TRADITIONAL VALUES? Russia Reaches Out to the Wingnuts of the World

[DonViejo]

Anna Nemtsova

The weekend conference in St. Petersburg suggests the emptiness of the Kremlin’s ideology, which really is nothing more than with Putin or against him.

MOSCOW—The St. Petersburg Holiday Inn hotel would seem a curious place to expose the feeble ideological core of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. But a cramped conference room crowded with the flotsam and jetsam of right-wing fringe groups in Europe and the United States showed this weekend just how low the Kremlin is inclined to go.

The unifying theme was defense of traditional values and the invited guests had several points of agreement with their Russian hosts: They judged people by their race and sexual orientation, blaming “modernism” for destroying traditional values, including Christianity; they hated homosexual marriages and called for same-sex families to be stripped of any right to have children. Politically and ideologically they trended toward, well, fascism.

Now, remember that the constant drumbeat of Putinesque propaganda about the Russian-backed war in Ukraine emphasizes the “fascist” and even the “Nazi” character of the government in Kiev. The boilerplate justification for Russian annexation of Crimea and support for the rebels in the eastern provinces is that something had to be done to protect them from those right-wing monsters of the Maidan uprising who are backed by the European Union.

Yet on Sunday, leaders of 11 European far-right parties and at least one infamous American nut-job gathered at the Holiday Inn for what was called the “International Russian Conservative Forum.”

more
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/03/24/russia-reaches-out-to-the-wingnuts-of-the-world.html

[NuclearDem]

1. Not surprised.