All around the world we have been carefully programmed to hate Russians by an American culture machine that engaged in an aggressive campaign to demonize all things and all people Russian. In every mainstream movie and TV show that addresses their “malign” existence, even after the Cold War, Russians are consistently presented as the enemy, a race of duplicitous villains who hate freedom for no other reason than because they do, because evil defines their national character without meaning. Growing up, I watched Sylvester Stallone and the Brat Pack murder scores of these people like they weren’t even human, just soulless props to highlight the blood-spattered glory of American exceptionalism with their primitive inferiority. Their slaughter was comedy.
And all the politicians and history books seemed to take their cues directly from the action movies. There was never any reason provided to explain the deep-seated hostility of our eastern adversaries. There was no Western invasion to strangle their revolution against Czarist tyranny in the cradle as Winston Churchill so eloquently put it. There were no Jupiter missiles on Khrushchev’s borders beckoning him to Cuba. They just hated us – according to the USA and our military dictators installed by Washington in South America - because we were “free” and they were evil, and we should hate them too, even the ones who escaped communist tyranny, even their children.
I had to grow up a little before I could realize that at the end of the day Russians were just people like anyone else.
Today we find ourselves living at the height of a whole new Cold War and even in an era where perceived wokeness reigns supreme it has never been hipper to hate people just because they’re Russian. As the news media hovers with a magnifying glass over every gruesome detail of Putin’s complicated war in Ukraine, Russophobia has once again taken the West by storm. Russian restaurants and Orthodox churches are being vandalized and harassed with death threats. Children with Russian names are being taunted and bullied. Sporting events like the Paralympics are barring Russian and Belarussian athletes from competing even as neutrals. Cultural institutions from the Munich Philharmonic to the Met are canceling Russian performers and pressuring others to pass purity tests on their proper hatred for Putin just to remain on stage. Even those sanctimonious self-appointed scions of tolerance at social media conglomerates like Facebook and Instagram have all but greenlit anti-Russian hate-speech and removed their previous ban on neo-Nazi death squads like the Azov Battalion just so long as they exterminate the right variety of untermenschen.
And once again, the US and the European Union can’t pretend like they’re innocent, as if provoking this heinous bloodbath with decades of reckless NATO expansion wasn’t bad enough. The combined forces of the so-called free world have united to punish Putin’s first victims within Russia’s own borders en masse with a crippling embargo that just keeps tightening like a noose around their throats. Sanctions like the kind being lobbed at Russia from the United States and being celebrated and encouraged by everyone from late night talk show hosts to self-anointed antiwar activists essentially amount to the collective punishment of an entire nation for the crimes of its crooked government.
These measures won’t deprive Putin or the oligarchs of a single spoon of caviar, but they will cause great stress for millions of Russians. Sanctions are a form of economic terrorism designed to torture the already desperate into affecting American-approved regime change. These actions are every bit as evil and indiscriminate as Russia’s bombs and I fear that they and the Russophobic propaganda barrage that goes with them are only the beginning of something far more sadistic.
The United States of America has long used its corporate tentacles across the mass media to soften up it’s natural intolerance for total war by systematically demonizing entire races of people. As Japan embraced imperialism in a gruesome attempt to defend their own rich culture from western expansion in the Pacific during the 1930s, everyone from Tinseltown to Dr. Seuss jumped on the bandwagon to demonize the Japanese people themselves as being senseless Oriental savages killing for amusement while the American government upped the ante with crippling sanctions that eventually resulted in a full-blown embargo that provoked the attacks on Pearl Harbor.
It’s not being a conspiracy nut to believe that this was as intentional as USA&NATO’s provocation of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Navy admirals lost their jobs just trying to warn FDR of the storm he was reaping with arms wide open. I shouldn’t have to tell people the results of this frighteningly familiar racist campaign of synergistic propaganda and economic warfare. 120,000 Japanese Americans in concentration camps, whole cities roasted alive with napalm, and 226,000 innocent civilians obliterated by two nuclear bombs after their nation had already thrown in the towel. I don’t want this nightmare to repeat itself, but I can’t ignore the growing signs all around me. They keep me up at night.
The Russian people are not the enemy. Russian history and culture is alive with resistance to tyranny and resilience under oppression. Russia won World War II on the ground, with the Red Army marching towards Berlin liberating Poland, Ukraine and the Concentration camps to the very end. You can feel it breathing inside your chest when you read the prose of Tolstoy or listen to the wild mood swings of Tchaikovsky. There are still those who despise NATO and their puppet regime in Kyiv. The USA & Nato don’t really care about all those lost lives. To them, they are just cannon fodder to excuse their own war crimes to come. Imperialism thrives on racism and Europeans and Americans all need to fight the racism of Russophobia before it gives our own “devils” in power the license they seek for atrocity.
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