“Your goal is to instill in these people that one should reconcile himself to this government. You disseminate apathy and disappointment among the people.” Readers adhering to the radical sentiment always criticize me with words like these. The thing is, however, that in such phrases, there are two words, the meaning of which is not fully understandable to me – “people” and “regime.” If the people are the people, mainly old people, who have been gathering in Freedom Square for different kinds of opposition rallies for 20 years, then I cannot disappoint them; they have admired and continue to admire all opposition orators, from Arshak Sadoyan to Nikol Pashinyan. If the people are the whole population of Armenia of, say, two million people, then I don’t have that large an audience; the number of my readers is a few thousand at best. One should take into account the fact that there are many brave and principled authors who, as opposed to me, write the names of the President of the Republic of Armenia, the officials and oligarchs in his inner-circle in lower case, showing by that how one should struggle against the regime. Therefore, my not encouraging is fully compensated by their encouraging.
Now let us talk about the regime. The regime, as far as I can tell, is a bad thing, since we don’t say the Obama regime or, say, the Hollande regime. So if we say “regime,” we probably mean a low level of democracy and a high level of corruption. Thus, now we have the Serzh Sargsyan regime. And before that, was there also a regime during the former presidents’ tenures or not? At least, the oppositionists of the time claimed that it was a regime, an establishment. Moreover, they used those words to describe also Levon Ter-Petrossian’s tenure, although no one seriously doubted that the first president assumed his office in 1991 as a result of a just election. Well, and before the independence, was there a regime in the Communist period? It seems yes. There were people who struggled against that regime too, although I can’t recall that people had a possibility to gather in any square and chant, say, “Brezhnev, go away, Podgorny for president.”
Thus, there is no clarity for me in the concepts of “the people” and “the regime.” Those who often use those words basically mean that the regime is a small group of bad guys who have seized power, and the people are a group with good and moral qualities that wishes to get rid of those bad guys. Let’s assume it is so. However, it is not clear what encouraging or not
encouraging has to do with that. If they are separate “good” and “bad” substances that have nothing to do with each other, then it is not that meaningful to oppose one to another.
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It seems to me the proponents of the “encouragement theory” make the same methodological mistake as Serzh Sargsyan does. The latter, as it is known, thought that the mass media were also responsible for the “bad atmosphere” in the country. And these people think that the regime is not destroyed, because some journalists don’t encourage the people.
ARAM ABRAHAMYAN
