The President of the Russian Federation, one Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, had some rather interesting things to say in response to a question about an interview that he did recently:

If you’re curious about what got the Neo-Tsar so fired up that he responded at such length to a relatively simple question, here are his original comments:

“The liberal idea has become obsolete. It has come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population.”

“[It] presupposes that nothing needs to be done. The migrants can kill, plunder and rape with impunity because their rights as migrants must be protected. What rights are these? Every crime must have its punishment.”

“Deep inside, there must be some fundamental human rules and moral values. In this sense, traditional values are more stable and more important for millions of people than this liberal idea, which, in my opinion, is really ceasing to exist.”

Knowing what I do of the Russian language – and it isn’t that much, actually, my Russian is at about the level of a 5-year-old – I am pretty sure that something substantial was lost in the translation.

Anyway, the point here is that President Putin is not saying anything that is not abundantly clear to anyone who is paying even the slightest bit of attention.

President Putin is a polarising figure, to be sure. It is difficult to get a feeling for what his standing is among the Russian people if you go solely by what the Western propaganda about him says – because that is entirely negative. Similarly, it is difficult to get any idea of what ordinary Russians think through outlets like RT or Russia Insight or Russia Insider or whatever – because, again, press in Russia is censored.

You have to come here and talk to the local people.

I have done, and am doing, this. And I can tell you personally that there is a very wide range of opinions about the man and his administration.

Large parts of the more cosmopolitan population in Russia, located in the big cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg and Nizhny Novgorod and so on, think that the man and his entire administration are nothing more than liars, thieves, and criminals. They hate Putin because they believe that he enriches himself and his friends at the expense of the Russian people.

They do have a point.

The reality of life in most of Russia is very hard. Food is by far the biggest expense that Russians have to shoulder. The government taxes food quite heavily, which makes even basic meat and milk quite expensive, but once you go away from the major cities, salaries plummet significantly while the cost of living doesn’t go down anywhere near as much.

That is part of the reason why so many Russians live in Moscow and St. Petersburg – because it is only in the large cities that people can even begin to hope of making decent money, enough to live on, enough to avoid a hand-to-mouth existence.

Those same people look out their windows every day and see immaculate churches built by the Russian Orthodox Church, gleaming with new paint jobs and gold-plated crosses, and they see the fancy cars that government officials get chauffeured around in.

And then they look at their own sons and daughters, for whom they have a difficult time providing meat and protein so that they can grow up strong and healthy. And they see that their children will not really have better lives than they did. At best, they might inherit an apartment in Moscow from their parents – which automatically makes them wealthy and stable compared with the vast majority of Muscovites who have to rent.

They see that their own government has raised the age at which people can get their pensions – and in the case of the men, the new age for drawing down state pensions is actually higher than the average life expectancy of those same men. So they know quite well that they will not, on average, live to get the fruits of their service to the Russian state.

And they feel anger and resentment toward Putin and what he represents.

On the other side of the coin, you have those who see that Putin has made Russia strong and stable again, after the chaos and calamity of the first 20 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They see an emperor ruling over an empire with the kind of iron fist that its people have come to expect over the course of a thousand-year history. They see a country that is strong and respected abroad, with a healthy domestic economy that has endured the shocks and pain of hefty international sanctions, and a restored sense of pride in who they are and what they believe.

They see a Russia that stands once more as the protector of the Slavic peoples, where other Eastern European countries around the frontier – with notable exceptions like Ukraine and Poland – view their nation as their protector and friend. They see a country where the economy has, to some degree at least, diversified away from its historical, and potentially crippling, dependence on oil and gas revenues. They see a land where the people have opportunities that their parents and grandparents never knew.

They see vibrant, beautiful, clean, safe, prosperous, expansive cities with highly functional and efficient public transport. They see that their public education systems – all free – teach their children what is good and right about their culture. They see the Russian language spoken and learned around the world, and not just in Russia.

And they see Vladimir Putin carrying the flag of Russia overseas, to countries that fear and distrust Russia because of age-old prejudices that have never fully worn away.

They, too, have a point.

What both camps admit, even if they won’t say it outright, is that the one thing that Putin has successfully kept the hell out of the Motherland is the crippling degeneracy and cultural poison of the West.

Those who hate Putin admit that the Western neo-liberal world order doesn’t work either. They don’t like Putin because their own lives are difficult and challenging – and I sympathise with them about this, very much, because I have seen firsthand how they live, and it is difficult indeed for most Americans to imagine that kind of life. But they categorically do not want the mentally diseased Western glorification of homosexuality, transgenderism, paedophilia, and now bestiality, to come to their shores.

That is not to say that Russians aren’t perfectly capable of making a complete dog’s breakfast of their own relationships and lives. Divorce rates around here are sky-high, especially in the big cities, and the number of dysfunctional and broken marriages and relationships is simply mind-boggling. The women here are beautiful, sweet, feminine, caring, and wonderful in many ways – but they come with a huge number of issues and mental problems that make dating them, and later marrying and having children with them, a daunting challenge for even the strongest red-pilled man.

And that is before we get to the Russian men, who have a list of problems and issues a mile long and twice as wide.

But, through it all, their leader’s points about the decaying Western world order ring true.

Neo-liberalism is indeed a failing and obsolete strategy. The belief of neo-liberals is that the world will eventually bend toward liberal democracy, free-market economics, zero borders, total freedom of movement, absolute tolerance of any and all ways of life, and an indistinguishable blended mass of peoples with no real identities or allegiances beyond their own existence.

It is a Utopian vision of the world – and as such is literally Satanic, given that the Lord Himself specifically says repeatedly that He loves the nations and expects to see those same nations around at the time of Judgement, and quite impossible, given that every possible attempt to describe Utopia results in a world with zero free will and total obedience to one form of authority or another.

That vision of the world completely eradicates distinctions between peoples. This is not how people think about themselves or about each other. And it is not how humans were meant to be.

Vladimir Putin recognises this, for all of his faults. Worse by far, according to his detractors, is his insistence on speaking plainly and saying that this nonsensical vision of the world is precisely that – nonsense.

A nation that allows immigrants in to live as they please, take jobs from the people of the host nation, and break the laws with impunity, is not a nation – and believe it or not, Russia has exactly that problem right now, with citizens from the Caucasus republics, such as Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, and Tajikistan.

Putin rightly criticises the West for having this problem, even though Russia has it as well – albeit on a far smaller and more manageable scale. (And the Russians have some rather unique, and extremely harsh, ways of dealing with such lawbreakers, which I will not get into here.)

Nations are a wonderful thing. People need to have a sense of identity, of belonging, of roots. As one of those who doesn’t really have a nation, but merely a passport, I wish more Westerners could understand just how privileged they are to belong to their nations – and to have passports that are worth considerably more than the paper that they are printed on.

Putin and his government, for all of his and its many flaws, understand this and enact policies which, flawed though they are, try to preserve the Russian nation against foreign influence and invasion.

That is a lesson that the United States of America would do well to heed.