President Putin: Culture Warrior

What a difference a couple of generations make:

. . .

President Reagan once called the old Soviet Empire “the focus of evil in the modern world.” President Putin is implying that Barack Obama’s America may deserve the title in the 21st century.

Nor is he without an argument when we reflect on America’s embrace of abortion on demand, homosexual marriage, pornography, promiscuity, and the whole panoply of Hollywood values.

Our grandparents would not recognize the America in which we live.

. . .

Peoples all over the world, claims Putin, are supporting Russia’s “defense of traditional values” against a “so-called tolerance” that is “genderless and infertile.”

While his stance as a defender of traditional values has drawn the mockery of Western media and cultural elites, Putin is not wrong in saying that he can speak for much of mankind.

. . .

While much of American and Western media dismiss him as an authoritarian and reactionary, a throwback, Putin may be seeing the future with more clarity than Americans still caught up in a Cold War paradigm.

As the decisive struggle in the second half of the 20th century was vertical, East vs. West, the 21st century struggle may be horizontal, with conservatives and traditionalists in every country arrayed against the militant secularism of a multicultural and transnational elite.

And though America’s elite may be found at the epicenter of anti-conservatism and anti-traditionalism, the American people have never been more alienated or more divided culturally, socially and morally.

. . .

He is seeking to redefine the “Us vs. Them” world conflict of the future as one in which conservatives, traditionalists and nationalists of all continents and countries stand up against the cultural and ideological imperialism of what he sees as a decadent west.

Source:  Pat Buchanan, ‘Is Putin One of Us?’, 17 Dec. 2013, http://buchanan.org/blog/putin-one-us-6071, accessed 20 Dec. 2013 (thanks to lewrockwell.com for the path).

Supporters of Phil Robertson (however crude his comments were and however silly his TV show is, which generally serves only to mock what is genuinely good in Southern culture, whether of the plain folk or of the gentry), and anything else traditional and Christian in the South and elsewhere, take note:  Orthodox Russia and not Puritan America is your ally in the culture war (which is a religious war at its root).

And the more we worship the idol of economic growth (a Puritan offspring), offering our toils and labors and children and old customs and institutions and countryside to the fires of this new Moloch; the more we enrich the so-called ‘job creators’ of Dow, Chase, Microsoft, etc., rather than local communities with their family farms & shops and small craftsmen; the more do we empower the very Elite who are tyrannically imposing upon us this New Morality we say we despise and oppose.

As Russia begins to resume her role of Christian opposition to this Elite (a role interrupted by the Communist takeover for much of the 20^th century, the effects of which have not been completely purged from her), we can do few things better than to pray for her - most fervently to pray for her - and to reproach ourselves for our own sins.