Culture’s Importance – II
Let us resort again to the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, for some politically incorrect common sense on the notion of “culture,” which he is taking in its broadest but real sense as the values, standards and way of life of different peoples at the national and international level. The enemies of man and God wish to homogenise all nations in a global mush which it will be that much easier for their Antichrist to dominate in the worldwide tyranny of which they dream. Almighty God, on the contrary, establishes an astonishing variety throughout His Creation, because the ordered variety of creatures best reflects His own fullness of being. But any ordered variety means a higher and a lower, in other words inequality. That is why His enemies wish to level everything down in the name of equality – “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” for example. Catholics on the contrary must wish for all creatures to be as varied and as unequal as their Creator meant them to be. Putin is in this respect on the side of Almighty God.
He was here talking to an international group of youngsters attending the 19th World Festival of Youth and Students held in Sochi, Russia, last October. See http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/55842.
India, our neighbour to the left, has a population of 1.2 billion, and China has a population of 1.5 billion. As for the United States, it continues to receive more and more immigrants; and, as far as I understand, its White Christian population has recently become a minority, less than 50 percent of the total US population. What I mean to say is that the world is going through dramatic, global change. I am not saying this is good or bad, just that global changes are taking place.
You have said Russia is a vast territory – indeed. But from its western to its eastern borders, it is a Eurasian space. As regards culture, even language, language group and history, it is all undoubtedly a European space insofar as it is inhabited by people of European culture. This I say because it is what we have to preserve if we are to remain a significant centre in the world – and I do not mean that in the military sense or any other such sense. We should not divide peoples according to their ethnicity, and we should not look back in history, thinking, say, of the war between France and Russia from 1812 to 1814, rather we should look to the future for ways to build a common future and follow a common path.
This is how we can preserve Russia and its people as a global centre that is significant for relations with Asian countries and the American continent. If we fail to preserve Russia, it will be divided into minor quasi-national associations of States that would eventually lose their significance in the global sense as independent centres. If we do preserve Russia, this will be a great advantage for the development of all mankind as well, because Russia is a major part of the global culture and it certainly has to be preserved.
Indeed. A leading part of men’s culture has always been their literature, visual arts and music, because human beings of all times and in all places stand especially in need of stories, pictures and music to express and share what is going on inside them. That is why theatre and cinema which can combine all three are so influential, especially cinema today. In literature Russia boasts a number of world-famous authors: Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekov, Solzhenitsyn, etc.; in music, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, etc.; in cinema, Eisenstein and Tarkovsky have international reputations. Putin is right – thanks to Russia’s long winters and deep thinkers, his country has much to contribute to world culture that is far superior to the heap of democratic trash presently expressing what is going on inside men.
Pray for Putin not to be assassinated, because God’s enemies hate him, not without reason – he is leading his country towards its Consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, which will put off, at least for a while, the Antichrist. May She protect him.
Kyrie eleison.
