Hitler thought the west was weak and decadent
Tojo thought the U.S. people were weak and lazy.
Napoleon thought the British were a ‘nation of shopkeepers’
While that Russian priest was correct about a lot of the immorality seen in the west, he, and a lot of others, always seem to make the mistake of believing that the loudest is an actual majority.
“In his sermon approximately two weeks into the war, on March 6, the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church justified the invasion of Ukraine as necessary to defend Orthodox Christians against Western values and gay pride parades. On March 24, during a meeting with young artists, Russian President Vladimir Putin complained about… the West was now ‘trying to cancel a whole 1,000-year culture, our people … Russian writers and books are now canceled.’… Russian media filled with TV shows and ‘documentaries’ on ‘Gayropa’ and ‘Sodom.’
These shows conjured up a caricature of weak ‘gayish’ Western males and women who lost their femininity by competing with men in spheres where they could achieve nothing serious. Russian media frequently stressed the oddity that many Western democracies nominated women as defense ministers… … Russia depicted itself… as the country of strength, the bulwark of traditional families: with strong men, fertile women and children properly guarded against subversive homosexual propaganda… Fascinated by this flattering vision of Russia, elites, it seems, overestimated the nation’s strength and underestimated Ukraine’s.”
Write Kristina Stoeckl and Dmitry Uzlaner in “Russia believed the West was weak and decadent. So it invaded. Russia sees itself at the global forefront of the culture wars, leading the resistance to gay parades, ‘cancel culture,’ and liberal values more generally” (WaPo).