The problem is finding a way to shield the vulnerable, particularly the youth, from adverse influences without restricting personal freedoms.

For centuries, Russia has been open to adopting popular Western traditions, but as the invasive cultural weed known as progressive liberalism enters the scene, Moscow is now forced to rethink the level of its engagement. With the internet and ubiquitous social media, however, such a cultural distancing will not be easy.

Russian Tsar Peter the Great (1672-1725), from the vantage point of his newly built capital of Saint Petersburg, encouraged his fellow Russians to emulate particular Western styles that he believed were civilized and cultivated. One of his less popular pro-Western reforms involved an edict that forbade beards among government officials and nobles.

“Peter, beardless himself, regarded beards as unnecessary, uncivilized and ridiculous,” wrote Peter Massie in his biography ‘Peter the Great’. “They made his country a subject of mirth and mockery in the West … Within a week of his return [from a trip around Europe], he went to a banquet given by [Army Commander Alexis] Shein and sent his court fool, Jacob Turgenov, around the room in the role of barber. The process was often uncomfortable; shaving long, thick beards with a dry razor left many gouges and cuts where the sharp blade had come to close. But no one dared object…”

Eventually, Tsar Peter relaxed his edict, allowing anyone who paid a hefty ‘beard tax’ to keep their beloved facial hair.

Fast forward about three centuries and we find Russian President Vladimir Putin starting to apply the emergency brakes on Russia’s import of Western ideas and traditions, many of which are far from innocuous.

During his annual end-of-year Q&A press conference, Putin was asked about issues that have obsessed the Western mind, like transgenderism and the rejection of traditional concepts, such as mother, father and gender – one-time unquestionable biological facts that are now open to a variety of interpretations according to the personal whims of each individual.

War is Peace.
Freedom is Slavery.
Ignorance is Strength.
The Penised Individual Who Raped You Is a Woman.https://t.co/SyxFnnboM1

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) December 12, 2021

“I adhere to that traditional approach that a woman is a woman and a man is a man. A mother is a mother, a father is a father,” Putin responded with a frankness that would make a modern liberal faint. “And I hope that our society has the internal moral protection dictated by the traditional religious denominations of the Russian Federation.”

Comparing the proliferation of such dangerous ideas to the spread of a pandemic, the Russian leader, hinting at the moral strength provided by Orthodoxy, argued that all Russian citizens enjoy “a certain internal moral protection against this obscurantism that you’ve just mentioned.”

Putin then alluded to a criminal case in the United States where a criminal serving time for rape declared that he was female and, after being transferred to a women’s prison, committed the same crime in his cell.

“It is necessary to fight [progressive liberalism] not with direct orders and shouts and accusations but with the support for our traditional values,” he asserted.

@RT_com presents a manual on just how one should (might) celebrate Christmas in 2021/22. In the eye of the beholder.

RT reminds -> in the age of new ethics and cancel culture all things conservative turn progressive. Or should they?#ThinkForYourself & #MerryChristmas! pic.twitter.com/BkSIAYRAb7

— MFA Russia (@mfa_russia) December 25, 2021

Here is the tremendous quandary now confronting Russia: since most people these days are more likely to be holding a smartphone and checking their social media accounts than reading Tolstoy, Bulgakov or Dostoevsky, ‘closing the window’ on dubious Western values is not so straightforward. The problem for Russia, and many other countries, is finding a way to shield the vulnerable, particularly the youth, from such adverse influences without restricting personal freedoms.

To get an idea exactly how popular social media has become, this year the Chinese video-sharing platform TikTok dethroned the behemoth Google – with all of its myriad services, like Maps, Translate, News, etc – from the top spot, while Facebook took third place. Meanwhile, Netflix, with its not-so-subtle programming on behalf of half-baked woke ideas, grabbed seventh place.

A one-minute scroll down TikTok’s main page tells a person everything they need to know about the platform’s content, which could be summed up in three words: lewd, vulgar and repulsive. There is literally no sign of intelligent life forms whatsoever. Indeed, the majority of the content creators appear to be very young and, shockingly, in various hedonistic stages of disrobing and debauchery.

That must be of no small concern when it is considered that over 29 million Russians use TikTok, and the largest share of the audience was represented by female users at nearly 56 percent as of May 2021 (12-24 year olds make up 26 percent of its audience). Many psychologists attribute this heavy social media usage to a dramatic uptick in adolescents – particularly females – expressing early confusion about their gender.

In one peer-reviewed academic study, it was found that “86.7% of parents reported that, along with the sudden or rapid onset of gender dysphoria, their child either had an increase in their social media/internet use, belonged to a friend group in which one or multiple friends became transgender-identified during a similar timeframe, or both.”

While TikTok is not the only social media company with a formidable footprint in Russia (Russia’s very own VKontakte, a popular alternative to Facebook, is the most popular social media site in the country, with some 70 million monthly users), it certainly ranks as one of the most disruptive in terms of its ability to shape the soft minds of predominantly young users. Yet to date it seems that Russia is content to merely mimic the Chinese platform. In September, Gazprom-Media unveiled a new platform called Yappy, which, like TikTok, enables users to record 60-second videos. The main target audience is for those people in the 14-34 age range.

Nevertheless, signs of a Russian pushback against the messaging are on the horizon. Twitter, for example, received a warning in March by the Russian communications regulator Roskomnadzor that it could be blocked from the country if it refuses to “remove content that incites minors to commit suicide, contains child pornography or information about the use of drugs.”

The Russian watchdog demanded the removal of more than 28,000 posts, links and publications, which reportedly included more than 2,500 calls for children to kill themselves and 450 involving child pornography.

The problem with social media and its inherently negative influence is not limited to Russia, of course. In January, Italian regulators forced TikTok to block underage users from using its app, after a 10-year-old girl from Palermo died attempting to perform a dangerous social media challenge that involved participants cutting off their oxygen supply to experience a high.

These types of peer-pressure challenges affecting children, which oftentimes do not make themselves known to parents (and the authorities) until the damage has already been done, can be described as a direct threat to national security, and perhaps more so for Russia than other countries.

As the vapid Western gospel of wokeness is widely disseminated from every social media pulpit, brainwashing children about strange new creeds, like transgenderism, this places the nuclear family unit under direct attack. And for a country like Russia, suffering as it is from low demographics amid a pandemic, such an attack cannot go unanswered forever.

“From both a humanitarian and geopolitical perspective, bearing in mind the people of the country – 146 million for such a vast territory is absolutely insufficient,” Putin told the assembled journalists. “We now have around 81 million people of working age – we have to seriously increase that by 2024 and 2030. It’s one of the factors of economic growth,” he added.

Clearly, woke ideology, with its marked tendency to assist in the impregnation of the mind – not the womb – has absolutely no place in modern Russia, and not just from a moralistic point of view. The question that now faces Russia at this critical juncture in its turbulent history, amid tumbling population rates, is how to keep these corrosive Western ‘values’ at bay, while allowing for the exchange of respectable ideas and technology. It’s probably no exaggeration to say that nothing less than Russia’s survival hinges on the right answer. 

The new Cold War launched by the West against China and Russia is escalating by the day. In a single week, the Kremlin has been unmasked trying to discover the secrets of Britain’s pursuit of a vaccine against coronavirus and revelations are promised about covert Russian interference in British politics. Boris Johnson made a U-turn on Huawei, announcing that it is to be kicked out of participation in the 5G network because it poses a threat to British security, though a curiously slow-burning one since they will only be evicted over seven years.

The US may put the widely-used Chinese video app TikTok on a blacklist that would prevent Americans from using it. The administration is considering using the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act in order to penalise TikTok as “an unusual and extraordinary threat” to US security. President Trump says he is considering banning the app in response to the way China handled the coronavirus epidemic.

This is a clue to the prime motive for Trump to ramp up the Cold War against China, which is his determination to win a second term in the White House by diverting voters’ attention from his catastrophic handling of the pandemic. “Don’t defend Trump – attack China,” is the advice of a leaked 57-page memo circulated among Republican Senatorial candidates in April. It suggested that Republican politicians should blame China for starting the epidemic by allowing the virus to escape from a laboratory in Wuhan, lying about it and hoarding medical equipment needed to treat the sick.

As during the original Cold War in the late 1940s and 1950s, critics can be conveniently dismissed as Communist sympathisers or dupes. Unsurprisingly, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is responding to the confrontation with China by demanding that the US should take an even tougher stance towards Beijing, while the Democratic Party establishment are ever hopeful that their prolonged campaign to portray Trump as the creature of Vladimir Putin’s Russia will take fire and do him serious damage at the polls.

As with Trump’s claim that China is ultimately responsible for the lethal debacle of America’s handling of the coronavirus epidemic, I have always thought that Hillary Clinton’s’ claim that she lost the 2016 presidential election because of Russian interference was absurd. Every history of her disastrous campaign shows that she lost for obvious self-inflicted reasons such as not campaigning enough in key northern states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan – states that Trump won by a whisker.

The explanation for Boris Johnson’s U-turn over Huawei is simply explained by his inability to withstand American pressure as Britain leaves the EU and becomes even more dependent on the US. The kowtow to Washington over Huawei is the first of many such humiliations that come as an inevitable consequence of Brexit. Instead of getting back control of its destiny, Boris Johnson’s Britain will be more like Little Red Riding Hood lost in the global forest and menaced by every passing wolf.

There may be enough Chinese and Russian misbehaviour to justify retaliation, but threat-inflation has the great advantage of diverting attention from the British government’s incompetence in coping with the pandemic, a failure only excelled by the US and Brazil. Quite possibly Russian intelligence in the shape of cybergroup Cozy Bear has devoted great efforts to stealing secrets from western academia and pharmaceutical companies seeking to produce a vaccine against coronavirus. Less clear is why such information should be secret, unless these institutions and companies are planning to keep monopoly control over any vaccine produced, unlike the polio vaccine which the US made available to the world when first developed by American scientists at the height of the previous Cold War in the 1950s.

The heads and former heads of British intelligence agencies have been giving solemn interviews about how British security is threatened by Russian and Chinese machinations. The nature of this threat is never spelled out and intelligence chiefs can always claim that to do so would compromise confidential information that must not be disclosed.

I have always had doubts over the exalted claims about the excellence of British intelligence, which has become part of the British national myth. The saga of the breaking of the German Enigma codes in the Second World War has replaced the defeat of the Spanish Armada as a source of national pride and self-confidence.

British officials I encountered over the years during wars in the Middle East never seemed strikingly well-informed, but it was always possible that they were being singularly discreet or they were outside the loop of those privy to such vital information. Yet when the exhaustive Chilcott enquiry into British actions during the Iraq War was finally published in 2016, it concluded that Britain was poorly informed about almost everything that was going on in Iraq before and after it joined the US-led invasion. On the Libyan war in 2011, a scathing report by the House of Commons select committee on foreign affairs concluded that Britain lacked “accurate intelligence” or much idea of what was happening.

Four years later, the British government launched a bombing campaign against Isis in Syria amid much angry debate in which all sides took it for granted that Britain was in a position to do more than military posturing. But nine months into the much-debated bombing, a report of the House of Commons defence committee chaired by Dr Julian Lewis revealed that only 65 air raids had taken place over nine months because the RAF did not know where Isis was hiding. Nor was the government able to identify the 70,000 armed anti-Assad fighters on whose behalf Britain was supposedly intervening. No wonder that Johnson was so dismayed by the election of the experienced and critical Lewis as the new chairman of the House of Commons intelligence and security committee, instead of Chris Grayling, his own notoriously blunder-prone nominee.

It is just possible to forget amid the threats and counter-threats of the new Cold War – and the intention is certainly that we should forget – that the world is failing to contain a pandemic that has killed half a million people. Never has global unity of effort been more necessary, whatever differences there may be, and its fragmentation more damaging. “How is it difficult for humans to unite and fight a common enemy that is killing people indiscriminately?” asked the director general of WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, wiping away tears of frustration earlier this month. “Can’t we understand that the divisions and the cracks between us are an advantage for the virus?”

He got his answer from the Cold War warriors the world over this week, and it was a resounding “no”.

counterpunch.org