Daddy Is Watching You
Final Speech, 8 semester
‘I love Belarus,’ - sang Anastasiya Vinnikova on the ESC this year, where politicizing is generally considered inappropriate. Does Anastasiya really love the country where, according to her song, ‘all the hearts keep on beating as one’?
Today I’m going to dwell on the current situation in Belarus.
Every day in the news we hear a lot abt Libya, Syria and Yemen. God bless them and their resources. I suggest we concentrate on the country that is only a thousand km away from NN, where a real tyrant is coming into existence right now.
Something is rotten in the state of Belarus.
I’m sure you guys are mature and professional enough to be able to distinguish objective and subjective prerequisites of various difficulties of any state, aren’t you? I’m here not to scrutinize objective problems of Belarus. What matters today is the subjective factor - that is whether the government can get rid of the blinders in respect to objective problems and whether it’s ready to admit its own mistakes. The answer for Belarus is no.
The regime of Alexander Lukashenko is rapidly losing its credibility. The state where the media are arbitrarily oppressed, where human rights advocates are persecuted, where former presidential candidates are kept behind bars, where citizens are afraid to express their opinion on political and economic issues tends to be sick. On the world scale Mr. Lukashenko is often not considered trustworthy and is sometimes compared to the Iranian impetuous president Ahmadinejad. Moreover, serious sanctions are imposed on him by the EU for outrageous human rights violations.
You guys may wonder why I am standing here and wasting your precious time speaking abt the Lukashenko regime - the thing I assume you are not very interested in. But the matter is that recently I have read Orwell 1984 - as many of you, right? The novel actually has given me the impetus to make this speech, for now I can’t help drawing parallels between Orwell’s dystopia and Belarusian reality. Of course, Lukashim (yes, there’s such a term) doesn’t equal Orwell’s Ingsoc at any level. Obviously, despotic Daddy perpetually watching the citizens of Belarus can not be a counterpart to Big Brother. But a couple of days ago Lukashenko claimed that certain media, predominately Russian, are wrong and unreliable, because there are certain crucial disparities between the image of reality they present and the one he wants his citizens and the world to see. Then it rang my bell. Does it ring yours?
Regardless of several fundamental differences between Belarus and Russia, they are still very similar to us - more than people of Libya or Yemen. Russia is - and in the foreseeable future will be - under the threat of falling into Lukashism or Big Brotherism. So I ask you guys, think of what you can do to prevent falling into authoritarianism. Please, do your best to prevent falling into totalitarianism once again. And please remember: history doesn’t teach, it only punishes those who fail to learn lessons from it.
‘I love Belarus,’ - sang Anastasiya Vinnikova on the ESC this year, where politicizing is generally considered inappropriate. Does Anastasiya really love the country where, according to her song, ‘all the hearts keep on beating as one’?
Today I’m going to dwell on the current situation in Belarus.
Every day in the news we hear a lot abt Libya, Syria and Yemen. God bless them and their resources. I suggest we concentrate on the country that is only a thousand km away from NN, where a real tyrant is coming into existence right now.
Something is rotten in the state of Belarus.
I’m sure you guys are mature and professional enough to be able to distinguish objective and subjective prerequisites of various difficulties of any state, aren’t you? I’m here not to scrutinize objective problems of Belarus. What matters today is the subjective factor - that is whether the government can get rid of the blinders in respect to objective problems and whether it’s ready to admit its own mistakes. The answer for Belarus is no.
The regime of Alexander Lukashenko is rapidly losing its credibility. The state where the media are arbitrarily oppressed, where human rights advocates are persecuted, where former presidential candidates are kept behind bars, where citizens are afraid to express their opinion on political and economic issues tends to be sick. On the world scale Mr. Lukashenko is often not considered trustworthy and is sometimes compared to the Iranian impetuous president Ahmadinejad. Moreover, serious sanctions are imposed on him by the EU for outrageous human rights violations.
You guys may wonder why I am standing here and wasting your precious time speaking abt the Lukashenko regime - the thing I assume you are not very interested in. But the matter is that recently I have read Orwell 1984 - as many of you, right? The novel actually has given me the impetus to make this speech, for now I can’t help drawing parallels between Orwell’s dystopia and Belarusian reality. Of course, Lukashim (yes, there’s such a term) doesn’t equal Orwell’s Ingsoc at any level. Obviously, despotic Daddy perpetually watching the citizens of Belarus can not be a counterpart to Big Brother. But a couple of days ago Lukashenko claimed that certain media, predominately Russian, are wrong and unreliable, because there are certain crucial disparities between the image of reality they present and the one he wants his citizens and the world to see. Then it rang my bell. Does it ring yours?
Regardless of several fundamental differences between Belarus and Russia, they are still very similar to us - more than people of Libya or Yemen. Russia is - and in the foreseeable future will be - under the threat of falling into Lukashism or Big Brotherism. So I ask you guys, think of what you can do to prevent falling into authoritarianism. Please, do your best to prevent falling into totalitarianism once again. And please remember: history doesn’t teach, it only punishes those who fail to learn lessons from it.