Weeks ago, Nikol Pashinyan, in order to justify his next unrestrained speech, said that he is a “passionate orator”.

I think many people mocked and joked about this topic, focusing on the word “passionate”, behind which Pashinyan’s confession was forgotten. he is really an orator, a good orator, who seized power in 2018 with his own words, and now one of the three main pillars that hold it is his word (I will not touch on the other two – repression and foreign support – A.A.).

Yes, Nicol is an orator, but in the ordinary, classical sense, he is of the most dangerous, most destructive school of orators; he is a sophist.

In our everyday life, we use the word, usually with a serious face, to describe people who iron their heads or who airlift.

In fact, it is not an innocent trait of self-righteous people. History knows many cases when sophists destroyed states, and Armenia is not the only one.

The leitmotif of my article is not a review or a theoretical analysis. I think the opposition is still losing to Pashinyan because it does not comprehensively analyze and systematically approach this issue. In short, the struggle of the opposition should be more “knowledge-based”, because in fact Nikol is a phenomenon that has its own methodology.

Let’s try to give the main descriptions using historical facts.

In ancient Greece, the conflict between Athens and Sparta ended with Sparta’s victory because of the sophists who held power in Athens. It was they who began to create a climate in Athens, and one of them, Alcibiades, who was the ruler and most influential orator, persuaded the city to send an unprecedentedly large fleet to Sicily, which ended in disaster for Athens.

The ancient Greeks knew well the power of speech, which became more important in the case of the Athenian polis democracy, the mechanism of which, if simplified, was the following: who would convince whom and how.

It was here that his perverted and manipulative type, sophistry, was mixed into sound and traditional rhetoric. If until then language and speech served to describe reality, then the sophists began to improve, using speech to distort reality. Sophists have perfected convincingly proving what is not true (Nicole, listen to AA).

As knowledge no longer prevailed, truth came under attack. Sophists turned political debates into who-who-disgusted-who-who-disgusted-principles, rather than the search for truth.

The sophists said that it was not important to master the subject or to be knowledgeable about the matter. It’s important to be able to talk about the topic (Nicole’s ear calls again).

Another important observation. if in science the facts are undeniable and unchanging phenomena, then in sophistic rhetoric any fact is deniable, so it is no longer a fact (I imagine how Nicole’s ears are responding now, – AA).

This is the “deadly weapon” of the sophists, ISKANDER. The blatant denial of facts violates the stability and balance of reality, destroys the environment surrounding people.

Another secret trick of sophists is to emphasize “values” and emotions in speech. And this is logical. denying the facts, they destroy the reality, which they fill with their emotions (as Pashinyan would say, with “passions”, A.A.).

Unlike facts, “values” and emotions are not immutable characteristics of reality, they do not contain information about the world, but express our subjective attitude towards the world…

However…

After the destruction of facts, the sophists’ “values” and emotions become guiding, determining, and creating the illusion of stability.

It is difficult to pretend to describe the problem in more detail with one article, that is from a prison cell, so in the next publications I will try to address the question (very important, – AA) of how the ancient Greeks fought against the tricks of corrosive sophists.

To be continued…

ARMEN ASHOTIAN

Vice President of RPA

“Vardashen” Prison

04.07.2026

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