Russia got violent, Ukraine got game, and now, the rest of the West has gotten aggressively stupid. For years, we refused to punish Vladimir Putin diplomatically, let alone with something as easy as sanctions, only to respond to the wannabe dictator’s attempt to restore his Soviet empire with the only thing our Western cultural and political elites seem to do well these days: pure virtue-signaling for maximum cringe with minimal effect.
While the United States continues to import more than 600,000 barrels of oil a day from Russia, the rest of the nation’s power players have responded to the post-modernist plea to #DoSomething with the metaphorical black square Instagram post of 2022.
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Governors from both sides of the aisle have united to ban Russian booze from bars, with some such as Republican Spencer Cox going as far as forcing Utah’s liquor stores to remove even Russian-branded vodka from their shelves. The Metropolitan Opera has dumped Russian soprano Anna Netrebko for failing to call out the dictator who may lord over her friends and family, and the International Cat Association, founded in Missouri and now headquartered in Texas, announced that cats bred in Russia are barred from international competitions.
(Luckily, it seems that the removal of the movie-musical Anastasia from Disney+ had nothing to do with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, lest the Hollywood giant notoriously on its knees for Xi Jinping have to finally pretend to give a damn about human rights abuses.)
Hammering Putin’s economic engine is one thing. In a sane world, no ethical consumer would want to fund human rights atrocities of any kind, whether they be fuel-funded incursions on Kyiv or slave-made sneakers from Xinjiang, especially when the concession required not to do so is as minimal as expanding domestic drilling and moving manufacturing to fellow Second World nations not currently engaged in genocide or catastrophic contributions to climate change.
But the U.S. and the rest of the West refuse to do the bare minimum to stop Putin, rendering all of this posturing more laughable than “freedom fries” and more pathetic than our flagrant refusal literally last month to boycott the Chinese Communist Party’s Olympics, especially now that we know (as any reasonable person had deduced) Russia specifically waited until after to invade Ukraine.
We didn’t boycott the Sochi Olympics two and a half minutes after Putin passed a law criminalizing LGBT “propaganda” or two and a half seconds before he had annexed Crimea. We didn’t boycott the Beijing Olympics knowing full well not just about the Uyghur genocide but also about the pandemic the Chinese Communist Party likely let escape from a lab, unleashed upon the world, and then lied about for two and a half years. What makes any person with the immense privilege of living in the Western Hemisphere think for a second that Paramount refusing to release Sonic the Hedgehog 2 in Russia will do anything at all?
We are not risking nuclear war, and thus the very real risk of the annihilation of humanity, for a nation we did not admit into NATO, much less one that we won’t even stop consuming Russian oil for. But at the very least, can we please stop acting like we’re doing something when we’re doing something actively worse than nothing? Performing solidarity while profiting from the enemy.
