Vladimir Putin, Russia's current President, was a Lieutenant Colonel in the KGB officer in his younger days. One would expect nothing but evil policies from a man who had been part of the Soviet Secret police, and it is fair to say that Putin's style of government is hardly - shall we say - democratic. However, while Mr Putin does not strike me as a particularly warm, pleasant man, on a couple of issues, he has been shown far more wisdom than most of his Western counterparts.
Let us take Egypt, for example. While the West prevaricates, Russia quickly expressed support for the deposition of the democratically-elected president Mohammed Morsi by the army. Now Putin here may well have spotted an opening to increase Russia's military influence in the region, and one might also argue that we in the West should support the democratic process, but the bottom line is that Morsi was a pretty lousy president. In our established democratic tradition, when we end up with a dud for Prime Minister like Edward Heath or Gordon brown, we patiently endure their incompetence and kick them out at the next election. Egypt does not have that same long tradition. The country discovered barely a year after embracing democracy that the government and the President they had chosen was pushing an agenda which many Egyptians - particularly the Christian minority - felt very threatened by. Furthermore, the economic problems, which the new administration had promised to resolve, continued unabated. While one cannot but be saddened by the loss of life last week, can one blame those disgruntled Egyptians who, without the restraints that accompany a mature democracy, felt they couldn't wait until the next elections to get rid of this awful administration and who turned to the Army for their salvation?
As the Moslem Brotherhood licks its wounds, its supporters have set fire to a number of churches, along with some businesses owned by Christians. Accounts speak of "dozens" of Christians being killed by these men, angered at Christian support for the Army's intervention. Why does our media focus on the deaths of Islamists and pay so little attention to attacks on those Egyptians who share the historic religion of our country? We may not wish to condone some of the methods being used by the Egyptian army, but ultimately, if they are keen to neutralise the power of militant Islam, they are on our side. Putin, whatever other motives he may have, does seem to have grasped this truth, having experienced at first hand similar problems from Islamic militants in Chechnya.
Secondly, since beginning his latest term of office, Putin has passed a law banning the promotion of homosexuality to anyone under the age of 18. Let's be clear - he has not made it illegal; he is not proposing that gays should be sent to the gulags, but he has still upset the PC brigade in the west, with the pompous Stephen Fry calling for the forthcoming 2014 Winter Olympics to be relocated from the Russian town of Sochi in protest. Fry even attempted to draw parallels with the notorious 1936 Berlin Olympics.
Russia’s Yelena Isinbayeva, the gold medallist in the pole vault, was less than impressed with this nonsense. She has therefore faced the wrath of the western media for saying that Russians “consider ourselves like normal, standard people" and ""We are normal Russians; we just live with woman with boys, boys with woman. We never had these problems in Russia, and we don't want to have any in the future, ”
Precisely, and well spoken, Yelena! In this country are plenty of "normal" Englishmen who just live women with boys and boys with women, We don't want these problems either, but if one of our top athletes were to say the same thing, the Loony Left would be on them like a ton of bricks. Miss Isinbayeva, to the credit of her country's government, has received no official sanction, even though in the UK and the USA, people seem to be queueing up to call her comments "behind the times" or worse.
Putin rules a country that tried unlimited sexual freedom in the early years of the Soviet era. The results were disastrous. Who can blame him for wanting to maintain stability in society by supporting the tried-and-tested formula of monogamous marriage? Meanwhile we in the West are rushing headlong into the abyss. The former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky once said "I have lived in your future, and it didn't work". He was talking about the harsh tyranny of the Soviet government, but could it be that he was also inadvertently prophecying the moral and social breakdown that will result from the head-in-the-sand attitudes of David Cameron and others in their desire to placate a very vocal 2% (at most) of the population?