If masked people had stormed the mayor’s office and “detained” the opposition-minded deputy mayor four years ago for no reason (they were not running away), human rights activists and “progressive” Facebook users would have made a fuss about blatant human rights abuses. But since all this is happening now, during the “people’s rule,” and the detainee, from their point of view, is a representative of the “previous criminal regime,” it is considered quite normal and even desirable. The “People’s Power” is fulfilling its “steel mandate.”
The problem is, the 21st century is not the age of steel. Steel is a metal of the last century, or rather an alloy of iron and carbon. One of the must-have books in my youth school was “How Steel Was Hardened” (which, by the way, I think is not an untalented work). One of the Bolshevik revolutionaries, who then ruled a huge country, chose his pseudonym by comparing himself to steel. Finally, when the Europeans decided to set up the first transnational economic structure in 1951, it was called the “European Union of Steel and Coal,” because in the middle of the last century these two products were the most important for the development of industry, and in particular, their customs tariffs had to be agreed upon. You can imagine what the industry of that time was like at least with the example of the “fallen giants” of Armenia, which have been preserved in some places as abandoned buildings and about which some of my contemporaries have illusions that they can ever be “utilized.”
Steel, as a policy allegory, is also impossible to utilize if we take into account the long-term strategy of the state. We live in the age of “software.” And just as it is pointless to repair a computer with a steel hammer, it is also ineffective to undermine the local self-government with the same hammer and to generally carry out personal revenge with ax methods. The pro-government electorate will rejoice a little, the authorities will enjoy their power a little, but in the long run, in terms of the future of the state, it will not stop any negative process.
This process will stop if: a) they stop treating people as fools and taking advantage of their ignorance, and the opposite- they give people full information and engage in serious discussions, and b) any opponent of the government ceases to be perceived as an enemy. In other words, in computer language, the construction of the state “software” should begin.
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Aram Abrahamyan
