The Russian conspiracy … to reclaim Western values

We live in a strange world. While the Russians have turned away from atheist communism and increasingly embrace traditional values, religion and capitalism, the United States is rapidly turning into a totalitarian Soviet Union. The coin definitely flipped, and rapidly so. Over 80 percent in the former atheist USSR now believe in God, probably constituting the greatest revival of Christianity in our time. In the East, they got tired of the communist state elite who controlled almost everything down to the shape of glasses factories were allowed to produce.

And somehow the left in America got so tired of individual freedom and the Constitution, they now crave to become a socialist state where the elite has total control over national revenues, the media, the public, the universities. Ever since the neo-Marxists won the social revolution in the 1960s, this ideology has been implemented with radical force, tearing down whoever stood in the way, breaking up traditional values, introducing new family structures, removing the authority of the church and making sure women and men don't get along.

It began with the post-war, neo-Marxist intellectuals in Germany, such as Theodore W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Friedrich Pollock and Max Horkheimer, who became the founding fathers of the student rebellions of 1968, the New Left and its liberal attitudes toward drugs, free sex, abortion and the revolt against traditional religion. Through control over the university systems, the publishing houses, the media and the public discourse, they were able to alter the value system in the West.

It becomes very hard to voice opposition in a socialist system because the state controls everything: jobs, careers and so on. You have to make sure the hard-core "groupthink elite" likes you, or else you will never be promoted. Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield has described it as soft despotism, claiming that the effects on the individual under a soft tyranny are just as hard to bear as the lack of freedom under any dictatorship.

In "The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy," professor T.J. Talmon argues that in totalitarian democracies – defined as socialist models that break with the originally liberal form of democracy – the goal of politics is for citizens to unite and agree – work in groups, express themselves in unison through a radical form of egalitarianism. Control of citizen behavior is the goal, as the elites then are free to do as they will with the national revenues.

If you resist, you are regarded as an obstacle to development and the enemy of state. This is why socialists hate private ownership, as economic independence threatens the goal of total state control over individuals. For the Russians, this kind of thinking led to the fall of the Soviet Union. Many do not understand to which degree many Russians detest the thought of returning to this system of complete personal bondage.

So, today Russia is a traditionalist, religion-friendly, capitalist society that remembers its history and honors its historic heroes: the precise values that makes the American establishment and its mainstream media puke. Russia's turn from Leninism to Christian Orthodoxy has largely happened under president Vladimir Putin, who is so demonized in the atheist Western press that it is almost impossible to Google his name and find unbiased facts.

In the U.S., very few are even aware of the massive revival that is happening in Russia as millions have turned to their cultural roots in Eastern Orthodoxy in the past years. The state has restored over 25,000 churches all over Russia, Putin on repeated pilgrimages to Mount Athos in Greece and so on. Of course, Russia is far from perfect, still battling corruption, elitism and its own vices.

Yet, an address by President Putin at the 2013 Valdai Summit illustrates the million miles between the borderless relativism most Western politicians seem to promote and the Russian way of thinking. Putin stated:

"The people in many European states are actually ashamed of their religious affiliations and are indeed frightened to speak about them. Christian holidays and celebrations are abolished or 'neutrally' renamed, as if one were ashamed of Christian holidays. With this method, one hides away the deeper moral values of these celebrations. And these countries try to force this model unto other countries, globally. I am deeply convinced that this is the direct way to the degradation and primitivization. This leads to deeper demographic and moral crisis in the West. Lessons of history show that a civilization that has abandoned its moral ideals loses its spiritual strength."

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