tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/hate-putin-hate-russia-hate-cats
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]]>It shows a dangerous level of brainwashed paranoia when upstanding liberals like the actor Edward Norton–people raised to see McCarthyism and the Red Scare as the defining parables of American politics–begin exhorting the FBI and CIA to hunt down
collaborators and perpetratorsand tear out Russian subversion in the United Statesby the roots.Get them! How quickly all that ultra-enlightened teaching about the dangers of demonizing theOtherdisappears when the virtuous people find a convenient victim. Norton was hardly the worst. Shortly after the war broke out, former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul declared:There are no moreinnocentneutralRussians anymore. Everyone has to make a choice–support or oppose this war.For the past five years, we have been warned about the grave dangers of populism in the West. The populists were supposedly xenophobes and bloody nationalists threatening the lives of immigrants and foreigners. Yet the present wave of naked anti-Russian prejudice is not being led by unruly mobs, but instead by actors, political officials, and the boards of powerful institutions, including the opera houses and ballets that are the very symbols of Western cultural achievement and civilization.
In Washington, D.C., the American-owned Russia House Restaurant has had its windows smashed and front door broken in two separate instances since the war started. In New York, the Metropolitan Opera first demanded that Russian soprano Anna Netrebko denounce Vladimir Putin and then fired her when she refused the loyalty test, replacing her with a Ukrainian singer. Much the same thing happened in the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra to conductor Valery Gergiev after he, too, refused an ultimatum to denounce the Russian leader and was fired. Gergiev’s management company called him
the greatest conductor alive and an extraordinary human being with a profound sense of decencyin a statement explaining why it was now moved to drop him due to his support for Putin. In the United Kingdom, a planned tour of the Russian State Ballet of Siberia was canceled, wrote the journalist Brendan O’Neill,as if pirouettes were propaganda, as if sublime dancing by Russian people might pollute the hearts and minds of British audiences.[…]
The notion that individuals should have their employment conditioned on the actions of a foreign government, or their willingness to denounce those actions, is frankly gross and authoritarian–the kind of thing I was raised to believe happened in Russia, not the United States.
—Jacob Siegel, Hate Putin! Hate Russia! Hate … Cats? Boycotting Russian food, art, people, and animals is not just misguided. It’s immoral.
Tablet (8 March 2022),