Paradoxical. Humanity seemed to have reached its highest levels of prosperity and tolerance after millennia of hardships and disturbances of all kinds when troubling signs of a degrading regression appeared. The progress heralded by the unusual rise of communications appears as a perverse boomerang: despotism ignites the ‘global village’ and spreads across the world with astonishing speed. Freedoms of thought and expression are declining; a thousand obstacles hinder movement; threats to abolish free trade loom. All to ‘protect values’, without clarifying which ideals they defend.
Such astonishing protectionist desires reach unusual levels. For almost a century, the epigones of Reverend Thomas Malthus have fiddled with their musings on birth control, now a banal pseudoscience. In the industrialised world, they overlapped under the banner of welfare, a vanguard conquest of women's right to plan motherhood. But coercion persists to this day in the formerly called Third World, where mothers - and fathers - are forced to reduce the number of children to deserve ‘international cooperation’. Just look at the recurring speeches of certain politicians and businessmen, from the distinguished Nicolas Sarkozy to the illustrious Bill Gates.
The Russian president corrects them, of course. Vladimir Putin promoted a controversial law last October: he prohibited the dissemination, by any means, of advertising or opinions that encourage not having children. Offenders are fined up to $4,000 if they are individuals, $50,000 for clinics and organisations. In other words: abortion and singlehood are subversive acts. For supporters of that draconian ‘special demographic operation’ - a term coined by Nina Ostanina, chairwoman of the Duma committee that processed it - the arguments from the West to limit procreation weaken Russia. On the contrary, detractors attribute the Kremlin's frantic interest in halting the drastic decline of the population to a reduction of troops for its wars. Thus, Russian women return to their traditional role: the duties proper to their sex, with a broken leg and at home. The silence of Western feminism in the face of such overwhelming and contradictory impositions leads to resurrecting a slogan coined during the vibrant uprisings of the French May, in 1968: ‘forbidden to forbid’. Will the future be anarchic?♦
