Crackdown on French Yellow Vests Shows True Face of West’s Liberalism: Russian Analyst

“The crackdown on the yellow vests was terrible, there were several people killed and hundreds maimed,” Dmitry Babich said in an interview with Tasnim.

“I was moved by the fact that French Muslims took part in this protest, which showed us the true face of Western ‘liberalism’,” he added.

Dmitry Babich, born in Moscow, has been an active journalist for over 25 years, focusing on Russian politics. Graduating from Moscow State University, Babich has had a successful career in Russian journalism. He has previously been a senior correspondent at the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily, RIA Novosti, and Russia Profile magazine. Between 1999 and 2003, Babich was a foreign editor at The Moscow News before returning to Russia Profile in 2009 as acting editor-in-chief. His core areas of focus include Russia’s modern political history and international relations. Babich is currently working as a political analyst at Sputnik International and is a frequent guest on BBC, Al Jazeera, CNN, commenting on international affairs and history.

The following is the full text of the interview:

Tasnim: Some Western powers which call themselves defenders of freedom of speech and interfere in the internal affairs of independent countries under this pretext have acted differently when it comes to their own countries. In the latest instance, the US voiced its support for violent protests in various sovereign states around the world ranging from Iran, Iraq, and Venezuela to China’s Hong Kong. However, many critics slam the lack of free expression in the US, itself. What do you think?

Babich: You are right, and we are living through a very interesting moment in US history. The globalist circles, which control the media in the US, are now using the same methods inside their country, which they used against president Milosevic in Yugoslavia and president Yanukovich in Ukraine. They openly try to undermine the results of the 2016 election in the US. I am no sympathizer for Mr. Trump, but he was elected according to US law in 2016, with 90 percent of the US media actively campaigning against him, in favor of Hillary Clinton. And now the globalists controlling the House of Representatives in the US have concocted a very weak case against Mr. Trump, but they are pushing it really hard, declaring all dissenting voices “pro-Russian,” pro-Assad, etc. What was so bad about president Trump asking president Zelensky to investigate the corruption of Mr. Joe Biden in Ukraine? This corruption was for everyone to see – Mr. Biden, the vice-president of the US, acted like a viceroy in Ukraine, telling them which prosecutor-general Ukrainians need to remove.

The problem is that this opinion – that Biden deserved to be investigated – it is almost impossible to express in the US now. As for “police violence” in pre-Maidan Ukraine or Hong Jong – just imagine what the US police would do to “peaceful protesters” who killed 38 policemen (as in Ukraine) or set several people on fire (as in Hong Kong). These “peaceful protesters” would end up with life imprisonment in the US – at best.     

Tasnim: If an academic association in the US criticizes Washington’s Israeli policy, it will lose its federal funding. That is the message the Department of Education recently sent with its threat to withdraw federal support for the Consortium for Middle East Studies, operated jointly by Duke University and the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, if it does not alter the content of its programming, according to a recent report published by the Guardian. How do assess academic freedom in the US?

Babich: There is no academic freedom in the US for ideological reasons. The crude anti-family, godless ideology, calling itself “liberalism”, is propagating aggressive feminism and the interests of perverts calling themselves “sexual minorities” – and you cannot object to it in the US. This ideology traces its origins to the leftist Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, founded in Germany in 1923, most of its professors moved to the US in the 1930s. This was a Marxist and Freudian institution, and in the 1960s its offsprings replaced the class struggle with gender struggle, pitting women against men and sexual minorities against “heterosexual white males.” 

It has taken control of US academia back in the early 1990s. Now it is advocating against any form of traditionalist religion, including Islam, Christianity and Judaism. It supports Israel, but not Judaism. It supports Israel as a part of globalist Western civilization, which this ideology now controls and which this ideology wants to use as a tool for achieving world domination.   

Like any totalitarian ideology, the totalitarianism of modern “ultraliberals” encompasses all spheres of life, including sports, science, art and especially media. That is why Russia and Iran don’t stand a chance of fair treatment in these spheres – there will always be sanctions from the modern West.  

Tasnim: The French government’s crackdown on yellow vest demonstrators is another example that refutes the world power’s claim to be a defender of freedom of speech. The protests began a year ago over high fuel prices but evolved into a broader social movement over income inequality and President Emmanuel Macron's leadership. How do you assess the crackdown and the free expression situation in the Western European country?

Babich: The crackdown on the yellow vests was terrible, there were several people killed and hundreds maimed. I was moved by the fact that French Muslims took part in this protest, which showed us the true face of Western “liberalism”. All freedom loving people should support the yellow vests because globally controlled “human rights groups” did not do it and will never do – until the Western countries retrieve their Christian, monotheistic and freedom-loving tradition.