Russian President Vladimir Putin has approved a decree putting into effect the National Security Strategy of the Russian Federation.
According to Putin, Russia’s traditional spiritual, moral, and cultural-historical values are under constant attack from the United States and its allies, as well as from multinational corporations, foreign non-governmental, religious, extremist, and terrorist organizations.
Nothing new here… the same old song: everyone around is an enemy dreaming of eradicating those Russian traditional values.
Article 91 of the Strategy lists the values that must be protected: life, dignity, human rights and freedoms, patriotism, citizenship, service to the fatherland, high moral ideals, strong family, creative work, the priority of the spiritual over the material, humanism, charity, justice, collectivism, mutual aid, historical memory, heredity of generations, and unity of the peoples in Russia.
In turn, the next article declares that the protection of values shall be ensured through fulfilling a number of tasks, including achieving the so-called interfaith harmony, protection of historical truth, development of state information policy aimed at reaffirming the said values, support for religious organizations of traditional denominations, protection of Russian language and protection of the Russian population from external influences.
However, if we put aside the pathetic statements about the importance of spiritual and cultural heritage, the first thing that comes to mind is that people’s health is nowhere to be seen among the protected values, as well as the need to develop medicine. At a time when this issue is almost in the first place in the world, Vladimir Putin, apparently, does not consider the coronavirus a threat to scrapie.
In addition, it seems that by asserting the priority of the spiritual over the material, the Kremlin has simply legalized and justified poverty of the vast majority of the Russian population, which is now supposed to be caring about their spiritual growth and ignoring such things as comfortable living, modern health care, convenient infrastructure and often even access to centralized sewerage.
In addition, most of the postulates laid down in the Strategy simply do not correspond to the realities of modern Russia. Achieving interfaith harmony is really nothing but securing the monopoly of the Russian Orthodox Church, which has enormous advantages and privileges over other denominations and faiths. Also, preservation of historical truth is in fact the “version,” or interpretation, of historical events that’s favorable to the Kremlin, while documented and well-known facts that level Russian propaganda narratives are strictly censored.
After all, protecting the Russian population from so-called threatening external influences is likely to turn into another “iron curtain.” The veil that, for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union, isolates Russia from the civilized world, modern science, economics, and law, ultimately turning Russia into a world exile, whose citizens will be made to be proud of their traditional values, repression, denunciations, tyranny, and medieval-style insane rulers.