It’s a trend in Russian schools that keeps growing. Teachers and lecturers take a break from the class curriculum to berate their students for supporting anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny. Standing before a classroom, the room’s only adult tells a dozen or so teenagers that they’re ignorant, unpatriotic fools who don’t realize what horrors their civic activism will unleash upon the Russian Federation.
And then one of the students films the incident on a mobile phone, and uploads it to the Internet, where the world gets a glimpse at the reactionary hostility Russian schoolchildren have faced, since the country’s collective consciousness recently realized that young people might be fed up with almost two decades of the same political regime.
The latest footage comes from a high school in Tomsk — the same city where a local university professor recently criticized his students for attending last Sunday’s anti-corruption demonstrations.
The Tomsk high school teacher, whose identity isn’t being reported, delivered an angry diatribe against “liberalism,” calling his students “fascists,” “national traitors,” and “Anglo Saxon lackeys.”
“I’m older and higher status than you,” the teacher told the classroom. “You people want freedom, is that it? [The liberals] gave freedom to all kinds of subhumans. Liberalism is freedom for the subhuman who exists at an animal stage of development; it’s when you say some scum is equal to a highly spiritual person. That’s the danger of liberalism! People aren’t equal in their level of development! And when you give equal rights to a five-year-old, a 14-year-old, and an 80-year-old, it is a crime. Liberalism leads humanity to hell.”
When students began responding sarcastically to the teacher’s insults, he escalated to threats, warning the classroom that liberals will face divine judgement.
“Many people think like I do — many people,” the teacher explained. “But in this country they don’t say it.”
In the audio shared online, you can hear a student speak up at this point, firing back, “So let’s speak the truth.”
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