Human imagination has no limits, neither does Russian propaganda. According to that propaganda, we will close Matenadaran, abandon our khachkars (cross-stones) and have homosexual marriages as a result of signing the Armenia-EU agreement. Good God, they do not say that every morning we will be forced to drink infants’ blood.
This and other scenes of jealousy as well as wicked comments by Russian independent media are even more surprising today when the official Kremlin says they do not see any problem in the agreement. Either the propagandists have not received relevant instructions yet, or the authorities are playing a double game.
But let us turn to the essence. One of these propagandists has stated that Armenians holding European orientation are the enemies of his country. Very well, and if the Russians have such orientation, are they also enemies of Russia? I am sure that there are dozens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people in that country now who have that “hostile” position. And it is so not only today. Many Russian leaders have sought European values, since Peter the Great, the 19th-century Russian intellectuals, artists, writers, aristocrats spent several months a year in Europe, most of the children of today’s elite representatives receive education in the West, and business ties of most of the businessmen are also there. How come Europe is Russia’s enemy?
On the other hand, some European figures (for example, British Prime Minister Theresa May at the Brussels summit) resort to extreme harsh pressures based not that much on reasonable calculations in relations with Russia, but on emotional outbursts mostly. Russia will never become a Soviet Union, and taken the market relations, the Internet, and the absence of a “metal curtain”, the efforts that the West imposes to “restrain” Russia, I think, are not relevant to the situation. Inadequate Russian propaganda, the “samples” of which I brought at the beginning of the article, are often opposed to equally absurd “anti-Russian” manifestations when they are looking for Putin’s conspiracy everywhere. Paranoids of all the camps are the same.
Of course, that would be nice if these contradictions resolved. But in any case, neither Europeans nor Russians are our enemies. And we, citizens of Armenia, are the enemies neither of the former nor of the latter, no matter how different we think. It is preferable not to be pushed by either of the sides.
Aram ABRAHAMYAN
