A woman was complaining about the protesters yesterday. “Well, they disgusted us with their Karabakh. They came to Yerevan and shouted ‘Karabakh.’ Let ‘s live in peace, I’ve had enough of them disturbing our peace (yes, the “peace” – AA). They say “Turk, Turk”. Isn’t a Turk a human being? They say, “You will become a Turk.” Does it matter if I am Armenian or Turkish? The most important thing is to be a human being and live a normal life.” In short, she was a member of the electorate of the current government and a supporter of the “peace agenda.”
As far as I know, no political force, no website is campaigning in such an extreme way (although I am not aware of the content of hundreds of “mushroom sites,” to be honest). However, I suppose that the current government is mediating, so to speak, “preparing the people for peace.” But that, of course, would not have been possible without the preconditions for such a mindset in previous decades. People have been saying for decades, “Be patient, suffer in the name of Artsakh,” and those who say that are absolutely impatient and in trouble, on the contrary, they are living with all the “pleasures” they imagine in life. So today’s moods are largely a reaction to that, to put it mildly, hypocrisy. But finding an explanation for the phenomenon, in my opinion, does not mean justifying it.
The real tragedy is not defeat in the war; you lost today, you will win tomorrow. The real tragedy is not that some people are sitting on some chairs; one will sit today and the other tomorrow. It is a tragedy when people are indifferent to the loss of a part of the homeland, when they not only do not want to have a state, but are ready to give up their nationality for the illusion of “living in peace.” It is really an illusion, losing one’s identity, a person can not “live well,” often they have no opportunity to live at all.
It would be an exaggeration to say that there have never been people who renounce their homeland, state, and identity in our history. From time to time, people appeared among Armenians, groups of people who were ready to become Greek, Zoroastrian or Muslim in order to “live normally.”
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But fortunately they were a minority, otherwise I would not have collected this text in letters written by Mesrop Mashtots today, in the third decade of the 21st century. But now the uniqueness of the situation is that thinkers like that woman, if not the majority, then a fairly tangible mass. This view is marginal from the point of view of millennia of history and today’s 10 million Armenians. But for the people living in Armenia today, I think this current is “mainstream.”
Aram Abrahamyan
