A thing probably worth talking about more is the dehumanization of Russian (and Eastern European) people that our European-American culture has had going on for the last 100+ years so our soldiers could more easily be prepared to kill Russian civilians and children.
You know the image: brutish, uncivilized, untrustworthy, unintelligent, violent.
This image has been created to block empathy and justify violence. It existed before the 20th century but it was massively pushed by anti-communists right after the communist revolution, increased and mixed with antisemitism by the Nazis and quite easily re-purposed to during the cold war.
And it’s still here. It’s heavily present in memes about Russia. A lot of these memes seem relatively positive but the fun is the ‘lol, violent uncivilized Russians again’ and at the end of the day there’s no empathy when it’s needed. Even things that seem like positive presentations of Russian strength and resilience translate to ‘I never have to care about Russians being hurt’, but like the ‘strong black woman’ trope translates to ‘I never have to care about black women being hurt’.
Even the phrase ‘The Russians’ serves the exact same function as ‘The Jews’, ‘The Gays’, etc: it presents a group of people as a whole without individuals, that can be collectively blamed for anything bad and collectively punished. We’re systematically pushed away from empathizing.
We see the results of this whenever workers from Eastern Europe or Russia come to work in Western Europe and are vilified with all the same tropes. We saw this when Putin’s persecution of LGBT people resulted in a lot of demonstrations against Putin as the symbol of everything bad about Russia, but almost no actual acts of solidarity for the Russian LGBT people effected. We see this now in the silence in anarchist scenes about the fact that anarchist and antifascist activists are literally being tortured with electric shocks and just randomly disappear.
And those are just some examples, there is a massive reserve of dehumanization there that can be easily tapped by any politician that at some point wants support for some kind of violence. This is something to be aware of and recognize.
(No, I am not Russian. Yes, I will talk about it. If Russians wanna talk about it I will listen and learn, but I am also talking now because if a form of dehumanization does not effect you and you see if from the side doing the dehumanizing it is your job to be a traitor to ‘your side’ and name what you see from the inside.)
QueerAnarchism 