When one calls himself a “long-suffering people,” one means first of all that his people differs from the others. I.e. there are peoples on the face of the earth that haven’t suffered, haven’t endured privations and haven’t been deported in the course of their history. According to that logic, there are peoples, the houses of which haven’t been intruded by enemies, their
enemies haven’t killed unarmed people, haven’t raped women, haven’t burned and stolen their property. Has it happened only to Armenians? Is it our national feature? Probably, a slight difference is that not all went through that relatively recently, in the 20th century, and not all killers, burners and rapists so impertinently claim that they and their state haven’t committed any crime against Armenians, as the Turks do, and what is more, they call us, Armenians, the criminals.
However, turning one’s wound, one’s being long-suffering into a sort of pride, a “national brand” and thus trying to assert oneself seems to me a wrong path. Building the “national ideology” with a psychology of “a long suffering nation that has been massacred, killed, miraculously evaded massacres and has sheltered on this small piece of land,” in my perception, leads us in the wrong direction. That “whining” was meaningful in the Russian or Soviet state – thus one preserved his national identity, language, culture and history, admittedly, distorted to a certain extent. In the past 20 years, we should have devised a new political conception of the Genocide differing from the Soviet and Diaspora ones in terms of both perceiving that issue in Armenia and presenting it to the rest of the world. However, we haven’t done that – we have been busy with other things.
Now we are busy with the election, forgetting that it is a short period of time, the passions of which will die away in a month one way or the other. The Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) and the Heritage Party have declared today a day of silence, a day without election campaign, as I understand it. It is a good initiative – it would be unpleasant, if political forces reproached or blamed each other today in regard to April 24 or any other thing. One can live a day without political twaddle.
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ARAM ABRAHAMYAN
