Commenter Himself had some solid points to add to my previous post about the hold that Communism has on both the Russian people and the Western world:

I’m not getting the russiaphobia the left is trying to stir up. When asked about current matters, or the west in general, I find Putin to be sober and pragmatic. I see nothing whatsoever wrong with working in your country’s interest, whether Uncle Stupid believes in it or not. Same thing runs for Xi.

The videos I’ve seen when Putin’s been asked questions, he has great answers. When asked about Hillary and the ensuing shitstorm from the left, he said (and I’m paraphrasing since I’m too lazy to get the youtube link) – Hillary lost, and now they need a scapegoat, so they are picking us.

He answer about “interfering” in the election was similarly concise. something like “why would we care?” Sure they stirred shit, but that’s what they’ve done for decades. We knew that. Obama knew that.

I just watched one where he was on a forum, and was asked about democracy. He said something along the lines of it’s not for everyone, and the US shouldn’t be imposing on other countries and cultures. That every time the US has done this it’s lead to disaster, pain, and suffering.

He wasn’t wrong.

Correct on all points. There are a few things here that are worth expanding and colouring upon.

As far as I can tell, there are several reasons why the Western (((media))) and liberal elites hate and fear Putin.

The first is that Putin represents everything that the neoliberal view hates. He is anti-democratic and authoritarian, does not care for liberal shibboleths, and has no interest whatsoever in pandering to the people.

The second is that Putin actually delivers what the neoliberals claim to want, but never actually do.

And the third, and most important, is that Putin recognises the neoliberal globohomo types for the slaves of psychopathic evil that they truly are, and refuses to give them access to his country or his people.

Let’s take a look at the first point and examine who Putin is.

Putin is indeed sober and pragmatic. He is unquestionably a tough, hard-nosed, gritty Alpha male who knows exactly what he wants and will stop at nothing to get it.

That does not mean that he is universally liked within Russia. There are many reasons for the Russian people to dislike the man – and many of them do. If you talk to the average metropolitan Russian, he will be at best somewhat ambivalent about whether he trusts Putin or not.

Take a look at this cartoon, for instance. I saw it earlier this summer while spending time in Moscow. The person who showed it to me really doesn’t like Putin and thinks that he is a thief and a liar who steals from the Russian people in order to enrich himself:

That cartoon tells you what a fairly significant chunk of the Russian people actually think about their supposed “dictator”. Yes, he is one, make no mistake – but he is not the ruler of some bankrupt tinpot banana republic, nor is he the type of ruler who routinely wins elections by 90% or more.

To paraphrase that line uttered by Derek Jacobi as Senator Gracchus in Gladiator, he does not pretend to be a man of the people, but he is a man for the people.

He doesn’t do a lot of the smarmy crowd-pleasing nonsense that other dictators do in order to keep power. He simply gets on with the business of ruling his country and projecting the image of a strong, masculine leader. He understands his people and knows that the Russians respect strength, masculinity, and firm leadership.

His major fault as a leader, as far as I can tell, is his tendency toward cronyism. He has no problem with enriching himself and the others around him.

It is true that many of the current crop of Russian oligarchs are extremely wealthy because of their connections to Putin. This looks like anathema to a culture and country that values individual freedom and private property. It reeks of cronyism and corruption. And Russia is full of both.

The problem is that Westerners look at Russia through the lens of their own experiences with liberal capitalist democracy. They simply do not understand that these concepts never took root in Russia.

The Russian experience with history is, as I have said several times before, built upon feudalism. The modern oligarchs are simply the current incarnation of the Russian boyars of old. Once you understand that Russia’s entire approach to governance for the past thousand years was predicated upon the existence of a single all-powerful king at the top, followed by a long retinue of nobles and asset owners, followed by the peasants and ordinary people right at the bottom, then you will better understand why it is that Russians tolerate and even like someone like Putin.

The tension that exists in Russia today is that the feudal structure does not work when you have a middle class. Russia does have this. Feudalism doesn’t work in an industrial or post-industrial economy because you have to find some way to accommodate the bourgeoisie, who are by nature and definition interested in constantly improving their economic situations.

That is why the Russian metropolitan classes dislike the oligarchs and, by extension, Putin, whom they see as the enabler of those oligarchs. They see that the oligarchs keep SMEs from breaking into the big leagues and growing. They see that the Russian government uses taxes and regulations to make life rather expensive for their people. And they see that the Russian government keeps making their pensions less and less accessible – from their point of view, anyway.

It is important to remember, however, that the pension reforms that Russia put through this year were absolutely necessary. And this comes back to the second point that I raised above, wherein Putin’s government delivers what Western globohomo elites say that they want to do, but conspicuously fail to provide.

Putin understood, as very few Western leaders do, that the social safety net has to be solvent in order to work properly. The reforms that he pushed through were hugely unpopular, but they had to be done in order to ensure the solvency of the Russian government.

The results are pretty obvious to anyone paying attention. While virtually every Western nation is basically bankrupt with debt to GDP ratios of at least 80% – and the USA in particular is facing at least 100 TRILLION dollars in future liabilities over the next 100 years from its particularly stupid Social Security and Medicare programs – Russia’s debt-to-GDP ratio stands at a downright ascetic 14% or so.

Russia IS NOT owned by any foreign power. Nobody can nuke Russia’s debt overnight and thereby bankrupt the country – which was the weapon that the globalists used to bring Russia to its knees in 1998.

And while other Western nations like to talk about giving their citizens cradle-to-the-grave benefits, the Russians actually do it.

They don’t do it necessarily very well, by Western standards. But they do it within their means.

Russians complain a lot about how much they are taxed. And they have good reason to do so. They pay quite a lot in taxes, though their tax rates look remarkably benevolent compared to Western ones. Russian residents pay a 13% flat tax; non-residents pay 30%. Residents pay a 9% dividend rate, non-residents pay 15%. Capital gains rate is 20%, rental tax is 13%, and property taxes range from 0% to 2%. The corporate tax rate is 20%.

Note, these are mostly flat rates. Virtually no Western nation has been sensible enough to offer similarly sensible and low tax rates. To get these kinds of tax rates with a similar level of quality in terms of government benefits, you have to go to small highly developed Asian nations like Singapore.

And, speaking of those benefits, the Russian people get a lot for what they pay in.

They get free full-coverage health care – though it’s government-run, and you know what that means. That being said, as I narrated earlier, I’ve seen Russian government health care in action, and it’s actually pretty good. They get a government pension for life. They get really impressive maternity benefits. They get unemployment benefits.

All of these benefits are piffling by Western standards, and in truth they are barely enough to keep the Russian people themselves alive, even when you account for the massive wage and income differences between Western nations and Russia.

You could argue that the Russian government takes a lot from its people and gives little back. There is some justification for this. I’ve heard many Russians say exactly that.

Or, you could argue that the Russian government tries very hard not to bankrupt itself by providing cradle-to-grave entitlements that it cannot afford. My training as a mathematician and an economist lead me to believe that this is closer to the truth.

What you have in Russia, therefore, is a country that has created exactly the situation that Western liberal elites claim to want, but can never deliver: a country that takes care of its people without coddling them and without going bankrupt in the process.

More than that, though, what really drives the globalist elite nuts about Russia is that President Putin and his government flatly refuse to bow to the globohomo agenda, as I mentioned in the third and most important point above.

Putin will not be bought, bullied, or bargained into a position that he believes is bad for himself or his people. He refuses to permit the toxic sewage of modern Leftist culture into Russia – GMO foods are banned there, homosexual propaganda aimed at children is outlawed, and the swivel-eyed lunatics of the “transgender” movement are considered precisely that, loonies. And he has absolutely no tolerance for foreign meddling in his own country’s domestic affairs, which is why globalists like George Soros hate him.

The Neo-Tsar understands that his nation is its people, not its land. I have heard it argued – in my opinion largely correctly – that Putin cares a lot about his nation, but doesn’t really care much for the people in it. That is not entirely true. Take a look at how Putin intervened on behalf of factory workers who felt that they were being exploited by their bosses, and he got all of the factory owners in a particular town in a room, sat them down, and gave them the tongue-lashing of their lives in front of the cameras:

You could argue that it was all political theatre. That “Deripaska” chap in the video? That would be Oleg Deripaska, who happens to own one of the world’s biggest aluminium companies, Rusal. The same Oleg Deripaska who was caught up in a highly embarrassing prostitution scandal involving a certain Nastya Rybka, and whose lawyers allegedly bullied and harassed the Belarussian girl into keeping schtum about any further allegations concerning Deripaska. The same Deripaska who happens to be rather close to Putin’s government.

As always, you can argue both ways about the Neo-Tsar. He is very, very far from perfect. But, again, he actually delivers on what the globohomo elites claim to want for the people, but never actually do.

Russia was once taken over by the very same forces that are destroying the West right now. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian state-owned companies were put up for sale in order to privatise them – on the advice of Western specialists and economists, mind you. But this was done in a very, very stupid way. Basically, all of the assets of the state-owned enterprises were lumped together into one big pile – regardless of their value – and sold off at a nominal price of like $1 a share.

In order to understand what this means, imagine taking ALL of ExxonMobil’s refineries, exploration fleets, distillation plants, petrol stations, and vast network of infrastructure, and selling off the entire company for (say) a million shares valued at $1 each.

ExxonMobil’s current market capitalisation, as of this writing, is over $300 BILLION. Its current stock price is $71.49 or so. (Full disclosure: I own shares in XOM.)

If the US government were to do what I had just outlined, how long do you suppose it would take before certain wealthy (((businessmen))) would buy up most or all of those shares, and then either sell off the assets or value them correctly and book colossal windfalls in the process?

That is more or less precisely what happened to Russia.

And the Russian people remember that lesson very, very well. That is why, when Putin came to power, one of the first things that he did was kick out the Jewish oligarchs and billionaires who had bled his country and people dry.

Make no mistake: while Putin himself is not anti-Semitic or anti-Jewish, the wealthy Jews of the world absolutely hate the man. And that is because he had the balls and the guts to take on the Jewish oligarchs and tell them to get out.

Never forget that liberal secular Jews are instrumental to the current globohomo push for diversity uber alles, gay “rights”, the madness of the transgender movement, and assorted other lunacies designed specifically to destroy the foundations of Western civilisation. They hate anyone who stands up against their dreams of a sexy secular colour-blended technologically advanced Utopia.

Putin stands against them, and they hate him for it. But they know that they cannot do anything to bend him, and as a result they fear him greatly.

After the severe upheavals and crises of the 1990s, Russia forced out the globalists and has since built up its defence forces to the point where any military action against Russia or its satellites would be devastating for the forces of the American empire. Putin has spent the past twenty years systematically rebuilding the Russian military to the point where it can go toe-to-toe with anyone else’s with a fair chance of winning.

They don’t have the technology of the Americans – but unlike the American military establishment, Russian technology has not been wasted on genuinely idiotic ideas like the F-35 and has instead been concentrated on creating aircraft, tanks, submarines, and weapons systems that can counter and even exceed the performance of American equivalents. That is why the Su-57 presents such a radical threat to American air supremacy; unlike the F-35, it actually works, isn’t insanely expensive, and has the ability to coordinate offensives with heavily armed low-profile drones.

And that’s before we get to their T-14 Armata MBT, which is untested in combat but appears to have the specs and performance to fight the M1-A3 Abrams and win, or their carrier-killing hypersonic missiles that cannot be defended against.

Unlike the American military, the Russian armed forces have not seen their strength sapped and their morale broken by endless insane social justice experiments or a bunch of ridiculous neoclown propaganda. The Russians do not use their forces to establish overseas empires but rather to defend their homeland; they learned the lesson of imperial overstretch from the Soviet Union quite well and evidently have no intention of repeating that mistake.

Finally, let us take a moment to note that Russia in particular, and Eastern Europe in general, has a strong culture and is proud of its history and traditions. You will find no tolerance for gay “rights” in Russia – yet the Russians have no anti-sodomy laws on their books. They are a strongly Christian nation who believe in a tradition that is quite alien to the Catholic or Protestant understanding of the Word, but at least they actually are Christians and do not want a post-Christian world. Russian woen believe in family values and like it when their men take charge; they strongly prefer children to careers and believe in being strong as women, not as men.

In other words, the globohomo elites have been unable to corrupt Russia’s culture, precisely because the Russians have put their faith and trust in a leader who will fight for that culture.

In conclusion, the reason why the American and European elites fear and loathe Putin is precisely because he represents everything that they are not. Where they want democracy and the inherent instability that it brings, he wants to retain Russia’s old authoritarian ways. Where they want cultural collapse and the erasure of all differences between peoples, he wants nations to retain their individual characteristics. Where they want debt-slavery and compliance, he wants independence and solvency. And where they want a unified neoliberal world order, he wants a multipolar world where peoples and nations can choose between competing ideologies.

He is everything that they are not – strong, firm, resolute, successful, tough, and genuine. It should come as no surprise that they truly hate him for that.