Putin’s covert war on western decadence: Russia is being presented as a moral fortress against gays and pornography, by Owen Matthews.
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. …
Mystical geopolitical thinker Alexander Dugin … is the chief ideologue of Eurasianism, an ideology which holds that Russia has a special historical destiny to save the world from the corrupt moral values of western capitalism. …
The influence of the Russian Orthodox church on public life is growing fast, thanks to Kremlin patronage. The church’s preferred instrument of control is a draconian law criminalising ‘offending the feeling of religious believers’ that was passed in the wake of a protest by the feminist punk group Pussy Riot in Moscow’s Christ the Saviour Cathedral in 2012. …
A month ago, 20-year-old blogger Ruslan Sokolovsky was arrested and sentenced to two months in jail after he posted an online video of himself playing Pokémon Go in a church. He could eventually spend five years behind bars if his action is classed as a ‘hate crime motivated by religion’. ‘I decided to catch some Pokémon in church because why not? I believe it’s both safe and not against the law,’ said Sokolovsky in his online video as he walked into Ekaterinburg’s Church of All Saints. ‘Who could be offended if you walk in a church with a smartphone in your hand?’ Apparently, the answer is: most Putin-era Russians.
See Russia’s Coolest Christian.
Russia is going on a very different path from the West:
[H]istorical polling data from the recently shuttered Levada research centre shows that Russian attitudes on gays, blacks, Jews, foreigners, capital punishment and the like have remained pretty unenlightened since the fall of the Soviet Union.
But what is new is that those prejudices — especially the hatred of westerners and intolerance of nonconformity — are now being officially reinforced not just by state-controlled media but also by a growing cacophony of religious and ultranationalist media.
And it is a new development:
In some ways it is no surprise that Russia has turned pious and moral after so many years of wickedness. In the mid-1990s — an epoch now much reviled by Russia’s new puritans — Moscow was a town where a strip club was considered a normal place to eat lunch, where bars served unlimited free drinks to young women from seven till nine before opening the doors to a predatory horde of men, where the main street of the city was lined with prostitutes and the television filled with tawdry soft porn. Russia was almost defined by an absolute, bottomless nihilism.
In the Anglosphere we need to recognize that we are under siege not only from our old revitalized Islamic enemy but also from our internal enemies including the sexual revolutionaries. The conservative narrative is currently weak and losing ground.
hat-tip Stephen Neil
