Of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, Leeches, and Snakes

I have thought about writing this for years. I’ve started and I’ve stopped. I’ve had enough. Here it is.

Stop attacking the Armenian Revolutionary Federation you worthless, spineless snakes.

The ARF is marking its 130th anniversary this year. Other than our Church, it is the oldest existing Armenian institution and it is the oldest political one.

It also happens to be the Armenian Nation’s favorite whipping boy. We still have to hear idiots ask questions like, “did you know the ARF worked with the Young Turks?” This is undoubtedly something you heard from your idiot uncle. The implication here is that the ARF was complicit in the Armenian Genocide, one of the telltale signs that you’re talking to an idiot. In the simplest and completely inadequate summary that I can now manage, the ARF met with the Young Turks because they hoped to improve the situation of the Armenians in the post-Sultan Ottoman Empire. When it became clear that the Young Turks were up to no good, guess what? The ARF started fighting against them.

But what about them signing away the First Republic? Again, you and the ignorance of your family members who still believe in this drivel is mind-boggling, not least because there are things called books and even this wonderful invention called the Internet where you can literally find any piece of information ever created in the history of mankind. If you used the Internet to learn things instead of trolling me on Twitter and inviting me to fights at the church across the street from your grandma’s house, you would know that the epicenter of the Armenian community was Tiflis (modern-day Tbilisi, but you knew that…no, you didn’t). The ARF tried for quite a while to get a coalition government together to run the show for the First Republic but, oddly, nobody wanted to move to Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. So who went? That’s right, the ARF. They went, they took up the unenviable burden of running an impoverished, disease-ridden, post-genocidal country – their homeland. When the situation was no longer sustainable as they had Turkey coming from one side and the Soviets from the other, they did what they could to preserve the country. It is this land that was the foundation of the Armenia you supposedly love today.

But, that doesn’t matter. Now the ARF gets attacked because “they signed it over to the Russians” by people who are undoubtedly the descendants of the cowards who wouldn’t go to Yerevan over a hundred years ago or who probably deserted their units at Sardarabad or who sold out their fellow Armenians to the Turks during the Genocide. Yes, you’re probably a descendant of one of those.

Why do I even have to say these things? Why do I have to take time to point these things out during the greatest tragedy to befall the Armenian Nation since the Genocide? Because you and your family sit around the table with your wine glasses and scarves or whatever offal you consider a delicacy and pontificate about why the ARF is doing wrong by the Armenian Nation. Because as the ARF, along with other people who love their country, try to save Armenia from the throes of the evil that has our homeland in its grasp, you people who derive your relevance from other people who have no other relevance besides the relevance they draw from you have decided to again attack the ARF. You’re a scientific phenomenon because you’re a cumulation of nothings that, in defiance of the laws of physics, somehow exist. And I have to waste my time, which is probably the objective of you insidious entities, distracted from the horror of my disintegrating nation to address you.

It has always been the same story. It’s actually astounding how little it has changed over time: the ARF shows up, they do what others aren’t capable or willing to do, and because they’re the only ones – or the largest ones – in the field, they’re the ones who get targeted. Do you see how this is a pattern to this day? The people on the battlefield, the people present, the people there in the worst of times are the ones who are attacked but nobody asks where those people who are doing the attacking were when those people were doing what they were doing. You know where? They were wherever they are now, in their living rooms, as far away from the problem as they possibly could be.

During this war, the ARF was one of the first to send units to the front; many of their volunteers didn’t come back. In the 2016 war, ARF members, again, ever unbeknownst to you halfwits, were at the front line while you idiots in Yerevan, Glendale, and Toronto were bloviating with your insufferable nonsense about the lands being sold, the virtues of Popper’s theories on open society, or what happened on World’s Top Chef and similar variations that might prove your absolutely perfect uselessness.

Why doesn’t the ARF talk about what they do? This is hard for people to understand when they will spend $5000 on a trip to Yerevan so they can take selfies in Republic Square with a bumbling group of fellow idiots to make sure they have proof of their participation in the eventual treacherous tragedy that would befall our Nation; it is difficult for people who buy $150,000 cars just so people can see they have those cars to understand; it is difficult for people who prioritize talk over action to comprehend.

I know you subjectivist cosmopolitan pseudo-intellectuals don’t understand what it means to have principles, but there are people who do work who do not believe it should be put on full public display. But the fact is that you’re the modern incarnation of Pharisees (see Matthew 6:5). You need to see it and you need to be seen. You need to have it slap you in the face, you need a glossy report, you need a powerpoint deck in order to understand and believe. What’s ironic is that when the ARF gives in to the protestations of people like me to advertise its work, our resident mountebanks get anxious that the ARF dares to talk about its work. I know you people and you’re pathetic.

So you and your profane politicians and arrogant professors and laughable personalities and nefarious activists and failed actresses go to ARF’s schools, listen to their music, participate in their camps, read their literature, enjoy their community centers, attend their events, subscribe to their papers, and even get paid by them – and then you scoff. You scoff at them when they do something you don’t like. You disparage them when they pick a political position that’s not in line with your own. You mock them, you call them names, you say they’re old, that they’re spending too much time on Genocide recognition, that they are too nationalistic. And yes, you even stab them in the back, this organization you receive so much from yet give nothing to. No, you’re not even charlatans, you’re leeches: you take but contribute nothing – and all you leave is a wound.

Nobody needs to tell me about the ARF’s problems: they are countless. They have made myriad mistakes. I know I have to point this out to you idiots but there is no neighborhood organization that has existed for ten years that hasn’t made many mistakes, much less an international one that has been in existence for 130. But why does it survive? Tell me your Ottoman-era conspiracy theory. Or will you tell me about the time an ARF member gave your uncle a dirty look in Beirut? Maybe it’s going to be something I haven’t heard from the Khruschev era.

You have a problem with the ARF, it really gets under your skin, that’s great (no, really, that’s great, I’m glad it gets under your skin, I hope it pesters you to no end and doesn’t let you sleep at night). But if this is the big concern in your life, open your own schools, publish your own books, set up your own youth and sports organizations, have your own relief society, and develop your own political party. Do it. I’ve been waiting for years. When will you idiots do it? Even when you try to do it, you still can’t stop talking about the ARF. Why? Are you that empty inside? Does your spouse not pay attention to you? Do you have no friends? What is it? Please, tell me what it is, maybe we can organize a fundraiser after we move past this catastrophe you helped bring upon our heads.

And yes, I need to be harsh in talking about you idiots. It is purposeful. I need to be harsh because nobody has been sufficiently harsh with you in calling you idiots so you stop saying the idiotic things you do. So just know that if you come to me with an uninformed opinion about something you haven’t bothered to read about – and I mean really read about – I am going to call you an idiot because that’s what you are. You don’t get an opinion on everything just because your idiot uncle told you about what he heard from his idiot uncle while you’re sitting on the beach in Baja or Batumi sipping your watered-down margarita.

I hope the ARF experiences a rebirth because of this national tragedy which will not only allow it to become a part of the political landscape but will regain its past confidence in leading the Armenian Nation in the homeland.

Կեցցէ՛ Հայ Յեղափոխական Դաշնակցութիւնը:

P.S. Before all you 19th century-minded vagabonds ask, I want you to know that I received LARGE sums of money for writing this from literally every ARF outfit there is in every corner of the world. My bank account is literally bursting at the seams from all the money I got from the ARF and all its affiliated organizations. Just wanted to make that clear for the offal hors d’oeuvres and spritzer gossip hour at the next film festival or whatever other supercilious event you all attend these days to discuss how we can be friends with Turks and Azeris and how the rest of us are just a bunch of provincial nationalists.