Russian President Vladimir Putin in a major keynote speech on Thursday again blasted the West for attempting to impose its "newfangled" values and foisting a culture with "dozens of genders, gay parades" on other countries .
In one of his longest public appearances since he sent troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24, Putin's speech and answers to the questions, with a familiar litany of grievances criticisms of the hegemonic “West”, descended into a rant as he accused the West of playing a "dangerous, bloody and dirty" game that was sowing chaos across the world.
"The collapse of the Soviet Union also destroyed the balance of geopolitical forces. The West felt like a winner and proclaimed a unipolar world order in which only its will, its culture, its interests had the right to exist."
"The West is not able to single-handedly manage humanity, but is desperately trying to do it, and most of the peoples of the world no longer want to put up with it. "
"Respect for the peculiarities of peoples and civilizations is in the interests of everyone. In fact, this is also in the interests of the so-called West. Losing its dominance, it quickly becomes a minority on the world stage. And, of course, the right of this Western minority to their own cultural identity, of course, I want to emphasize this, must be ensured, it must be treated, of course, with respect, but, I emphasize, on an equal footing with the rights of everyone else".
"If Western elites think they can inject into the minds of their people, their societies, strange, in my opinion, newfangled trends like dozens of genders and gay pride parades, then so be it. Let them do what they want! But what they certainly have no right to do is to require others to follow in the same direction."
"The so-called cancel culture, but in fact - we have already talked about this many times - the real cancel culture mows down everything that is alive and creative, does not allow free thought to develop in any of the areas: neither in economics, nor in politics, nor in culture."
"The very liberal ideology today has changed beyond recognition. If initially classical liberalism understood the freedom of every person as the freedom to say what you want, to do what you want, then already in the 20th century liberals began to declare that the so-called open society has enemies - it turns out that an open society has enemies - and the freedom of such enemies can and should be limited, if not abolished. Now they have reached the point of absurdity, when any alternative point of view is declared subversive propaganda and a threat to democracy."
The full text of Putin's speech and answer is available here: The transcript of Putin's keynote address and answers atthe Valdai Discussion Club
