The story of the emergence and development of the Third Republic after 1994 is a story of unending betrayal, dilettantism, and degradation. A considerable part of the first generation of state-minded and passionate individuals either fell during the Artsakh liberation war or were eliminated in the October 1999 terrorist attack in National Parliament. Everything thereafter followed an entirely predictable script: the entrenchment of a feudal-clan system in lieu of national and state building, a shoddy class of functionaries and logrollers in lieu of statesmen and managers, a regime of imitation in lieu of creation. The country had become a walking corpse, desperately trying to convince itself that it was still alive – that it still looked presentable, could occasionally even be attractive, and might yet prove useful.
The political world of the living differs from the zombieland inhabited by walking corpses in one crucial respect: it has a dream. A dream is a metaphysical category, and it is what determines strategic consciousness. Without it, there can be no search for answers to the fundamental epistemological questions: Who are we? What is Armenianness? And what is its logos? That path is difficult, dangerous, and thorny, and it demands serious spiritual and intellectual discipline. There is another, simpler solution: to deny the existence of metaphysical categories altogether and kneel before a false idol – hedonism. In that case, the goal becomes much simpler as well: to turn everyone involved into GDP generators, consumers, and aimless philistines. For whom? To what end? Where does the meaning of such a choice lie? These are questions that need never be asked, because what is at stake is not a meaningful life, but the mere prolongation of a banal, semi-parasitic existence.
Why dwell on thousand-year-old cultural monuments handed over to the enemy and left to be destroyed — tangible witnesses to a heritage uniquely our own — when we can instead marvel at the hideous residential complexes springing up like mushrooms, where Robert Abajyan’s family is unlikely ever to be able to afford an apartment, while Nvidia’s foreign employees presumably will, even if they never bother setting foot in Yerablur? And why keep mourning the Berdzor road of shame and disgrace in 2023, which became the road of exile for the Armenians of Artsakh – driven from the homeland that generations of their forebears had spent centuries building with their own sweat and blood?
Far more satisfying, surely, to admire the gleaming road surface in central Yerevan from the back seat of an armoured government Mercedes, cruising aimlessly through the city and running over a young pregnant woman with impunity along the way.
In the end, what was the point of this ‘state’, of the hundreds of puffed-up organisations scattered around the world, of the Eduardo Eurnekians, the Noubar Afeyans, and the Serj Tankians, and of the dozens of hyped up resolutions recognising the Genocide of 1915 – if all we have ended up with is yet another road of shame and disgrace, after the one at Der Zor?
Hundreds of peoples, across different parts of the world and throughout history, have fought bloody battles, taken lives, and endured hardship in the name of the right to have a country of their own. In most cases, the same unsophisticated motive was at work: to have a framework within which one’s own economic and socio-cultural life could be built. Borders drawn within defined geographical limits possessed a certain magic, creating an almost perfect illusion of control over one’s own destiny. But history has demonstrated time and again, and with merciless clarity, that form alone, without substance, is not worth a penny. Then again – why reflect on the matter at all? Why keep asking about the reasons the ‘state’ failed at the very task for which it had been created? One should simply accept it and be grateful that the Armenians expelled from Artsakh received certificates towards the purchase of housing – mostly requiring a top-up funded by loans, and issued only after humiliating queues for an Armenian passport bearing the ‘correct’ code – and thank the Soviet General Staff, which once, over a drop of vodka, drew the borders of one of the world’s oldest civilisations.
In the eyes of those who have chosen the second path, the contradictions are immaterial. The Soviet General Staff, after all, made an invaluable contribution to the long-awaited peace between two ‘brotherly peoples’, whose enmity was supposedly sown by the short-sighted founding fathers of the Soviet Union. Turkey, which refuses to acknowledge the crime against the Armenians of 1915–1923 and built its state on the ruins of the Armenian world, becomes a ‘partner’ – in reality, a metropole – of the ‘Armenian state’ created in the first place to restrain Ankara in its determination to close the Armenian Question once and for all. And now a ‘minister’ named Ararat is busy explaining to the local philistines that Mount Ararat, the birthplace of the Armenian nation, has no business appearing in the new biometric passports of the ‘Fourth Republic’ (otherwise known as ‘Real Armenia’), because it is apparently not to the liking of the brothers in Ankara. Meanwhile, the ‘strategic alliance’ with Russia is no longer relevant – not because Moscow armed Azerbaijan and, together with Ankara, participated in the liquidation of Artsakh, but because the new ‘friends’ in Europe wished it so, in exchange for the illusion of visa-free travel and the privilege of calling oneself a bona fide member of the civilised Western world.
The silencing and persecution of those who dare to utter the word Artsakh is by now the policy not of Azerbaijan but of the ‘Armenian state’ once born of the Miatsum movement, the ideological conception of the reunification of Armenia and Artsakh. In such circumstances, there is no point even in asking the question ‘to be or not to be’, since geographical Armenia did not want to be ‘the Armenian state born of Miatsum’, nor did it become ‘the guarantor against a repetition of the genocide’ or ‘the country of all Armenians and the architect of the Armenian world’. None of that is to be, at least not for the time being. What is to be, is ‘Real Armenia’ – also known as ‘the geopolitical brothel beneath the gleaming glass of the Nvidia corporation’; otherwise known as ‘the Fourth Republic, whose strategic infrastructure is handed over to the owner of an online casino’; otherwise known as ‘the country for everyone except Armenians, Armenian history, and Ararat’. In this country, heritage, honour, and dignity are unwelcome, while loyalty to the metropole, faint-heartedness, irresolution, and the desire to live in ‘peace’ are counted as virtues – even if that means granting the new ‘friends, partners, and brothers’ droit de seigneur, the right of the first night.
The feudal-clan rulers of geographical Armenia, including colonial administrators of every stripe, and those representatives of the Armenian world who spent decades legitimising this process of decay and degradation, have made their choice. This is not a matter of opinion, supposition, or theory; these are the dry facts and their consequences. There is no room for illusions: at this stage geographical Armenia – otherwise known as ‘real Armenia’, also known as the ‘fourth republic’, stripped of meanings, functions, and strategic consciousness – is doomed to inevitable death.
But this is far from the end, and the demise of something that deliberately places blocks of flats built with Turkish materials and Nvidia above Artsakh, history, memory, and dignity should not be mourned as a tragedy. Let us not forget: what is at issue is a walking corpse that is merely pretending to be alive, or has persuaded itself that it is. Its death, however, by no means signifies the death of the Armenian world, despite what dilettantes within geographical Armenia and beyond would have us believe. Israel and Ireland are living, functioning proof of the contrary. They were resurrected from the ashes, built, and safeguarded by their global national aristocracies. The process of bringing order and structure to an Armenian world long left without anyone to speak and act for it – a world endowed with an almost insane creative and destructive potential – has already been set in motion, and it will inevitably lead to one result alone: the birth of a meaningful Armenian subjectness, and everything that entails.
To be continued…
