‘Mandate’ is one of the beloved words in the ‘Real Armenian’ vocabulary. It is a currency known to the Turkish collaborationist alone, one he supposedly receives from ‘the people’ at an exchange rate known only to him, for deeds that – so it seems to him – only he knows about. Never mind that not a single opinion poll credits him with even a third of public support, or that he ‘won’ his non-alternative 2021 ‘election’ on the mendacious promise to hold on to Artsakh rather than surrender it once and for all. Never mind, either, that for Artsakh, and for the villages of Syunik, Tavush, the Ararat region and Gegharkunik that have since become frontier settlements, he could produce no ‘cadastre extract.’ What matters is the imaginary ‘mandate’ to hand them over.
Yet the moment someone begins disposing of statehood, identity, and that same ‘mandate’ as a monetisable asset, putting them up for public auction, they inevitably lose control over the price. And just like that, the Turkish collaborationist realises that once the ‘mandate’ – won at the cost of Armenian blood, sweat, and tears over millennia – has been carved up, his foreign patrons may leave him without even the most basic guarantees of a free life and a peaceful death, let alone perpetual stewardship of the colonial administration.
The Moor has indeed done his work, and he made no secret of his intentions: he cemented the renunciation of Artsakh and of a strong, still to be built Spyurk (comprising the scattered Armenian communities), disavowed the Armenian Church, the national symbols and the memory of the Armenian Genocide, turned Armenia into a thoroughfare open to all passers, and formalised the surrender of Armenian political subjectness. From that moment on, a placeholder unable to secure even half the vote in stage-managed elections becomes of no further interest to external centres of power. Politics is the art of the possible, and where the immunodeficient Third Republic is concerned, almost nothing is now beyond reach. Only one frontier remains: the ultimate disarmament of the global Armenian world – and such a task is beyond a cheap opportunist like Pashinyan.
What is more, thereafter the satrap’s former and current patrons find it hard to trust the man who decided that ‘independence means dependence on many.’ A feudal-clan system can by definition have no single centre; and to keep it from coalescing into a state, the emergence of such a centre must be prevented. Plainly, the only possible centre of that kind is the Armenian world – the one common enemy in this war of all against all on the wreckage of the Third Republic. This is why, in their joint attempts to neutralise it, the foreign patrons of the anti-Armenian administration in Yerevan think ever more often about the post-Armenian future of the scrap of what remains of Armenia. Each of them has settled on whom to back. Pashinyan is not on that list, and nor is anyone among his more promising young Janissaries irreplaceable (Ruben Rubinyan, Alen Simonyan, Arman Yeghoyan and other henchmen of ever more varied external centres of power among them).
Furthermore, it is no longer complicity in the deeds of the anti-Armenian regime alone that fails to guarantee anything, but even unconditional loyalty to the Turkish satrap. In his haste to please his patrons, Pashinyan did not so much as blink before dismissing his faithful servant, former Security Council Secretary Armen Grigoryan. Grigoryan was saved neither by the servile book he had already written about the new Grandpa Lenin-Pashinyan, nor by the handshake of the supreme collaborationist and his young Janissaries at the ensuing presentation of that waste paper. True to his leader’s teaching, Armen Grigoryan gave up everything – including his honour – for nothing.
Nor should the pseudo-‘rivals’ of this pack, representing the ‘old’ and ‘new’ ‘opposition,’ take any comfort in this rat race. These Moors, too, have done their work; before long, they too will be carted off to the rubbish heap of history, having legitimised yet another round of the Turkish collaborationist’s so-called ‘elections’, the final purge of what little political competition remained, and the liquidation of the Third Republic’s political subjectness. The collaborationists’ Kaluga branch, in the face of Samvel Karapetyan’s ‘Powerful Armenia’ (though had they any face to speak of, they would not be sitting in the colonial ‘parliament’), also bustled about on the matter of pushing Armenian communities still further away from Armenia, casting particular segments of the Armenian world – part of Russia’s Armenians, some refugees from Artsakh – as both accomplices and victims of their petty games.
If the self-proclaimed representatives of Kaluga, Moscow or Washington expect a fate any different from that of their future cellmates who volunteered to become representatives of Ankara and Tel Aviv, they are deeply mistaken. Patrons never ponder for even a second before disposing of their clients – least of all those who have betrayed their own people. Which is what makes it so entertaining to watch newcomers to this circus trying to play a ‘constructive parliamentary opposition.’ While the collaborationist ‘Civil Contract’ pins its hopes on its newly minted Israeli patrons and ‘guarantors,’ Kaluga’s ‘Strong Armenia’ has left itself no chance of escaping this food chain as it ‘comes to terms’ with the Israeli-Azerbaijani administration.
It is only fitting that the ‘constructive opposition’ is today reaping the fruits of its own collaborationism. A feudal-clan system cannot by definition uphold durable agreements or honour commitments. The architects, long-standing participants and supporters of this system could hardly have been unaware of that when they agreed to take part in elections knowingly lost in advance. Having traded the remnants of their reputation for the illusory hope of keeping what they had plundered in earlier years, they not only legitimised the Turkish commandant but guaranteed his omnipotence, strangling healthy opposition forces in the cradle. The monster begotten by today’s ‘opposition’ – the Pashinyan regime – set the flywheel of detentions, arrests and confiscations spinning immediately after the ‘elections’ its future inmates had endorsed, thereby setting an example for every other would-be collaborationist and, by an irony of fate, foretelling its own future.
Such is the lot of those who choose perpetual servitude: they are not guaranteed even a single parliamentary or prime-ministerial term, for their fate is decided in negotiations and elections among their patrons. The US presidential election is already due in 2028, and thanks to the fact that the United States, unlike the Third Republic, had genuine founding fathers, a national aristocracy, and political institutions, the absurd and dangerous anti-Iranian campaign is doomed to fail. Yerevan’s collaborationists will not merely fail to collect the commission on their double game; they will pay very dearly for inviting the anti-Iranian coalition to Iran’s north-western frontiers in Artsakh and Syunik, for voluntarily handing the most valuable resources of the twenty-first century – data, access to telecommunications, transport routes, and energy resources – into the hands of pro-Israeli forces, and for the ongoing hasty freezing of relations with Iran.
The feudal-clan system deliberately distanced itself from its only natural ally, the Armenian world; it consciously renounced Artsakh; it effectively handed Syunik over for others to use; it abjured the national symbols and values, and in doing so stripped geographical Armenia of every physical and spiritual protective barrier. Its dirty hands are not needed here any longer. There can be no immunity for those who destroyed the immunity of their own citizens. There can be neither a ‘mandate’ nor ‘guarantees’ to govern something that no longer exists. And if anyone thinks they have nothing left to lose and therefore intends to keep playing in this casino to its ignominious end, and to the last inch of Armenian territory and dignity, an unpleasant surprise awaits them in the very near future.
