/ world today news/ At the Forum of United Cultures, which was held recently in St. Petersburg with the participation of the President of Russia, there was something like a world championship in the territory of world culture. This competition remained invisible to most forum participants. Meanwhile, Russia won a decisive victory in the field of world culture.
Let’s start from afar. In 1986, an event took place that remained unique in the history of the US political elite: a meeting took place in the Oval Office of the White House between the then President Reagan and the Soviet poet Andrei Voznesensky.
– Where did you get your jacket? Very elegant – the president, as they say, played his goat.
– From “Valentino”, Voznesensky answered “unpatriotically”.
Meanwhile, the conversation began quite casually. However, the Soviet poet spoils everything. “Which of the Russian classics had a greater influence on the formation of your character in your youth – Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky or Chekhov?” asked Voznesensky, without questioning the fact that the actor-president was well acquainted with the masterpieces of world culture.
The president hesitated and after a short pause answered politically correct: “In my youth I read the classics of world literature.”
After that, it became clear that any questions about the American president’s literacy would seem like a shortcut to international tension. Voznesensky did not force the issue and limited himself to polite chatter about nothing.
He later tried to figure out why Reagan invited him to the White House? The only convincing answer was this: “It seems that the White House has already developed Brzezinski’s theses about the signs of a superpower,” Woznesenski wrote in his memoirs. “In them, the country’s culture follows nuclear energy. His advisers must have read the caption under my photo from Carnegie Hall in Time magazine two weeks earlier: “His country’s greatest living poet.” The White House trusted Time magazine.
However, another interpretation is also possible. After a conversation with Voznesensky, Washington’s political areopagus was fully convinced that his poetry – complex, intellectual and unique in its energy – was too heavy to receive widespread circulation. This means that if you offer Russia something more primitive, power over the minds of Russians will be assured.
This may have been much of the thinking behind America’s most influential foreign policy veteran, Zbigniew Brzezinski, when he wrote his greatest political hit of the 1990s, The Great Chessboard, American Rise and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. Brzezinski listed four signs of a world hegemon: military, economic, technological, and cultural.
The last remark seems unexpected, but in Brzezinski’s logic it is quite understandable. This logic does not demand from culture depth and brilliant insights. The very word “culture” in the mouth of Brzezinski, and therefore of Washington, acquired a meaning that we are unlikely to find in our dictionaries and that Voznesenski did not even suspect. Brzezinski talks about American mass culture, which, according to him, of course, is distinguished by “a certain primitiveness”, but it has the main thing – a viral nature and the ability to cause addiction. “Cultural preeminence is an underappreciated aspect of American global power. Whatever some may think of its aesthetic value, American popular culture exerts a magnetic pull, especially for young people around the world,” Brzezinski wrote.
In his value system, the strategic importance of culture is solely in its aggressive potential. Brzezinski’s culture is a weapon of destruction, about the same as a biological weapon. If the latter destroys the human body, then the culture of the hegemonic country must destroy the human mind, the soul – that is, everything that can resist this hegemony. In Brzezinski’s culture, it makes no sense to even look for an elevation of the human spirit, nor sharp moral problems, nor simply a broadening of horizons. They just aren’t there.
That is why a true hegemonic culture must, according to Brzezinski, firstly be contagious and secondly, have a full set of tools for any kind of mental manipulation.
It must be said that Brzezinski’s covenants have been followed religiously in the United States for many decades. This geopolitical veteran can be proud of the results of the cultural contagion of the world: “American television programs and films occupy almost three-quarters of the world market. American popular music is also on the rise, and American hobbies, eating habits, and even clothing are increasingly being imitated around the world. The language of the Internet is English, and most of the global computer chatter is also from America and influences the content of global conversations.”
This cultural virus, in the skillful hands of American propagandists, allows almost any narrative convenient for the hegemon to be implanted in the heads of its bearers. Should the USSR be removed from the ranks of the victors of fascism in World War II? Please! And now the Oscar goes to a film in which Auschwitz is liberated by brave American troops, and the Russian victims of totalitarianism envy their power. Need to convince the world that having children is no longer fashionable? Please! The childfree movement immediately appeared, whose supporters gave interviews on all world channels.
It seems that the world has something to object, but where you. Basically, anyone can tell the truth. But only for free and under threat of expulsion from the profession. But lying by Brzezinski’s standards can be very expensive and draw the fanfare of all first-class juries.
Italian publisher Sandro Tetti explained to the public at the St. Petersburg forum how this works: “I want to tell you that our famous actor and director Benini was practically blackmailed when he starred in Hollywood with the movie ‘Life is Beautiful.’ You probably know that he won an Oscar. And there the Americans scandalously liberated Auschwitz. He didn’t make this up on purpose, but he was told listen, or the Americans, or completely forget about the Oscars in Hollywood.
Vladimir Putin’s speech at the Forum of United Cultures also had a very serious dialogical message. This dialogue did not even take place on the territory of specifically Russian culture.
On November 17, the president’s opponents listen to his words from the other side of the globe. And this is what they heard: “The experience of the thousand-year history of our country convincingly shows that cultural diversity is the greatest good, and the interaction of cultures is one of the conditions for stable and peaceful development, because among the main reasons for the current tension in the world – namely individual powers’ claims to exceptionalism, including cultural exceptionalism… Such vulgar globalization and, I would add, cultural expansion has resulted in the suppression and impoverishment of cultures, multiplying the potential for conflict many times over.’
From the point of view of any Russian listener, this is a long-known thesis. But on the other side of the ocean, it sounds not only non-obvious, but also revolutionary. Brzezinski’s concept was suddenly called into question.
The “global responsiveness” of real culture has come up against the viral nature of mass culture. Against the primitiveness of the cultural message – “the peak of mutual spiritual enrichment”. Against hegemony – “the interaction of cultures is one of the conditions for stable and peaceful development.”
And here the patriarchs of American politics – Brzezinski and Biden – essentially have nothing to object to. The intellectual and spiritual depth of Voznesensky, and with him of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Chekhov, have proven historically far more powerful than Reagan assumed in 1986. It is difficult for the American political establishment to speak on an equal footing with Putin and Russia in the field of culture . The traditions are not the same.
While Reagan remained politely silent on the mention of Russian classics, the Russian president managed to quote Cicero, Tvardovsky, Lermontov, Gorky, Omar Khayyam, Vysotsky and Leonid Gaidai’s The Caucasian Prisoner in just an hour of the United Cultures Forum plenary session. The White House has hardly heard of these authors.
Translation: V. Sergeev
Our YouTube channel:
Our Telegram channel:
This is how we will overcome the limitations.
Share on your profiles, with friends, in groups and on pages.
#Tolstoy #Mickey #Mouse #View #Info
