Do You Know Why Students Are Not Joining Protests? Garry Arzumanyan

Artist Garry Arzumanyan wrote on his Facebook page: "Do you know why students are not joining protests? No, young people are not stupid or uneducated, as representatives from middle or older ages portray them; they also realize that they have a good chance of being slaughtered and dispossessed in their own territory. The youth have begun to doubt the 'good intentions' of the Western neighbor. Nevertheless, the enthusiasm that was the main driving force of the revolution is absent from these young individuals.

The reason is deeper: the 'conscious configuration' of the youth has been changed. Through media, grant programs, colorful NGOs, and religious organizations, all these short- and medium-term educational and training programs had a distant goal—to change the psychological configuration of the post-Soviet population. Religious confessions, no matter how beneficial they are at the individual level, have still been catastrophic at the macro level. For the same reason, the psychological configuration of different Christians is also different and has become a significant cause of conflict and misunderstanding among the masses. I'm not even going to talk about the colorful NGOs; they have literally brought the traditional moral system of youth to a fiasco.

All these factors have systematically and gradually brought the consciousness of youth to a state described by some as 'stateless.' For them, it is simply incomprehensible why one should fight, endure hardship, and take risks for the right to make decisions at the national level, for national dignity and statehood, when one can live comfortably, even glamorously, without anxiety and modernly by sacrificing dignity, voice, and national identity. And this was one of the main traps of the Trojan horse that has been sown, rooted, and as far as I understand, has very little chance of being uprooted anymore…"