Smoke in their face: Kremlin yields to smokers

Today the land of the free and the home of the brave is crowned with onion domes. Russian life, and government, surely have their downside, but when it comes right down to the most personal level, there can be no doubt: the Russian people have decided and shall continue to decide for themselves.

Healthist propaganda (the New York Times piece we link with is inevitably rife with this) or busybody government are futile when and where they are properly disrespected and defied. Ultimately, for and by themselves, the people choose.

The Kremlin has learned the lessons of personal integrity and freedom while the erstwhile “free world” has forgotten them. Sheep in New York or Dublin may respect walls of oppression today, but as the Times notes with consternation, the Russian people’s ability to produce “a sharp backlash” is not in the least doubt.

A youthful Muscovite smoker tells the incredulous New York newspaper: “Every cigarette pack has a health warning written on it and in principle every person who buys cigarettes sees this. It’s the same way as it is with alcohol. More or less everyone drinks and smokes, and nothing is going to change this.”

Some of us, even in a brainwashed and goose-stepping nation such as the USA, always understood and never forgot this. We still know how to backlash too. If you have accepted widely advertised “freedom from” as a new and improved substitute for “freedom to,” if you prefer walls to expansive views, and toe the party line, you have been fleeced. You have lost your humanity along with your brains and your hair, and have even begun to deny the existence, of those around you who remain unshorn.

Very likely, you even deny your denial, but by now you are in fact supporting bans on the very sight or thought of heretical reality. Yet this has not gone away. All to the East, West, North, and South, human nature, and sanity, still surround your ideologically suppressed vision of the world. These forces press inexorably on your fortress of fantasy.

Over time your fabricated walls will come down. Larger brains and hairier arms than yours will tear them down. The Kremlin, with fresh experience, understands what you and the New York Times do not. Nothing is going to change this.