The reaction from pro-government and government-aligned circles to the tragic death of opposition figure Arsen Gevorgyan can hardly be described as anything other than a “moral lustration” — or, rather, yet another wave of it. This is because, over the past several years, Armenia’s society has experienced a series of events with such devastating consequences that we have witnessed numerous waves of “moral lustration” in their aftermath.
And each time, as the tide of these waves recedes, it exposes the deep-seated damage inflicted on our social organism in terms of its value system, moral standards and guiding principles. The damage has been so profound that, driven by political and, in many cases, purely material expediency, a human tragedy can be trampled underfoot and subjected to the most cynical interpretations. And let me stress once again: this phenomenon comes from the top down. It is itself the consequence of a state policy whose very purpose is to destroy and erase the red lines in the realm of values and moral principles. This is how the perception of the disasters and tragedies themselves can also be erased, along with the danger of truly grasping their significance — disasters and tragedies for which the ruling force bears at least political responsibility.
The point is that these disasters and losses have occurred on a massive scale within a state and society whose foundations rested on a particular moral and value-based architecture. As long as that architecture remains intact, the collapse taking place around it is always visible and tangible to those within it. Consequently, the question of responsibility can never disappear.
Yet where there is a question of responsibility, there is also a problem for those seeking to retain power. Accordingly, in order to hold on to power and free themselves from responsibility once and for all, they must permanently neutralise the society’s moral and value-based identity, the very framework through which it perceives the realities that have collapsed as a result of their political tenure. A new social morality and a new value architecture have been built on the philosophy of “everyday submissiveness”, with material well-being proclaimed the state’s supreme objective. Under such circumstances, everything else, including human life, ceases to be a public value. This is already a state tragedy, and yet another metastasis of it is manifesting itself in certain reactions to a human tragedy.
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Hakob BADALYAN
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