Western nations and their lapdog allies are falling over themselves to impose the most ridiculous sanctions on Russia. The high point, or low point depending on your point of view, would probably have to be the international council that judges pedigree cats which booted out Russia in a tumultuous display of feline ferocity. The competition’s organisers for one brief moment made themselves newsworthy.
Which is the point – they got some attention. It’s virtue signaling gone to its extremes, and virtue signaling is just about the only thing left that the West knows how to do.
Keep in mind that this feline judging group is a private entity. They are not related to any government. They have not been told to do this. Rather, they are doing it off their own bat. Someone woke up in the morning, turned on CNN, sucked down the latest bout of lies, rose up from the table and raised their arms to the ceiling and declared, “From this day no Russian cats will take home the trophies!” Tell me that I’m wrong, that it didn’t happen that way. Of course it did, because that scene is ridiculous but the whole West has gone up its own backside in levels of ridiculousness not seen since the pitch of the film that would become Animal House.
Russians are now being actively persecuted in the West by private companies. Take this story of the Russian woman living in Amsterdam who had her rental contract cancelled by the company that manages her house. There is no legal justification for this, but courts around the West will do as they are told by the political whims of the day. They judge based upon feelings and mood, not law. So she will lose.
We are not yet at war with Russia but we are acting as if that already was the case. Which is astonishing. I have had conversations with people in the Netherlands who are justifiably concerned at what might happen to their families if real war breaks out, while in the same breath they will solemnly declare that Russia must be punished. It seems as if the citizens of Europe in particular live in a fantasy land where they can act against others but retaliation is not supposed to return in kind. In their minds, this would not be fair. Because they are European and thus they are good.
I have seen reports that universities are removing from their curriculums works by Russian writers. Very serious works by guys like Dostoevsky. This sort of thing never happened in the entire history of the Cold War. It could be argued that we don’t have real universities anymore, that these places are simply bastions of virtue signaling, which is true. But this argument omits the effect that this virtue signaling has. Because during the Cold War, the Soviet Union banned just about everything from the West, which was a symptom of its underlying totalitarianism. But it was the Soviet government that enforced the banning.
Today, the situations have been reversed. And private companies and individuals are taking it upon themselves to act in this way without being forced to by our governments. Which makes us many degrees worse than the Soviet Union. And this makes sense when you examine the bigger picture. The West virtue signals because it has no virtue. The West turned its collective back on God and now it acts as if it exists in a Godless world. Which means that we are the baddies.
Originally published at Pushing Rubber Downhill. You can purchase Adam’s books here.