Peguy

April 1, 2010
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READING PEGUY
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“Out of ignorance and a sense of duty most decent people are liable to turn into criminals.”
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Charles Péguy (1873-1914) is closer to my heart than any other writer you care to mention. Unlike Toynbee and Sartre, he is as accessible to the ordinary reader as, say, Chekhov. Like Chekhov, he was an honest man and he said what he thought. Organized religions have their saints. Literature does not. If it did, I would name Peggy as one of the greatest.
Has he been translated into Armenian? I don't know. I doubt it. I don't think so. Probably because he was quintessentially un-Armenian. We are not brought up to appreciate honesty and straight talk. After centuries of subservience to brutal regimes, we have learned to be cautious and calculating in our speech – a diplomatic way of saying, we are born liars.
Enough by way of introduction and warning. Let Peggy speak for himself:
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“It is vulgar to want to be right and still more so to want to be in the right against someone else.”
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“The man who doesn't bawl out the truth when he knows the truth becomes the accomplice of liars.”
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“When people become established they become intelligent.”
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“Let them leave us to our work. But if they disturb us, then we shall see to it that we shall not have been uselessly interrupted.”
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“The life of the decent man must in some ways be one of continual apostasy; he must continually be a renegade and in this sense his life is one continual unfaithfulness.”
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“Destitution is not a pumice stone by which people can be polished and made to shine. If it were it would be worth preserving. Destitution weakens people and thereby makes them incapable of getting out of it. Destitution not only makes people unhappy, which is a serious matter, it makes them bad, ugly and weak, which is also a serious matter.”
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“Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.”
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“One does not have the right to betray even a traitor. Traitors must be fought and not betrayed.”
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“What is most contrary to salvation is not sin but habit.”
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“Charity is no substitute for justice withheld.”
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Once, I remember, when I said as much to one of our Panchoonies who headed one of our major charity organizations, he explained: “If we assume a critical stance towards the regime in Yerevan, we will not be allowed to help the people.” To which I could only say: “You mean, they would allow the people to starve? If you know them to be so evil, why legitimize them with your support?” At this point he hung up on me and thus I acquired still another enemy in high places.
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April 2, 2010
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READING ZOHRAB
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“Oppression corrupts everything it touches, even the highest moral principles.”
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“We all of us condemn prostitution; yet, how many of us engage in it! Lawyers who perjure themselves for a few pieces of silver; ghazetajis who sell their conscience to vested interests; physicians who prolong a useless treatment; young men who marry wealth. In what way, may I ask, are these individuals different from common whores?”
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“My code of ethics: Between the real and the imaginary, choose the real; between truth and falsehood, choose truth – at all times, everywhere.”
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“A newspaper is not a chameleon. It should not change colors to please its readers. It is bound to make enemies. I would measure the moral success of a newspaper by its willingness to make enemies.”
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“In the same way that nature abhors a vacuum, literature abhors the absence of ideas.”
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“As impressionable as soft wax, the Armenian acquires indiscriminately the virtues as well as the vices of the country in which he happens to be living.”
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Which may explain why Armenians from the Levant are more Levantine than Armenian, and Armenians from the former Soviet Union are more Soviet and less Armenian. Hence Sylva Kapoutikian's boast (and this after the collapse of the USSR) “I am proud to have been a member of the Communist Party!” -- the very same party that slaughtered two generations of our best intellects and awarded her the Stalin Prize.
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Krikor Zohrab (1861-1915) was a victim of the Genocide. Has anything changed since then? Or rather, what have we learned from the Genocide? Are we not at the mercy of lying whores who will sell not only their bodies but also their souls to anyone for a few pieces of silver?
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If we “dzour nesdink, shidag khossink,” we shall have to admit that “mart bidi ch'ellank!”
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April 3, 2010
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Q/A
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Q: What makes an Armenian happy?
A: To crap on a fellow Armenian, what else?
Q: Isn't that what you have been doing too?
A: If I do it's only on brainwashed dupes who consider crapping to be their patriotic duty.
Q: Do you think you are always right?
A: Hell no! On the contrary. Everything I say may well be wrong. I don't know the truth. Only God does. All I ever hope to do is expose lies and in doing so to take a tiny step in the direction of truth which I may never reach in this lifetime.
Q: If you have such a low opinion of Armenians, why do you continue to identify yourself as one?
A: I identify myself as a human being. I consider my national identity an accident of nature. I don't see any inconsistency here perhaps because after being dehumanized by our propaganda I am now a born-again human being and as such I believe all men are brothers, which happens to be an assertion we make every time when we repeat the Lord's prayer -- “Our Father Who art in heaven...”
Q: No one denies that we have problems. But isn't it a fact that all men and all nations have problems similar to ours?
A: They do, yes. But that doesn't mean the best way to deal with them is to cover them up or to ignore them on the grounds that time or the Almighty will solve them for us. Time has never been on our side. After a thousand years of subservience to tyrants we were rewarded with a series of massacres. Am I saying something or anything that has not been said before by far better men than myself? Of course not! I will go further and say, everything I say is either a quotation or a paraphrase. I have at no time hidden that fact from my readers. I quote as a challenge to those who accuse me of of being anti-Armenian or even pro-Turkish. On the subject of Armenians crapping on fellow Armenians: I am reminded of a passage in Zarian's TRAVELLER AND HIS ROAD, in which, speaking of the new generation of Soviet-Armenian writers, among them Charents (who at first swallowed Kremlin's propaganda hook, line, and sinker), Zarian wrote: “They are spitting on Raffi. They are spitting on Derian. They are spitting on Aharonian. Danger! Danger! Danger!” Armenian worldview at the time Zarian wrote these lines was shaped by Lenin's and Stalin's commissars. Our worldview today is shaped by Jack S. Avanakian charlatans and arav-pakhav mi-kich-pogh Panchoonies who have been more than successful in raising a wall between us and reality by saying all we need to solve our problems is more money. As for ideas: they are empty verbiage and irrelevant commodities. Which may suggest, the more things change, the deeper we sink in our own merde.
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