The Frenzy to Cancel Russian Culture is a Symptom of the West’s Decline
Published: 25 March 2022 ~ Cancel Russian Culture Quickly the West is on its way Out!
Immediately prior to the outbreak of the Second World War and throughout that war, the Nazi’s singled out the Jewish population and subjected them to a sustained and brutal campaign of harassment, persecution and violence. Proscription and marginalisation began in 1933 and were reinforced and legitimised in 1935 with the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws. These laws, the sanctions of their day, paved the way for more widespread and incisive discriminatory practices and opened the floodgates of prejudice for the justification of genocide.
Over time, the sustained ideological prohibition on personal liberty, human rights and freedom of religious association escalated. Campaigns of intimidation and terror ran simultaneously with random acts of violence and official decrees which, hampering Jews in their professional and vocational lives, combined economic degradation with societal segregation.
Today, such examples of state-orchestrated social and economic ostracism are endemic in western societies. They may have acquired a new moniker, namely cancel culture, but whatever title they operate under, in application and in effect, it’s Nazi business as usual.
Cancel Russian Culture Quickly the West is on its way Out!
A prime recent and surprising example of cancel culture occurred in of all places Canada, the epicentre of liberal conformity, when Justin Trudeau, the then prime minister-in-hiding, unleashed his army of robo-cops on an unsuspecting convoy of peacefully protesting Canadian truckers.
As well as being predominantly white and patriots, another cardinal sin committed by the truckers was that they tried to invoke their rights, which unbeknown to them had been quietly and stealthily side-lined. Freedom of speech, even freedom of thought, had been stringently replaced by an explicit demand for mass obedience and unquestionable allegiance to liberal mandates.
Arguably, the social and economic violations enacted by Trudeau against his own people came as more of a shock to them than cancel-culture warfare has to Russian nationals living, working and studying in western countries, where, since Russia’s military offensive in Ukraine to ‘de-Nazify and de-militarise’, Russians experience demonisation on a daily basis.
Cancel Russian Culture Quickly the West is on its way Out!
It is tempting to postulate that since Russians are no strangers to prejudice from the West ~ they have certainly been the recipients of it for decades, even centuries ~ they would not be unduly surprised or alarmed by this latest round of belligerence. But if the views of Russians with whom I have personally spoken on the subject of cancel culture represent the views of the Russian nation as a whole, then fortunately until now, or so it would seem, no clear comprehension has existed, at least among ordinary Russians, of the vitriol, enmity and hostility harboured against them by the West, nor the blatant disregard of the West for the sovereignty of their country and the sanctity of their culture.
Pervasive as this blind vindictiveness is in the West, nowhere does it assert itself more forcefully than in the United Kingdom. The explanation for this phenomenon might conceivably lie in the efficacy of propaganda, but it is not so much that UK media has got its misinformation and also its disinformation off to such a fine art that Brits can’t tell their arse from their elbow (although the argument in favour of this is strong) as the willingness of Brits to suspend disbelief about what they see on the telly or read in the media, no matter how one-sided it is, how sensationalised or misleading.
Brits believe what they want to believe at any given time, especially during a crisis, when solidarity of thought ~ or should that be solidity ~ offers them a temporary fix for the rifts in British society. That the British establishment endorses and whole-heartedly encourages such deflecting hysteria is unequivocal: Better to bring people together in a media-manufactured frenzy against the goings on in a far-away country about which they know less than nothing, than have them focus too objectively on the grievous problems in their own back yard.
The simpler explanation for the willingness of Brits to jump through hoops when told to do so is that they feel the need to get value for money for obediently paying their TV licence or, no less reasonable or less risible, that the Russophobia they are so keen to champion is inextricably linked to that transatlantic ‘special relationship’ we hear so much about, whilst other countries in the West feel rather less obliged to carry the can kicked down the road by big old bully boy Uncle Sam.
Obliged or not, countries of the EU bloc, including Germany, which is rather good at this sort of thing, are busy pooling their cancel-culture resources. The problem, although obviously not a problem to western governments and the sheeple that they shepherd, is that artists, singers, sportsmen, 19th century literary figures and even Mr Tchaikovsky himself are in no way implicated in the Ukraine conflict, and neither are Russian students nor for that matter Russian schoolchildren, unless the culture into which one is born is considered to be a crime as birth right was for the Jews, according to cancel culture, cancel everything, 1940s’ Germans.
Cancel Russian Culture Quickly the West is on its way Out!
The castigation and negation of Russia’s cultural class, the hate speech and violent abuse with which Russian nationals have to contend, are the punitive reflex actions of a deeper frustration coursing through the West than can be rationally credited to the events taking place in the Ukraine alone. They are rather a manifestation of the failings within western societies, and the compulsive instinctual need that stems from recognition of those failures that Russian culture must be cancelled as their own cultures have been cancelled, albeit non-consensually, by the leaders that they elected and who have written them off, Trudeau-style.
As the West sinks slowly but inevitably into the great abyss, where eventually all spent empires slide, the beacon of light from Russian culture is an untimely for some and timely for others rather wistful reminder of what the West once was, once had and what it could have been if it had only lived up to and not betrayed the values it espoused.
The task that Russia is faced with now, and the responsibility it owes to its thousand years of history, to its people and to the world, is to shape a multipolar destiny whilst avoiding the fate of being dragged down into the awful vortex of the spiralling West, as it gradually disappears behind the geo-political and moral horizon.
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Examples of Third Reich-style Cancel-Culture Occurrences in Western Europe
In my previous post I provided a treatise on the collective psychology on which cancel culture is premised and the mechanisms by which it works generally in the West and specifically in the UK.
Here are some examples of cancel culture at work today: the perpetrators, western governments, leaned-on western corporations and led-on western citizens; the victims, Russian nationals.
Alexander Ovechkin, National Hockey League star and Washington Capitals captain, cancelled from advertising campaigns by insurance firm sponsor
Russian and Belorusian athletes and officials cancelled from international sports federations
Journalists working for or on behalf of Russian state-backed media outlets cancelled by the EU
Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky, who died in 1881, temporarily cancelled by the University of Milano-Bicocca, in Italy, but reinstated after a public backlash
Russian cats cancelled from competitions by the International Feline Federation
Russian dogs cancelled by Crufts dog show
Russian football team cancelled, including ban on taking part in Word Cup 2022 qualifying matches
Russian pianist Alexander Malofeev cancelled by the Montreal Symphony Orchestra
The chief conductor of the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, Valery Gergiev, cancelled in Germany
Wimbledon, UK, considers cancelling Russian players who do not denounce the role of their country in the conflict in Ukraine
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Examples of Nazi-style discrimination, abuse and aggression towards Russian nationals in western countries
Russian students have been expelled from universities in France and Belgium and there are reports of Czech teachers and professors refusing to teach Russian students and ordering them to leave lecture theatres
In Washington, a Russian restaurant was attacked and anti-Russian slogans daubed on the walls
In Germany a restaurant owner banned Russian nationals
In Holland, Russians have received threats of physical violence.
In Britain, acts of violence and harassment are occurring against Russian nationals
In England Russian students studying both in state and private schools are subject to bullying, intimidation, destructive acts of personal property, mockery and violence
Social media sites allows calls for violence against Russians in violation of anti-genocide laws enshrined in the UN Convention of 1948
Copyright © 2018-2022 Mick Hart. All rights reserved.
Image attributions
Dostoevsky: https://pixabay.com/vectors/dostoevsky-russian-novelist-writer-3571776/
Cancel Culture: https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Stop-cancel-culture-now/87593.html
Sheep face: https://pixabay.com/photos/sheep-animals-cute-nature-3727049/
Union Jack: Author: Karen Arnold / publicdomainpictures.net; https://www.freeimg.net/photo/1361181/union-jack-flag-union-jack-flag-colors
Skyscrapers: https://pixabay.com/vectors/cityscape-buildings-skyscrapers-1254616/
Spiral: https://pixabay.com/vectors/background-design-pattern-spiral-1299431/
