Sanctions, Boycotts, Bans - Cancel culture as reaction to #PutinsWar?

Week 2 of  Putin's senseless War against Ukraine has come to an end and we are witnessing already the start of the third week of a war which noone wanted to have, despite Mr.Putin and his political apparatus. 

However, economic sanctions will be felt not only by Mr.Putin and his puppets, they will hit eventually the population, the first ones are already to be felt. No facebook, no twitter, no MacDonalds...Discussions are in full swing everywhere as to which extent Russian culture too will have to be avoided, excluded or even cancelled.....

 

March 9, 2022

 Russian-German pianist Igor Levit, left, and Russian sopranoa Anna Netrebko.Illustration by The New York Times; Photography by Stefanie Loos, Angelos Tzortzinis and mikroman6 via Getty Images

 

By Spencer Bokat-Lindell Staff Editor, Opinion

A specter is haunting Russia — the specter of cancellation.

As Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine enters its third week, conscientious consumers and businesses across the West have retaliated through what can be described only as a mass cultural boycott.

In Russia, Disney and Warner Bros. have paused theatrical releases, and McDonald’s, Starbucks and Coca-Cola have suspended their business operations. In the United States, liquor stores and supermarkets have pulled Russian vodka from their shelves, and the Metropolitan Opera cut ties with one of its most acclaimed sopranos after she criticized the war but refused to distance herself from Putin. And in the international arena, Eurovision, FIFA and the Paralympic Games have banned Russians from participating in this year’s competitions.

Twitter

Are these informal sanctions of Russian culture and business justified, and can they alter the course of the war? Or are these histrionic gestures that risk stigmatizing an entire population for the crimes of one autocrat? And what does the invocation of “cancel culture” — as both a rhetorical cliché and a material phenomenon — reveal about the way the war is being metabolized through social media? Here’s what people are saying. The case for cancellation About a century ago, sanctions emerged on the world stage as an alternative to conventional warfare, an “economic weapon” intended to impose such a high burden on a country’s political elite that it would be forced to change its behavior. While conceived as a tool to be wielded by nation-states against other nation-states, they can also be levied — however haphazardly — by nonstate actors against other nonstate actors, as we’re now seeing. In the arts, Javier C. Hernández reports for The Times, organizations are facing pressure from donors, board members, audiences and social media users to fire Russian artists who do not distance themselves from Putin or fail to speak out with sufficient fervor against the war. Such campaigns are not unprecedented, as some commentators have pointed out. Twitter But vetting artists for their political beliefs and ties raises difficult questions. “What is the point at which cultural exchange — always a blur between being a humanizing balm and a tool of propaganda, a co-opting of music’s supposed neutrality — becomes unbearable?” asks Zachary Woolfe, The Times’s classical music editor. “What is sufficient distance from authoritarian leadership? And what is sufficient disavowal, particularly in a context when speaking up could threaten the safety of artists or their families?” For the Russian-born pianist Igor Levit, the issue isn’t so complicated. “Being a musician does not free you from being a citizen, from taking responsibility,” he commented on his Instagram account, adding the #StandWithUkraine hashtag. “Remaining vague when one man, especially the man who is the leader of your home country, starts a war against another country and by doing so also causes greatest suffering to your home country and your people is unacceptable.” Others have argued that athletics are the better cultural theater in which to wage war against Putin. “Sanctions against Putin in the sphere of games have a reach unlike any other because they leave him sweatingly exposed to the only audience he really fears or courts: the Russians in the street,” Sally Jenkins argues in The Washington Post. “His brand of shirtless belligerent patriotism — his macho nationalism — has been a long con, and it’s no small thing to knock him off medal podiums and expose the lifts in his shoes, or to rip off his judo belt and show the softening of his belly and, in turn, weaken his influence.” Twitter So far, the cultural backlash doesn’t seem to have done much to get Putin to change course — and may even be playing into his preferred narrative of Russia being victimized by the West. Yet the longer the country’s cultural isolation persists, “the more chance such measures have of breaking through the state’s narrative,” Yasmeen Serhan writes for The Atlantic. “If ordinary Russians can no longer enjoy many of the activities they love, including things as quotidian as watching their soccer teams play in international matches, seeing the latest films, and enjoying live concerts, their tolerance for their government’s isolationist policies will diminish.” The risk of a new Russophobia When holding a country’s people responsible for the transgressions of its political system, how do you decide whom it’s fair to punish? In Russia’s case, the economist Tyler Cowen argues that you can’t. “It is simply not possible to draw fair or accurate lines of demarcation,” he writes in Bloomberg. “What about performers who may have favored Putin in the more benign times of 2003 and now are skeptical, but have family members still living in Russia? Do they have to speak out?” Another question: “Who exactly counts as Russian? Ethnic Russians? Russian citizens? Former citizens? Ethnic Russians born in Ukraine?” Tricky moral calculus aside, the utility of these informal sanctions is still very much in doubt. “None of these measures will reduce the Ukraine war’s life span by a minute, let alone a day,” Jack Schafer argues in Politico. “It would be a mistake to even proclaim these gestures symbolic because they don’t really symbolize anything meaningful about the war,” he adds, noting that only about 1.5 percent of all vodka consumed in the United States comes from Russia. Twitter At worst, critics warn that these cancellation campaigns directed at ordinary Russians could backfire. “Contrary to expectations, making life harder for the population can bind them to the rulers who blame outside interference,” writes Samuel Goldman, an associate professor of political science at George Washington University. “Even when sanctions succeed in destabilizing the regimes they target, new dictators may come to power under conditions of economic collapse and social disorder.” A potential rise in anti-Russian bigotry is another concern. Already in the West, The Washington Post reports, people of Russian descent or association are reporting a rise in discriminatory attacks, comments and refusals of service from local businesses. In New York City, some Russian restaurants have seen a decline in customers. Twitter What might a more targeted informal sanctions regime look like? In Mondoweiss, Jonathan Ofir, an Israeli-born musician, suggests looking to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which calls — controversially, to be sure — for an end to the Israeli government’s occupation of Palestinian land captured in 1967, among other demands. The B.D.S. movement claims to reject on principle boycotts based on individuals’ identities, opinions or mere affiliation with Israeli cultural institutions. Rather, only those who represent the State of Israel or participate in Israel’s efforts to “rebrand” its occupation are targeted for sanctions. Insofar as measures are being taken against Russians with no apparent ties to their leader, “the B.D.S. movement takes a softer boycott than what was applied to apartheid South Africa, and than the one now readily applied to Russia,” Ofir says. When it comes to Russian goods, though, the biggest pressure point is fossil fuels, which are not within the average person’s ability to boycott. President Biden did take the striking step on Tuesday of banning imports of Russian oil and natural gas. But Europe, which is much more dependent on Russian energy, has not yet demonstrated the same resolve, and continues to pay Russia hundreds of millions of dollars every day for fuel. Twitter From culture war to actual war As Kyle Chayka writes for The New Yorker, the invasion of Ukraine is by no means the first conflict to play out over social media. But it is perhaps the first war to be mediated primarily by content creators and live-streamers rather than by traditional news organizations. As people and institutions watch the war get spun into content in real time, they react to it as social media has trained them to: through arguably superficial displays of solidarity, entreaties to practice self-care, the reflexive lionization of political figures, Twitter clapbacks (in one case, between the Russian and German Embassies in South Africa), and a desperate desire to be — or at least appear — useful. The cancellation of Russian cultural figures and products can be understood as a successive step in this familiar choreography. “This is the globalization of moral outrage,” the Times columnist Thomas Friedman writes. “It goes from watching a short video online showing Russian soldiers firing on a Ukrainian nuclear energy facility to an employee posting that video on his or her Facebook page to a group of employees emailing their bosses or going on Slack — not to ask their C.E.O.s to do something but to tell them they have to do something or they will lose workers and customers.” This decentralized response — “a kind of global ad hoc pro-Ukraine-resistance-solidarity-movement,” as Friedman calls it — is arguably quite inspiring. But there’s a danger to it too, Friedman warns: While nation-states may choose to lift their sanctions at some point for realpolitik reasons, everyone else may not. “When Anonymous, the global hacker consortium, announced that it was attempting to take down Russian websites, that was not by government order; it just acted on its own,” he writes. “Who does Russia call to get Anonymous to accept a cease-fire?”   READ MORE “The Russian Cultural Boycotts Are Going Too Far” [The New Republic] “With war in Ukraine, companies seem less wary of political involvement” [The New York Times] “Are bans against Russian arts targeting the right people?” [Deutsche Welle] “A Breakdown of Cultural Institutions Boycotting Russian Involvement” [Vulture] “To Boycott Russians, or Not? In Film and Beyond, That’s the Question.” [The New York Times]   Related Debates: - War/03.03.2022 - War on the horizon???/04.02.2022    #PutinsWar   #StandingWithUkraine

Continue reading the main story

 

War

Since 24 February 2022 the world is ticking differently. After 2 years of a worldwide pandemic our language has to get used to words labeling not any longer an invisible adversary but a human ennemie, after nearly 77 years of peace, Europe is facing a war. Putin's attack of the Ukraine, having been a possibility for a couple of weeks, came when most politicians and simple folks still thought he wouldn't dare this kind of aggression. Heavy reply sanctions would weaken Russia's economy enormously and it was hoped that Putin wouldn't go for that. How wrong we had been. 

Now we see not only soldiers on both sides dying and getting injured, we see civilians fleeing, civilians hiding in bunkers, cellars, metro stations, civilians shot at, towns under siege like Mariupol, being cut off electricity, food, water, heating and transport. 

And we see that Putin might go even as so far as to risk a nuclear attack. The following text, again a debate within New York Times and sent to me by newsletter, is about that possibility.

 Illustration by The New York Times; photographs by SimpleImages, MicroStockHub and mikroman6, via Getty Images

By Spencer Bokat-Lindell Staff Editor, Opinion

Over the weekend, as his military laid siege to Ukraine for the fourth day, President Vladimir Putin ordered Russia’s nuclear forces into a higher state of alert, the first time the Kremlin has done so since the Russian Federation was established in 1991.

“This is unprecedented in the post-Cold War era,” Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association, a Washington nonprofit, told NBC. “There has been no instance in which a U.S. or a Russian leader has raised the alert level of their nuclear forces in a middle of a crisis in order to try to coerce the other side’s behavior.”

Since the end of the Cold War, it has been easy enough for most people to disregard the possibility of a nuclear attack; the conflict in Ukraine has thrust it back into view. How troubling is Putin’s escalation, and in what ways might the prospect of a nuclear exchange shape the outcome of this conflict? Here’s what people are saying.

What does Putin’s order mean?

Russia and the United States control 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons. Those weapons can be delivered by aircraft — as were the two atomic bombs that the United States used against Japan in World War II — or via submarine- or land-based missiles.

During the Cold War, as Robert Burns of The Associated Press explains, the United States and Russia maintained several times their current number of nuclear weapons, and kept them more closely at the ready. Shortly before the Soviet Union’s collapse, President George H.W. Bush took U.S. nuclear-armed bombers off alert in an effort to slow the nuclear arms race. But both nations have kept their land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles at a constant state of readiness. Capable of being launched within minutes, these missiles provided the bedrock of the “mutually assured destruction” strategy that U.S. nuclear doctrine credits with avoiding nuclear exchanges throughout the Cold War. How Putin’s order will change the status quo isn’t yet clear: In his televised announcement he issued only a vague command to his generals for “special combat readiness.” “If Russia’s alerts look anything like ours, this means that the crews and institutions that control strategic missiles, submarines and bombers will be told to make preparedness a higher priority,” Tom Nichols writes for The Atlantic. “They will cancel leaves, conduct inspections, check their communications and so on, and their intelligence organizations will devote more time and attention than usual to monitoring for indications of possible launches against Russia.” On Tuesday, the Russian military announced it had conducted drills involving nuclear submarines and mobile land-based missile launchers. But it’s not yet known — at least among the public — whether the exercises were directly related to Putin’s order or if they marked a change in the country’s standard nuclear operations. “Both Russia and the United States conduct drills that replicate various levels of nuclear alert status, so the choreography of such moves is well understood by both sides,” David E. Sanger and William J. Broad report for The Times. The United States and its allies monitor Russia’s nuclear forces around the clock, so “a deviation from usual practice would almost certainly be noticeable.” How worrying is Putin’s escalation? History is full of instances in which nuclear powers publicly threatened to use their arsenals. Matthew Kroenig, a professor of government and foreign service at Georgetown, pointed to the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, the 1969 border war between the Soviet Union and China, and the 1999 war between India and Pakistan, among other examples. (More recently, President Donald Trump threatened North Korea with “fire and fury like the world has never seen” after it conducted long-range missile tests.) Perhaps one of the closest precedents to the current moment occurred during the Yom Kippur War of 1973, when Arab states, then allied with the Soviet Union, launched attacks on Israel. As Nichols recounts, the Nixon administration responded by raising the United States’ nuclear alert level, albeit with no formal announcement. From a strategic standpoint, many experts say that there is no reason for Putin to use nuclear weapons: His goal, according to Paul Hare, a senior lecturer in global studies at Boston University, is to “swallow Ukraine” and restore the historical power of imperial Russia — not to instigate a nuclear exchange, which, if it did not bring about civilization’s end, would make him a pariah not just to the world’s democracies but also to China.Among those who see Putin’s order as incongruous with that goal, the move has raised questions about his state of mind. “It makes no sense,” said Graham Allison, a Harvard political scientist who worked on the project to decommission thousands of nuclear weapons that once belonged to the Soviet Union. He noted that the incident is “adding to the worry that Putin’s grasp on reality may be loosening.” Twitter Other experts, though, are skeptical of such conjecture. “I don’t fully subscribe to this view that Putin’s lost it completely,” Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard, told Yahoo News. “I always like to remind people, and occasionally remind my students, that plenty of leaders that we regarded as fairly smart and fairly sensible did dumb things in the past.” It’s also possible to see the alert as an attempt by Putin to guard against the threat of overthrow that he may see as the ultimate goal of the countries issuing sanctions. In the view of Pavel Podvig, an expert on Russia’s nuclear forces at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, Putin’s announcement could make his government less vulnerable to decapitation. Still, some experts and military officials warn that the risk for mistakes in a heightened state of alert is worrisome. “What would happen if the Russian warning system had a false alarm in the middle of a crisis like this?” Jeffrey Lewis, a senior scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, said on NPR. “Would Putin know it was a false alarm? Or would he jump to the wrong conclusion?” Twitter “I don’t think we should look at this as a threat by Putin to use nuclear weapons against the United States, against Europe, against NATO,” said Kimball. But, he added, “it’s a point in which both sides needs to back down and move the word ‘nuclear’ from this equation.” The United States seems to be doing just that. The Biden administration could have countered Putin’s order by putting its bombers, nuclear silos and submarines on a higher alert level. Instead, the White House made clear that it had not changed. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations also told the Security Council on Sunday that Russia was “under no threat” and chided Putin for “another escalatory and unnecessary step that threatens us all.” How nuclear weapons are shaping the terms of the Ukraine conflict and beyond Since the dawn of the Cold War, the logic of mutually assured destruction held that nuclear weapons would act as deterrents to full-scale nuclear conflict. One school of thought known as “nuclear revolution theory” posits that the proliferation of nuclear weapons has made the world safer by increasing the risk of aggression. The advent of nuclear weapons did coincide with a decades-long decline in war-related deaths among nuclear-armed states. But another theory holds that nuclear weapons can make conventional warfare more likely rather than less. It’s known in academic circles as the “stability-instability paradox”: Because nuclear-armed states feel secure in the knowledge that neither side will chance annihilation, they develop a larger risk appetite for crisis, escalation and violence at a smaller scale than full-blown war. Viewed through the lens of the stability-instability paradox, nuclear weapons may have actually laid the groundwork for the current conflict. “Russia can be relatively confident that the United States and its allies won’t come to Ukraine’s defense directly, because such a clash carries the threat of nuclear war,” Zack Beauchamp writes for Vox. “This could make Putin more confident that his invasion could succeed.” Perhaps the most destabilizing effect of Russia’s invasion, then, could be a renewed global thirst for nuclear weapons as a means of protecting national sovereignty, Ivan Krastev writes in The Times. He notes that at the Munich Security Forum this month, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine stated that his country had made a mistake in abandoning the nuclear weapons it inherited from the Soviet Union. In the face of a nuclear-armed China and North Korea, a large majority of South Koreans have also come to favor the development of a domestic nuclear weapons program. (The current prime minister of Japan, it should be said, has remained resolute in his country’s commitment to nonproliferation, calling the idea of hosting U.S. nuclear weapons “unacceptable.”) “I sense a period ending,” writes Mary Elise Sarotte, a historian at Johns Hopkins University, in The Times. “I am now deeply afraid that Mr. Putin’s recklessness may cause the years between the Cold War and the Covid-19 pandemic to seem a halcyon period to future historians, compared with what came after. I fear we may find ourselves missing the old Cold War.”   Related: - War on the horizon???/04.02.2022  #PutinsWar   #StandingWithUkraine