“Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it,” as a saying often attributed to Jonathan Swift goes. It captures a simple rule of how information spreads: once a lie is voiced—especially one that flatters the crowd—no amount of refutation the next day will matter much. Very few people will care.
The current Armenian authorities make ample use of this pattern. Two examples will suffice.
At one of his recent press conferences, a journalist asks Nikol Pashinyan why Yerevan’s potholes were not fixed THIS SPRING. The Prime Minister replies that the mayors of Yerevan and Gyumri—clearly referring to Hayk Marutyan and Vardan Ghukasyan—had been working against the government. But Marutyan resigned on December 22, 2021. And in any city, including Yerevan, potholes appear every spring, once the snow and ice melt. They have to be filled and the roads repaired EACH YEAR. So if the situation in the city is a disgrace this spring, responsibility lies with the current mayor, Tigran Avinyan—not with someone who stepped down four and a half years ago, no matter how much he may have “worked against the government.”
This makes it clear that Pashinyan’s answer to the journalist’s question—like his answers to all “uncomfortable” questions—is, in scientific terms, irrelevant. In plain language, it’s just spin. Can this be explained to the average Armenian? I strongly doubt it. What that person hears in the question is “Yerevan potholes,” and in the Prime Minister’s answer, “former mayors worked against the government.” The result is a deeply distorted picture of reality.
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Or consider Pashinyan shouting in parliament: “You became a billionaire by stealing electricity from us!” What is that supposed to mean? That Samvel Karapetyan came from Kaluga, took over the Electric Networks of Armenia, and became a billionaire by taking electricity from Armenians. But Karapetyan was first listed by Forbes as a dollar billionaire in 2006, whereas he acquired the Electric Networks of Armenia in 2015. In other words, the Prime Minister’s outburst has no connection to reality. It takes only a few minutes to compare the dates, but the average Armenian—who has long had to deal with both “planned” and “emergency” outages—will hardly spend those minutes.
Meanwhile, fact-checkers are mostly busy exposing the opposition’s lies, rather than those of the authorities.
Aram ABRAHAMYAN
