Op-Eds
Efforts to build a “real Armenia”
Translated and edited with permission from the original Armenian text by Dr. Karen Khanlari
The notion of a “real Armenia,” as propagated by Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, is deeply rooted in the rhetoric of Armenian-Azerbaijani “peace” and the “zeroing” of Armenian-Turkish enmity. This ideology stems from a defeatist mindset and a commitment by the Armenian government to serve the Turkey-Azerbaijan tandem, despite attempts by Pashinyan’s party to present a more optimi
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The utopian waffle of the internationalist Bolsheviks and the short sighted gulliblity of the mendacious Soviet Union trading away western Armenia hoping to gain an ally in Turkey but gained a thanks but no thanks and we don’t need you anymore from the wily Turks who a century later seem to be fooling the gullible Kremlin beaurocrats much in the way they did then. Nevertheless the arbitrary boundaries just as elsewhere in the world so don’t take it personally! will be considered binding by the international community and protocols and unless there’s a collapse of the UN such dreams will go nowhere although it does legally protect Armenia from encroachment and conquest and annexation and such actions wouldn’t be accepted by other powers as lawful.
I admit that I have no recollection of having read any of Garo Mehian’s works. But he was a known ARF party ideologue and I distinctly remember attending in my youth, in late 60’s or early 70’s, a lecture he gave in Beirut, in a hall in the Djemaran complex. I have retained the following from his presentation to this day. He said that ARF reined communist soviet expansion onto the Armenian diaspora. He was a committed anti-communist and anti-Soviet Union. Those were the cold war days and Soviet Armenia was an inaccessible state. The idea that “The homeland is an idea, and an idea is conditioned by understanding”, transcending borders may have served Diaspora then but not for long given the state of the Armenian community in Lebanon now. Homeland is in a geographic entity with well-Vadefinite borders.