How the West plays up to Putin’s caricature

In an outstanding article in the New York Times, Roger Cohen recounted his experience of travelling across Russia for a full month, and hats off to the veteran journalist for risking a shared cell with the Wall Street Journal ‘spy’ Evan Gershkovich.

Cohen explains that Vladimir Putin is successfully flogging his war in Ukraine to the Russian people as a battle against the whole spiritually depraved West, no longer the home of ruthless capitalism but of ‘sex changes, the rampages of drag queens, barbaric gender debates and an LGBTQ takeover’. In a tirade last November, Putin lambasted the US and ‘other unfriendly foreign states’ for ‘selfishness, permissiveness, immorality, the denial of the ideals of patriotism’ and ‘destruction of the traditional family through the promotion of nontraditional sexual relations’.

You must admit, he’s got a point.

Of course, most folks on our side of the re-erected Iron Curtain roundly deplore Russia’s criminal prosecution of homosexuals, but we went way beyond merely legalising same-sex relations long ago – so much farther that garden-variety gays and lesbians are passé.