The New York Daily News drew attention to increasing schizophrenization of Russian population by their KGB junta.
In an article entitled "Vladimir Putin would like you to read a book: Why his proposal for a "Russian canon" is scary as hell, the newspaper comments on a recent essay by Putin which he stole from others KGB men by giving it as his own.
The newspaper writes in particular:
"Most of the tediously long essay, called "Russia: The Ethnicity Issue," is shamelessly borrowed from the demagogue's playbook, positing a confused West ("the melting pot of assimilation is highly volatile") against a Russia that was almost destroyed (not finished off - KC) not by communism, but the Soviet Union's downfall ("Russia did not vanish, even when the state as an institution was critically weakened").
Putin also waxes nostalgic about how "some leading universities in the United States advocated something referred to as the Western Canon, a canon of books regarded as the most important and influential in shaping Western culture. Each self-respecting student was required to read 100 books from a specially compiled list of the greatest books of the Western world".
This appears to be a reference to the Harvard Classics or Mortimer Adler's "Great Books", perhaps even to the traditional curricula of Columbia or the University of Chicago.
But Putin willfully misses the point - besides these not being requirements, as far as I am aware, they were meant to instill civic virtues, not patriotic ones.
The question Adler (see photo on the Time cover in 1952) wanted to ask was how to be a good person, not just a good American, because that identity is itself paramount. That latter would merely follow, those midcentury popularizes of culture thoughts.
As far as Putin is concerned, it is only Russianess that matters - reading is not an end in itself, but a means to further his crass political goals, much as Social Realist art, with its plentiful harvests, furthered the image Stalin wanted to sell, even as he starved the Ukrainian populace by the thousands.
As such, Putin's apparent overture to literature is actually an assault on the freedom literature thrives on.
Reporting on Putin's new cultural program, Radio Free Europe has one citizen of Moscow wondering, "I wonder if Orwell will make the list". No, he won't", wrote columnist Alexander Nazaryan in New York Daily News.
Department of Monitoring
Kavkaz Center
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