A treacherous poisoning of Armenian individual and collective consciousness has been occurring for many years in the Homeland and Diaspora to soften the hard targets of Armenian indigenous national interests, Armenian indigenous identity, and, to weaken the hearts and minds of the stalwart men and women who sacrifice, each day, for the sake of Armenia and Armenians.
The familiar contextualization of half-truths, proto-truths, and outright lies bent into projected reality (the foundation of all advertising) to which many have, it seems, comfortably surrendered many areas of their personal and collective lives, is now heightened and on full display across the complete spectrum of Armenian reality.
Both in the Homeland and Diaspora, we now bear witness to an increasing proliferation of false narratives and commensurate state violence being directed against indigenous Armenian national interests and, now, particularly against the Armenian Church and democratic reform-minded Armenian citizens.
This type of false narrative deployment and mass manipulation has been and is at the core of Soft Power tactics, Psy-Ops (Psychological Operations), and Marketing Spin (intentional bias placed on news or narratives) that have targeted–and mutilated–Armenian cultural consciousness for some time.
These exercises in mass behavior modification have aimed to eventually make Armenians think very differently about themselves, their nation, and their identity and have played integral roles in so many recent pan-national losses and portend more to come.
Weaving fictions from half-truths, taking information and statements out of context, omitting innumerable important facts, as well as dispensing with quantifiable data, eyewitness accounts, and specific source notations from reporting, news, and analyses are all par for an advanced course in strategic culture cultivation and command control.
Creating revisionist histories, both proximate and distant, all with an eye towards disempowering indigenous people and diminishing their lands/resources, history/culture, and religion/beliefs, is at the crux of these ruthless processes.
This is the toxic cocktail aiming to keep us from seeing the ties (lies) that bind us as we are led to slaughter.
And, when all of this semiotic sculpting and mind machination is done in the voice and visage of curated, archetypal purveyors of human rights, kindness, and empathy—both Armenian and foreign–these deadliest of cultural killers and narrative-makers, are more easily followed, wreaking havoc upon the psyches and social fabric of all they encounter.
Although these assets often speak the theoretic language of altruism, in actuality, they are but the disguised, friendly-seeming faces of fascism–an advance force for rampant, merciless, violent, foreign and/or local state, corporate, clan, and/or individual interests of exploitation and destruction.
Whether they be the archetypes of the “attractive, vacuous commentator,” “the avuncular academic,” “the good Armenian (or Turk),” “the sincere democratic politician” or “the truthful investigative journalist,” each with his or her, respective, choreographed, seemingly even-keeled, caring,” and purportedly objective meanderings, the results are the same.
These deadly false-democracy dealers and not-so-civil-society operators, often led and tread by representatives, contractors, and/or assets (conscious or not) of foreign intelligence services or their front groups, have run roughshod-ruin over every country they have ever entered during not only the many tragic Arab and other Springs of recent memory, but a long list of wasted Winters of destruction implemented throughout the Middle East and the world for greed and grotesque gains.
Whether the orders come from neighboring belligerent states, their affiliates or are filtered through the likes of the USAID, British Council, myriad NGOs, and their non-western counterparts (as well as their native Armenian cohorts), the targets, consequences, and purpose are the same. We see and hear the narratives echo through the “venerable” New York Times, NPR, BBC, CNN, Radio Liberty, and, of course, their Armenian home-grown iterations. And, when combined with a massive proliferation of (social) media players–foreign, Armenian, and questionably funded—the destruction upon Armenian national consciousness and, consequentially, programmatic action for the sake of Armenian national interests in real world and virtual settings is immeasurable.
This is just the tip of the spear (not iceberg) piercing the very heart of what is left of Armenia and all Armenians…
When you kill the mind, the body will follow…
It is a shame that these acts of nuanced and not so nuanced propaganda (and their devastating real world consequences) against our nation, ordered from on high and implemented on low, continue without so much as a nod of acknowledgment from most of our beleaguered, murdered, and still cognitively dissonant people as they welcome, again and again, the rewriting of their histories, the mythification of their reality, and the brainwashing of their own, as their and our world collapses at the hands of others and ourselves.
This is true in the Homeland as well as in the Diaspora wherein foreign assets bearing Armenian names are also knowingly tearing asunder the very fabric of our communities, and the national identity and national unity of future generations, even in the most sacrosanct of individual and collective cultural, organizational—and now–religious spaces, at the most fateful of times.
This deliberate, strategic narrative building by expert operators (foreign and Armenian) in concert with the increasingly violent physical correlatives of Armenian state organized repression–selectively in real world spaces and completely in virtual social space–have worked in tandem with neighboring and regional genocidal powers directly against indigenous Armenian national interests and our survival.
Our enemies, sometimes camouflaged as allies–and sometimes as Armenians–have cultivated an all too fertile ground for the lies and subsequent actual injustices heralding the coming of their so-called peace and democracy, however that much-anticipated arrival is actually the coming of further death and destruction to us and ours in this dire reality, with guaranteed bloody profits to the harbingers of this doom.
These are the hybrid horrors of hell, the evil marriage of hard and soft power in bloody narrative building, the massaging and massacring of real life, and the molding of semiotic code and humanity into the language of the “objective documentary,” the nightly news, and the social media feed, all festooned with lies of prosperity and peace, but bursting with the underlying, living truth of oppression, intolerance, and disdain for all that is ours and indigenous—our beliefs, our identity, our honor, our lives.
These modern day tyrants, with their minions and machinations, have created demographics of indentured servitude so Instagrammatically skewed that their victims cannot even recognize that the soft power players, often disguised as journalists, experts, influencers, and purveyors of aid and benign-seeming goods and services, are but sextons in the graveyards of the already fallen.
The true monsters—the Grendels and Gollums—of this world are preparing, once again, for a New World Order of great magnitude and girth, and the sacrifice for that order, again, is Armenia and Armenians, among other indigenous peoples.
Part of getting ready for this New World Order is preparing generations that will not only not remember the past, but will not recognize the future-forming present nor their role within it, thus producing generations cultivated to never know themselves, and, moreover, to feel no power in doing anything about their collective, critical present and their endangered future.
It is time to unravel the web of deceit, destruction, and dissonance—cognitive and otherwise–foisted upon us by others (including traitorous Armenians) and allowed by our own softened selves, that constitutes the representational, codic, mutation of culture and polity which precedes the collapse of frameworks of mores and values that have otherwise buttressed Armenian identity and consciousness inside and outside the Homeland for millennia.
And, the first step in this process of shedding the yolk of manipulation and oppression is to unlearn the lies and untruths that have plagued us and plague us still, to call things by their actual names, and to learn (and never forget) our true histories, values, and our particular place in this world–who we are and what we–and the Armenian Highland–truly represent.
Don’t underestimate your enemies… They have been expending great resources, blatant and subtle–human, financial, material, and cultural–to destroy us for a very long time and always right under our very noses.
More importantly, however, never, ever underestimate yourselves and the stalwarts of our nation who despite all the horrors, endured, and still to come, shall rise up to strike with great might our enemies, external and internal.
Do not misconstrue silent preparation for sleep…
Nine months of gestation is the price of birth and one always must dismantle one world to be born into another… –Ara Mgrdichian/AKM
Los Angeles, CA
(Expanded from an article by the author published in 2022)
© Ara Mgrdichian
