According to the Russian president, the current battle for what liberals call equal rights in some Western nations has turned into a phantasmagorical farce. NOTE: Phantasmagorical describes something with a dreamlike, fantastical, unreal, deceptive, or shifting appearance, like an optical illusion.

The West’s battle against discrimination and equal rights appears to be turning into aggressive dogmatism on the verge of absurdity, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said. A few weeks ago, Russian Foreign Minister Sergeir Lavrov accused western liberals, media and educational establishments of being institutionalised anti-White.

‘Looking at what’s happening in a number of Western countries, we see with amazement our own practices (Soviet) which we thankfully have left behind, hopefully, in the distant past,’ Putin said, speaking at the Valdai forum on Thursday.

‘The battle for equal rights and against discrimination are being turned into aggressive dogmatism bordering on the absurd, when the great authors of the past, such as Shakespeare, are no longer taught in schools and universities, because they and their ideas come to be viewed as backward. The classics are considered backward for their failure to understand the importance of the questions of race or gender,’ Putin said.

Russia, Putin suggested, looks on ‘in amazement’ at the processes taking place in countries which have dubbed themselves the ‘flagships of progress.’

The discussion of gender rights in the West, for instance, has turned into a ‘phantasmagoria’ in a number of Western countries, according to the president. The same is the case when it comes to the idea of giving children the right to independently determine their gender. The latter, he suggested, ‘borders on a crime against humanity.’

Characterising Russia’s conservative ideology as a ‘conservativism of optimists,’ Putin said that ‘we believe that stable and successful development is possible,’ and that ‘everything depends first and foremost on our own efforts.’

‘For the coming period of global reconstruction, which may continue for quite some time and the final outcome of which is not known, moderate conservatism is the most reasonable approach, at least in my opinion,’ Putin suggested. ‘People really value in us our stability and the possibility for normal development, for the certainty that their plans and hopes will not collapse due to the irresponsible aspirations of the latest revolutionaries,’ he added.