RUTHFULLY YOURS

Russia is one of the few countries in the Western world in which religion is becoming increasingly important and not less.

To establish his authority on the Russian society, President Vladimir Putin has shaped a doctrine mobilizing the entire Russian society against a perceived Western “decadence”. He has declared that Russian traditional family values are a bulwark against the West’s “so-called tolerance — genderless and infertile.”

The first Cold War was a clash between Western democracy and the Soviet dictatorship of the proletariat. The new Cold War is a one between Western liberalism and Russian conservatism.

During the Cold War, American conservatives used to label the Soviet Union “the godless nation” on the verge of collapse because it had purged religion from the Russian society. Two decades later, the Kremlin is occupied by a former officer of the KGB, secretly baptized, who launches the same accusation of atheism at the United States and the West.

Welcome to “Putin’s covert war on Western decadence”, as The Spectator defined it:

“Putin’s Russia is fast becoming a very puritan place. Ever since returning to the presidency in 2012, Putin has pursued an increasingly religious-conservative ideology both at home and abroad, defining Russia as a moral fortress against sexual licence and decadence, porn and gay rights”.

Recently, Russian officials censored porn websites. When the largest pornography site on the internet, PornHub, offered the Russia’s official communications and media watchdog a premium account in exchange for lifting the ban, Russian officials replied: “Sorry, we are not in the market and the demography is not a commodity.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ideological war against the West is getting cocky and self-confident. In a televised speech from a Kremlin hall, Putin declared that Russian traditional family values are a bulwark against the West’s “so-called tolerance — genderless and infertile.”

“Many Euro-Atlantic countries have abandoned their roots, including Christian values,” said Putin. The patriarch of the Orthodox Church, Kirill, echoed Putin by charging the West of being engaged in a “spiritual disarmament” of the Russian people, and by criticizing the European laws that prevent wearing religious symbols in public. “We have experienced an era of atheism and we know what it means to live without God”, Kirill said.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee bestowing the Peace Prize on Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, for his concessions to the narco-terrorist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), reinforces the trend to legitimize terrorism, legalize drugs, and reward criminals. This contradicts the instructions Alfred Nobel gave in his will, which clearly states the Peace Prize should be rewarded to those who “have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”

Had Nobel been alive today, he, like the Colombian people, would have voted against the Cuban and Venezuelan-sponsored deal, which was negotiated and signed in Havana. The agreement, as well as the Nobel Peace Prize, is aimed at whitewashing the violent drug-trafficking FARC. Over the past fifty years, the group has claimed the lives of more than 220,000 Colombians and displaced some six million people. The agreement, however, re-labeled the FARC members as “fighters” and “rebels,” whose cause was to “[improve] the country’s rural areas.” Not surprisingly, Raul Castro, John Kerry, the Obama Administration, the European Union, and the United Nations, among others, hailed the agreement, as did the international media. All were “shocked” when the agreement was rejected in the plebiscite held on October 2, 2016.

This is not the first time that negotiations with the FARC have failed. The first initiative to negotiate with the narco-terrorists began in 1997, during the Bill Clinton Administration. Peace talks have been chosen to resolve a criminal conflict and to appease dangerous criminals under the guise of a political agenda. In 1999, Colombian Pres. Andres Pastrana told the Argentine newspaper, Clarin, “there is no evidence that the FARC are drug traffickers.” On the contrary, Pastrana claimed, “The FARC have always said they are interested in eradicating illegal crops.” To boot, then Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, used the Left’s favored “blame America first” motto, claiming the extensive growth drug supply from Colombia is not the FARC’s fault, but the fault of “our [America’s] demand for drugs.”

Indeed, this slogan has become the mantra of drug traffickers smuggling ever growing quantities of illegal drugs to the United States, as well as the international movement to legalize drugs, which has been launched and funded by Bill and Hillary’s long-time and generous supporter, George Soros. In the early 1990s, after he made at least one billion dollars bidding against the Bank of England, Soros positioned himself as a social reformer and set out to create an “open society.” Since then he has been using his philanthropy to “change” or more accurately deconstruct the moral values and attitudes of the world’s leading democracy. He declared war on the “war on drugs’ because, like the Castro brothers in Havana, he understood that corruption by drugs and ultimately drug money, can take advantage of even the most advanced, democratic, capitalistic system.