Putin lashes out at West ‘cancelling’ Russian culture, says it reeks of Hitler’s Germany

Russian President Vladimir Putin has drawn a parallel between the current campaign against Russian culture in the West an what was going on in Nazi Germany under Hitler.

“The notorious cancel culture has turned into the cancellation of culture. The names of Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, Rachmaninov are being removed from playbills, Russian writers and their books are being banned,” he said on Friday.

“Last time, such a large-scale campaign against undesired literature was conducted by the Nazi in Germany nearly 90 years ago,” he noted.

The president harked back to newsreels of that time when books were tossed into bonfires lit on the central squares of German cities. “It is impossible to even imagine such things in our country! We are immune to such things thanks to our culture. It is inseparable from [our] homeland, from Russia, where there is no place for ethnic intolerance, where people of dozens of nationalities have been living, working, and raising their children side by side and where cultural diversity is the pride of society, the strength and advantage of our state,” he stressed.

Commenting of the phenomenon of cancel culture, he noted, “Today, they are seeking to ‘cancel’ an entire centuries-old country, our people.” “I mean the growing discrimination of everything that is linked with Russia, about this tendency, which is unfolding in several Western nations with the utter connivance of the ruling elites or even encouraged by them,” he said.