Ran across this article on American Thinker.
Putin’s Remarks About ‘Woke’ Culture Deserve Serious Consideration
The translation is a little rough in the quoted material from President Putin’s speech. But it’s very readable and he makes some good points.
I suppose this caught my attention because Putin is supposed to be “The Bad Guy”. I grew up in the 60’s At the time common perception was, the Russians were always evil… In fact over the last four years we’ve seen that much of Washington D.C. still seems to think this is the case.
Sting made a little bit of a wave with his song, Russians love their children too, back in the day.
I’d long thought that the Russians weren’t the comic book super villains they’d been portrayed as. The first time I heard Sting singing this song I remember being glad that someone else was thinking along the same lines.
Now, President Putin is speaking a truth that so many of us in America have been cowed into keeping to ourselves.
I’m posting his comments copied directly from the American Thinker Article because even if you don’t have time or inclination to go to the piece itself, you should read Putin’s comments to the Valdai Discussion Club.
The fight for equality and against discrimination has turned into aggressive dogmatism bordering on absurdity, when the works of the great authors of the past – such as Shakespeare – are no longer taught at schools or universities, because their ideas are believed to be backward. The classics are declared backward and ignorant of the importance of gender or race. In Hollywood memos are distributed about proper storytelling and how many characters of what colour or gender should be in a movie. This is even worse than the agitprop department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause, but the new ‘cancel culture’ has turned it into ‘reverse discrimination’ that is, reverse racism. The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, when the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin colour. I specifically asked my colleagues to find the following quote from Martin Luther King: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by their character.” This is the true value. However, things are turning out differently there. By the way, the absolute majority of Russian people do not think that the colour of a person’s skin or their gender is an important matter. Each of us is a human being. This is what matters.
In a number of Western countries, the debate over men’s and women’s rights has turned into a perfect phantasmagoria. Look, beware of going where the Bolsheviks once planned to go – not only communalising chickens, but also communalising women. One more step and you will be there.
Zealots of these new approaches even go so far as to want to abolish these concepts altogether. Anyone who dares mention that men and women actually exist, which is a biological fact, risk being ostracised. “Parent number one” and “parent number two,” “’birthing parent” instead of “mother,” and “human milk” replacing “breastmilk” because it might upset the people who are unsure about their own gender. I repeat, this is nothing new; in the 1920s, the so-called Soviet Kulturtraegers also invented some newspeak believing they were creating a new consciousness and changing values that way. And, as I have already said, they made such a mess it still makes one shudder at times.
Not to mention some truly monstrous things when children are taught from an early age that a boy can easily become a girl and vice versa. That is, the teachers actually impose on them a choice we all supposedly have. They do so while shutting the parents out of the process and forcing the child to make decisions that can upend their entire life. They do not even bother to consult with child psychologists – is a child at this age even capable of making a decision of this kind? Calling a spade a spade, this verges on a crime against humanity, and it is being done in the name and under the banner of progress.
When, Vladimir Putin makes more sense than most of the “Leaders” in the West, we’ve gone around the proverbial bend.
Putin, in his time may well have done some questionable things. He has probably had dissenters and dissidents imprisoned. He’s certainly in absolute control of his nation.
One could say he rules with an iron fist, making money along the way. These are things that have been said about President Putin for years and during that same time Leaders in the West have pointed to President Putin and said, “This is what we’re fighting to prevent.“
Were you to ask the folks arrested in the “Jan 6th mostly peaceful protest” if they felt there was any difference between America and Russia today, what do you think their answer would be?
What would locked down Australians or New Zealanders say?
When Vladimir Putin… Now, think about this, Putin alludes to cancel culture, essentially saying it’s no different than Bolshevik thinking. Perhaps we should all take heed.
We might even thank President Putin for speaking truth to the “power of the mob” because he is in a position of authority that allows him to do so.
I was just thinking about the way Putin treated Obama. It was obvious there was no love lost there. In my opinion, Putin consistently humiliated Obama on the world stage. Putin and Trump appeared to have at least grudging respect for each other.
With Biden… Putin has demonstrated that he may be a man of honor. Thus far he’s taken actions to protect his nation from Biden’s fuckups.
But he has not actively humiliated Biden. After all, there is no honor in embarrassing or fighting with, a sick, weak, opponent. When Kamala becomes The President, I’d bet that Putin will mostly ignore her too. That’s not sexist, there is simply no honor in beating-up the village idiot.
Indirectly, Putin not engaging in any serious way with America’s leadership is in fact humiliation. It says that we are no longer powerful or threatening. Without saying it, Putin is communicating to the world, that America has become irrelevant.
Given that President Putin has much more experience dealing with communism, and socialism, I suspect that he will be able to manipulate our leaders into whatever he sees as advantageous to his country.
Be that lifting tariffs, export controls, or increasing trade. Russia is a modern country now, in another five or ten years it may well be completely indistinguishable from any other European country, with one exception. Russia will be moving forward into the future, not seeking to destroy itself with pointless divisiveness or contemplation of its navel.
Who knows? Perhaps I’ll have a lovely retirement in a Moscow suburb.