“There is no such thing as a former KGB man.” — Vladimir Putin
It is a bitter irony to watch so-called conservatives, once the champions of liberty, transform into courtiers of tyranny. Those whose heroes once thundered against the Iron Curtain now whisper excuses for those who would rebuild it. The supposed heirs of Churchill and Reagan are not fighting for the soul of the West but selling it, piece by piece, to the very force their forebears spent lifetimes resisting.
This is not merely a shift in foreign policy; it is a turning of the moral axis. Once, the Right stood as a bulwark against the encroachments of Soviet power, warning that appeasement led only to subjugation. Now, some of its loudest voices exalt Vladimir Putin’s Russia, mistaking its cruelty for strength, its repression for righteousness. They admire a man who imprisons his enemies, crushes dissent, and wages a war of conquest against a sovereign nation. They embrace him because he flatters their grievances while echoing their scorn for wokery.
They call themselves nationalists yet excuse the most brazen act of imperial conquest since Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest in 1956. They claim to defend Christianity yet align with a regime that assassinates priests who dare to speak against it. They champion free speech yet defend a man who poisons journalists. They claim to wage war on communism, but in truth, they are its last, devoted disciples.
“The West will not contain communism, it will transcend communism,” Reagan declared. The Cold War was not fought for power alone but for something deeper—the conviction that men should be free, that nations should chart their own destinies, that truth should not bow to state propaganda. Churchill saw it first. “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,” he warned in 1946, “an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” He understood what was at stake: a future where tyranny reigns or one where liberty survives.
Reagan, too, understood. His stand against the Soviet Union was not merely strategic—it was moral. He saw the gulags, the censorship, the disappearances, and he knew that a system built on terror could not be allowed to endure. He called it what it was: an “Evil Empire.” Because of those like him, because of Havel, because of Pope John Paul II, because of Thatcher, and because of those who fought and died resisting Soviet oppression, the Berlin Wall came crashing down.
Yet, like ghosts rising from a graveyard, the old lies return.
The men who ruled the Soviet Union did not vanish in 1991. They changed their banners. They learned new words. But the system—its mechanisms of repression, its lust for control—endured. The KGB became the FSB. The show trials continued. The bullets still found the backs of dissidents’ heads.
At the center of it all stands a man who once swore an oath to the Soviet Union, trained in its black arts of subversion, and mourned his empire’s fall as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” Vladimir Putin did not emerge from nothing. He is not an aberration. He is the Soviet Union’s truest son—its latest and most faithful leader.
And yet today, self-proclaimed conservatives kneel before him. Donald Trump, despite having restored Churchill’s bust to the White House, called Putin’s invasion of Ukraine “genius” and blamed NATO rather than Russian imperialism. Tucker Carlson, once the most-watched news host in America, openly wondered, “Why shouldn’t I root for Russia?” before traveling to Moscow to conduct a fawning, uncritical interview with Putin. Nigel Farage, who claims to be the guardian of Western sovereignty, dismissed Putin’s aggression as a reaction to Western provocation, parroting the very justifications used by the Kremlin. Marine Le Pen, whose party has taken loans from Russian banks, continues to argue against supporting Ukraine. Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister, obstructs EU efforts to aid Ukraine while maintaining warm relations with Moscow. Steve Bannon, once a chief strategist to the U.S. president, praises Putin’s “traditionalist” values as a model for the West. Meanwhile, Republican figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene and JD Vance work to undermine American aid to Ukraine, effectively doing the Kremlin’s bidding under the guise of “America First.”
The world has heard these justifications before. When the Soviets invaded Hungary in 1956, they claimed they were liberators. When they crushed Prague in 1968, they called it a “brotherly intervention.” When they rolled into Afghanistan in 1979, they insisted they were protecting their allies. Now, as Russian missiles reduce Ukrainian cities to rubble, as its armies butcher civilians, as its soldiers deport children from their homes, Putin’s apologists repeat the same excuses. The same deceit. The same evil. Only the dates have changed.
“If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without bloodshed… you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you,” Churchill warned. What would he say if he could see the heirs of English and American conservatism shrug at the invasion of a free European nation? What would Reagan say if he could see American conservatives defending a KGB operative who censors his critics and imprisons opposition leaders?
He would say that we have abandoned what made us great. That we have traded principle for partisanship. That we have lost the courage to stand against tyranny—not because we lack the power, but because we lack the will.
History is watching, and it will remember. It will remember those who stood for liberty and those who excused its destruction. It will remember those who named evil for what it was and those who justified it. It will remember that once, the people of the West were willing to fight for freedom—and that now, there are those who would surrender it simply because their enemy’s enemy wears a cross and speaks in scorn of liberals.
But tyranny is tyranny. And those who make excuses for it now will one day find that the beast they fed does not ask for loyalty. It only demands obedience.
“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” Christopher McQuarrie’s words have never rung truer. The Soviet Union was never defeated. It changed form. It learned new disguises. And now, in the darkness of the present, its spirit rises again—cheered, inexplicably, by those who once swore to bury it.
But the choice remains.
To stand, as our forebears did, in defense of freedom.
Or to kneel to authoritarian evil.
If true conservatism is to rise again, it must stand now.
