Glory and honor to all those who conscientiously do their jobs — whether they are car mechanics, street sweepers, writers, or actors — and say that they “do not engage in politics.” That is, not only do they not aspire to any office or mandate, but they also don’t particularly follow the struggle for those positions and mandates. I also “do not engage in politics” in the sense that I do not aspire to office, and if I follow it, then only by virtue of my profession, not because it particularly interests me.
But — if you see, for example, ten janissaries (or representatives of the Armenian branch of “Yashma”) in a Yerevan street beating up a young female protester, do you have the right to say that you “do not engage in politics”? I think not, because politics has nothing to do with it — you are manifesting yourself either as a human being, or as a plant. No one demands that you cry out “long live these, down with those,” but the dividing line is, I think, quite clear between where “political expressions” end and where burying one’s head in the sand begins.
And if people are kept in prison for months because of some whim of the country’s leader or for political reasons? Of course, there is always the excuse: “We don’t know what those people did, let law enforcement figure it out, maybe they did something — after all, people are not imprisoned for no reason.” In Stalin’s time, people justified their silence in exactly the same way. Often it was those very people, who said “maybe they did something,” who were taken away next.
Should artistic works reflect this reality? Indirectly, in an abstracted form — “yes.” Even under conditions of totalitarianism and censorship, artists found ways to express their protest. Let us recall, for example, the plays of Yevgeny Shvarts and Grigory Gorin.
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All the more so now — no heroism is required to respond to the indignities of the authorities.
…If, for some musician or actor, performing in front of Nikol Pashinyan is OK, then there’s no problem.
Aram Abrahamyan
