"Getting Out of the 'Chicken Coop' Together" - Karen AGEKYAN

Karen Agekyan's article is devoted to analyzing the refusal of the Parliament of the Republic of Armenia to consider the question of recognizing the Genocide of Greeks and Assyrians, examined not as an isolated moral incident, but as a systemic phenomenon connected to the mechanisms of external management of the country and the structural peculiarities of the formation of the Armenian nation.

Introduction and Methodology
The author consciously refrains from a moralizing assessment of the parliamentarians' act, proposing instead to rationalize the event through an analysis of the broader political context — as an element in a series of decisions that discredit representative power in Armenia in the eyes of society and the diaspora.

Key Thesis: The Mechanism of External Control
Agekyan formulates the thesis that external centers of power avoid two extremes — the consolidation of society and its complete chaos — by supporting the monopoly of a discredited but functional political elite. This allows simultaneously:

• keeping Armenia in a manageable state;
• separating the diaspora from statehood, thereby facilitating external management of the Spyurk.

The Value Dimension of State Interest
A separate section of the article is devoted to a critique of the cliché of "state interest" as a self-sufficient category. The author insists that state interest must be sanctified by values, and for Armenianhood such a value is the duty owed to the memory of the victims of the Genocide — not as mourning, but as an obligation to struggle for the global triumph of justice, extending also to other peoples who were victims of the Turkish genocide (Greeks, Assyrians), whom the author, following Tessa Hofmann, calls "fellow sufferers of genocide" [собратья по геноциду].

The Metaphor of the "Armenian Henhouse"
Central to the article is a reinterpretation of Lenin's metaphor of the "Armenian henhouse" (from Lenin's letter to Shahumyan, 1914). Agekyan shows that:

• the narrowness of national vision was historically inevitable due to the absence of Armenian statehood and a unified society;
• the urbanization of Armenians took place predominantly outside the historical homeland (Constantinople, Tiflis, Izmir, Baku), which hindered the formation of the nation as a "collective personality";
• only with the transformation of Yerevan into a capital center in the 20th century did conditions arise for a truly national, rather than locally diasporic, worldview.

Conclusion
The author concludes that today's refusal to raise the question of recognizing the genocides of other peoples signifies a voluntary self-limitation of Armenia to the narrow confines of the "henhouse" — a renunciation of the global role that Armenianhood could historically have assumed in the struggle for justice on behalf of all victims of genocidal crimes. The article's key conclusion: overcoming the "henhouse" requires not only political will, but also the completion of the process of forming Armenianhood as a unified "collective personality," capable of developing a truly national vision of the world.