Final remarks

We have attempted to review most, if not all significant aspects of the public life of Azerbaijan that displays a premeditated and far-reaching cultivation and indoctrination of armenophobia at state policy level.

It infiltrates all aspects of the country’s life on both horizontal and vertical planes engulfing all groups irrespective of sex, age and social status. The level of involvement in the fight against “the world Armeniandom” encompasses all most significant areas of country’s socio-economic and intellectual life, such as its science, economy, politics, upbringing, education, culture and sport.

Fallacious practices are employed along with the distortion and arbitrary interpretation of the universal set of values. The core meaning of certain categories is replaced to impose a form that is essentially in contradiction with universal concepts. This comes to discredit such concepts as patriotism and tolerance, law and morality, good and evil.

It is the missing tolerance that sets conditions for an emerging aggression. Unacceptable in a civilized society, it nonetheless exists in today’s Azerbaijan, which, in its turn, signals the continuing existence of a fertile soil for the emergence of a xenophobic propaganda.

However, the ethnic intolerance must not be regarded in isolation from the progression of the Azerbaijani national self-awareness, as it forms an integral part of the process, rather than an individual social and psychological phenomenon.

Yet, it must be noted that the anti-Armenian propaganda which targets the Azerbaijani society carries serious risks for Armenia as well.

Modern.az^[520] has conducted a poll among the three generations of Azerbaijanis; the respondents included grandparents, parents and children. Contrasted to a more or less adequate appraisal of Armenians on behalf of adult respondents, the children’s aggression is a matter of concern for the future of our own youngsters.

Gismet, 5th grader: Lachin is the place, where my father and mother were born, it is my homeland. Now, these lands are in the hands of the mean Armenians. They are bad and cruel people. But they must not be feared, as they are a weak people and a weak state”. < … >In order to make Lachin ours again, we need a strong army to kill Armenians and recover our lands. < …> When I grow up, I will be brave like Mubariz, and I will return our lands. If I can get my hands on an Armenian child, I’ll kill him/ her. I will do all that they have done in Khojaly. My heart is filled with hatred of them < …>
Do we have to fight the enemy on the battlefield only? < …> Armenians must be fought against everywhere, even in sports. The Armenian children always said that Sultanbek was a bad man who had banished them from Lachin. They perceived our heroes as their enemies and hated them.

Aysel, 10 years old: <…> The Armenians are our enemies. They are bad people. They kill people. They want to take our land from us. They want to kill the people, children. My mother told me. <… > If I see an Armenian child, I will kill him/her.

< … >The youngest of children, a preschooler Aikhan, though did not venture to kill an Armenian child, but said that he would still beat him up in revenge.

Sooner or later, the peace will be restored in the region. What will be the face of such peace, if the next generation treads heavy with hatred to another people, and the murderous intent becomes part of its identity?

Will the feelings of hatred towards Armenians dissipate? Will it take years before generations change and those harboring feelings of armenophobia disappear as a form of perceiving the surrounding world?

Yet, such policy of inciting hatred for Armenians is no less prejudicial for the Azerbaijani society in short and long perspective. Unable to show real aggression against the Armenians, the new generations of Azerbaijanis develop psychological phenomena known as transference, when the hatred is directed against a more readily available and weaker entity, and sublimation, when an aggressive impulse takes an entirely different form against an entirely different object.

Father axes his daughter of fifteen in Agdzhabedy”, “Husband kills wife for too little salt in food in Sabirabad region”, “Resident of Baku maims girl for his rejected advances”, “17-year-old stabs his 14-year old brother five times over a computer game in the Khachmaz region”, “Man pours gasoline on civil wife and sets her ablaze in Baku”, “Brother beheads his 16-year-old sister in Shemakha.
< …> The results of a research conducted in a local university were literally shocking for specialists. “The latent aggression among the Azerbaijani youth simply exceeds all limits. Massive verbal aggression (verbal expression of negative feelings), rumors, gossip and envy among the students lead us to believe that a further surge of aggression is to be expected in the coming years”, says Araz A. Manuchei- Lalei, an associate professor at the chair of Psychiatry of the Medical University of Azerbaijan.^[521] <…>

Raising entire generations in a spirit of hatred for Armenians based on false stereotypes, the rulers of Azerbaijan attack the minds of their children robbing them of any chance to follow a natural path of development and personal growth. Instead, the resulting product of such policy is a citizen who takes an aggressive stance against his arch enemy – the Armenian – fully prepared to take ruthless action against Armenians. The heroization of Ramil Safarov by the leadership of Azerbaijan sets a precedent for generations to come which raised under the heavy load of the anti-Armenian propaganda are pushed towards similar ‘heroic deeds’ by all means available.

We would like to conclude this book with a quote from Akram Aylisli appearing in his interview to the Azadlyg radio station on July 19, 2013:^[522] “If we had carefully studied the legacy of Mirza Jalil, Sabir^[a] and others, we would not have been in the moral abyss, in which we are now. But Mirza and Sabir wrote about exactly the same things, of which I write now”