Vladimir Putin's culture gestapo : ''Russians have extra chromosome"
Last edited Sun Jul 6, 2014, 01:09 AM - Edit history (1)
Meet the Second-Rate Academic Who is Vladimir Putin's Culture Cop
Vladimir Medinsky is nationalist and anti-European, just like Putin
In April, the Russian Ministry of Culture issued a document that declared “Russia is not Europe,” and argued that Europe was morally inferior, even reprehensible. In May, the culture minister, Vladimir Medinsky, was to visit Venice to accept an honorary fellowship from the University Ca’ Foscari. He never made it to Italy, though. Professors and students protested the university’s choice and, at the last moment, the ceremony was canceled. But Medinsky got his honor nonetheless: An emissary from the Italian university travelled to Moscow last week, and the award ceremony was held on the premises of the ministry of culture.
The ministry’s document, laying out ideas for Russia’s official culture policy, was published in the leading pro-Kremlin daily, Izvestia. It is interspersed with quotes from Putin's articles and speeches, just as Soviet government programs drew on Marx and Lenin. Since Putin had earlier condemned European multiculturalism and dismissed the policy of tolerance as “neutered and barren,” so the cultural policy blueprint includes “a rejection of the principles of tolerance and multiculturalism.” Following Putin's lead, the document emphasizes Russian “traditional values” and cautions against any kind of art that may be at variance with those values. Contemporary art is deemed especially suspicious: “No experiments with form,” the documents warns, “can justify the substance that contradicts the values traditional for our society.”
Medinsky also eagerly picked up the Kremlin’s anti-gay stances: Earlier this year, he joined others in denying that Russia’s famous composer Pyotr Chaikovsky was gay despite numerous archival documents, including Chaikovsky’s personal letters, that leave no doubt that he was. Before he was appointed minister of culture in 2012, Medinsky published a series of books debunking “myths” about Russia—a text that attempted to refute any negative fact or opinion, including widely accepted truths, such as the poor condition of Russia’s roads. Medinsky is so keen to demonstrate Russia’s superiority to other nations that he has even said that Russia’s perseverance in the face of all twentieth-century catastrophes, indicates that “our people have an extra chromosome.”
read:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117896/vladimir-medinsky-russias-culture-minister-putin-toady
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