Baku was baffled after The Telegraph listed Yerevan as one of the oldest cities in Europe.
As Khakin.az wrotes: “Yerevan as an ancient Armenian city – this is not our history. This is annoying, painful, and shameful. Yes, this is a lie! Yes, a falsification! Yes, we have written a lot about the fact that Yerevan is a medieval Azerbaijani city built a little more than 500 years ago, and we refuted the Armenian speculation that Yerevan is 29 years older than Rome, etc. But alas, it didn’t work!”
Of course, the Absheron (district in Azerbaijan) media almost every day provide their dumbfounded readers with brilliant fragments of “history”, “political science”, and “geopolitics”. But not such a thing!
The grief, in this case, is accompanied by complaints that our dear neighbors “failed to advance the truth beyond the borders of the Azerbaijani media.” The Western scientific world seduced by the “Armenian lie” did not hear their voice.
This annoyance can be understood. This isn’t just about the Armenians with their “mighty lobby” that can prove anything to anyone, defeating the poor Turks…
Over the past few years, President Ilham Aliyev has repeatedly asserted that there is no Armenia and never has been, that “the so-called Eastern Armenia” is nothing more than “Western Azerbaijan”, and that the time is not far when he, as the supreme commander in chief, will order his heroic troops to wash their boots in the cold waters of Lake Gekcha, which the Armenians for some reason call Sevan.
The president’s word, as you know, is the law. But a completely different thing turned out – apparently, not everyone agrees with such absolute truth, his word isn’t law for everyone.
“Nonsense, and nothing more!” And to refute “falsification”, any means are good.
Khakin.az with a reference to the British newspaper writes that “the city has been conquered by the Assyrians, Byzantines, Romans, Persians, Seljuk Arabs, Mongols, Turks, and the Soviet Red Army in 1920.”
Here it is! Armenia has already “forgotten” that it was the Soviet government that created a state for them at the expense of the native Azerbaijani lands. At the same time, Armenians are allowing The Telegraph to expose the USSR as an invading empire. Here it is – yet another evidence that Armenians have betrayed Russia!
Dear reader, do you understand anything? Personally, I do not. How do you go from the topic of Erebuni (original name of Yerevan) to the USSR, not to mention the “Armenians betrayed Russia”?
However, it is very possible that this strange opus filled with the names of medieval Turkic “builders” and nomadic tribes (nomads, I must say, have never built cities) has been written for the very sake of the betrayal claim and in order to once again try to have the Armenians punished by the heavy hand of the formidable Moscow.
What if this works, they thought? However, so far, none of these attempts have brought results…
The author curses not only Armenians but also his own state structures and the Azerbaijani diaspora that work poorly, that have not developed the necessary PR plan which would allow competing with the Armenians on an equal footing on the world stage.
But the Azerbaijanis do not understand that it is necessary to work rather than “honor and praise themselves at one-time foreign events which guests remember for their pilaf, kebab, and pakhlava more than for political theses important for Azerbaijan.” We will agree, self-criticism is good. But even if you treat foreign PR specialists with kebab and pakhlava all day, nothing will change.
And one more thing. While Azerbaijanis are “offended”, we are anxious. The main problem, after all, is not that opuses of this kind appear from beneath the feathers of Azerbaijani propagandists – this can be understood.
It is bad that they, apparently, themselves begin to believe in all the lies that they have deliberately invented for many years. As a result, not only regular people but also individuals who are supposed to clearly distinguish the truth from their own conjectures are seriously confused.
The 10-million-strong neighboring people do not live in reality but in some fictitious virtual space in which there is no place for Armenia and the Armenians at all. This is very dangerous and worrying.
With that in mind, it is very difficult to imagine how they will “prepare the nations for peace”, when sooner or later such a task arises. Who to make peace with – with those who do not exist and have never existed?
If you think about it, this is the propaganda of war – much more harmful and dangerous than military spells, display of firearms, etc. The military must ex-officio look brave – such is their job.
But writing people, I think, should instead rely more on intellectual “muscles”. Unless, of course, they have finally atrophied.
Armen Khanbabyan
