This isn’t to suggest that the dynamic duo are having a relationship unbefitting world leaders. Nor is this to imply that Angie is in any way implicated in Putin’s recent divorce.
It’s just that Frau (formerly Comrade) Merkel wants Col. (also formerly Comrade) Putin to repeal the recent Russian law banning the propaganda of homosexuality among children.
According to Angie’s spokesman, the law means that homosexuals “may ultimately be subjected to discrimination”. “We do not abandon the hope,” he continued, “that the Russian state… will repeal this law. It runs contrary to the spirit of the European Convention on Human Rights.”
So according to the Convention there’s nothing wrong with propaganda of homosexuality among children? Mind you, there’s plenty wrong with the Convention, but this is off my topic today.
My topic is the response of the Russian ‘opposition’ media to this law. There are quite a few good writers in these media, and they have some things in common.
First, they all detest Putin, which is good. He is indeed detestable and his state, created and run by an elite made up of KGB and mafia types, even more so.
Second, they all look to the West in search of a model Russia should follow instead, which is problematic. Nor is this problem particularly new.
Bad things are always easier to pick up than good, and ever since Peter I Russian ‘Westernisers’ have been learning all the wrong things from the West – partly because they caught it at a bad time, namely during the Enlightenment.
Thus the Russians violently rejected the West’s formative religion, its respect for the law, accountable government and individual dignity. Instead they imported revolutionary afflatus, ignorance of philosophy, rampant atheism and vague liberal phraseology designed to conceal the underlying subversiveness. Planted on the traditional Russian soil, these seeds sprouted to luxuriant growth in 1917, with well-publicised results.
Such selective borrowing was partly due to the Russians’ endemic ignorance of the West, what with reliable sources of information having been systematically suppressed. This ignorance still perseveres, and it’s the third characteristic shared by today’s journalists in general, and ‘opposition’ journalists in particular.
This is revealed even through inconsequential details, such as reaction to drink-driving laws. When the Duma debated criminalising any amount of blood alcohol, one of the best-informed Russian journalists, Yulia Latynina, attacked the government citing the West as an example of lenience.
In the West, she wrote, there’s no law against drink-driving; there’s only one against dangerous driving. It’s clear that Miss Latynina hasn’t clocked in many miles on European roads. Otherwise she’d know that spot-checking is routine everywhere.
The Russians also don’t realise that the Leftie, touchy-feely, PC ethos doesn’t run unopposed in the West. The West to them is a homogeneous entity enviably committed to such lovely Western things as political correctness, multi-culti national suicide, homomarriage and so forth.
Few of their anti-Putin pundits are capable of enunciating the conservative position on such matters (Latynina is one of the few, by the way). They uncritically pick up the views sanctified by American and EU Lefties and, for lack of indigenous vocabulary, express such views in Guardian language at best.
Thus they’ve picked up the non-word ‘homophobic’, which they apply to the current legislation. Rather than campaigning for the rule of just law, which would severely punish and thereby prevent violent attacks on homosexuals (endemic in Russia), they support allowing homosexual propaganda among children simply because Putin opposes it.
The Russian Orthodox Church could have offered advice here but, having over the last century turned itself into a KGB stooge, it has lost whatever little credibility it ever had with the Russian intelligentsia. The ROC hierarchy is seen as being in cahoots in Putin, which of course it is. Instead the Russians look to the West for guidance – and get it from the likes of Matthew Parris and Polly Toynbee.
Yet a real Christian Church could provide a coherent position on this matter. Christianity regards homosexuality as a mortal sin, pure and simple. However, it’s neither the only nor the worst such sin. For example, breaking any of the Ten Commandments, regrettably including adultery, is even worse.
Any sin can be forgiven if sincerely repented – hence the Christian concept ‘hate the sin, love the sinner’, which goes back to St Augustine’s ‘Cum dilectione hominum et odio vitiorum’. The problem with homosexual propaganda is that it spreads the diktat that homosexuality isn’t a sin at all, that it’s as normal as sex between a man and a woman.
Allowing and encouraging such propaganda, Western-style, is a reliable symptom of all-pervasive decadence known to be deadly to society. It sends the same message to West-haters as raised hands send in battle: we surrender.
Russian journalists, lamentably including those who seek to be on the side of the angels, don’t understand any of this. Nor can they rely on any tradition of indigenous conservative thought or any filtering mechanism they can apply to the West, dividing the righteous wheat from the Leftie chaff.
Hence their arguments on most political subjects, including this one, tend to be exceptionally primitive and unsound. Thus one influential pundit, who spent years in a Soviet camp, says there’s nothing wrong with homosexuality (and therefore its propaganda) because “at least 1,500 species of animals do it.”
Fair enough. But do let’s decide to what extent we want to be guided in our behaviour by examples set by animals. For instance dogs eat faeces, drink from puddles and chase cats – are we going to emulate them? Lions kill other lions’ cubs to prevent dynastic competition – are we going to do it too?
The exclusivity of man is the founding principle of our civilisation – too bad Putin’s opponents don’t know this. Nor do they seem to be aware that it’s not just “communists, Nazis and Islamic fundamentalists” who find anything wrong with rampant homosexuality and its propaganda.
It would also be useful for them to realise that just because “70 percent of female bats practise oral sex” it doesn’t follow that governments should condone marriages based on such or similar practices.
Even banning polygamy, an injunction that’s still in force in the West (for how long?) is to the columnist in question tantamount to Nazism. After all, Muslims allow it, all religions and ‘cultures’ are equal, ergo on what grounds do we ban polygamy?
On the grounds of traditional Western morality, one could suggest. Alas, Russian ‘liberal’ pundits would neither understand nor accept this reply. With opponents like these, it’s hardly surprising that Putin’s tyranny is enjoying a free ride in Russia.