Let’s Wait for Repentance

May 25 2013

Galust Sahakyan, the leader of the Republican Party of Armenia (RPA),
compared his colleague, MP Zaruhi Postanjyan, with a woman who stands
on a highway. To anyone who was raised in Armenia and is more or less
aware of our language features, such an expression is a
badly-concealed sexual slur. Frankly speaking, I haven’t completely
understood what `Nzhdehism’ means, after all, but the Republicans say
that it is national conservatism. Does insulting a woman, a mother of
four, from the parliament hall correspond to that ideology? It seems
to me that nationalism begins with delicate – I would say deferential
– attitude toward the woman, the continuer of the nation, the enricher
of the nation’s gene pool. I have always written that attacks on women
for political reasons are just disgusting. The politicized part of our
society took such an attitude toward Naira Zohrabyan, for example,
when the latter was not an `alternative’; the same thing continues now
with Arpine Hovhannisyan, Margarit Yesayan, and Shushan Petrosyan.
`Justification’ is always the same: `Well, if they are women, let them
not be engaged in politics, otherwise, let them be ready for
anything!’ However, this is not about disagreeing with their ideas – I
don’t like most of their speeches either – but about insulting those
MPs, as women. So if Zaruhi behaves like a `Xantippe,’ I have a right
to insult her. By the way, there is a difference between these
expressions: the Republican Party of Armenia (RPA) women are insulted
on Facebook and websites, while Mr. Sahakyan voices his insult in the
hall where the country’s legislature convenes, which is blameworthy.
However, the RPA parliamentary group leader made a more interesting
statement during the National Assembly briefings yesterday. He said
that he was not going to apologize to Zaruhi Postanjyan; he had never
apologized in his life, because he had lived such a life that he had
never felt the need for apologizing. Let me inform Mr. Sahakyan that
there no such man on the planet Earth, has never been and will never
be. So even theoretically, there cannot be a mortal who has lived such
a life. Even much more scrupulous people than we are, such as, for
example, St. Augustine, Grigor Narekatsi or Blaise Pascal, repented on
many occasions and expressed that repentance through their brilliant
works. Claiming that you have never done such a thing in your life
that would make you apologize is a very self-conceited idea, to say
the least. …Dear Zaruhi, I by no means support your political force,
but I apologize to you in Galust Sahakyan’s stead. I do that on behalf
of all men, which include Mr. Sahakyan and myself. ARAM ABRAHAMYAN