Notes from the Armenian Blogosphere
Republic Square, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Oneworld Multimedia 2006
Following an earlier post of a photograph of just one of a few swastikas sprayed onto walls near Yerevan’s Republic Square, Garo (AKA Christian Garbis) from Notes from Hairenik left a comment about cleaning them off. Former blogger Nessuna took up the idea and suggested that Garo, his wife Ariga, myself and a visiting German tourist meet on Saturday morning to do work that you’d have expected the local authorities to have done ages ago.
Garo has more on his blog.
It strikes me as hard to believe that some punk is running around Republic Square painting swastikas in some kind of perverse display of national pride, while Armenians are being either brutally beaten or killed in Moscow as well as Krasnodar by neo-Nazi groups. Never mind the fact that over 200,000 Armenians died during World War II to make sure that symbol never draped over the wall of the Government Building on Republic Square. Really, I don’t know what this guy is thinking, but he is seriously misguided, and one only hopes his parents catch on to what he’s been doing, then knock some sense into his pea-brained skull. I hate seeing swastikas anywhere I happen to be, and the last place I want to see them is near my home. Actually, the first thing I saw when I got back about 10 days ago were four of them painted in a grid pattern on a garage door just near the entrance to my section of the apartment building. Nessuna happened to see the owners of the garage today and told them what we had been up to. Within the hour they had painted over the graffiti as well.
So our efforts were not in vain—we were able to get through to some out there that they should take matters into their own hands when they don’t like to see something instead of waiting for someone else, like the “government” to do something about it. One guy even came over and began lecturing Ariga about how to properly remove the paint with the sandpaper by wrapping it around a hard object like a small piece of wood or rock, which was conveniently at hand, then run it across the stone surface in long, even strokes. As Onnik pointed out, to get the job done yourself may never sink in, but at least I feel content that we took matters into our own hands by cleaning away symbols representing hatred, destruction, and pure evil.
Garo’s full post is here.
By the way the guy in orange black shirt is a passer-by who just seeing what we do volunteered to help while cursing the person who painted the swastikas. An older man and a woman joined in scratching the swastikas off, while some other people just looked and gave encouraging nods and “apreqs”. One of them even made a remark like “He makes us feel ashamed,” meaning Armenians and not a foreigner must have done this. Overall, it was interesting to see that people do care.
Comment by Nessuna — October 1, 2006 @ 8:21 pm
nice job guys.
Comment by artyom — October 1, 2006 @ 9:15 pm
This is what my all time fav Ayn Rand has got to say on racism:
Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage—the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.
Racism claims that the content of a man’s mind (not his cognitive apparatus, but its content) is inherited; that a man’s convictions, values and character are determined before he is born, by physical factors beyond his control. This is the caveman’s version of the doctrine of innate ideas—or of inherited knowledge—which has been thoroughly refuted by philosophy and science. Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes. It is a barnyard or stock-farm version of collectivism, appropriate to a mentality that differentiates between various breeds of animals, but not between animals and men.
http://freedomkeys.com/ar-racism.htm
Comment by Nessuna — October 1, 2006 @ 9:20 pm
Thank you guys!
Comment by Nanul — October 1, 2006 @ 10:10 pm
French autumn
ut
…
Trackback by f o l l o w t h e w a y — October 2, 2006 @ 11:33 pm