I often see on the Internet that people are amazed at how former journalists who are now (led by the Prime Minister) pass one law after another against the media. In fact, it is a simple and humanly understandable psychological mechanism.
To understand this situation, many compare it to George Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” where pigs, initially fighting humans with other animals “for the sake of universal equality” over time begin to make “exceptions” for themselves, eventually taking the whip and becoming like people. That parallel, I think, is correct. But yesterday I remembered an episode from another famous work- Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained.” Freed from slavery, Jango comes to negotiate with the white landowner, and the servant of that cruel slave owner, Steven, who is also black, indignantly addresses his master: “And you would allow this Negro (that is how he describes Django- A.A.) to enter your house and sit at the table with you?” Steven is just as African-American as Jango, but after serving on the estate for many years, he has become more of a racist than his master.
Here is the whole picture of being cut off from reality. As long as you are a journalist (any other profession can be mentioned here), you live a normal life and, of course, do not deviate from reality. As soon as you find yourself in the palaces, free from the worries of everyday life, in the atmosphere of “problem solving,” privileges, greed, flattery, and hanging a picture of the leader on the walls, you start to get angry: “Who are those journalists who are constantly being trampled? Who are they to not glorify our hard, patriotic work?”
I did not expect anything else from Robert Kocharyan, Serzh Sargsyan, and their entourage because they started their careers in the conditions of the communist nomenclature. That is, they did not live the lives of ordinary people from a young age. But seeing that both the PANM members and the current authorities eventually began to manifest themselves in the same way, I am simply once again convinced of the legitimacy of the 19th century English historian and politician John Dahlberg-Acton’s statement: “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
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In the mid-1970s, an anecdote was circulated about the former leader of Soviet Armenia, Anton Kochinyan (which, of course, has nothing to do with that patriotic and well-to-do man). The joke is about being cut off from reality. A few days after leaving work, Kochinyan went to the store for the first time in his life to buy a sausage. He only sees the bruised piece of doctoral sausage on the shop window and, thinking that the sausage has disappeared from the shops in the last few days, sighs, “You will give glory to Anton Yervandovich.”
Aram Abrahamyan
