Let us talk plainly about the end of the world as we have known it for generations. A dark age is on the horizon, and there’s precious little time for humanity to prevent an unprecedented catastrophe. In the words of a great statesman from this era, “The cost of ill-conceived social experiments is sometimes beyond estimation.” And the experiment we in the world find ourselves in now will certainly end in a dystopian nightmare.
Russia’s president Vladimir Putin was cited by many media outlets after making a case that western civilization is on the brink of collapse during a discussion at the recent Valdai Club meeting. I’ve read through his remarks, which are not just spot on, but deeply prophetic. Putin likened the Woke situation and the gender fluidity nonsense in America to what happened when the Bolcheviks took over in 1917. Americans do not do well understanding political science, unless they major in the subject at the university, so Bolshevism is not a term they get. Socialism, for most Americans, is a catch all derogatory easier on the tongue than “Them Communists.” Putin 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.”
The ideas Putin exerts here are super important for understanding the state of our world today. In America, for instance, people do not care to draw lines of distinction between socialism and communism, and most have no idea who the Bolsheviks were, let alone the parallels with happenings in America today. The looming dictatorship hovering over my country now, is as invisible to the average American as the Nikolas II and his family being gunned down in Yekaterinburg. The moral fiber of my country is ripped even farther than War torn and destitute Russia was at the time of the revolution. Forces and ideas similar to those of Vladimir Lenin are now working to shred what’s left of western civilization.
His commentary on degradation western values came as a warning of further disjointedness and trouble. He cited the COVID-19 pandemic experience, much in the same way many of us have, but adding that global governance institutions need “fine tuning” instead of proclaiming these institutions as total failures. Here on the ground in Greece, however, the fact that leadership has failed to tackle the challenges posed by the dynamics of global processes is acute. Short version, Mr. Putin was actually playing nice in his commentary at the Valdai conference. Still, the Russian leader’s observations carry an ominous message and repercussions for most Americans. Putin continued:
“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.”
Once again, Russia’s president was gentle in his assessment of the Woke trends raging in America. He called the huge shift in morality and tradition “structural disruptions,” rather than referring to the decimation of the family unit and a way of life for what it really is. He was more vehement where children are concerned, a soft spot we’ve seen from the Russian leader many times. He referred to gender destruction for kids as “truly monstrous things when children are taught from an early age that a boy can easily become a girl and vice versa.” He went on to observe that children are being able to “determine” such life changing things without so much as a consultation with a child psychologist. But for us observing the horrors, only one question really matters. Is Vladimir Putin right? Is the liberal order engaged in “crimes against humanity?”
Many in my country, perhaps even a majority, believe that Donald Trump losing to Joe Biden was a fundamental shift away from any sense of conservatism. And whether or not Americans like the former president or not, nothing about the new order is either moderate or conservative at its core. Like Bolshevism, the far left standing behind Joe Biden (or perhaps even Trump as a spoiler) aims to usurp America’s core value proposition and call it “liberty.” The social experiment America is now going through, will end up in another type of holocaust. Interestingly, publicist Paweł Jędrzejewski at Salon 24 in Poland, characterizes American “wokeness” in this way:
“Wokeness in the United States is characterized by everything that marked these phenomena in history, such as the fanaticism of religious wars during the counter-reformation, the amok of absolute faith and obedience to Stalin during the Stalinist terror, the brutality of the Maoist “cultural revolution” in China in the second half of the sixties of the twentieth century.”
The publicist and advocate of the ideas of Emil Fackenheim goes on to say that this current trend is a process for breaking with any rational and logical thinking, and a “complete submission to feelings, first of all, hatred of the existing world, without any restrictions whatsoever. It is not about strategy, nor about achieving change – it is about its absolute extremism, fanaticism, and a path to the end of days. The goal is to completely destroy what western civilization is based on and replace it with chaos.
The reader will find it interesting that a disciple of a Jewish philosopher, Russia’s president, and a Georgia boy from America’s south share a common fear. Emil Fackenheim, for those unfamiliar, was a reform rabbi who fought to prevent what some referred to as a “posthumous victory for Hitler.” I’ve no space here to go into a new moral imperative for Judaism crystallized in the “614th commandment” (or “614th mitzvah”). The point of my citing Jędrzejewski is to show the battle lines have no national or regional borders. The ideas being decimated in my country and elsewhere, by those who would destroy our future, they’re an ideological war declaration. This is why Putin, and if we’re accurate the majority of the Russian people, are so adamantly against these “woke’ upheavals. Russians already experienced what happens “next” if the liberal order succeeds.
Right now, you can already witness a new “Kristallnacht” (or the Night of Broken Glass) taking shape not in Nazi Germany, but in the United States of America. And you don’t have to fly to New York or LA to see. On Facebook (radical organization, banned in Russia) people are being accused of “not being sufficiently ‘awake’ – or in some circles your “wokeness” is not authentic, as Jędrzejewski suggests. Mr. Putin, contrary to what liberal media propagates, is probably the best friend America and the rest of the westerners ever had. I’d like to see their arguments, their proof, that Vladmir Putin is wrong in all this. History is on his side. Rational thinking is. And for the believers around the world, God must be as well. What we are discussing here is the apocalypse, and nothing short of that.
The purge this time around will won’t be yellow stars of David painted on people and places, it will be geocoordinates and rounding up dissenters. The Wokeness army aims for something you could call “Day Zero” when the future and past of humanity are “recalibrated.” This is not some grass roots movement, but a top-down idealistic schism that took root in academia, to be funded by lunatic elites who believe a moral Armageddon is in their best interest. Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover institute calls these ideas; “bastard offshoots of harebrained “critical theory,” which arose from a demoralized and adrift Europe after the cataclysms of two devastating European-spawned world wars.”
So, you see how the irony highlights the situation when even Russophobes support the same logic as Russia’s vilified leader. And, no, this is not about Trump being a Putin puppet. The truth is far from thatа. Trump, in my view, is the Manchucian Candidate of the liberal order. I’ve discussed this previously. What is crucial now is for sanity to prevail over demoralizing, nonsensical rule. We must defeat chaos and put in place what Putin refers to as reasonable conservatism as the foundation for a political course” for the future. Sanity must prevail, in other words. Humanity does not need right or left extremist ideologies going forward. We all know the ends of these methods. As time and problems grow more critical, the world needs pragmatism and cooperation, not more chaos. If we are to avoid the darkest age ever, or perhaps even the ultimate end, we have to come to our senses now.
Phil Butler, is a policy investigator and analyst, a political scientist and expert on Eastern Europe, he’s an author of the recent bestseller “Putin’s Praetorians” and other books. He writes exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
