In recent days, many people were upset by the information that starting from July 1, several tens of thousands of citizens no longer will not receive social benefits. Many categories of pensioners, whose pensions have been increased by the government by 10,000 drams, and who have also become beneficiaries of the health insurance system, belong to them.

The government’s argument is that since their incomes have increased, they no longer receive benefits. The indignant people were upset not only by the fact itself, but also by the fact that the government has been depriving people of benefits, especially since July, when the elections have already ended, and Nikol Pashinyan received the votes of all those people to whom he distributed election bribes at the expense of all taxpayers in the form of increased incomes.

What happened, with all its abomination, contains certain components of justice. In the sense that all those who blindly believed in Pashinyan’s promises and who preferred the conditional 10 thousand drams to the tragedies caused by his fault to Armenia and Artsakh, the spilled blood and sacrifices of more than 5,000 young people, here they all really get, including being deprived of benefits.

You have to pay for everything, and now all those people are paying to elect Pashinyan, who lost the war during the elections, surrendered Artsakh, generates hatred against the Armenians of Artsakh, and fights against Armenianness.

In that sense, they are lucky, because the allowance is an unimaginably small price that one can and should pay to wrap this crap around Armenia’s neck.

This story, however, has a wider context and raises the issue of civil responsibility in general, the payment of a person for any act of public significance. Elections in Armenia have always been treated as a performance, in which participation is something like a protocol.

The most cunning ones not only participated, but also snatched some material compensation from one side or the other. But due to individual choice, there was no mechanism of collective responsibility and individual payment again, as such, there was not and cannot be. But life shows that it should be, at least in the future not to let anti-state elements close to power.

The devilishness of this payment mechanism, however, is that the voters of this government pay not all those who did not elect the government and who have to suffer the deprivations made inevitable by the former, but … the same government.

In other words, this is a monetary settlement between the government and its own electorate, which has nothing to do with real justice. Meanwhile, the justice would be that the citizens who voted for the CP should somehow pay more than 700,000 to those citizens who rejected Nikol Pashinyan. But even in the case of payment, there was hardly any question of justice, because most of the refusers did it not for material gain, but thus protecting dignity, the last remaining fragments of Armenianness.

Nikol Pashinyan, using administrative levers, power structures, external support and the state budget, won not only and not so much his political opponents, but those very people, the citizens of RA, who will have to endure national shame and indignity for at least another 5 years because of the citizens who elected him and were deprived of social benefits.

Everything, yes, has a price in life. Several tens of thousands of citizens are paying for Pashinyan’s rule by being deprived of social benefits, while at least five thousand people have paid for it with their lives, and an entire people living in Artsakh with their homeland. And this is not a story about justice, but about cosmic injustice.   

Harutyun Avetisyan