Political scientist Vahe Davtyan writes: “There are conditions in which the only alternative to revanchism is assimilation. Substantial nutrition. A people living in a closed cycle of injustice for years cannot help but accumulate negative energy. And that energy sooner or later transforms into big waves of extremism. It is a special “compressed spring”, the opening of which sometimes has disastrous consequences.

The reality is, sooner or later that spring snaps.

Read the classics of geopolitics, from Haushofer to Gumilev, who long established this fundamental pattern at the biological level. Each ethnic group strives for the expansion of its living space. Meanwhile, the purposeful compression of that space within the ethnic group leads to deep mental distortions, collective complexes. As a result, there is a desire to establish justice. Sometimes it’s a healthy aspiration, sometimes it’s fanatical. But that is perhaps another topic.
That accumulation begins with the elementary opposition “I-he”, “us-them”, without which there is no identity. Neither national nor political. Instead there is a virtual identity, a digital identity with extensive artificial intelligence infrastructure.

And today they are trying to root out that organic opposition by unilaterally establishing “peace” and liquidating the Declaration of Independence, by symbolic importation of wheat and gasoline, and by statements about the non-existence of the Artsakh movement. The goal is simple: by excluding that opposition, we also exclude our re-consciousness.

Parallel to that, in Azerbaijan, “us-them” is a basic factor of state policy. The second Artsakh war and subsequent developments created fertile ground for nation-building, national and political identity formation in Azerbaijan. Today they are in the most active stage of that process. Meanwhile, they urge us not to use the place name “Artsakh” so that in Azerbaijan… they don’t use “Goychan”.

This is a psychological operation, the goal of which is the deactivation of collective memory, the gradual dismantling of political subjectivity. In this context, the artificial cancellation of the “us-them” contrast is not a reconciliation mechanism, but a disorientation mechanism.

The paradox is that on one side “us-them” is institutionalized, on the other side it is presented as a source of backwardness and even a threat.

However, historical experience shows that such asymmetries do not last long. A spring cannot be compressed indefinitely.”

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