The recent war in Artsakh traumatized the Armenian people, many found themselves in a kind of shock, and for about three years continue to face security problems. The consequences of war have not been completely overcome yet; moreover, its dangers have become more tangible and threatening. We regularly have victims, 120 thousand of our compatriots in Artsakh are in captivity under blockade by Azerbaijan, facing humanitarian crisis and ethnic cleansing. Their lives are in danger, not counting the deprivations they suffer every day. The predictions for the future are unfortunately, even more depressing.
Every day, we face a new challenge, a newly tangled problem, a new tragedy... And this happens in a society divided into opposed, mutually hostile camps, where the generated hate speech poisons the society by threatening individual rights and human dignity. The public's trust has been increasingly declining in the current government. Furthermore the opposition or oppositions fail to offer a way out as a blueprint for a reliable future. Uncertainty about a possible future threat disrupts our ability to avoid it or to mitigate its negative impact, and thus results in anxiety, a depressed state of mind, which is usually caused not as much by losses, but rather by not being able to find a way out of continuous losses.
Against this backdrop, the public has begun to be interested in issues that were previously out of its general attention scope: they are issues related to the course of our history. Are today’s happenings predetermined by the wrong steps taken in past? Did our misconduct in the past cause the loss of Armenian statehood several times? The problem may lie in us, in our thinking, worldview, and value system. May geography be destiny, implying our geographical position and enemy neighbors to be not a secondary factor?
If, however, the cause is within us, which is the most likely of all hypotheses, then its disclosure and acknowledging the past mistakes and omissions may give us a chance to avoid them in the future and correct the situation. The reason, without a doubt, lies within us, at least in the sense that we missed many opportunities in the post-independence decades, did not strengthen and modernize our army, economy and diplomacy, failed to destroy the coalition of foreign forces forming against us, and failed to build relations with possible allies.
These are the issues that we have recently started to talk and write about, which was not done before. We had to ask ourselves such questions every day and find the answers to them every day and build our security system and all other systems similarly.
The idea that the time to talk has passed, and it’s now time for action is repeated over and again. Hitherto, we didn't speak, we didn't write and didn't make sense of the words, we "acted" – the way each understood how to"take actions." The result, as we can see, is disappointing, because the time to talk, judge, and study was missed. However, we should walk the talk, and any work must be based on the "talk" on which all concepts, strategies and tactics are built.
As a part of Christian civilization, we should at least learn from the Gospel, where it is written: "in the beginning was the Word..." Only after that did God create this sinful world of ours. In this sense “the word" should be understood as a project for the future. Time will tell whether we will have such a project able to bring the country out of its dead end.