A journalist from a newspaper edition, which I don’t remember now wrote an article about the “Golden Apricot” third annual international film festival and called it “unprecedented”, perhaps not realizing the fact that the other two festivals had preceded the third. But this is not a matter of misunderstanding, but rather the artificial use of a criminological word.
This is the same reason that the TV advertisement announcer screams “unprecedented prizes” and you predict that people (the poor citizens of the country) have already won the washing machine and now they’re going to win a car. Then a dance teacher says the word “unprecedented”. He says: “Our dance ensemble had unprecedented success during the concert in Paris”. This means to say that the ensemble doesn’t have the opportunity to dance and reach success anytime. How unjust.
In a word, for Armenians, the word precedent means something joyful, which could have happened in the past but didn’t due to bad luck. Now when we’re dealing with the unprecedented attack on General Suren Abrahamyan and the general has made an unprecedented announcement and pointed fingers at the prime minister, Chairman of the National Assembly Tigran Torosyan is trying to distract the people’s attention from the Prime Minister through the means of the same precedent event. He says that the prime minister has been in that position for all these yeas and there still hasn’t been a precedent when he has attacked his opponents.
By using yet another term from the criminological terminology-the hypothesis of innocence-I don’t want to doubt and it doesn’t even cross my mind that the prime minister could be capable of such a thing. In this case, I’m using the hypothesis of innocence based on morality. I’m not getting into legal issues because either way nobody is going to find out about the attack on the general and no investigation is going to lead to the authorities. This is really unprecedented.
It’s really interesting to analyze the sub-consciousness of Tigran Torosyan as he uses his defense strategy (in the previous edition I talked about “not paying the salaries of doctors) and “solve the problem concerning the salaries that haven’[ been paid” in order to show that the television show host confesses that the salaries haven’t been paid). Now the Chairman of the National Assembly is doing the same thing as he confesses that the authorities are criminals. However, he doesn’t say that Andranik Markaryan doesn’t have such values and that he would never do something like that to get revenge over some general who made an offensive statement aimed towards him, but rather he says that Andranik Markaryan has never committed a precedent act like that during his six years as prime minister of Armenia. Based on this , we can conclude:
a. he could have done it, but he didn’t
b he could have done it and continue being prime minister.
It’s because nobody can say anything to the prime minister as long as the political situation of the country hasn’t changed and as long as the higher authorities haven’t decided to “sacrifice” someone for the sake of PR. It’s because in Armenia, the precedent is the unprecedented. Let’s not go too far: the case of Hakob Hakobyan shows Armenians that they are governed by a group of people with a criminal past. It’ s enough for one of them to make a careless mistake and the chief prosecutor will come to the parliament with unprecedented articles. American “crime” movies would no longer be produced if American investigators would have been able to reveal crimes this fast, or perhaps they are revealing the cases and film producers are making people misunderstand so that the film will be longer and interesting. One of the major scenes of the “crime” films is the debate between the “boss” and the average investigator. The “boss” wants to throw the unnecessary collected evidence on the shoulders of the average investigator and this proves the lack of talent of the other investigators. Then the “boss” and the investigator go to the bar for some whisky and to think about new ways of revealing the case. It’s too bad that film production doesn’t go back millennia, otherwise we Armenians would say that when Armenia was producing films, Hollywood was nothing. It’s too bad that the Armenian state doesn’t go back centuries, otherwise we would say that when Armenians were revealing crimes, Americans still didn’t know the meaning of a crime. It’s too bad that the Armenians didn’t invent criminology because otherwise the precedent would be unprecedented, just like the washing machine, as well as the deputy mandate.