Russia’s Putin claps back at “woke” culture, says his country experienced it once before and it led to decades of tyranny

10/31/2021 / By JD Heyes

It’s not often that the United States and the West, in general, get good advice from Russian President Vladimir Putin, but he doled some out during a recent speech that, if Americans and citizens of other Western democracies still care about liberty and freedom, should pay close attention to and heed.

Speaking at a conference headlined “Global Shake-up in the 21st Century,” in Russia’s largest resort city of Sochi last week, Putin ripped ultra-woke “cancel culture” and explained that the impetus behind it is nothing but pure tyranny.

“We see with bemusement the paralysis unfolding in countries that have grown accustomed to viewing themselves as the flagships of progress,” said Putin during his speech. “Of course, it’s none of our business or what is happening, the social and cultural shocks that are happening in some countries in the Western countries, some believe that aggressive blotting out of whole pages of your own history, the affirmative action in the interest of minorities, and the requirement to renounce the traditional interpretation of such basic values as mother, father, family, and the distinction between sexes are a milestone … a renewal of society.”

The Russian president noted further that while other nations are free to chart their own course, “the overwhelming majority of Russian society” has pushed back on what amounts to left-wing political and cultural ideologies.

“The preparedness of the so-called social progress believe that the bringing a new conscience, a new consciousness to humanity, something that is more correct,” the former KGB operative and prime minister told the conference, adding that in fact, woke thinking is “nothing new.”

“Paradoxical as it may seem, but this is something we saw in Russia. It happened in our country before after the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks followed the dogmas of [Karl] Marx and [Friedrich] Engels,” he said, in reference to the two German philosophers who first devised and introduced Communist thinking as a political philosophy in the 1800s.

The Russian president noted that both philosophers “declared that they would go into change the traditional lifestyle, the political, the economic lifestyle, as well as the very notion of morality, the basic principles for a healthy society,” as they focused on ways to “destroy age- and century-long values” as a way of “revisiting the relationship between the people.”

“It was hailed as the march of progress,” he continued, adding that the movement back then “was very popular across the world and it was supported by many.” And, “as we see, it is happening right now,” he added.

Putin went on to talk about how the Bolshevik mindset was one of intolerance, and whose adherents rejected “other opinions…different from their own.” He noted that that way of thinking “should remind you of something that is happening” currently “in the Western countries.”

“…[I]t is with puzzlement that we see the practices Russia used to have and that we left behind in distant path, the fight for equality and against discrimination turns into an aggressive dogmatism on the brink of absurdity — when great authors of the past such as Shakespeare are no longer taught in schools and universities because they announced as backward classics that did not understand the importance of gender or race,” Putin said.

“In Hollywood, there are leaflets reminding what you should do in the cinema, in the films, how many personalities and actors you’ve got, what kind of color, what sex, and sometimes it’s even tighter and stricter than what the Department of Propaganda of the Soviet Communist Party Central Committee did,” he continued.

“And I would like to say that this is not something new, and the 20s and the 1920s, the Soviet couture Tagore came up with the so-called ‘Newspeak’, and they thought that thereby they were building a new consciousness and coming up with new values, and they went so far that we feel the consequences up until now,” Putin said, going on to add a final remark about transgenderism.

“There are some monstrous things when from a very young age, you teach to children that the boy can easily become a girl and you impose on them this selection, this choice. You push the parents aside and make the child take these decisions that can destroy their lives,” he said.

“And if we call the spade a spade, this is nigh to crime against humanity and all of that under the banner of progress, while some people just want to do that.”