The Czech President Said The Silent Part About Russophobia Out Loud

Leading media across the Global South should make sure that all non-Westerners are aware of this scandal, both what Czech President Petr Pavel initially implied about internment camps and then what he later said about “monitoring” people solely on the basis of their ethno-national identity.

Czech President Petr Pavel is trying to walk back his proposal from last week about what he thinks should happen to Russians living in the West, which he implied could resemble the US’ internment of Japanese during World War II. This former Chairman of the NATO Military Committee justified that scenario as “simply a cost of war”, but he now claims that his words were misinterpreted. Several days later, Pavel spun his proposal as only suggesting “general monitoring of what is going on in that community”.

The soft power damage is already done, however, since he said the silent part about Russophobia out loud. It’s a form of bigotry that’s no different from antisemitism, Islamophobia, and racism, and just like those three much more well-known examples of discrimination, its proponents also envisage restricting their targeted group’s rights. At the very least, Pavel is proposing to make ethnic Russians and that country’s nationals uncomfortable by putting them under state scrutiny solely because of their identity.

This contradicts the official principles of the so-called ‘rules-based order’ that Western liberal-globalists always rant about, but the dark truth is that it’s actually fully consonant with what they truly have in mind. The pursuit of socio-political and legal equality between people of different identities is noble and everyone should support it, but what’s ignoble is exploiting this concept as an ideological weapon for destabilizing other countries, which is condemnable.

In this context, the West accuses its geopolitical rivals of violating minorities’ rights while claiming that they themselves prioritize their protection, yet now one of their own leaders is publicly lobbying for the violation of their Russian minorities’ rights on national security pretexts. It’s already bad enough that the West has ‘canceled’ everything connected to Russia on the false basis of ‘solidarity’ with Ukraine, but it’s even worse that this evolved to the point of openly talking about scrutinizing that community.

Advocates of this policy might defend it by claiming that those without anything to hide shouldn’t have a problem with the state snooping on their activities, yet these people don’t extend credence to that explanation whenever advocates of their geopolitical rivals’ allegedly bigoted policies say the same. This double standard is typical of the ‘rules-based order’ and exposes its official principles as nothing but ideological weapons for discrediting other countries and encouraging their minorities to revolt.

Up until Pavel shared his proposal last week that he ominously compared to the US’ internment of Japanese during World War II, the West’s supporters could claim that their de facto New Cold War bloc learned from its history of human rights abuses at home during that time. That was never believable to begin with for those who are informed of everything that took place in the proceeding decades, but a certain proportion of people still fall for it.

Even fewer would do so now after what Pavel just suggested despite him trying to walk back his words, which only confirmed that he does indeed envisage violating the rights of the West’s Russian minority even if he unconvincingly claims says that he didn’t have internment camps in mind. The cat’s out of the bag after he said the silent part about Russophobia out loud, which proves that everything that the West alleges about its geopolitical rivals violating their own minorities’ human rights is just projection.  

Leading media across the Global South should make sure that all non-Westerners are aware of this scandal, both what Pavel initially implied about internment camps and then what he later said about “monitoring” people solely on the basis of their ethno-national identity. His infamous words shatter whatever impression the naïve among them might have had about the West’s so-called ‘moral high ground’, which can help ‘deprogram’ their populations and thus inoculate them from future ideological viruses.