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March
11
2022

Western Response to Ukraine Conflict Exposes
Deep-Seated Anti-Russia Prejudice
Robert Bridge

The West wants to lecture Russia on the merits of peace, yet that is exactly what Moscow was attempting to achieve for many years.

For many decades, every American public institution – from the spook-infested studios of Hollywood to the dinosaur legacy media – presented a tired and repugnant image of the Russian people to its audiences. Now, with Moscow forced to contend with a neo-Nazi element smack on its border, the by-product of that sinister propaganda campaign is targeting Russians in the form of pure racism.

If the Western world’s contempt for Russia could somehow be converted into reusable fuel, the Western world would have enough oil and gas reserves to last the next 1,000 years and probably much longer. But alas, the world of science and technology has not yet found a way of tapping into human irrationality for any strictly practical purposes, thus we’re just left with crude displays of xenophobia in some of the most unexpected places.

This week, for example, the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra fired famed Russian conductor, Valery Gergiev for not denouncing Moscow’s special operation in Ukraine. Gergiev, 68, a vocal supporter of Vladimir Putin, had previously expressed his approval of Crimea becoming part of the Russian Federation. And while Germany’s cultural elite are free to hire and fire whoever they like, and for whatever political views they deem inappropriate, it would be good to see some consistency on such matters. When U.S.-led NATO forces unleashed hell on Iraq in 2003 and in Libya in 2011, for example, were any American or European composers sacked because of their views and place of birth? In fact, cheering on Western forces during their long run of illicit warmongering, in hardscrabble places like Iraq, Syria and Libya, would have done nothing to hurt a person’s career and more than likely advance it.

On the other end of the cultural spectrum, in the realm of sport, Russian and Belarusian athletes were banned from competing in the Beijing 2022 Paralympic Winter Games due to the military conflict in Ukraine. Again, where is the precedent for this noxious form of discrimination, where competitors are outright banned solely for the ‘crime’ of being born in a particular country? And let’s not forget, as much as the mainstream media would like us to, that Russia was not the only nation that found itself engaged in a military operation at this period in time.

On February 24, the very same day that Russia began its special operation in Ukraine, Israel conducted yet another air strike near the Syrian capital Damascus. The unprovoked attack left three Syrian soldiers dead, according to Syria’s state media. How many people are aware that it was the fourth reported time this month that Israel has launched strikes inside of Syria? If the International Olympic Committee was aware of it, why did that unsettling information not stop Israeli athletes from competing?

Former Russian Olympic champion Alina Kabaeva said the sanctions unfairly targeting Russian athletes represent the “most disgraceful page in the history of world sports.”

“The leadership of many international sports organizations has long been engaged in completely unsportsmanlike affairs under various pretexts,” continued Kabaeva, who went on to become a State Duma Deputy following her retirement from sport. “Now it is no longer hidden.”

And finally there has been a refusal on the part of journalists to hear the perspective of Russian citizens.

On March 3, the Australian talk program Q&A took questions from the audience as part of its extremely biased discussion on the events in Ukraine. During the program, a viewer in the audience, one Sasha Gillies-Lekakis, introduced himself as part of the Russian community in Australia before saying, “I’ve been pretty outraged by the narrative created by our media depicting the Ukraine as the ‘good guy’ and Russia as the ‘bad guy’.” He went on to explain, correctly, that since 2014, “the Ukrainian Government together with Nazi-groups like the Azov Battalion have besieged the Russian populations in the Donbas, killing an estimated 13,000 people according to the United Nations. My question is where was your outpouring of grief and concern for those thousands of mostly Russians?”

It seems to be a reasonable question that deserves a fair answer, but Q&A host Stan Grant was having none of it: “Sasha, people here have been talking about family who are suffering and people are dying, and I understand you wanted to ask your question is there some reasoning for this. But you supported what’s happening [in Ukraine] hearing that people are dying and can I just say I’m not comfortable with you being here. Could you please leave?”

And that pretty much sums up the Western media’s mindless approach to the conflict if you happen to be Russian or pro-Russian – “Could you please leave” – that is, if you were fortunate to have been invited in the first place. This month, RT and Sputnik were blanked across the EU, while Strategic Culture Foundation has suffered heavy censorship since at least 2020 for ‘the crime’ of being a Russia-based analytical platform that presents an alternative voice to the West’s obsessively controlled narrative. Such attacks on free speech, which carry unmistakable racist overtones, have been coming so thick and heavy that an entire Telegram channel, called ‘Russophobia Watch,’ has been created just to track them.

It is no secret that the media has been priming the public mind for a long time about the “aggressive Russians” with numerous debunked stories, like Russiagate, where somehow a handful of Russian social media posts, as the fairy tale goes, managed to sway the 2016 presidential election for Donald Trump. Once again, it seems that the real culprits of such political shenanigans – liberal-driven Silicon Valley behemoths, like Google, who really does have the infinite power to sway elections – were merely projecting and protecting their own misdeeds behind their favorite fall guy, Russia.

Speaking of aggression, let us not forget, since the mainstream media certainly has, that for many years humanity has been held captive audience as U.S.-led NATO launched a number of unprovoked wars in places like Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.

Where was the virtue-signaling pearl clutching then from the sanctimonious liberal capitals, especially when none of those brazen military escapades were remotely justified? Meanwhile, Russia has been warning on NATO expansion very publicly – at least since Vladimir Putin’s now-famous presentation at the 2007 Munich Conference on Security Policy – to absolutely no avail. Yet now the West, in all of its dripping hypocrisy and double standards, wants to lecture Russia on the merits of peace, yet that is exactly what Moscow was attempting to achieve for many years.

American writer and journalist.

www.strategic-culture.org