I agree Russia vs. China is a very real thing but I take issue with your “Western” values trope.
1) Most people who support Putin on these forums have never lived in Russia. You can love Russia, be anti-Soros, and still be against Putin. As I am.
2) Where do you think China got their communist cues from? Mongolia? No. Russia. The Revolution in Russia.
3) Karl Marx and Friederich Engels were what? WESTERNERS. Communism is a Western idea.
4) The Soviet Union installed the Kim Il Sung regime in North Korea, a country Putin and China prop up to this day.
3) China’s economy is several times bigger, stronger, and faster growing than Putin’s Russia. Is Russia’s “Western” values holding it back? Perhaps: after all, Putin’s crony oligarchs have spent the past 20 years plundering the Russian people and their land only to then store their spoils where? In *Globalist* *Western* Banks. Why in those banks and not in Russia? Must be their Western values.
4) Putin once said: Russian “Orthodoxy has more in common with Islam than Roman Catholicism” — namely Western Christianity. You can look up the tape.
5) Just last week in an interview about Valaam monastery, Putin said “Communism is like Christianity and Lenin’s body like saintly relics.”
Indeed you should visit Lenin’s tomb in Moscow id you have not already. To the satisfaction of many, Putin has promised not to bury him.
Finally: one Orthodox bishop (in Siberia) publicly condemned Putin’s statement.
I guess we can disagree on many things
However I have spent time in Russia
Not Moscow- real Russia in the far east
Terrific people. Wonderful. Long suffering. Survivors.
In fact have adopted 2 kids from Russia so will always have family ties there
I could live with Russian people, but never with Japanese or Chinese
If this country ever fell I would look to Russia for refuge but never to China
Saying Communism is a western “ value” because Marx was a westerner ignores the fact that Winston Churchill and all the US Founders were .. westerners and Mao Zedong was an easterner
The Russians and Europeans suffered terribly at the hands of Germans ( reading now about Stalingrad) and the Chinese and Pacific nations were brutalized by Japan so calling Marx a “ westerner” or Mao an “ easterner” is a bit of a stretch in trying to define what is the nature of East vs West or where “ communism” derives its roots . Brutal North Korea’s Kim Il Sung and his dynasty were and are more influenced in their statist repression by Stalin than by Mao. Are their values eastern or western?
Tyranny fomented by secret societies that believe themselves morally superior to common people and therefore entitled to power over them is neither an eastern nor western “ value”
It was pretty terrible being a POW in WW2 but let me ask you this: what were the differences between being captured by Germans or being captured by Japanese? Imo The fundamental value of human life and humanity is the line between eastern and western values and we and Russia are closer in that than we will EVER be with China. Or Japan for that matter. Maybe even Germany.
Why do you think the globalists work so hard to isolate Russia and to keep up a permanent state of fear paranoia and enmity between us?