Pashinyan has incited and is inciting a "war of memory" against us. If we want to defeat and remove him from office, we must first defeat him in that very war of "memory." Armen Ashotyan

War against our memory: Who won, the heart or the stomach?, wrote Armen Ashotyan, Vice Chairman of the Republican Party of Armenia, from the Vardashen Penitentiary Institution.

“Two weeks have passed since the parliamentary elections, and it was expected that passions would not subside after such a terrible electoral spectacle.

However, the problem is deeper than the results of the rigged elections or the unresolved crisis.

Indeed, everyone is dissatisfied with the election results: Pashinyan, who was unable to secure the much-coveted constitutional majority, the opposition, who did not reach the indicator necessary for Nikol's dismissal.

I think it was natural and inevitable that the crisis that has existed since 2020 would not be resolved with the political toolkit alone, namely the parliamentary elections. The explanation is clear: after the 44-day war, our people are in a continuing, exhausting, and shattering crisis, not political, but value-system-based.

In the last elections, we, as a society, were choosing not only between the paths of the future, but also between assessments of the past. With our votes, we were answering not only the question “where are we going?” but also “where do we come from?”

We must have the courage to admit that, despite all the shameful pressures, fraud, interference, and pre-election bribes, Pashinyan has managed to form a crowd of admirers of his destructive, revisionist “new morality.” Yes, he still does not have a majority around that agenda, but the united opposition must also record that there is no longer a majority around “classical patriotism.”

During the election campaign, figuratively speaking, the first board was about the “stomach” - from pensions to new jobs, but at least the second board was about the “heart” - “From Ararat to Aragats”.

Without underestimating the electoral and mobilization potential of the “stomach”, I emphasize that the ontological battlefield for the future of Armenia is the “heart” - the struggle for our past.

Pashinyan has provoked and is waging a “war of memory” against us, and if we want to win and remove him from office, we must first defeat him in that very war of “memory”.

As the Roman historian Tacitus used to say: “Those who go to war, remember both your descendants and your ancestors,” he wrote.