Soft power, hard targets
Editor’s note: This article is an expanded version of a piece originally published by the author in 2022.
A treacherous poisoning of Armenian individual and collective consciousness has been taking place for many years—both in the homeland and the diaspora—to soften the hard targets of indigenous national interests and identity, and to weaken the hearts and minds of those who sacrifice daily for the sake of Armenia and Armenians.
The familiar distortion of half-truths, proto-truths and outright lies—bent into projected reality. the foundation of all advertising—has become deeply embedded in many spheres of Armenian life. This distortion, to which many have seemingly surrendered, is now heightened and on full display across the complete spectrum of Armenian reality.
Both in Armenia and across the diaspora, we now bear witness to an increasing proliferation of false narratives and the commensurate state violence—aimed squarely at indigenous Armenian national interests and, now, particularly against the Armenian Church and democratic reform-minded Armenian citizens.
This deployment of false narratives and mass manipulation lies at the core of soft power tactics, psy-ops (psychological operations) and marketing spin (intentional bias placed on news or narratives). These tactics have targeted—and mutilated—Armenian cultural consciousness for some time.
Such exercises in mass behavior modification have aimed to alter how Armenians see themselves, their nation and their identity. They have played integral roles in so many recent pan-national losses and portend more to come.
The weaving of fiction from half-truths, the removal of context, the omission of innumerable important facts and the dispensing of 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.
While these assets often speak the theoretical language of altruism, in actuality, they are the disguised, friendly-seeming faces of fascism—an advanced 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,” their performance is rehearsed. Despite the seemingly even-keeled, caring delivery 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. From the tragic Arab (and other) Springs of recent memory to 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 USAID, the British Council, a myriad of NGOs or 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.
This is as true in the diaspora as it is in the homeland. Foreign assets bearing Armenian names are also knowingly tearing asunder the very fabric of our communities, threatening the national identity and unity of future generations—even in our most sacred cultural, organizational—and now—religious spaces, at the most fateful of times.
This strategic narrative-building, deployed by both foreign and Armenian operatives, now runs parallel to the increasingly violent repression of dissent in Armenia—both in real world spaces and in virtual social space. Together, these efforts serve the agendas of 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 injustices they herald. Their calls for so-called peace and democracy are cloaked in deception. What they actually offer is further death and destruction, with guaranteed profits to the harbingers of this doom.
These are the hybrid horrors: the unholy union of hard and soft power. This is the massaging and massacring of real life, the bending of symbols and language into the shape of objectivity, delivered through documentaries, news reports and social media feeds—promising peace and prosperity while concealing contempt and conquest.
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—foisted upon us by others (including traitorous Armenians) and allowed by our own softened selves. This erosion of culture, identity and values has long preceded collapse.
Our first act must be 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 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—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 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. A world must always be dismantled before a new one is born.
