CENTRAL VIEW for Monday, November 22, 2021

Putin attacks U.S. Left & Soviet Bolshevism

On October 21, 2021, Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke at Souci’s Valdai International Discussion Club. Space does not permit full coverage of Putin’s devastating critique of Biden’s* "progressive" domestic policies and Putin’s amazingly candid critique of Soviet Bolshevism. Yes, you read that correctly: Soviet Bolshevism. President Putin says things about the former Soviet Union that, pre-Yeltsin, would send him straight to the Gulag.

Reading the 78-page translation of Putin’s three-hour discussion with the Valdai Club, recalls our face-to-face discussions with Soviet journalists during two trips behind the Iron Curtain. While the Russian journalists we met stuck with the Communist Party line, we could tell they were itching to tell our little band of American journalists that the "people’s paradise" did not exist.

At night, back in our "bugged" hotel rooms -- the Hotel Budapest in Moscow provided free head lice-- we tried to be helpful to our Soviet colleagues by discussing how impressed we were with their ability to explain Soviet domestic and foreign policy. We did not dare say any of them tried to whisper anything different.

Slipping away from electronic surveillance, we discussed how sorry we felt for the Soviet journalists who could not practice actual journalism. How they had to parrot the Communist Party line or lose their jobs. In today’s Internet parlance, we would say "canceled by Facebook or Twitter." Or, banned from public speaking.

With condescending smugness, we Americans told each other that Soviet one-sided reporting and censorship could never happen in America. We did not foresee news outlets such as CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, NPR, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Big Tech becoming slaves of the Progressive Left.

Actually, in 1981, we should have seen it coming after The Washington Post and Newsweek fired award-winning journalist Arnaud de Borchgrave for publishing The Spike, a novel exposing how Big Media "spike" the reporting that does not adhere to its leftist agenda.

Now, here’s just a sample from Putin’s speech: [America’s] "aggressive dogmatism borders on absurdity, when the works of the great authors of the past – such as Shakespeare – are no longer taught at schools or universities, because their ideas are believed to be backward. The classics are declared backward and ignorant of the importance of gender or race. In Hollywood memos are distributed about proper storytelling and how many characters of what colour or gender should be in a movie. This is even worse than the agitprop department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union...

"Anyone who dares mention that men and women actually exist, which is a biological fact, risk being ostracized. ’Parent number one’ and ’parent number two,’ ’birthing parent’ instead of ’mother,’ and ’human milk’ replacing ’breast milk’ because it might upset the people who are unsure about their own gender. I repeat, this is nothing new; in the 1920s, the so-called Soviet Kulturtraegers also invented some newspeak believing they were creating a new consciousness and changing values that way. And, as I have already said, they made such a mess it still makes one shudder at times..."

Note: Please, find and read the full text of Putin’s amazing speech.

*Election increasingly disputed.

Suggested reading: The Spike by Arnaud de Borchgrave and Robert Moss, 1981. Putin’s Valdai Club speech at: https://russialist.org/transcript-putin-at-meeting-of-the-valdai-international-discussion-club-partial-transcript/

©2021. William Hamilton.

Dr. Hamilton can be contacted at:

Email: william@central-view.com