The greatest human virtue is the ability to break one’s own ill will. One can go mad and become a hero; one can become a hero by precisely calculating the enemy’s vice; one can increase one’s own stature by denying the stature of the enemy—and the law of victorious struggle demands this. Yet the greatest virtue remains the noble ability to crush one’s own ill will.
Today an impossible effort is required of all of us and of each of us: to drive that ill will out of every one of us. I say impossible because it seems like the destruction of one’s own will, almost self-annihilation. Yet this is the road to honouring and becoming great, to becoming great by honouring others; to raising and rising, saving and being saved, going forward and arriving. For “what you put in, you find—what we put in, we find”: if today I put in a “monster,” tomorrow a monster sprung from myself will stand in my path; if today I put in a “friend and brother,” tomorrow I will find myself in the ranks of my brothers and friends.
The hardest thing truly is to crush one’s own worm in one’s own soul; the easiest truly is to deny what is undeniable in others, whose only fault is that they are not you: they are of us, but not us; of me, but not me.
The diabolical road of disavowal, negation and destruction begins in our souls, and our mouths, which could send forth light, pour out light, become the starting point of the alluring road of plunder and devastation. At the sunset of our long day, that road leads us with certainty to one thing: our own pedestal as denier and destroyer, but never to the flourishing home that would be called country and homeland and belong to us all. The end of that road is our own end, and we want the road to stretch on, want it to be endless, because its end is our end, because yesterday we were nobody and today we are somebody.
The path of hatred, negation and devastation begins in our souls. Yet this generation—the tragic generation of our sons and brothers, deceived, falling, retreating, rising and becoming proud again—we are obliged only to bless and wish well on its way. For perhaps for the first time in our thousand-year history, this generation is made of our flesh and blood and our days; it was destined to make our mistakes, stumble in our place, stand before history instead of us and take upon itself our share of the curses of generation after generation—if we deserve to be cursed.
History is a sphinx seated on the road of nations and peoples. It does not ask you to recite the lessons of the roads you have travelled; it tests your will to pass beyond it, beyond today, and step into the future.
Our position is difficult, yes. Never, at no other time, has adversity crouched like such a sphinx at our door. If we raised the flag of sovereignty, we kept the white flag of surrender ready inside our coats; if we rebelled, we appealed to the throne of our foreign master; if we were deported, we were driven into humble subjection, not scattered to the winds. Now they do not want our surrendered obedience; they demand our non-existence. Either be, or do not be. Either—or.
And this is demanded of a generation that, in the thousand-year march of our generations, was least prepared to face such a demand. It thought it existed, and existed once and for all in the ranks of victorious nations. But there are no victories once and for all: every generation must adorn itself with its own victory.
A fight for existence is demanded of a generation compelled to sit alone, face to face with the trained wolves of diplomacy; to stand alone before butchers skilled in the craft of war; to deal with a pursuit called trade, where cheating is victory and being cheated is immoral; to relearn the ancient language of the soil and converse with field and orchard, as though the ox had never been its idol and the apricot tree its sister; to halt on the road of decline and flight at the call not of the prosecutor but of its own conscience; to overcome the slavish freedom of violence, plunder, lawlessness and adultery, and restrain itself with the bonds of morality.
We have no right not to take this generation as our guide—this deceived, falling, retreating, rising and newly proud generation, the tragically heroic generation of our sons and brothers. We have no right not to lend our strength to the momentum of its great march; we have no moral right not to regard the one who leads it as the one who leads us.
Hayastani Hanrapetutyun, 19 September 1996.