.

The young director is undoubtedly talented, and his film suffused with human warmth typical of Turkish cinema does not lack original sequences as, the boys’ daily long march to the “town” from their dusty villages, photographed from their backs, like two Chaplinesque figures trundling along, discussing their childish problems seen through occasional profiles. The watermelon seller is a handsome middle-aged man whose shop is the mere pavement in a corner street opposite a funeral director – he is so bored out of his wits that when a coffin is laid before him, he imagines the dead moving – it is a small sweet jump to his good-hearted fantasy that he could marry soon the widow, using his apprentice’s connections – no wonder he goes bankrupt towards the end of the film giving up his whole stock to the local mafia…

Insaat (Under Construction); Dir.Omer Vargi, 108m, Turkey 2003.

This is the first time in a lifetime of film viewing that I did not wish the film to end… and that includes the masterpieces of Ingmar Bergman, Fellini, Kurosawa, Vittorio de Sica, and now the forgotten classics of Rouben Mamoulian – the Hollywood Armenian film-director who produced the world’s first Technicolor film.

Not that this Turkish film did not achieve its natural conclusion. On the contrary, Vargi’s film flowed into a logical ending – just that the whole cinematic experience was bathed in overwhelming human warmth – the sheer human decency of its working class characters was breathtaking to witness.

Characterized (in publicity materials) as a “black comedy”, it is nothing like any Hollywood black comedy you have ever seen – it is in fact a perfect example of the deeply flawed critical habit of judging Turkish films (and the films of other nationals) by the yardstick of American genres – simplistic categories, with stereotypical characterizations and simple stories – plot twists and turns, as some American film experts seem to think, do not render a story complex but merely foolish – intended for the mass-consumption of unsophisticated dumb American audiences. We must get rid of the genres, and all critically inane talk about it – thank god, none of the non-American greats of world cinema ever created their masterpieces according to those Hollywood categories meant for easy consumption, by non-thinking infantile audiences grabbed by Walt Disney…

This Turkish film begins with a semi-touristy aerial photography of Istanbul’s wealthy areas, to cleverly shift and sift visually through the Banking area, then to the slum regions of the Byzantine capital, to finally descend onto a building site, where two mates are stuck building a house for a Mercedes driving boss.

Ali (initially slightly amateurishly acted by Sevket Coruh – but no matter, he achieved greatness halfway through, to the end) and Sudi (played perfectly by Emre Kinay, deserving better than an Oscar – a double Oscar!) are the two mates, so close as to be blood brothers. Their relationship is constructed with such profound warmth and humanity, without a whiff of any homosexuality, that it serves as a perfect example of the remarkable skill with which Turkish film directors seem to be endowed uniquely in world cinema – the ability to portray the profundity of same-sex friendship without sexualizing it into homosexuality, which seems to be the post-modern requisite norm in American and West European film industry. In this, I think Turkish cinema has a lot to teach Western film-makers. Let Omer Vargi’s film be a whole big textbook on the subject.

There is an interfering neighbour, a hunchbacked old woman (gloriously hilariously acted straight, without any camping up, which would be the trap of a British film director) from the other side of the street, constantly watching the mates, and critiquing daily their bricklaying and cementing work, commenting on the right mixture of sea sand that she thinks must be cleansed of its shells…

As if the old woman’s publicly shouted nagging were not enough, Sudi one night is awoken by the noise of a spade digging surreptitiously in the backyard, only to discover that his boss is burying a… dead body! The mates are horrified, and terrified – they are citizens of such decency that they would want to have nothing ever to do with any criminal act – the film is full of one-liners, wise philosophical Confucian-style sayings splurged here and there, from anybody’s mouth, enlightening life’s difficulties and the need for survival through economic poverty, the constant exploitation of the poor by the wealthy, and the mafia infestation of Turkish social life – one of the characters, a hysterical ‘shorty’ (played excellently by an actress) is a TV journalist on the verge of a scoop, to be given by a mafia super-grass the list of all the famous Turks snorting cocaine… instead, she runs him over by mistake!

She becomes only one of an endless string of first, Mafiosi, then, ordinary people bringing their murdered bodies to the construction workers to get rid of them – soon the mates’ working (and living) site turns into a cemetery of mass graves. The TV journalist had forgotten her camcorder at their place. Clever clogs Sudi begins to secretly film their customers, egged on by himself, to tell the circumstances of their crimes – never mind the Mafia Families, some of all the professions (symbolical of Turkish social classes) are there – Bankers, psychiatrists, jealous lovers, feminists fornicating with toy-boys, Gays – all kill their mates unwittingly, accidentally, out of bottled up rage, misunderstandings, unfulfilled passions, any imaginable cause that can let people lose control, and end in murder.

The interfering neighbour opens a second vein of money-mining for the pair, when Ali makes up to her that Sudi is the great grandson of a Mufti – an imagined Sheikh Sehabuttin, capable of distance healing with… amulets! A new stream of an endless queue of clients forms, to consult Sudi, especially at night time – mostly women of all sorts, concerned mostly with their relatives’ sex lives... Sudi has to change his clothes frequently, to wear the traditional loose striped shirt, and sit cross-legged for the blowing of hot air on worried faces, lifting off the evil spells of evil spirits…

The director Omer Vargi does not forget to explore also the Biblical theme of the Woman’s evil, very much the preoccupation of Turkish men – both traditional and modern, and post-modern even more so… A local sophisticated divorcee comes between the mates, as Sudi falls seriously in love with her. But they make up – Ali in turn finds love in the sweetly unsophisticated daughter of one of their old-women customers. Ali himself is cross-eyed, and they both take delight in Ali’s identification with the ‘Armenian’ cats of Lake Van – apparently most famous in Turkey for possessing eyes that can see both ways…

Pre- the women, the mates were dreaming of escaping to Italy to start a new life in idealized and idolized Europe, when Sudi catches the TV news that Turkish refugees in Italy had just been arrested and imprisoned as illegal immigrants… The four of them, this time girl-friends included in social equality, have a summit and decide to call it a day, forget xenophobic racist Europe, take the monies accumulated under the mattress (in Dollars paid cash by their clients, as if Turkey was a state of the USA) and just leave – drive in an old banger in Turkey to anywhere, wherever a road would take them, as they cannot decide whereto…

But as bad luck would have it… Japanese scientists turn up with the local governor, wanting to dig up their building-site to measure the seismic potential of an earthquake happening soon… The mates resist, and in the fracas that follows, the competing Mafia Families all turn up together – in a hilarious inimitable send up of Hollywood mafia films, everybody puts a gun to somebody’s head threatening to blow their brains out… while the interfering neighbour, who by now has adopted the mates as the sons she never had, calls the Police that turn up and… leave, frightened of the Mafiosi…

Suddenly, the Capo di Capo – the Boss of the mafia Bosses, middle aged, handsome, turns up with his bodyguards, all dressed up in angelic camp creamy white suits (echoing the gay lead in the American film of Tennessee Williams’ play Suddenly Last Summer). With a totally reasonable calm rationality, he persuades everyone to lay down their guns, to save their skins. He calls for a rational solution of their crime feuds – you wish he were the United Nations ambassador sent to all the hot spots of the world as a master of conflict management! “You fools think we are in a Hollywood film?” he chides the Mafiosi memorably – “We are all in it together, let’s sit down and discuss it rationally” he orders, and arranges for the… Police to come and ‘discover’ the dead bodies, and arrest the workmates as the guilty partners! But little could he guess that Sudi had given the collection of his incriminating films to his girl-friend, hoping that she will hand them over to the authorities, to exact the justice they deserve.

The film ends on the Turkish national television reporting the shocking discovery of the mass graves, as if in Yugoslavia or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, while the two poor men (in all the meanings of the word) are carried through a horrified mob attacking them. The Big Question haunting the lives of all the poor and the abused in the world is left unanswered – can they, will they ever be able to get justice from their corrupt, mafia-infested rulers, even with all the recorded historical factual self-confessed filmed evidence of the criminals proving their own guilt?

With this film alone Omer Vargi joins hands with the greats of humane cinema. The film is not explicitly political, but profoundly sociological, unravelling corrupted social relations in a dollars-obsessed economy, where even the Mafiosi are victims of circumstances beyond their control – symbolized by the owner of the building site, whose life is threatened forcing him to turn reluctant accomplice in assuming the guilt of the mafia-murder of his childhood friend.

The neurotic local slapper is not a prostitute, but just a homeless village girl come to the neon lights of the Europeanised Istanbul, offered lodgings (and driven mad…) by her Bourgeois female friend living it up…

The interfering neighbour is a sweet old lonely lady, plainly out of her mind, because of sheer boredom and social isolation – a disease caused by the individual’s alienation in capitalist societies.

Vargi’s complicated film is not faultless – knots here and there, and I have some reservations about the necessity of the second thematic seam satirizing the religious fundamentalists as superstitious believers in hocus pocus, but I repeat, for the first time in my professional life, I did not want a film, this film, to end – and I saw it twice, without changing any of my mind. It should have been the Gala choice to launch the festival.

Neredesin Firuze [Where’s Firuze]; Dir. Ezel Akay, 138m, Turkey 2004.

In comparison with the warmth of the tragic-comic condition in Insaat, Akay’s film is an example of cold Turkish high (very high!) camp. The cinematography is superbly kaleidoscopically Technicolor in costumes and sets, even more than a Walt Disney cartoon.

I cannot tell if this film satirizes or imitates the infantilism of the Eurovision Song Contest, of which the British X-Factor is an awful parody – similar sequences pre-date it here. Of course the Japanese invention of Karaoke may have served as the common source of inspiration for both, whereby people of all ages try to sing, even though they are off tune, off pitch and quite bonkers...

If Akay’s film is intended as a satire on the Indian Bollywood film industry, then it is a fair and good game. Still, it is not to my tastes, while I acknowledge the popularity of this Turkish market, and the massive audience it obviously attracts (the most sold out of the Festival season).

I was startled to note that a young Turkish lady from the cinema Gallery, in a question and answer session (after the first showing of the film) asked the Director on the stage… to sing for ‘us’. Thank god the Director was professional enough to decline, but the young lady would not give up, and insisted cheekily to have her wish granted, which of course was not.

Inat Hikayeleri [Tales of Intransigence]; Dir. Reis Celik, 90m, Turkey-Germany 2003.

A remarkable narrative film (could have been another Gala opening choice) – stories within stories that show the originalities of Turkish treatment of established genres – compared with Kurosawa’s incomparable Rashomon (one of the pioneers of the multi-layered story-telling), and the more repulsive examples of Pasolini’s Decameron, Canterbury Tales, and the totally disgusting Salo, Celik’s film shines brilliantly as a gem.

It begins with that magnificent and glorious actor Tuncel Kurtiz, whose voice contains a hundred cellos, himself looking like a volcano on the verge of eruption, standing in a snow bound mountainous landscape – he tells us that many nations have fought endless battles massacring each other on these lands so unnecessarily that, even the beloveds of his mountains – the clouds, have vanished, causing their lovers- the mountains infinite grief and eternal snow… He promises to tell us the stories bounded by cities like Kars and Ardahan – Armenian audiences would instantly recognize these as the region of their ancestral cities topped by their sacred mountains of Ararat, subtitled only at the end of the film.

The first (of the three) is a story of a bet set long-term by a wishbone (from a chicken consumed at a wedding party), forced onto the two notables from different villages. The Bet is set, when they pull at the V-shaped bone joining the wings of the chicken, until it breaks off. Then the punters must miss no occasion to give one another objects, counting on the possibility that the opponent might have forgotten the bet, in which case the giver wins. Not to lose, the opponent must say loud and clear before he touches the offered gift, that he remembers their bet.

One of them gets so obsessed that he starts experiencing constant nightmares, dreaming of his wife committing adultery with his opponent. Every time he wakes up, he beats up his wife… a typical male behaviour in Turkish villages, missing no opportunity of ensuring that the wife never forgets Who’s Boss!

One day, even during the day, daydreaming while blizzards outside punish the world, he dreams of giving the reigns of his horse to his opponent, who he is sure would not remember the wishbone-bet amidst the inhospitable climatic chaos. He wakes up, jumps up, and against the pleas of wife and son, risking life and limb, rides to his opponent’s village, makes to the house, gives the reins of his horse to him… but alas, alack, the opponent shouts he remembered the bet. As a kind friend though, he wants him to stay overnight in the warmth of his house. But no, no use, the man is inat, literally enormously stubborn like a donkey – the folk belief in these parts of the world – with his masculine macho pride hurt, he rides into the blizzards, and freezes to death…

Masculine chauvinist macho stubbornness causing human tragedy and death is one of the grand themes of Celik’s film, titled in Turkish as Tales of Stubborness, and there is no excuse to mistranslate it in English as intransigence.

The second tale is a love-story – a class-conscious land-owning father (played magnificently by Tuncel Kurtiz as the Narrator, and the lead in all the three tales) decides that his son should be forced into marrying the paternal choice of a bride, having rejected the earlier ones, starting at the top with the daughter of the Padishah of Iran… The son refuses even this one, the daughter of the local chief, and is terrified to confess that he is actually in love with a poor peasant girl.

The father is desperate. He goes to consult an experienced polygamous friend, who comforts him by proposing that he shall set the peasant girl a riddle, which no one, not even a wise man like himself could solve, for a hundred years. They give the girl five pairs of match-size sticks, to be placed on a table like a radiating sun, of which a star is to be made, but without manhandling any of the sticks – a truly impossible task!

They give the bride-to-be forty days, causing her immense grief struggling for a solution. The forty days pass and the father, an ancient castle-owner, orders the servants to begin preparations for the marriage of his own choice of a wealthy bride, when lo and behold, in the nick of time, the peasant girl arrives on horseback to announce that she has indeed solved the riddle… the proof? She places the stick-pairs on the table, drops water over them, and behold – slowly the wooden sticks expand and form a beautiful star…

The virile father and his chauvinist cohorts are stunned, that a woman, let alone a peasant one, can possess enough brains to defeat male wisdom and experience of ages… They demand to know how she found the solution. She answers that in her desperate love and wretchedness, when her tears fell on the sticks accidentally; it provided her with the natural solution... the moral? Emotional creative nature conquers rational logic!

The men reluctantly agree to the marriage – but wait, this peasant girl is also a post-modern feminist – she says the castle-owning father can stuff his wimpy son in whatever hole he wants, as she is having none of him, for putting her through forty days of total misery, and she stomps out of the castle room never to return…

The Director, Reis Celik intelligently, subtly and beautifully integrates the ancient, the modern and the post-modern in intricate narrative embroidery that could teach a thing or two to any film director of international standing. As the first story is undoubtedly about murderous virile stubbornness (be it manifest in men like George Bush or women like Condoleeza Rice), the second story is without a shred of doubt about liberated female emotionality – wiser than the wise men, and most loving even in desertion.

The last tale is a masterpiece of obscene political humour, told masterly, unforgettably, and cleanly, without any visual or verbal obscenities – a powerful and devastating attack on the most inhuman social system of Capitalism.

Celik imprints his last parable on the viewer’s brain like a computer burning data on a CD – you will never forget it, and will laugh and laugh forever, feeling eternally grateful to Celik for such a powerful insight – it is worth telling in detail.

Saho (Tuncel Kurtiz) is a punter whose speciality is betting. He is also the frustrating riddle of the young handsome local Bank Manager, half his age (perfectly acted by Kemal Gultekin, I think), as he can never understand how Saho always saves money in his bank, and never withdraws any!

How can Saho survive without any money? Obviously a capitalist’s murderous nightmare – if it were at all possible, it would destroy the money-obsessed system that makes whores of us all!

The Bank manager is determined to find out Saho’s secret, in case he can exploit it himself to make even more money he does not need, as he is obviously well paid. He invites Saho to a foxy warm meeting – offers him tea, letting Saho even get sexually excited by his tea-making young secretary. And finally, the million-dollar question – What does Saho do, as a profession, that lets him save money in the bank, and never makes him need to spend any to survive… Saho is happy to oblige and proudly announces that he is a betting man. The Banker is even more amazed – surely Saho would lose some, as he may win some.

Saho’s answer falls like a thunderbolt – he never loses any bets! Proof? He will bet with his host, the Bank Manager himself, that in a month’s time, a grey hair from somewhere on his body will change direction and jut out of his…ass!

And Tuncel Kurtiz gloriously, in a grotesque gesture, sticks his finger up! The Banker, this youthful jet-black haired Americanised symbol of globalisation, is dumbfounded – he agrees instantly to the bet, as he is cock-certain that no such hair will overtake his well-groomed bottom in the foreseeable future.

Saho leaves their high-powered meeting, promising to return in a month’s time, on the 25th of April – the genocide of the Armenians ordered by the Young Turk regime had begun on the 24th of April, 1915 – with an independent witness to check the condition of the Banker’s arse.

On the said date, Saho appears with a briefcase full of the agreed betting sum of one million pounds, with the appropriately formally dressed moukhtar (the local governor) to verify the results.

A close-up shows the name of the Bank as Cildir Bank, of madness…They take tea together. The Banker, very much like an IMF banker, cock-sure that the world is his to rule, shows some compassion to poor Saho, offering to cancel the bet (symbolical of the Third World debt to the Americanised IMF?). Saho and the governor would not hear of it. They are here for the beer – to check for the grey hair in the Banker’s bottom.

The Banker happily invites them to his private bathroom. Now if this film were directed by a gay American, or a European Pasolini, Bertolucci, by now the viewer would have been offered a hundred close-up shots of well made-up bronzed-up Californian sun-drenched US buttocks, or anal shots of Italian gladiators! Not a sight of them in this Turkish film.

With a jump-cut, the Turkish Banker and his clients are merely shown to come out of their private viewing, with the bet confirmed out of the spectator’s sight – the Governor leaves sour-faced but with the satisfaction of a mission accomplished…

The IMF type Banker happy that he has won the bet wants his pound of flesh from Saho, who joyously hands over to him the briefcase, announcing that it contains not one, but two millions, one million for the Banker, and one million for Saho himself to be put in his own account, for, he had simultaneously betted with the moukhtar that on this day, he, Saho, would get the Bank Manager to show them his arse… Capitalism is fit for bottom-displaying Apes!

Reis Celik achieves all this in a bleak but beautiful snow-bound landscape, of almost monochrome location work in Anatolia, with the snow filmed in all its nuances of natural light, woven in an unforgettable framework (outside of the stories) of complex topical references as people go about their ordinary lives locked into stubborn competitiveness.

There is Kaiser for example, a Turk with a German name epitomizing the epithet of the German Kaiser responsible for the First World War, when Germany was Turkey’s main ally, and the main cause of its loss of the (Ottoman) empire.

Celik builds complex satirical puns and modern references in the script, decrying those fatal imperialist political errors – the Turkish Kaiser here is the owner of a modern minibus coloured dark blood-red… ferrying passengers across a frozen lake (the Armenian Lake Van? in the heartland of Anatolia – the mother of Se-van up in the Caucasian Republic of Armenia) that may shatter and swallow them up anytime. He threatens the livelihood of the local traditional horse-drawn cart owner, doing the same journey but safely, without any risk to the passengers’ lives, providing them moreover caringly with warm blankets, and frequent stops for provisions.

Kaiser’s minibus has all the mod-cons – heating, stereo, windows … even though it gets stuck in the snow, and the passengers have to get out dragging it out, like donkeys! While in the bus, they discuss the… Korean War, some of them have fought for the Americans they label as “cowards”, and who are “only brave in the presence of Turkish soldiers”!

The chauvinist joke is immediately dissipated by the further observation of a veteran of the war, who leaves no doubt that they themselves (the Turkish soldiers) were ignorant of any causes for the senseless war, were used merely as canon fodder by their own Machiavellian Turkish governments at home in Ankara, – “they said go – we went, they said fall on the ground – we fell, they said shoot – we shot!”

The Director’s topical references will not spare even Bush’s war in Iraq – Saho tells the Banker that he won’t bet on the outcome of the war there, even though he knows who shall be the ultimate winners – the bomb-makers! And because all the sides are losers, except of course the anonymous bomb-makers…

What unfortunately and tragically spoils almost a perfect ‘Marxist’ work-of-art is the sudden inexplicable, and unacceptable racist chauvinist nationalism of the last only few concluding lines of the film – the film had began with commendable Marxist internationalism, enlightening all human condition, condemning the horrible warmongering of all nations, only to conclude in total contradiction at the end of the film, with the same Narrator on the screen, that these and such wonderful tales from the Ararat region were carried by the local troubadours – by the Turks – to Europe and all over the world, initiating everybody’s culture…

Thankfully (and cleverly) “by the Turks” was not subtitled, presumably not to offend the world, but it was there in the film, in the narrator’s speech, as a grotesque monstrosity.

The absolute unalterable historical fact is that the Turks appeared in the West and sacked Constantinople in the mid 15th century – Suleiman ‘the Magnificent’ founded the Ottoman Sultanate only in 1520 AD.

The Armenians were there two thousand years earlier, surviving the Hittites, the Urartians, the Byzantines, the Ottomans – their last sultan Hamit, who was given the sobriquet The Red Sultan by the international press of the time precisely for his genocidal attempt to massacre bloodily the native Armenians of Anatolia. Toppled by the pseudo-revolutionary-republican Young Turks Party (with the help of truly revolutionary Armenian political parties), the bloodied Sultan nevertheless left them his genocidal legacy – most of the generation of my own grandparents alas perished in 1915, deported (with our parents as children) on a death march out of their ancestral lands they had settled continuously for millennia.

Older than any European Aristocracy, my own paternal and maternal grandparents owned between them most of Khasgal-Adapazar for example, producing ‘Chinese’ silk from cocoons fed on forests of mulberry trees… My paternal grandfather Hovhanness (whose name I bear) owned further several water-mills, and was the local proto-Medici money-lender – more than a hundred IOUs have survived miraculously now in the Matenataran – the National Manuscript Museum of Armenia – from three bags full lost during the deportations. Most of the family names of the borrowers mentioned in those documents have survived only…in those documents. My grandfather’s emptied mansion sited on a hill (as in Britain’s Iron Age archaeological sites) was later turned into barracks by the retreating Greek armies during the civil war in Turkey following the end of the First World War (a Greek soldier has left us a photograph!), to then be used for the same purpose by the victorious Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. Still later, it was burnt to the ground we do not know when, how, why, and by whom?

The continuity of our historical identity was viciously, violently, abruptly, inhumanly cut-off. I cannot tell my children my family’s full history, as my parents would speak of only happy bits and pieces, trying desperately to forget the genocidal trauma they had lived through.

How could Reis Celik, a man of such admirable intellect and knowledge, a creative filmmaker of genius, think he could get away with a monstrous lie, when even the real people (the non-actors) in his film (never mind the ‘vanished’ Armenians) are… Kurds, speaking Kurdish, which a Turkish speaking person would not understand (unless he knew Kurdish), as the two languages are so very different?

And why this strange masochism, this self-immolation, of wishing to destroy an otherwise a perfect piece of film-making?

Why turn from an internationalist Marxist to a racist nationalist Fascist – within the short span of a film?

Is it perhaps only to please the modern Turkish authorities that deny the Armenian ownership of those beautiful lands conceived by the Armenian Troubadours as paradise on earth?

PS. Let us not forget – and even ignorant fascist Armenians do in their understandable but unjustifiable blind hatred of all things Turkish – that Ata-turk himself, the ‘Father’ of the modern Turks, acknowledged the genocidal crime of the Young Turks by court-martialling their leaders in absentia, resulting in a Guilty verdict, condemning them to death.

The ridiculous Armenian Diaspora battle for a Turkish state-recognition of the genocide, was one of the cleverest Anglo-American conspiracies

(1) To re-write history, to exonerate their own guilt of reneging on the American President Wilson’s map of an independent Armenia including Anatolia,
(2) To trap and dissipate and waste Armenian intellectual power and financial resources that the Armenian Diaspora leaders in foolish love with all things Anglo-American fell into.

The Armenians must now stop convincing the world that the Turks deny the genocide and inform the world instead that their ‘mythical’ Father, the Great Ataturk himself left the water-tight State-legacy of Recognition – Law enough, and enough law, for overdue Reparations, not in hot-air money, but in Real Estate American style!!!!!!!

Let the super-wealthy American-Armenian Republican capitalists try to persuade their omnipotent President Bush they love so much, and his omniscient Condi Rice, to finally realize their truly great President Wilson’s map of historical Armenia, instead of killing a hundred thousand innocent Iraqis with (phosphorous) Poison Gas, dumdum bullets, cluster bombs – the whole bloody arsenal of illegal weaponry – only to line their mafia New Con gang pockets with Iraq’s Oil.

Post-Modern Turkish Cinema - Firecrackers in north East London

2005-12-03T07:04:00.000-08:00

Turkish Cinema? – And the 9th London Turkish Film Festival (in 2001) in the Rio Cinema – Stoke Newington, not a ‘posh’ area of London, with total silence from the posh London newspapers, which cater for a moneyed middle-class readership, whatever that may mean… Their West-End 'Art-consuming’ classes would be frightened to visit ‘those areas’ even during the daylight hours, full of exotic Turkish restaurants, popular markets, and cheap goods sold cheaper even in brand-name supermarkets – not very different from the downmarket areas of New York reeking of middle-eastern kebabs-poverty…

The rat-colony visibly enjoying themselves on the grass elevations of the Stoke Newington train station could not be ‘ethnically cleansed’, according to the station-master, because the rats have wizened up to the nature of the warfarin poison that thins their blood to death (and is used in Ibuprofen tablets that millions of Britons take as painkillers…), so the local Council does not know what else to do to ‘genocide’ the Stoke Newington rat-packs backing the restaurants above them in the High road.

The presentational context apart, could ‘Turkish Cinema’ be defined as clearly as a Turkish Delight?

The concept surely does not even exist. Judging by what is offered on Turkish Television, according to a film-actor friend of mine who watches it occasionally – Vic Tablian (himself directed by no less than the likes of Spielberg, Lucas and Alan Parker!), it is not even worth wasting time trying to ‘work it out’.

Not a single English professional film-critic writes about Turkish films – the critical situation had not changed by December 2004, the 12th year of the festival (and that of 2005 has not taken place yet) – no wonder I was as ignorant about it as the London critics, until my Turkish friends (Akgul and Cahit Baylav) had popped the Booklet-programme in the mailbox. A joke, Vic Tablian thought, and would not be persuaded to see any of the films with me.

What a shock I experienced when in 2001, I saw three of the films in a single day – three superb art-films, enough to announce to the whole world that Turkish Cinema had indeed arrived, was well-born and could be clearly defined with its own definitive features, a new powerful force to be reckoned with, in the arena of international serious film-making.

O Da Beni Seviyor (“Summer Love” / Dir: Baris Pirhasan) tackles the classical predicament of town and country, peasant folk fighting for their outdated way of life against the encroachments of urbanization, the children of farmers leaving derelict lands and oppressive societies behind (where everybody is in everybody’s business) for the anonymity of the sordid freedoms (mostly sexual) big cities offer and people long for.

Esma, a startlingly tall 12 years old in virginal submission is packed by her parents off to friends in the country, for a bit of clean air and practical education. It is the summer of 1973, and the landscape in Malatya (South-East of present day Turkey, or ancient Armenia) looks still wholesome, healthy, ravishingly beautiful – a Paradise if ever there was one, with its brooks and mulberry trees and incredible colours, as rich as the palette of a Titian. All praise to the remarkable tastes of the Armenian lady, the costume designer, whose name alas I could not download into my memory from the rolling credits.

Esma is plunged into this outwardly most divinely beautiful open-hearted world, magnificently clothed, but populated mostly by horrible old women, occasionally middle-aged tarts in heat, rarely young and pregnant, all guarding unspeakable secrets, like the Cicilian Mafiosi. Sentences are always incomplete, and what is said is mostly half-spoken, half-muttered. An incredibly oppressive matriarchal world, where women prettily dressed are the landowners and the fruit-gatherers and the food-makers and the guardians of all secrets, where the men just about manage to throw minor tantrums while being the object of women’s secret sexual desires. The young men occasionally explode into drunken violence just to remind themselves of their social existence. The older men concoct for themselves some social worth by going theological! Forming their own secret (Sufi) society where, like women, they sing and dance and play the Turkish lute. I doubt if any radical Lesbian feminist film-director could express the dark mysteries of an emasculating matriarchal society better. Perhaps it does need the male distance to give it its true worth.

The husband of the elegant tart from Ankara, Saliha, the black sheep of the family, finally turns up (at the end of the film) to demand his piece of the financial cake from the intended sale of the land – a land which anyway was more or less snatched by the family from the Armenian natives who, to escape genocide (this cause is not mentioned in the film) had fled to America (mentioned as a fact in the film, and very cleverly integrated by the Director into the story line with the implication that the absconding woman was another black-sheep member of the clan, which technically speaking makes the confiscation of her land legitimate and necessary…)

The money-obsessed husband (a living symbol of urban capitalism and globalisation) was gossiped as dead, and his menopausal Ankara wife in mourning, needed some comforting in the bosom of the peasant family. When the husband unexpectedly returns from Germany in his silly little car, he is violently attacked and viciously wounded in the paradise of the family forests, having disturbed their picnic and the children’s play – an ethnic version of cricket with sticks.

The complexities of Pirhasan’s film are delightfully endless. There is of course the mandatory love-interest, Esma falling in love with the village Beau, who is in love with the menopausal city-tart who uses Esma for her own ends while simultaneously initiating her into the female rites of passage – dressing and making-up, discovering menstruation, blowing the first kiss etc.

There is the evil boy in the village, labelled “The Fox”, and definitely symbolizing Satan in this matriarchal paradise, constantly on the prowl and lurking around the forbidden excursions of Esma, who is no village doormat, but a feminist Istambul tom-boy, engages the Fox in physical combat and wins!

The editing of the film is fast and occasionally appropriately furious. The theme-music on the violins is hauntingly sad, romantically mournful and very catching.

Baris Pirhasan, the Director, seems to be undoubtedly referencing Paradjanov’s most famous ethnic film NRRAN GOOYNE (=The Colour of the Pomegranate) with its trademark aerial long shots of moving sheep (in Paradjanov – A symbol of the Innocent – God’s lambs as sacrifices sent to genocidal slaughter).

Amongst all this impressive achievement, I could not understand why the outdoor shots in the city at the beginning of the film (for about five minutes) were unacceptably amateur, shot without creative lighting, in natural light, as if with a digital camcorder.

Herkes Kendi Evinde (“Away From Home” / Dir: Semih Kaplanoglu) shares the same thematic obsessions with O Da Beni Seviyor. I wonder if the two Directors are friends and frequent the same intellectual café-society. But no two films could be more different in the expressive means they employ to tackle the same predicaments. Equally, they represent the two aspects of Turkish cinema (1) the ethnic (Eastern), with quaint peasant customs and costumes, and (2) the modernist, urban and urbane, suffering from the existentialist angst of the European Intelligentsia. Forgotten are the miserable wretched lives of the ultra-poor of the Italian neo-Realism.

Selim (Tolga Cevik) is a thoroughly post-modern sensitive young man, with an affluent foul-mouthed feminist girl-friend who demands her pound of flesh every time! No wonder Selim suffers from a premature male menopause. To survive it, he decides to play the lottery of winning US citizenship, answering one of those notorious US government ads published globally. Incredibly, he wins it. Nevertheless, he needs money (and an excuse to free himself of the bondage to his virile girl-friend) to reach New York, his “hobby” – expressed to an American academic he bumps into in a Bar, who is surprised at Selim’s intimate knowledge of the New York map.

Out of the blue, a letter arrives announcing the immediate appearance of Nasuhi – a long lost uncle from of all places Russia. He arrives with no more than a back-pack, a distinguished old man, professorial (his back-pack contains books, and the last Soviet apple!), with a voice that echoes the depths of the very earth he treads on doing his daily Tai Chi, or sits on to do his Yoga asanas (postures). Nasuhi has come to die in his ancestral village home drowned in olive groves, a country property Selim had almost forgotten he had inherited from his late parents.

Meanwhile a separate saga weaves its way creeping slowly close to Selim’s destiny. A most beautiful young Russian girl, Olga, tall as a super model, from the dregs of the defunct Soviet Union (beautifully played by a Polish actress Anna Bielska) waits everyday on the shores of Bosporus, in her hands – the photograph of her father – the captain (ex Red Army) of a mysterious Russian ship – hoping that someone would recognize him, and lead her to him, even to the ends of the world, as she hates her multiply-married mother back home. Olga finally finds out that her father has gone to Australia. She needs 200 dollars to purchase an airline ticket. Broken, devastated, desperate, hungry, homeless, resisting thoughts of prostitution (tries to sell her camera and handbag nobody wants to buy), Olga pleads in tears with the local Russian priest (played by an Armenian actor – I think actually also the cinematographer of the film) to lend her the money. All the Orthodox priest can do is to offer her… prayers. In a powerful dialogue, in a makeshift Church, Olga calls on the Priest to drag his God through the recently developed Russian market place in Istanbul, teeming with Russian prostitutes, to let God witness human misery first hand.

The same night, Olga dresses up in a mini-skirt, forcing herself to sell her body, but determined that it would be only and only for this once, for the 200 dollars she needs desperately.

And in a most remarkable slow-motion sequence (in time, bound to become a most famous sequence in world cinema), the camera picks up a long shot of Olga’s body thrown on the muddy ground – long legs in white stockings, high heeled brown boots covered in muck, tattered leather coat stuck like boiled skin on a stony wall, and an airplane taking flight. Obviously, a rapist has done his worst near the airport in Istanbul.

The heartbreak of the scene when Olga tries to get up and cannot is such that, one wishes with all the Lesbian feminists of the world that all the male rapists of the world be butchered and turned to dog meat and cat food!

Enter the magnificent Nasuhi, old but virile, gentle but powerful, helps the struggling Olga to get up and walk proud again. While Hollywood (and under its influence, Television in our countries of the West) is beginning to glorify Prostitution as some kind of great and profitable Californian fun for women (a most despicable and dangerous social development), the director Kaplanoglu thank god still promotes the old Marxist view of Prostitution as a most wretched evil of capitalism, an outrageous socio-economic exploitation worth no less than a socially cleansing Revolution.

Nasuhi is an old-style Leninist Communist – a loner, though not by choice. In a memorable sequence, when Nasuhi first reaches the village square of his childhood, at night time, the rain pelting down, in an aerial long shot, an old dog is shown slowly walking towards him, diagonally from the left corner of the screen. The dog stops screen-centre for a moment, in the deserted square signposted with blood red Turkish flags, stares at Nasuhi and walks on.

Dedicated to the most humane of political ideologies, the communist Nasuhi is really almost a perfect Christian/Muslim – totally compassionate, honest, totally truthful, totally forgiving. In a profoundly moving scene in a restaurant in Istanbul, Nasuhi forgives unconditionally, without the slightest recrimination, the friend (named Kemal – am sure referencing Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, and incredibly also of the Turkish Communist Party for which he was rewarded by Lenin with a pot of pure Gold) who had betrayed him as a communist to the Turkish fascist authorities – Ataturk had then persecuted his former comrades – an inhuman act that had forced Nasuhi to escape to the Soviet Union, only alas to be sent further to the Stalinist Gulag.

Nasuhi’s dignity intact, now in his ancestral dilapidated home in Anatolia, he sets to work, like the untiring communist that he is, to rebuild the broken stone house from the roof down, re-cultivating the parched land. All of which make no sense to Selim, his young nephew, who secretly sells the lot to Istanbul property-developers, with the proceeds buys a bungalow in the city for his uncle, with a little back garden to let him raise some chicken! With the rest of the money he wants to pursue his American dream by immigrating into the USA.

Predictably, Nasuhi declines the offer, Olga absconds with the money, the developers bulldoze the just-repaired house, and Selim goes to rot in New York.

The film ends with Nasuhi, back-packed as when we first saw him arrive in Istanbul, with the strange gawky gait of an honest communist, leaving his land, disappearing into the groves and the sunset. Will he be back one day bringing his true communism back from the horizon? It is tragic that such totally perfect men (my own Armenian father was one) with no perceptible mundane evil attached to them, should have been eliminated from history so soon by the forces of capitalist evil.

I was certain that the actor of Nasuhi was a rare Russian actor in the best traditions of Stanislavsky’s art, with the miraculous skill of total focus and concentration of energies on the role he sculpts so life-likely. There is nothing like it in the history of the British theatre – strong, weighty, powerful realism, often more natural than Life’s reality itself. Even the best of British acting exemplified by the craft of greats like Olivier and Gielgud contains a lot of forgettable camp nonsense.

I was stunned to discover that this very great actor of Nasuhi was Turkish, Erol Keskin. He is worth the whole of the Hollywood film industry – a unique textbook display of true acting (whatever that may mean!) unsurpassed. I could see the film a dozen times for it.

There is only one other such actor in Russia still on stage, Armen Jikiarkhanian, the Armenian film star of many Soviet films. He could have been Keskin’s unique model. Keskin’s portrayal of Nasuhi constantly reminded me of Jikiarkhanian. Curiously, the Soviet cinema could never create (and god knows how many times it tried and failed) the character of the ideal visionary communist – idealistic, humanistic, dedicated honestly to the creation of the ideal society for the happiness of all mankind. It is quite an incredible feat, a miraculous coup de theatre that this achievement should occur in the Turkish cinema, in this film by Kaplanoglu, in the portrayal of Erol Keskin’s Nasuhi. It is a gem of a polished diamond, the sight of which produces a profound emotional experience – an abstract ideal (like Compassion) made perfectly real, felt in the blood veins, in the bones.

The pity of it is that the Director, Kaplanoglu has chosen an episodic style of editing which gives the film occasionally a stagy texture, and some slack in pace, in spite of its perfect cinematography by the Armenian Hayk Kirakossian.

However, Keskin’s monumental portrayal of the honest communist, although Stanislavskian but never stagy, makes you forget all technical faults. It is equally remarkable that it never overshadows the totally modernist style of acting by Bielska and Cevik – the most unlikely characters ever to come together by Chance, and in a film.

Guzel Bir Gun (“A fine Day” : Dir : Thomas Arslan, Germany 2000) is a wonderful example of a 3rd category in Turkish cinema – the films made in the Turkish Diaspora, meant primarily the 2 million Turks living and working in Germany.

The Armenian Diaspora spread throughout the world was created as a direct result of the genocide perpetrated on the Armenians in Turkey by the Young Turk government in 1915, the allies of Germany in the First World War, and under the German military command. The Turkish Diaspora in Germany on the other hand, was created by Turkish economic migrants, and Germany’s voracious need of industrial manpower decimated by the two World Wars, instigated by no less than their own (German) governments.

Arslan’s film is advertised as the final part of a Berlin trilogy. Although self-contained, it is strange that the other two parts were not also on show in the Festival.

Deniz (Florian Stetter) is an unusually tall Turkish female born in Germany. Imagine a Giacometti sculpture being alive. She walks lithely and endlessly all over Berlin, catching the different machines of the Berlin Public transport. I like the haunting metaphor of Deniz being on a life-journey (what made the French actor Jean Paul Belmondo famous in films directed by Jean Luc Goddard), pulled in and out of stations, with the directorial dolly-camera speeding out of long shots on train tracks.

Deniz is a feminist bit-actress, has no hesitation in breaking off with her long-time boy friend, a German university-student, and because she is bored and thinks that he is good for nothing. Deniz has no problems with chasing men on the tubes, of course discreetly.

Such a young man she eventually corners turns out to be… Portugese, and a music editor on the radio. They are undoubtedly attracted to one another. Incredibly, they happen to be also neighbours. She tells him she has just left her boy friend, this very day. He tells her that his long term girl-friend will be returning tomorrow from a year’s scholarship in America. Deniz of course is not a slut, presumably still inhibited by her Turkish background, does the honourable thing and restrains herself from sleeping with him, who in turn is honourable and would not dream of forcing himself on her. They both part amicably, for Deniz to target another handsome young man travelling on the tube some seats away from her. At least he is smiley, and one feels that he won’t leave all the hard work of getting together to Deniz alone.

The film ends with some implied hope of a good relationship for Deniz, whatever that may mean in her feminist dictionary. She had just met a German female in a café asking her for a cigarette and a light, and who turns out to be a feminist lecturer, lecturing her about how post-modernist understanding of Sex defines it as a social construct, lacking any special significance, and being no more than a socio-social survival need – like eating and pissing.

During the film, Deniz had also visited her Turkish born and bred mother, carrying her laundry there. In a highly original sequence of a tragic dialogue, the mother speaks in Turkish as the daughter answers in German (something most ‘foreigners’ in a culture recognize), we are given the old folks’ philosophy of Love back home, which of course contrasts dramatically with that of the German feminist lecturer. Deniz, as a modernist, is keen that her middle-aged mother finds herself a new sexual partner to console her loneliness caused by her father’s death. She cannot understand why her mother idealizes now her relationship with her father, as she remembers how (and makes sure that the mother remembers it too) they would have violent arguments, father even hitting the mother, whose explanation that Love grows, need not be all there from the start, falls on Deniz’s deaf ears, while her feminist sister, who Deniz had just met en passant in a train Station for a Chinese meal had told her she was pregnant, and although happy with her boyfriend, and certain he would welcome the news, was determined to abort it, because her pregnancy would interfere with her brilliant career…

The French flavour of art-cinema is everywhere in Arslan’s film. I liked the Frenchy humour of pre-pubescent sexuality (the ‘paedophiliac’ trademark of French art-cinema) in a scene where three underage Turkish boys in the neighbourhood give themselves airs of being the tough guardian angels of the neighbourhood (defending it presumably from the local neo-nazi racists). They are waiting on a public bench for Deniz, to accompany her home. One of them can no more contain the effect of his hormones and involuntarily blurts out, “hey, actress, I want to sleep with you”, only to win Deniz’s shocked scorn and a good hiding from his boss, the slightly older gang leader.

The Director is obviously enamoured of the French director Rohmer’s work (because of its sexual trademark?). Deniz in the film is dubbing Rohmer’s Conte D’ete into German. Bresson and Jean-Luc Goddard equally flood Arslan’s film, and unfortunately in the end drown it. I could no more bear the characters’ Bressonean style flat unemotional, unrelentingly boring, rendering of human speech, which in the context of the old French films spoken by the singing undulating tones of Comedie Francaise actors, was refreshing and revolutionary in the films of Bresson. It is a technique past its useful date, even in post nouvelle-vague French cinema.

The out of focus backgrounds in Arslan’s film also suggests out of date cameras and poor man’s budgets, which is strange coming from generous German subsidies. I shall be looking forward to the day when Arslan forgets all about French cinema and finds his own talented voice.

To conclude, Turkish cinema with its serious tackling of socio-economic issues and historical memory displays an extraordinary political courage, even greater than that of the bravehearts of the last days of the Soviet cinema – Paradjanov and his disciple Tarkosvky. May the Turkish cineastes survive longer for the greater glory of world- cinema!

Sex Shop in Armenia - my response

2005-11-24T07:49:00.000-08:00

The GIBRAHAYER Internet Magazine ( http://gibrahayer.cyprusnewsletter.com ) had carried a news item on Tuesday November 15, 2005, about the opening of the first sex-shop in Yerevan, the capital of ex-Soviet, now Independent Armenia. Some Readers were outraged. Professor Pilikian wrote the following in defense of Simon Aynedjian, the Editor, and his cartoonist Tatiana.

Like most of your ‘traditional’ readers, I too was saddened by the news of Western Pornography finally making its ‘civilized’ appearance in our ancestral country… but unlike them, I was doubly saddened for their unfair aggression against your Magazine – I find it very odd indeed that some of your Readers seem to wish to blame… you (and poor Tatiana) for the Opening of the first Sex Shop in Yerevan, as if you were the owners… especially that you had made it abundantly clear that you were merely carrying forward a news-story from another website - ArmeniaNow.com Why don’t they vent their anger there? Why don’t they flood the Armenian Government with their protest letters while expressing their enormous gratitude to YOU for the information to wake them up to the facts of modern life – Western style? Humour is an idiosyncratic business. One man’s wit is another’s witlessness – fair enough, but what outrages me about the misplaced criticism of Tatiana’s sardonic caricature is the complete misunderstanding of her meaning – an apt mockery of the ‘respectable’ women involved in the porno business, not an endorsement of it… Pornography is not only the oldest profession, but also the jewel in the crown of post-modern Mafia-capitalism. It is part and parcel of the Business package imposed on the post-Soviet market economies! Bush-and-Blair freedom and democracy comes with Pornography, which is a 12 billion dollars business in the US alone… Today’s single sex-shop in Yerevan will soon mushroom to ten and a hundred in the next decades… The victims of the earthquake in Gyumri may still be living in Pipes and Containers, but they shall soon be given the fun of peeping into the porno shops – perhaps that will make them forget the misery of their living conditions! As for us in the West – the poor Armenians of Yerevan shall never be able to catch up with the sight on the British Television even today (21st November 2005) of Miss Carol Thatcher, the 52 years old daughter of the once world-famous prime minister Mrs Thatcher, pulling her underwear down, in full view of the British nation, to urinate in the jungles of Australia… - “Her action prompted the ITV show’s {I’m A Celebrity, Get me out of Here] bosses to order all the contestants to use the lavatories provided for hygiene purposes” (Evening Standard, 21 November 2005, p.7) You see, we the highly civilized British, the leaders with the US of the free nations of the world, are not shocked by the sight of the ex-PM’s daughter relieving herself in the jungle, NO, not at all, we are only concerned with the hygienic problems that entails! And finally, what of this, the most disturbing news yet – I who have seen it all, and consider myself to be shock-proof, I am shocked beyond despair – I read the news to my wife, ashen-pale and with trembling hands – a paragraph, lost in a corner of the free edition of the London Evening Standard newspaper (14 November 2005, p. 3) I shall quote fully, which has not even made the headlines – “THOMAS COOK [the world famous travel agents] is running tours of Amsterdam’s red light district – with a discount for children. Its trips will show prostitutes touting for business in licensed brothels. The tours, conducted at night, cost 12 English pounds for adults and 6 pounds for children under 12, while those four and under go free.” Children under 4 years of age do not have to pay… to tour the brothels of Amsterdam, with their parents of course, witnessing prostitutes touting for business! I think even the Mafiosi of Yerevan would not take such a tour yet…

This alone could have been cause enough for a socialist Revolution, if we in the West were not so dehumanised by the Bush-and-Blair market forces as to give Paedophilia social respectability. And where is Pat Robertson, America’s number one Christian fundamentalist and godfather of the new Cons who prays officially every Sunday? He was too busy indeed calling publicly for the the murder of Hugo Chavez, the democratically elected Christ-like President of Venezuela caring for the poor, a second Fidel Castro.

What a topsy-turvy world… can you blame the Jehovah’s Witnesses for thinking that Satan rules it?

Yours truly - Prof. H. I. Pilikian

The truth about Mass-poverty in post-modern Britain

2005-11-19T20:11:00.000-08:00

by Professor Hovhannes Pilikian

Some people in Britain are not aware of the mass-poverty that exists under their noses. There are pockets of extreme economic deprivation, in East London for example – traditionally the crime capital of London, or South London, which is on a par with dying Africa. The British news media is guilty of not uncovering this terrible truth, gladdening the hearts of every British government.

I shall argue in this article that mass-poverty in to-day’s post-modern Britain has a culture- and time-specific causality (created artificially or constructed by interference from human agency) very different from other countries and even its own immediate history in Victorian times, where poverty evolved in a Malthusian-Darwinist fashion (‘naturally’) caused directly by the ‘Marxist’ economic forces of the Industrial Revolution.

The search for and discovery of new evolutionary forms or ‘viral species’ arising in British capitalism is vital to diagnose, to warn the world against their pandemic infective spread globally causing massive misery and enslavement of ordinary people all over the world.

The single great error Karl Marx (1818-83) committed was to eliminate the contribution of the individual human agency (including his own…) from the massive historical forces he defined in producing societal change. He was so keen on finding an unstoppable power to affect revolutionary change for a utopian society, that he put all his eggs in the basket of the Proletariat = the industrial workers, denying completely the individual power of the power-holders serving the ruling classes.

One such example was Britain’s Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher, who with all the military pistons of state-power in full steam, successfully destroyed, not only the power of the last remaining bastion of the British proletariat – the Miners, she genocided their whole class out of existence! Furthermore, she manufactured genetically a new viral form of non-industrial capitalism usually labelled as ‘service industry’ – a glorified form of ancient slavery, based on classical Marxist exploitation of cheap labour – usually migrant human beings escaping genocidal wars in their own native Afro-Asian countries initiated by the very military-industrial complex of the host countries they come to serve… such ‘foreign’ workers will have no trade unions to defend them from abject racism, and starvation-wages.

The late British James Goldsmith, one of the richest men on earth, was deeply concerned by the enormous gulf being created globally between the rich and the poor, not because he loved the poor, but because he wanted to save the very wealthy from their Marxist ire or, potential Revolution. As a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) elected in France, Goldsmith was disturbed that the Thatcherites of Europe (in cahoots with the Reaganites of America) were actively breeding the poor by cut-throat policies, buzz-worded nowadays as Globalisation (I call Hamburgarization!).

An example Goldsmith quoted in his book The Trap (Macmillan, London, 1994, p. 9) was the official British government statistics, that “ between 1961 and 1991 the number of those living in poverty [in Britain] grew from 5.3 million to 11.4 million” – the greatest achievement of Mrs Thatcher’s government – more than a hundred percent increase in the number of the impoverished!

I do not have the latest government figures in hand, but I know that numbers have increased by several million since the so-said socialist Labour party was voted in, to reduce it … The tourist who visits Buckingham Palace, and shops in Oxford Street could never guess that the Third world exists here in Britain. There are vast areas of major cities like Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Glasgow etc. and London of course, where enormous numbers of people, perhaps up to 14 million people live in Dickensian conditions typical of the lumpenproletariat in affluent Victorian times (South London is awash with beautiful housing stock, but behind the deceptive ornamented exteriors, there are no decent bathroom or kitchen facilities) (1). Then too, the wealthy would not notice the poor. With Queen Victoria empress-ing over the world, the rich getting massively richer, the British masses were dying of disease, malnutrition, exploitation and abuse of human labour, only and only because of the imperialist man’s sheer inhumanity to man (2).

Is it any different today, when the minimum wage is set officially by the British government at a laughable 4 pounds and some pennies per hour (half as yet the amount of the same in Europe, as if the latter was anything to be proud of) (3). The British Conservative Party always objects even to this pitiable amount – they think it undercuts Business! If they could help it, the Conservatives it seems would not hesitate to build concentration camps for the poor, as they had invented its Victorian prototype – the Workhouses, where the poor were starved to death working their guts out, spitting blood. Incredibly, there are serious British Conservative voices (4) advocating the return of the Workhouse for the unemployed, a measure matching in inhumanity the Labour government’s own plans to force physically disabled people into the labour market, and extending the retirement age from 65 to 70 – the dream of the workers in ‘civilized capitalism’ (as in France and Germany) was to reduce the working life-span, not to increase it, as British capitalism is pioneering ruthlessly, indecently, inhumanly and genocidally – more and more workers in Britain will die on their jobs!.

Tony Blair, the great Warmonger, proved to be the best Conservative Prime Minister they never had. His adoration of Mrs Thatcher is not a secret anymore. He abuses it whenever he needs to resuscitate the image of the Iron Lady, oblivious to the fact that the British people were finally sickened by her inhumanity, and hoping for a cure voted Labour instead, thrice seduced by Blair’s compassionate hot-air image.

And every time he warmongers with American Presidents, Blair wears the Lady’s slippers (5). He stepped in them yet again (earlier than expected, as the war of the lunatics on Iraq got postponed several times), “By reviving the spectre of Arthur Scargill”(6), the Miners’ leader Mrs Thatcher killed off... Poor Arthur Scargill, he had nothing to do whatsoever with the wage-claim (in 2002) of Britain’s Fire-Brigades Union, and yet was libellously abused for the 1000th time as a mere symbol of thatcherite bashing of the trade unions (7).

Tony Blair was lying to himself when he declared to his “aides that the dispute [of the fire-fighters’ union was] being politically driven by the far Left.” He was using American marketing tricks to deliberately mislead the nation (if not deliberate, then stupid, which he cannot be) when he droned “that ‘no Government could yield to’ the 40 per cent pay claim tabled by the fire-fighters.”(8)

A 100% of 0, produces nothing, while a mere 1% of a 100,000 (an MP’s salary paid by the DSS …) (9) yields instantly 1,000 pounds.

It does not matter what percentage rise of your salary it is when you need 30,000 English pounds a year to just make ends meet in today’s London (10).

The true cause of poverty in Britain has nothing to do with the lies
whipped up by the British governments. The truth has to do mainly with the manipulation of the property market via the rise in housing prices (11) – something few people if at all understand in economic theory – it is a new viral form in British capitalism that shall eventually globalise and create a pandemic, killing off millions of the poor in the world via the terror of homelessness already experienced by the pavement-dwelling poor in India, USA, post-Soviet Russia etc.

In Britain, this is achieved with a complex web of interlocking devices. One of them was put in place in our own lifetime (two decades ago) when the Abbey National Building Society went into the business of selling properties, acting as Estate Agents, thus subverting its own conceptual structure built on the non-profit making definition of its essence. The very notion of a socialist type co-operative Building Society was dynamited, opening the floodgates to their conversion into Banks.

Today, the Halifax is not only Britain’s biggest mortgage lending ex-Building Society turned-Bank, but also the foxiest, a body of prime masseurs with tentacles on price-pushers (parasitic estate agents). Its regular published forecasts pretend to reflect objectively the price movements in the housing market, when in fact with foxy subtlety, they engineer price pushing upwards by no more than hypothetical baseless predictions, fraudulent crystal-ball gazing passed as serious economic forecasting.

The foxiness lays in the occasional clever ‘anticipation’ of a ‘downturn’ – dust in the eyes to cover up their loan sharking ready for the next ‘upturn’ (12) thus primed (via their own estate agents). The invention and growth of fanciful television programmes on the subject, titillating the fantasies of the masses, give the hot-air gangs of the property wheeler-dealers societal respectability, alas – the borrowers are made to feel grateful to the money-launderers for cutting their throats.

The right to affordable housing is a basic human right the British governments are denying their people, and that, at the start of the 21st century.

Housing deprivation is of course one way of population control, or ‘enslavement’ by another word. Artificially manufactured price rises in the housing markets leads to universal corruption, with knock on effects in every walk of life, leading to criminal behaviour – rise in substance abuse (alcoholism and drug addiction), prostitution, even racism (13), to mention but a few. It produces one-to-one deception in daily social transactions (14). My local newsagents have to cheat pennies on the sweets and the chocolate bars they sell to meet the sudden enormous rises in their rents. I feel great sadness when they try to overcharge even long-standing customers (like myself) pretending that they made a mistake in their mental calculation, because … there were too many schoolchildren at the time, etc. etc. They apologise profusely if you catch them. And I get saddened catching them. I let go, even though they may begin to think one is senile!

I had a very dear friend (an ex-Maths teacher), who ran with his wife (a qualified Nurse) two shops in different areas of Greater London selling pine furniture (because two decades ago they could not make ends meet working in the public sector). They worked physically hard day and night (unable to afford annual holidays) receiving and delivering massive pieces of furniture to their customers. They lived crammed on top of one of their shops, lacking themselves the beautiful bookcases, coffee tables, and pine beds their customers bought.

Their landlord, crazed by the recent mad rise in the housing prices, decided suddenly, without any rhyme or reason except sheer sub-human greed, to put up their rent by 20,000 pounds per annum!

My friend had to go bankrupt overnight, and move his family out into the sticks. He thought the national shortage of teachers and Nurses would be a good motivation to try again what husband and wife had initially trained for anyway. Two weeks into it, they could not survive the misery and wretchedness of what decades of Thatcherite inhumanity (continued by the Blairite lies) had done to our Schools and the NHS. My friend finally went into managing a DIY store miles away from home – and I lacked the courage to ask what his wife had decided to do next for sheer survival in the world’s unnecessarily most expensive city.

The argument that the homeowner is enriched by the rise in the price of his home is nonsense. It may be true for a statistically insignificant minority that are property investors, but it can never be true for the majority of homeowners who cannot…feed on their houses for daily living! As for the next-of-kin inheritors after their demise, when life has generally become even more exorbitantly expensive as a direct result of the artificially priced-up housing market, the new owners will come not into wealth, but by then ‘low’ priced old stock – viz. back to square one on the British capitalism’s game-board of poverty.

Pre-Thatcher, a single salary had sufficed for an average family upkeep. Mrs Thatcher changed all that too. She nicely abused the struggles of the Feminist Movement for socio-economic equality by seducing the liberated women into the labour market, to then shamelessly exploit their employment as cheap labour. With housing prices meanwhile pushed up non-stop (in spite of and even because of the sickly negative equity), 2 salaries became a must for family survival (albeit women’s work still lacks parity with male employment – not that the men have any better time of it).

The Fire fighters of Britain should have asked for 30,000 a year after tax. That is how much you need today to just about breathe polluted foul air (not fair weather) in London.

Take public transport, for example – a basic human right and not a luxury in an urban social context. An all zones Travel Card for a single trip to and fro costs a massive Five English Pounds! (£5.10 actually and going up) (15). Granted you can travel all day hopping on different buses and changing underground stations, but what fool is going to do just that? The old can get a beautifully named Freedom Pass, but only as they become half dead and unlikely to want to travel – an example of British paradigmatic bureaucratic sadism. One must therefore pay the Fiver to travel minimally for a single destination for whatever reason.

And if you are a Christian (monogamous) nuclear family of 1 wife and 3 children, that is already 25 pounds. If you wish to visit a theatre, at an average of £10 a ticket (cheap seats, with obstruction!), there goes another 50 pounds. Tea and cakes (not food!) at the national centres of culture, subsidised from your taxes (the National Theatre, the South Bank Centre, and the National Film theatre) would rip you off another £25.

In conclusion, a family of 5 today in London needs as a matter of hard facts that would delight the Iron Lady’s heart at the least a 100 English Pounds for a single afternoon’s humble entertainment! Double that amount for Opera at the Coliseum, treble – at the Covent Garden – and I have done it, I know, I speak from sheer experience! And by the time this article sees the light of day, the prices may have doubled yet again… In the much-maligned Soviet Union, public transport and the Arts cost pennies, not even an English pound. Against London Covent Garden’s 150 pounds per ticket, the Bolshoi in Moscow would cost 1 pound.

For the family entertainment in London to be reasonably proportioned, you need to earn 30 thousand pounds a week, not per year the fire fighters were seeking. No wonder they were prepared to go through fire for it, to survive the unnatural despicable massaging of the house prices.

But why British governments allow such ‘Halifaxian’ abuse of the property market?

Because Britain’s Royal Family and the landed Aristocracy that sustain it, own, not only most of the best land of Britain (16 ), but also specifically every best prime property in London worth trillions – Kensington, Knightsbridge, Belgravia, Regents Park area, Strand etc. and these are still the known ones, according to an extremely important book just published. From its cover – “70% of land [in Britain] is still owned by less than 1% of the population”(17).

Her Majesty the Queen and Prince Charles separately and together own about one and a half million acres of the best in Britain – that is as much as Britain’s Forestry Commission owns – the only other largest British government landowner (18).

The extortionist rise in housing prices in Britain guarantees the exorbitant values of the property market, which in turn secures in a grand tautology the fabulous monetary wealth of the Royal family thus linked to prime property (19), which unfortunately also simultaneously causes directly mass-poverty in Britain.

It is the price the British people pay for continuity and peace, undisturbed since the horrors of the English Civil War and Cromwell’s Revolution, which taught (in another grand tautology) the Americans and the French, and the rest of the world (via the latter) the craft of revolution (it is a British product!), by cutting off the King’s head (Charles I).

The French Revolutionaries went further and guillotined all aristocratic heads, and they would not stop there, they then cut off their own heads too, to eventually spawn the likes of the Young Turks who murdered this time a whole nation (the Armenians in Ottoman Turkey – in 1915), setting a perfect example for Hitler, who wanted to cut off the whole world’s head.

And it had all started four centuries earlier with Charles I losing his head in Whitehall, London. But that is another story.

Post Scriptum

When a first version of this article was published in London (2002), it provoked predictably the ire of some Estate Agents and newly affluent old ‘socialists’ who wrote distressed letters to the Editor. But soon after, the British government for the first time ever announced an official enquiry into the problems of the housing market diagnosed in the article – the government’s intention was not however to cure the disease, but to control the cancer, which has now spread to other capital cities of the world, especially the newly mafia-plundered countries of the former Soviet Union. The Mafiosi of Moscow, Yerevan, Warsaw, Prague… are playing with jungle-ferocity the London property-game in their own cities making thousands of people homeless. According to press reports, Russian property developers in Moscow (for example) have their sights set on Moscow… theatres they wish to pull down, as they occupy prime building sites!

The American capitalists were the first to initiate the game they called Real Estate in early 20th c. but they failed at the game to produce the exorbitant hoped-for dividends, simply because the continent of America was too vast for the market manipulation of land scarcity in terms of supply and demand – they of course succeeded only in New York city, not even in its suburbs.

It took Tony Blair’s Gordon Brown (Finance Minister) to re-invent the British Monopoly game for real – creating a completely new virus of British capitalism with a global potential of a pandemic already surfacing in post-Soviet states. Brown now wants every homeowner in Britain to play the property-game risking life, limb, and mental health – “…unlocking money from their homes” (‘State pension makes up only half of income’ by Sarah Womack, The Daily Telegraph, 16 November 2005, p.8), a euphemism for property theft by the Banks, is Blair’s Brownite stratagem to merely eventually eliminate the British State Pension altogether!

On February 13, 2005, the London Sunday Express in an article (headlined on the 1st page) came to finally prove and vindicate entirely the diagnoses offered in this article that from Britain’s Royal Family, the heir to the throne, Prince Charles alone may be making “up to 100 million pounds a year” from “property deals” etc.

And finally, in tandem, by October 15, 2005, for the lesser British mortals, all mortgage restraints on the housing market were removed by the lending mechanisms – the Banks and the Building societies. Even the rightest voice of the British Right, the Daily Mail had titled its article “Mortgage madness. Banks are tearing up the rules limiting the amounts homebuyers can borrow and encouraging them to take on enormous mortgages” warning (by quoting an expert) that “The potential harm is huge”.

Of course the money lenders and launderers lose nothing, as they merely re-possess the properties and re-market them again if the mortgagees skinned alive die on them!

As for Britain’s Royal Family, they may possibly be only bankrupted at and by the End of the World… just before the Jehovah’s Witnesses take over to live forever…

Notes:

(1) “London is a capital divided. Almost half its children live in poverty… according to the first report from the Office of Children’s Rights Commissioner (OCRC)… the report claims that 43% of London children live in poverty.” (“London’s poverty divide hits children hard”, Society Matters, edited by Richard Skellington, The Open University Faculty of Social Sciences Newspaper, No 5 Autumn, 2003, p.3).

The government has plans to force local councils to have “their homes… be brought up to the decency standard by 2010” (from a parliamentary Early Day Motion ‘Council Housing’ 116 in Parliament), already a hundred years too late, I would say!

Even this is regarded by lobbying groups (like Defend Council Housing, P O Box 33519, London E8 4XW) as an insidious Blairite trick to privatise council housing (‘Stop Privatisation/Invest in Council Housing with No Strings Attached’, Rally, 29 January 2003, Central Hall Westminster) by handing over the houses of the poor to the big Banks subsidizing their renovation.

(2) F. Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, edited with a Foreword by
Victor Kiernan, Penguin Books, 1987 (First published in Germany 1845). It is curious to note that in his ‘scientific’ mode of scholarly humility, the mature Engels underestimated the facts of the detail in his grand vision – in a ‘Preface to the English Edition’ (dated 11 January 1892), he feels his work is superseded; “The state of things described in this book belongs today, in many respects, to the past, as far as England is concerned… But while England has thus outgrown the juvenile state of capitalist exploitation described by me, other countries have only just attained it.” Engels in 1892 is dazzled by “the revival of the East End of London. That immense haunt of misery is no longer the stagnant pool it was six years ago”, something I myself have heard once a decade about London’s East End, still being revived…

In his typical Victorian passion for grand narratives, Engles was convinced that “it is still a law of modern political economy that the larger the scale on which capitalistic production is carried on, the less can it support the petty devices of swindling and pilfering which characterize its early stages… The fact is, those tricks do not pay any longer in a large market… where a certain standard of commercial morality is unavoidably developed… The competition of manufacturer against manufacturer by means of petty thefts upon the workpeople did no longer pay. Trade had outgrown such low means of making money…thankful to pick up a penny wherever they could.”

Engels would have eaten his words if he had lived to witness The US energy Company Enron’s recent plundering of the New York Stock markets, or the gravy train of the European Common Market, or the corruption of Cool Britannia into the rip-off Britain, where everyone on the micro-level is still ‘thankful to pick up a penny wherever he could’ in the manner the 24 years old Engels had described so potently.

And here is a factual example that proves Engels’ rosy-tinted vision of ‘respectable capitalism’ entirely wrong, and also shows up one of the post-modern tricks of the daylight robbery of the consumers – Campbells, one of the biggest multi-nationals produces what is labelled as V8 Vegetable juice hitherto glass-bottled at 500ml selling at an average of one English pounds – they have just replaced the glass-bottle with a plastic one, almost halving the contents (to 354ml) while preserving the same price!

There is no ‘respect’ in service- capitalism – it is back to the jungle of the war of all against all, as Thomas Hobbes had described in The Leviathan (1651), and which Karl Marx (and undoubtedly also Engels) had read.

(3) Every year, Blair’s government proudly announces that it is increasing the minimum wage by ten pence! – It trumpets the news with a great aplomb hoping for mass adulation, only to become naturally the butt of British Comedians like Rory Bremner! If you wish to know the truth about British politics, watch his TV shows, and I am not joking.

(4) One of them, Niall Ferguson, thinks the much maligned British Empire is good for you, and is proud of Slavery, one of the most disgusting acts an inhuman human is capable of – here is how an extended extract from his book (Empire: How Britain Made The Modern World, Allen Lane Publishers, 2003) is titled in the Daily Mail, (January 13, 2003, pp. 30-1); “THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK. WHY WE CAN STAND PROUD OVER SLAVERY” The first sentence is placed in a prominent square, while the second is heavily underlined! As a well-trained Oxford historian, Ferguson cannot of course deny the historical facts – he merely perverts them. He would agree that tar is black, but he wishes it were white, and is convinced he can bleach it!

Another such ‘intellectual’ Mitchell Symons, “Columnist of the Year”, from worse stables, Daily Express (January 17, 2003, p.13), the owner of which is a well-known publisher of hard-core porno magazines, incredibly advises Britain’s security services without much ado to simply murder one James Hewitt (one of Princess Diana’s lovers) for daring to put on the market Princess Diana’s love letters; “If we had security services worthy of the name the letters would have been destroyed long ago and, come to think of it, so would Hewitt.”

Granted that the latter is a cad, a self-interest seeking cynic (what money-man is not!), Hewitt himself thinks he is performing a moral act of public good, by wanting £10 million for the letters (“Former Life Guards officer defends his offer to sell Princess’s love notes on American chat show” by Caroline Davies, Daily Telegraph, 10 January 2003, p.3), but does he deserve to be overtly murdered for it by the MI 5 or 6?

(5) Iain Duncan Smith (abbreviated to IDS), the recent Conservative Party Leader, was nevertheless still dissatisfied, “accused Mr Blair of ‘wobbling’ on the question of British involvement in any military action”, never mind the fact that “The YouGov poll, for ITV News, found that 58 per cent of people were not convinced that Saddam was sufficiently dangerous to justify war” (Daily Express, 13 January, 2003, pp. 8-9, “Blair: Back Me in War, PM’s crusade as support within Labour slips away” by Patrick O’Flynn, Political Editor). IDS would get in there, ‘in your face’ messing about with Saddam Hussein before even Bush Jr., risking the life of our tuppeny soldiers – according to an editorial in the same issue “The pay is low… Ten per cent of them are not medically fit to fight… Our troops face going into a battle without firm conviction, knowing there will not be enough doctors to treat them if they are wounded. In contrast, the US has sent a hospital ship the size of the QE2.” Could it be that true to the thatcherite murderous principles of cost cutting at all costs, Blair was counting on the American medical military?

The classical Greeks contemplated a wonderful philosophical conundrum – if a liar called a known liar a liar, would he be speaking the truth? There is undoubted “public anger over the Hutton report… widely seen as an establishment whitewash” (“51 pc want Blair out in wake of ‘lies’ over Iraq”, by Graeme Wilson, Political Correspondent, Daily Mail, 7 February 2004, p. 6).

British governments like to brag to the world that their judiciary is independent of them. The great horror of the Hutton report that whitewashed Prime Minister Blair lies in the fact that it unwittingly proved once and for all that the British Judiciary is not independent of the Executive, servile to the Ruling class – it gave the lie to the grandest of all the lies that it was! One could quote endless cases of corrupt practices embedded within the British judiciary – to begin with, it has nothing to do with finding justice, but rather an arrangement for an elaborate game-play sustaining the Darwinian survival of the wealthiest …

(6) “Blair vows to stamp on ‘Scargillite’ fire fighters”, by Philip Webster, Tom Baldwin, and Christine Buckley, in The Times, 23 October 2002, First page.

(7) Every prediction of Arthur Scargill’s about secret thatcherite plans to destroy Britain’s coal mining industry proved to be true. He was viciously ridiculed and made a scapegoat at the time, when he used to waive to the British nation (via the news media) the confidential list of the planned pit closures – a grand example of market-manipulation (and lies) by the grand advocate of free markets, Mrs Thatcher, whose other grand plan was to tar over Britain’s Railways to create lebensraum (to use Hitler-speak) for the expansion of the car industry, in replication of the American madness of car-polluting the planet. Blair’s equivalent plan seems to have been the destruction of the Fire Brigades Union (cum ‘modernisation’ – New Labour-speak for capitalist ‘privatisation’).

(8) “Last-ditch bid by Prescott to avert the firemen’s strike” by David Hughes, Political Editor, Daily Mail, October 24, 2002, p. 2.

(9) The DSS (Department of Social Security) became a dirty name in Mrs Thatcher’s mouth. Of course I intend this as bitter irony – it is an unalterable economic fact that the Social Security Benefits are paid from the same source (the Taxes) as everything else, including the MP’s salaries, the only difference being that the unemployed get crumbs for their belly ache (£45 per week? – that is how much I pay for buying books!), while MP’s wives/partners get fat salaries as their Secretaries (£10,000 more than Britain’s fire-fighters were being refused for!)…

(10) People in Britain are brainwashed to name their salaries pre-tax, when in fact their take-home pay is hardly two-thirds of it.

Yet another exploitative British industrial habit is overtime-dependency for normal production, and the creation of unnecessary emergencies to justify it, as the average labour wage is so low, something the post-war German economy (for example) never experienced. German workers are paid adequately for a normal working day, not to need overtime as top-up salaries just to pay for the essentials of life. The British workers could never live decently without some kind of overtime stretch of their normal working hours, nowadays even worse than ever – the British work-force is the most overworked of the capitalist West.

(11) That the Markets are free in Britain is another major economic lie. As to how the markets are manipulated and massaged by the private Players may be the subject of another study. Suffice it to note that, Estate Agents that feed parasitically on the sale of people’s homes invent property prices out of no more than hot air tittle-tattle. Housing prices at least in Britain are total fantasy-figures pulled out of magic hats.
.
(12) Negative Equity is another hot air construct, invented as recently as the late 1980’s to denote the minute slump in hugely over-inflated housing prices – when the sale price is blown ten-folds upwards, what’s half a percent drop?

It is an extremely useful little scare-mongering device to empower the macho money-men to manipulate and dominate the markets through fear, a basic human instinct (“Thousands to Lose Houses in Price Slump, Negative equity nightmare is back” by David Smith, Daily Express, 13 January, 2003, First page headlines). US style Capitalist marketing stratagems are, by definition, based on the abuse of basic human instincts, sexual most of all.

(13) I do not wish to appear simplistic about these issues. They have complex causality. Economic deprivation is a fundamental one, but so is emotional trauma or depravity, which in turn in a vicious circle can cause and be caused by the first. Substance abuse can start with a simple desire for relaxation, and build up into masochistic fashionable self-abuse amongst the wealthy of the world. While Prostitution universally begins with economic need, can turn into a means to gratify consumer fetishism – to buy things one does not need (like a hundred designer clothes and pairs of shoes – 2,000 of them made the wife of the Philippine dictator, Mrs Marcos world famous!) Last but not least, the rise of Racism caused by accommodative deprivation disrupting social interaction is a new idea worthy of sociological research.

(14) Engels was absolutely right about petty thieving, when he thought he was wrong (see note 2 above) about advanced capitalism being rid of it. Engels’ Victorian faith in progress blinded him to the fact of the immoral nature of profiteering anytime anywhere, even though he could come up with immortal insights into the esoteric workings of the capitalist social relations – for example, his observation of genius that strike-action by the workers is abused by the capitalist as a mechanism to control production quotas; “out of ten strikes [work-people] make, nine are provoked by the manufacturers in their own interests, as the only means of securing a reduced production. You can never get the masters to agree to work ‘short time’, let manufactured goods be ever so unsaleable; but get the work-people to strike, and the masters shut their factories to a man.” (ibid, p. 42).

A large fuss was made in the British news media concerning the strike-busting action of the Army, when “Chief of Defence Staff Admiral Sir Michael Boyce stunned No. 10 with his ‘extreme concern about the military effectiveness of our armed forces’, because of the 19,000 men required for firefighting duties.” (Editorial, Daily Mail, 4 January 2003, p.12).

Could it be that the Blair government, like the manufacturers in the days of Engels, manufactured the firemen’s strike as an excuse not to participate fully in Bush’s war, to put a more ‘humane’ face on an unforgivable inhuman act of a presumed pre-emptive war?

(15) It is short of a nazi practice to want to put it up further while the service is dilapidated downwards, into extreme risk to life and limb. Today in London, travelling by Underground is a minute-by-minute passage through Hell and back.

(16) If, as a result of global climate change, most of Britain may sink, the Royal Family will be the first to be safe on the Queen’s vast lands in the Scottish Highlands, as it would probably remain the only piece of Britain still afloat. The Tragedy of this scenario is that, like the Armenian King Ardavazt (BC), her successors will have no people to rule over!

(17) Kevin Cahill (2001), Who Owns Britain, Canongate Books, Edinburgh.

(18) Britain, with America, leads the world in the Death industries (arms manufacturing). The astronomical profits are incalculable and can only be guessed at, especially when long lasting wars are deliberately engineered, to use up surplus arms-mountains. In the Iraq-Iran war, for example, Mrs Thatcher’s government supplied both sides (The Scott Report), creating the Saddam Hussein phenomenon, as the USA had created the Taliban monsters against the Soviet Red Army in Afghanistan.

Mrs Thatcher’s son, Mark Thatcher, was alleged in the British news media of the day to have received 450 million English pounds as a kickback on his mother’s arms deals with the Saudi government (codenamed Al-Yamama). Mrs Thatcher herself was ‘reviewed’ by the press immediately after her resignation as the first British Prime Minister cum arms-dealer, with Jonathan Aitken, MP, as her fall guy.

To gift the Royal Family with a piece of the massive cake, Blair’s government designated Prince Andrew as its global agent for arms selling – “the Duke’s ambassadorial skills for the air defence industry” are casually mentioned and euphemistically admired in an article that has nothing to do with it, and is no more than mere amatory tittle-tattle (‘Andy’s Mystery Woman’ by Richard Kay, Daily Mail, 21 September 2002).

(19) The British Monarch is without a doubt the world’s wealthiest person. His or Her wealth can only be fantasized in terms of the riches of the semi-mythical Oriental emperors.

The ‘poverty’ of the Royal family is a political myth actively frequently and subtly promoted by the news media to conquer any popular envy. For example, Princess Diana who had a £50 million divorce-settlement from Prince Charles “sold her unwanted designer dresses to second-hand shops to fund everyday expenses… to pay for trips abroad, shopping visits, cinema tickets, magazines and other day-to-day expenses etc. etc.” (‘Diana’s Secret Hoard of Cash’ by John Twomey, Daily Express, 19 October 2002, pp.1 and 7).

The “poor Palace wages” have been notorious since the days of Queen Victoria …

Edward Viii, according to a dynamite of a book, “although he often pleaded poverty throughout his tumultuous life, he was never less than a very wealthy man.” (Lynn Picknett, Clive Prince, Stephen Prior and Robert Brydon, War Of The Windsors, A century of Unconstitutional Monarchy, Mainstream Publishing, 2002, p. 37).

The Lord and the madness of mammon-worshippers - Requim for an Armenian Nuclear Family

2005-11-17T11:04:00.000-08:00

The Helios Airways flight HCY 522
crashed into a hill north of AthensArmenian
Cypriot family perish in air tragedy

GIBRAHAYER e-magazine 14 August 2005

by Hovhanness I. Pilikian

A roomful of people turning blue

They were not aliens but people of this earth
Not British Conservatives or porno Artistes {2}

Wholly innocent, on their Augustan holidays
Flying from their sun-soaked country to Homeric Hellas
Over the azure sea-drowned bronzed-up snow-capped Olympus {3}

They were turning blue one by one
Mother and child, father and friend alike
Freezing in mid-air

Robbed clean of the priceless gift the ancient gods
Gave mankind soiled by the knowledge of their deaths –
The ignorance of the precise moment of one’s death {4}

Of all the earthlings, they alone knew they were going to die now then

Are you OK Simon, I wrote
Tell me if you were on that plane of aphros-born Kupris {5}

Silly question of panic-born moments of loving concern

I knew there were no survivors, as if of a genocide
The news was well-defined and final

Icarus crashed to the Earth
In the country of his myth

Because he was too ambitious to become the son of Helios {6}

The globalised icarus-plane crashed
To gratify its masters’ lust for mammonas, not women

The froth-born islanders of Aphrodite
Go home to Greece – Aphrodite’s home
To live a bit of joie de vivre

To sweeten the bitter sweat of their toil
By which the Old Testament Lord said they must eat
The crumbs of bread they produce
Pinched by the rich to feed their swine

They pay through their noses not to congeal in mid-air

Simon of Cyprus e-mailed back he was OK
But mourned for Hakop, Hilda, Ara and Baret…

The friend of a priceless friend is a precious friend indeed

Simon remembered he had danced and sang with Hilda
At the Ham-azkayin Song and Dance ensembles {7}
He had played football with Hakop when growing up together

A whole small Armenian family wiped out
A globalised sacrifice to post-modern mad Mammon

The ghosts of Enver and Talaat turning in their graveless holes
Thirsting for sacrificial Armenian blood yet again

When shall the genocide of the Armenians finally end, Oh Lord

My precious friend Simon mourned his priceless friends
The nicotine-stained bones turned dust of the Young Turks
Wished to be washed awash with the sweet blood of the Tutundjians {8}

Travelling together as a family for the very first time – a lovely loving family
Giving their baby son Baret his first Icarus-ian flight experience…
Wrote Hakop Dikranian in absolute shock and horror

Those globalised crashing aeroplanes are not airworthy
Their multinational mafia owners know it well
Their hamburgarized governments know it even better
They all put profits before their people – manna for mammonas

That is the cardinal cardiac law of global Das Kapital {9}
Profits are people who do not count as people
But as pawns in a power-game
To pinch and punch your way
Through the wild jungle

Fodder for the trans-national companies’ cash tills

Who cares if they freeze and turn blue above the clouds?
Best place to turn blue in the azure-blue of the skies
Said a cynic punter of blue-chips philosophy

Who cares if an oft genocided Armenian family is genocided yet again?

The Tutundjians - I knew them not, Horatio {10}, until this very day
They took life for me as they lost their lives

Alive to my mind in their deaths, alas, alack
I wish they were alive and dead to me

Cursed be those globalisers who turned them alien blue
For pale green money smeared with famous dead US heads

Any of the ancient gods luxuriating on Mount Olympus
Could have caused this criminal deed

Created in our own images
They love and hate and murder
Just like us on this earth
They are a shameless ruthless bloody bunch
Kill for a few drops of ambrosia
Rape for a honey-sight of heavenly pudenda
Bugger Ganymede to do Marquis de Sade {11}

But not the Christian mono Theos
He is all aghape love and nothing else

Unlike his mad twin in the Old Testament
Who punishes you for a… smile
If you dared smile when HE would not say so
His Christian twin forgives All all their sins

Oh Christian God, my Lord and Creator
If you are or ever were

Could you not have snatched that plane from Satan’s clutches?

Why do you wash your hands
Off the hoofed Beast nowadays so very often

Why do you allow his Devils to pace up and down
The corridors and the boardrooms of power
Polluting minds and bodies on this heavenly piece of earth

Turning the innocent masses blue…

One such tailed and sopranoed US geezer {12}
Who touts food on the world’s Airlines
Wastes 10 million US dollars on his birthday
Cavorting with Rolling Stones
But makes his London Asian workers worthless {13}

In New Orleans
The poor black men and women
Sang of their miserable loves and life in persecuted poverty
Sank into the petrol black waters of Hades {14}

To save their soul
Their president a-bush {15}
Who thought the Gulf coast was a Golf course

Of the wealthiest materialist nation on earth
Deprived of all spiritual prosperity
Wished to fund-raise riding on the Red Cross

While wasting the US national chest
To kill the Innocents of Iraq
To rob their country’s black gold

What’s the point of your Being Oh Lord
If such beings should have a point

Could you not or would you not
For you could if you would
Confirm the faith of Christian Love

And bring the Tutundjians back
From the graveless void

And Oh God of Love

I would so love to see
My genocided grand parents too coming back…

Notes

{1} ‘Nuclear Family’ contains a pun on the bomb, but is also a sociological concept referring to the post-modern Western standard of a heterosexual couple producing 2.5 [Statistical average] children, against the traditional custom of having 5/6 children – a dozen in the Orthodox Jewish family. The nuclear family is also the standard, which replenishes Western capitalist society. There are unspoken government fears in Britain today (for example) where fertility is falling to 2.1 children, not enough to reproduce the workforce of the future to sustain the present levels of capitalist economic relations, hence the need for… immigration!

Multi-culturalism thus is a pressure from the capitalist forces of production, and not a generous humane gift from benign governments… The equivalence in China is the single-child family – the rigorous practice of which has produced incalculable unintended social consequences, of which there seems to be no acute awareness in the media – for example, the words for family relations (elder brother, younger sister, older sister, younger brother etc.) are foundation stones in the Chinese language, still the first to occur in Chinese-teaching language text-books… Confucianism, the state-‘religion’ of China throughout the ages, was based on the family hierarchy of many children headed by the Father, and the eldest son next. Few people stop and think that incredibly, the present day Chinese have no brothers and sisters to speak of…

{2} ‘Blue’ is the colour famously adopted by the British Conservative Party, hence Mrs Thatcher’s notorious wardrobe in blue… The ladies of the shires in Britain still wear blue dresses in public, if they wish to advertise their Conservative Party loyalties.

Blue blood is a semiotic reference meaning an Aristocrat-by-birth belonging to the landowning classes – to differentiate them from the phoney Lords created by the British governments as Honours.

Feeling Blue in Jazz discourse means being in a state of depression and hopeless melancholy, caused of course by social factors of poverty, and discriminatory racist deprivation.

Blue (in Art – films, for example) also means sexually explicit pornographic content.

{3} Hellas is the name the ancient Greeks gave to their country, still used today. Of course a Modern Greek would need no help to understand this reference, but one should remember that one’s Internet readership is global, and it is highly unlikely that a Chinese reader of this poem (for example) may capture all its Western classical references.

The ancient Greeks firmly believed that Mount Olympus was where their numerous gods lived, feeding on ambrosia/honey (=the elixir of life, ambrotos=immortal), under a hierarchy topped by Zeus, their god of gods.

Modern experts always refer to ancient myths as no more than untrue fairy tales – they forget that their creators, ancient peoples believed in them as true stories!

Homer’s narrative poems The Iliad and the Odyssey are the first records of creative literature/poetry in Western History. Some, doubt the very identity of Homer as a single poet – they think ‘he’ may be a label for collective authorship. Some accept Homer’s single identity, and authorship of The Iliad, but doubt his authorship of the Odyssey etc. What is undoubted is the progeny of the poems from Asia Minor – I would say ancient Armenia. Characteristic of his poetic craft is the adjectival multiple-words formation – the wine-coloured sea, the rosy-fingered dawn – imitated among others by Shakespeare, and typical of e.g. scholarly German.

{4} In ancient myth, there was a belief that the first mankind’s lot was so miserable, that they even knew the exact time of their deaths… The gods took pity on them, and one of the first divine gifts they gave mankind was to take away that knowledge, gift them with the ignorance of the precise moment of their death – thenceforth releasing human creativity as a means of acquiring immortality… viz. it is the ignorance of one’s moment of death that gives impetus to one’s creative life! The debilitating fear of death contained within the knowledge of one’s day of dying kills the soul.

This divine spiritual gift – the ignorance of one’s death-day, preceded the other most precious technological gift of the Fire, the knowledge of which the Titan-god Prometheus had to steal from the god of gods Zeus, and suffer the latter’s eternal punishment chained on the mountains of Caucasus (in present day Armenia). An Armenian species of an Eagle gnaws daily on Prometheus’ liver, which grows back daily, eternally… giving the Titanic god no peace – the bad luck of the Armenian people suffering massive earthquakes.

{5} Simon Aynedjian, Publisher and Editor of GIBRAHAYER, universally admired and loved, almost adored like an ancient god of wisdom, by its readership.

Kupris = Cyprus, now the name of the island, was in fact an ancient name for Aphrodite, the goddess of female beauty and sexuality. The irony was that this most beautiful ‘woman’ was married off to Hephaistos, the ugliest crippled god of Olympus, who alone of all the gods did not live there, but had to create his workshops under the volcanic mountains – for he also was the most artistically creative of all the gods – he provided them with their jewellery…

Hephaistos symbolizes the mysterious, rationally inexplicable and shockingly contradictory, but dialectical processes in Nature, and human relationships – many are the men (and women) married to ‘ugly’ women (and men)… Physically crippled, he possessed a creatively beautiful mind.

The etymology of the name Aphrodite means froth-given or born. She was born out of the froth created in the sea when the son (Zeus, the supreme god of the New gods) of Cronos (the supreme god of the old gods – the Titans) castrated his father (upon the egging of his mother Gaia=Earth, who was fed up with the habit of her husband swallowing up every male-child she bore him, having heard a prophesy that his son will be greater than him!), and threw his Dad’s massive (titanic) genitals into the sea… It became the island of Cyprus itself, where in ancient times was found the most famous brothel of antiquity sacred to the goddess – the other was found on the mainland of Greece, on the acropolis of the city-state of Corinth.

The archaeological evidence indicates that the Cypriot Aphrodite had a … moustache – obviously an acknowledgment of the hairy female in the Mediterranean and the Indian subcontinents.

{6} Icarus expresses first man’s first desire to join the birds in the sky, finally realized in the 20th c., and made dangerous by the capitalist greed of the airline companies.

A feeling of fellowship with the avian population on the other hand (very much so in the famous classical Greek Comedy The Birds by Aristophanes) may even be indicative of an evolutionary link between the species.

Helios, the name of a god (literally meaning the sun) was sculpted as the Colossus of the island of Rhodes, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.

The sun-cult is undoubtedly the very first and universal religion of mankind – the archaeological record globally has unearthed evidence of sun-worship all over the world – from China to Africa (Ethiopia and ancient Egypt) to South America via ancient Armenia – the multi-cultural, multi-ethnic cross road of the ancient world, joining up Asia with Europe.

By the classical times, the cult had already eroded and drowned to insignificance within the matrix of multi-god theocracy – the overall massive single cult was reduced to individual minor sun-gods, still regarded as the most ancient among the others – for example, the Ra of ancient Egypt – all the other gods including the Pharaohs were regarded as his children.

The original Sun-cult was by definition monotheistic – its birthplace a mystery. Its historical and most notorious revival by Akhnaten in ancient Egypt (against the polytheism of his day) provoked a massive socio-political revolution. Akhnaten’s motivation and inspiration is one of the great puzzles of ancient History.

The clue I think lies in the fact that he was married to Nefertiti, a Hittite princess from ancient Armenia (sited in the region of Van, around the mountains of Ararat), who I think had brought the original cult down to Egypt with her dowry as it were, all of which suggests that the birthplace of mankind’s very first religion was indeed pre-historical Armenia, and the cult-object was the very Ararat mountains, re-fashioned into the Pyramids of Egypt – the number one wonder of the world, otherwise wholly inexplicable in both architectural and religious concepts, in view of the well-established fact of their linkage with sun-worship.

Ra the name of the Egyptian sun-god, is indeed the Semitic variant/reversal of the Indo-European Ar – the Armenian root of the word for sun=ar(e)-k.

{7} Hamazkayin=pan-National is the name of an Armenian cultural organization with dynamic branches in several Armenian Diaspora communities – ham=pan- is a prefix in Armenian, here used as a pun on the root of the word ham-ov=tasty…

{8} In most Medieval cultures, surnames arose frequently from people’s occupations, a habit still active in early 20th c. A lot of Armenian surnames in the Ottoman Empire originated from Turkish words – tutun=nicotine/cigarette (tutunji=cigarette seller) linkage was obviously the etymological meaning of the Tutundjian family’s surname.

Enver with Talaat and Djemal formed the ruling triumvirate of the Young Turk political party that toppled Sultan Hamit, only to adopt his policies against the Armenians. Finally, at the start of the First World War, in 1915, with Germany behind them, they thought they could genocide 2 million Armenians out of their historical lands at the heart of the Ottoman Empire. They succeeded in killing 1.5 million, and leaving the legacy of their genocidal techniques to the Nazis for effective use upon the Jews… Half a million Armenians were saved miraculously within the Arab countries of the Middle East, and radiated out into the rest of the world.

{9} Even rabid anti-Marxists cannot deny that Karl Marx’s masterpiece is one of the great books of all time – ironically, it defined the modern capitalist system with such clarity and finality as to leave the capitalist system in its debt for as long as it shall exist… Karl Marx single-handedly, and very ironically, almost created while condemning it the Capitalist system and its inhumane market practices, as we know it today…

{10} Shakespeare’s Hamlet’s stoic friend, Horatio characterizes Roman Ciceronian type rationality, with enough empathy and compassion to be Hamlet’s loyal friend and confidant.

Shakespeare had transformed completely the character of his source material, the Roman Horatius, who was a warlike figure, killed his own sister in front of his army because she was in love and crying in public for the killing of one of the three Alban brothers by Horatius…

{11} Zeus, the god of gods, had to be all things to all men – while mostly a lover of women, he was also a homosexual paedophile. He fell in love with a young prince called Ganymede, snatched him away to Olympus, turned him into his personal private cup-bearer! The myth is full of homosexual symbolism and was used as such by the Renaissance artists – originally, obviously the myth mourned the passing away of an aristocratic child in mysterious circumstances.

There is a profoundly disturbing Rembrandt painting (not commonly understood or published) of an infant Ganymede, terrified in the clutches of a massive Eagle – [ Zeus seduced his lovers assuming different shapes – from animal forms, as a Swan for Leda, to a mere ray of light, as a shower of gold for Semele ] – urine dripping down his angelic chubby legs… If anything could condemn the horrendous crime of paedophelia, Rembrandt’s said painting could – it should hang in every Catholic priory, including the Vatican, as the latter tried and thank God failed to cover-up the massive scale of child-abuse in the Catholic world!

{12} A recent TV series much admired in Anglo-America is The Sopranos – about the American Mafia brutally but with … great charm and warmth massacring its way in at least New York… The producers blatantly wish to render the socio-economic cancer acceptable, almost desirable!

{13} From The Independent, London newspaper, 13 August 2005, p. 6 – ‘Sacked staff wonder how they will pay the bills, Meanwhile, their boss spends $10m on his birthday party’ by Rachel Stevenson;

“With the reported $10m David Bonderman, the American financial tycoon whose business owns the Gate Gourmet catering company, spent on his 60th birthday party, he could have paid a fair chunk of the wages of the 650 Gourmet workers who lost their jobs this week.”

{14} Hades was the name of the place, and that of the god itself, of the Underworld, which was not a place of punishment as is the case of the Christian Hell.

Hades abducted Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, one of the most important goddesses of land-fertility and its crops. A universal famine was avoided when Zeus himself interfered and negotiated a civilized settlement (the first of its kind in Greek mythology) to allow Persephone to visit her mother above ground for six months of the year, before spending the other six months under the ground with her husband in the Hades.
{15} In Armenian, abush=stupid.

Modern Art or criminal acts. Does the past justify present evil?

2005-11-17T10:59:00.000-08:00

by Professor Hovhanness I. Pilikian

Why is it that Art in our own post-modern (1) times means no more a recognizable painting or a piece of sculpture? Even modernists like Picasso, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Brancusi, you name it, make no more sense, except of course as objects for investment and money-making – wealthy collectors preserve them in bank vaults to augment the worth of their wealth.

Van Gogh, unable to sell his work, was driven mad by poverty (to the extent of cutting off his ear and shooting himself), today must be also turning in his grave endlessly every time one of his Sunflowers are auctioned for tens of millions of dollars.

Even the “–isms” of the labels signifying artistic movements are out of fashion – Impressionism, Futurism, Dadaism, Cubism, Orphism, Surrealism, Modernism…all gone, now we speak of Performance Art, Installation…elephant dung (what made the name of a British-African ‘artist’), and soiled knickers (by now the ‘famous’ bed of a British born Turkish female ‘artist’, with handbag and used-up tampax next to the slept-in bed) are all equally valid Museum objects on a par with a Picasso painting.

A post-modern work of art can be anything, even nothing, like a light going on and off – the 2001 Turner Prize winner, who received 20,000 English pounds for it, disgracing the name of Britain’s greatest Painter of all time – the Shakespeare of British Painting.

An art-object today is what anyone can convince Mr Nicholas Serota, the Supremo of the mighty Tate in London (and his lieutenants with tentacles to private collectors of barbaric tastes like Saatchi) that it is so! As to how Mr Serota’s mind works, who can tell? If the junk-filled Tate Modern is anything to judge by, then Mr Serota must be hovering on the verge of insanity. He and the ‘artists’ he makes need very long term therapy.

Charles now Lord Saatchi for being once Britain’s awful prime minister Mrs Thatcher’s bosom companion, a most un-educated man who makes and breaks British artists by his… cheque-book, according to a piece in the London Guardian newspaper (29 September, 2005) “used to live with a Damien Hirst dead sheep in his hallway, a gynaecologist’s chair with exotic fish swimming round it in his kitchen.”

Culture (Art, Music, Theatre, Literature…) always manifests the social relations of the society that creates it. The social relations (the time-specific relationship between socio-economic classes and the individuals that constitute them) are the constructs of the economic structure of that society. These are classical Marxist diagnoses that seem to hold true for all historical times and social spaces.

(European) Medieval art was subservient to the absolutist power-interests of the Catholic Church (which was only ultimately defeated by continental Freemasonry led by the French Revolutionaries of the Enlightenment and the Grand Orient Lodge)(2).

Renaissance art in turn served the social power-interests of the individual proto-capitalist Renaissance Princes (the Medicis, the Sforzas and the Borgias…the Popes themselves turned Renaissance Princes, as some of those princelings became Popes!) The individual princely power replaced the institutional power of the organized church. Art (mostly Painting, and some Sculpture) was mostly ideological in the medieval times, illustrative of religious themes and notions. Renaissance art began the process of the secularisation of the aesthetic experience.

Aesthetics came to denote and define the philosophical framework that sustained the artistic expression down to the modern times. It was based on the cult of the Beautiful – the Greco-Roman ideal and idealization of ‘natural’ beauty, and its continuous cultivation.

Granted that ‘Beauty’ is something impossible to define precisely, and one man’s beauty may be another man’s ugliness, so totally it is instinctive and in the eye of the beholder. People perhaps could agree at least about what it is not – most definitely, it cannot be linked to sewage and lavatory ejections as glorified by the post-modern art-Establishments of New York and London (and their minions in Paris and German capital cities).

Furthermore, an understanding of Plato’s pure Forms may be helpful to appreciating beauty, as the etymology of the above mentioned word (aesthetics) demands. It stretches back to the classical Greeks, and superficially seems to have nothing to do with Beauty – aisthanomai means to perceive, meaning literally to see inside (which is what perception is in psychological theory), but also to see from the inside out, which can only be indeed clarified by its link with Plato, the world’s first philosopher.

Plato’s philosophy (of life) was based on the notion that one was born to pursue instinctively the divine ideal that was the Good and which was Beautiful, hence Goodness and Beauty became synonymous in man’s search for the Ideal that he had already experienced in a past life – Plato believed in the Hindu concept of Reincarnation.

In other words, according to Plato, man is born with an internal knowledge and experience of the Forms of which the divine beautiful is the ultimate, though forgotten at birth (hence coded within the human instinct). To be virtuous, individual human life must therefore be spent to re-capture that mystical experience present inside every human being, via the exercise of Reason.

The inherent ‘dialectical’ (3) contradictions in Plato’s thought (Mysticism Vs Reason is one of many) was first noted by his student Aristotle, whose arguments, with his teacher’s, were ultimately converted into the Christian dogma by the pre-Christian neo-Platonists (Plautinus – the greatest of them), and the Christian Medieval thinkers – the early Church Fathers of the Patristic period (St. Augustine), and the Scholastic philosophers (Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, Bonaventure, Meister Ekhart)(4).

The search and hunt for goodness and inner beauty was made the cornerstone of medieval art. During the Renaissance, the “goodness” dropped out of the aesthetic formula, but the manifestation of Beauty still remained the purpose of the artistic endeavour albeit exteriorised – internal beauty being too vague a concept for the ‘avant-garde’ Renaissance artists to pursue.

The modernist-classical Beauty of the Pre-Raphaelites in 19th c. Britain – imitating belatedly French Neo-classicism a hundred years earlier – gradually and slowly but surely evolved into the horrors of the Cubist women in France, to finally turn totally ugly and stinky in our own times in New York, and now in London, and everywhere else in the Western world.

There is however some worth to the junk and dung of post-modern Western ‘art’. Worthless as works of aesthetic art, they nevertheless freeze as a sociological document reflecting the horrors of the war-ridden 20th century, the most genocidal yet of mankind’s history – not one, but two massive genocides (of the Armenians, and the Jews) attempted during two World Wars in succession (with 30 million dead and countless maimed), not one but two atom bombs exploded (Hiroshima and Nagasaki), the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Cambodian War, Wars in the Congo, Algeria, Ethiopia, Somalia, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Sierra Leone, Apartheid in South Africa, the genocide of the Ibos in Nigeria, Tootsies in Rwanda, the Iraq-Iran war, the Falklands war, War in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Colombia, Karabagh, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Israeli-Arab war, and the Bush-Blair war on Iraq merely to steal its petrol still going on…

No wonder warmongering American and British Establishments glorify their junk and dung via poor, pathetic, drugs-and-drinks infested, mentally ill ‘artists’, leaving the sane, balanced, disciplined beauty-hunting traditionalists well alone, and as commercial ‘failures’.

The First World War was a terrifying experience for mankind. Until then, people only knew the horrors of war at the local level. Although Napoleon’s invasion of Russia had been throughout Europe, nevertheless the rest of the world was more or less at peace.

With the World War I, there was no escape from the evils of global imperialism. The Armenians of the Ottoman Empire became its first and greatest victim, slaughtered openly in the eyes of the whole world (the Nazis learnt from it to do their dirty jobs in secret!) There had never been in human history a state-organized genocide of a whole people shamelessly perpetrated on such a vast scale, although genocides have been mankind’s staple murderous diet from time immemorial – there was even one going on in secret in the African Congo, swallowing 11 million victims, so that King Leopold of Belgium, a ‘senior’ member of the incestuously bound Royalty ruling the European roost, may fatten himself on Rubber – the Black Gold of the day. Mark Twain, the American comic writer of genius, who rang the alarm bells, was not heard…

If Prostitution is the oldest profession, then Genocide is the oldest mass crime of which the Old Testament is full to the brink – tribes are always at it, trying to massacre each other to extinction (5).

In 146 BC, the Roman Empire had marked the end of its third Punic Wars with the city-state of Carthage (in Africa) by a genocidal destruction of even the earth – they covered it with a thick layer of salt, to ensure that nothing could grow for the foreseeable future. Ironically, a hundred years later (in 45 BC), colonists from Rome (which included the descendents of the Carthaginian exiles) settled there, and turned it into the wealthy capital of the (Roman) province of Africa…

A thousand years later (in 1213 AD), Genghis Khan began the conquest of Northern China, dreaming of genociding the Chinese tribes, to convert the whole of China into grazing fields for his horses …he died in 1227 still fantasizing of his Chinese genocide even though his empire extended from the Yellow Sea to the Black Sea (via Northern India).

Like the Armenians (for example, in Istanbul today), the Carthaginians, and the Chinese had survived and blossomed. But when the attempted genocide of the Armenians was reported in the world press at the time, as it was happening (unlike the Nazi genocide of the Jews perpetrated in secrecy during the Second World War), the world was disgusted and shocked into total impotence.

The creative artists were the first to move. The traumatic experience produced in Art and Literature (which always reflect socio-economic problems) the masochistic nihilism of Dadaism (6) – a movement founded in 1915 in Zurich (Switzerland) by a Romanian exile, the poet Tristan Tzara, as the Young Turks were madly mass-murdering the Armenians.

Soon, other Dadaist groups mushroomed in America (New York – founded by Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray), Spain (Barcelona – by Francis Picabia), and Germany (Kurt Schwitters – he survived also the Nazism of his country by escaping to Norway, and then to Britain where he died in 1948).

Dadaism evolved into the lunacies of Surrealism under the influence of Sigmund Freud’s ideas, the founder of Psychoanalysis, who was himself rendered mentally ill by the anti-Semitism rampant in Vienna, as the great Armenian composer Komitas had lost his mind several decades earlier eye-witnessing the genocide of his people.

The Armenian Komitas displayed the dignity of silence, and died speechless in a Parisian asylum. Freud, alas, mutilated his own nose with a surgical knife (convinced that he could control his sexuality that way), and snorting cocaine (initially for the pain) to the end of his life, became the greatest single destructive influence on American culture, which today dominates the world with its mafia violence, porno sex, obesity-producing Hamburgers, teeth-rotting Colas, and general dumbing-down of Everything, including the annihilation of the drug-infested human mind (7).

The New York American Marcel Duchamp, shocked the art-world in 1919 by exhibiting a reproduction of Leonardo Da Vinci’s masterpiece Mona Lisa, with a moustache and a beard added on it. Then, in the first international exhibition of Dada in Paris (1922), Duchamp placed a ready-made “pissoir” (a urinal bought in the market) as a piece of sculpture. He had at least turned it upside down, as a creative act, showing some kind of minimal inventive intelligence.

Little could Duchamp then guess that the time would come when under pressure from his country’s ... Beef-burgers and drugs-Barons, paintings and sculptures would be eliminated altogether (genocided!) out of existence from the museum-world. Today, the work of art is anything else, including elephant dung, human faeces, Andy Warhol’s piss-made prints, Tracy Emin’s dirty knickers, electric light bulbs and switches (at least they don’t stink), narcissistic sado-masochist pornography like Performance Art – there is an American ‘artist’ whose exhibited work is himself sitting in an art-gallery masturbating – pointless constructions (Installations), and last but not least dead bodies, yes, the human dead desecrated and distorted into despicable blood-lust.

I know quite a few London artists who cannot live by their art alone lacking the sewage links to the Tate Modern directorate. They cannot find fame and fortune in the art-market because they still paint on canvas, and believe that Art must express life and beauty.

Cinzia Bonada, a Portraitist who would not paint a decrepit witch bitch and say it is Her Majesty the Queen (Lucian Freud’s portrait of the British monarch!). Bonada has at least the consolation of being an RBA (a member of the Royal British Artists association). Olga Sienko, a master print-maker, of true formal eroticism (without Tracy Emin’s menstrual gunk), compatriot of Mariusz Katdowshiego, a delicate Polish soul whose romantic themes are full of the exile’s Chopin-esque nostalgia for the homeland. Paolo Carraro, a Theosophist, creates the most puzzling wordless books of exquisite beauty that you would love to ‘read’! Artour Oshakantsi, the first Abstract painter of Soviet Armenia, now resident in London, whose world contains a whole world of forms representing the whole world of Nature – people, plants, animals, female nudes, all in edible sun-soaked colours…

Ben Swift, a sculptor who can shape a human pose in an instant in the most perfect manner, shapes his students’ works at the Mary Ward Centre instead of selling in a Cork Street Gallery. Stephen McNeilly, a painter, designs at the London Swedenborg Society heavy spiritual books so light and ethereal; they almost fly away like white doves in a blue sky. And Marc Balakjian, whose prints are as complex and subtle as those of the Old Masters, could not even be bothered to exhibit, instead wastes his life doing the dog’s work for some of the grandees at the Marlborough in London, who would not know how to paint let alone print!

And what hope for massively talented young artists I personally know who are as innovative as any post-modernist, but paint and draw traditionally, on a frame-worthy surface, and would want nothing with junk and dung.

Ugliness generally, and coprophilia in particular (dead bodies also stink!) constitute the post-modern ‘aesthetics’. The ‘beauty’ of the beast has become the rallying cry of the Serota and Saatchi museum-ed ‘artists’, unworthy of the label.

The much-trumpeted conversion of the electricity generating building of the Tate Modern itself is a prime example of fascist architecture. No amount of interior re-decoration and architectural conversion can erase the early 20th c. imperialist male chauvinism of the external structure – a massive chimney-like phallus perverted on each side with … squared testicles! Inside – a hell-hole for the cult of Ugliness and bodily ejections – a paean to the barbaric tastes of the British ‘nouveau riches’ born of Mrs Thatcher and Saatchi…

When 15 years ago (in the 1990s) Charles Saatchi bought a totally unknown Damian Hirst for pennies, it was no more than a dead sheep (or was it a calf? perhaps a shark) preserved in formaldehyde.

Hirst’s employment background was in the morgues. He loved the dead – he did not hate his job in the dissecting rooms – Oh No. He was not a mere professional earning a livelihood. He made a TV documentary to extol the excitements of the morgue. But even he dared not predict the spawning of the German lunatic evolving from him and loose in London – and I can hardly bring myself to writing down his name – a Gunther von Hagens, a Professor Doktor on top of it…

Hagens could be arrested as a common criminal, not celebrated as a creative artist. He has made a fortune by collecting dead bodies, buys them from the dollar-hungry Russian and Chinese government mafias, and in the name of art vulturizes them into torn bits of blood-stained sculptures. He wears a Greta Garbo hat, and I bet he thinks he is she.

The question is why did Hagens chose London for his ‘artistic’ but really criminal antics on 20th November 2002, and was allowed by the Sunday church-going Tony Blair’s government to cut up a dead body in public, and on television (televised by Britain’s Channel 4)?

It was advertised in the London press as “autopsy” (8), which it was not – autopsies are done by medical professionals, in private, to establish the cause of death. Hagens’ openly criminal deed was a costumed performance – why else did he have to wear his black Greta Garbo hat! – as he himself announced in a Freudian slip for a commercial break – “let’s have integh mission fogh zis peghfoghmance”!

Besides his direct “artistic” ancestry from Damian Hirst’s dead animals – in turn an evolution from Marcel Duchamp’s pissing-bowl, and Tate Modern’s Turner-prized elephant-dung – the horror of this mad German is that he manifests the “clinical” work of Nazis like Dr. Mengele – Doctor? My foot! – the inhuman wretch used to smash helpless children’s heads on the walls of his laboratory, splatter their Jewish brains for “scientific” research (his claim!) and record the results…

In the name of post-modern tolerance and stretching boundaries, one viewed Damian Hirst-s and Tracy Emin-s as harmless funsters. Can one, should one do the same with Hagens’ dead bodies of real human beings?

Perhaps, for the sake of human decency and/or sanity, some boundaries should stay firm and fixed and never be stretched. In Nature, there is what is called the species barrier, which protects and preserves the life of the different species from the diseases of each other. The AIDS virus was the first to arise destroying that barrier, giving its unfortunate human victims the horrendous diseases of other animals. The most feared SARS flu is another such virus evolving, jumping the human species barrier from birds, and may in the near future cause a pandemic killing millions of human beings globally.

With false claims to being scientific, public approval of ‘work’ by people like Hagens, may soon bring into scientific circulation the results of Mengele’s “work” – I dread the day when members of the British Psychological Society (BPS) may be quoting Mengele’s data as respectable science, and use them to produce new “scientific” theories globalising nazi practices.

History has a way of repeating itself and pulling into the mainstream fringe practices – Fascism in Italy, turning into Nazism in Germany – and vice versa (Soviet Communism thrown into the fringes).

Snuff movies (where women and children are truly murdered for sexual fun) sold for porno under the counter, may soon surface as Hollywood films – why bother hiring stunt men, the American studios can save a lot of money killing the US destitute and the homeless on film, saving the US Federal Bank some money too in unclaimed welfare!

One could be forgiven for thinking that British Conservatives would at least pretend to be shocked by ‘liberal’ camp antics displayed by neo-nazi flashers like von Hagens, but nay, a distinguished right-wing intellectual Christopher Hudson signed a big article in the Right-est of the Rights, the Daily Mail (9) justifying Hagens’ nazi antics by proving it “to be part of a theatrical tradition which goes back hundreds of years”.

So what, Mr Hudson, why should we as a civilized society want to replicate man’s inhumanity to man endlessly, the genocidal barbarism of past empires and mad men?

Should the exercise of past evil justify the present misdeed? As a British Armenian intellectual, I say, NEVER.

Notes

(1) Recent critical consensus considers the late 19th c. as the beginning of
Modernism, and the 1960s hippy Flower Power as the dawn of Post-modernism.

The conventional wisdom was to regard the Italian Renaissance as the precursor of Modern times, although the Renaissance values of humanism displayed its shoots in the Armenian culture (of Cilicia especially) by well over a century earlier.

It is almost certain that the Crusaders, on their way to the Holy Places, passed through the Armenian homelands of the Byzantine Empire (and frequently ended in the Armenian Jerusalem!) were influenced by Armenian Art and Architecture (especially castle-building) and carried the concepts, with Platonic manuscripts plundered from Armenian monasteries, to kick-start the Italian Renaissance.

There can be little doubt that the proto-Masonic Templar Knights imbibed the Jerusalemite Armenian esoteric tradition to the full. One of our great philosophers, David Anhaght (=the Invincible One, of the 7th c.) was titled Trismegisthus (=thrice great), a loaded term of the Alexandrian esoteric tradition.

(2) The Vatican could finally forgive the Jews (a few years ago – it took them two thousand years to do so) for the murder of Jesus, the Protestants for the erosion of Vatican’s power and loss of empire, but still cannot bring itself to forgive the Freemasons for the secularisation and liberation of Europe from the Vatican’s clutches of medieval ignorance and the genocidal barbarism of the Inquisition. Although there are Catholic (and Anglican) priest-Masons and Jewish Masonic-lodges, the official Vatican decries the first, and un-brotherly Masons decry the second!

(3) Not only in the Platonic, but also in the 18th c. Hegelian sense of the term, derived from the Greek philosophy anyway.

(4) Vaughan Pilikian, Mysterium Tremendum, Metaphysics and Epistemology on the Border of Eternity and Time, May 2002, Harvard University Paper.

(5) This word Genocide was invented by the American-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, in 1944. He was aware he wished “to denote an old practice in its modern development” (Genocide, an anthropological reader, ed. by A. L. Hinton, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, p. 27). But of course Lemkin shows no awareness of its Old Testament practice. One could argue that the latter constitutes the world’s first documentary evidence of such evil.

For example, the great prophet Samuel (though why ‘great’? I cannot tell), orders Saul the 1st anointed King of Israel (anointed no less than by Samuel himself!) to genocide a neighbouring tribe, not only “without pity for the old, the women and the children”, but also their animals!

There seems little doubt that the Young Turk government Order to do the same to the Armenians (“without pity for the old, the women and the children”) is a direct verbatim quotation from the Old Testament, in a cynical mockery of their victims’ Christian faith, something that hitherto has escaped the notice of the historians of genocide.

Saul does sheepishly as Samuel commands, but suddenly reasons to himself in the nick of time that he need not kill the innocent animals; instead he could sell them to make money for his people. Delighted with his own clever idea, he returns to Samuel hoping for his approval. But Samuel, the power-mad prophet that he was, won’t have it, and curses his own anointed to destruction, for which reason Saul one day commits suicide by falling on his own sword.

His son Jonathan’s bosom friend, King David succeeds Saul. When he finally conquers Jerusalem and enters the city, he roasts his enemies in “ovens”, teaching the Nazis a very bad lesson in cremation!

(6) There is no critical consensus as to what the label Dada means. Some take its derivation to the Russian word da meaning Yes, which would not of course do conceptual justice to the self-negating mode of the Dada-philosophy. Others have gone as far as suggesting that it is a camouflaged variation on the French infantile expression of caca.

Others still suggest that it is a consciously meaningless derivation pointing up the absurdity of life itself, that all is Vanity – the theme of the Old Testament book, Ecclesiastes, attributed to King Solomon – the 3rd King of Israel, son of David and the non-Jewish Bathsheba, whose Hittite-Armenian husband King David sent to the wars to be killed, that he may ravish the wife upon whose bath-taking nakedness he had peeped!

In formal philosophy, Dadaist nihilism I think contributed to the birth of (French) Existentialism with Death-affirmation as its central theme.

(7) No wonder American Presidents (since Dwight Eisenhower but excluding him) have become notorious with their inability to speak grammatical English – George Bush Senior could not even complete a sentence! On an official visit to Tokyo, he arrived drunk and vomited on the Japanese prime minister at an official dinner. His predecessor President Reagan had addressed Princess Diana on an official visit as Prince David! And Bill Clinton’s brother jailed for cocaine offences used to protest claiming that his president-brother was the greatest “snorter” of all time.

According to a recent study reported in the New Scientist magazine, “fast food, sweets, fizzy drinks and a lack of vitamins may be a key to the loutish behaviour of young people.” (“Lad Food, Poor diets could hold key to yobs’ behaviour” by Stephen Moyes, Daily Mirror, 14 November 2002).

“Britain faces a public health disaster because of the widespread use of cannabis… the cannabis available on the streets today is 15 times more powerful than that of three decades ago... regular consumers are also at higher risk of developing schizophrenia... the findings will shock many who have formed the view that cannabis use is relatively harmless...” (“Cannabis cancer risk is 50 per cent higher than cigarettes, say scientists” by Elaine Galloway, Evening Standard, 11 November 2002).

(8) For example, “Storm over autopsy on TV” by Maxine Firth and Laura Burkin, London Evening Standard, First Page, 20 November, 2002.

(9) “Theatres of Horror”, Daily Mail, 23rd November 2002, pp. 44-5.

The Armenian Titans of Istanbul and their new Olympian Gods

2005-11-17T10:54:00.000-08:00

by Professor Hovhanness I. Pilikian

For the Religious, History (like everything else) presents no problems. It (and everything else) manifests God’s will. For the intellectual Atheist (scientist and philosopher alike), everything, let alone history, including the very concept of god itself and its creation by Man, presents a problem that needs definition, analysis, intellectual construction, restoration, continual restructuring and re-re-definition, endlessly. Religious folk are happy people, getting their answers from their leaders – the Catholic Church, the Jehovah Witnesses, like Judaism and Islam (and the Protestants – not at all) present their followers with a complete way of life, while self-respecting intellectuals and non-superstitious scientists suffer the unspeakable anxieties of the sceptical mind.

Man was verbal (for a very long time) before becoming literal. Alphabets are virtually ‘modern’ creations in mankind’s history, and post-date the visual man, who learnt to draw before he could write. But Man could certainly think all the time, from the very first moment of his human existence. Cognition seems to be the most fundamental innate skill the human child is born with (1).

Myth making was pre-historical man’s first intellectual activity (to include all later cognitive processes of poetry and philosophy, ritual and religion, history, psychology etc.) Ancient myths thus record (and serve as a source of data) as much for religion and poetry, as for pre-historical events as yet un-deciphered or little understood. The poets Homer, Hesiod, and classical Greek Dramatists provide us with our primary sources of Western myths. (2)

One of the most ancient, and the first with Armenian connections, is the myth of Prometheus, the Titan. The Titans were the ancient Greeks’ conception of the gigantic children born of the union of the masculine Uranus (=Sky) and the feminine Gaia (=Earth). Chronos (=Time) was one of them (3), the father of Zeus who (like Satan in the Christian dogma) rebelled and declared a global war against the Titans. Like father, like son, Zeus battled ruthlessly with no holds barred for a decade, and finally won the war in the heavens (in the biblical book of Revelations, Satan’s war against the heavenly host has not began yet), deciding upon Mount Olympus (in Greece) as his new abode, where he lived with his divine siblings, together referred to as ‘The New Olympians’.

Zeus was particularly vicious to his uncle Prometheus for stealing the Fire from the gods and giving it to mankind (4). Zeus enchained him in perpetuity in the mountains of Caucasian Armenia, where to torture him like a Nazi, an eagle (or, a vulture in some versions of the myth) visits Prometheus daily to feed on his liver, which grows back by night, as a sign of Prometheus’ defiance of the ‘fascist’ state of affairs created by Zeus’ anti-humanity.

The Armenian community of Istanbul is a Promethean miracle of the twentieth century. They were marked for genocidal destruction by Sultan Hamit and the Young Turk regime that toppled him (while adopting his policies towards the Armenian natives of Byzantium). Today, they count ten fold the number of the London Armenians of ten thousand. The latter has an improvised Sunday school renting an English primary in Acton Town, and a single puny church (built by Istanbuli Calouste Gulbenkian as a private altar in London, then left to the community by him). The Armenians in Istanbul possess eighteen totally Armenian community owned schools, and thirty three churches, built in Ottoman times, and surviving the massacres of 1915.

One of the nine most beautiful islands (Adalar) off the coast of Istanbul (in the south-eastern part of the sea of Marmora) is Knale(h), practically wholly owned by wealthy Armenian families who go there for the summer, where no cars are allowed, and public transport is in the form of horse drawn carriages.

I wonder how the Young Turks had intended to wipe out Knale(h) off the map. No mention of it occurs in any known Young Turkish government document of the planned genocide. Were they hoping that by murdering their owners, they would automatically confiscate the place, as they did with the rest of ‘turkish’ Armenia? They may have succeeded with the rest, but obviously they have failed with the Knale(h), and in Istanbul, grown back in the night of the massacres, like the Promethean life-giving liver!

In a sense, I feel sorry for Ataturk, the Father Stalin of the modern Turks, who even though loved dying in Istanbul in the Dolmabhce Palace built by the very Armenian Balian brothers (5), forced himself to be buried in dingy Ankara, his chosen capital, one of the ugliest spots on earth, chosen I am certain under duress from the international public opinion of the time, horrified by the attempted genocide of the Armenians.

Any government of Turkey that can win the forgiveness of the Armenians may wish to transfer its capital back to Istanbul, one of the most beautifully sited cities in the world. And the forgiveness of the Armenians must not suffice for such a deed – a civilised Turkish government could prove its credentials (to for example the European Union) only by committing itself to the full restoration of Haghia Sophia to its former Byzantine glory, its paradigm being the perfectly preserved Saint Marks Cathedral in Venice, which was built in imitation of the Haghia Sophia in the first place…

Today, the Aya Sofya Muzesi (advertised as a museum, but really a converted mosque) is an insult to History, and man’s inhumanity to man’s creative genius – a reminder of ugliness, brutality and the conquering tribe’s lack of civilised tastes. The erasure of the golden murals, the fixture of ridiculous massive medallions on the pilasters, the construction of ugly structures inside the church to pretend it is a mosque is merely an insult to Islam itself. I am sure if the Prophet himself were alive today in Istanbul, and God’s Mercy be upon his soul, he would not have approved of the pitiable state of Aya Sofia. We know that the holy Prophet was civilised enough to insist upon perfuming oneself before attending a mosque to honour God with prayers! He may not have approved of Christian idolatry for doctrinal reasons, but he could never approve of defacing Christian places of worship. On the contrary, Muhammed preached tolerance of other religions.

The named Titans of classical Greek mythology were five in number (6). By a strange coincidence, so is the number of the titans of the Armenian belles lettres in Istanbul – they are Zahrad, Shigaher, Vartanyan, Haddejian, and Khrakhouni, more or less of the same age (early seventy), forming a literary cohort in modern (Western) Armenian literature, as the direct inheritors of the pre-genocide giants of Armenian prose and poetry; Bedross Tourian, Daniel Varoujan, Medsarents, Siamanto, Zohrab, Roupen Sevak, and that unique pre-Freud ‘Freudian’ phenomenon in Armenian literature – Indra (Nerashkharh = Innerworld/1906), who still lacks any disciples (7).

{I am focusing here of course on the literary titans – but one name I must mention before any further ado, Ara Guler, Turkey’s greatest photographer, often compared with the other Istanbuli Armenian Youssef Karsch (a Canadian citizen), the world-renowned portraitist, but more than the latter, Guler’s titanic work documents Istanbul’s socio-economic history and the city’s physical evolution (not only the portraits of its leading intellectuals) in countless photographs, a minute fragment of which is collected in massive volumes published in Turkish. Who will inherit his priceless museum-worth collection of negatives? The British Museum would do well to bid for it}.

It is a great historical mystery (and a miracle!) as to how the above-mentioned literary cohort was born in the aftermath of the genocidal context, and not only blossomed, but also achieved continuity in literary greatness and perfection with their predecessors.

Most interestingly and excitingly, two complex currents run concurrently through their works – Haddejian, Shigaher and Khrakhouni on one hand are the keepers of the classical tradition of form and content, with occasional forays into a mild form of modernism (Haddejian’s newspaper-Diaries collected into an impressive forty volumes! And Khrakhouni’s differently shaped unpunctuated poems).

On the other hand, Zahrad in poetry and Vartanyan in playwriting invented the Armenian literary modernism, the first re-inventing French (Jacques Prevert) and Russian futurist (Mayakovsky) forms in literary Western Armenian, the second re-experiencing the whole of the Theatre de l’Absurde through the wealth of its English prism stretching back to Oscar Wilde down to Harold Pinter.

Zahrad occasionally invaded the Khrakhouni territory, but I am glad he retreated to his own with Dsaire Dsairin (= End Upon End, Or, Edge to Edge, 2001) where he is an absolute grand master. He seems to be endowed with a phenomenal memory – most people half his age in Britain suffer from memory loss, and the quirky turn of phrase distinctive of his poetry seems to be very much part of his own usual idiom full of ‘twisted’ multiple meanings.

When I recently visited Robert Haddejian in his editorial office at Marmara (a daily newspaper Haddejian has been writing-editing-publishing as a one-man-show for as long as anyone can remember!), I had the good fortune of meeting also Zahrad entirely by chance, who popped in to give Haddejian a copy of his recent book, a collection of his poems translated and published in Turkish.

I was so overwhelmed with joy of being able to embrace these two titans of modern Armenian letters, that I could not hide my genuine emotions, and Zahrad remarked acerbically; toun Istanbul yegar ourakhanaloo hamar, which if literally translated sounds puzzling (=you’ve come to Istanbul to feel joy), but understood instinctively trembles with all sorts of multiple meanings, echoing his awareness and appreciation of my genuine evaluation of their achievement, and not as a mere lip service to good manners. What I know Zahrad meant was that I had come to Istanbul to meet them, in true appreciation of their work, and profound understanding of their ‘greatness’ that I have tried to impart to others (in the Armenian Diaspora), and that he himself reciprocated the joy I felt meeting them personally for the first time. All that, was enwrapped in Zahrad’s simple single phrase. He knew better than me my family history, in view of the fact that my eldest sister Mary and her husband Nourhan Sarian (Istanbul born) have been his friends for decades. He even knew about my divorce, my recent marriage and brood of 3 babies!

Haddejian, besides being one of Armenian Diaspora’s greatest newspaper editors, is a writer of classical range and encyclopaedic achievement. I do not know if he has tried his hand at poetry, if he has not, then poetry is the only medium Haddejian has not attempted, although his critical analysis of poetry is second to none (as expressed in a textbook collection Bdouyd me(h) Hai Panasdeghdsoutian Bardezin Metch = A walk in the Garden of Armenian Poetry, 2000), where Haddejian, the literary critic, selects a poem and formally analyses it for the reader/’student’.

Haddejian’s two novels (Arrasdagh=the Ceiling, and Arrasdaghin miooss goghmeh = The Other Side of the Ceiling) are as great as what our great Zohrab would have written, if his head were not crushed literally with rocks by the Young Turk genociders.

Haddejian has a collection of plays (= Taderakhagher, 2002) as classically traditional as a Shirvanzateh, our Ibsen.

A tremendous contrast to Haddejian’s dramatic oeuvre are the plays of Arman Vartanyan, published individually and collected in three massive volumes. Although entirely modernist, Vartanyan’s mastery of the Armenian language is as classical as Khrakhouni’s and Haddejian’s. While technically modernising the Armenian playwriting, Vartanyan draws strength from the sophisticated humour of the classical satirist Hagop Baronian, the Jonathan Swift of Armenian literature, and as subtle and learned.

Vartanyan synthesises all the greats of the Absurdist theatre, from Ionesco to Pinter (if one considered the latter as the British variety), and forges his own which is even more original than any of his European predecessors. Especially to note (and what makes him unique in modern drama) is the fact that Vartanyan, trained as a concert pianist (in Vienna), has succeeded in adapting musical techniques to dramaturgical ends, like borrowing Mozart’s ‘trickery’ of smoothly overlapping duets with trios, or playing Beethoven quartets while giving dominance to a chosen instrument/dramatic character etc.

And Vart Shigaher, a most wonderful and a remarkable human being, a poet to his toes even when he writes glorious prose on his erudite readings (Herg oo Perk = Ploughing and harvesting, 2001). His Quatrains Tchors dogh Myayn (= Four lines in all, 1993), are in the tradition of the greatest of Hovhanness Toumanian and Yeghishe Tcharents (both inspired by Omar Khayyam), but nothing like them in content, and well a cut above Khayyam, whose Quatrains are limited to wine and women.

Shigaher’s Quatrains are polished gems of a hundred karats! The (linguistic) beauty and perfection of his Armenian, tackling the range of existential philosophy, the emotional depth of his sonorous vocabulary, flood the short poems into a sheer pleasure of musical sound, as deep as a Beethoven quartet.

A trained medical Doctor (physician, like Roupen Sevag, and Anton Checkov), son of a cleric, Shigaher does his father proud, being a profoundly spiritual intellectual at all times. Always passionate, but never sensuous even in love-poetry (Pari Asdghi Dag = Under a Star of Goodness, 1999), Shigaher never lacks spiritual content. He could have easily entrapped himself into religiosity, but No, never, his scientific training has obviously saved him from such a disastrous fundamentalism, instead, moreover it has even enriched him with gems of philosophical spiritualism, in the mould of a Platonist. Viewed thus, his compassionate love (like that of Jesus Christ) is everywhere given in abundance to everyone, and not only in his books – his patients (and every Istanbul Armenian seems to be one) vouch for it. Sweet, gentle, and extremely civilised, always humorous, he quietly charms his new acquaintance into his personal world of interesting memoirs, full of historical figures from the Armenian past, but also especially of people he has known personally in positions of community leadership (educators, archbishops, laymen, all become extremely interesting people in Shigaher’s stories…)

How I loved listening to Shigaher for hours, not even finding a moment to have my blood pressure taken, as he had promised when I visited his surgery (with Arman Vartanyan) for the first time. If no other Armenian lived in Istanbul, every Diaspora Armenian wishing for some spiritual comfort would do well to visit Istanbul just only to visit Shigaher’s sweet surgery overflowing with the milk of human kindness…

Shigaher is the real ideal Armenian – Armenians brag about when they feel patriotic and wish to share with non-Armenians (the odar) their national pride, especially when they want to deliberately forget their scum – the mafia in control of independent Armenia today, where Armenians like Shigaher are dying out daily…where even the Armenian language itself is being destroyed (8)– the Soviet Armenian government (in the thirties) took a remarkably short time to achieve 100% literacy of its much-massacred population, today, the government of ‘Americanised’ Armenia took equally short time to plunge that achievement to the levels of illiteracy in America, the “Dumbest Country on Earth” (in the words of the American Michael Moore) (9).

To further expand the metaphor from classical Greek mythology, one could note that there are also new gods being born, the ‘New Olympians’ of the Istanbul Armenian community.

The Zeus among them seems to be Hrant Dink, a sharp intellectual with well-deserved links and position among the Turkish intelligentsia, who had the absolutely right and forward looking concept to act within the Turkish intellectual context by founding and editing Agos, the first Armenian newspaper in Turkish.

Dink has built up a well-merited weight and great respect amongst the serious progressive intellectuals gathered around the Turkish daily Cumhuriyet, the London Guardian and Independent combined!

Half the age of the avuncular (10) titans, Dink is assisted by the likes of Sevan Ataoglu (Hermes, the messenger god!) and Karin Karakas (a wise Athene!). The Armenian section is edited by Yervant Gobelian, a novelist, essayist, and a translator – all in one.

The paradigm of being involved with the local cultures was one set (in the fifties) by the communist Armenian intellectuals of Beirut, Lebanon (Karnig Attarian, poet, his brother Armen Tarian writer of fiction, Istanbul-born Kegham Sevan, novelist, etc.) who owed it to the international nature of their ideology – Marxist socialism (11).

Other Armenian Olympians of Istanbul, public figures that have achieved prominence in the Turkish creative context (and who I could not meet due to pressure of time), are Raffi Portakal, the owner of an Art-auction House, and the Publisher of P, a quality Art and Culture Magazine of such beautiful perfect printing that it stands on a par with international art publications like Apollo (gloriously edited by a London-based Armenian, David Ekserdjian!), Tate, Burlington etc.

I was startled to find a multi-talented Armenian actor, Nisan Sirinyan on the stage of the Turkish National Theatre, playing excellent trumpet live, as part of his hip characterisation (‘an Escort for women’, in a play by Ozen Yula, Kirmizi Yorgunlari).

The brave founder of ARAS Yayincilik (=Publishers), Mgrditch Margossian battles hard (financially but also intellectually, unable to find expert bi-lingual translators) to produce books of European standards, of Armenian authors translated into Turkish. He then suffers the disaster of inefficient distribution and the hunt for buyers. Still, he will not give up, worthy of a New Olympian, he generates the necessary strength, and hope, to keep going.

Last but not least, there is Puzant Akbash, I name him ‘The Admirable’, who is creating an international market for out of print Armenian books, old photographs, post-cards and authors’ manuscripts. He will teach wealthy Armenians to love their intellectuals so much as to want to buy and own their manuscripts with pride, and display and trade in them as objects d’art {and for those who want to own a piece of Armenian history, here is his Tel. No; 0212-245-4588, Fax; 0212-245-4584}.

During the Soviet times, there was a far-sighted cultural movement to save and transport the archival wealth of the Diaspora Armenian intellectuals to the Yeghisheh Tcharents modern manuscript museum of Yerevan. As the spiritual wealth accumulated in Yerevan is being plundered by the mafiosi, a similar museum should now be established in a safe European country (like Britain), to preserve for scholarship what Puzant Akbash is trying to save from destruction (and carving a living out of it, by sheer dedicated hard work).

A wealthy Armenian, like the American Kirk Krikorian, one of the richest men in the world, should establish a British (or an American) Library of Armenian Books and modern Manuscripts, collecting the archives of Armenian Diaspora intellectuals, and every Armenian book ever published in the global Diaspora. It is a pity that no such public library exists (the Noubarian in Paris, and the one in the Jerusalem Patriarchate are out of date, limited in range and availability).

The Young Turks abused natural forces (of thirst and starvation via deportation) to enhance their mass-murder of the Western Armenian population. The government mafia of Eastern Armenia today is doing precisely the same by starving its people, ‘forcing’ those who can find Dollars, to flee – a ‘deportation’ by another name!

The Young Turks failed, thank God. The young turks of independent Armenian government may yet succeed.

Ironically, the Armenian communities of Istanbul, and of Beirut, Aleppo and Palestine, if only they could network and co-operate, are the only hopes left for the survival of the Armenian people and its culture, into the next century (stretching back to the Hittites and beyond into pre-history).

Soviet Armenia in its time and at its peak was the single hope for the survival of the Diaspora Armenians. The American-mafiazation of Armenia reversed that – the Armenian on his own native Caucasian land is being murdered by the Armenian young turk, his brother, just like in the Cain and Abel myth (like the Israeli Jew and the Palestinian Arab, who are Biblical step- but nevertheless brothers from Abraham, killing each other. And King George Fifth of Britain, was first cousin with the Tsar of Russia and the Kaiser of Germany – grandchildren of Queen Victoria, causing the First World War with 10 million dead and countless maimed).

When shall mankind finally grasp that we are all brothers and sisters under different coloured skins, children of Adam and Eve, or God, take your pick (and we share 98% of our genetic material with the Big Baboons – a lesson for the racists!)

Notes

(1) The animals close to man on the evolutionary scale (the Primates) can also think. As to what is ‘Thinking’ is a subject of endless debate in all the disciplines of human knowledge (Philosophy, Psychology, Neurology etc.). Most philosophers used to link the thinking-process with pure Rationalism, and ignore its dimension of emotionality (Plato, Kant, the French philosophes of the Age of Enlightenment etc.). First the European Romantic Movement (18th c.), and now modern Psychologists, restored that element (of the emotions) to the human thought by enlarging the definition of Cognition. American New Age ‘thinkers’ today have gone further by assigning ‘minds’ and feelings to even Plants and rocks …

(2) One must be cautious in examining these sources. With great poets like Homer (9-8th c. BC), perhaps even Hesiod (8th c.) but definitely so with the classical Greek Dramatists (5th c.), their version of a myth may be just that, their own variation on ancient themes. This creates an insurmountable difficulty as there can be no standard version of those myths – every extant myth will be no more than a version, impossible to accept as the universal standard. Take the myth of Pandora (the first woman Zeus sent to Earth with a box full of evils, to neutralise the blessings given by Prometheus to mankind) exists in Hesiod’s works, but not in Homer, and may even be Hesiod’s own creation, if not an Eve-like myth he has recorded (the myth-making man’s medical theory of viral infection!).

What is undoubted (though not yet grasped by most scholars) is that all mythical events are historical and fact-based, even though the history of those pre-historical events can only be known unfortunately for the time being still only through those very myths themselves, until such time that Archaeology in conjunction with other sciences (like Geology) could come up with the scientific answers. For example, the Biblical Flood-story – that it reflects a historical event, there can be little doubt about it, as already the geological sciences have finally come to understand the evidence embedded in the earth, of processes that prove the existence of massive local flooding (as we are experiencing annually in Bangladesh, along the Rhine in Europe, the Yang Tse in China, and nowadays in Britain). As to what is the precise history of the great flood contained in Noah’s story, it is still impossible to decipher.

The whole history of mankind (its pre-history) is buried deep down in ancient Armenia – the whole of Turkey today. Until such time that the Armenian highlands (starting from the area surrounding the Ararat mountains where the Ark of Noah rested) is dug up and studied archeologically, we shall never know man’s pre-history, reflected in ancient mythology.

All scholars interpret the Flood story as a myth about the sinking of the world. I take the diametrically and dialectically opposite view – I suggest that in the Hebrew Book of the Genesis (of the Torah) is preserved the historical record of the birth of the Earth itself, and life on it, according to which the very first piece of earth built up by volcanic eruptions (scientifically true) is the Ararat mountains, itself a volcano continuing the process of land-building (over billions of years).

The whole of ancient Armenia thus when it emerged was the whole world (the Ark) containing all living things and creatures (Noah’s Ark is not a huge ocean-liner containing animals that would gobble up each other…) Much later, tectonic plates were formed, to further create land-masses and their fissures, shaping our present geographical map, which if squeezed fits like a perfect jigsaw puzzle into a single entity of land, with ancient Armenia at its heartland. In my theory, Ararat need not be the highest mountains in the world, but the most ancient piece of land on this planet.

(3) He cut off his father Uranus’ sexual organs (penis and testicles together) upon the instigation of his mother Gaia, and threw them in the sea. They floated to where the island of Cyprus is and turned to foam and froth, out of which Aphrodite (=born-of-aphros=foam), universally thought of as the Goddess of Love was born, and became the island of Cyprus itself (Kupris, a presumed classical Greek pronunciation of ‘Cyprus’ was one of the several names of Aphrodite. And on the island was found in antiquity one of the most famous temples of Love, where the holy priestesses were prostitutes, and Aphrodite’s icon was bearded!).

In this little tale, there are many layers of pre-historical man’s ‘philosophical’, ‘psychological’ and overall ‘scientific’ views of the natural phenomena he was trying to explain rationally – thus, the profoundly sexual evil act of the son (no less than the incestuous castration of his own father) is provoked by a vengeful woman (no less than the mother). Gaia though had a very good reason to be remorselessly furious with her husband Uranus for swallowing up their children soon after birth (a strange case this of inexplicable psycho-neurotic perversion, of perhaps child-hatred, even paedophilia).

An incomparably milder form of this ‘cannibalism’ exists as an anthropological survival in the linguistic metaphor of most Indo-European cultures – ‘eating’ the loved one, be it the beloved, their child, or bits of their anatomy.

In the Armenian, it goes the furthest, from the physical into the realm of the spiritual – ho kit oodem= may I eat your soul, which is a variation of the expression ho kit sirem= I love your soul, and usually expressed together in succession – ho kit sirem – hokit oodem. It peaks in the Christian Church in the ritual of the Holy Communion, whereby Christ’s body is eaten and his blood-wine drunk, derived absolutely from the time-old ancient custom of the Bacchic women, who sex-crazed would chase a fawn (the symbol of the wine-god Dionysus), catch it, tear it apart and eat its flesh raw while drinking its wine-blood.

Myths demonstrate complex multi-symbolism. The above-mentioned very ancient sexual practice of the Dionysiac women may be the very first record of the discovery of what came to be known as fellatio (in Latin), if one interprets ‘blood’ as the life-force (it is a universal such symbol in most ancient cultures), hence specifically the male ‘sperm’ sprouting (like blood) out of the ‘eaten’ phallus-flesh.

Eve’s capricious evil in the Old Testament myth of the Paradise parallels Gaia’s justifiable evil, but with an important distinction – Eve had absolutely no reason whatever to betray Adam’s (and God’s) monogamous trust. Adam was totally contented and happy in Paradise. But Eve was obviously bored, and relieved her boredom by sleeping with Satan (the Talmudic exegesis of the myth). Eve’s ‘eating the apple’ may be the Jewish record of the same historical fact of the Dionysiac women’s discovery of fellatio, as the ‘apple’ is an indubitable symbol of the male testicles (transformed strangely to symbolising the female breast, in the late Medieval and early Renaissance art).

The incestuous castration of Uranus by his son Chronos has a puzzling parallel in Genesis 9:20-27 – Noah gets drunk, strips himself naked and falls asleep in his tent. One of his sons, Ham “saw his father’s nakedness and told his two brothers outside”. “When Noah awoke from his wine and found out what his youngest son had done to him” (but what? The text does not say!), Noah goes berserk and curses Ham’s progeny. There can be no definitive deciphering of Ham’s textually non-specified deed towards his father; hence the latter’s inexplicable fury! Any explanation is as good as any other.

It remains to note that Noah is the Hebrew Dionysus – the first thing he does on leaving the Ark (after the subsidence of the Flood) is to “plant a vineyard” and get drunk! Wine was God’s compassionate gift to Man, to unwind and find some joy after the daily horrors of toiling away for Bread; the direct result of Eve’s punishment for being evicted from Adam’s paradise.

No interpreter of Greek myths has hitherto grasped the pre-historical mythmakers’ profound insight into human sexuality. All books analysing Greek myths agree that Aphrodite (later called ‘Venus’ by the Romans) was the goddess of Love, an error that needs immediate correction. The hidden truth of the mythological fact, and the etymological meaning of the name indicating that Aphrodite was born of the froth (=ejaculation) of male (Uranus’) sexual organs should have left no doubt for the scholars that Aphrodite-Venus was specifically the goddess of male heterosexual desire for women, and not Love in general, highlighted by the further mythological given that there were other goddesses of female sexuality, childbirth and love.

The linkage of immemorial Time (=Chronos) itself, as an almost Einsteinian-Kantian category, with male heterosexual drive for women, is yet another unique and remarkable insight of the pre-historical man expressed through the myths of the Titans – as history’s driving force (a) for the continuation of the species, but also (b) for intellectual creation, whether be it in the arts or the sciences.

(4) The knowledge of making fire was acknowledged by pre-historical mythmakers to be an essential acquisition in man’s ‘historical’ progress towards culture and civilisation. 2,500 years ago, the Greek tragedian Aeschylus, in his play Prometheus Bound portrays Zeus as a ruthless tyrant for punishing Prometheus, man’s greatest fire-friend. He goes further by ascribing to Prometheus the gift of teaching mankind everything else in terms of all knowledge, of the arts and the crafts. The root of the titan’s name derives from the multiple-meaning Greek verb mathein (= to learn, to know, to grasp, to think), which is equally the root of ‘mathematics’, the greatest of all sciences for the classical Greek philosophers (especially Pythagoras).

Prometheus=forethought suggests also a prophetic mind, instinctive and mystical at once, as in Medea, cognate with the Armenian noun midk =mind, and the name of the clever princess from Colchis in the mountains of Caucasian Armenia (or Georgia), who was the heroine of Euripides’ play of the same name.

Zeus is a wholly negative character only in Aeschylus’ this specific play. In most other plays of Greek drama, he is a beneficent god, warm and compassionate, frequently the butt of Aristophanesian satire for his boundless polygamy.

(5) Uniquely in the history of Architecture, the Balian brothers have more than a hundred massive public and residential buildings to their credit dotted all over Istanbul.

The Dolmabahce Sarayi is a delicately ‘embroidered’ sheer feminine beauty, sitting gently as if tied to a mast, like a Venetian gondola, on the waters of Bosphorus bobbing up and down in front of it. Excellently preserved, there is nothing like it among the ‘macho’ palaces of Europe.

The Russian Armenian painter of seascapes, Hovhannes Aivazovsky (whose work had influenced Britain’s Turner) has even lived there, to paint for some of its reception rooms.

The grand reception hall is domed like Haghia Sophia Church, and in imitation of it, I am certain. The brothers Balian have even built mosques looking like the Armenian churches of the medieval city of Ani (minus the minarets of course).

Some of the museum guides are known to have turkified the Armenian architects by implying that they were Turks from Italy named Baliani… Aivazovsky’s surname on the other hand needed no such minor surgery, as it is so obviously Russian!

(6) Chronos, Rhea, Themis, Prometheus, and Oceanus, whose name although synonymous with ‘ocean’, originally meant a gigantic… river, which the Greek cosmologists thought encircled the earth (like a belt), and out of which flowed all the waters of the world, including the seas and the rivers!

(7) One could however argue with some force that in another field, Hakop Oshakan, the founder of our literary criticism, owes his unique linguistic stylistic originality to the pioneering idiosyncratic handling of the Armenian idiom by Indra (a pun on Indra – the Hindu Zeus, god of the Thunderbolt).

(8) The internationalisation of Armenian culture on the back of Soviet culture produced a well-deserved dominance for the Eastern literary Armenian dialect, which began to influence understandably the survivals of Armenian culture in the Western Diaspora. With mass illiteracy engulfing the post-Soviet ‘capitalist’ Armenia, I think the Diaspora intellectuals, trying to re-establish the beauty of the literary legacy of our massacred writers, must consciously linguistically reverse this process.

Unfortunately, our Istanbul Titans all suffer from common grammatical errors (due to universal American style dumbing-down) that are unforgivable (and frankly shocking) in the glorious context of their predecessors (Tourian,Varoujan, Zohrab, Siamanto etc.) who had fixed the literary form of the Western Armenian (deriving from the very Istanbul dialect itself).

For example, the very common verbal prefix ge which can only drop its vowel (-e) if the verb begins with another full-vowel, in which case –e must be substituted with an apostrophe to mark its disappearance, and elided with the verb thus; ge oodem (=I eat), must be written and pronounced as a single word, g’oodem. We have semi-vowels in Armenian that do not obey the rule and must be written ordinarily and pronounced as two separate entities thus; ge sbasem (=I wait), not g’sbasem, which is how they write and publish in Istanbul – s- is technically a consonant!

The 3rd person plural in the (very common) Future tense always ends with –e(h), never –ye(tch) thus; bidi bare(h)n (=they’ll dance), never bidi baryen which is how our beloved Armenians in Istanbul erroneously write and publish. It is the Subjunctive which is exclusively with ye(tch).

One should never borrow linguistically, if it is not for the purposes of aesthetic improvement and pleasure. For example, the third person pronoun a(h)n in Western Armenian is as beautiful as its inversion na(h)(a linguistic survival from Krapar) in Eastern Armenian (each to his own). Why bother changing it in Western Armenian?

I personally even prefer our a(h)n [invariably changed to na(h) in Shigaher, for example]. It serves no poetic purpose whatsoever.

Personally, I love (for example) Bedross Tourian’s most beautiful invention of ne(h), to distinguish it as a female gender-indicator, occasionally also in Krapar, but definitely derived from a(h)n which contains no such distinction (it is used for both genders). Surprisingly, Tourian’s aesthetically pleasing innovation never caught up in the Western Armenian parlance, or literature, and remained, alas, an idiosyncrasy of his poetry. I wish a Khrakhouni would revive Tourian’s ne(h), which would be perfectly acceptable being in the Western Armenian tradition.

I see no reason why unnecessary substitutions should be supported intellectually. For example; mook is the Eastern Armenian word for ‘dark’, which in Western Armenian is moot. I can find no reason whatsoever to substitute our word with its Eastern Armenian equivalent, especially that the latter can easily be confused with our Western Armenian word for ‘mouse’=moog!

I am not advocating linguistic Purity, but Beauty – the first is cold and frigid, the second is passionate and fertile, in a word, ‘promethean’! It is incumbent on our Istanbul Armenian Titans to preserve the beauty of our linguistic culture under genocidal threat from American half-wits, parading as professorial Armenologists, in parochial ignorance of our vibrant Armenian communities in the Middle East – Istanbul, Beirut, Aleppo, and Palestine

I know at least two other intellectual Titans by any standards of European history, the Barrister Kaspar Derderian in Beirut, and the Patriarch Poet of the Armenian Palestine, His Beatitude Archbishop Torkom Manoukian, both of whom belong to the Western (Istanbul) Armenian literary culture, and are absolute masters of that universe.

It is time that a mechanism is found for those Armenian communities to link up in mutual support to resist, and actively battle, to preserve our cultural national identity, as the collapse of the Soviet Union caused the hamburgerisation and coca-colisation of Caucasian Armenia, today balancing it on the verge of extinction. Half of its 3 million population of the Soviet times has already fled the starving and frozen country. A militarist fascist Turkish government could easily conquer it overnight, were it not for the defence of its borders by the Russian army. But a corrupt deal with a mafia-ruled Russia could hand over ‘independent’ Armenia on a silver plate to Turkey, for a few billion…hamburgers and Coca Colas, and there will be no Armenian army to stop it.

(9) However incredible it may sound, there seems to be only and only two American intellectuals of some international standing who dare speak the truth about the horrors of their country – Professor Noam Chomsky, and comedian Michael Moore, whose book Stupid White Men (Penguin Books, 2002) just published in Britain was destined for pulping in America – Michael Moore unravels all the facts relating to President Bush’s corrupt thievery of Al Gore’s election, proving beyond any reasonable doubt that his usurpation of power was “A Very American Coup” (the title of Ch. 1) fit for a “banana republic”!

Moore also names and tells the story of “one of the top TV pundits in America, seen every week…. gleefully scorning others for their ignorance” (p. 92), of, e.g. Homer’s poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey, but when confronted by Moore, accepts that he himself does not know either – “Well, they’re…. uh… you know…uh… okay, fine, you got me – I don’t know what they’re about. Happy now?” (p. 91).

Moore laments, “There are forty-four million Americans who cannot read and write above a fourth-grade level – in other words, who are functional illiterates” (p. 86), and President Bush seems to be one of them, even though he “went to Yale and Harvard” (Moore’s italics, p. 88).

(10) I had just met Hrant Dink, and Robert Haddejian feeling immense joy, appreciative of their monumental achievements against all historical odds, Haddejian having acted almost like an uncle to Dink in the past, encouraging his first steps, only to discover that they were suddenly at each others’ throats…and all for Hecuba, Shakespeare’s Hamlet would say. What’s Hecuba to them?

Their internecine petty battles based on no more than community old wives’ tales, petty gossip and tittle-tattle, “wouldn’t fill up a walnut” (=engouyzin gegheve tchi(h) letsner), my late mother full of folk wisdom would say. How tragic of our Armenian communities everywhere!

And I had just escaped the incredible foolishness of the London Armenian Church Council electioneering, only to experience a similar situation in Istanbul, and amongst the best of our intellectuals…Woe is to our nation!

Do we deserve to be saved from our enemies, when we are our worst enemy?

(11) Inspired by the slogans of the French Revolution, the brotherhood (and sisterhood) of mankind (and womankind) is the only hope left for the future survival of humanism, and civilisation (the true socialist values), resisting the American-led globalisation or the imperialist domination of the world markets.

Cahit and his wife Akgul are Turkish socialist friends of mine. They pronounce my name as sweetly as my siblings. They knew my ninety-five year old father, who as a child of ten had walked from his birthplace in Adapazar-Armenia to Kirkuk-Iraq, in the genocidal conditions of 1915. He later also survived the decade of civil war in Beirut-Lebanon.

Cahit and Akgul met him first, when once I took my father to a Turkish human rights evening in London (in aid of Amnesty International), he wanted to sing with his undiminished powerful tenor (he had a perfect pitch at ninety-five!) for the audience. He asked me to translate into English (for the benefit of the local MP in attendance) that he “wished to sing not for the Turkish government, but for the Turkish people! People are friends. It is the governments that make them enemies, to dominate and enslave them!” These were my father’s exact words, still remembered by Cahit and Akgul.

When my father died, Akgul attended his funeral and cried like my sisters. And if I knew that my Turkish socialist friends would be homeless or targeted by the British neo-fascists one day, God forbid, I would happily share my home with them! Only and only the socialist values of compassion (never the capitalist gun-laws of the US jungle!) possess the inherent capacity to solve all the problems of mankind, problems created by the very greed of the capitalist’s desire for power and domination over fellow human beings.

The capitalist joy at the sight of global socialist ‘defeat’ is premature. The American-invented AIDS virus may yet kill off the peoples of Africa, but there will be another Russian revolution… and China has not yet scorned American imperialism, letting it stew in its own Enron-juices by playing cat and mouse with easy targets like Iraq.

Let the Bush-Mafia dare challenge the might of China! Americans will then see the pathetic nakedness of their infantile emperor…

Where are we in the infinite universe? A theory about coincidences or simultaneous occurrence, and infinity

2005-11-17T10:51:00.000-08:00

by Professor H. I. Pilikian

Coincidences or Simultaneous occurrences are puzzling phenomena. Most people have experienced them, and some on many occasions – when you would be thinking of a person, and suddenly he/she appears (“speak of the Devil” they say), or the telephone rings and there he/she is at the other end of the line. Folk wisdom ascribes it to the powers of the Devil, while scientists scratch their heads for an acceptable theory.

On one occasion, I picked up the telephone to ring the London Iranian-Armenian poetess, Mrs. Shoghik Minassian, only to find her at the other end of the line without the telephone having yet rang... she had picked up the telephone to make a phone call herself. In even more of a complex and extremely unlikely version of this – I have dialled the London based Painter from Armenia, Artour Oshakantsi’s number, to discover him at the other end of the line having picked up the telephone with the intention of telephoning me!

Coincidences are the chance occurrence of two unlikely events, seemingly connected, sometimes the same, happening simultaneously, often at the same time, overlapping, and even if not, still unlikely to occur, let alone out of the blue, for no logical reason at all – it is how Matter behaves at the subatomic Quantum level that scientists are still unable but struggling to explain, three quarters of a century after the discovery of the phenomena by the Danish Physicist Niels Bohr (2) and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (3).

On a less significant mode but even more puzzling was the most bizarre occurrence when on the 3rd of November 2003, having attended a seminar on musical theory, I was on my way in Central London, Queen Square, WC1, at around 8.15 pm, when I noticed at the door of a well-kept house a nicely upholstered wooden chair left in the street, obviously intended for anyone to take. I had never encountered such a surreal sight before (have you?). As an old-fashioned Armenian, I hate waste – my parents’ generation that had survived the 1915 genocide were turned masters of Recycling – A wisdom American Governments still resist learning, in fact they teach their citizens to boast shamelessly that the world-polluting American economy is built on Waste – a mantra the millionaire parents of my first wife would drum into me in my youth every time I would try to eat everything on my plate…

I thought, if I had a car I could take this antique-looking chair home. I chuckled to myself imagining me carrying a wooden chair in the streets, onto the underground, changing trains with it at Finsbury Park station, then on the bus to my home in Barnet – a most surreal scene fit for an avant-garde film. Then I thought no more of it.

An hour later I reached New Barnet train Station, my stop, and as I got off the train I almost bumped into a man carrying in his hands incredibly a… similar wooden chair onto the train!

You tell me, when was the last time (if at all) you saw a man carrying in his hands a big wooden chair taking the train?

Another form of pure coincidence would be winning the fat British Euro Lottery – a matter of impossible luck, just as the first time I visited Istanbul (end of December 2002), the first words spoken I heard in the airport lounge was… Armenian, moreover, Caucasian Armenian. I could not believe my ears. On further investigation, I discovered that an aeroplane from the Armenian Republic had just landed, with a planeful of passengers from the little Armenia the Ottoman Turks had attempted to genocide off the map ninety years ago. For me, from London, born in Iraq of half-genocided parents from ‘turkish’ Armenia, to have been there in Istanbul, the capital of the Young Turk genociders, at that very specific moment when a planeful of Armenians ‘downloaded’, were as likely in terms of probability, as to have won the Euro Lottery!

Control-freaks among the scientists who would want to leave nothing to chance, have tried their damnedest to work out mathematically the possibilities of controlling the vicissitudes of Fortune – the great mystery of the ancients, and the subject of Shakespeare’s ire – he always refers to it as a female, and as nothing but a whore – The good of this world have always wondered with Shakespeare as to why the evil people flourish in the same world and are able to live life happily without conscience, while the good ones (like Othello, and Hamlet) suffer intolerably? Why God does not punish evil in this life?

One of the most interesting books of the Old Testament, The Book of Job could be shown to be an attempt to crack the code of Bad Fortune’s mysteries, its sheer unfairness in devastating a just man, so innocent and holy. The writer’s solution to the crux of unfair fortune is the exasperated religious one – God’s belated intervention (the deus ex machina of the classical Greek dramatists) to restore just deserts. But why let it happen in the first place causing endless misery – Job (like any infant killed in a disaster) never did any wrong – he did not need to be tried…

One could interpret The Gospels equally as a ‘musical’ variation on the theme set by the book of Job – Jesus, like Job, is wholly innocent, Job was God’s man as Jesus is His very son, and yet is doled out the most evil bad luck, this time by totally evil men. Even Jesus himself on the cross finally loses his cool and protests to God – his in-human Father – “Why hast thou forsaken me?”

No suffering in the world, except perhaps by infants, can remotely compare with what Jesus (and Job) had to put up with. And yet those responsible – the warmongers, the Mafia bosses, and the pornographers of this world seem to blossom, and have it all! This awareness has led many a poet and philosopher to loss of faith and atheism.

Few people know, for example, the heart-rending verses of protest against God by the Armenian medieval poet, Frik, or that Karl Marx in his youth was a Christian zealot, had written a thesis on Jesus, advocating the spread of his word to the world so ardently, that he (Karl Marx) could have been mistaken today for a Jehovah Witness…

There is a whole industry in mathematical sciences of Probability Theory (4), the basis of Statistical analyses, attempting to induce respectability to the ancient esoteric arts of prophecy and prediction. This is ironical, because the acceptance of chance is the fundamental conceptual difference between scientific theorizing and religious faith. Religious people believe that all is for a purpose, and that is in God’s mind, not given to man to understand fully, History being the unravelling of that divine mystery. Nothing occurs by chance.

Modern Science rejects this Aristotelian teleology (Christian dogma owes a lot; some would say everything, to the Plato-Aristotle debates in Western philosophy). Scientists believe that all change is due to genetic mutation occurring by chance – quite an infantile concept I must say unworthy of great scientific minds, as causality is proven endlessly daily at all levels of human action and behaviour.

Even Genetic mutation cannot be ascribed to chance if it has to survive environmental change, and adapt to it. As for environmental change – for example, the dilapidation of the ozone layer is undoubtedly caused by the human folly of capitalist polluters seeking blindly cutthroat profits first, last, and in between. They have their own inhuman scientists paid to insist that global warming is a matter of chance! (5)

How then could one account scientifically (not caused by an almighty deity) for impossible coincidences and unlikely events happening, as a matter of historical fact? In terms of religious or quasi-religious faith, the question does not even arise, as the non-scientific mind believes in universal causality – nothing happens by chance, and all events are webbed, or interconnected, and ultimately the deeds of God Himself.

I think the well-established theorem of parallel-lines (6) in mathematics presents a solution and produces an extraordinary insight into the nature of infinity and our place (physical location) in the universe, thus – parallel lines which by definition do not meet run parallel into infinity where they converge to meet (7). A line is the trajectory of a point in motion.

If coincidences are event-points, then their simultaneous occurrence (or meeting) can only take place in or near infinity. It follows that, if the universe (8) is infinite, then our planet specifically (and consequently the whole of the solar system) is physically located very near the edges of the infinity of the universal ontology, resulting in awesome consequences – the main of which is that we are indeed very, very far from the centre of the universe (or God. Medieval philosophers used tautological rationality to identify God to be at the centre of All – thence the Universe – He created) (9).

As we are hovering frighteningly near infinity where, if all points (parallel lines) meet, then we may be next to a most explosive unstable place (energy field), possibly an all devouring Black Hole, which are infinite-energy fields of what is referred to as Dark Matter – still a scientific mystery constituting most of the universe, of which known Matter is thought to be a mere fraction!

But if the Quantum world reflects Infinity and behaves like one – a mini-infinity (10), then ultimately we may be safe, as in spite of all the collisions of subatomic particles within it, Matter is somehow mysteriously still constituted and stable – something science cannot yet explain, but which is perhaps reflected in the psychological construction of the human individual – a mixed bag of explosive contradictions, that may indeed sometimes explode, just as some atoms do. The wonder is that very few do.

If all people exploded at once, it would turn our planet into a black hole! Even during the general madness of the two World Wars, most people, thank God preserved the sanity of matter.

Notes and References

(1) A ‘theory’ is a hypothesis ‘proven’ by facts – laboratory experiments and observation – the deductive/inductive method. The difficulty is that nothing can be proven with finality and certainty. Karl Popper (1902-1994), Austrian-born, a philosopher of science at the London School of Economics, proposed instead the inverted notion of ‘falsifiability’ – a theory must be capable of being falsified by facts… when it is, then a new theory or a ‘paradigm’ (according to Thomas Kuhn [1922-1996], the American philosopher of science) needs to be constructed to replace the old theory, and that is how revolutions occur in scientific thought.

The reason I call mine a theory, and not a hypothesis that is the first rung of an intended theory, is because the mathematics (of parallel lines) upon which my explanations are based is uncontroversial, well-established, and I can take it for granted.

(2) Technically speaking, the Quantum Theory is the definition of Max Planck (1858-1947), the German Physicist and Nobel Prize laureate (1918). He had hypothesized (in 1900) that Energy is emanated/radiated/produced in tiny packages, discrete units he called quanta (from the Latin), something Isaac Newton had already referred to less precisely as the stream of particles in a Light-beam.

More astonishingly, Planck then mathematised a universal constant of nature by attempting to calculate precisely the amount of energy in a quantum of radiation, now labelled as Planck’s Constant (h) = 6.626 x 10 [raised to –34] joule-seconds. The energy content E = h f , where f is the frequency (the number of vibrations per second) of the electromagnetic radiation.

Max Planck had also a highly evolved sense of social conscience, and great courage – he endangered life and limb by criticizing the Nazi regime publicly and suffered some consequences.

Planck’s ideas were given a new lease of life by Niels Bohr (1885-1962), also a Nobel Prize winner (1922), and a man of great conscience – during the Nazi occupation of his country, he fled to Sweden in a small boat, in the darkness of the night, to persuade the King to offer safe haven to all the Jews escaping from Denmark. Although he worked later on the atom bomb in Los Alamos (USA), he was opposed to the secrecy of the project, organizing the first Atoms for Peace Conference in Geneva (1955). Five years earlier, concerned about the consequences of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he had addressed the United Nations arguing for an “open world” to eliminate all possibility of preparing wars secretly.

After Einstein’s death, Niels Bohr was feted as the greatest physicist alive. In 1912, he had gone to Manchester University where Ernest Rutherford had just discovered the nucleus of the atom and built the model of a mini-solar system – electrons like planets circling the nuclear ‘sun’.

Bohr shocked the world of Physics when in 1913 proposed his own model (based on Planck’s quanta) suggesting that electrons of a nucleus, circle on specified trajectories only, and energy (electromagnetic radiation) is emitted only when an electron jumps from one circulatory level to another. And an atomic nucleus was less like a sun, more like a drop of liquid where molecules collide all the time.

One of Bohr’s children, Aage Bohr (b. in 1922) developed this ‘liquid’ concept further (won the Nobel Prize in 1975) by demonstrating that particles in the nucleus may vibrate and rotate distorting its shape from the expected spherical symmetry into an ellipse.

Based on the latter’s work, I myself would go further and suggest that the ‘spherical symmetry’ is a left-over metaphor from the Rutherfordian concept of an atom that needs to be rejected entirely, being a mere assumption, which then moreover limits the physicist’s vision of a nuclear shape to be related to the image of a sphere. Nuclei in fact I think come in all possible forms and shapes, known (ellipsoids, rhomboids, cones, triangles etc.) and unknown, which explains the infinite variety of material manifestation.

(3) Werner Heisnberg (1901-1976) was a protégé of Niels Bohr, although unlike his mentor he ended up heading the Nazi research for the Bomb. Recent attempts to exonerate him from Nazi crimes suggest that he was secretly subverting the project…

In 1925, Heisenberg had attempted to develop a kind of quantum mechanics (labelled ‘matrix mechanics’ – the unacknowledged pop-basis for the recent Hollywood blockbuster trilogy of ‘matrix’ films starring Keanu Reeves) to rival the classical Newtonian mechanics. Its main focus was the energy levels of the atomic structure, working out the mathematics of the frequencies and amplitudes of the radiation waves absorbed and/or emitted by the atomic system.

What made Heisenberg a world-class intellectual figure (and won him the Nobel Prize in 1932) was his ‘uncertainty principle’ (‘discovered’ in 1927) given I think overrated significance by Niels Bohr. It also fired the imagination of the philosophers struggling with the social uncertainties of the post First World War Europe.

According to the Uncertainty Principle, it is impossible to precisely measure certain quantities simultaneously (that abound in the quantum world). For example, in the Newtonian world, one could ‘observe’ a particle passing through an exactly specified locum (position point), moving with a precisely quantifiable momentum (or speed). According to Heisenberg, this is impossible in quantum mechanics, I would suggest only because of the lack of technology then! Heisenberg arrogantly I think made a universal (quantum) law out of scientific ignorance and inadequacy (his own in the first place).

Einstein, who believed in the objective existence of the physical laws, rubbished Heisenberg’s views uttering his famous injunction ‘God does not play dice in the universe’!

Bohr jumped to Heisenberg’s defence with a self-contradictory circular explanation, acknowledging the physicist’s inability to measure quantities by insisting on its reverse, only to confirm immediately the limitations of the way by which the position and momentum of quanta could be defined, which frankly amounts to the same thing – the inadequacy of technology then to do so!

Bohr philosophised further – that physical quantities are defined by the experimental methods that measured them, that experimenters do effect the results they wish to discover (hence there never can be objective facts!), which although true in especially the social sciences, does not have to be so in carefully constructed experiments – the tendency of a true scientist anyway.

Bohr provided a famously clinching argument – that to describe a living creature completely, one has to know all about its inner workings, which would necessitate taking it to pieces, which means killing it before reaching the full facts!

Once again, strangely, it did not occur to Bohr that such was the failure of culture-specific technology of a time-specific scientific ignorance. Genetic engineering alone today disproves the above – today it is possible to discover the inner workings of a living organism without having to kill it!

Bohr (and Heisenberg) was simply wrong (or right at the time…), even though their ideas laid the foundations of cultural relativism, gay and lesbian theory and/or post-modernism.

(4) Thomas Bayes (1702-1761) was an English mathematician who gave his name to the fundamental theorem in Statistics, relating the probability of an event taking place, to the probability of another event conditional upon it, to have occurred.

For example, the face of a coin with two faces, thrown, would have a fifty percent chance of turning up. Or, for an individual buyer of a lottery ticket, the probability of winning it stands at one over the total number of tickets sold for that particular throw.

The probability of myself (or any Armenian) as an Armenian to visit Istanbul (or any part of Turkey) is one out of the total number of all the Armenians alive in the world.

One could of course mathematically refine this basic idea further (to reduce the chances of occurrence) by arguing that all Armenians would not want to visit Turkey because of bad blood between them, or if they did, they must be healthy or able-bodied (although some airlines make provision for the wheel-chair bound) etc. etc.

(5) Religious sentiment (belief in God) is something so private and personal, that displaying it to all in a public way as American fundamentalists do, amounts to pornography, the equivalent of showing one’s private parts in the London daily Sun newspaper…

However, it is vital to possess and preserve what I call a methodological atheism for scientific research. The scientist may privately feel a powerful faith in a Creator, but he/she would make an inadequate scientist if she/he lacked methodological atheism – the sole path of scientific understanding, and analysis of objective causality, leading to discovery and technological advancement.

(6) Two straight lines are said to run parallel if they are the same distance apart at every point on their trajectories. And if a third straight line crosses them, it cuts each at an angle of the same value.

Parallel lines form the basis of many important geometrical figures called generically parallelograms, like squares, rectangles, and rhombuses.

They constitute also a fundamental element in the scientific understanding of Perspective, which was only decoded in human history as recently as the 15th century, by Italian Renaissance artists, based on the perception that parallel lines converge in infinity, hence in a painting reflecting this conceptually at what is called a vanishing point – usually at the centre of the composition, where the most important element of the painting (like Jesus and the Holy Virgin) is placed – as in The Birth of Mary (1485-1490) by Domenico Ghirlandaio.

The architect Filippo Brunelleschi in Florence was the first (as far as we know) to perform a series of experiments between 1417 and 1420 to teach himself the laws of perspective. Masaccio and Paolo Uccello used Brunelleschi’s mathematical rules to produce the illusion of perspective in painting – depth or three-dimensional feature on the flat surface of the canvas.

In 1435, another architect, Leon Battista Alberti wrote (originally in Latin, subsequently translated into Italian and published in 1436) Della Pittura, a book on painting explaining and adopting Brunelleschi’s methods to achieve the same effects in the visual arts.

It is thought that Dutch and Flemish painters were the first to work out the rules of aerial perspective, subtly noticeable in the work of Jan van Eyck.

The first element that the avant-garde artists of the early 20th century wished to destroy was perspective! What was a hard won mathematical secret unravelled in the Renaissance by hard work was now regarded as irrelevant, and thrown out with the bath water.

What is worth noting (and puzzling) in the history of art is the fact that the problem of perspective emerged only in the aesthetic sensibility of Western art – it was never the concern of any other artistic tradition in the rest of the world – Chinese, pre-Colombian, African, Aboriginal etc. I think the discovery of Eastern art (Japanese prints) by the French Impressionists may have unwittingly triggered the process of the eventual elimination of perspective from Western art.

(7) A simple illustration of this would be to look at the panoramic picture of a road (or rail tracks) running straight into the horizon – you will instantly see the vanishing point, at what looks like the juncture of the two border-lines constituting the road or the track-lines.

The grasp of Perspective (based on the assumption of two parallel lines converging in infinity) is so fundamental that it may be inborn and a Kantian category of the Mind, coded in the primate brain – we use unconsciously our instinctive knowledge of perspective to judge distances, and the relationship of objects in the space we experience them. For example, when you wish to cross a street (ignoring the traffic lights…), if you misjudge the approximate distance of a car racing towards you, you may get run over.

(8) Recent ‘String’ theories derived purely from mathematics and based on Quantum Mechanics arguing for quanta to be string-shaped, assume the existence of many dimensions and universes co-existing in the same space… I consider them to be mathematical-poetry like Heisenberg’s Uncertainty principal (see Note 3).

(9) Classical religious belief demands that God be at the centre of the Universe, of which we are frighteningly far away. It may explain symbolically human folly and evil.

In contradiction, as Man also needs to feel close to God, religion also conceives of the Deity being the whole of the universe, infinity itself, being everywhere at all times accessible to mortals.

(10) One of the great laws of medieval esoteric sciences stated that ‘as below, so is above’ (in some versions ‘as above, so below’) – that the micro-cosmos reflected the macro-cosmos. The concept of the Chinese Box (smaller boxes within larger ones), or the Russian matrioshka dolls, represents a visual representation of similar insights into the natural world and its objective reality.

The End

Should not Psychology be renamed Mindology = the logos of the mind?

2005-11-17T10:42:00.000-08:00

by Professor H. I. Pilikian

Of all the Social Sciences, Psychology seems to be the one discipline galloping into the practical details of post-modern life, ran over by women-students in the American and British universities.

Most recently, the bastion of British Conservatism, the London Daily Mail newspaper reported with typical rightwing nagging; “A new approach to teaching in which pupils are asked to talk about their feelings is being tested at a cost of £5 million… in the belief it will help tackle disruptive behaviour… Critics have described the scheme as a waste of money and a dangerous fad that will undermine the teaching of English and maths at a time when thousands of pupils leave primary schools unable to read and write properly. The scheme is based on the theories of American psychologist Daniel Goleman who coined the term ‘emotional intelligence’ to describe the ability to recognize and control feelings.” (7)

Gone are the days when Psychology departments were exclusive male clubs, founded by German sounding patriarchal chauvinists, in white overalls, playing at being natural scientists, experimenting with docile monkeys or white rats in Skinnerian boxes (1). Pop-psychology is the staple diet Jerry Springer and Oprah Winfrey addicts are fed on everywhere in America, and in glossy women’s (even in cheap-porno) magazines – Cosmopolitan, Playboy, you name it!

Psychology proper is as old as Philosophy, and an offshoot of it, stretching back to the ancient Greeks and those magnificent two, Plato (c.427-c.347 BC) and Aristotle (384-322 BC), who between them laid the foundations of Western thought, with such mind-power, that no subsequent intellectual earthquakes (from John Locke, Hume, Kant, to Newton, down to Einstein, Quantum Mechanics, or String Theory), seem able to ever budge them, perhaps shake them a little, but never ruin them. Greek Philosophy (in the Western world) became the mother of all knowledge, branching gradually over the centuries into the natural and social sciences.

Aristotle’s book On the Soul is perhaps the first book on psychology (=the logos of the Soul). He formalized it as the study (the logos) of the Soul (psyche). For the Pythagoreans before him, the Soul was an (spiritual) entity ‘imprisoned’ within and by the body, which thus deserved, and needed, to be ‘disciplined’ (almost as a ‘spiritual’ punishment) by external means – specific actions like cleanliness, holding silence (against thoughtless babble), sexual self-restraint, vegetarianism etc. a frugal monastic way of life designed by the saintly Pythagoras (6th c. BC) himself for his disciples. The Pythagorean soul, arguably, cannot exist without the body, but especially vice versa, as the body is an embodied soul (the basic tenet of all later spiritual ‘sciences’).

Plato resolved the Pythagorean dialectical contradiction by splitting them apart – he seems to have adopted the ancient Egyptian concept of the Soul as a separate non-physical entity, able to exist without the body. Plato also adapted the ancient Egyptian concept, this time to resolve the latter’s dialectical contradiction about the Soul’s mortality – although souls (especially those of the Pharaohs) became stars in the sky, and stars were immortal, but ‘ordinary’ souls could be killed individually (by erasing a dead man’s name from documents, for example). Plato made the soul universally and uniquely immortal.

All of the above was too unreal for the practical ‘scientific’ Aristotle. He conceived of Things as intertwined Form (from his teacher, Plato’s notion of the unchanging characteristic element of an object that defines its essence) and Matter (the universal undifferentiated substratum of all things – the Body), always existing together (except in the case of God – in whom Aristotle had scant interest) (2). He then provided a practical common-sense view of the soul defining it (for the first time ever) as the Life-force – the overall ‘supervisor’ of a body that empowers it to “support vital functions”, the vital force in other words that keeps the body alive. Soul seems to be the same as Motion – the dead do not move!

Have you seen a dead body? To appreciate Aristotle’s deep insight, one ought to witness the lifeless body of a live person, or even introspect on organic dead matter, say a piece of wood. It lacks movement-soul, or life force. Moving-things, even dead objects in motion, can seem to be alive…(3).

All agree that Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) founded ‘scientific’ (experimental) psychology as an independent discipline by cutting its umbilical cord from Philosophy. He was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Leipzig (1875-1917), when he initiated the first academic course in psychology (1862), established the world’s first laboratory for experimental psychology (1879), and published the first journal of academic psychology (in 1881) labelling it strangely… Philosophical Studies
(Philosophische Studien). And he would not give up on Philosophy at all – among his massive published works (over 500), he has volumes on Logic (Logik 1880), Ethics (Ethik 1886) and, The Philosophical System (System der Philosophie 1889).

Wundt’s case illustrates how people find it difficult to change mindsets and consequent attitudes, methodologies or definitions. Wundt could transform psychology radically, revolutionize it, and yet he found it impossible to give up its philosophical non-scientific (because non-experimental) progeny.

Similarly, a plethora of psychologists since Wundt, who have been desperately trying to ‘scientify’ the discipline, have neglected to transform its definitional name (names define natures and essences), still calling it psychology, even though mind and soul are no more congruous (they never were, merely some lazy scholars perpetuated the mistranslation of the soul into mind during German Romanticism).

Science refutes and rejects the very notion of the Soul, be it purely spiritual as in Plato, or mildly scientific as in Aristotle. Science simply could not define the soul, the un-observable. This (the denial of the soul) denotes in fact the beginnings of all modern science. Yet, psychological ‘scientists’ (and/or ‘scientific’ psychologists) still persist in calling themselves students of the psyche=the Soul.

And Aristotle is not finished either. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle laid a huge emphasis on the significance of actions people take, viz. people’s behaviour. Action creates the individual – according to Aristotle, a person’s very character is defined by and evolves through the actions he takes.

John Watson (1878-1958) founded Behaviourism in psychology on similar lines – he was convinced that by changing behaviour, he could reshape character. John Dewey (1859-1952) who transformed American education (with his fellow Pragmatists), was totally practical-obsessed and action-orientated. For him, thinking as a process is a means for planning practical action. Truth is not a Platonic abstract ideal, but a practical (I would say ‘Aristotelian’ action-orientated) idea that has worked in the past, emerges out of past practical experience.

Why then do all psychologists still hang onto the soul=psyche while babbling of the Mind?

Social Psychologists are the most condemned lot among the Experimental pseudo-psycho-scientists for pursuing non-scientific methods – producing data that cannot be tested, replicated, or publicly checked (as in the case of confidential psychoanalytic case studies).

Yet even the social psychologists that are happy to battle against laboratory dehumanisation of subjects they insist on calling “participants” and rightly so, take pride in being open and humane and democratic, yet do their damnedest to ‘prove’ that their methods of cultural and social studies are entirely unambiguously… scientific, and they join forces with their ‘dehumanised’ experimental colleagues to snigger and scapegoat poor old Freud for huffing and puffing and producing hot air and no recognizable testable science! The irony is that Freud himself considered himself as none other than a neuroscientist, albeit accepting of the soul=psyche in psychology, in the classical Greek sense of it.

Social Psychologists should have the courage to declare all Psychology to be Social Psychology… Social mores are culture-specific, very often even time-specific trends and fads. Any psychology experiment delivers up results valid only and only for that particular time (of the experiment) in a specific culture – it should never be generalized and universalized as a fixture of human cognition.

Social psychologists should resist any temptation ‘to be scientific’, integrating with their deluded nitpicking pretentious Cognitive brethren (and sisters) sniggering at them, wasting precious research time and resources – millions of dollars are squandered annually, in American universities, creating cognitive psychological … fog, publishing massive tomes of hot air – frequently sheer risible nonsense.

As deluded ‘scientists’, Cognitive psychologists talk non-stop of the mind, yet they lack absolutely any definition, let alone any theory, of the Mind (of which their hated Philosophers have god’s plenty!). They think ‘thinking’ is no more than a function of the brain, in exclusion of all emotion and the five senses – their millions of dollars of wasteful research are obsessed with visual, and rarely with audio experiments, in total ignorance of the olfactory and haptic senses, when in fact it is the ‘chemical’ (to use hard-core scientific terms!) compoundation of all the five ‘elements’ of the senses (or the lack of some in an individual due to physical damage) that ‘yield’ the emotions, that trigger the hormones and the enzymes, that dictate and carry the thoughts at synaptic junctions in the brain, and along the neural pathways of the nervous system, covering the whole body!

But what is Science, so beloved of social scientists? Can anything other than the natural sciences (chemistry, biology, physics etc.) be regarded as scientific?

The verbal root of science derives from the Latin scire (4) = to know. Speaking etymologically, science denotes all the fields of human knowledge. It took very many centuries of human thought to finally arrive at the refinements of constructed meaning, to invent a web of cognate meanings and definitions, to render it a special kind of knowledge with its own (scientific) methodology. As Devalle (1996/2001, p. 119) confirms – “the word ‘scientist’ was only invented by William Whewell in 1840”.

Francis Bacon in the 16th c. Britain laid first the foundations of the scientific methodology by defining the deductive Aristotelian method of fact-observation. Karl Popper, only in the 20th c. could define the falsifiability-principle of a scientific theory. Kuhn in the USA carved in stone the concept of the scientific paradigm, and how it shifts as a result of Popperian falsifiability. All had in mind the complexities presented by the Realism of the natural sciences – that physical objective reality has an existence independent of the perceiving mind. It signified a fight to the death against the ultra solipsism/relativism of the Irish Platonist Bishop Berkeley (1685-1753), who had insisted that all was in the mind, and in God’s mind at that – esse est percipi = to exist is to be perceived [by the Christian God especially].

At the root of Psychology on the other hand lies the classical Greek noun psukhe forming a cluster of complex cognate meanings beginning with the oldest one wind, evolving into breath, then life, life-force, and finally soul. It was also personified in Greek mythology as the passionately monogamous lover of Eros (she died for him! Something no modern feminist could do…), himself the illegitimate son of Aphrodite (the most beautiful of the goddesses) married to lame Hephaistos (the ugliest of the gods though the most artistic, and the only one living – not in Olympus – but under the earth, being responsible for the volcanic eruptions).

Aphrodite was the whore of Aries, the god of Warmongering, and the father of Eros (the lover of Psyche), all of which Freud knew well and absorbed into his analytical theorizing. Freud was a true psychologist in the correct (‘scientific’) meaning of the word, being keen on the etymological concept of the word psycho-logy as the logos of the Soul linked deeply with Eros (thence Freud’s overall concept of the Unconscious being the product of the sexual instinct warring its way through the Ego etc).

It is the first British translators who got it wrong in English by translating Freud’s use of the soul (same word in German as in Greek and pronounced exactly the same) as mind in an insidious fraudulent attempt to give Freud’s concepts a ‘scientific’ shine, and Freud incomprehensibly did not bother to correct them, perhaps because he himself was keen on being acknowledged as a serious scientist (5). Bruno Bettelheim’s (1982/2001) revelation of these facts fell on deaf ears and seem still stuck there!

Miller (1962/1991) provided by now a universally accepted definition of psychology as “the science of mental life” (as much the subtitle of his classic treatise on the subject), but lacking the courage it seems to go further and re-label psychology (the very name of the discipline itself) in a scientific mode.

The synonymous coupling of soul and mind still current in dictionaries and non-scientific literature sounds very primitive and needs desperately scientific updating if one aught to propagate Psychology as a scientific discipline, taking into account the evolutionary socio-linguistic strides in meaning achieved since the 18th c. Rationalism that necessitates the belated de-coupling of the two concepts. Mind as the function of the Brain (mathematically speaking), must have no more congress with the Soul (in psychology), the existence and location of which is still a great mystery even in Religion!

Perhaps time is finally ripe that Psychology is renamed Mindology, to give it the scientific accolade its practitioners have been so desperate striving to achieve. Let’s have Social Mindology (instead of social psychology), child mindology, cognitive mindology, clinical mindology, experimental mindology etc.

Social constructionists (and possibly experientialists) won’t mind one way or the other as long as meanings are clarified and socially embedded. Psychodynamicists alone may regret the day, unless they too wished to dump their Freudian progeny for scientific respectability.

But why should science be respectable let alone desirable?

Because, it aims to discover the truth irrespective of all the hindrances obfuscating its revelation. In theology, truth is a definition of the godhead. It is therefore the more surprising that Christian dogma opposed science to its religion – an error Islam did not commit, considering science to be the revelation of the divine mind as the truth itself.

Ironically then, Western science replaced the Christian religion, simply to usurp its place. Auguste Comte (1798-1857), the French founder of positivism (and Sociology – he invented the word in 1830), did not hesitate to go the extra mile and wear the priestly vestments of a science-man!

We are frequently amazed by the rich diversity of human ontology – response, intentions and behaviour, especially if one aims at an integrative critical analysis of a predicament (like issues of health or disability – alcoholism, anorexia, autism, Down syndrome etc.) Still, compared to overall biological diversity in Nature, human ontology is predictably limited (taken singly, all species are ‘limited’).

Devalle’s (1996-2001, p. 124) notion that “Much of science is ‘uncommon’ sense and ‘counter-intuitive’” is nonsense – some of science, yes, perhaps, but very little of it – most of science in fact is common sense, most scientific truisms are practically tautological (under which Functional explanations, and socio-biology specifically, suffer).

Post-modern Gay and Lesbian theorizing (some would argue post-modernism is homosexual Theory) finally established the cubist multiplicity of most things, especially the Self and its sex – there are now many selves in a self, and many genders, resulting in a whole gamut of many sciences and many social sciences – Newtonian and Quantum Physics co-exist, many sociologies and feminisms, and several social psychologies like psp=psychological social psychology, and ssp=sociological social psychology, and five more (if the 5 perspectives of Britain’s Open University D317 course would be separately categorized…)

Let us focus for a moment on the 3 kinds of sciences in the social psychology (=mindology) paradigm created at the Open University (OU) (8) by the above mentioned D 317 module ; traditional/natural, ‘moral’ and, critical/political.

Being an ultra-inclusivist, I consider those to be complimentary. I am not at all persuaded by the “non-negotiables” of Stevens and Wetherell (1996/2002 pp. 364-7). The power of the human mind is such that, wherever it be located, whether in the individual’s head (biological/cognitive-experimental, frequently experiential, and occasionally psychodynamic perspectives) or in society and culture at large (the social constructionist view), all can be eventually perfectly negotiated and beautifully integrated (as in mathematical theories), if wished and determined to do so.

It is only the hierarchical power-obsession in people that excludes and disrupts and destroys the Mead-ian other (6), to self-destruct eventually – the case of all male tyrants (Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler, etc.) There may be a gender difference in this – grounds for a biological/cognitive mindological research – as female Tyrants (Boudiccea, Catherine the Great, and Mrs Thatcher) survive intact, never suicidal!

Other contradictory concepts can also be converted to harmonious dialectical Hegelian syntheses. For example, Realism – belief in an external objective reality existing independently of a perceiving mind, which is universally regarded as a defining non-negotiable of the scientific method – hard as a rock and absolutely opposed to Relativism (considered as the defining principle of social constructionism), would instantly melt away if understood as yet another relativist conception in the scientific mindset.

What is regarded as an example of another dialectical opposition in the social sciences – the Quantitative methodology usually ‘violently’ contradicted to the Qualitative method of data gathering, I say is merely complimentary, especially if one subscribes to Pythagoras’ 2,500 years old notion that the whole universe (and not only our world) and all the objects in it could be mathematized – represented as numbers, literally (which is the basis of all modern computer science).

Of course the experimental method is, and must be reductionist – as perfectly defined in Descarte’s classic 17th c. treatise On Method – controlled, unnatural and in-the-laboratory. But it better be, to produce valid, replicable, testable scientific data. It is not in opposition to the immeasurably rich and ecologically valid, naturally observed though interpretative data of the psychodynamic researchers, and the hidden meanings revealed via content analyses by discursive psychologists=mindologists.

The nomothetic approach of the traditional science attempting to discover general laws and define norms ought not to be construed as contradictory to the hermeneutic discipline of the critical/political sciences that challenge norms, with the intention of transforming society and empowering the individual – one needs norms to challenge them, rebel against to change them!

A bone of contention could be picked in the mislabelling of social psychology in the OU paradigm as a moral science. Moral is one of the few English words with enormous narratives and historical baggage loaded onto it, rendering it misleading for the simpler connotation of empowering the individual to reflexivity, and Hegelian freedom of choice and autonomous action.

Nothing in the definitional concepts propagated by the OU paradigm of social psychology (=mindology) would contradict labelling it ethical, which seems even a more apposite description of the meanings desired and intended by the writers of the course material. It is likely that the course team (of D 317) did not wish to be lumbered with the already well-established discipline of Ethics in Philosophy, only to end up with their own clanger…

A happier solution could have emerged from the observation that the philosophical category ends in s – Ethics – Baruch Spinoza (1632-77), the Jewish-Dutch philosopher sadly ex-communicated by the ignorant and superstitious members of his Jewish Orthodox community, had tried to create at least the mathematics if not the science of ethics. Thence, the D 317 OU course team could decide on the congruent expression of ethical science – there could be no mindological confusion, as there is an exciting world of difference, between the science of ethics, and an ethical science!

A claim of ethical (instead of the moral) science would flow (in Csikszentmihalyi’s Californian New-Ageist technical sense of ‘flow of consciousness’ plagiarized from Hegel) in a seamless way into the claims for the critical/political science of the Open University paradigm – to transform society for the better, by revealing the hidden, iniquitous, ideologically perverted power relations of a capitalist society needing lies, and a continuum of deception, to thrive. In this very important sense at the least, social mindology (=psychology) becomes science in the traditional belief of the notion – the revelation of the truth (of things).

Notes:

(1) Skinner, with the strange first name of Burrhus, was a power-obsessed Harvard-educated American psychologist (1904-1990), who infested psychology departments first with pigeons, then with white rats… in boxes he designed, forcing the poor animals to press levers endlessly mindlessly for bits of food! Nothing was original in his work, based on a rehash of the Russian Physiologist, Ivan Pavlov’s (1849-1936) work (on conditioning salivating dogs). Lionized by the powers that be in the US, Skinner developed megalomaniac fascist fantasies of social control via mass conditioning – an extension of his work with rats! This great world-famous American, must have been mentally ill to pen the following drivel as evidence of his theories, in his much-acclaimed and badly punctuated autobiography, pioneering the modern days of Jerry Springer shows;

“ I learned the technique of masturbation quite by accident, when I was perhaps eleven. Up to that point sexual play had consisted of undirected handling of genitalia. One day another boy and I had gone out of town on our bicycles and walked up a creek, beside which we were later to build a shack. We were sitting in the sun engaged in rather idle sex play when I made several rhythmic strokes which had a highly reinforcing effect. I immediately repeated them with even more reinforcing results.”

{Particulars of my Life, Jonathan Cape publisher, London 1976, cited without a page number by Frederick Toates and Ingrid Slack in ‘Behaviourism and its consequences’, Ch. 6, Introduction to Psychology, edited by Ilona Roth, vol. 1, p. 276, published by Psychology Press in association with The Open University.}

(2) Aristotle seems to have nurtured a kind of monotheism hitherto unnoticed by historians of philosophy, which came to him from the knowledge of ancient sun-cults.

One of the great errors in history has been the crediting of the Hebrews with monotheism – the concept of God is polytheistic in both the Old and the New Testaments – Jehovah, frequently referred to as elohim in plural is not a deferential form, as misinterpreted by scholars, but a symbolic sign signifying the god of gods. As for the Christian God, it is a… Trinity after all – the cause of endless infantile Byzantine feuds splitting churches on doctrinal grounds, whether the Three are attributes of the One, and if so, at what ontological point or split second of becoming etc.

Mankind’s first religion in pre-history globally was the sun-cult, which by definition is monotheistic in nature, and the first of its kind, something hitherto unobserved by historians of religion. Mankind in other words began its religion at the dawn of history with monotheism, and stayed so for millennia. It then re-surfaced in Akhenaten’s Egypt brought over by his wife Nefertiti – a Hittite princess from the Armenian heartland around the mountains of Ararat, the sun-cult object… Monotheism was finally fixated in ‘modern’ times by Islam, with the only truly monotheistic concept of a single God, jumping the polytheistic absurdities of the Holy Bible.

(3) Great art was defined as the life-force, captured by the creative artist in and through his work. A heavily carved and ornamented medieval wooden chair looks livelier than a plain modern plastic seat. During the High Renaissance in Italy, the great artist (like a mini-god) was thought of as the life-giver to a lifeless object – the mover of the dead object. Modern art, for the same reasons, seems lifeless, soul-less, and hence dead. According to Aristotle, only through the life of the Soul – its proper functioning – can the moral and intellectual abilities of a human being be developed – the lively arts therefore have a vital contribution to make to the development of individual personality. Imagine therefore the immeasurable damage Bad art – the coprophiliac death-obsessed modern art beloved by the New York Metropolitan Museum and the London Tate Modern elites can cause.

(4) Incredibly, misprinted as scrire in no less than The Concise Oxford Dictionary (1984, p. 939, col. 1).

(5) If Karl Marx (1818-1883) was the greatest single influence on the Socialist half of the world, Freud (1856-1939) was his equal on the other Capitalist half, merely because of Freud’s massive influence on American life. Unfortunately, some of the fundamental concepts Freud grappled with are grotesque (Oedipus Complex, women’s penis envy etc.), and certain indication of mental illness he undoubtedly suffered for many reasons – in his relative youth, he was under the homoerotic influence of a lunatic colleague by the name of Fliess, who persuaded him that the human sexual urge is controllable being linked to the… nose! Freud, incredibly, allowed Fliess to mutilate his nose in a botched up surgery, and had to take cocaine for pain relief for the rest of his famous life… undoubtedly causing all the ridiculous sexual hallucinations Freud dreamt up as theoretical insights, and the Victorian world gobbled up from him as respectable, publicly permitted pornography! The tragedy is that millions of Americans still live by Freudian fantasies.

Take pornographic fantasy out of Freudian theories, very little would be left worth any serious consideration – one of them, that Dreams (for example) are a re-enactment of one’s subconscious social relations is an idea as old as the Sumerians and the Assyrians who had Dream-interpreters amongst their ruling-class elites.

(6) George Mead (1863-1931) was an American social psychologist who had studied also in Europe. Under Marxist influence (unacknowledged), he emphasized the massive importance of the social context in the development of the individual. Even the Mind, he defined it as a social product! – Mind, self, and Society, published in 1934 posthumously, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

(7) ‘£5m price of putting youngsters in touch with their emotions’, by Laura Clark, Education Reporter, Daily Mail, December 27, 2003, p.39.

(8) The massive importance of this paradigm for future life in Britain can only be gauged by the formal launch recently (on 14 April 2005) at the Royal Society of Arts in London, of a British Government initiative, subsidized to the tune of 4 million English pounds, to research Identity issues – 25 research projects across universities in the whole of the United Kingdom. The directorship of the overall programme is under Professor Margie Wetherell, a leading light of the course team at the OU that created the D317 Social Psychology paradigm.

One such project directed by Prof. Wetherell herself at the OU is titled very strangely to say the least – Identities in Process: becoming Bangladeshi, African-Caribbean and White Mothers in Tower Hamlets (Society Matters, The Newspaper of the Social Sciences Faculty at the OU, edited by Richard Skellington, No. 8, Autumn/Winter 2005-2006, p.14) – it strides from the very specific well-defined – Bangladeshi, to the vague – Africans, and Caribbeans lumped together, to the impossible, almost racist nonsense – the White mothers – who are they? The Welsh? The Scots? The English? The Bangladeshi and the endlessly multi-ethnic Afro-Caribbean Blacks may not belong to a class-structured society as the White Brits, but the latter are riddled with it – thence added incongruities in a research with scientific pretensions…

References:

Bettelheim, B. (1982/2001) Freud and Man’s Soul, London, Pimlico.

Devalle, D. (1996/2001) ‘Da Capo: science and social psychology’ in Sapsford, R. (ed) Issues For Social Psychology, Milton Keynes, The Open University.

Miller, G. A. (1962/1991) Psychology, the Science of Mental Life, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books.

Stevens, R. and Wetherell, M. (1996/2002) ‘The self in the modern world: drawing together the threads’ in Stevens, R. (ed) Understanding The Self, London and Milton Keynes, Sage Publications in association with The Open University.

Wetherell, M. and Still, A. (1996/2001) ‘Realism and relativism’ in Sapsford, R. (ed) Issues For Social Psychology, Milton Keynes, The Open University.

Max Maximus Optimus

2005-11-16T23:57:00.000-08:00

by Professor Hovhanness I. Pilikian

April (2005) was the month of Max (as the composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies would like to be known) at London’s Royal Festival Hall. Some shall disagree with me – some always do – but I am certain that Max is Britain’s greatest living composer, hence the Latin titles I have given him… I am glad that at least Her Majesty the Queen agrees with me, having just appointed him the Master of her [the Queen’s] Music.

Max is also one of the most intensively formally educated men around – has studied Music in Manchester, Rome and at the Princeton University (USA). The sheer quantity let alone quality of his work is impressive. I wish to focus here exclusively on his Symphony No. 8 – the Antarctic (premiered on 30th April at the RFH), a symphonic poem against Pollution, which I think will emerge as the first great work of the 21st century music. It proves yet again that a composer with pure sounds as his palette can nevertheless be political following Beethoven’s lead.

Musical inheritance detected in a composer’s work (otherwise labelled as ‘influences’, ‘references’, I call them continuities) should not be regarded as detrimental to the originalities of the composer’s own conceptions. Of all the arts, especially in Music, continuities are essential to preserve an aristocratic=classical progeny that endures and leads to greatness. Repetition is the Soul of Music.

Max, musically, is of the highest noble birth – I would say out of the wedlock of Wagner and Stravinsky, with some midwifery from Debussy!

I am no fan of later Stravinsky (Oedipus Rex – 1927), and especially dislike Wagner’s (1813-1883) oeuvre – incestuous, overstretched, macho racist absurdities (no wonder Hitler loved him), but I am passionate about Max’s own music produced in the last half a decade.

Stravinsky could not cope with his own volcanic originalities exploding in The Firebird (1910) and The Rite of Spring (1913), and went off tangent into collage and neo-classical hot air (Pulcinella 1920). It is still a crux in Stravinsky scholarship as to why?

Wagner on the other hand, had difficulty finding his way back home to his tonics… even though incredibly he became the greatest single influence on all music post-him – Strauss, Mahler, Sibelius, you name it, could not be born without his massive input.

But thank god for the failures of Wagner and Stravinsky – for here comes Max, and marries them off in his music (the Antarctic Symphony) – evolving their music the way they would have done, if only they could or knew how to…endowing their continuities with such rich and huge complexities, that the Wagnerian-Stravinskian originals in comparison sound like children playing…Max has become an absolute master of complex orchestration.

Debussy’s (1862-1912) music is illustrative, of some simple overall images (most famously La Mer=The Sea 1905). Max’s music on a parallel track (the Sea is crucial to Max’s music too – he lives drenched in it on Orkney Islands off Scotland) is profoundly, intensely, incredibly visual, almost on every phrase and cadence, more so than a symphonic poem by Strauss.

No other composer seems to me to possess such an extraordinary cinematic visuality – as a film-director, like a Fellini or Kurosawa. This is why I was appalled when the powers that be, forced on us the concert-goers at the RFH premiere of the symphony, projections on a huge screen of Max going on slow-motion walk-abouts among the icebergs of Antarctica, which made a nonsense of the unique visuality of his music – I had to shut my eyes throughout to focus on it.

The ending of the Antarctic Symphony is a coup de theatre – it doesn’t end so much as it fades into the vastness of the universe, like a drop dripping from a stalactite off the edge of an iceberg.

It very much reminded me of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion – the Everest of Western Classical music – the ending of which is most unique in world music – a kind of Lullaby, as Jesus (murdered for and by our sins) sleeps in peace in his Father’s (not Mother’s) arms (Bach’s daring reversal of the maternal stereotype!), ready to wake up – for Resurrection. Bach’s music here, unending, merely fades into God’s universal space.

It remains for me to confirm that, besides being the great composer that he has become in the last half a decade (Max too had his ‘modern-music’ excesses earlier in his career), Max is also a very great writer of the English language, undiscovered yet – the Diary extracts of his Antarctic experience published in the programme prove it.

Finally, and incidentally, Max is also a first class raconteur – having heard him, I could also confirm that Sir Peter Maxwell Davies could have been a great stand-up comic (the classical gentle kind), were he not the great composer that he is, and, that right at the start of our new 21st century.

P.S. or, How to Create an Objet d’Art from the Armenian April the 24th

On the 24th of April, the national mourning day for the Armenians world-wide, remembering the attempted genocide of their people in Ottoman Turkey, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies gave a magnificent lecture at the Royal Festival Hall concerning the present and the future of Music in Britain. He had no hesitation in decrying the evils of money-obsession and globalization, causing massive soul-destruction globally – I would call it the American Genocide of the human Soul.

Suddenly, I was inspired to buy the impressive programme-booklet with the composer’s picture on the cover, and get Sir Peter himself to autograph and date it – 24th April… thus creating a unique museum-piece for the Soul of Armenia, which I then gave as a priceless heirloom gift to my friend in Yerevan, Artsvi Bakhchinyan, the great encyclopaedist of the Armenian contribution to world culture.