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Russia to ban Valentine's Day to 'save' youth
Russia has announced plans to ban foreign toys and Valentine’s Day in a bid to protect the country’s youth from moral corruption by the West.

Despite accusations of censorship and nationalism, the Russian Duma this week introduced a series of bills designed to uphold the spiritual values of children by protecting their morals.

The legislation envisages a ban on the sale of children’s toys that “provoke aggression”, “model actions of a sexual nature”, “justify extremism and a criminal lifestyle”, “depict horror or unbearable pain” or are created “on the basis of the psychologically incongruous”.

Under the new law, schools would also be forbidden from celebrating Halloween and St Valentine’s Day because they were inappropriate to ‘Russian cultural values.'

All school children would also be subject to a 10pm curfew, while minors would be banned from wearing tattoos and body-piercing. Mobile phone providers are to be instructed to block text messages sent by children than contain obscenities.

The authors of the policy paper, which has yet to be debated, were unable to provide a full list of the products to be sanctioned, but said that most came from the West.

Giving examples of the kind of merchandise that would be targeted, Yevgeny Yuryev, a sociologist who co-ordinated the draft legislation, identified a range of British made soft toys called the Bad Taste Bears.

“I can’t even describe what these bears do but they involve things of a sexual nature that might be traumatic for children,” he said.

Alongside a range of violent and criminal teddy bears, the company’s website advertises a line of “pornstar bears” featuring a character called Kenny Lingus and his friends.

While some of the legislation’s proposals have been welcomed by child welfare specialists, it has also been criticised as too draconian and anti-western in tone.

“For all of its positive moments, there are serious errors,” Galina Semya, a member of the Ministry of Education’s council, was quoted as saying in the Kommersant newspaper.

“For example, everything borrowed from the West is condemned — the good and the bad.”

Teenagers who model themselves on Western youth subcultures like Goths — who are accused of “cultivating bisexuality” — are to be regarded by the authorities as social nuisances in the same league as skinheads, football hooligans anti-fascists.

Heh. Just wait until we send you the Teletubbies. Tinky Winky rocks, dude.

The authors of the legislation, which mirrors other government measures to promote Russian nationalism, say urgent action is required to end a moral crisis inspired by the West that has seen a dramatic rise in alcoholism and addiction among teenagers.

“Today we have a lost generation of wandering morons whose parents’ moral vision was robbed by perestroika,” said Stanislav Govorukhin, a Duma deputy.

Not that the obvious reversion to Soviet governance and its deadend has anything to do with it.

“We have taken the worst from the West because we failed to resist the encroachment of Western values.” He denied accusations by liberal activists that the new laws represented an attack on freedom of expression.

“The essence of freedom is that there should be moral restrictions — that is what freedom is,” he said.

Social nuisances such as ... anti-fascists. As we find in an excellent Wikipedia entry, "Fascism is typified by totalitarian attempts to impose state control over all aspects of life: political, social, cultural, and economic, by way of a strong, single-party government for enacting laws and a strong, sometimes brutal militia or police force for enforcing them. Fascism exalts the nation, state, or group of people as superior to the individuals composing it. Fascism uses explicit populist rhetoric; calls for a heroic mass effort to restore past greatness; and demands loyalty to a single leader, leading to a cult of personality and unquestioned obedience to orders (Führerprinzip). Fascism is also considered to be a form of collectivism."

Couple that with some classic paranoia and you've arrived at the Paradise of Vladimir Paranoid.


Via The Telegraph