“It is increasingly obvious that social networks and cyber tools are making efficient autocrats, like China, even more efficient. But they seem to be making soft authoritarians, like Jordan more fragile, and they are making Western democracies increasingly ungovernable.” Thomas Friedman.
It is a good morning on this Saturday April 10, 2021. It is a gorgeous New England day. It is sunny. On the outside the weather is reported to be a pleasant 68 degrees Fahrenheit. It is neither hot nor cold but just the right temperature to be outside in the blossoming and budding New England nature. But I became reflective as an utter chaos percolates in the world that is Armenian. It is world that crosses boundaries and spreads across oceans and continents and is reflected in the Armenian social networks characterized by intolerance, more than anything else. But, I admit to that. It is where I draw most of my information as to what is transpiring in the world that is Armenia.
A friend of mine had posted the screen shot of the Google map posted above. The caption states that Azeri hackers have changed some of the names of the streets of Yerevan and named them after Azeris. The original source may be a fake but the reality is that war is being waged both by hardware and software. We just recently experienced the catastrophic results of a hardware war that was unleashed against us from the land and from the air by TurkaBaijan forces. And after the catastrophic war that led to the capitulation of Armenia, we are now continuing to loose the soft war, that is to say the information war and loose it big time. At this rate, it is not far fetched that in a generation the word Armenia will be erased from the occupied Artsakh and a people called Albanians, who are being projected as native Azeris, will be revived and who will be presented as the builders of the churches, cathedrals and other historical monument we left behind.
I still cannot dismiss the notion that the war we lost was the doing of 30 years of mismanagement and falsehood we believed in and not because of an utter incompetence of the government that came onto power in Armenia in 2018 because of the revolution lead by Nikol Pachinyan. Jirair Tutunjian makes a compelling case of our false understanding that gave us a false comfort. I quote him “Two years ago, the Global Militarization Index of the Bonn International Centre for Conversion (BICC) reported that Armenia was the third-most militarized (after Israel and Singapore) country in the world. Azerbaijan was 12th while Turkey was 23rd. The BICC statistics might have given false comfort to some Armenians who might have misunderstood what “most militarized means” in this context. It means these countries allocate high levels of resources to their military in comparison to other areas of society. The United States, which has the biggest defense budget in the world, was 29th. The United Kingdom was 64th and Canada 94th.”
We took comfort and projected a false sense of security reading that Armenia was the “third-most militarized” country in the world when in fact we did not understand what that really meant. Did we also not miss other important cues as well? A chess player knows that its greatest challenge is not to see on the playing board, what its mind instinctively tells him or her to see, but to see well beyond it. So, I can surmise is in realpolitik. But in order to do that, a person, or for that matter the people as a whole, needs to engage in civil debates and dialogues and not in innuendos and name callings hurled right and left.
I just cannot help. I look back as I become reflective and I realize that the most productive and lasting years of security, and advancement in culture and in science happened in Armenia during the past 70 years of communism rule to which I was blindly opposed, contrary to my maternal uncle Antranig Chalabian who stood with Soviet Armenia when all around our circle of friends chastised him for his stand. He understood and knew what the rest of us did not. Could it be that, for whatever reasons, we are not capable of governing ourselves by ourselves, although we register remarkable personal achievements? The fact of the matter is that thirty years of post Soviet rule brought nothing of tangible value to Armenia in way of furthering fair governance, we faulted Soviet rule to begin with. The fact of the matter is that after thirty years of independence from Soviet rule, a good segment of the Armenians left Armenia because they had lost hope for a better future there and continues to do so.
Rightly or wrongly I am remainded of Doris Days’ popular song “Que Sera Sera”. My mother used to sing it during my childhood years and would take time to explain to me what the lyrics meant when it noted: “the future is not for us to see, whatever will be, wiill be.” Let us hope for the best but not dismiss preparing ourselves for the worst that may come due to faults of our own and no one else.
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