04.05.2017, Russia.
The resolution of the III Congress of the All-Russian Parents’ Resistance non-profit organization for the defense of families and the Essence of Time sociopolitical movement.
The third congress of All-Russian Parents’ Resistance (ARPR) non-profit organization for the defense of families was held together with the Essence of Time movement, which made a decisive contribution to creating the ARPR, and which, alongside the ARPR, is engaged in combating the most dangerous tendencies the further development of which, according to the ARPR and Essence of Time, threatens to turn the current ill-being into a full-scale catastrophe.
Essence of Time’s participation in the work of the III Congress of the ARPR made it possible to examine both the topics of parenthood and topics of a general political nature concurrently. No other approach is possible today, since parents are equally disturbed both by negative tendencies in family issues, and by negative tendencies of a general political nature.
Parents strive to fend off those forces, which encroach upon the family with an obviously destructive agenda. However, parents also strive to fend off the forces that encroach upon education, culture, civil life, national independence, state sovereignty, international law, and the practices of the existing world order. The parents firmly believe that both forces equally threaten the well-being of their children, the survival of their families, nations, and states as such, and that what we are dealing with is the practical existence not of two forces attacking on two fronts: the family front and the socio-political front, but a single force with a single goal and acting under different masks.
This is what prompted the delegates of the ARPR, members of the Essence of Time movement, and the representatives of the patriotic community, the intelligentsia, religious circles of the Russian Federation who participated in the work of the Congress as guests, to propose a dual agenda for discussion for the Congress, of both family and general politics.
Moreover, family problematics were discussed during the Congress as part of the preparation of a collective alternative report to the President of Russian Federation on the major legal and human rights violations in Russia in the field of family policy.
We discussed the general political problematics as part of an analysis of new tendencies, which put on the Russian agenda the question of transitioning from a strategy of merging into the Western community to a strategy of development on the basis of our own otherness, to a strategy of separation from the West, to the strategy of a value-based global-cultural opposition to the West, meaning that which is called a Cold War.
And even though the ARPR naturally dedicated more time in its reports to addressing family problematics, while Essence of Time dedicated more time to addressing general political problematics, the most solid of ties between the two movements, and the unity of the two problematics, which has been exposed, gave birth to this common resolution, in which both topics discussed are being regarded as two parts of the same process, which before our very eyes is taking a pre-catastrophic nature.
A Cold War is, in our opinion, the sole positive alternative to two other negative case scenarios: of a hot war between the two most powerful nuclear states, which promises death to humanity, and collapse of our state.
It is necessary both due to general reasons based on worldview and historiosophy, and new critically important global circumstances.
The number of the latter includes, in our opinion, the significant degradation or mutation of the bourgeois classical West, which now rejects its own fundamental principles of life.
The West now refuses not only to properly follow the tenets of the world religions that formed its identity. It rejects the great culture, which was formed out of these tenets. The West’s rapid and purposeful dismantling of the very basis of this great culture, which is Christian in its essence, is evident.
Long ago, the great Russian philosopher and poet Vladimir Solovyov asked Russia:
O Rus’! in lofty premonition
You ponder a proud idea;
Which East do you want to be:
The East of Xerxes or of Christ?
Now we can all ask our “Westernists”, which West do they swear allegiance to: the West of Dante, Shakespeare, Hugo, Dickens, Thomas Mann, or the West, which declares the profound dehumanization and perversion of all of the foundations of human existence as its new goal?
Do you swear allegiance to the West, which profoundly venerated family values, or the West, which now mercilessly destroys these values? Do you swear allegiance to the West, which profoundly despised lechery, sexual perversion, moral impurity, or do you swear allegiance to the West, which now puts perversion, lechery, gender politics, and immoralism on a pedestal?
Do you swear allegiance to the West, which viewed itself for centuries and millennia as the driving force behind the historical process, or do you swear allegiance to the West, which now declares the end of history as the end of the creative development of humans and humankind?
Do you swear allegiance to the West, which was faithful to the ideas of humanism and progress, or to the West, which now clearly throws these ideas to the dumpster?
Such questions, alas, have already become rhetorical. The West is rapidly mutating. And even if healthy forces continue to exist within this mutation, they are not the ones who define the quality of the modern Western world, this house, in which our “Westernists” attempted to drag Russia into.
The question remains of Western prosperity, which, supposedly, will automatically be attained by everyone who joins “the great Western house.”
It is naive to talk about this now, when all of the Western periphery: Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Spain, Italy, Portugal – end up as interior colonies of the developed countries of the West.
And finally, it is naive to talk about Russia uniting with the West now, after all the hopes for such a union have been exhausted, with the last thread of such hopes being the naive hopes in relation to Trump.
Then is now not the time to acknowledge that the very idea, according to which Russia is just one of the countries of the Western world, and that the Russian mentality and Russian culture represent just one of the modifications of Western mentality and Western culture, is wrong at its core? And that Russia is actually a different, special West, one that cannot be reduced to the West built upon the Roman Catholic and Protestant foundation?
Is it not time to acknowledge that both the concept of the Third Rome, and the concept of Russian communism are only individual manifestations of one great concept of human’s and humanity’s development based on principles fundamentally different from those that the Roman Catholic and Protestant Western world had to offer?
We insist that it is the acknowledgment of this fundamental circumstance (and in a certain sense, repentance for its temporary, late-Soviet and post-Soviet desecration) which must become the basis for a new course for Russia.
This course can also be called a course towards the attainment of our own different identity, and a course toward a strategic separation from the West, and a course towards a new Cold War, Cold War 2.0.
We firmly state that this course has nothing in common with militaristic spasms; on the contrary, we strive to secure peace with the West through the acknowledgment of our otherness, and through building a new kind of relations based on the difference between two global actors in dialogue: the West and Russia.
We do not want to push Russia into war by doing this. We want to rescue it from such a pointless, spasmodic slipping into a pre-war state, and then into a full-fledged state of war. We do not urge it to return to the past, we urge it to look into the future by cleansing its past of historically conditioned buildup and by finding support in its innermost meaning.
We are convinced that with such an irreversible and inescapable escalation of the global situation, which is the result of new actions by the United States and the submissive acceptance of these actions by the ruling European elites, Russian Westernism and Russian patriotism can no longer be reconciled. And that when those who truly love Russia will have to choose between Russia’s being loyal to the Western path and loyalty to their national duty, will choose their national duty.
Those who will make a different choice must not deceitfully coexist with truly patriotic forces, claiming to have their own pro-Western patriotism. Pro-Western patriotism is in the past. Ahead is a new era with new priorities. Either it will come, or Russia and the world will collapse.
We are also convinced that a special role in responding to the new challenges and threats is meant for Russia’s President and national leader, Vladimir Putin.
On the one hand, the West has essentially opened a hunting season on Putin, in other words, it launched an unprecedented campaign to demonize the Russian leader.
On the other hand, Vladimir Putin himself, in defending Russia through his specific actions, regardless of what they concern, is already pursuing a course which can hardly be called pro-Western. What is left is to move from specific actions, which in themselves cannot form an alternative strategic course, to forming such a course based on new general worldview constants.
This is a difficult step for a Russian Westernist patriot. But at this moment there are no more possibilities to avoid such a step. And the question lies not only in a specific political fate. The fate of Russia and the world is at stake.
By rejecting the forced foster care system, Vladimir Putin takes one of the most important steps in terms of Russia’s rejection of the new anti-family and anti-moral West, which even the leaders of Western Christian persuasion, who are always ready to compromise, have already called a “civilization of death”. .
But the President’s principal position on this question is being sabotaged by wide layers of deeply pro-Western forced foster care bureaucracy. Putin is pushing Russia away from the forced foster care catastrophe, while the bureaucratic system, inside of which this most powerful pro-Western segment took roots, is pushing the country in the opposite direction.
Is this not the tragedy of modern Russia?
And can this be limited to only one the family-forced foster care question, even if it is of the utmost importance?
Since, after all, this question itself is only a partial manifestation of something larger! The current West, by sabotaging the family, is essentially leading towards dehumanization. And we are convinced that the roots of forced foster care technologies, forced and propagated in Western countries, lie in the fascist past of humanity.
But perhaps we are exaggerating the conflict between the President’s actions directed against forced foster care and the pro-forced foster care actions of the bureaucratic system, which significantly infected by this and other kind of Westernism?
Alas, we are not exaggerating anything.
Back in 2013 during the I Congress of the ARPR, the President of Russia voiced his rejection of forced foster care and gave specific orders to prevent it. But by the end of 2016, forced foster care, cunningly implemented by the bureaucratic system as it soothingly talked about its new adherence to traditional values, was almost victorious. The President of Russia’s new actions at the turn of 2016-2017 prevented the pro-forced foster care powers which swear allegiance to the West, which is anti-human in its essence, from cementing down their final victory. But after a brief stupor caused by the President’s new decisive steps, made in response to the alarm of the broadest Russian anti-forced foster care community, the same powers are once again sabotaging his decisions. Besides, the President’s decisive steps against forced foster care are not enough. What is needed is a new strategy in terms of the family, and a new system of actions aimed at removing the pro-forced foster care implants that are already in places, implants that are being constructed by way of both laws, bylaws and methodological recommendations. A new system of legal punishment is also needed, without which the pro-forced foster care government bureaucrats will keep viewing children as commodities to be sold on both gray and black markets.
Fortunately for Russia, the President of Russian Federation personally stopped the most poisonous forced foster care law, which the people called“the law of spanks”.
But a no less dangerous, though more covert vector for forced foster care technologies in Russia is the Federal Law №442, “On the fundamentals of providing social services to the citizens of Russian Federation,” which allows bureaucrats to force parents to enter a contract for the provision of these social services, which are, as practice shows, only a slightly veiled form of the same anti-family violence.
No surgical actions to repel forced foster care tendencies can be stopped if changes to family policies are carried out without the participation of representatives of the authorities, and without consulting with the public, if the pro-forced foster care bureaucracy is implementing these changes with the help of illegal bylaws and instructions, and sometimes with the help of guidelines,where Western forced foster care ideas are copied, ideas that a certain kind of bureaucracy considers above the law.
Under the pretense of the necessity to have children left without parental care “placed in a family”, a certain “market of children” has been created. Its participants are motivated to expand it. We see mass lawlessness carried out by the employees of child protective services. Its root lies in the interest toward budget funds allocated for “protection of rights” and “protection from violence.” The financial incentive of the participants of the market leads to destroying families and making people suffer. “Hired parenthood” rightfully leads to discrimination against and the destruction of families of kinship. Measures are being proposed for the sake of acquiring children for this market, which are capable of changing society’s moral and ethical standards through the implementation of baby hatches, which allow people to discard their own children in a “civilized manner.”
Evaluating the prospects of the processes underway across the world and in Russia, we understand that the destruction of the family as such entails a direct danger to Russian statehood. The rejection of state ideology, as documented in the Constitution, in actuality, leaves the formation of the rising generation’s worldview to its own devices. In this situation, only family, traditions, and a firm bond of generations can save children from the influence of extremism’s destructive ideas, and give them a meaning of life that is compatible with the existence of the state.
Having noted certain positive developments in the area of cooperation between the authorities and the public in terms of family policy, we are compelled to state that these developments are not enough for reversing the family policy in the direction that would be of salvation for the Russian family (and consequently, for Russian statehood). The reports presented clearly demonstrate the connection between the family policy that the state pursues and the orientation of a significant part of the Russian elite towards “becoming a part of the West.” The public’s resistance against the implementation of Western norms that are destructive to families leads to supporters of the forced foster care approach changing their rhetoric, but not to any change in the essence of their actions. The declaration of the value of family as an institution on paper does not lead to defending the family in real life, and it does not hamper the implementation of forced foster care technologies in Russia.
We are convinced that securing the safety of children in Russia is possible only through influencing the cause, not the effect of families’ ill-being, with the necessary elimination of the willful interference of government bureaucrats in families. We are convinced that if current family and childhood policies are pursued further, then the severance of the cultural and moral connection between generations is inevitable, which will lead to the weakening of the state. The recent rallies of the non-systemic opposition have demonstrated that Russia’s enemies are already using teenagers to the fullest extent, in order to stir up and destabilize the socio-political situation in the country.
Emphasizing that using children as tools for the sake of attaining somebody’s goals is unacceptable, we point to the main reason why children are actively participating in actions directed at destabilizing the country. This reason is the changes in education and upbringing that lead to the development of a thoughtless member of society, who is easy to manipulate. Unlike the Soviet system of education and upbringing, which was directed at both learning the knowledge humanity accumulated, and at the achievement of a high moral compass, and the capacity of children for friendship and effective teamwork, the current system strives to create an “atomized” person, preoccupied with only his personal interests and his own benefit.
The transition of education to so-called student-centered learning leads to one’s knowledge becoming inferior, and to one’s worldview becoming narrow which limits teens’ ability to reasonably react to the events around them. Substituting teaching staff with school psychologists and mediators complicates the process of childrens’ upbringing in schools. The reformatting of libraries leads to the narrowing of the intellectual leisure space for children, alienating them from culture, thus hindering their upbringing outside of school. A significant part of the television entertainment industry is propagating (in other words, in practice presenting as new norms) examples of deeply immoral and anti-cultural behavior as the conditions for “prestigious” consumption, which is bound to lead many children and teenagers to choose life goals in a way that is “outside of the morals”.
Declaring our patriotic position, we are compelled to recognize that the current situation in the country together with the international atmosphere creates a deadly threat to the existence of the Russian Federation as a whole. A significant part of Russian elite having an obvious focus on the West as an example prevents an adequate response to the challenges facing Russia. We are convinced that if the current course will continue, Russia will cease to exist as an independent state, either through direct capitulation, or through perishing in war, because refusing to capitulate without changing the country’s direction of movement makes a “hot” war inevitable.
And finally, we can’t help but ask ourselves whether the struggle between the pro-Western bureaucracy and the President unfolds only in the narrow, though very important, scope of the family, or if it will reach a massive scale, turning gradually from sabotage to a revolt, if relations between Russia and the West continue to inevitably escalate.
In this highly probable case, only forming a reasonable and enlightened self-identity for Russia based on a clearly formulated difference between the Russian and Western identities, and especially between those of Russia and the new anti-humanistic West, which is being formed before our very eyes, can give the system a new outline; and by doing so, it can spare Russia from revolts and turmoil resulting from the actions of pro-Western intrasystemic forces, which have made their choice, refusing, under these new tensions, to serve Russia for the sake of serving the West.
We, the participants of the Congress “The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It”, in our concern over the fate of our common Motherland, and understanding the mortal danger that delaying the change of course entails, consider it necessary to state the following.
1. Addressing the President, the Government of Russian Federation, the State Duma, and the Federation Council, we insist on the necessity of adopting the following measures:
1.1. In the field of global strategic goal-setting:
First – to express on behalf of Russia a deep concern over those transformations being performed by the West. To persuasively demonstrate that the new West is, in essence, degenerating, encroaching upon its own former ideals. That it is establishing a new anti-humanistic cult of:
- unrestrained consumerism;
- extreme forms of egotism and individualism;
- militant immoralism.
That it, by disrupting the continuity of generations, is forming:
- a cult of cruelty and violence;
- a cult of rejecting all of the commandments of the world religions that shaped classical humanistic culture;
- a cult of hedonism, which bears in itself a deep and irreversible moral decay of individuals and human communities;
- a cult of extreme ethical relativism that blurs the lines between good and evil.
Second – to state on behalf of Russia that the destruction of nation states and the infringement of national sovereignties is unacceptable. Urge to resume the natural course of interstate relations which were born through suffering in the flame of the world wars, the highest principle of which is the right of every people to independently determine its own historical fate, and to determine its form of political order of own society.
Third – to express our deepest concern over the transformation of democracy as a very important tool used by peoples to affirm their goal-setting, into something final and meaningful in and of itself. Peoples have a right to establish a democratic order, or any other. The highest principle for humanity is not democracy, but humanism and development. Any kind of substitution of these principles with something else is an attack upon the main and inherent right of humans and human communities: the right to ascension.
Fourth – to express our deep concern at the effective collapse of international law, the effective substitution of this law by the archaic principle, according to which he who is stronger is right.
Fifth – to insist on restoring the principle of the presumption of innocence in everything that has to do with international relations. To state the unacceptability of substituting reputable international investigations with baseless slanderous hype conducted by a new kind of global media. To state the unacceptability of such anti-humanistic ideas, such as the idea of the post-human, post-truth, post-humanism, and the end of history. To state that the support of such ideas together with translating these ideas into international practice, with their transformation into a new seemingly post-ideological ideologism, is the prologue to a new fascism.
Sixth – to state the categorical unacceptability of any kind of justification of historical Nazism and fascism, the categorical unacceptability of equating Communism and Stalinism to Nazism, the categorical unacceptability of rewriting history. To firmly state that the peoples of Russia had defined and will continue to define their own path based on respect toward their history, the rejection of demonizing its individual periods, understanding the unity of their historical fate, their historical distinctness, their unique historical place in the symphony of peoples and states.
Seventh – to address all peoples and states, all people of good will, with a call to resist all tendencies of the dehumanization of humans, all tendencies of constructing a multi-tiered humanity based on denying the unity of the human race, which will inevitably lead to the revival of fascism.
Eighth – to urge all healthy forces to unite on the basis of rejecting archaization and dehumanization, as is represented by a healthy humanistic conservative worldview that is alien to inflexibility, and which considers the humanistic development of people and humankind to be the highest value. To state the necessity of creating an alliance of left-wing forces and conservatives for the sake of defending humanism from attacks by forces speaking about the end of history, the post-human, by forces that endorse archaization and regress on the periphery of the world, by forces that are trying to bring a new fascism into the world.
1.2. In the field of family policy:
First – to cut short the tendencies of imposing Western technologies in the field of family and childhood on Russian politicians and state bureaucrats, to remove the supporters and conductors of these Western technologies from government bodies.
Second – to equate all organizations that engage in activities in the area of social support and protection of citizens, maternity, and childhood that receive funding from abroad, as well as those that implement joint programs with foreign and international organizations, to foreign agents, since their activity in this area has political goals.
Third – to add amendments to Federal Law №442, “On the fundamentals of providing social services to the citizens of Russian Federation”, which exclude forcing services upon the population by “socially-oriented” NGOs.
Fourth – to legislate the presumption of trustworthiness for parents, affirming that the actions and decisions of parents in regard to their children are recognized as being made in good faith and in the interests of the child, as long as the opposite had not been proven and confirmed in the court of law.
Fifth – to establish criminal liability for the illegal interference into family matters.
Sixth – to recognize the support of the birth family through financial and non-financial incentives, the creation of a healthy social and informational environment, to be the main content of the state social policy, not control over families.
Seventh – to orient family policy towards the reduction and the rapid elimination of “hired parenthood” as a form of finding homes for orphans.
Eighth – to conduct the revision of the bylaws that empower civil servants to interfere in families, and to revoke such bylaws. In particular, to cancel Moscow’s “Regulation for Interdepartmental Cooperation for Exposure of Family Ill-Being, Organization of Work with Ill-Being Families that are at Social Risk (in Hardships),” which was enacted on January 1, 2011, as well as similar regulations in other regions.
Ninth – to legislate the right of parents to choose any measures of upbringing that do not harm the health of children.
Tenth – to exclude child protective services from any kind of work with families, not under custodial care, including the seizure of children, in order to avoid conflicts of interest.
Eleventh – to cease “interdepartmental cooperation for exposure of ill-being” and to think through a system of performance indicators of each of the departments working in the area of family relations, which would stimulate their mutual oversight and the absence of extraneous interests.
Twelfth – to legislate against the implementation of so-called baby hatches for the “civilized” disposal of children.
Thirteenth – to cease the practice of forced foster care courts acting in pilot regions as they are unconstitutional judicial authorities.
Fourteenth – to restore the procedures for compulsory medical treatment of alcoholism and drug addiction on the basis of a court ruling for parents and family members in a situation of social risk.
1.3. In the field of education:
First – to restore the unique national system of special education, including a system of specialized educational institutions that provide education, upbringing, and treatment to children with special needs, and which facilitate their social adaptation and integration into the society.
Second – to take measures to work out textbooks based on Soviet methodologies, which are improved classical methodologies of education traditional for Russia, and to provide schools the possibility to select these textbooks when forming their curricula.
Third – to cease the optimization of libraries and their reformatting into entertainment centers.
Fourth – to stop the substitution of teachers with school psychologists and mediators, to shift the focus of children’s legal education from studying their rights to studying their duties.
Fifth – to legislate against the participation of unaccompanied minors in large-scale street events.
1.4. The ARPR is ready to submit specific legislative proposals for each of the changes in Russian policies in the fields of family legislation and education.
2. In order to contribute to the change in family policy and education in Russia on the part of the civil society we outline the following goals in the activity of the ARPR:
2.1. To present an alternative report on an analysis of the practice of taking children away from their families, and the excessive and unjustified interference in families by child protective services;
2.2. To continue work on current ARPR projects (the “Steps of History” project, a project on revision of Soviet textbooks in order to bring them into accordance with contemporary realities, and others);
2.3. To continue the participation of ARPR experts in round tables and conferences of various levels to develop and discuss legal initiatives and to analyze the processes in the field of family policy and education in Russia;
2.4. To intensify the actions aimed at informing society on the threats of thoughtlessly copying Western technologies in the fields of family, education, and culture to the socio-political stability and state integrity of the Russian Federation.
Adopted unanimously during the III Congress of ARPR, which took place in Moscow on April 15, 2017.
