The army is being taken away from Etchmiadzin

Nikol Pashinyan is facing a very difficult task. The Prime Minister of Armenia should explain to the Armenians that white is white, and black, respectively, is black. For almost two hundred years, Armenians thought differently, but now they have to learn to live in the real world. It's very difficult. Parting with myths and inflated ambitions, and even so deeply rooted, is a difficult process. Especially when there are a lot of people who want to get in the way.

Judging by the Armenian media, the propaganda against the current government is very widespread. Most of the country's media carry out propaganda in favor of the revanchist opposition. In principle, they can be understood - the economic situation in Armenia is difficult, and therefore the principle of "whoever pays, orders music" works there without regard to the interests of his native state. And the Karapetyan and Vardanyan families pay, the Kocharyan mafia pays. There are almost no voices of reason in this yell. 

At his last press conference, the Armenian Prime Minister once again stated that the topic of the so-called "Karabakh movement" should be closed forever. By keeping it on the agenda, Armenia continues to remain in a geopolitical trap, Pashinyan said. In his New Year's address, the Prime minister suggested that Armenians who disagree with this course of government organize a revolution. No revolution has taken place, and now Nikol Pashinyan says: "the revolution has not taken place, we will continue this policy."

By building a real Armenia, Pashinyan abandoned the "Karabakh issue" and the use of such instruments of the Armenian community as the Diaspora and the church in politics. For this, he became a target for criticism from revanchists and unstable and still subject to the old myths of the masses. The other day, former President Robert Kocharian bluntly accused Pashinyan of not using this potential "for the benefit of the Republic of Armenia." In previous years, the Diaspora and the Church, rather than the national Armenian state, the Republic of Armenia, represented the Armenian people to the world. In pre-Pashinyan times, these two tools were very actively used to promote criminal Armenian interests. Pashinyan rejected them, opposing Yerevan to the diaspora and entering into a struggle with the church.

Last week, church revanchist circles were rocked by another hysteria.

The Armenian government has made a tough decision on regimental priests. By order of the Minister of Defense, the spiritual leadership of the armed forces was dissolved. This structure, which had been in operation since 1997, was disbanded, and the regimental priests were sent home. Since February 1, the activities of the so-called spiritual leader of the Armed Forces and the Institute of military clergy as a whole have been discontinued. This does not mean that military personnel will be deprived of spiritual support. But now the appointment of priests will be handled not by the Armenian Apostolic Church, but by the secular authorities - the departments of moral and psychological support of the General Staff of the Armed Forces. In addition, conscripts with appropriate education will be able to perform spiritual service. During their service, they will be appointed chaplains. The Minister of Defense retained control over the execution of this order.

Thus, the state eliminated the control of the AAC over the formation of the worldviews of the Armed Forces personnel. The Armenian Apostolic Church has lost the opportunity to influence the ideological training of Armenian servicemen and introduce toxic narratives into the fragile minds of the younger generation. Armenian priests will no longer march in orderly rows at military parades.

Patriotic training in the Armenian army has always been based on the nationalistic and misanthropic tenets of the church, which seriously distort the idea of what the armed forces are for. The army has always been positioned in Armenia as a means of realizing painful ideological fantasies and realizing expansion, achieving certain "age-old aspirations" and "restoring historical justice." The Armenian "warrior" was brought up in the spirit of extreme hatred of his neighbors, because only unmotivated hatred could force him to commit grave war crimes, striving to achieve his goal by any means. The Armenian people and the Armenian army, including, being not only spiritually, but also morally, ideologically, politically and at the level of everyday life, under the pressure of the postulates of the Armenian Apostolic Church, turned into a crowd living in a far-fetched past and actually left without a future.

In an environment where the military leadership and the army command staff are saturated with corruption, and violence is rampant in the Armed Forces, it was very convenient for the church to work. It's the easiest environment to raise zombies in. However, this had nothing to do with building a professional and properly motivated army.

More broadly, the Armenian Church disfigured the consciousness of not only military personnel, but also society as a whole. To stop this and allow the society to recover, Pashinyan began to push the AAC away from the possibilities of influence. For this, Yerevan, for the first time in recent history, was accused by PACE of violating rights and freedoms. For the first time, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe saw violations of democracy in Armenia, but not where they were worth seeing. The relationship between the authorities and the church is just a positive process, a kind of sanitization of ideological stables. The current prime minister has always had strained relations with Etchmiadzin, and the church's attempt to lead a coup in 2024 angered him completely.

Answering relevant questions at the PACE session in January, Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan called the talk about the oppression of the Armenian Apostolic Church gossip. According to him, there is no persecution of clergymen in Armenia. But there are clergymen who publicly urge citizens to eliminate the democratically elected government by force.

As you know, Etchmiadzin has always been a separate "state" that does not take into account the official authorities of the country. The leaders of Armenia themselves went bowing to the Catholicos. Because it was not Armenia, but the church that was the center around which the world's Armenians revolved. This construction has always been based on the idea of a "martyred people," and the church has acted as a guarantor of the preservation of identity. In this scheme, the army was assigned the role of a practical executor of "age-old aspirations", in other words, an occupier. The Church was directly involved in shaping the worldview of military personnel. This worldview did not prevent the massacre of peaceful Azerbaijani villages, but it did not contribute to the motivation for heroic deeds, nor did it encourage the desire to die in a foreign land. The Second Karabakh War was a demonstration of the complete failure of church training manuals for the army, which were compiled in the dark corners of Etchmiadzin.

In order to turn the country into a real national state, which itself would become the center for the world of Armenians, it was necessary to eliminate the omnipotence of Etchmiadzin. Of course, in order to completely defeat evil, it will be necessary to clean up a huge layer of mythologized history and shake out the ideological cushion of today's Armenian statehood. But the result will be the first real Armenian state in history. Who will have an army defending the borders of his own country, and not killing children and the elderly on the territory of his neighbors.