By Dr. Boyd Cathey
The unrestrained Russophobia of a John McCain or a Bill Kristol or Max Boot is grounded in their essential belief in such concepts as international “human rights” and America’s role as the global “enforcer” of those rights, which impels them to condemn Russia’s “persecution” of homosexuals, its institution of mandatory Christian religious instruction in its public schools (which neoconservatives condemn as “religious intolerance”), and its refusal to accept the economic and political straightjacket of the EU or other “international organizations.”
Additionally, as many of the leading Neocon pundits and writers are of Russian Jewish descent and Russian nationalism and Orthodoxy imply for them various forms of historical anti-semitism and the pre-revolutionary era anti-Jewish pogroms, Putin’s Russia is seen as symbolizing a possible recrudescence of those evils (despite the strong support he has received from Russia’s native Jewish population).
So, thus, the conjunction and harmony of Max Boot’s and Romney’s view, with George Soros’s view that Russia is now globally, “enemy number one.” And thus, also, some of the reasons for that unseemly ideological “marriage”….
Back at the beginning of 2015 (December 29, 2014), I wrote a long, heavily documented article about Putin and Putin’s Russia, attempting to shed some light on his past and the various largely spurious accusations leveled against him. It was reprinted by over thirteen web sites, both in the United States and overseas, and translated into Italian, Russian and a couple of other languages. I won’t reproduce it today, although it may be accessed at: http://www.unz.com/article/examining-the-hatred-of-vladimir-putin-and-russia/ (I have revised and updated it since then and can send that newer version to anyone requesting it.) Rather, today I will offer some details of what the media, in its near entirety, does not report, or, if it does, it does with a pronounced and virulent anti-Putin bias.
Over the past few months Russia has been commemorating the 100th anniversary of the bloody Bolshevik Revolution (1917), the results of which included the violent and horrible deaths of approximately 100 million human beings (according to the authoritative Black Book of Communism). Vladimir Putin has repeatedly traveled to various sites of infamous Communist murder and criminality from that era, and has dedicated memorials—“walls of grief”—and newly-erected and rebuilt Christian churches to memorialize and honor those victims. Russian cinema has, likewise, joined this effort of memory and correcting the Marxist view of history, with numerous (and popular) films that portray a frankly, very open anti-Communist viewpoint.
You would think that the Western media and our Western political leaders would welcome this—that after the life-and-death struggle with Communism for over seven decades our leaders would celebrate this turn of events.
But, no, rather Putin’s praxis is seen as nothing more than “calculating,” the “insincere use” of those anniversaries to consolidate his “dictatorial” or “neo-Stalinist” rule, and, more grievously, his refusal to fully accept all those wonderful fruits of Western-style globalism and, yes, his unreasonable rejection of the triumph of that other variant of Marxism, the dominant Cultural Marxism which pervades the West.
Is this not, then, Leon Trotsky’s revenge? Stalin’s legions were incapable of bringing down the Christian West, and Soviet Communism of the doddering Kremlin commissars ended up on that “ash heap of history.” But Trotsky, whom Stalin had murdered in his Mexican exile in 1940, now, with his millions of ideological descendants and godchildren, appears well on his way to actual and ultimate triumph.
Today, then, I ask your indulgence at the length: I pass on four items that offer a somewhat impressionistic view of what has happened in and to Russia since August 1991, when Vladimir Putin—that ex-KGB bureaucrat—was largely responsible for thwarting and defeating the KGB coup against the incipient anti-Communist Russian republic. (Yes, that is just one fact most of our Neocon pundits like to omit.) First, London-based Professor Paul Robinson’s examination of how the establishment Western media continues to ignore Putin’s open and vigorous rejection of Soviet Communism and his exhibited desire to memorialize its victims.
Second, I pass on a short article that appeared in The Washington Post back in 2008, shortly after the death of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in which he praised Putin’s efforts to revive Russia’s traditional Christian and moral heritage, and, equally, Putin’s praise of Solzhenitsyn’s valiant opposition to Godless Communism.
Third, from that epitome of Establishment Deep State “high” journalism, I reproduce a 2013 article from The Atlantic monthly, worryingly suggesting that Putin was becoming the head of a “worldwide traditionalist conservative crusade” against the progressivist and modern West. It literally sent shivers down their secularist spines. Yet, the article is fascinating for offering a view in not only the minds of the cultural Marxist Left, but, with a certain irony, found also in much of basic Neocon thinking.
Fourth, from the large collection of Putin’s speeches that I have archived, I pass on excerpts of his “State of the State” address to the Russian people, December 16, 2013—this is representative of the rhetoric and imagery, and the historical references that he employs in most of his addresses, and also exemplifies the type of conservative legislation his political party, United Russia, has enacted in the Russian Duma. (The UR party hold 340 of the 450 seats.)
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~ DR. BOYD D. CATHEY is an Unz Review columnist, as well as a Barely a Blog contributor, whose work is easily located on this site under the “BAB’s A List” search category. Dr. Cathey earned an MA in history at the University of Virginia (as a Thomas Jefferson Fellow), and as a Richard M Weaver Fellow earned his doctorate in history and political philosophy at the University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain. After additional studies in theology and philosophy in Switzerland, he taught in Argentina and Connecticut before returning to North Carolina. He was State Registrar of the North Carolina State Archives before retiring in 2011. He writes for The Unz Review, The Abbeville Institute, Confederate Veteran magazine, The Remnant, and other publications in the United States and Europe on a variety of topics, including politics, social and religious questions, film, and music.
Related:
“Examining the Hatred of Vladimir Putin and Russia” By Boyd Cathey.
“Wall of Grief” BY PROFESSOR PAUL ROBINSON.
“Toward end, Solzhenitsyn embraced Putin’s Russia,” Boston.com.
“Vladimir Putin, Conservative Icon,” By Brian Whitmore.
TRANSCRIPT: [Putin] Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly.
UPDATE (11/7):
