Sums it up very nicely !! The nett result ofmad leftie elitist rubbish & we let it happen !
Vladimir Putin’s outrageous invasion of Ukraine is not just a territorial dispute or shameless land grab. It is a litmus test for the West.
Putin, a man as smart as he is ruthless, has looked at the Atlantic powers and clearly decided he is more than their match.
In the US he sees the somnambulant Joe Biden, whose cognitive decline seems more and more apparent and who has already hopelessly and bloodily blundered the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
In the UK he sees the scandal-ridden Boris Johnson, whose strong language on the crisis is undermined by the fact he is close to being a lame-duck prime minister who desperately needs a foreign win for his own political survival.
In the twin powers of the European Union, France’s Emmanuel Macron stepped into a leading role only to be outplayed and humiliated by Putin while Germany has appeased his regime from the outset.
In short, the Russian president sees a West that is both weak and divided, soft leaders with soft support at home who are thus incapable of projecting power abroad.
And this sad vision of the West in decline goes beyond mere geopolitics. In fact it goes right to the very heart of how the West sees itself — or indeed if it sees anything at all.
For all the unspeakable horrors of World War II, it at least gave the Allies something worth fighting for. A common cause based around democracy and freedom and human decency.
When the USSR meanwhile imposed its own communist nightmare upon eastern Europe it only crystalised those values even more among the Western powers.
In short, we understood what we were and who we were. We understood what we stood for.
And when the Iron Curtain finally fell in the last decade of the 20th century it appeared that those values had at last prevailed. Their worth, their righteousness, had become self-evident and citizens had voted with their feet.
Yet in the first two decades of this century there has been a distinct malaise in the West. A globalist political class ended up becoming so remote from ordinary people that uprisings of populist nationalism brought electoral revolution in the UK and US — only to have those sentiments once more sneered at by the cultural elites.
At the same time there is almost a hollowing out of the West from within, with those same cultural elites often decrying or dismantling the very nature of the West itself. In Australia we even had the absurd situation of an academic research institution focused on Western civilisation effectively cancelled because of accusations of colonialism or imperialism or various other modern academic thought crimes.
That sentiment runs hot through universities and cultural institutions throughout the Anglosphere.
And if the West is ashamed of itself, how can it possibly prosecute a moral argument against others? How, for example, can we take a stand against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine when according to our own self-hating citizens we are all living on stolen land?
The West’s emerging rivals, on the other hand, have no such postmodern qualms. As we in the West cede land, devolve power and cut traditional international ties, Russia is openly and physically trying to recreate its Soviet empire while China, having crushed Hong Kong, is now trying to annex Taiwan and colonise the South China Sea in its campaign of “reunification”.
Both superpowers are driven not just by egos and opportunism but by a fierce national pride that cloaks their military incursions in the language of destiny or just restitution.
In the West, meanwhile, we are too insecure in our values to even express them. Little wonder Putin has stared into our souls and seen nothing to stop him. As even Katy Perry once observed, if you stand for nothing you fall for everything.
If the West is to resist being walked all over by autocratic thugs like Putin and Xi Jinping then we need to once more acknowledge and celebrate the achievements and qualities of our civilisation.
After all, you cannot fight for values you do not have.
