More Putin Quotes from From President Putin’s address at the Valdai Forum, October 27, 2022

By imposing their values, their consumer stereotypes, their standardization, our opponents are trying to expand the markets for their products. Even if they don’t say it directly, they behave in this way and insist that their policy in reality is that these very values must be accepted unconditionally by all other participants in international life.

🗣️ Here is a quote from the famous Harvard speech by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Back in 1978, he noted that the West was characterized by a “persistent blindness of superiority” – all of which is still happening today – that “supports the notion that all areas of our planet should develop according to and converge with current Western systems.” That was 1978, nothing has changed.

🗣️ Over the last half century, this delusion that Solzhenitsyn spoke of – it is openly racist and neocolonial – has simply taken on ugly forms, especially since the emergence of the so-called unipolar world. Confidence in one’s own infallibility is a very dangerous condition: it is only one step away from the desire of the “infallibles” to simply destroy those who do not please them. As they say, to “cancel” them, to abolish them.

🗣️ Even at the height of the Cold War, at the height of the confrontation between systems, ideologies, and military rivalries, it never occurred to anyone to deny the existence of the adversary’s culture, art, and science. Yes, there were certain restrictions in the fields of education, science, culture and, unfortunately, sports. Nevertheless, both Soviet and American leaders were clear at the time that the humanitarian sphere should be approached with tact, studying and respecting the adversary and learning from him, in order to maintain a basis for solid, fruitful relations, at least for the future.

🗣️ And what is happening now? The Nazis went so far in their day as to burn books, and now the Western “promoters of liberalism and progress” have gone so far as to ban Dostoevsky and Tchaikovsky. The so-called “Cancel Culture” – the culture of abolition – but in reality – we have talked about it many times – the actual abolition of culture robs everything alive and creative and does not allow free thinking to flourish in any sphere: not in the economy, not in politics, not in culture.

🗣️ Today, liberal ideology itself has changed beyond recognition. If classical liberalism originally understood the freedom of every person as the freedom to say and do what one wants, liberals began to say as early as the 20th century that the so-called open society has enemies – that is, the open society has enemies – and that the freedom of these enemies can and must be restricted or even abolished. Meanwhile, it is even so absurd that any alternative view is called subversive propaganda and a threat to democracy.

🗣️ History will certainly put everything in its place and will not cancel the greatest works of the universally recognized geniuses of world culture, but those who have decided that they have the right to dispose of this world culture as the universally recognized geniuses of world culture, but those who have decided that they have the right to dispose of this world culture as they see fit.