By David Truman and Daniel Jupp
Conventional wisdom everywhere in the legacy media and among nearly all our politicians in the West, including Australia, is that contemporary Russia is a recalcitrant villain, an incorrigible rebuilder of empire, and the aggressor in an unprovoked war. Today Ukraine, tomorrow the Baltics and Poland … who’s next? Nobody can be safe while that evil dictator Putin is still oppressing his people!
Huge numbers of people believe this, and think that Putin today is communist. And in letters to the editor, and on social media, they express this view. The overwhelming mass of them know just about nothing about Russia’s motivations leading to the “special military operation” in Ukraine and have no idea of how most Russians think. To understand that, you have to know not only the history of recent events (since 1991) but also the life experience of the Russian people over centuries, which has conditioned how they think and what they expect from their government. Hint: Most Russians are NOT itching to get rid of Putin.
This website contains a detailed article Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine at https://freedomandheritage.org.au/russias-invasion-of-ukraine/ written in August 2022 after the incursion into the Donbas (Donetsk and Luhansk), and eight years after Russia took back Crimea in March 2014. The article contains essential background to the tragedy. The American neocons and unipolar hegemonists don’t care that the war that THEY incited has been so gutwrenching for both Ukrainians and Russians, very many of whom have extended family in the other country.
The fall of communism and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was – just like the events of 1918 following the Bolshevik Revolution – the end of civilization as we knew it. The Russians and citizens of the other former Soviet republics endured economically and socially dreadful times in the 1990s (as they did in the Bolshevik reforms of 1918 and the Civil War of 1918-21).
But “the end of civilization as we knew it” SHOULD be true also for people in the West. The world has changed. Past realities are no longer the same, however much contemporary Russophobes think they are.
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, there has been a shouting match of the deaf between the West and Russia.
In March 2025, Daniel Jupp, a contributor on substack, wrote about the ongoing confrontation between Russia and the West, especially western Europe but also including the Australian government and most of our politicians from the right as well as the left.
Tony Abbott, for example, blames Putin for the downing of the Malaysian plane shot down over Ukraine by Donbas separatists – a huge tragedy, certainly, but ridiculous to imagine that Putin or the Russian government authorized the shooting down of a civilian passenger plane. Undoubtedly this was a misidentification of the plane by the Donbas rebels – who’d been armed by Russia for their self defence against the persecuting Ukrainian government.
Jupp writes:
“We obsess endlessly over the fact that Russians [in the Soviet Union] built a tyranny of ever more ridiculous lies, but we forget they were also the suffering victims and the determined opponents and finally the laughing conquerors of that system of lies. The arms race and the stern western opposition and US economic might and cultural attraction all broke the Soviet Union…but so did ordinary Russians, over very many years, by increasing doubt, increasing contempt, and by jokes and sneers before strikes and riots and marches.
“Russians know the difference, more than anyone, between real strength and its absence.
“The break between the West and East comes not so much because Putin is a madman or bent on world conquest or even would rather like to restore the Tsarist or mid Soviet borders and spheres of influence, as it comes because WE [the West] keep insisting that the events of today should be viewed solely as a repetition of something else. We are the ones trapped in the past, not Russia. Russia and Putin when historical causes are discussed at least know their own history, at least reach back before their own birth. We apply 1939 endlessly, again and again, as if that isn’t ridiculous. Or we apply the old War, again and again, as if nothing has changed and more particularly our power and their weakness were both fixed, just like our Goodness and their Evil.
“The fact that our leaders are considerably less good than they used to be, our causes considerably muddier, and our reach and power as reduced as Russia’s has been restored under Putin, escapes us. But it doesn’t escape the Russians.”
Huge cultural gap
There is now a huge contrast between the internal situation of Russia and that of western Europe and the West generally (apart from the resurgence of patriotic motivation in the USA under President Trump.) Europe and most of the West (including Australia but excluding Poland, Hungary and Slovakia) are racked with cultural pessimism and the attack on traditional values by “woke” denials of reality and uncontrolled mass immigration of unassimilating people from the Middle East and Africa. We are seeing increasing social fracture. SEE SEPARATE ARTICLE on this website Multiculturalism in Britain, at https://freedomandheritage.org.au/multiculturalism-in-britain/
The status of Christianity, the millennial bedrock of Western civilization, is derided and attacked, while Islam succeeds in getting more and more recognition, and “get out of jail free” concessions from the judiciary, the police, the legacy media and leftist politicians. We keep on approving mosques while many of their imams preach contempt for our civilization and incitement to vicious anti-Semitism.
Russia has a large Muslim minority – about a seventh of the population. This reflects the historical incorporation since the 16th century of previous Muslim Khanates (descendants of the Mongols), areas in the Caucasus (such as Chechnya) and territories that were previously part of Persia (Dagestan). Unlike the situation in the West, Putin lays down very clearly that religions generally are tolerated but the FIRST loyalty of all citizens of the Russian Federation must be to Russia. The result? A much more peaceful country in which terrorist acts are few, the law against them is applied firmly, and there are far fewer sexual crimes like those committed all the time by Muslims in western Europe, including, in the UK, the appalling Rotherham Pakistani rape gangs.
The West is dying, Russia is culturally resurgent
Europe and much of the West is dying culturally. Too many people have come to hate their own country and culture. They blame the West for all the ills of the world – “racism, colonialism, imperialism, genocide” while cancelling from the record the outstanding achievements of Western Civilization. So we see the rewriting of history, the vandalization of statues, and the burning of our national flags. Cultural Marxism has ruined much of our art products – there’s so much meaningless, nihilistic ugliness.
You don’t see ANY of this in today’s Russia. Here is a typical example of very contemporary Russian painting, which affirms the beautiful and the real:
They are also revisiting their history and producing much religious art.
Post-communist Russia has reembraced its Christian roots in huge numbers. Thousands of new churches are being built. Moscow now has more than 1,000 churches and, each year, another 10-20 are being built in the city. [Source: https://www.rbth.com/arts/334461-how-many-churches-russia ] The churches are full of young families with children.
There is virtually no cultural pessimism in Russia. People generally affirm and love their cultural icons – their great writers, painters and musicians.
You won’t see in Russia Gay Mardi Gras marches, or monstering of bakers for refusing to bake a same-sex wedding cake. Nor will you see noisy minorities yelling to smash the state and give back “stolen land”. Or public statements from Putin (like those from Albanese and WA Premier Cook) threatening measures to stamp out “Islamophobia.” (This is a unicorn delusion – it is not an irrational fear or hatred to despise the evil record of Islam.)
While the European West is imploding under mass immigration, political correctness, multiculturalism and abandonment of its spiritual roots, Europe, under Macron, the appalling Keir Starmer and other feckless anti-nationalist leaders maintains the absurd delusion that it can reverse the shrinking of Ukraine by sending troops and more equipment. Australia’s hapless Albanese is even considering contributing troops to a Starmer-organized detachment. This is from countries with laughably small military capacities.
Daniel Jupp concludes his article thus:
“What the Russians share in common with Trump, MAGA and blue collar Americans who would rather fix the problems at home is not evil, as European and British snobs and leaders would suggest, but realism. And that realism can see what a tottering mess Western Europe really is. While the US, firmly wedded under self hating Globalist Americans to keeping the bureaucracy alive and content, has with Trump’s second term acquired a reviving dose of objective reality, the UK and Europe wander ever more complacently towards the abyss by skipping happily along the yellow brick road of Delusion.
“Geopolitical realities shift like tectonic plates. The world realigns. America seeks to divest itself of parasites, domestic and foreign, a giant reviving, shaking its head and restoring true sight. And off the giant’s back sloughs the rules based order. Across the Bering Strait one giant views another, realizing perhaps that they need not fight when little old howling midgets demand it. In that mixed shadow Western Europe lies, and lies, and lies, but both giants know it.”