Which program is high-quality and is best for television viewers? It is when the hosts ask questions and give answers that society doesn’t even know about. Which program has the lowest quality? The one where the viewer knows the answers to the questions but the audience answers incorrectly. But there is also the average of the high and low quality-when the guests are Armenian intellectuals. In this case, the viewer starts debating with the intellectuals
I myself got into a debate with two intellectuals last Friday while watching the program called “Urvagits” (Conspectus) on Kentron television. The host had invited cartoonist Robet Sahkyants and poet Marine Petrosyan. Three topics were being discussed: the elections in Nor Hachn where Armen Keshishyan, who had killed somebody two weeks ago and was in prison, got elected mayor; the constitutional amendments referendum and the return of deposits. Let’s leave the third topic aside. The guests presented two currents that can probably only be found in Armenia. Marine Petrosyan was defending democracy, while Sahakyants was in favor of keeping the authorities by falsifying the elections, in other words, the Armenian version of dictatorship.
Yes, Sahakyants wanted to prove that Robert Kocharyan has the highest authority and that we can not let that slip out of our hands. Democracy is threatening to him and if you are for democracy, then that means you are for dictatorship. This is the context. He was not mentioning the president’s name, but rather, he was threatening the viewers with the word democracy. He literally claimed that we needed to falsify the elections: “There is no other way. If we start an election where everyone gets a chance to vote for who they want to see as president, Aram Asatryan and Tigran Karapetyan will fight against each other to be elected as president. There is something sainting about all of this and that is to help falsify the elections.” Generally, regime ideologists try to go with this by scaring everyone with the words freedom and democracy. An extreme manifestation of that was Stalin who had scared people so much with the word freedom that when he died, the people felt like orphans. Now it is Sahakyants who is scaring society with freedom, claiming he knows what will happen if there is no falsification in elections. It would be interesting to know what will happen. If there is democracy in the U.S., does DMX get elected as president or Dr. Dre? But it is senseless to debate with someone who speaks with hatred and sentimental feelings instead of logic. If we go deeper, there is a personal interest hidden in those sentimental feelings-if his close friends who are officials get elected, he will get large amounts from the state budget for making cartoons. This is how Armenian intellectuals differ from the rest. They think that being an intellectual helps them to hide their personal interest behind the ideology.
But there is something else in Sahakyan’s speech which is more sincere-since Armenian people are not disciplined and do not have good taste, they will elect someone who is also not disciplined and does not have taste. It is Sahakyants’ dream to see everyone having good taste. During one interview, he said that it is necessary to have cultural border-guards. The man with the totalitarian mentality wants to demand his taste without coming to terms with the Armenian popular wisdom-nothing beats taste. This is a saying that is tolerated by the Western world. It was the Soviet Union’s intolerance that eliminated many courses taken, many modernist ways of portraying art and rabiz music for Sahakyants in particular. Due to that intolerance, rabiz did not grow and it became something ignored by everyone. But as soon as it was accepted in the Western world, it became elite art. For example, Jivan Gasparyan’s duduk (now readers will debate and say that duduk is not rabiz, but rabiz started by playing the duduk at funerals and singing songs). In addition, host of the show “Urvagits” (Conspectus) Petros Ghazaryan loves going against rabiz music and during his program on Monday, he found out that 61 percent of viewers are against rabiz music through a telephone survey. He is part of that 61 percent. Being against rabiz music is considered to have good taste. Ghazaryan loves to show his intellectuality and taste. As to why Armenian art is not promoted internationally, the answer is plain and simple: the freedom to create is under pressure, and not by the authorities, but rather by the intellectuals. Jazz, just like rabiz, was started during funeral marches, but people in America who hate jazz could not debate with jazzmen. There are rabiz clarinetists who do not play worse than Sidney Beshet; they just did not have the luck and became the taste of Armenian intellectuals. Sahakyants believes that the Eastern world is not alone, the extreme manifestation of the nationalistic ideology formed in the Western World mixed with Eastern mentality. Sahakyants says: “ya vsegda razdelyal narod i natsyu, natsiey ya garzhus a zhoghovurt, u menya depresia nachinayetsa” (I have always looked at Nazis as a nation. I associate Nazis with the word people and I start to go into depression.) (It is known that Sahakyants never speaks Armenian and his speech is not translated because he is an exception. I have translated his references. I did not translate this one in Armenian because he said the word that he hates the most, zhoghovurt (people) in Armenian where it appears that he hates Armenians too).
What is a nation? There are differing views. But let’s leave point of views aside. There is the concept of a European nation, for example, the French nation where there are people who listen to Aznavour, Brel, Kirkorov and Aram Asatryan; I know those people and they all belong to the French nation. The only people that are not French are people who can’t speak French. The destiny for Armenians was different. But Sahakyants is talking about a different type of nation-the Armenian version of Nazis. The people are healthy, they are an army of uniformed, Russian speakers, people who listen to the same music, watch the same films, eat the same food and welcome the same people. In his cartoons, the people are always portrayed as ugly, with big noses, listen to rabiz music and they look sick (let’s recall Nazi Germany where sick people were castrated). Marine and Sahakyants agreed on some things, for example, that the elections in Nor Hachn were horrible. Marine brought up statistics she read about in the press and counted: “There were 8,600 voters in the city of Nor Hachn and only half-4400-participated in the elections. The half of the 4400 did not participate and they boycotted. The half of this elected the mayor and 2160 voters claimed that this shows the people’s mentality. The people who did not take part in the elections represent my people. Normal people do not go to elections.” After this, it is clear as to why there is no real debate between Petrosyan and Sahakyants, although they contradict each other when it comes to talking about forming society. Marine also thinks that the nation is divided into the people and Nazi, but expressed in other words as normal and immoral. She is the one who decides that the person not going to elections is normal. But there was a problem when Petros Ghazaryan, the host, said that he goes to the elections: “Petros, do you actually go to the elections?” This means that we must consider other standards. What about the people who have gone and elected the murderer for mayor? Can’t we ask them why? We can picture a woman whose husband is not in Armenia, she barely takes care of her three children, her job depends on the mayor and everyone tells her to vote for the candidate in order to not lose your job. She votes. Does that mean she is not normal? That type of woman is not the only one in her kind. This represents the people as a whole-an army of helpless women who suffer the consequences and the murderer can force them to vote for him. There are other figures in Armenia, but if we divide them into normal and abnormal, in the end, you will not know where you are living because those adjectives do not depict society.
However, there is one other thing which Sahakyants and Marine agree on. They both agree that elections are real. Even if we accept the fact that the ballots entered into the boxes were counted correctly, again, there was no election. An election is when the voter goes to the polls without any pressure, threat, is not dependent of anyone and gives his voice to the person who he thinks will improve the well-being of the people. How could the voter think-well, many things but not free elections-that a murderer could ameliorate the well-being of the nation. Sahakyants says: “This is all degradation. I am waiting for the day when people will elect the candidate who is sitting in jail for raping an innocent girl”. Sahakyants hates the people so much that he turns them into abnormal. According to Sahakyants, it turns out that the families know that the candidate has raped the girl, get filled with enthusiasm and happily vote for that candidate, dreaming that one day he will rape their daughters too. It is obvious that no citizen who has not committed a murder or any other crime will vote for someone who can kill someone and not get punished; that person can be the criminal himself, a member of a family, Armenian, Georgian, Russian or Azeri.