Vladimir Putin compared the cancellation of performances by Russian artists in the West on Friday to the Nazi book burnings. “Today you’re trying to wipe out a thousand-year-old country – I’m talking about progressive discrimination against everything related to Russia,” he said in a televised conversation with artists. “The last time such a massive campaign to destroy objectionable literature was waged was almost 90 years ago by the Nazis in Germany.”
“Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich and Rachmaninov will be removed from concert announcements, Russian authors and their books will also be banned,” Putin claimed, referring to the Nazi book burnings in Hitler’s Germany. “Today, a whole thousand-year-old country, they are trying to ‘cancel’ our people,” Putin said. Everything with Russia connected, are discriminated against, with the approval of the ruling elites. The 69-year-old criticized the fact that Hollywood films acted as if only the USA had liberated Europe from Hitlerite fascism in World War II. The courage of the Red Army, on the other hand, whose soldiers made a decisive contribution to the victory over Hitler, is left out.
“That’s unimaginable in our country,” Putin said at his residence in Novo-Ogaryovo near Moscow. For Russia national culture is inseparable from the motherland, there is no place for intolerance. “Cultural diversity is the pride of society, it is the strength and advantage of our state,” said the Kremlin chief. Ukraine throws Russia before taking unwanted Ukrainian literature from the libraries in the occupied territories. Russia on the other hand, deplores the suppression of his language in Ukraine.
Several Russian artists close to the Kremlin, such as the conductor and Putin friend Valery Gergiev (also: Valery Gergiev) lost their engagements in the EU and the USA after the Russian attack on Ukraine. But many have Russia left or have resigned from their posts because they are Putins war not support against Ukraine.
Sanctions upset Moscow
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had already compared statements by European politicians with those of Adolf Hitler. “Today they declared a real hybrid war on us, total war,” Lavrov said at a meeting with representatives of a diplomatic foundation on Friday, according to the state agency TASS. He specifically referred to Western economic sanctions. Many European politicians would currently use this term from Germany under Hitler to explain “what they want to do with Russia.” They made no secret of their goal – “to destroy, break, annihilate, strangle the Russian economy as a whole,” said the foreign minister.
The actual use of the term by well-known EU politicians in the past few weeks is not known. In 1943, Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels called for “total war” in his notorious speech at the Sportpalast.
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Fight against “Nazis” in Ukraine
Russia has been the target of unprecedented Western sanctions since the start of its military operation in Ukraine. They target the country’s financial system, supply chains and currency, among other things. Moscow leads fighting “Nazis” in Ukraine.
The central role of the Soviet Union in defeating Nazi Germany in World War II has long figured prominently in Putin’s patriotic rhetoric. In the past few weeks he had repeatedly used terms from the Nazi era and, for example, denounced an economic “Blitzkrieg” in the West or compared sanctions with “anti-Semitic pogroms”.
Video: Historian Philipp Lesiak talks about the Iron Curtain
Source: Nachrichten
