fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Primed For Collective Guilt

Commenting on our Russophobic moment.
St.,Basil's,Cathedral,-,An,Orthodox,Church,On,Red,Square

Putin isn’t the only one to blame for the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

At least, so says Michael McFaul, Obama’s ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014. “There are no more ‘innocent’ ‘neutral’ Russians anymore. Everyone has to make a choice— support or oppose this war. The only way to end this war is if 100,000s, not thousands, protest against this senseless war. Putin can’t arrest you all!” McFaul wrote in a since-deleted tweet on March 2. McFaul is far from the only one to lay the blame of the Russian invasion at the feet of the Russian people. The wide-scale embrace of the concept of collective guilt by cosmopolitan elites and years of blaming the Russians for stealing the 2016 election makes it hard to ignore that we were headed for a moment such as this.

On Feb. 28, the FIFA Council and the UEFA Executive Committee proclaimed they had adopted measures to ban all Russian club teams, as well as the Russian national team, from competing in FIFA and UEFA contests, including the World Cup “until further notice.”

“Football is fully united here and in full solidarity with all the people affected in Ukraine,” the joint statement said.

Electronic Arts (EA), the popular game developer of the FIFA series and other sports video games, subsequently announced that all Russian teams, as well as the Russian national team, would be removed from FIFA 22 to “stand in solidarity with the Ukrainian people.”

Both the Glasgow Film Festival and the Stockholm Film Festival have canceled their screenings of Russian films—pictures that had nothing to do with the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. The Glasgow Film Festival assured the public their decision was “not a reflection on the views or opinions of the makers of these films.” Rather, their justification for pulling the films boiled down to these filmmakers being born in the wrong place, and their movies coming out at the wrong time. “We believe that right now it would be inappropriate to proceed as normal with these screenings while the assault on the Ukrainian people continues,” the statement from the Glasgow Film Festival read. Better luck next time!

The tech giant Apple has also jumped into the fray, saying it was “deeply concerned” about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and has thus “paused all product sales” in the Federation. “Last week, we stopped all exports into our sales channel in the country. Apple Pay and other services have been limited. RT News and Sputnik News are no longer available for download from the App Store outside Russia,” the company said. YouTube and Netflix also said they would not carry content from RT or Sputnik out of disinformation concerns. Never mind these platforms are eager to promote Ukrainian propaganda seeking to court Western involvement.

In Germany, Munich Mayor Dieter Reiter ordered Valery Gergiev, a Russian national who served as the conductor of the Munich Philharmonic since 2015, to denounce Russia’s invasion or face the consequences. When Gergiev refused, he was fired. His contract was set to expire in 2025. Even before Gergiev lost his gig at the Munich Philharmonic, Gergiev was dropped by his representation and pulled from the lineup from several upcoming concerts, including an appearance at Carnegie Hall.

The anti-Russian fervor is so ludicrously out of control that not only is it targeting Russian people, but Russian animals. Over the weekend, the Fédération Internationale Féline (FIFe) said that, for the next three months, Russian cats are banned from competing. “The FIFe Executive Board is shocked and horrified that the army of the Russian Federation invaded the Republic of Ukraine and started a war. Many innocent people died, many more are wounded and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are forced to flee their homes to save their lives,” FIFe claimed. “The Board of FIFe feels it cannot just witness these atrocities and do nothing,” the statement added.

We need a total and complete shutdown of Russian Blues and Russian Hairlesses until we can figure out what is going on!

Going after Russian conductors and cats makes it all seem so absurd. Nevertheless, these are the conclusions drawn by a culture primed for a thorough embrace of collective guilt.

Whites are responsible for the systemic oppression of black and brown people. Men and the patriarchy they’ve established tries to keep women in their place. Religious folks, especially Christians, seek to trample the rights of gays, lesbians, and transgender people. The part of America that isn’t just an idea, but a physical country, was stolen from indigenous people, who likely brutally conquered it from another indigenous tribe, before white settlers came. Its borders are designed to keep minority immigrants from opportunity.

That’s just about all we hear from the hard left these days, which has long forgotten its working-class roots and caved to the pseudo-intellectualism of our enlightened bourgeois.

It helps explain why the media, academia, Hollywood, the administrative state, and corporate America—where the hard left now resides—justified the record-breaking destruction caused by the Black Lives Matter riots in the summer of 2020. The following year, the same intellectual movement downplayed arson attacks and vandalism carried out against a number of churches in Canada—though the perpetrators’ reason for doing so was completely fabricated. Don’t you see, these communities were complicit, and deserved their comeuppance! Now it’s the Russians’ turn, and they’ve had it coming to them for quite some time because of their meddling in the 2016 election.

But maybe everyday Russians aren’t the people who should be asking for forgiveness.

Advertisement

Comments

Become a Member today for a growing stake in the conservative movement.
Join here!
Join here