The Healthiest Country on Earth

When I heard that Netflix was going to stop broadcasting in Russia, my first thought was: "Oh!, but was Netflix allowed in Russia at all? How imprudent!"

I mean: I'm a freedom enthusiast, and generally am not in the least for banning anything. I believe in free market and, in principle, support people's possibility to access whatever services and goods they want or need of their own will, even though most person's ability to choose what's best for them leaves much to be desired: ideally, in my opinion, choice should come alongside education... But I'm drifting towards a too complicated debate here. For the moment, suffice to say that - well, if someone wants to watch whichever channel or online content, then let them do it.

However, when it comes to Netflix (or HBO, Amazon Video, Disney Channel, DW, etc.), I confess that my belief in liberty wavers quite a bit, and no longer know if I'm pro freedom of choice above all other considerations. And this is so because... well, Netflix and the like are such powerful indoctrinating tools that might even be labelled and treated like toxic: the same as governments regulate and restrict to the average layman the intake of certain drugs, least he poisons himself, so should perhaps be done with the venomous contents fed to uneducated or unprepared societies by those media platforms. Indeed, all of their video productions are manufactured to subtly -yet very efficiently- shape, when not manipulate, people's minds in order for all of us to think in very much the same way, share identical values and have matching opinions: gender ideology, femin(az)ism, multiculturalism, identity politics, LGBTIQism, climate change, veganism, abortion, animalism, euthanasia, indigenism, welcome refugees, open borders... you name it! Such ready-made ideas are been seeded on most of the world's population by -though not only- the mentioned platforms. Therefore, any nation endowed with a sensible patriotic sentiment (meaning a feeling of their own traditional values) or simply a healthy self-preservation instict; any nation who does not want to hypnotically and uncritically follow the ideological path devised for -and practically imposed on- us by the global agenda and other supranational powers we've never elected nor legitimated, should probably consider banning Netflix (& co.) in order to protect their citizens' brains from the platforms' subliminal and insidious indoctrination.

Of course this is not optimal. Ideally, I think, governments should educate their citizens so as to make them able to tell among the garbage and the flowers, while guaranteeing that several and diverse "cultural offers" -instead of one unique set- is available to the public, for us to freely (informedly, critically) pick our choice. But this situation being very far from reality and, as a matter of fact, from our governments' true goals, some degree of protection -however imperfect- against alien brainwashing may at least be achieved by forbidding those trojans of globalism to enter our home. And that's why I was surprised to learn that they were allowed in Russia, a country I thought was more concerned than others about its citizens' healthy minds.

Something similar can be said about food corporations like McDonald's, Starbucks or Coca-Cola, though in this case the poisoning is much more literal, albeit perhaps less harmful. Having many countries their own vast, rich and healthy local gastronomies (and Russia is no exception), it's a pity that their people succumb to cultural colonization and opt for eating fast food, to the detriment of healthier, often more sustainable and always more profitable (for their own country's economy) alternatives. Again, there's nothing necessarily wrong in widening the food offer available to a given society, even if it's junk, provided the consumers are wise enough to know not only what's best for them, but also what undermines their culture and identity. In this regard, it would also be desirable that freedom of choice came accompanied by proper information, on the part of publilc powers, about nutrition, feeding habits and by some reinforcement of the confidence in our own traditional food, mostly if it's healthy. In moderate doses, chauvinism is perhaps a good thing, and opposition to cultural colonization is something at the very least worth having in mind.

In any case, today I can't but laugh at those companies for trying to "punish" Russian population by discontinuing their businesses in this country and "depriving" its inhabitants of their products. (Here, by the way, we're pretending to believe that behind such commercial decisions there lies an ideal of "justice for Ukraine" on the part of the corporations instead of cold arithmetics on how to better monetize westerner's anger at Russia.) First off, such measures are ridiculous -if not mean and contemptible- because they're aimed to penalize a whole nation not responsible for its government's decision; and they're useless too for that matter, because in fact Vladimir Putin's popularity has only increased nationwide since all the wave of EUSA (European Union States of America) sanctions begun. But then they are hilarious because, it seems to me, those companies are actually doing Russians a great favour: not only for leaving market room which local businesses can seize to settle down or thrive, but mostly because, without Netflix and McDonalds, without Amazon Video and Coca-Cola, Russia is nowadays perhaps the healthiest country on Earth to live in, mentally and physically.