President Vladimir Putin’s “State of the Union” Speech to the Russian State Duma

by Dr. Joseph P. Farrell

Recently I had a private conversation with a friend of mine about what is going on in Russia, and the West’s assessment of it. During our conversation, I stressed that one of Russia’s principal assets is a kind of “soft power” that the modern post-Christian West has little understanding of. Indeed, I stressed that in a certain sense, the Russian Federation is probably the only genuinely “post-secular” state in the world, having lived through the horrors of Communism and Marxism, which, let us recall, were “post-Christian” western imports imposed on Russia by force (and considerable Western financial backing, a story the Russians know all too well). In a sense, then, Russia understands something about the inevitable outcomes of the type of materialism reigning in the contemporary “post-Christian” secular West that the West itself has not yet reached. In essence, in our conversation I was arguing for the hypothesis that Russia was, from a certain point of view, further down the path of history than the West. Russia lived through its “post-Christian” stage and has emerged on the other side of it, and is engaged in something entirely new, and it is this “something new” that Western analysts, with their secular and “scientific” outlook, are missing entirely.

Continue reading

Related reading:

Russian President Vladimir Putin Strikes Harsh Tone on With West