Putin compares war in Ukraine with criticism of J.K. Rowling and says the West is trying to 'cancel' Russia.
archived 26 Mar 2022 01:20:27 UTC
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It was a big Sensible Chuckle(tm) watching the brains of not just every Ex-Something Awful LF goon but anyone even vaguely adjacent fry in real time when that quote dropped. Fun knife-twisty insult, a bit incoherent but that doesn't matter. Just another episode that causes all the people who've been endlessly fedposting about how much they want a world without amerika to immediately double back without even thinking the second it briefly flashes into their brains what that world would actually look like.
There's an omission here of something that Putin and his audience take for granted but the 10s of thousands of liberal dunktweeters are taking advantage of, and it's the fact that the u.s. west has been on autopilot for so long that it can now afford to cull media influencers over increasingly smaller infractions. It's kind of obvious that Rowling is, in every way but one big fat one, a standard-issue western liberal and imperialist. She worked with the same PR agency that gave us Bana Alabed and supported her, so she supported US Syrian intervention. Putin and a Russian audience are going to take that for granted coming in, US shitlibs aren't. But that doesn't matter, because the u.s. war machine is on autopilot and public support for/opposition to it is increasingly irrelevant. In fact even most American Marxists are so liberal they don't so much as bring her imperialism up when
unloading on Rowling and her supporters.
Putin's outsider view is his downfall here - he imagines a far more internally coherent US society than what actually exists. His day-to-day existence is concerned with the business end of the United States - the one that sends money/weapons/support/supplies to the neonazis on his doorstep, the one that drops 46 bombs on average somewhere in the world every day. The hell it unleashes on the globe is very different from the virtual world it has become on the inside.
He kinda knows that the US and Russia practice incredibly different forms of censorship. He just, naturally, thinks his is better. In Russia, censorship is handled by the authorities, who "deplatform" people directly by blocking sites, shutting down newspapers, directing TV/radio stations, just arresting you, etc. In the US, it's always been various forms of outsourced, group-based soft marginalization. It "feels" more like the tyranny of the majority, more democratic, since it's ostensibly the decisions of individuals based on norms/beliefs/etc. Social media just merged it with a sort of social bounty system, made it look nastier but more populous. "Cancel culture" is the ultimate thought-terminating cliche for describing this system, and it's escaped the language barrier.
In short, I doubt Putin likes or supports Rowling, this is more a commentary on the kinds of priorities people in the American media blob have. Her opinions on trans stuff are of course stupid, but I doubt any of the Hatian teenagers sewing together Hufflepuff underwear right now care very much about them.