When the Australian government began beating their citizens in the street for leaving their houses and protesting against severe lockdown rules, I said –somewhat tongue in cheek at the time– to watch Vladimir Putin (Russia) and Xi Jinping (China) trigger U.N. security council sanctions against the Australian government for human rights abuses.
The point I was making earlier was to highlight a danger. If Western governments continued to devolve into totalitarian regimes, global autocratic leaders will take the opportunity to exploit vulnerabilities created by such open undemocratic hostility toward the principles of freedom.
Putin, Xi and the Mullahs in Iran can easily enlarge their global influence if citizens in formerly free democratic nations react to western COVID mandates by rightly and appropriately rebuking their national and regional leadership.
CONSIDER– What population inside a western democracy is going to want to fight Russian or Chinese geopolitical aggression when they view their own national leaders through the same totalitarian prism?
Think about it carefully, because we are at this inflection point.
♦Ex. If China takes military action against Taiwan, and the leaders of France, Germany, the U.K, Australia and the United States want to do something about it, their internal credibility accounts are overdrawn. Western populations writ large will not support those requests, because the citizens no longer view those leaders through the prism of freedom, liberty and democracy. This is the current situation. This is the danger western leaders ignored when they jumped into their totalitarian COVID mindset.
In a clear example of how autocrats can exploit this self-inflicted vulnerability, check out this speech during a plenary session of the 18th annual meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club in Sochi, by Russian President Vladimir Putin (h/t Rebel News):
Vladimir Putin:“We look in amazement at the processes underway in the countries which have been traditionally looked at as the standard-bearers of progress,” Putin said. “Of course, the social and cultural shocks that are taking place in the United States and Western Europe are none of our business; we are keeping out of this.”
“Some people in the West believe that an aggressive elimination of entire pages from their own history, ‘reverse discrimination’ against the majority in the interests of a minority, and the demand to give up the traditional notions of mother, father, family and even gender, they believe that all of these are the mileposts on the path towards social renewal,” said Putin, elaborating on the cultural decline of the west in the name of social justice.
“Listen, I would like to point out once again that they have a right to do this, we are keeping out of this,” Putin continued. “But we would like to ask them to keep out of our business as well. We have a different viewpoint, at least the overwhelming majority of Russian society — it would be more correct to put it this way – has a different opinion on this matter. We believe that we must rely on our own spiritual values, our historical tradition and the culture of our multiethnic nation.”
“The advocates of so-called ‘social progress’ believe they are introducing humanity to some kind of a new and better consciousness,” he added. “Godspeed, hoist the flags as we say, go right ahead.”
“The only thing that I want to say now is that their prescriptions are not new at all,” Putin continued, and highlighted the similarities between woke progressives to the Soviet revolutionaries who took over Russia.
“It may come as a surprise to some people, but Russia has been there already,” he said. “After the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks, relying on the dogmas of Marx and Engels, also said that they would change existing ways and customs and not just political and economic ones, but the very notion of human morality and the foundations of a healthy society. The destruction of age-old values, religion and relations between people, up to and including the total rejection of family (we had that, too), encouragement to inform on loved ones – all this was proclaimed progress and, by the way, was widely supported around the world back then and was quite fashionable, same as today. By the way, the Bolsheviks were absolutely intolerant of opinions other than theirs.”
“This, I believe, should call to mind some of what we are witnessing now,” he said. “Looking at what is happening in a number of Western countries, we are amazed to see the domestic practices, which we, fortunately, have left, I hope, in the distant past.”
“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,” he said. “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,” noted Putin, who apt went on to describe the woke obsession with race and gender.
“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,” said Putin in reference to Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech.
“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,” he said.
“However, things are turning out differently there,” he added. “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,” Putin warned.
“Zealots of these new approaches even go so far as to want to abolish these concepts altogether,” he said. “Anyone who dares mention that men and women actually exist, which is a biological fact, risk being ostracised.”
Putin then remarked upon the transgender activist movement and widespread efforts to erase femininity and womanhood.
“‘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,” he said.
“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,” said Putin, remarking on childhood gender transitions and the embrace of non-binary identities to the exclusion of parents. “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.”
“Well, if someone likes this, let them do it. I have already mentioned that, in shaping our approaches, we will be guided by a healthy conservatism,” said Putin. “That was a few years ago, when passions on the international arena were not yet running as high as they are now, although, of course, we can say that clouds were gathering even then. Now, when the world is going through a structural disruption, the importance of reasonable conservatism as the foundation for a political course has skyrocketed — precisely because of the multiplying risks and dangers, and the fragility of the reality around us.”
“This conservative approach is not about an ignorant traditionalism, a fear of change or a restraining game, much less about withdrawing into our own shell,” he noted. “It is primarily about reliance on a time-tested tradition, the preservation and growth of the population, a realistic assessment of oneself and others, a precise alignment of priorities, a correlation of necessity and possibility, a prudent formulation of goals, and a fundamental rejection of extremism as a method. And frankly, in the impending period of global reconstruction, which may take quite long, with its final design being uncertain, moderate conservatism is the most reasonable line of conduct, as far as I see it. It will inevitably change at some point, but so far, do no harm — the guiding principle in medicine — seems to be the most rational one. Noli nocere, as they say.” (Kremlin Website)
You likely found yourself nodding in agreement with almost everything stated in that speech, me too. However, in the bigger picture, it is important to recognize who has inflicted this shifting dynamic in global and geopolitical perspectives. Western leadership, writ large, have only themselves to blame.
Traditional Fascism was authoritarian government working hand-in-glove with corporations to achieve totalitarian objectives. It didn’t work because the principles of free people cast aside the authoritarianism. Then along came a new approach to achieve the same objective.
The World Economic Forum was created to use the same fundamental associations of government and corporations; only this time the WEF was organized for multinational corporations to assemble and tell the various governments how to cooperate to achieve control. Fascism is the underlying objective. The WEF just flipped the internal dynamic.
Some have called this corporatism. However, the relationship between government and multinationals is just fascism essentially reversed with the government doing what the corporations tell them to do. Brutally obvious example: Big Pharma telling governments to promote the vaccine, and figure out the control details later….