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Comment by 88840-8855 | Hacker News Reader

What do you expect? The Russians are a pretty comfy enemy. From Call of Duty over Mission Impossible, we are familiar to the evil Russian, hence, those reactions are so satisfying to too many people, unfortunately.

I have Ukranian/Russian roots. My girl, born in Germany, was just pushed by classmates and called nasty words just last week in school.

This reminds me of the racism against Asian people when Covid appeared.

This war only has losers, the Ukranians, the Russian people, the Europeans, the Americans.

Edit: Somehow some posts were deleted from this thread, also my experience with Racism I have faced a few days ago. That is strange.

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Pretty much. San Francisco fired the SF Symphony Director because... he's from Russia.

Amazing how quickly our base, tribal instincts kick in when an "enemy" appears. All pretense to "peace" and "restraint" and "avoid foreign wars" goes out the window really damn quick.

If you're the kind of person who looks back and thinks "man, how could America be so stupid to get involved in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq"? Well, you're living in those times right now.

Hell, that's exactly why we put the Japanese in internment camps. Looks like a pretty good portion of HN would support that even now.

It works especially well when the enemy is somewhat predefined by the media and the general tropes and narratives in movies, games, books. The Chinese are evil, so are the Russians. Everyone knows that. Or Middle Eastern guys. They could be terrorists. All evil, we are good. Did you ever think that a Dutch or an Italian girl could be bad?

I told my child to say that she has Ukranian roots (which she has, my grandmother is from Ukraine) and deny her Russian roots after she was bullied last week in school. I tried to explain to her the situation and the motivation of those bullies.

I also deny my Russian roots in the volunteer group I support in my city here in Germany. They need Ukrainian/Russian speaking people to help to translate. When I first joined the coordination zoom chat of one group and it was my turn to introduce myself and mentioned my Russian roots (to explain why I speak Russian), I got banned. I later joined another group and there only mentioned my Ukrainian heritage. Now every day I help as a translator for the people who come to my city and I am very happy to do that.

I feel for your situation and I'm sure as a parent, the treatment your daughter is getting is the most painful of all.

As they cliche goes "the veneer of civilization is thin".

Wishing you the best during these difficult times.

Pretty much. San Francisco much fired the SF Symphony Director because... he's from Russia.

This isn't a thing that happened.

Looks like a pretty good portion of HN would support that even now.

No, it doesn't. "It's okay to freeze the assets of the oligarch collective currently invading a friendly nation" is quite far away from "let's round up Russians and put them into camps" and your comparison is ridiculous.

>Pretty much. San Francisco fired the SF Symphony Director because... he's from Russia.

Who would this be? A casual googling shows an individual from Finland has been the director since 2020. What am I missing here?

Looks like the story was updated.

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/San-Francisco-Symphon...

Director at SF Symphony lost a bunch of gigs because the Montreal Symphony cancelled a bunch of performances by a Russian pianist.

I'm French, this story makes my stomach wrench.

I'm very sorry to hear that. Kids are very eager to single out some other kids for the dumbest of reasons and attack them. Any difference might be a pretense for attack under the right conditions. I'm afraid that's how our species works naturally and there's a huge role of upbringing and education to silence those innate impulses in young people.

the worst part about this is, most Russians in the west are basically asylum seekers now. their state went full totalitarian in the last couple weeks. i'm trying hard to make delimit the difference between Russians and Putin, but it's hard to get ordinary people to listen. MSM does not like nuance at all.

> their state went full totalitarian in the last couple weeks

I’m sorry but a state does not go full totalitarian in a week. Putin has been in control for 20 years. This, was predictable and many had been predicting it for a long time.

What happened over the last couple weeks is that “authoritarianism” has lost its sheen. Russian-style strongman authoritarianism has bee a twinkle in the eye of a certain strain of American and Western politician for some years now (I’m looking at you Peter “Democracy and freedom are incompatible” Thiel and Fox News), and people who previously called Putin a strong and capable leader are now either having to get on board with a genocidal war, or eat crow.

A lot of people (on this site and elsewhere) are still even pushing the lines coming straight out of the kremlin (but biolabs! But nato aggression! Think of the poor oligarchs’ seized yachts! Can we really call the invasion and slaughter of Ukrainian people and cultural identity a a genocide?). It’s really quite sad how self proclaimed free thinkers on this site so obviously push the Russian propaganda being circulated in their conservative newsfeeds. These talking points go from the Kremlin, to Fox News, then back to Russia to be aired on RT, and at some point they make a stop here on HN by avid “free thinking“ consumers of this media.

you're contradicting yourself here:

> I’m sorry but a state does not go full totalitarian in a week. Putin has been in control for 20 years.

the point is that it has happened suddenly in the past couple of weeks; let arrests of top FSB officials speak for it.

> This, was predictable and many had been predicting it for a long time.

oh that is absolutely true. every child in eastern europe knows this. the point is, when it happens matters - and it just has.

> the point is that it has happened suddenly

My point is that invasions don’t happen suddenly. Even if the spark happened in the last few weeks, the preconditions to make this war possible had been laid for years. People pretending that they never saw this coming are the very same who have been cheering Putin and Russia on for years.

oh, there must've been a misunderstanding. yes, this particular invasion has been under preparation for at least months if not years; i'm talking about the country going full totalitarian oppressive basically overnight with a few new hastily introduced laws. this botched war has been the catalyst.

note that if not for these laws and arresting people holding blank pieces of paper, there would be a full-blown revolution in moscow now.

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