MINSK, 14 March (BelTA) - Western countries have been using the democratic values as a front to ensure the dominance of Western civilization in the modern world, Belarusian Minister of Foreign Affairs Vladimir Makei said in an interview with China Central Television, BelTA has learned.
Asked about the Western sanctions, which have affected even art and sport, the minister said: "They [sanctions] contradict common sense and all the democratic values that Western countries have tried to impose on us and the whole planet over the past decades and maybe even centuries.”
As an example, Vladimir Makei cited the principle of the rule of law which was positioned as the basis of democracy: "As soon as the need arose, they trampled on this principle. They change laws fast to punish this or that country, including Belarus and Russia. All laws are tailored to the situation. Is that acceptable? Absolutely unacceptable."
"What kind of freedom of speech and freedom of expression can we talk about when the media outlets that are trying to convey at least some objective picture of the world have been shut down in Western countries?" he added.
Vladimir Makei is convinced that today we can forget about democratic values. "In my understanding, the current situation has very clearly shown that democratic values are just a front they have used to achieve their goals, namely, to ensure the dominance of Western civilization in the modern world," he said.
The minister used figurative language to decribe the actions of many Western politicians. He said that they experienced "the decompression of the brain membrane", which is why they take emotional, absolutely ill-considered and destructive steps. "What moral norms can we talk about when, contrary to all existing international conventions, the rights of women, children, and the disabled are trampled upon? When Paralympians are not allowed to compete... This actually suggests that the protection of the rights of these most vulnerable categories of people is not among their priorities. We can say that the ideas of racial superiority and, in fact, neo-Nazism are fundamental for the Western community, although they try to hide it carefully. Our assessment is unequivocal: this is unacceptable," the minister emphasized.
In his opinion, the current situation, when books by Dostoevsky and Pushkin are removed from store shelves in a number of Western countries, resembles the events of the 1930s when books by progressive writers were burned in Germany.
