There is a pernicious belief held by many of my colleagues on the New Right in the West that Russia’s dictator, President Vladimir Putin, is some sort of defender of Western Civilization. Under his reign, Putin has made comments that would make many Right-wingers swoon.
For example, on Vladimir Lenin’s birthday in 2005, Mr. Putin lamented that Lenin was possessed of many “bad ideas” and whose Bolshevik regime “placed a time bomb” under the Russian state.
Putin has repeatedly struck at the ideological underpinnings of communism and he has correctly assessed that communism utterly eviscerated Russian prestige and power in the century that Marxist-Leninism ruled Russia in the form of the Soviet Union. Vladimir Putin has restored, for example, the Christian Eastern Orthodox Church to its pre-Soviet standing in Russian society. Putin has attempted to reclaim traditional Russian civilization after almost a century of it being eroded by the Reds.
All of these things make many Right-wingers pleased–notably those who lived through the particularly frigid days of the Cold War. And, let’s face it, Putin has implemented extremely traditional social programs–ranging from pro-natalist policies to anti-homosexual laws that appeal to many Western conservatives (if not in practice, then certainly in theory).
Yet, all of that is a thin veneer meant to weaken and appeal to a sympathetic Right-wing in the West at a time when the Left has fallen out of love with Russia. Remember: it was the Western Left that routinely carried water for the old Soviet Union during the heady days of the Cold War. As I noted elsewhere many years ago, the problem the Left has always had with Putin was that he wasn’t enough of a communist for their radical liking.
And that for most Right-wingers in the West was enough to make Putin an appealing foreign ally. After all, those (such as myself) who believe there is really a Culture War raging between the Left and Right in the West–between domestic Cultural Marxists and defenders of the classical, Western Civilization–were heartened by many statements Putin has made in recent years.
Here is Mr. Putin speaking just a few years ago to an audience in Russia, in which he castigated Western Progressives:
“We can see how many of the Euro-Atlantic countries are actually rejecting their roots, including the Christian values that constitute the basis of Western Civilization. They are denying the moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious, and even sexual.”
This kind of rhetoric, especially that last swipe at LGBTQI lifestyles, is catnip to a certain sect of RIght-leaning people. For many of those people on the Right, they take these comments at face-value because they are, by nature and interest, not plugged into foreign policy generally or Russian politics specifically. They can–and should–be forgiven for not recognizing that they’re being played.
To be clear: not being a communist doesn’t mean that Mr. Putin is actually a friend or a fellow traveler of the Right or Western Civilization as a whole. Paul Gottfried, far from a neoconservative anti-Russian elite, had this to say in an incredibly thoughtful piece at American Greatness entitled “Paleos and Putin”:
But it was Putin, not the neocons, who invaded Ukraine, and Russian military forces, not Victoria Nuland or the Wall Street Journal editorial page, who are murdering Ukrainian civilians. I keep telling friends on the Right who want to stress those “other circumstances” leading to Putin’s invasion that by all means let’s discuss them. But we should preface that discussion by blaming Putin and his military for the havoc they have wrought. They have behaved outrageously no matter how defective American foreign policy has been and no matter how repugnant neoconservative rhetoric may sound. Looking at babies killed and maimed in the streets of Kharkov and Mariupol, it seems to me that the blame should be ascribed to someone more immediately responsible than blundering U.S. foreign policy mavens or rabid neoconservative journalists.
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