Vakha Khashkhanov, Director of the Center for Spiritual and Moral Education.
It is precisely thanks to the head of our republic, Ramzan Akhmatovich Kadyrov, who pays so much attention to the spiritual and moral education of the growing generation, that we, in our republic, manage… if I say so, maybe not everybody will be able to understand… to isolate the minds of our young people from the aggressive phenomena that today affect them through all kinds of, say, internet channels and various mass media. In the West, the notion of freedom has been replaced with permissiveness. The notion of culture has been replaced with a ‘subculture’.
Today in our republic, you can ask any young boy or girl what their values are, say, what’s good and proper. They will answer right away. Nowadays it’s happening not only in the Chechen republic, but to all the people of our country who have a rich culture of their own: they are trying to superimpose on us some ideas and some, as it were, culture from Paris, from London or from Washington – well, it’s totally absurd. We respect their culture and treat it with tolerance, if it’s really a culture. But we do need to define the terms: what is a culture and what is a subculture? What is democracy? What is freedom and what is permissiveness?
The things we see on some Western private TV channels, and particularly what is on the Internet – these are just inhuman values. Not to speak about religion, there’s nothing human in such phenomena as advertising alcohol or advertising, say, promiscuity – all human values get perverted. Today, western mass media show us movies where cool guys are casually doing drugs. Our children watch these movies.
That means certain training is going on. Say, they show us people committing acts of promiscuity. The result is that our country and our youth suffer heavily. Unfortunately, today we have terrifying statistics on drug addicts and AIDS patients in our country. Here, unfortunately, the statistics are horrible as well: be it drug users, be it people with AIDS or alcoholism. And it is necessary to fight all this. We are fighting this with means based on religious values. We succeed with preventative actions.
This approach meets our society’s expectations; it’s the most effective of all. I’d also like to mention one more thing: even though the communists prosecuted religious people, there were still some cultural values: you had to be 16 years of age before you came into contact with anything that might be morally corrupting. There was such a thing. And today it’s all about freedom, freedom and freedom… everybody speaks about it, but nobody really knows what freedom means. It doesn’t mean permissiveness, does it?
Today the notion of freedom has been replaced with permissiveness. Anything goes, whatever comes to one’s mind… Like this one – same sex marriage, or those weird gay clubs. All these things have been invented by the enemies of our enormous country in order to ruin our country, to corrupt it from the inside by destroying our spiritual values and our national values. I think that thanks to the politics of the government of our huge country and in particular thanks to the head of our republic Ramzan Akhmatovich – we here, in Northern Caucasus, will be fighting those phenomena.
Knowing that today’s youth is facing globalization and has so much information, we must approach this problem with wisdom. That is, if we are going to cite some religious dogma and return to the time of the Quran's creation – the situation of that time was different.
Today the situation is different. Our society has to prioritise the problems. We have to approach these matters with wisdom and poetic arguments. That’s how it is. Faith, faith… A believer lives a healthy lifestyle. It is through faith that we will save our youth.
