The Guilty Men: How the Alt-Right Harms Conservatism

The Xi-Putin Axis and Western Failure

It’s 1938 all over again. China, Russia, and their authoritarian allies form a new Axis. Ukraine and Taiwan are today’s Sudetenland. And once more, appeasers seek another Munich.

In the 1930s, appeasement was driven by the trauma of the Great War and a troubling admiration for fascism, which seemed to restore order and suppress Bolshevism. During the Cold War, it took a new form: progressives, fearful of nuclear conflict, often viewed communism with misplaced sympathy, believing socialism couldn’t be all bad.

“The guilty men” was the phrase Britain used to condemn those who appeased Hitler, and it was revived to shame Cold War apologists for Soviet aggression. Today’s guilty men serve Moscow and Beijing, echoing propaganda and defending the indefensible. Post-communist China and Russia have reemerged as nationalist corporatist regimes, recalling Mussolini’s model. Despite centuries of rivalry, they have united again in an axis bent on undermining the Free World. And once more, Western enablers look away, their excuses familiar, their moral blindness just as dangerous.

The Seduction of Authoritarianism

Well-grounded concerns across North America and Europe about mass immigration without assimilation, and many other woke perversions, especially in education, have driven some fringe elements toward a disturbing admiration for Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Full disclosure: though I am an almost lifelong Calgarian (Canada), I was born and raised in St. Petersburg, Russia, which I left nearly half a century ago. I am not a citizen there and have never returned. I avoid their community here. My values are unapologetically those of the 1980s Reagan-Thatcher brand of liberal conservatism.

Russia is mired in crisis. Studies show it leads the world in divorce rates, an astonishing 74%. Alcoholism affects over 20% of the population. Approximately 1.5% of adults are HIV-positive. Domestic abuse is partially decriminalized by the government in the name of “traditional values.”

Tyranny Disguised as Tradition

As with many fascist regimes, Russia promotes the myth of an organic national community. Cosmopolitanism and sexual nonconformity are driven underground. Regime critics are pressured to emigrate; political imprisonments are routine. Inconvenient individuals, even abroad, fall from high-rise windows or are poisoned with internationally banned chemical and radiological weapons.

Corruption is endemic at every level in the land of Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector General. Putin is a multi-billionaire through theft, and kleptocratic oligarchs blend seamlessly with the government, resembling Latin American narco-states. The church functions effectively as an arm of the state. Meanwhile, public infrastructure crumbles from neglect.

The army is corrupt, drunken, sadistic, criminal, and incompetent. Life is cheap: the staggering death toll in Ukraine, over a million casualties from a population of 145 million, has failed to spark public unrest. This squalid “parade-ground tyranny,” as Marquis de Custine once called it, markets itself as a bastion of wholesome national serenity. It sustains this illusion through naked lies, spread online by troll farms like the toxic Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg.

Imperial Nostalgia and Historical Revisionism

Muscovite Russia’s territorial expansionism, relentless since the 1300s, presses on unabated. The border losses of 1989–1991 remain deeply resented. Against a backdrop of rampant anti-Western xenophobia, the self-styled “gendarme of Europe” eyes the West once more. Totalitarian and imperial nostalgia run deep. Stalin statues, once toppled, are now being resurrected.

Bizarrely, in its militant pride, Russia has subordinated itself as a junior ally to China, even as Beijing covets Russia’s Far East (Outer Manchuria), seized by the czars through “unequal treaties” during China’s “century of humiliation.” While posturing as a bastion of Christian virtue and elevated spirituality (the so-called “Russian soul”), Moscow has forged an alliance with Iran, even as it fights against fellow Orthodox Christians in Ukraine.

The shadow of history darkens further with the Holodomor, the devastating 1930s Soviet famine-genocide that claimed millions of Ukrainian lives. To this day, Moscow twists and denies the truth, burying the horror beneath layers of distortion. Similarly, the brutal Katyn massacre, where Soviet forces executed thousands of Polish officers and intelligentsia in 1940, was concealed for decades behind a wall of lies, with the USSR blaming Nazi Germany until finally admitting responsibility in 1990. Yet even this reluctant confession hasn’t fully healed the wounds or silenced the scars in Eastern Europe.

Smashing the Kremlin’s Ukraine Falsehoods

A central Kremlin lie is that Ukraine is “Nazi.” It’s true that some ultra-nationalist militias in western Ukraine collaborated with Nazi Germany during World War II, committing atrocities against Poles and Jews. But Soviet Ukrainian soldiers also participated in the Red Army’s mass rapes of German women, an inconvenient truth Russia ignores.

Today’s Ukraine, 80 years later, is a struggling democracy working to confront its past and align itself with the liberal values of the Free World. President Volodymyr (not Vladimir) Zelensky is Jewish. Ukraine’s army has purged hardline nationalist elements, and in the last election, far-right parties won just 2.15% of the vote, far less than in France or Germany.

Putin, a dictator in all but name, holds sham elections. Ukraine postponed its own elections under wartime emergency law. Some openly pro-Moscow groups were banned, just as Britain banned fascist parties during WWII. Would Putin call Churchill a Nazi? Zelensky is not corrupt. His wealth comes from his entertainment career, and Ukraine is pushing to dismantle its Russian-style corruption under international oversight.

Is Russia really protecting Russian-speakers in Ukraine, or just making an excuse to invade? Russian-speakers in Ukraine are not oppressed. Ukrainian is rightly the state language, but minority rights remain protected. Zelensky’s first language is Russian, and many Russian-speakers now fight against Putin in Ukraine’s army. Ironically, it was Russia’s invasion that spurred many to abandon Russian and embrace Ukrainian. These two languages are similar but not mutually intelligible. The root cause of this war is simple: unprovoked Russian aggression.

The Russian and Soviet empires brutally Russified their non-Russian populations. Border expansion has long been Moscow’s default policy. Like Hitler’s Lebensraum, today’s Kremlin pushes the idea of a global “Russian world,” claiming the right to represent and protect Russian-speakers everywhere - Ein Volk, ein Wille, ein Reich. Since I speak Russian, will they invade Alberta to “protect” me?

NATO Myths

Before invading Ukraine, Moscow openly demanded the rollback of NATO and the re-subjugation of Eastern Europe - signaling ambitions far beyond Ukraine. The Free World said no.

It is Russia, not Ukraine, that has repeatedly broken key peace agreements, from the Budapest Memorandum guaranteeing Ukraine’s sovereignty to the Minsk accords aimed at ending the war. Moscow’s pattern of betrayal is so blatant, Joachim von Ribbentrop (Nazi Germany’s notorious diplomat known for duplicitous deals) would be impressed.

Another Kremlin falsehood is that NATO broke a promise not to expand east after 1989. No such promise was made. While the idea was discussed, it was rejected to avoid a dangerous security vacuum. NATO only expanded when Eastern European countries freely chose to join, seeking protection from a resurgent, aggressive Russia. Sweden and Finland joined for the same reason. Like Ukraine, the Baltic states are democratic, and also coveted by Moscow.

Alt-Right: Kremlin’s Useful Idiots

In echoing Kremlin lies, the alt-right serves Moscow’s interests and undermines the Free World, just as American isolationists did Hitler’s bidding in 1939–1941 by opposing aid to Britain.

This parroting of Putin stains conservatism. At a time when North America badly needs steady, principled leadership to counter the excesses of woke ideology, the alt-right offers only its snarling reflection: bigoted, isolationist, and authoritarian.

Reagan and Thatcher would be appalled.

Dr. Henry Lyatsky

Geological Consultant | Conservative Campaigner

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