“I must tell everyone what people tell me, but I don’t have to believe everything at all”
Herodot, old Greek historician
I think people believe everything and anything in early childhood. For example children never suspect that their parents will buy toys for them when they promise to buy toys if they eat their meal. I can’t say exactly what the reason is that people are suspicious. But I can say for sure that starting from some age people start to be suspicious about everything. There are lot of reasons for this… For instance, how can we believe those doctors that say that smoking is bad for health but they smoke themselves? When we see that “false democrats” say that everyone is equal but we understand that strong people always do more, we understand that legal acts are just words on paper, nothing more. After all these people will not give a damn about anything and will try to be as strong as they can. Armenians used to believe in Russians for a long time. Then Armenians started to suspect. I don’t know why but we were the next after Georgia and Ukraine to believe in America. After the referendum everyone understands that Americans are not paradoxical, but rather very paradoxical… And the most important thing is that Europeans still can’t understand why we want to join the EU when sometimes we believe in Russians, and sometimes in Americans. I will explain this. They can’t even imagine that some people understand something different by “joining”. And the EU is the continuence of Russian and American belief for those people. We are always happy to say that we are the first country in the world to accept Christianity as a national religion. And we celebrated the 1700th anniversary of Christianity in Armenia to show this to the world. Everyone saw this. And now, four years after this celebration they still don’t understand why a country that rejected atheism way back in the beginning of the fourth century wants to return to it again. They understand that some of us think that America is a source for money and grants, and others think it is a source of revolution. Some of us think that Russia is a source for weapons and military defense for us, others think it is a source for energy, gas and culture for us. Some of us think that Turkey is a source for enemies for us, others think it is a source for business cooperation for us and so on.
And Armenians don’t believe in anyone any more after the referendum: neither in the authorities, nor in the opposition and nor in inteligentsia.
But I am optimist and Christian, I believe in God. And if we have overcome more difficult situations in our history for many times, it means that we will overcome this unbearable environment of widespread fraud very soon too, and then we will meet each other with smiling and happy faces.