Babken DerGrigorian
Babken DerGrigorian was appointed deputy diaspora minister of Armenia in May 2019.
Babken DerGrigorian is a former Students for a Democratic Society organizer who worked for the 2012 Barack Obama campaign.
About
- Babken DerGrigorian was appointed deputy diaspora minister of Armenia in May 2019, and in the wake of the absorption of the Diaspora Ministry into the remaining ministries in the government, he has been “tasked with coming up with a model of how to go about transitioning in the face of the high commission for Diaspora affairs,” he said in a recent interview from his office in Yerevan.
- Babken DerGrigorian was born to parents from Iran and he was born in Paris. His family then moved to Los Angeles, where he grow up. After finishing his undergraduate studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, he moved to the UK, where he received two master’s degrees from the London School of Economics and Politics. He came back to the US to work for the presidential campaign of Barack Obama in Florida for six months.
- That experience, plus his time with Birthright Armenia, helped propel him deeper in the realm of activism in support of a government for all in Armenia.
- He decided to give Armenia a try and moved there in April 2012.
- In Armenia he worked at several organizations., including the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) office, Open Society, HALO Trust as well as Transparency International.
- There were also ups and downs in his early and eager involvement with activism in Armenia. “I was arrested a number of times but it was all worth it,” he recalled.
- Yet even he was surprised by the success of the Velvet Revolution. “I think anyone who says they predicted the revolution is lying,” he said. The protests were getting bigger and people learned from Electric Yerevan, the previous wave of protests for the rising cost of electricity. In fact, he said proudly that he coined the phrase Electric Yerevan.[1]
Too Radical for Obama?
- "On 3 November 2008—one day before the U.S. presidential elections—Stop McCain, Stop the War! (a new Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) working group) along with Freedom Road Socialist Organization and the Strategy Center of Los Angeles (the group behind the Bus Riders Union) held a rally on the UCLA campus under the call “Speak Out: No to the War! No to McCain! No on the Six [California ballot propositions]!” for the purpose of “going to the polls on November 4 and sending a resounding defeat to John McCain.” This call to vote for the capitalist politician Barack Obama is but the latest and most explicit expression of the rad-lib SDS’s pro-Democratic Party politics.
- “SDS is a part of the radical liberal milieu that actively pushes ‘anybody but Bush’ politics. Their efforts are aimed at pressuring (through various means, including ‘direct action’) and boosting the electoral fortunes of the Democratic Party, which is the other capitalist party of racism and imperialist war. Indeed, when the SYC was distributing our defense letter defending those arrested for protesting fee hikes, SDSers told us that they were going to vote for Democrat Barack Obama in the upcoming presidential elections.”
- —Worker's Vanguard No. 918, 1 August 2008
- When SDS organizer Babken DerGrigorian read our article he was furious; he claimed that these characterizations were slanders, insisted that SDS members are radicals and denied that any of their members were voting for Obama. But facts are stubborn things.
- In the subsequent months, written arguments about why SDS should work in the Obama campaign have spilled from the pens of UCLA SDS’s leading lights. Dave Shukla argued that “Our fellow students and youth are becoming more anti-militarist, anti-capitalist, and for economic democracy—without hardly even knowing it!... SDS will miss this historic opportunity if we collectively ignore what the elections are already doing for our movements” (“Will SDS Miss the Boat? Engaging With Those Newly Politicized by the Elections is Crucial for Radical Movements,” SDS News Bulletin No. 5, June/July 2008). Gurujiwan Khalsa followed up with, “A huge majority of people in this country are deeply concerned with the current state of affairs in it. Obama’s candidacy happens to be the way that many are expressing that concern. We ought to plug into this groundswell. We ought to talk to them on their terms” (“What Is at Stake in the Coming Elections and What SDS Ought to Do About It,” SDS News Bulletin No. 6, undated). Babken DerGrigorian certainly did not want to miss the boat—he dove into the groundswell, taking a job as a staff member for the Obama campaign!
- The speeches at the rally argued that it was crucial to defeat McCain and Palin, the continuators of the Bush regime, as was, in the words of leading SDSer Eric Gardner, “holding the Obama administration to their antiwar promises.” The claim that Obama made “antiwar promises” is patently false, as evidenced by his defense of American imperialist interests, such as his calls to increase troops in Afghanistan and his military threats against Iran and Pakistan.
- The irony is, jumping headfirst onto the Obama bandwagon only netted SDS a headache—basically the only attendees at the demo were the organizers! People won’t hobnob with Robin when they can hang with Batman: the pro-Obama students didn’t stay home—they were a little way down UCLA’s Bruin Walk with the real deal, the Bruin Democrats.
- We in the Spartacus Youth Club know campaigning for capitalist politicians only builds faith in the capitalist system. We stood in opposition to this rally for the Democratic wing of the bourgeoisie, selling Workers Vanguard with the front page headlining, “McCain, Obama: Class Enemies of Workers, Oppressed” and “Down With the Rotten Capitalist System! For a Workers Party to Fight for Socialist Revolution!” On the battlefield of class struggle, the SYC stands with the working class and for its historic task of international socialist revolution. SDS has proven time and time again, they stand with the capitalist camp and its current commander, Barack Obama.
SDS
In 2008 UCLA Students for a Democratic Society, University of California-Los Angeles, CA contacts Babken DerGrigorian, Eric Gardner.
Anti War protest
February 2007, the UCLA Students for a Democratic Society held a demonstration in front of Kerckhoff Hall on Thursday afternoon to protest the war in Iraq.
More than two dozen participants were asked to spontaneously drop dead around noon and lay down with signs that said “U.S. Out Of Iraq” taped to their chests.
The event was also planned to coincide with other student anti-war protests being held at college campuses throughout the nation, including UC Berkeley and Columbia University. Not all protests were die-ins, though, said Eric Gardner, a member of the UCLA Students for a Democratic Society.
Babken DerGrigorian, cofounder of UCLA Students for a Democratic Society, said the group is against the war because they believe it is morally wrong.
“The war in Iraq is one of the main things that we will be working to end. It’s one of the main reasons why we started the club,” DerGrigorian said, adding that the club plans to hold more anti-war events in the future.
The die-in lasted eight minutes before demonstrators stood up and passed out fliers to students passing by. The fliers included statistics from the war, including the number of U.S. soldiers killed so far and the number of Iraqi civilian deaths.
The demonstration was put into motion through Facebook and text messaging, said fourth-year women’s studies student Harmony Shrewsbury.
Shrewsbury said the demonstration was inspired by protests against the Vietnam War in the ’60s and was also the result of a need for an anti-war movement on campus.
“It is so sad that there is no anti-war movement on campus, to my knowledge, and the war has been going on for a while,” Shrewsbury said.[2]