Watching the episodes where the Azerbaijani 3-4 years old children were being taught their “compulsory exercises of hatred” in the kindergarten, I remembered of George Orwell’s “1984” novel, in which the party members should have watches a 2-minute film about “the enemies of the party” and the audience had to express their hatred against the chosen targets.
Although the manifestations of the English writer and the Azerbaijani authorities are extremist, but to say it is an extraordinary phenomena which cannot be met in the history ever, unfortunately, would be an “optimistic exaggeration”. I am sure that suchlike “lessons” were being taught to the children of the kindergartens in Nazi Germany, in the previous century and similar feelings were awakened against Jews and Slavs.
Suchlike hatred is taught against the “unbelievers” since childhood in extremist Islamic madrasas. If we go back into the depth of the centuries, I do not think the same has been done in case of various nations and even within the same nation, take, in the relations of Catholics and Protestants. Which are the mechanisms of turning people into beasts? 30 years ago the agents of Azerbaijani Special service were on a business trip to Sumgayit and they were telling the people as if Armenians raped Azerbaijani girls in the towns of Armenia and about a train passing from Kapan to Nakhijevan entirely filled with corpses of Azerbaijani people. Common people are not inclined towards perceiving the information critically, especially in the case when the information is harmonious with their dark instincts.
What “antitoxin” exists against the darkness of those brains? The “antitoxin” I imagine is the following: at that moment a set of authoritative intelligentsia representatives should have appeared and told, “People, let us think, does the information makes sense?” an intelligentsia which would not be afraid of the revenge of the crowd.
In Armenia there is no ground for suchlike misinformation of “national character”, fortunately. Our public suffers from another type of disease, our dark instincts are in another place, in the social field. Those instincts are not less dangerous than the seeds of the national hatred. However, the anger of the crowd is equally powerful, especially the crowd of Facebook.
ARAM ABRAHAMYAN
