International, Universal Human Culture Does Not Exist – Garegin Nzhdeh

“The ruins of the Ancient Temples… These are material traces left by history, in which history itself is looking for the idea, the meaning that the Nation-Creator had once put into its Temples.

This idea which turns stone buildings, structures into a temple is called the historical past. A nation is the sum of living personalities, past and existing generations, it is a community of fate, while a clan is a community of blood which is in an eternal struggle with foreign borrowings.

The clan is the sculptor of our spirit and flesh. The clan is the divine potter that created our body from the land of Armenia and our spirit from Armenian history. Let’s get rid of that huge delusion that there is a certain common, international, universal human culture… Such a culture is fiction, it does not exist.

True culture always bears the stamp of the individuality of the nation that created it. An Armenian should use the supremacy of spirit over matter and strive to ensure that the Armenian culture is celebrated more than once a year and experienced every day as the integrity of spiritual values.

Another misconception – is a nation cultural only because it has a language and literature? Of course not. In order to be called truly cultural, a writer and a book, a scientist and science are not enough. A culture whose creator’s spiritual life has more thorns than flowers of kindness is suspicious.

A nation engaged in self-consumption isn’t cultural at all. Culture implies warmth of heart, humanity, a vigilant conscience, the nobility of thought and relationships, the grandeur of goals – values whose deficit turned modern Armenian life into hell.

Try to free the national spirit from the content formed by history, and you will turn the nation into a faceless mass. The concepts of “man” and “humanity”, in general, acquire a certain meaning only through the spirit of a particular nation.

The national genius gives a certain content to universal human nature. In the ruins of nations, true art cannot flourish. Outside of a given nation, both man and humanity are false.

Modern man under the influence of destructive cosmopolitan teachings has almost lost his original spiritual appearance, his natural essence.

A radical revolution is needed, a return from bloodless abstract humanity to an organic, generic person – a real person who is connected to his land and race by all the threads of his essence.

Learn to think in Armenian – this is the basis of national morality. Self-awareness of a nation is possible only through its own history. Our own history is our wise adviser, educator of our spirit, the mentor of our national conscience.

Two things are well known to a person familiar with their own history. He knows what he can do and what needs to be done to perpetuate everything Armenian and Armenia.

Equally miserable and contemptible is the generation that is satisfied with the bread of a foreign land. National morality is primarily determined by the creative harmony of the people. Whether those living abroad or locals, scholars or the ignorant, the neutral or party adherents – these are Armenians, and your coldness towards them is equal to treachery.

Every Armenian is a brother by fate. Moreover, every Armenian is you – this is the unshakable law of national morality. Those who violate this law shake the foundations of their nation, they are the enemy of their nation.

Yesterday, we were a nation of quality. And so as not to disappear, we must become like that again tomorrow.

A regime does not correct people – on the contrary, people correct, change regimes. The government becomes a legalized anarchy if public conscience has no control over it. The nature of voters dictates the nature of those who they choose. Ideologists are mistaken in believing that freedom can give birth to wisdom – on the contrary, wisdom gives birth to freedom.”

© Garegin Nzhdeh. Արևախաչ

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