A Swedish folk band, Södra Bergens Balalaikor, was banned from performing at a concert organized in support of Ukraine because they play a Russian musical instrument. Some critics even claimed the balalaika was as bad as a Nazi swastika.
The music band, first formed in 1969, had been scheduled to play a charity concert to support Ukraine in the Swedish city of Uppsala. However, their performance was cancelled after complaints that the balalaika, a three-string musical instrument with a characteristic triangular wooden body, was a “national symbol of Russia.”
“People wrote that the balalaika is a symbol for Russia and to play for Ukraine on a balalaika is a sacrilege. They compared it to a swastika,” one of the members of the orchestra, Jonas Nyberg, told Swedish broadcaster SVT.
He called on people with another opinion to have some sympathy in this situation, as those who claimed so are “upset and angry”. However, he admitted that the argument gets “a little weird.”
“We are not Russians, we just happen to play Russian instruments, as we have done all these years. Our Ukrainian musician friends don’t understand it as well,” Nyberg added.
This is just another example of how anything even remotely connected to Russia immediately gets under a “road roller” of the cancel-culture. As was reported earlier this month, the British National Gallery changed the name of a 19th century painting by French impressionist Edgar Degas from “Russian Dancers” to “Ukrainian Dancers” claiming the origin of the dancers on the picture was identified as Russian mistakenly.
Also, the University of Milano-Bicocca attempted to cancel a teaching course about the 19th century writer Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Russian prodigy pianist Alexander Malofeev was dropped from performing for the Montreal Symphony Orchestra after complaints by Ukrainians, while chief conductor of the Munich Philharmonic Valery Gergiev faced similar cancellation after failing to pass an ideological purity test. Furthermore, Siberian cats were banned from appearing in international cat competitions.
Ru-Main, 14.04.2022
Source: InfoWars
