VIDEO: Are the 10 million Armenians we keep mentioning listed somewhere? - Pashinyan

Recently, a question arose for me: is there a list of the 10 million Armenians we constantly mention? I am convinced that there isn’t. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan stated this today, June 19, during a meeting with participants of the 'iGorts' program on involving specialists from the diaspora in Armenian state governance, noting that we do not always give importance to numbers.

“This is again a phenomenon of sanctification, where that number is sacred; do not touch it! That number neither increases nor decreases, you cannot change it. If someone says it's not 10 million, but 10 million 561 thousand, everyone will attack them and say, ‘Hey, you fool, you amateur, how do you know?’ If someone says no, it’s 9 million 200 thousand, they’ll say, ‘You liar, you’re minimizing the global influence of Armenians, you just erased 800 thousand Armenians with a stroke of a pen.’ This is our reality,” Pashinyan added.

“It seems that only a few hundred people out of that 10 million participate in the 'iGorts' program, but that’s a very important factor. First, it’s a political message, then it’s an organic connection. Organic ties are formed at a genetic level, and genes are very invisible, just as one soul can remain invisible among millions of people. What I said today, I believe is very important, but I wouldn’t have said it in another environment. We can meet with various strata of society; every audience implies its own discourse, and what I said today was only possible to express at this meeting,” he remarked.