Monday 20 September, 2010
Solution to the notoriously youtubed incident - Make Every Sunday in the Army a Vartanants Day
The incidents in the army of our homeland have shaken us wherever we live - Armenia or Diaspora. It is shocking to see, hear stories of atrocities at times ending in death in the army at the time of no war. The reactions are always a mix of two camps - on the one hand, we are absolutely concerned with what these incidents cause in terms of the external factors of our national security; and we're concerned with what such offenses entail in terms of internal national security. Some of us even console ourselves with the amount of crimes in the army when compared to those of our neighbors. And surely, our neighbors console themselves with the same criteria. There's an arms race in the Caucasus. Is this new? No. Is it in fact predictable to suppose the period of peace the entire region may ever enjoy? No.
Historically, baptized as Terra Incognita by the Romans, the Caucasus nevertheless has been the geostrategic battleground of the North-South connection whereas the Middle East has been "managed" as a battleground of East-West dimensions. Accordingly, every single warring period has been maintained with the instillment of that period's particular tools of politically militarized games, stretching from treacherous murders of genuine leaders via buying entrusted aides (Roman business as usual), imposition of "cultural ideology" and thus bringing a rupture inside a single nation, causing final division (Persian and Greek business as usual, that caused the seemingly eternal division of Armenia into Eastern and Western), promising to defend if only we make the first move, e.g. rebel, then not showing up to deliver (the Brits, the Americans, the French) due to undisclosed parallel deals with the very same Party they suggested us to rebel against, making long-term agreements for cooperation only to provide corridors of otherwise impossible jurisdiction over internal matters vis-a-vis the international community (Russian business as usual). Now, these forms have unfortunately not vanished, they've rather florsihed over the centuries having turned into sophisticated mechanism of international affairs where small nations truly have no primary voice. Add to this the latest fashion, addition to this family of awkward factors of dominance - the arms race. yes, the Cold War de jure is over. De jure there's no cause for yet another World threatening war. But de facto, and given the many loopholes in the greatly under-achieved democracy anywhere East and South of Vienna, the arms race is on and only proves that Mr Brzezinski and Co.'s army has simply moved its fight onto another stage - the traditional ones - Caucasus and the Middle East.
The point of all this already familiar? Well, very simply put, we all acknowledge that there are no foreseeable shifts from this form of a game. Statistically, they last at least 50 years. The fact that we no longer live in the Middle Ages only gives us advantage compared to our less fortunate ancestors - our CVs of getting robbed of our homelands and cultures (and getting killed in millions on both occasions) have only made the lists of our practical and academic experiences longer and wider in scope and thus, we've become wiser, added with constant exposure to technologically enhanced info input from every single dimension our eyes lay upon in contemporary society. The one lesson we ought to learn is simply go back and reread the pages of our victories, plus the requirements of the age of information and the reality of arms race staged in the Caucasus.
Throughout our victories, starting from Vartanants War ending with the Karabakh War, we always had one thing working for us every single time without exception - faith. Faith in the strength of our minds, endurance of our bodies and the will of steel of our souls. Any description of the Vartanants always begins with "St. Vartan is the Christian general who led the Armenian troops (the Vartanants) against the Persians at the Battle of Avarayr on May 26, 451 A.D. The feast commemorating this great defining moment of the Armenian nation is now kept on the Thursday preceeding the Great Lent." The Karabakh War was fought with more heart when we had St Churches of Gandzasar and Ghazanchetsots and many others right in front of us. True, many of the fighters were raised in the atheist USSR but the reality of letting go of our Holy Sites in our historic homeland has eternally been stamped in our minds and our soldiers fought for it, led by great Armenian commanders, at times from Diaspora who had had the chance to be raised as Christians. The matter was not about the religion as much as the moral grounds that strengthen one's will. No one may ever win if they do not set the almost supernatural as a threshold, to which one's will should aim. Even the communist bosses knew this and having deleted God and religion off the Soviet people's souls had simply replaced THAT God with THIS God- Lenin+Stalin. The images created about these two leaders were nothing short of a giant yet successful PR project. Faith in oneself was one threshold, faith in one's neighbors, friends, comrades-in-arms was another level, which logically is followed with the faith in one's country and can in best cases grow into faith in the world.
Yes, the Soviet Army taught of communism-induced faith but communism itself being non-believer in the supernatural created a despise of a mask of an army that looked shiny and polished and armed-to-the-teeth on the outside, but on the inside it bled to its end by the culture of low individual moral that came in one code name - DEDOVSHCHINA. For those, unfamiliar with the concept, it's basically a hierarchical set up parallel to army titles whereby the superiors get to mock and belittle their inferiors by any and every possible means. We all have inherited this culture in our armies. All our nations are now being armed, creating that polished, well-armed army on the outside and internally demoralized collection of individuals on the inside. Individuals who are, like their relatives back home, getting ready for some kind of real possibility of war (as indefinite as it sounds, the reality of it cannot be denied), confused about what their dues are in the nation's army.
Now, I'm gonna bring God in. Do read before you cringe. Again, we're all in a situation where the scripts are written on bigger political negotiation tables and simply are thrown at us leaving us with no other choice but to react. One party may be led to reacting as an aggressor, while the second army naturally shall react in defense. This is a dark case scenario, but this pictures precisely the case scenarios our armies are being trained for by the best and the greatest of the world's democratic unions. We also have some other big neighbors-gone-nuts that could push a bomb-button at a random second. As you see, in such a setting, anyone, even at an individual level has one thing to assuredly rely on - faith. There's no better weapon than faith, especially when in our reactive defense we know we're in a lesser sin than our unfortunate neighbor.
Thus, having established the reality of ready-to-explode-any-moment state of the affairs and no escape from having army with a strong will above all else, I bring your attention to the fact that we no longer can deny the reality of our Soviet "inheritance" of Godless army hierarchy. We have now all the means to deal with its collective psychological and social hazards for such hazards are more harmful to an army than any enemy's any amount of attacks. Vartanants and Sardarapat Wars were fought by the cheapest weapons one may imagine (inclusive of kitchen knives suitable for cutting vegetables into a salad), Karabakh was fought with outdated weapons that would make us technologically inferior to the enemy, nevertheless we fought and won having shielded ourselves with faith. These incidents have filled our CVs with good emergency response credentials. In emergency, we fight bravely, we fight with faith, we have high moral pre-disposition when facing our enemy. However, now, being owners of our independent country we ought to transpose this faith onto our brothers and friends in the army. The faith that has its threshold set higher than the mere person, the mere army division, the mere country but has at its core moral values that universally and positively and effectively work anywhere in the world.
The dimensions of such faith truly have a universal value and bear a truly giant share of responsibility. Having been a great civilization and still one of the unique old nations with its feet strongly grounded on our homeland, we ought to have faith in that we don't win by merely learning one or two of those tricks they call military diplomacy. We win by teaching that by never being the aggressor, but by always standing up for what's right and defending our very own individual rights to each own piece of our homeland, we can set a standard of that threshold that is universally valuable and has vitality strong enough to grow on other nations - big or small.
Hence, I propose to present our army with structural concepts of this supernatural. Our army, well trained in mind and in body, lacks this spiritual boost due to its Soviet past. But here we are, free and independent and can build a church of moral values inside each and every one of us, even when we're in the army. One thing I've learned looking at Diaspora was how never being armed to attack but being armed to self defense throughout the many wars in the Middle East, our Diaspora kept its cool with its constant questioning and strengthening of morals. There is so much faith, for every person in Diaspora finds it absolutely easy to talk about moral concerns to a clergy man. Our communities in Diaspora are led by and administered by our Church and National Committees. Again, it's not about the religion itself, but the fact that trying to insert moral outside of God's realm is an a priori failure.
We have something to learn from our Diaspora. Its very existence is due to being massacred merely because of being Christian for they WERE given the "option" to convert to Islam and stay alive or remain Christian and perish. (And those of you reading these lines from a "greater power" country driven to becoming an epitome of 21st century modern man, forget the contemporary requirements of political correctness for a moment and see the reality of the Genocide from the 1915 Ottoman reality's viewpoint). Faith is what has kept it thriving and powerful (yes, we are, even though we tend to believe we're not out of sheer disbelief or "achqov chtal").
I suggest that the MoD of RoA bring the church closer to the army. To avoid any future amoral acts, no added force of violence should be exercised. We should preserve that energy and focus it on the day when buttons of the region are pushed big time. For longer and better results and higher moral preparation, give the soldiers a chance to attend a Mass, albeit even a brief one, give them the chance to understand our place on the face of this earth from a universal perspective for them to better realize the importance of their seemingly little roles. Don't belittle them as a means to not evoke disrespect to military hierarchy. Allow a weekly doze of strong moral sense do the job of keeping the person on the demanding line of balance between his superiors and inferiors. And if they've committed a an act of violation (basically, a sin), oblige them to confess and beg for forgiveness along with bearing the consequences by rules of the army's administrative and/or cirminal code. And if someone has messed it all up big time like the youtube guy, and the verdict has been to encarcerate him in isolation, then have the divine lethargy played to him once a day. I'm not saying this is the ONLY way to go about the diminishing offenses, but it does mirror a serious gap in having an army with a perfect mind-body-spirit harmony. Anything less than that is incapable of victory.
September 2, 2010
Iron Curtain Moved, Not Removed - Ode to a 21st Century Style First of September
"...Those two, in paradise, were given a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative..." — Yevgeny Zamyatin (We)
***
"Put your bag at your desk". My teacher, my first ever teacher was screening me from head to toe. I had a giant white bow on a clip hugging my hair into a ponytail. My uniform was brown with a crispy white apron and crispy white cuffs. Everyone was dressed in uniforms of the same color. But mine was a bit different. Instead of three buttons stretching to my neck and holding my collar tightly together, mine was a zipper.
"Where is your uniform from? Did your parents have it made?". She continued not picking her eyes off of my collar, a mesmerizing process that had me in her invisible grip.
"No, comrade Khachatryan, my mother bought it when we were vacationing in Saint Petersburg this summer". I whispered.
"From a department store?"
"Yes".
Her face suddenly shone off. "That's excellent. That is an excellent uniform". She said. "And you are an exemplary student. You will be the head of the class". And through this unclear to my childish mind logic, I was immediately promoted into a level of privilege. I had access to our teacher any time I wanted. The other pupils could of course approach her with questions during the break, but only I could approach not just ask questions but have discussions with her on organisational matters.
***
This is the story of my first ever First of September. First of September was a ritual, a very important ritual of the Homos Sovieticus. It was a threshold between milestones of year-by-year programming that was aimed at turning us into decent communists. My generation was viewed as the lucky one for we were the closest ever to LIVE the communism and not just be concerned with building it or fighting for it. A lot was expected of us in terms of education. We HAD to be the best students on the face of the Earth for "we were born to make fairy tales come true" in a fashion of dialectic materialism.
Our books were provided by the school library, our school stationary costed less than 10 USD for supplies covering an entire academic year. there were children's libraries near our apartment buildings where we lived, our schools where we studied and in the center of the city where our parents would take us to lavishly green and endless parks to play on weekends. There were reading and writing contests at the libraries. We had free access to any books that were placed on the shelved past the censorship regulatory. We had playgrounds near every apartment complex and were safe and secure. Our entire environment was filled with a special kind of naivité. We were protected from someone mean by someone wonderful, but we were not encouraged to ask questions about either of those someones and our parents didn't really like to give answers on how high the pyramid above us stretched.
It was easy to sign up for any cultural activity, literally ANY and expect to learn it at a master level by master teachers - chess clubs for children, houses of culture around every fourth block, teaching performing arts, hand crafts, music... It was all free and the teachers... The teachers were just wonderful. In the course of 10 years, from the age of 5 to 15, I'd learn crochet, macrame, needlework, dancing, shooting (this one lasted till 1987 and was a part of Education in Military-Patriotic Doctrine campaign launched in mid-80s to bring back that lost touch of grand bolshevism) all in one place. Basically I had a free education that years later seemed to be the most expensive form of education rich families strived for in the Western hemisphere.
***
Until now, I don't understand why we had to fair goodbye to all that was so necessarily good. That sense of naivité had a certain romance to it. It was uncorrupted by constant exposures to direct and indirect marketing of anything that has been poisoning the world since 1950s. We had no commercials, our TV programs weren't dull. When we'd return home from school, there would be university professors on live TV giving math, chemistry and physics tutorials for homework, twice a week there were lessons of foreign language, and videoclips were sung by people who actually KNEW how to sing for people who actually UNDERSTOOD music and hence could appreciate it. I now have banned the TV from my home, so my children can appreciate books and guided viewing of films and cartoons with actual messages of worthwhile lessons on life. Every time I walk through the long corridors of stuffed supermarkets, i find myself lecturing them about distinguishing between healthy food and unhealthy food, about chemicals mixed into soil to bring up big and cute fruits and vegetables with no actual taste. I tell them to dig their nose onto the pile of tomatoes and peppers and apples and pears to detect the scent of that polished, well marketed product and see if it resembles its essence.
***
The Iron Curtain is gone, everyone claims to be free and independent, fighting, constantly fighting against all sorts of things - social injustice, corruption, electoral frauds, uncompetitive behavior in the markets, closing of factories and artisan workshops, the increase of prices and so many many other things. But every year around September 1, I can't help but wonder how our lives would have been had Mr Gorbachev not rushed bullheaded onto the Berlin Wall - would my two childhood friends not die in Karabakh? Would a pair of close friends not die from overdoze of drugs that replenished the veins of our eager post-communist youth to experience true freedom? Would my mother go on to be a leading scientist in the field of Chemical Engineering, instead of being sent home from a rather serious industry complex because no one knew if the thing would ever operate again? Would my father be a proud head of a family he could afford to take to summer vacations, to wed them and be present at their weddings, to have that luxury of playing with his grandchildren? Would my sister become an all-homegrown scientist in the field of biochemistry instead of turning the entire pack of her wisdom to the country of Canada? Would I meet my Diasporan husband in a dream country of our homeland and have our children raised there and then, close to our share on this Earth? Would so many people stay in their homelands and do the simplest thing like drinking coffee in the balcony and greeting the sun at exact same time zone without any worries that in 5 years he'd have to deliver this very same ritual God knows in what country, from what balcony and in what timezone.
One may justifiably wonder that it was a choice to eave, that for millions of people there was a choice to stay and a choice to leave. But a First September is a strong catalyst, a prove that neither those who stayed, nor those who left, did so by their own voluntary choice. Once Marx had said the famous quote "There's a ghost lurking in Europe. That is the ghost of communism" . Now it seems "there's a ghost lurking in the globe, it's the ghost of globalization". No one really knows when it started, why it started, where it's leading us to and how, but this particular ghost has no Iron Curtains to face anymore. It does all its ghostly duties rather properly, making sure no one's left behind from this big project of his. Everyone is caught in its whirlwind and all we see is whatever happens inside this whirlpool, we discuss, we debate, we create, we structure and harmonize things that we see inside this giant laundry machine with no sense of mercy, if you're a waste, it'll splash you away from the rest. These days you HAVE to be a part of this whirlpool, it's euphoric, it's promising, it's horrendous no less than communism. And it does claim just as many victims as communism did with the qualitative difference being globalization's gifted covertness.
It's a laundry machine, we're getting clean, we're getting better. WERE we THAT dirty? DID we really need to be in THIS particular laundry? In our unachieved communism, we could progressively think and discuss matters beyond our Iron Curtains, we weren't dumbed down, we were intrigued up. Curiosity was the number one requirement in our schools. Real, scientific level of curiosity. We replaced our known ghost with another one, the way a rehabilitating addict replaces his addiction with another one. It was THIS pattern of addiction THEY were counting on when coming after us. It would be easy for an entire chunk of people to stop chasing a Ghost only to chase another one. It was more colorful, bigger in appearance and it came with pockets full of what Indians call "puja"... "Puja" in sanskrit means blessings by material means. For instance the Indian pagan Gods each arrive at the site of worship and throw "puja" on worshippers - flowers, candy, coins etc. Astonishingly, in conversant Armenian, when we say "puj a", it means "hollow, vanity, emptiness". Essentailly ghost hunting and ghost chasing is a pagan tradition and our communist leaders had long tuned us up to the ok-ness of it, albeit many will claim they were atheists then and are atheists now. In this sense, it's apparent, that atheism, too, is a listed item inside the whirlpool and is, thus, a part of the bad side of the supernatural.
The curiosity of Homos Sovieticus did fail at denying the supernatural and perhaps it takes such an undignifying whirlpool to open our Homos Sovieticus eyes and see that the one and only natural constant in this universe is the supernatural. BUT....but I do seek my very own Iron Curtain. I feel that by removing the Iron Curtain we didn't get rid of it, we simply moved it and placed it between Homos Post-Sovieticus and Homos Sovieticus. In my case (and, in my humble opinion, in my entire generation's case), this has meant an Iron Courtain between the "New" me and all that was good about my Soviet childhood. WE know what we've lost. THEY knew what we ought to loose to join into this global stage of mockery of a human soul. To our new generation - the children of independence, who cheer to First of September - I very sincerely want to pose a question. Do YOU know what WE and subsequently YOU, lost?
