There are three kinds of responses to every sad incident: a. genuine concern; b. political exploitation (“Oh, how have we come to this?” “Where will the country end up?”); c. conspiracy theories (“Dark forces directed by international power centers encroach on our security”). In the last two cases, there is a certain amount of populism, because a lot of our compatriots like the talk of those two kinds.
I have been listening to such talk since childhood, thus, regardless of social formations and regimes. When people who have minimum intellectual aspirations (used to) gather, they necessarily talk about Jews and Freemason lodges, “Don’t you know, bro, the whole world belongs to Jews?” I perceive it as a reflection of a small nation’s certain complexes; when you cannot create your own, you base your judgments on a negative perception of others. Well, and the second response has more universal roots; such a perception is characteristic of not only the Ashugh art (“Yesterday was better than today”) and Khorenatsi’s lamentation; there is such logic also in the Old Testimony, in particular, in Jeremiah’s prophecies, “I looked at the earth, and it was empty and formless. I looked at the heavens, and there was no light.”
The propaganda of the opposition in the past 20 years has been based on this kind of lamentation, which, I repeat, I have heard in small talk in relatively abundant Communist times. In this sense, modern oppositionists have rather talented “forefathers” in the form of Arshak Sadoyan, Seyran Avagyan, and Davit Vardanyan of the 1990s; the latter asked the first president his “historic” question how our poor people survived on a salary, with which they could buy only two eggs a month.
That limitless populism is always opposed by limitless cynicism, “Today when the country is factually at war, some forces, which are directed by some other forces from outside, furnish grist for the enemy’s mill.” It is correct that the country is factually at war, but why should that fact restrain “some forces” and ordinary citizens and have no impact on the appetite of the powers that be?
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Let us remember any memorable event, and we will see the same attitude from both sides. The opposition tries to “generalize” the case with its lamentation and make it a stimulus for a tide of protests; the government searches for the “directors” of the people’s absolutely
genuine and spontaneous protest. The response of the sides to the burial of the murdered soldier is a classic example of that situation.
The opposition between limitless populism and cynicism about both this incident and, say, the hail prevent one from understanding the real reasons and seriously discussing ways out of the situation.
ARAM ABRAHAMYAN
