I do not think anyone around here seriously argues against the view that the West is currently is a state of free-fall, and headed toward total collapse. While living standards in the West remain high by international standards – trust me on that one, I know better than most that much of the world is a giant shithole – they are dropping fast, and in some parts have dropped BELOW Third World standards.

Don’t believe me? All you have to do is to walk the streets of Austin, TX. Or Philadelphia. Or large parts of NYFC. Or Baltimore. Or, heck, London, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, Rome, and so on and so forth. The greatest cities in the West are rapidly reverting to what they used to be 500 years ago – disease-infested hellholes where people died like flies in the summer, and froze to death in the streets in winter.

And all of that is before we get to the cultural cancers eating the West from the inside. Indeed, the outward decay is merely a manifestation of the rottenness within the West.

Healthy and sensible nations and cultures do not glorify godlessness, homosexuality (or, really, sexual perversion of any kind), Izzlam, Satanism, and all other things contrary to human nature. Yet, that is precisely what we have seen in the West, for the better part of three decades.

All of us can name countless examples of such degeneracy. “Pride Month”, for instance, is coming up in many Western countries, and that confronts us traditionalists and nationalists with the shoulder-sagging and revolting prospect of watching homosexuals and the mentally ill parading in the streets, demanding the rest of us accept them without hesitation or reservation. Recently, we were treated to the truly ridiculous spectacle of watching actual Satanists – from Ireland, no less, a formerly Catholic nation – “performing” at Eurovision. We also now have the General Secretary of NATO claiming that the mission of the world’s largest (and stupidest) military alliance, is to protect the rights of seriously degenerate minorities.

This, to repeat, IS NOT NORMAL anywhere else in the world. The West glorifies all that is corrupt and disgusting, and vilifies the Good, the Beautiful, and the True.

Comparative Analytics

As has often been said, comparison is the beginning of clarity. And few things bring more clarity to those of us living in the West, than travelling to places that are decidedly NOT in the West, and seeing how they look, relative to the Western nations.

I have been fortunate and blessed with many opportunities to travel in my life. I have seen much of the rest of the world, outside the West. As many of you know, most of my travel in recent years has been to Russia, where I have come to understand and appreciate the people, culture, history, and nation in a way that few outsiders can.

Having lived in both the West and in Russia, for extended periods, I can therefore write and speak with some authority on what Russia looks like. And, while I was not alive in the 1950s, I can state, with considerable certainty, that Russia today, is VERY much like what America was in the late 1950s to early 1960s – before the Sexual Revolution, before the Boomers destroyed American society, and before the great evils of Progressivism truly made themselves felt.

This is a rather germane topic, in fact, given a recent email from LRFotS AuntRat, who asked:

Hi Didact,

I live in the West. And like most Western countries, my government hates me and wants me replaced. Collapse seems imminent.

I look at Russia and see a government that doesn’t hate its citizens (which is a huge start), and didn’t sell off its industrial base. The big cities are breathtaking. A proud people with a lot for me to admire.

And yet…

Occasionally, I’ll see alarming stats about Russia. Mostly these relate to personal issues. Russia tops international lists with the highest rates of:

Suicide

Prostitution

Alcoholism

Divorce

What’s the story? How can a country have it together as far as the big picture but top the list with these issues? Are these real problems or more overblown Western fake news?

These are excellent questions. I can answer them to a greater or lesser degree. Let us take a look, first and foremost, at the problems in Russian society, as illustrated above.

I want to make it very clear that Russia is NOT perfect. Not at all. I have lived there for well over a year in total, and I know full well that Russia has some very serious social problems. The very problems noted above, are indeed real.

But, we must not overstate things. Russia has rebuilt, refurbished, or opened over THIRTY THOUSAND churches since the fall of the Soviet Union. More are being built every single day. There is a vast Orthodox reawakening stirring throughout the country. The Muslim minority there is generally well-behaved and does not attempt to assert itself over the Christian majority – not least because the most hardcore of them, the Chechens, received repeated and extremely brutal lessons on the need to stay in line, during the early years of the Neo-Tsar’s rule.

Life in Russia is hard, for sure – I can state with absolute certainty that most Westerners would not survive 6 months there on their own, without local contacts and knowledge of the Russian language. But, today, the people of Russia live better than they ever have before.

Looking at the points raised above:

Suicide

Assuming we can trust World Bank and WHO data (which is a shaky proposition, at best), it is true Russia continues to have one of the highest suicide rates in the world – currently, it ranks 9th out of all nations, and its suicide rate of 25.1 for every 100K inhabitants is substantially higher than the US’s 16 per 100K.

However, you have to look at the trend over time as well. And the trend is very clear. Suicide rates have been declining consistently in Russia for many years. (Don’t be deceived by the “percentage” presented in that link. In reality, they are numbers per 100K.)

Let us now apply that point above about comparison. The moment you do that, you see it is Russia’s society that is healing, and America’s that is collapsing.

Alcoholism

What about alcoholism? I have repeatedly encountered drunks in Russia – most of them being of a fairly friendly sort. I can personally attest that alcoholism is, indeed, a problem there. Several of my closest contacts in Russia have had to deal with the unwanted consequences of their friends, colleagues, and acquaintances getting very drunk.

But does that mean Russia has a serious problem with alcoholism?

No.

Rosstat’s own data show the number of patients diagnosed in Russia with alcoholism and alcohol-related psychoses, declined by nearly 70% between 2010 and 2021. There was a slight uptick in 2023, in the wake of the Plandemic – Russia was certainly affected too, because they did lock down during March and April – but alcoholism is still nowhere near the problem it was once upon a time.

Meanwhile – again, using the comparative lens – alcohol-related problems and deaths have been rising for years in the US. And, again, it is obvious which country is more healthy.

Divorce

This is definitely still a huge problem in Russia. The divorce rate in Russia is around 6.5-7.1 per 10 marriages. And that sounds disastrous. But then, if you take a closer look at the data (in Russian – use Goolag or Yandex Translate), you find something astonishing:

The most problematic parts of Russia for divorce, are the North Caucasian republics – which are MUSLIM.

And, even more amazingly, the lowest rates of divorce – though still staggeringly high – are in the big cities, Moscow and St. Petersburg.

The data also reveal something genuinely fascinating – and worrying, for the future – about Russian marriages in the North Caucasian republics. Women get divorced, because they can get money from the government to support themselves and their children.

Guess where else that has happened? In Black America. That is literally where the “welfare queen” meme comes from. All you have to do is to look at the disaster that is Black America, to understand how catastrophic such a situation would be.

If the Russian government does not move fast to arrest that problem – and there are signs that they are moving to do so – they will end up with exactly the same problem Amerikhastan has, of a significant minority of the population (about 14% of it, similar to the quantity of Blacks in America) that has no “skin in the game”, and no incentive to contribute to society and the broader community.

Prostitution

This is one where we have a hard time finding data. If you listen to anti-Kremlin mouthpieces like Meduza, Mediazona, The Moscow Slimes (which actually sits in the Netherlands, now), you would think Russians women are all whores, and Russian streets are full of Tat’yanas and Anastasias, dyed bottle-blonde with pneumatic breasts and whoring themselves out for pennies.

Prostitution is illegal in Russia, and has been since… well, pretty much always, as far as I am aware. But, we all know the stories of Russian “mail-order brides” in the 1990s, which were both titillating and heartbreaking.

All I can say is, having been to Russia many times – and 3 times in the past 12 months – I have seen NOTHING on the streets of Moscow, or SPb, or Voronezh, or (especially) Makhachkala, that indicates rampant prostitution.

Furthermore, I can say with absolute certainty that the desire of Russian women, in particular, to leave Russia and live in the West, has declined dramatically, in just the last 7 years that I have been travelling there. Once upon a time, every third Russian girl you met, would express a desire to travel through the West, and live in the US or Europe.

Two years of rampant Russophobia in the West has cured all of that. The vast majority of Russian women now understand how much the West hates them, and sees them as little more than sex objects.

Western views of Russian women, at least at the elite level, have never moved on from the mid-1990s – Alexander Mercouris once related a story about a function he attended in London, where he saw numerous rich political elites show up with absolute DIME PIECES on their arms, and every one of them was from Russia, Ukraine, or Belarus.

Every one of them was also under the age of 25.

It sickened him so much that he never went back to those functions.

But that is not what Russia is like today. Russian girls certainly want the good life – what girl doesn’t? – but they want to live IN RUSSIA and marry RUSSIAN men. Thanks to the insane idiocy of Western MUH SANKSHUNS!!!!, Russians cannot easily travel outside of Russia to the West any more, anyway, which makes it much easier for Russian women to stay in their own country and live a good life.

The Return of Traditionalism

The Russia of the 1990s was a place of horror, misery, collapse, and decay. The entire country came perilously close to embracing every last aspect of degenerate Western neoliberalism. For a while there, it tottered right on the edge. There was a time when Russia could, conceivably, have become what the Baltic states have become – economically irrelevant, dependent on the West, and full of queers and faggots that run around trying to tell the rest of the world what to do and how to live.

That is not Russia today.

In my last round of adolt edjoomuhcayshun, I attended courses with a Russian, who wanted to experience what the West is like. She and I became very close friends, because I understand Russian culture and language. She left her husband and child in Russia to attend school – but when she left, she made it clear she would never come back. And she has not. Every time I visit her during my trips over there, we agree that life for her is vastly better in her homeland – and she is utterly DISGUSTED with the West today.

When we met, she wanted her daughter to go to Harvard or MIT to study mathematics. Today, years later, she wants her daughter to go to Moscow State University, because she has seen first-hand how broken the West is, and how useless its education system is.

Moreover, Russia is rapidly bringing back its traditions and values. Consider the following:

• LGBTQWTFISTHISSHIT propaganda, of ALL kinds, is fully outlawed;
• Gender “reassignment” surgery – i.e. body mutilation – is essentially outlawed;
• Gay “marriage” is outlawed;
• Marriage is defined in their Constitution as a union of one man and one woman – to the irritation, no doubt, of the goat-humpers, who believe you ought to be able to have up to 4 wives;
• When you walk around on the streets, especially this year, in the Year of the Family, the billboards are full of pictures of families of 4-6 children, and they are ALL White;
• Mass migration is absolutely restricted, and in fact emigrating to Russia is EXTREMELY difficult;
• Education standards have returned to the old Soviet standard, abandoning the Western “Bologna approach”, or whatever it is called, and therefore has put an immense emphasis on STEM topics;
• Tattoos, though increasingly common (sadly) among both men and women, are still rare to see on people;
• Men AND women dress simply, but are neat and tidy in their clothing and demeanour – you very rarely see people with sagging jeans, or slutty dresses;
• People take care of their shoes, their clothes, their apartments, and their surroundings;
• The streets are SPOTLESSLY clean, and Moscow, despite being the largest urban centre in Europe, is completely safe, even at 3am, and even outside the centre;

All of these things are signs of a healthy, happy, traditionalist society. This is what Amerikhastan USED to be like. It is what England USED to be like. It is what France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, a dozens of other Western nations USED TO BE LIKE – in the 1950s.

The Failure of Cuckservatism

Russia today also illustrates one fundamental and undeniable truth:

The American understanding of “conservatism” has FAILED, completely and totally. And Russia shows why.

Conservatism, as Americans understand it, has no actual core principles. This is not my view of it – that is literally in Russell Kirk‘s own preamble to the “Ten Conservative Principles” that define(d) the American conservative philosophy:

Being neither a religion nor an ideology, the body of opinion termed conservatism possesses no Holy Writ and no Das Kapital to provide dogmata. So far as it is possible to determine what conservatives believe, the first principles of the conservative persuasion are derived from what leading conservative writers and public men have professed during the past two centuries. After some introductory remarks on this general theme, I will proceed to list ten such conservative principles.

Fast forward to today, and you see what “conservatives” in America have achieved. They have done NOT ONE DAMNED THING to stop America’s slide into degeneracy and collapse.

The pattern is depressingly tedious. Conservatives claim to oppose something; they stand against it; they lose against the progressives and liberals; they assume the lesson learned is to become like the people they just fought; and 20 years later, they adopt exactly the same ideas as the ones they opposed, but slightly less retarded (hopefully).

It does not matter what you look at – mass migration, corporatism, the New Deal, gay “marriage”, the LGBTQWTFISTHISSHIT movement, drug legalisation, and nowadays the mainstreaming of paedophilia. Conservatives can always and everywhere be trusted to collapse like a heap of dry twigs in the face of a strong wind.

Russia, on the other hand, is essentially a moderate conservative multiethnic and multifaith society, dominated by Christians. And therein lies the secret of its success and cohesion.

I have strong disagreements with Orthodoxy – it is essentially the same as Catholicism, in terms of its emphasis on tradition and ritual over the actual words of Scripture, but with a different flavour. However, we cannot deny the fact that Russian Orthodoxy has made a roaring comeback – and has stood strong for over a thousand years against every attempt to destroy it. (Including, by the way, by Catholics and Protestants from Europe.)

Conservatism, alone, is neither necessary nor sufficient to inoculate and preserve a society against the Satanic evils of the progressive hivemind. It needs a hill to die on. Who exactly, among American conservatives, is going to stand and fight for such woolly notions as “less spending”, or “reducing the size of government”? Virtually NONE.

But… how many Christians – REAL Christians – will stand, fight, and die for Jesus Christ?

Every. Single. One. Because He died for us, and we owe him our very lives.

That spiritual principle provides a powerful barrier against the tides of evil that have swamped the West. But it, too, is not sufficient. All you have to do to understand this, is to look at Greece, which is supposedly an Orthodox nation, and yet has serious problems with TEH GHEYNESS. They just approved gay “marriage” 3 months ago, in fact, and allowed them to have almost full parental rights – thereby guaranteeing sexual abuse of minors, and colossal psychological damage to the minors unfortunate enough to be raised by homosexual couples.

Russia, by contrast, has outlawed such madness, such “reckless faggotry”, as it were. And that is in large part because Russia does not believe in dumbocracy, and never really has.

The Even Greater Failure of Dumbocracy

Christianity, by itself, is not enough. Ireland – once a Catholic nation – has legalised abortion. The United Kingdom – once an Anglican nation – is no longer even English, and is increasingly turning into an ugly melange of Arab, Pakistani, Indian, and African. Germany – once Lutheran – is totally defeated and broken. France – once Catholic – is even worse.

America – once Protestant – has at least 30 million illegal invaders in it, and another 40 million Blacks, who seem to have little interest in taking part in the wider civic society, and are instead busy tearing it down.

Why did this happen? Because the West was stupid enough to embrace dumbocracy.

If there is one thing that has become clear from watching America turn from a republic into a dumbocracy, it is the utter unworkability of giving every man (and woman) and his dog the right to vote, without having commensurate skin in the game. Too many Americans think they can vote for whatever they want, whenever they want, without sacrifice or effort. Worse, the entire American system is effectively designed to encourage a two-party system – thereby resulting in a situation where your only choices are between Evil and Stupid, between Gay and Gayer, and between going over the fiscal cliff just below or just above the speed of sound.

This is not really a choice, if we are honest.

Russia, by contrast, now demands that its top politicians must be Russian citizens, and must not hold dual citizenship. It also insists on the use of voter ID – which too many Americans are deluded enough to think is RAAAAYYYYCISSSSS!!!!, or some such nonsense – because they actually believe that one man has one vote.

In Russia, the Communists, believe it or not, are the second largest party in the country – and these days, even the COMMIES endorse and accept the Orthodox Church and encourage Russians to attend religious services. It is almost enough to make me rethink my longstanding conviction that shooting Communists on sight should be legal, on the grounds of national self-defence.

Dumboracy and democracy ARE NOT the same things. The former is what happens when you have elected representatives, who can easily be subordinated and co-opted by corporatist interests. The latter is what happens when you make every voter directly responsible for the outcomes of their own votes – not through elected representatives, but through active participation in the political process.

You can have democracy in small nations – Switzerland comes the closest, but even there, the Swiss have allowed themselves to be captured by Clown World. But, in big nations, the overriding lesson is, you need a king.

Russia has one. It has ALWAYS had one, the 80-year abortive and disastrous experiment in Communism being only a partial and not-very-good exception. Today, the Neo-Tsar rules over Russia, much like the ancient Tsars did – through well-defined and embedded structures of power that radiate from the Kremlin, in a VERY legalistic and rigid fashion, throughout the rest of the country.

If Americans have the sense God gave a honey badger – not guaranteed, these days, given what I am seeing – they will abandon their experiment in dumbocracy, and go back to what works. Which is to say, monarchism.

Conclusion – the Painful Truth

Russia today is what America used to be. It is the Ark of Civilisation, as Grandpa Grumpuss (correctly) calls it. And they intend to keep it that way.

In summary, don’t believe the lying whore-media propaganda. Russia is not perfect – not at all. There ARE huge problems in their society – particularly around spousal abuse and domestic violence, actually. (I have had the misfortune of seeing that particularly ugly pathology first-hand during my time in Russia – I will not go into details, but it can get bad there.) But, overall, Russia today is a happy, healthy, flourishing society, that preserves the best of what the West once was.