‘Strong Armenia’ or a Feast for Scavengers

The imaginary ‘Strong Armenia’ of the Karapetyan family is becoming increasingly indistinguishable from their other business venture – the Yerevan circus. Well, what’s one to do but have a bit of fun? They enjoy access to state television airtime and all the attention of the junk media owned by the ruling collaborationist government. A secure second-place finish for the new ‘opposition number one,’ legitimising the dismantling of Armenian statehood, requires nothing more.

Yet Our Way and Strong Armenia simply cannot help it. They do not deem it enough to promise unrealistic 300,000 jobs (somewhat coincidentally, mini-sultan Aliyev promises us exactly the same number of Azerbaijanis). Nor is it enough to fail to hire an Armenian-speaking editor and keep embarrassing themselves with their clumsy ‘polls’ all over the Internet, allowing Pashinyan’s Young Janissaries to act as chief guardians of Armenian tongue and grammar. It is not nearly enough to promise to improve the intimate lives of Armenia’s citizens. Not nearly enough to cosily chat with Petros Ghazaryan, the chief brute of Turkish propaganda.
Not nearly enough to brazenly lie to voters, claiming they will win the ‘elections’ and immediately amend the Constitution to suit their sponsor. Not nearly enough, even now, to have no position on the so-called Washington ‘peace’ with Azerbaijan.
After all, the naive voters – who, in their eyes, cannot even have children without their help – might still fail to open their eyes and show up to the circus performance on June 7, 2026, anyway.

And since the show must go on, the Karapetyan family has picked another guarantor of Strong Armenia out of their hat. After all, as all these months they’ve been hand-feeding the notorious lawyer Robert Amsterdam – famous for his cosy friendship with Erdoğan – then disappointing us with yet another ‘consultant’ who will tell us how to live was simply out of the question. In this circus, where citizens in the electoral acrobatics wheel are no longer spectators, but mere circus animals, the role of the coach went to Zvika Haimovitch – a retired brigadier general of the Israel Defence Forces and former commander of Israel’s Air Defence.

Surely, if we were real spectators and treated with a tiny bit of respect, they wouldn’t have been so petty and would have gone straight for a Turkish or Azerbaijani general. He could have advised us on how to properly surrender without a fight, given that Strong Armenia harbours no ambition to resist the Turkish world. Nor does it have any plans to build a resilient, combat-ready army worth spending the ‘great and powerful’ Bayraktars on. In 2020, Armenia already starred in the most expensive advertisement in Erdoğan’s son-in-law’s company’s history, and now we are being set up to appear on other Turkish channels.

We don’t know which chapter of the Karapetyan edition of The Art of War tells that to win by poaching the enemy’s expended consultants. Besides, what war are we even talking about? The agenda is nothing but peace, friendship, illusionary foreign investors, and jobs. As for military discipline, statutory relations, officers’ qualification, combat morale, technical equipment, population’s preparedness for emergencies, electronic warfare and other essentials of successful defence – well, those can all be rolled out in the next cartoon featuring ‘Mr. Strength’. The main thing is not to forget to cover him with an Iron Dome. Consultant Haimovich can at least help write the prompts for a neural network, right? After all, he is being paid for something, isn’t he?

Alas, in reality, if we do not extensively boycott our own performance in the circus called ‘the June 7 elections,’ it will not be the Armenian sky that gets covered by an Iron Dome, but the last chance to save the remnants of Armenian statehood. Since the arrest of Samvel Karapetyan, his family has invited countless vultures from around the world – from Russia to the United States and Israel – circling over those remnants. If the Armenian world mobilises and refuses to become their prey, they will have no choice but to leave our country with empty stomachs, even if their pockets filled by the Karapetyan family’s junior members.