At the end of June and the beginning of July 2015, Putin put in a higher gear and was accusing the West again for depraved liberal decadence. Putin claims that he and Russia maintain a kind of moral conservatism, that contrasts with the western countries’ depraved lifestyles with gay rainbow parades and all that nonsense. But this moral conservatism is obligatory for the individual in Russia. It is not possible to talk about Russian freedom anymore.
Interestingly, Russia, after 2011, according to Russian academy member Vadim Pokrovsky, head of the Federal Center for the Fight against AIDS in Russia, has withdrawn all state funds for HIV/AIDS prevention in the country. This resulted in that the number of HIV-infected Russians increased by ten percent in just one year, and the increase continued. 90,000 new infected people were discovered in 2014 and Pokrovsky said there would be one million HIV-infected Russians by the end of 2015. The medical specialist Pokrovsky expected the actual number to be much higher, perhaps as much as seven times higher. In 2014 alone, 190,000 Russians died of AIDS or AIDS-related diseases. Almost half of those infected with HIV in Russia are drug addicts, but those who catch HIV increasingly acquire it through heterosexual contacts. 3 percent of all Russian men are infected.
Vladimir Putin thus believes that the West is depraved. But at least classic Americans and Swedes believe that we have got a free will, of which we are meant to use. We have the God-given right to choose God or to reject Him, man as well as woman. One cannot force anyone to choose heaven, it does not lead to the heavenly kingdom either for the coercer nor for the coerced!
Therefore, it is we who are right, who let every man and woman decide for themselves how to live their lives, without reprisals from a hypothetic state church or from the politicians. Freedom of agency is so important to God, because God wants you to seek him up of your own free will.
If it then would turn out that we are the same scrap of iron as the Russians, then we at least are only coercive to a much lesser degree, and we are supported by God unlike Putin’s Russia. Those who are the least wicked are also those who are commissioned by God to lead the free world. Traditionally, the Americans have been the only ones who have been able to do so. Therefore, Putin’s new-Roman ambitions will fail, for he does not have God on his side.
Putin’s Russia is more like a corrupt kleptocratic central African country with a consolidated and stable post-colonial rule than it is like America. And I have been so keen on that the United States does not deviate from the straight path, because then it would be all over for everybody. And it appears like it is going to be over soon.
Homework:
It is time to confess color. What do you think of the following statement:
”One cannot force anyone to choose heaven, it does not lead to the heavenly kingdom either for the coercer nor for the coerced.”
You might think the above sentence to be unrelated to strategy. But it is not unrelated at all. The manner in which we answer this question says everything about everything. Your answer reveals more about your implied strategy and also tactics than anything else you can say or do. If I know that you are the kind of person who disagree about this statement I also know that I can beat you. You wouldn’t know what hit you if you were a foreign statesman and I would decide that my country should attack your country or your country’s interests! Smack.., you are dead!
Roger M. Klang, defense political Spokesman for the Christian Values Party (Kristna Värdepartiet) in Sweden
The strategist cowboy 