I think about the people who refused the jab and were treated like dogshit over the past two years; about yesterday's scapegoats. They may forgive their fellow citizens, but it is doubtful they'll ever forget how quickly neighbors, employers, and their own politicians turned on them; how restaurants, grocery stores, and other establishments turned them out like lepers; how their faith leaders who heroically defied unconstitutional decrees were rounded up and arrested; how their basic mobility rights were violated; how their lives were destroyed on the basis of fears manufactured and threats greatly exaggerated; how medical tyranny was cheered on by uncritical thinkers, cowards, and bovine rule-followers.
They may forgive their fellow citizens for joining the NPC herd and treating them like the enemy during a pandemic in which the primary enemy, if an enemy needs be defined, was the genocidal terror state formed by the Chinese Communist Party; the same CCP that manufactured and accelerated the spread of the Wuhan Virus. (If you want to split hairs, the enemy could be said to include Fauci's NIH which sponsored the coronavirus research at the P4 level lab in Hubei despite caution suggested by the Pentagon or Big Pharma, which peddled a dangerous, leaky, and ineffective set of gene therapies, whose adverse effects number in the hundreds-of-thousands and are now dropping athletic kids left, right, and center.)
Owing largely to well-coordinated propaganda campaigns dutifully performed by Big Media, censorship by Big Tech, coercion aided and abetted by Big Business, and evasive rhetoric by Big Government, many were led to believe that instead of the CCP, it was their fellow citizens who were the enemy. The nurse who got the Delta variant over a year ago and had natural anti-bodies was the enemy because she refused to get the redundant and ineffective clot shot. She was fired during a nurse shortage. The trucker who stocked your shelves while you worked remotely these past two years was the enemy because he didn't want to produce papers documenting his personal medical history every time he pulled into station. He was smeared as a racist, a misogynist, and a white supremacist by the government now financing neonazis to fight the Russians. Neither were the cause of the pandemic. Neither were the reason why businesses were shuttered and our civilization was destroyed. Both, however, were presented by the aforementioned empowered conspirators as effigies to be isolated and destroyed. Those who are inconvenient—in substance, in essence, in thought—or 'other' (i.e. outside the herd as defined by our progressive elites and neoliberal establishment) cannot be tolerated. They must be made the focus of our two-minutes of hate 720 times a day, seven days a week.
Now, as our protracted moment of COVID insanity nears its end, a new epoch of hysteria begins, fueled by the same perverse energies. In a society desperate for villains and where the obvious villains for some reason cannot be named, some might thank God for the war in Ukraine. After all, we have a new inconvenient group to crush.
Were it not for an easy pivot to a new enemy, we might have to do some serious soul searching. We might have to come to grips with having lived through the answer to the question of how upper-middle class Germans could have so rapidly signed onto the Hitlerite's identitarian and eugenicist program, i.e. once their fears were properly stoked and their group identity fully defined. Rather than reflect on the past two years of othering and discrimination at home, the news is demanding our attention, trying to define in low-resolution a new binary; once again re-parameterizing the herd to which we must cling.
Now let's be clear: during this Russian invasion of Ukraine, the enemy is first and foremost the Putin regime, itself an FSB artifact (FSB was formerly the KGB, which was previously the NKVD, previously the OGPU, the GPU, the CHEKA) with a long and grievous history of committing crimes against humanity. (A distant second—perhaps not an enemy but at the very least a substantial bearer of guilt deserving of some ire once the fog of war is lifted—is the neoliberal establishment that violated [Baker's promise] not to expand NATO east of Berlin; that threatened to arm Ukraine with nukes; that mounted the 2014 coup in Kiev; that threatened to make Ukraine part of NATO; that provoked Russian action. )
That said, just as the Trudeau regime is not one and the same with Canada or Canadians, Putin's regime is not one and the same with Russians, made abundantly clear by the recent rash of Russian protests against the invasion of Ukraine. It is understandable and perhaps even laudable to castigate the primary agent in what can be said to be a criminal [albeit provoked] invasion, but we should resist the leftist impulse to conflate a state with a people.
Readers may recognize the fact that I make a note of always distinguishing the CCP from China, as one instance. I am fully aware of the fact that the Chinese people are the first victims of the occupying CCP regime. In a nation of 1.44Bn people, there are approximately 94M legitimate CCP members, and fewer than 5,000 hold legitimate power in the regime. Similarly, as Fulton Sheen reminded us about the CCCP in the early 1950s, the Russian people are not their government, especially since their form of government can hardly be said to be a product of democracy or functional democratic processes.
I think now about the ~700,000 Canadians of Russian dissent and how they might perceive the intense hatred being fomented against their ilk and place of origin. I wonder what they think about our so-called multiculturalism; one in which certain cultures and ethnicities are demonstrably preferred over others; wherein there is a pecking order towards the base of which they now go.
Furthermore, I wonder how much of this mentality is a product of the concept of total war, born of the French Revolution. Eric von Kuehnelt-Leddihn writes in Leftism:
[Limited professional- and mercenary-fought cabinet wars] came to an end with the French Revolution. And since all able-bodied men had to serve, whether they had a natural talent and enthusiasm for war or not, they and their families had to be propagandized and indoctrinated. Now nation was pitted against nation, not merely government against government. This new concept of total war was the natural result of the two totalitarian trends toward democracy and toward identitarian nationalism. [391]
As Zelensky conscripts Ukrainian civilians, the lines between nation and government further blur on one side, certainly, but is there no difference between a Russian and a Russian soldier? Between a Russian and the Putin regime? After the American State Department armed and trained jihadists in southern Syria (see: Operation Timber Sycamore), and helped kill tens-of-thousands of civilians, most reasonable people wouldn't place the guilt on the average American back home. Similarly, when the Trudeau government provides weapons to the Saudis, which are used to murder civilians in the genocide in Yemen, no one would think to blame the average Canadian or cancel him for a tenuous connection to his government. This to say: the globalists and cosmopolitan neoliberals who seem to despise nationalism so greatly seem also the first ready to conflate people with nation, nation with state, and then attribute the guilt belonging to elements of the latter to the former.
Lastly, it would be prudent to recognize the difference between actions taken to undermine a state, and actions that will only hurt a people. Boycotting oil is one thing. Boycotting people is another. Thinking back to the 700,000 Canadians of Russian origin who are no doubt now witnessing their kin further afield cancelled, I wonder: when the fog of war has lifted, will they forgive? Will they forget?