by Vadim Bondar
[REGNUM] Western politicians (it’s difficult to call them anything else) are irresistible in their irrepressible desire to abolish, ban, and eradicate everything in the slightest degree connected with Russia, not only in their fiefdoms, but everywhere they can reach. Why did they suddenly become so hateful about Russian culture? Is it really possible to erase it from world reality? And what could all this hectic activity ultimately lead to?
Answering the question whether it is possible, we will say unequivocally: no, it is not possible. Why? For a very simple reason. Today, in the age of cross-border networking, it is basically impossible to cancel something, especially if many people like it for some reason.
Even in the pre-digital age in the USSR, despite all the propaganda and powerful prohibitive pressure, people not only enjoyed watching “Melodies and Rhythms of Foreign Pop” and stormed the cinemas when festival films from famous world directors appeared there, but also brought them from abroad - records and art albums that were not published in the Union. The Soviet man, despite all the ideological indoctrination, was in himself a cultural product of the postmodern era, he was a Eurasian and, first of all, a European.
The revolution, the construction of socialism and the Iron Curtain could not isolate Russia culturally. Moreover, this is impossible now. Now almost all of the world's cultural classics, including Russian, have been digitized, be it literature, music, painting, opera, ballet, theater, cinema, and so on. Finding all this on the Internet and digital galleries is not difficult, and anyone who wants can always learn more about the culture of past and modern Russia. And many people want it - like Lev Oshanin: “You can’t strangle this song, you can’t kill it!”
Now let’s talk about what actually caused these maliciously prohibitive attempts and what they are aimed at. Culture is understood as social information that is preserved and accumulated in society with the help of symbolic means created by people. Russian culture is a symbolic means with inexhaustible semantic potential. It is deeply national and at the same time carries within itself a huge supranational sensory and semantic component. Let's remember Tolstoy's War and Peace. There are huge chunks in French, there is a universal cosmism of reflection and reflection, characteristic of all people in general, and at the same time an amazing, indelible Russianness.
“Where, how, when did this countess, raised by a French emigrant, suck into herself from that Russian air that she breathed, this spirit, where did she get these techniques that pas de chale should have long ago been supplanted? But these spirits and techniques were the same, inimitable, unstudied, Russian ones that her uncle expected from her,” Tolstoy writes about Natasha Rostova.
This is the strength and power of Russian classics. It is entirely imbued with the Russian spirit, Russian thought, Russian design, if you like, but at the same time it is close and understandable to other peoples. She brings them the truth about Russia, about the Russian people, his soul, his aspirations, and through empathy for him, Russian classics build unburnable bridges between ours and other European - and not only European - peoples. This phenomenon of synthesis of apparent simplicity and cosmism, national nature and internationalism cannot be refuted and destroyed by cultural forms.
You can only try to do this by force, as in Ukraine. There, according to the deputy head of the Committee on Humanitarian and Information Policy of the Verkhovna Rada, Evgenia Kravchuk, more than 11 million books have already been destroyed during the “derussification of libraries.” It’s a pity for the obsessed, but, as the Kiev resident and Russian classic Mikhail Bulgakov wrote in “The Master and Margarita”: “Manuscripts do not burn.” Russian culture cannot be abolished. You can cancel the happiness of enjoying it, your involvement in this part of the noosphere, but this part itself cannot be canceled. This is one aspect of the problem.
The second aspect is why, along with the classics, they are just as fiercely trying to abolish Russian cultural modernity? Since the nineties and until recently, modern culture and contemporary art in Russia have largely been a blurred copy of the Western original. And a copy is always worse than the original, because it is secondary and imitative. Let's be honest, during this period our people were not the bearers of the culture and cultural code that lay, and even now partly underlie the created cultural samples and works of art.
Let’s say, the films “Brother” and “Brother-2”, which still cause a lot of controversy and are condemned by a significant part of our creative intelligentsia as vulgar, low-grade, like “gangster smut” and so on. But these films are still very popular among the people. Why?
Brother and Brother 2 both were excellent action/crime films made and released in a time when that style of film was very popular worldwide. I've seen and have enjoyed both films immensely. The actor who played the lead role died decades before his time.
Because there are some core works of art, the same films, on which the people’s idea of good and evil, about themselves, about the people’s hero, about how everything should be in this life, about the world as a whole is based. And if people watch these films, as they say, to their hilt, it means that they see all this in them.
You shouldn't judge whether it's good or bad. This is objective reality. Obviously, people see in these films much more than a Western with fights and chases or banal gang wars. But he doesn’t see Western art in overt and covert remakes. Therefore, in Russia they are a disposable product. But until recently, these stampings were put on stream, therefore they drilled into the consciousness of ordinary people and conquered them with their massive numbers and - with rare exceptions - the lack of an alternative.
And everyone was happy with everything. The West “Hollywoodized” Russia, the part of the domestic creative intelligentsia, which prayed for everything Western, was completely satisfied with this, since, being a conductor of Western values in the homeland, it was a handshake in a “civilized society”, and “people hawal”, as they say, is what they give.
But as soon as Russia started talking about returning to its own cultural sources, to its own classics, to its own rich cultural heritage, this heritage immediately began to be abolished, just like the modern one that began to be created on the basis of its own, and not someone else’s, cultural experience. It's like in Hollywood movies about colleges, where there is a girl - the star of the class, and all her friends must imitate her, praise her and grovel before her, and the boys must be completely in love with her and compete for her attention and favor. If someone violates this law of the system, he is immediately subjected to obstruction, boycott, ridicule, bullying, in general, becomes an outcast and an enemy of the civilized society of this college.
Today this primitive scenario is being played out in relation to Russia. SVO is just an excuse. The true reasons are much more fundamental, otherwise the bans would not have affected culture, sports, tourism and any human communication. Unable to oppose anything conceptual to the emerging new multipolar world order and Russia as one of its key links, the West is trying to deprive our country and its people of kinship with humanity. By erasing us from world culture, he is trying to “dehumanize” Russians (Russians in this case are a collective image, read all Russians). Moreover, by canceling everything Russian, they want to erase us from world history, as if we never existed. There is no other way to seriously fight us. Neither military nor economic methods work.
Well, the last thing: what this fuss can lead to.
Probably, few people paid attention to how, starting around 2004, a campaign was launched in the West to abolish the attributes of Christmas, so as not to cause discontent among followers of non-Christian religions. In the name of the principle of secularism, Christmas trees were removed from schools. That is, they tried to actively reformat their culture using the same methods of prohibitions and abolition. The peak of this campaign was between 2012 and 2016. What did this lead to?
In 2017, Trump came to power in the wake of protest voting in the United States. Next year his triumph has every chance to be repeated. In any case, the electorate is already warmed up for this. In Europe, throughout last and this year there was a triumphal march of right-wing parties, gradually taking over the continent. Just the other day, the far-right leader of the PVV (Party for Freedom) Geert Wilders came to power in the Netherlands.
In general, ban and cross out further. Let's see where your dreams take you.