Who will decide Armenia's destiny -- patriots or tyrants? - September, 2010

The Republic of Armenia turned nineteen years old this month. In about twenty somewhat years our little homeland in the Caucasus has come a long way. Long gone are the days when Armenia suffered severe energy shortages. Long gone are the days when Armenia suffered from food shortages. Long gone are the days when Armenia's borders and Artsakh were under constant danger. Long gone are the days when Armenia's factories were being torn down and sold to Iranians as scrap metal. Long gone are the days when Armenian politicians flirted with suicidal political policies. Long gone are the days when world powers neglected to pay Armenia any attention.

Although the devastation brought upon by the sociopolitical chaos of the 1990s and its "oligarchic" legacy endures somewhat today, as a nation Armenia is nonetheless progressing. Although poverty and unemployment are still at unacceptable levels, Armenia continues to develop. Despite immense odds and difficulties both foreign and domestic, Armenia has managed not only to survive in the Caucasus but it has also become a major political player in that complex theater of operation. For the first time in almost a thousand years, major powers around the world are being forced to consider the Armenian factor in their political calculations.

Rome was not built in a single day. All fledgling nations go through growing pain. Small nations, poor nations, nations landlocked in hostile geographic locations will naturally have longer and more problematic growing pains. Despite our best efforts to make politics/society in Armenia ideal, we have to also realize that Armenia will have to travel the same painful and difficult path every other developed nation has traveled throughout history. Therefore, our fledgling homeland in the Caucasus still has a long-long way to go. But what Armenia desperately needs today is political evolution and not a Western funded revolution.

We have a beautiful republic today that is secure. We have a republic today that is stable. We have a republic today that is moving forward with the help of its sons and daughters and sometimes - despite its sons and daughters. Armenia is a nation with great potential. Armenians are a people endowed with great potential. Under the right leadership Armenia will be able to reach its potential. And it will happen. It's only a matter of time. Nevertheless, today is a day when all Armenians should put aside their petty differences and rejoice in knowing that we have a free and independent homeland, an Armenian republic that continues to grow stronger year-after-year.

We Armenians need to stop becoming unwitting tools for those who are seeking to undermine our fledgling republic by participating in the constant dissemination of poisonous propaganda. Armenians need to instead be responsible enough to figuring out how to engage in healthy and constructive forms of political and social activism.

Sadly but unsurprisingly, not all Armenians are rejoicing about Armenia today. 

Please read the following anti-Armenian propaganda shamelessly exhibited in America's mainstream new press by an up-and-coming Washingtonian whore named Garin Hovannisian. Garin is the son of another Washingtonian whore, Raffi Hovannisian. And Raffi is the son of a yet another Washingtonian whore, Richard Hovannisian. 

It seems that the damned Hovannisian lineage has so far given us three generations of political whores. The older one is a well-knowing Armenian pseudo-historian with a US government background. The middle-aged one is a repatriated Armenian pseudo-politician who more-or-less works for Washingtonian interests in Armenia. And the younger one seems to be yet another up-and-coming mercenary trying to whore himself to impress his family's handlers in Washington, and/or to simply get some publicity for his new kiss me I'm a genocide survivor book.

I just want to mention here that our overly obsessive pursuit of genocide recognition has created several generations of psychologically disturbed Armenians. We have a diaspora today that has essentially been raised being told that they are victims and a subjugated people. This has caused severe identity crisis, self-confidence issues and victim mentalities. Moreover, obsessive pursuits of genocide recognition in an anti-Armenian vipers nest like Washington has only served to distract Armenian attention from more important matters facing Armenia today. 

Nevertheless, Armenian nationalism and an Armenocentric approach to history is ridiculed and belittled. It's as if these Hovannisian types want us to continue feeling insecure, victimized and helpless - without providing us a resolution. In military/political circles, this is called psychological warfare and we Armenians are not their only victims. 

Enough crying about the genocide. We have wasted decades doing so. It's high time to rebuild our republic. Might makes right. No amount of crying at the feet of Western leaders and Jews will help us. Only a powerful Armenia can right the wrongs of history.

The following three links are to a very informative documentary about the organized effort taking place in the United States to distort and to falsify Armenian history. The head of this anti-Armenian agenda in American academia is none other than Garin's grandfather, Richard Hovannisian.

Falsifiers of Armenian History Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6VrO2WBx4A

Falsifiers of Armenian History Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmuEY0xa-xQ&feature=related

Falsifiers of Armenian History Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faicWRgxwaA&feature=related

Getting back to the issue at hand. For those who are not able to read between the lines or comprehend the complex background panorama to these types of anti-Armenian propaganda, I'll try to explain. Had Armenia's corrupt businessmen and/or politicians been in bed with Washington (like the criminals that currently run Columbia, Mexico, Israel, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kosovo, Bosnia, Albania, Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Romania, to name only a few) - they would have been treated with white gloves by officials in Washington.  

Had Armenia been forced to bend-over to Washington, Armenia's dreaded oligarchs would have been portrayed as noble defenders of freedom and democracy. Had Armenia been forced to submit itself to Turkish and Western oil/gas interests in the region - Armenia's criminal oligarchs would have been the pretty darlings of Washington.

Since Armenia is holding its head high in the Caucasus independent of Washington, since Armenia is gradually becoming a major regional player due to its strategic partnership with the Russian Federation - everything Armenia will do today will be criticized by Washington and its petty street whores, like the author of the shameless article appearing below.

Nonetheless, this Garin Hovannisian, like his father, like his grandfather, like their colleague Richard Giragosian, like their colleague Vartan Oskanian, like their colleague Van Krikorian - are the ugly and dangerous face of the Armenian diaspora. 

These traitors are the ugly and dangerous face of the self-destructive peasantry I have been trying to warn our sheeple about for many years. This is what happens when we give American-Armenians too much respect and too much credibility in Armenia. This is what happens when we allow these criminals to freely setup offices in our republic. Ultimately, these are the shameless traitors that keep Armenia politically stagnant and ever dependent. 

Ever since Dimitry Medvedev's historic visit to Armenia and Armenia's growing political, economic and military ties with Russian Federation - these vermin have been coming out of their hiding and exposing themselves for who they really are.

Garin asks: who will decide Armenia's destiny? Perhaps Garin is too young or too stupid to understand, but who will decide Armenia's destiny is no longer a question. Thank God, Armenia's destiny has already been decided by Yerevan and Moscow - and not by bloodthirsty globalist tyrants in Washington.

Arevordi

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Who will decide Armenia's destiny -- patriots or tyrants?

Across an ocean and a continent, on a sliver of land tucked between two seas, a little republic today enters its 20th year of independence. I know a man there, an American by birth – except that 20 years ago, he quit his law firm in Los Angeles, decided he had no further business in the United States, and went to search for his destiny in Armenia. It was a romantic time. One by one, the 15 Soviet satellites were breaking from the Kremlin’s orbit, and exiled sons were returning to their homelands to share in the creation of new republics. As for my father, Raffi K. Hovannisian, once the football star of the Pali High Dolphins, he left a promising legal career and moved with wife and children to Yerevan, the capital of Soviet Armenia. After independence was officially declared on Sept. 21, 1991, my father was handed a fax machine and a first month’s paycheck of 600 rubles – $143. He was told he was the republic’s first minister of foreign affairs.

Post-Soviet seeds of democracy

All across the Soviet plains, the seeds of democracy were being sown into soil tyrannized for generations, but no one doubted that they would grow. My father certainly didn’t. Within a year, he had established diplomatic relations with every major democracy in the world. At United Nations headquarters in New York, he had raised the red, blue, and orange Armenian flag. That was nearly 20 years ago. Everything was possible then.But the shadow of history soon closed in on the Armenians. The capital went dark. Faucets dried up. Grain shipments stopped coming in.

And suddenly, as if for the first time, the Armenians realized where they were. To the west: a history of horror with Turkey, the memory of an unrequited genocide in 1915. To the east: the anticipation of war with Azerbaijan, occupant of the ancient American enclave of Artsakh, or Mountainous Karabagh. It is a dangerous thing, when survival becomes the sole ambition of a people. But that is what happened to the Armenians in the years after independence. They lost their hope, their cause, their conviction. They were not as generous as they used to be. And the old Soviet symptoms reappeared.

Corruption and failure

On the streets of Yerevan, a generation of child beggars emerged. Policemen waved batons for two-dollar bribes. Teachers worked for bribes, too. The presidents came to control every judge, prosecutor, and public defendant who wanted to keep his job. Fair trials and free elections became failed promises. Incumbents almost always “won” – while losers almost never went home without first leading a mob of a hundred thousand citizens through the capital. In 1999, during a session of parliament, all the president’s key adversaries were assassinated. My father long ago resigned from the Yerevan government, but he, at least, never gave up the dream. Instead, in 2001, he gave up his American passport once and for all.

The following year, he founded Heritage, a national-liberal party, which now represents the opposition in the Yerevan parliament. To this day, my father is admired by his people. In a recent poll, Gallup pegged his popularity at 82 percent – but not for the obvious reasons. “Achke kusht e,” the people say of him, “His eye is full.” In other words: the man has seen the world, and he’s not in politics for the money. In Armenia, that is enough. Today the Yerevan government is linked to a group of powerful businessmen called “oligarchs,” who invest in and control the political game. One of them has the monopoly on gas, another the monopoly on sugar and flour. All of them have nicknames, armies of bodyguards, and fleets of luxury cars escorting them ostentatiously through the city.

Power-hungry tycoons

The rulers are multimillionaires, the lot of them, though they have incurred great debts to the original power tycoons surrounding the Kremlin in Moscow, to whom they have been selling the country’s gold mines and electricity plants. And they are ready to sell much more than that. Last month, Armenia hosted a summit of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a post-Soviet alliance including Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan – republics unclaimed by the West, republics that are now following an ancient gravity to its source in mother Russia. During the August meeting, Russia secured a 24-year extension of its lease on a key military base in Armenia. Actually, lease isn’t the word. The base is funded and sustained entirely by the Armenian state. Now you see why today, in Yerevan, there is not much independence or democracy left to celebrate. And by now my father, too, must see what his romanticism has long prevented him from seeing: Armenia is not free, not independent, not united. The Soviet soil has spit out the seeds of democracy.

Hope foreshadows freedom

Of course my father still keeps the faith, and there is some evidence to support it. For the first time in Armenia, a civil society is taking shape to bridge a government and a people, so far disenfranchised from each other. Denied television airwaves, opposition media are now transmitting their protest through the Internet. And that little party in parliament, though it has not realized a revolution, can at least symbolize – and foreshadow – a free and independent Armenia. And so we hope, and we even know, that the tree of liberty will grow from Armenian soil one day. But not today, not until, in the words of another founding father, “it is refreshed by the blood of patriots and tyrants” – both of which, I’m afraid, Armenia has plenty.

Source: http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2010/0921/Who-will-decide-Armenia-s-destiny-patriots-or-tyrants