Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
(Please send me links to any examples I've missed, I'll add them to this post. Also feel free to send this post elsewhere and use it as agitprop. )
CNN
It’s one thing for sarin gas to be used on people in far away Syria who are Muslim and of a different culture. What is Europe going to do when it is on European soil, done to Europeans?
-- Julia Ioffe
CBS News
This isn't a place ... like Iraq or Afghanistan that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilized, relatively European ... city where you wouldn't expect that, or hope that it's going to happen.
BBC News
'It's very emotional for me because I see European people with blue eyes and blonde hair...being killed every day by Putin's missiles'
Al Jazeera
What's compelling is just looking at them, the way they're dressed, these are prosperous...middle class people. These are not obviously refugees trying to get away from areas in the middle east that are still in a big state of war, these are not people trying to get away from areas in north Africa, they look like any European family that you would live next door to.
NBC News
These are not refugees from Syria, these are refugees from neighbouring Ukraine....These are Christians, so, white, they're very similar to people who live in Poland
ITV News
Now the unthinkable has happened to them, and this is not a developing, third world nation, this is Europe.
BFM TV
We’re not talking here about Syrians fleeing the bombing of the Syrian regime backed by Putin, we’re talking about Europeans leaving in cars that look like ours to save their lives.
The Telegraph
They seem so like us. That is what makes it so shocking. War is no longer something visited upon impoverished and remote populations. It can happen to anyone
Other examples
French media doing the same
Bulgarian PM
These are not the refugees we are used to. They are Europeans, intelligent, educated people, some are IT programmers...this is not the usual refugee wave of people with an unknown past. No European country is afraid on them.
Black people blocked from escaping Ukraine/entering nearby countries
A Nigerian medical student at Poland/Ukraine border (Medyka-Shehyni) told me she has been waiting 7hrs to cross, she says border guards are stopping black people and sending them to the back of the queue, saying they have to let 'Ukrainians' through first.
Official Ukrainian National Guard Twitter account
Azov fighters of the National Guard greased the bullets with lard against the Kadyrov orcs
Denmark likely to exempt Ukrainians from controversial refugee jewllery law
A controversial law allowing Danish authorities to confiscate valuable items from refugees is unlikely to be applied to Ukrainians who seek protection in the Nordic country.
Others (unconfirmed/unverified)
We are currently at the Ukraine-Poland border. Their Police and Army refused to let Africans cross they only allow Ukrainian.
Ukrainian forces brutally beating Indian Students in Ukraine after India abstained on UN vote against Russia.
Links in order, all archived
https://web.archive.org/web/20220227200905/https://twitter.com/incontextmedia/status/1497608440134340610
https://web.archive.org/web/20220227201110/https://twitter.com/jrc1921/status/1497718700547346433
https://web.archive.org/web/20220227201116/https://twitter.com/DocRobotnivik/status/1497895651887271938
https://web.archive.org/web/20220227201122/https://twitter.com/ruchirsharma_1/status/1497655099979714563
https://web.archive.org/web/20220227201127/https://twitter.com/jrc1921/status/1497878168216252416
https://web.archive.org/web/20220227201131/https://twitter.com/RioMoussallem/status/1497535170450231301
https://web.archive.org/web/20220227201135/https://twitter.com/Telegraph/status/1497652701890555914
https://web.archive.org/web/20220227201145/https://twitter.com/PierreABISAAB/status/1497592136329531394
https://web.archive.org/web/20220227201146/https://twitter.com/VictorPPetrov/status/1497600362626359296
https://web.archive.org/web/20220227201149/https://twitter.com/TihomirSabchev/status/1497264454236610563
https://web.archive.org/web/20220227201151/https://twitter.com/stephhegarty/status/1497603013799784449
https://web.archive.org/web/20220227200242/https://twitter.com/ng_ukraine/status/1497924614865002497
https://web.archive.org/web/20220227201157/https://twitter.com/nzekiev/status/1497805019311218689
https://web.archive.org/web/20220227201159/https://twitter.com/Damilare_arah/status/1497654141350522880
https://web.archive.org/web/20220227201208/https://twitter.com/Damilare_arah/status/1497650917088374790
i used to say stalin should have kept going til he got back to moscow but he should have then done a whole other pass just to be sure. fuck.
Stalin should've used his comically big spoon to scoop up the reactionaries and fling them into outer space :sadness:
He can’t do that because he’ll fall off the edge of the planet once he reaches past the US
They seem so like us. That is what makes it so shocking. War is no longer something visited upon impoverished and remote populations. It can happen to anyone
This is making me so fucking angry. The fucking inhumanity dripping from this statement, as if War is just something passive that YOUR fucking countries and countrymen haven't visited upon those 'impoverished and remote' populations. Fuck you. Shit like this makes me want to just not even give a fuck about the plight of the people being affected by all this. What would it mean to someone from all the war torn countries to see shit like this and wonder why they should care about an invaded populace that largely views them as savages?
Yes, it's really rough to see the mask torn off of the West so suddenly and with such a fever pitch the likes which we haven't seen since 7/11
Love the “relatively civilized, relatively European” remark by that one guy. If Russia wasn’t involved, they wouldn’t give a shit about Ukraine.
How can a country literally in europe be only relativly European? What is going through these peoples brains?
I see, they arent fully civilized because starbucks still exists in some form in the country
The cheese and wine Europeans always have looked down on the slavic Europeans.
Yep, there are still people in the US who think White Catholics aren't really "white" in the same sense they are. (white Catholics are really fucking white)
And get a Br*t talking about Polish plumbers and the racism just falls out.
Whiteness is a social construct.
One sec. Texas State Sheriffs at the door, saying I'm not allowed to read this.
I find it curious how a right wing shithole like Russia still voted against Nazism. WW2 really must have been traumatic
I don't know how true it is but the Russian nationalists also hate the Nazis apparently.
I guess maybe they were just assholes. I heard after the fall of the USSR the entire place was absolutely overrun with the shitheads to the point it was borderline unliveable. Some guy on leftypol or reddit told me that he actually liked Putin because he cracked down on them like crazy when he took power. It still seems like they have a lot but they way the guy described it to me it seemed like there were organized, roving gangs terrorizing everyone with impunity
reposting from the megathread:
from the ukrainian national guard twitter account
Azov fighters of the National Guard greased the bullets with lard against the Kadyrov orcs
https://twitter.com/ng_ukraine/status/1497924614865002497
:what-the-hell:
What the fuck is the deal with orcs, I know they were an expy by Tolkein of racist shit (just from the description and them "coming from the east") but it's so weird to see them get re-appropriated as real world racist terms. Red Kahina used it too.
I hate the "were the orcs intentionally racist or was that just an accidental undertone?" discourse so much
I don't know the actual answer to your question but I think it's just dehumanization.
All the lib responses
this looks bad
this is propaganda fuel for Putin!
And my favorite
maybe you should delete/rethink this
Rethink as in they should hire an HR consultant and have a “sensitivity training” as do all these US corporate boards?
:agony-shivering:
i think what's amazing to me is that there is a case to be made here about the gravity of the situation because nato and russia are egging each other on in a much more direct way than they have in recent memory.. but no let's be astonished because this are white people (or almost white people, i guess)
I have had european friends who most of the time have good takes on refugees, social justice, capitalism, and so on, confide to me that when it feels geographically close, it just feels different. I think it's hard to fully decolonize your rational mind, and your emotions/automatic reactions are even harder. They acknowledge that it's a shitty thing to feel, and that they should not act like they care more, but they are scared for themselves and their families, and that's a very human thing to do.
Jesus Christ... The comments on RT's Telegram is a cesspool of antisemitism, homophobia and demands for planet-scaled nuclear murder-suicide. NATO are monsters but this war seems to have made everyone into war-crazed psychos.
Yeah. It’s fucked.
homophobia, transphobia
There’s at least one of these telegram channels that consistently uses the rainbow flag and trans liberation flag to mock EU and NATO. Which is such a fucking cesspool of fucks given how the latter and the US and of course Israel deliberately “queer-wash” their war crimes. And now it’s being perpetuated. Fuck
India and China organized for their students to be evacuated from Ukraine
The Chinese ambassador who’s still at Kiev released a video statement yesterday explaining that evacuating people by flight right now is probably more dangerous than staying put. He also had to ask the Chinese citizens in Ukraine to basically hide who they are. There’s info circulating in Ukraine that that China is backing Russia, etc, and the statement mentions that “aggressive and unfriendly” behaviors have already occurred to some Chinese there.
I’ve seen a few videos from young Chinese uni students at Kiev and Kharkiv saying that they don’t feel safe going into the shelters cuz everyone has guns and, I think one can imply, uncertainty about what the Ukrainians think of China/the Chinese right now.
murdering chinese people in cold blood would just bait PRC from ambivalence into openly supporting the russians in this war imo. the prc has a great relationship with ukraine before the war (their first carrier, the liaoning, was purchased from ukraine in the late 1990s.)
Yup, I feel Chechnya and Georgia were a little too "Muslim" for Americans to rally the right jingoistic fervor.
Georgia
like the second christian country ever, named in english after their patron saint lmao
I read that Putin brought Chechens on because he knew that Russians and Ukrainians would judge them based on stereotypes. It worked. Not only Russians and Ukrainians, but westerners too. Lots of talk of “savages” now getting involved in the war
Al Jazeera picked up some of these (even reported on their own reporter lol) :
BFM TV
We’re not talking here about Syrians fleeing the bombing of the Syrian regime backed by Putin, we’re talking about Europeans leaving in cars that look like ours to save their lives.
The Telegraph
They seem so like us. That is what makes it so shocking. War is no longer something visited upon impoverished and remote populations. It can happen to anyone
Bulgarian PM
These are not the refugees we are used to. They are Europeans, intelligent, educated people, some are IT programmers...this is not the usual refugee wave of people with an unknown past. No European country is afraid on them.
I don't have the video ready rn, but I posted this today
https://hexbear.net/post/177013/comment/2195083
I've got it open in the background now so I'll try to catch it, but if you find a video let me know and I'll add it
