the horrors of Western political correctness in the Russian media

Russian politicians and propagandists rarely pass a day without cursing the spiritless West, destroying blessed conservative values. On Sunday, Speaker of the Federation Council Valentina Matvienko, at a meeting with the head of the Chamber of Deputies of the National Assembly of Bahrain, Fauzia Abdullah Zeynal, said:

“They are trying to impose on us values ​​that are alien to us. And not only for us, but also for the whole promotion in the world. These are the rights of sexual minorities, this (and what) in Europe has already counted 85 genders. This is unacceptable for us.

The number of gender variants recognized in the West in the statements of Russian politicians is growing uncontrollably. In January 2019, Deputy Speaker of the State Duma Pyotr Tolstoy statedthat PACE recommended to Russia to divide the members of the delegation into six sexes. Later, he tried to explain his awkward joke with terminological confusion, but in July 2019, Vladimir Putin picked up the topic:

– Six or five sexes were invented – transformers, tran … I don’t even understand what it is, you know.

The Insider then became interested in this thesis and found outthat the idea of ​​six gender varieties Tolstoy and Putin could glean in the ancient Jewish religious texts – the Mishnah and the Talmud – and about five – perhaps in the humorous “Star Diaries of Iyon the Quiet” by Stanislav Lem, which describes a five-sex alien race.

However, even earlier, in 2014, the Russian media reported that Facebook proposes users define their gender identity by choosing from 58 options. True, in the full list that appeared in the American online edition Slate, some positions repeated each other, but now, as it is easy to notice for any user of the social network, Facebook offers only three options – “woman”, “man”, “other.” But the idea, thrown to the masses, continued to live: in the peculiar consciousness of the once famous Irina Bergset, who became famous for the story of how her four-year-old son dressed up in “Putin’s suit” and subjected to gang rape, this turned into in “58 Kinds of Gays”, and now the speaker of the Federation Council, apparently, has changed the numbers and the level of gender diversity in the corrupted West has reached a record high.

On the same day “News of the week” reported shocking news:

“The British Library has blacklisted Oscar Wilde, Lord Byron and George Orwell. All of them were allegedly guilty of the fact that they had slave owners in their ancestors. Oscar Wilde had the worst of all: he fell under the tread of the morality police twice. A little more than a century ago – for “indecent behavior towards men” (today it is practically like an order in Britain), but now the concept has changed in relation to race, and Wilde has become a burner of the inheritance acquired by the exploitation of slave labor. The library undertook this abolition of the classics of English literature within the framework of what it claimed was “a new understanding of the historical context and the personalities of the writers themselves.”

The news, however, turned out to be a year ago: in November 2020, the newspaper The Telegraph reported of the British Library’s list of “figures associated with fortunes from slavery or colonial violence” and that it mistakenly included the prominent 20th century poet Ted Hughes (in fact, his distant relative, once associated with the company, engaged in the slave trade, later went bankrupt and left no inheritance). From publication in The Telegraph it is also known that the list includes Byron, Wilde and Orwell. The list itself is not on the library website, but there is apologies in front of Hughes’ relatives.

More important, however, is that no “black list” exists, no one in the British Library and in Britain in general thought to blame the classics for the sins of their ancestors. The library staff simply added information about the origin of the fortunes of the original owners to the description of the private collections of books and documents in its holdings. The library explains this step as follows:

“As part of the library’s ongoing work to interpret and document the origins and history of the printed collections under our care, curators have done some research to identify collections associated with wealth derived from enslaved people or as a result of colonial violence. The aim is to share knowledge with researchers so that they can judge whether these aspects are important to their understanding of the circumstances behind the creation of individual collections. “

The point of this decision is not at all to discredit the classics within the framework of the notorious “culture of abolition”, but to show how complex and contradictory history is, including the history of many families. It can be said that the library, relying on unshakable authorities in British culture, is precisely opposed to the extremes of modern political correctness. But Russian propagandists need to find an example of the decline of Western culture – and they do.

The next day about another sign of the destruction of Western civilization told program “Time”. The story is titled “Girls and Boys Shared Toilet Are Introduced in Chicago Schools”:

“Schools in Chicago have made shared toilets for girls and boys. Mothers in maternity hospitals are offered not to determine the sex of the child. The fashion for neutrality and gender equality has begun to distort itself so much that it is not clear where it will all go.

Encouraging the richness of choice that children are introduced to in an accessible form even in elementary grades, schools in Chicago decided to make all toilets shared. <…>

Progressive liberals have long criticized traditional toilets: they say they discriminate against women. After all, in the women’s restroom there is usually a crowd in front of the entrance, and it is easier to get into the men’s one. A celebration of justice in a gender-neutral toilet in a New York store: men and women stand in the same line and no discrimination.

But first of all, the introduction of unisex toilets across the country was lobbied by transgender people so that, say, a woman who changed sex could legally go where ordinary men go.

This topic is being discussed so widely that conservatives believe: the idea of ​​gender reassignment has already become a part of school fashion. “

In fact, in recent years in America, and in Europe, they increasingly refuse to divide toilets into male and female. Such recommendations were given to schools by government agencies in the United States, Great Britain and Ireland. But there are no signs of “depravity” or “decline” in this. Irish newspaper The Irish Times So describes school toilet design recommended by the authorities:

“Instead of traditional toilets for boys and girls with urinals or stalls indoors, the new design is based on individual stalls that open out onto a shared washbasin area.”

This is a much more convenient design and provides everyone with the maximum level of privacy. The innovation has no direct relation to the rights of transgender people and sexual minorities. By the way, such toilets are increasingly common in Russian public buildings, for example, in restaurants.