Russia's war on “Western Satanism”

The Attorney General's Office has secured the banning of an “international movement” which, in reality, local authorities have used to lump together everyone from environmentalists to Pokemon fans, all accused of being part of “conspiracies organised to weaken patriotic spirit among young people”. Anthropologist Arkhipova: it is a new “millenarian ideology”, according to which only “true Russians” will be saved.

Moscow (AsiaNews) - Russia's Attorney General's Office has obtained a court ban on the “international Satanism movement”, against which Moscow Patriarch Kirill (Gundjaev) had intervened on several occasions, warning that “Western Satanists” are ruining Russian youth. This concern was also shared by the Moscow Duma, where deputy and former actor Nikolai Burlaev conveyed to his fellow deputies his fear that Satanism ‘is even worse than the LGBT movement’ and that a law against this terrible threat must be drafted as soon as possible.

Anthropologist Aleksandra Arkhipova, author of the Telegram channel “Unfunny Anthropology”, attempts to explain this choice. She recalls the panic spread in 2016 by an article in Novaya Evropa about the “blue whales”, a movement promoting a large vegetarian campaign, which sparked a rather surreal debate in Russian society. As a result of these discussions, a new law was passed condemning not only “incitement to suicide” but also “suicidal tendencies”, accusing a “conspiracy of instigators”, evidently organised from abroad, of leading the Russian soul to self-destruction.

The idea of an external conspiracy to ruin Russians from within was taken up with great fervour by Russian legislative bodies, condemning any message disseminated online that could create the conditions for “extremist activity”. The “Columbine movement” was identified, reminiscent of the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in Colorado, when two students killed 24 people, including students and school staff. This was then associated with the “LGBT movement” and the “child-free” movement against having children, all generic issues that in Russia were instead considered to be projects organised by dark forces intent on devastating the spirits of the West and the whole world, and especially Russia.

This led to the unification of these major conspiracies into the “Satanist movement”, with the intention of “killing children” under the guise of environmental, naturalist and gender causes, including the organisers of “Pokemon games” and “Quadroberi”, who dress up as animals. All websites offering stunts and reckless games for young people have also been added to these threats, such as “Run or Die”, which encourages people to run across roads in the middle of traffic, and others like it. Extreme youth madness, which has unfortunately always existed, is now multiplying thanks to the ongoing war, which, according to Arkhipova, “is developing in Russia an idea of a besieged fortress, where it is necessary to mobilise and seek out internal and external enemies”.

The anthropologist believes that a new “millenarian ideology” is spreading in Russia, rooted in the apocalyptic tendencies typical of the Russian soul, which exalt the prospect of global destruction in which only those who defend authentic values will be saved, and the rest are destined to disappear. This paradigm is quite evident in the statements of President Putin, who often repeats that “in a nuclear war, everyone will be annihilated, but only we will go to paradise”, and in those of the head of counter-intelligence Sergei Naryshkin, according to whom “everything is normal here in Russia, while in the West only biomekhanoids, beings transformed into automatons, now live”.

Hence the widespread Russian obsession with the need to “save our children”, starting with those deported to Russia from Ukraine, and possibly attracting them from other countries. Education in “traditional values” and “patriotic spirit” must absolutely begin in nursery school, as reiterated by several recent measures by the government and the Duma, and access to digital information sources must be restricted as soon as possible, as in the project to replace the WhatsApp messenger with the national Max. The Russian state is “patriarchal”, comments Arkhipova, not so much in the sense of relations between men and women, but in the concept of a “family state”, in which the head-tsar addresses his subjects as children of a large family, victims of “global Satanism”.

• Russia
• Moscow
• Putin
• Kirill
• Satanism
• the West
• Arkhipova