“Gagik Tsarukyan, has your tongue gotten too long? We’ll drag your punk son back from Belarus by the neck and make him answer for it. We’ll catch him and bring him here. You little punk, you won’t escape, and even your father won’t save you.”
This threat was voiced not during a street “showdown,” but at an election rally of the ruling party. And these words were spoken not by some neighborhood thug, but by Armenia’s sitting prime minister, eager to posture before his lumpenized electorate.
Naturally, this is neither the language of a prime minister, nor of a statesman, nor even of a politician. In my view, a politician should speak in political terms — however harsh or sharply critical — addressing political issues rather than individuals, their families, or relatives. What Pashinyan said was hooliganism in form and the rhetoric of a certain type of journalist in substance: someone accustomed to dealing with people not through discussion of the issue at hand, but through personal blackmail and compromising material (“kompromat”) (“And I happen to know that you…”)
Such media and such journalism exist all over the world. Setting ethical questions aside, that in itself is normal. What is abnormal is when such people are handed state, law-enforcement, and repressive powers, which are then used not in the interests of the state, but to collect compromising material on political opponents and citizens with dissenting views, organize leaks, conduct wiretaps, and prosecute people under various supposedly “criminal” charges — all so that critics “do not get too outspoken.”
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In that case, it is not only the authorities who become “yellow,” but also the prosecutor’s office, the National Security Service, investigative bodies, the courts, and the police.
One wonders whether Macron and Ursula von der Leyen realize whom they have chosen to deal with.
Aram ABRAHAMYAN
