When the opposition activists gather outside the prosecutor’s office and complain about putting Tigran Arakelyan in prison for 6 years, it is normal. When social activists demand to punish all perpetrators in the Harsnakar case, it is also a normal phenomenon. By the way, I am all for those complaints and demands. I will also be for people’s protests, if, let’s say, child molester Serob Ter-Poghosyan is suddenly pardoned or released on parole, as some “humane” community leaders propose. In all those cases, citizens make demands of state bodies, i.e. the institutions, which exist at citizens’ expense and ought to serve their interests.
It is a different matter, when different groups of citizens protest against each other trying to impose their own perceptions of how one should believe in God or which God one should believe in, also how one should love his motherland and people (also physically). Certainly, all that can and should be discussed, which is done in press, on websites and social networks in Armenia, in particular, and is scarcely done on TV, but not because there is censorship, but because there is no consumer of those discussions – the people have been absorbed in TV series. However, the mentioned areas concern people’s personal life, beliefs and opinions and there can be no judges or demanders here.
Recently, especially after the “pious” sentence on Pussy Riot women, in Russia, “Orthodox” believers have become more active. Generally, I treat that religious denomination, as well as all traditional denominations, with great respect. I admire the Russian philosophers and writers who professed that denomination. Yet today I put “faith fighters” in quotes, because their attitude, in my opinion, contradicts Christian values. Those “Orthodox” believers try to disrupt a theatrical performance, which they don’t like; they burst into a museum, the exhibits of which they don’t like. It seems to me that it is not civil activity, but rather reminds of a campaign of the inquisition, which is obviously stimulated by some government circles of that country.
As we know, there are “Orthodox” believers and “inquisitors” whose main function is to ensure the purity of the religious or political “faith” perceived and interpreted their way in our country too. It has nothing to do with the real faith, religion or conviction. There are just many people around the world after whom English writer Thomas Stearns Eliot entitled his poem The Hollow Men. By the way, that author expressed the following idea too, “The democracy was ultimately triumphant and it is harder to be an individual now than it was before.”
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ARAM ABRAHAMYAN
