Can a great culture be banned?

The Western media shamelessly lies because they have already formed a “mass-media citizen” who is obedient and incapable of asking questions

The West’s ban on Russian culture means a ban on a huge part of human history. Not only is this ban now being imposed on culture, media, air travel and transportation, banks and even cats, but attempts are being made to silence the history and memory of the peoples of the world.

The censor is as cruel as it is stupid, proclaiming, “Shostakovich did not exist, there was no blockade of Leningrad, there was no Gagarin, no Great October Revolution.” In doing so, he exposes his barbarism, the programmed ignorance that forms the core of the political and cultural system of capitalism. We know this and suffer for it, although the distractions used by the hamburger-faced god seem endless.

Why does the West censor Russian culture? Has censorship emerged only now, or has it persisted since the old anti-communist paranoia of the West? Could it be that censorship and distortion of facts appeared much earlier, when the historical event – the October Revolution of 1917 – that changed the fate of humanity once and for all took place? What is the reason for this persistent censorship, which has taken various forms over time? Is the current censorship part of a total war against Russia, a cultural aspect of this war?

In 2022, many masks have been thrown off. The West was not at all delicate: its anti-Russian scenario was grotesque and aimed at the masses, previously intoxicated by fear – a diffuse but ubiquitous fear that easily turns into irrational hatred. Doesn’t this remind you of anything?

The Western media have done their job well and now lie shamelessly, precisely because they created in advance a “mass-media citizen” that is docile and incapable of asking questions. They say there is no time for doubts: it’s time to fall in line and repeat the order. Fear rules everything – fear of the future, fear of the present, fear of imagining what could be, fear of losing if those at the top collapse, even if you are not in solidarity with them.

There is undoubtedly a loss of understanding of who the well-publicized citizen of the “Free West” is – or should be. Someone who was capable of shouting, even without knowing exactly what he meant, the famous slogan “It is forbidden to forbid” of 1968, and who in doing so made no secret of his aggression against the Soviet Union and the “terrible Stalinist totalitarians.” The mixing of freedom and liberalism is not an innocent thing; it is a postmodern program of relativization, social defeat, and the loss of the historical and political horizon. A program that produces the most extravagant “free” identities, increasingly fragmented, more and more capable of complaint and inaction, and existing exclusively within a system that gives crumbs from its table and preserves the main thing: domination.

Now the stupid Western elites are banning Russian culture with absolute impunity and without shame – because shame is a human feeling. And this feeling sometimes even drives a revolution. US and European elites are desperately sinking into their own apocalyptic ideology (they know much about death and artificially created plague) and are more afraid of the “Red Scare” today than ever before. They have always feared that the peoples of the world would be infected by the courage and strength of those who were able to build the world’s first socialist country and defeat Nazism soon after.

Since 1917, this savage Western elite had been trying to defeat the Revolution of the Soviets and destroy Russia. Entire armies opposed the Soviet people and intervened, but lost. The Revolution of the Soviets strengthened, and in a short time, the country made incredible progress and became a great power.

All of these events in the West have always been told inside out and very dishonestly. An anti-communist belief is an anti-historical belief. A huge propaganda machine was thrown at the task of equating communism with prohibition, persecution, gulags, spies – in general, with everything that was called “totalitarianism,” specially designed to equate communism with fascism. And a pathetic caste of newly converted intellectuals was bought to claim remorse for their previous adherence to communist ideas. They received recognition and money.

The West presented itself as a bulwark of freedom, while at the same time destroying peoples in Asia, Africa and Latin America who dared to follow the “bad example” of the USSR. At the same time, the West invented slogans like “It is forbidden to forbid” and other mantras about “freedom” and “democracy” that had become so worn out. Mantras that bleed. Wars and crimes grew in proportion to the power of shouting about freedom, not only in Asia, Africa and Latin America, but also in Europe and the United States. In the name of “freedom” and “democracy,” a culture of death was spread there.

The West gained the support of the bourgeoisie in the vassal states and imposed on them the “great American culture” of cowboys, chewing gum, sex-drag-rock-n-roll, hamburgers, fried chicken, cars, gangsters and bombs. A worthless culture that never cared about truth and human life, that legalized lies so much that it convinced the world that they were the ones who “civilized” Indians and blacks (who were in reality enslaved and ruthlessly exterminated), and that they were the ones who won World War II (while it was the USSR that defeated Nazism). The West proved to be good at this: the culture and information war idiotized and corrupted the vast exploited masses.

This culture spread throughout the West and, step by step, took on the absurd appearance that we see now. A broken man who is only a consumer, a slave without a voice, a self-murderer or a murderer. The “culture” imposed on us – and it must be admitted – is a culture of death and dehumanization. If you feel bad, your big pharma doctor will prescribe you a good antidepressant. And if you feel really bad, he will kindly suggest euthanasia.

Apparently, the West is so afraid of the great Russian culture, which does not submit and has an alternative project for the construction of human existence, also because the culture of the West itself is in outright decline and despair. Its old propaganda arsenal, heavily used, although still working, has already almost exhausted itself.

Europe, colonized and mired in debts, submits to the “American-English way of life,” but cannot hide the price it pays for the structural crisis in the United States. The USA is a country without any social services, with millions of poor people on the streets, with the largest number of imprisoned persons in the world, and with a long list of historical crimes for which it has yet to answer – Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Guatemala, Iraq, Libya… and beyond.

So it is even curious to watch how those who used to shout “It is forbidden to forbid”, promoting Western “virtues”, today fearfully ban everything, even though they know that, for example, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Gorky, Blok, Mayakovsky and others simply great Russian writers cannot be banned. You cannot, because they would break through these rotten walls of the Western world of death with its crimes that have become so commonplace, one of which, as a vivid example, occurred last month at the walls of Melilla (on June 24, 37 migrants died trying to cross the border fences in the Spanish enclave of Melilla in Morocco, 130 of two thousand people reached Spain).

Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich would break through these vile fences of Western decadence, and in doing so would pave the way for a new humanity, as the revolutionary people did in 1917.

Thus, the question of the censorship of Russian culture leads to an important and urgent question: how and what should be done so that our peoples wake up from the imperialist nightmare?

How to awaken the almost erased memory of the most average citizen of the West?

How to restore people’s curiosity, their ability to dream, their profound sense of love and solidarity, that is, how to re-humanize them before it is too late?

The imperialist system is mortally wounded, but wounded it is even more insane and dangerous. And either people will wake up and rebel against it, or it will destroy what is left of humanity. It seems that the central role in this struggle has once again fallen to the Russian people, and the goal is the same as it was 80 years ago – the victory of life over the realm of death.

Sara Rosenberg, leftist activist, writer and journalist from Argentina

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