The 'Russians are really Asiatics (sic) at heart' meme has long been used by Westerners, both to demonize Russians
and to excuse Russian misbehavior. For instance, some Western sympathizers have attempted to rationalize the Soviet
soldiers' mass rapes of German women as 'natural' because Russians have been under 'Mongolian' cultural influence,
as if German women had nothing to fear from the 'civilized' white Soviet soldiers.
"Pan-Mongolism--though the word is strange,
My ear acclaims its gongs."
--Vladimir Solovyov
"You are the millions, we are multitude
And multitude and multitude.
Come, fight! Yea, we are Scythians,
Yea, Asians, a squint-eyed, greedy brood."
--Alexander Blok
"They are 'civilised' and 'look like us': the racist coverage of Ukraine.
Are Ukrainians more deserving of sympathy than Afghans and Iraqis? Many seem to think so."
--Moustafa Bayoumi
"These comments point to a pernicious racism that permeates today’s war coverage and seeps into its fabric like a stain
that won’t go away. The implication is clear: war is a natural state for people of color, while white people naturally gravitate
toward peace."
"The people of Ukraine need our solidarity. But not just because they’re ‘like us’"
--Kenan Malik
"In 1857, the English poet and Chartist leader
wrote a series of articles in the
People’s Paper about the
“Indian Mutiny” of that year. It was, he observed, no “mutiny” but a “national insurrection” that Britons should support as
much as they had supported similar struggles in Europe. Britons were “on the side of Poland” when it “struggled for its
freedom against Russia”. If Poland was “right”, Jones insisted, then “so is Hindostan”."
"the belief that our capacity to empathise with people’s hopes, fears and suffering is defined by whether they are “like us”.
It’s an argument that circumscribes solidarity along lines of identity. One of the ironies of much rightwing criticism of
identity politics is the obliviousness to their own wallowing in the swamp of identity.
There is an irony, too, in that the place of eastern Europeans and of Russians in the western imagination has always been ambiguous.
Today, Europeans might embrace Ukrainians as “one of us”. It has not always been so. There is a long history of bigotry towards Slavs,
of viewing them as primitive and “Asiatic”."
"The 1917 Russian Revolution was cast by many in racial terms. The prominent white supremacist Lothrop Stoddard viewed the
Russian population as “made up chiefly of primitive racial strains… which have always shown an instinctive hostility to civilisation”. Another American writer, Clinton Stoddard Burr, saw Bolshevism as “fundamentally an Asiatic conception which is repugnant to
the western mind”
"In 2018, the
Wall Street Journal on Putin’s diplomacy headlined “Russia’s Turn to Its Asian Past”.
"The boundaries of those who are “like us”, of those who are European, of even those who are considered “white”, are not
fixed but shift according to political and social need. And those ever-changing boundaries are defined as much by those
deemed to be not like us as by those whom we acknowledge are."
"The EU president Ursula von der Leyen
that Ukraine “belongs in the European family”. One of her first
acts on becoming EU president in 2019 was to move responsibility for immigration into
for “Promoting Our
European Way of Life”, the task of which included protecting it from “
”. Refugees from Ukraine are part of
the “European way of life”. Those from beyond are not. That is how boundaries are marked to delimit empathy and solidarity."
