Uriel Araujo, researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts.
Students of the University of Chicago are circulating a letter urging respected scholar John Mearsheimer "clarifies" his supposed "Putinism", as the president of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology (CSPI) Richard Hanania has denounced in his Twitter account. Many other examples abound of an international trend that seems to aim at "canceling" all Russian things and any speech that does not demonize this country and culture. Now it has escalated into an anti-Russian neo-Mccarthyism, but it is part of a larger phenomenon of Russophobia that actually predates the current Russian-Ukrainian conflict.
The so-called "cancel culture" - a modern form of social ostracism - seems to have inspired a kind of "state cancel culture" against the Eastern European country that even seeks to consider removing the Russian Federation from its permanent seat at the United Nations Security Council (which would make the UN largely irrelevant). However, it goes beyond the state level and now a wave of anti-Russian feelings - fueled by the current military operation in Ukraine and by Western mostly biased coverage of it - is targeting anything related to Russia and even Russian individuals such as shop-owners, that are being targeted in Germany. From sports to literature, cinema, cat exhibitions, and even Dostoievski, examples abound and indicate a global phenomenon that is escalating. A famous restaurant in Sao Paolo has even banned Strogonoff from its menu, notwithstanding the fact that what is called "Strogonoff" in Brazilian cuisine is normally much closer to a Fricassee and, apart from having meat and mushrooms amongst its ingredients, does not resemble Russian Strogonoff at all.
Under such a climate, with Russian stores being vandalized and Russian artists and athletes discriminated against, it is not far-fetched at all to consider the risk of it escalating into anti-Russian pogroms or anti-Russian persecution, as has been taking place in Donbass since at least 2014. Let us consider some facts.
Way before the current war, Russia's very existence, as Macalester College international relations professor Andrew Latham argues, has been a kind of existential challenge for American identity. Zbigniew Brzeziński, in his famous 1997 Foreign Affairs article, openly called for a "loosely confederated Russia - composed of a European Russia, a Siberian Republic and a Far Eastern Republic." This was and is russophobia plain and simple. As Alexander Lukin (National Research University Higher School of Economics' Head of the International Affairs Department) remarks in a 2014 Russia in Global Affairs piece, "ideological hatred toward Russia, or Russophobia" already existed in Tsarist Russia among some of the Russian liberals themselves, such as Pyotr Chaadayev with his idea according to which "Russia allegedly had no history because real history existed only in the Catholic West."
The outright "canceling" of Russia (now part of a global campaign) started in Ukraine in 2013, with the Maidan revolution, characterized by its far-right Ukrainian ultra-nationalism. This is a country marked by its high rates of mixed Russian-Ukrainian marriages, as well as by bilingualism, and even by (in some cases) a "complete confusion and non-distinction in the speaker’s mind of two closely related Russian and Ukrainian languages which leads to the emergence of so-called sublanguage – surzhyk", as National Chengchi University Philology professor A. V. Sachenko writes. However, Kiev has been pursuing chauvinist ethno-linguistic policies of "de-Russification".
A clear instance of ethnic and cultural Russophobia was evident last year in Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky statements during an interview with the Dom TV Channel published on August 5, 2021. He basically told anyone who considers oneself Russian to leave Donbass, (which has been at war since 2014) when he said: "I think that if you live on the Donbass territory today, which is temporarily occupied, and you think that [...] 'we are russkiye [ethnic Russians]', then it is a big mistake to remain living in Donbass."
Firstly, one should keep in mind that the Donbas conflict is not an ethnic conflict plain and simple but rather started over a political division pertaining to the 2013 anti-Russian Maidan revolution in Ukraine. Many pro-Russian Donbass combatants are ethnic Ukrainians. In any case, according to the State Statistics Committee of Ukraine, ethnic Russians were 17.3% of Ukraine's population in 2001 (the last time Ukraine counted its citizens), and over 50 per cent of the population in Donetsk and Crimea listed Russian as their native language.
According to Columbia University Political Science Lecturer Elise Giuliano's 2018 paper (based on a KIIS opinion poll), Donbas residents' separatism was motivated by "a sense of abandonment by Kiev", and Russian ethnic identity, albeit not determinant, was relevant "in shaping political attitudes". Ethnic Russians were at least 30% of the Donbass population in 2014, while 11% identify as both ethnic Ukrainian and ethnic Russian. Considering this data, it is not far-fetched to describe Zelenski's 2021 remarks as a call for ethnic cleansing or for a Russian-frei Donbass.
It is no wonder then that the violence against the civilians in Donbass has also been described as genocidal. At a time of "woke" culture, when anyone and anything can be accused of "fascism" (and thus "canceled"), the Western press seems to be having a hard time finding pictures of Ukrainian military that are not wearing Nazi and neo-Nazi symbols somewhere on their uniforms, as exemplified by the fact that NATO's official Twitter account recently shared the image of a Ukrainian soldier wearing "Black Sun" neo-Nazi insignia - and upon realizing the potential embarassment later deleted it. This is far from being an isolated case.
One could also recall the recent incident when soldiers in the US-funded neo-Nazi Azov batalion (part of the Ukrainian National Guard) shared a islamophobic video of its military personnel greasing bullets with pig fat to be used against Muslim Chechen soliders (an injury often employed by anti-Semites against Jews too - whose religious customs also ban the consumption of pork). The fact that Ukraine's current president is Jewish only makes Kiev's policy of instrumentalizing far-right groups against ethnic Russians even more shameful.
A September 2021 Bloomberg piece has famously stated that the "woke" movement could be "the next great U.S. cultural export." One could very well argue wokeism's main contribution to society has been the "cancel" phenomenon. In a nutshell, the "cancel culture" amid today's information battle is in service of a new cold war and in service of NATO' total warfare against Russia in all spheres of life. One cannot simply "cancel" or wish Russia out of existence, though. Russia is real and it will not go away. What the "canceling" of Russia might inadvertently promote is a call to rethink Washington-led globalization - economically, politically and culturally.
