The idea of the 'culture wars' has been gaining ground over the last decade: Jay Doubleyou: culture wars
It is now one of the main fuels of our current politics: Jay Doubleyou: register: populism, culture wars and woke
CANCEL CULTURE
Soon after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in spring 2022, the NY Times looked at the 'culture wars':
Putin Goes Into Battle on a Second Front: Culture
March 2022
In a blast against “cancel culture,” he said the West is “canceling” Russia by going after “an entire thousand-year-old country, our people.”
Russia, Mr. Putin’s argument goes, is culturally superior, because it respects history and traditional values. Now, he says, the West is betraying its “Russophobia” by trying to “cancel” Russia itself, including its contributions to the arts and to history, particularly to the defeat of Nazi Germany.
Indeed, how broadly to punish Russian cultural figures in response to the war in Ukraine is a topic of debate around the world. Some have called for Russia’s total isolation, while others argue that blanket bans on all Russian entries at film festivals, for example, go too far.
In the main, however, relatively few Russian artists have been “canceled,” as Mr. Putin would have it. While there have been scattered examples of arts organizations in the West canceling Russian works and performers in the aftermath of Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the vast majority have continued to prominently feature Russian culture.
The Metropolitan Opera on Friday was opening a revival of Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin” featuring three Russian artists. That same night, the New York Philharmonic was performing Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony (next week, the orchestra will play Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev). The Chicago Symphony, meanwhile, is in the midst of a series of all-Tchaikovsky concerts.
To Mr. Putin, though, the idea that the West is rising up against all things Russian is a convenient foil. He had the conductor Valery Gergiev join him for Friday’s videoconference, which was held to mark Culture Workers’ Day in Russia and honored the winners of a Kremlin arts prize.
Mr. Gergiev, a prominent supporter of Mr. Putin, was removed from his post as chief conductor of the Munich Philharmonic this month after he refused to denounce the invasion of Ukraine. On Friday, Mr. Putin dangled what appeared to be a reward for Mr. Gergiev’s loyalty: He asked the conductor whether he was interested in “recreating a common directorate” that would unite the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow with the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg.
Putin Goes Into Battle on a Second Front: Culture - The New York Times
BEAUTIFUL WOMEN
And later that summer, there was an extraordinary short film issued by the Russian embassy in Madrid:
Time to move to Russia! - YouTube
It got a lot of attention at the time:
What to Know About That Video Titled, ‘Time to Move to Russia’
LANGUAGE
A year later. ABC news looked at the developing 'cultural war':
A report by PEN America published in Dec. 2022 said that “culture was on the frontlines” and that Putin “seeks not only to control Ukrainian territory, but to erase Ukrainian culture and identity.”
Olga Kozyrieva lives in the eastern settlement of Petropavlivka, Kharkiv region, which was occupied by Russian forces before being liberated in Ukraine’s counteroffensive in September last year. “Many children came here for books in Ukrainian,” Kozyrieva told ABC News, standing in the ruins of a school that was shelled. “But during the occupation, the Russians brought their own books and they wanted to teach our children the Russian language and literature.”
Families there said they hid Ukrainian books in their homes -- evidence that Russia was not just trying to take Ukrainians land, but turn it into Russia.
How the Russia-Ukraine conflict became a cultural war - ABC News
And, as the Kyiv Independent points out, language has become politicised: Explainer: Why do some Ukrainians speak Russian?
Or, as said on these pages: not every English/Swedish/German/Russian-speaker is English/Swedish/German/Russian [See also: Jay Doubleyou: language and politics in ukraine and Jay Doubleyou: language in ukraine: language maps and Jay Doubleyou: language in ukraine: mariupol greek]
WEAPONISING THE CULTURE WARS
In a piece from last year, the Global Government Forum looked at how this battle has become international, pushed by Russia:
Organised chaos: how Russia weaponised the culture wars
December 2024
Social divisions, conspiracy theories and populist politics are rife in the democratic world. And these are not just home-grown problems: Russia and other hostile states have deliberately stoked internal dissent, weakening their opponents overseas. As we enter a year during which more than two billion people will go to the polls, Global Government Forum is publishing a five-part report on foreign interference in elections – beginning with an explanation of Russia’s goals, and the threat its actions pose to democracy itself
Russia’s goals
Various states have sought to surreptitiously influence public debates and election results in the democratic world, including North Korea and Iran. But the big players are Russia and China, whose contrasting approaches illustrate the range of techniques available – with Russia taking a far more aggressive line.
Russia’s over-riding goal appears – in the words of the UK Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) – to be the “poisoning of the political narrative in the West by fomenting political extremism and ‘wedge issues’.” UK Labour Member of Parliament Ben Bradshaw – who is taking the UK government to the European Court of Human Rights over its failure to commission an independent investigation into Russian interference – tells GGF that “Russia’s strategic goals have been pretty clear for some time. Along with other hostile state actors in autocratic countries, it is to do whatever they can in their power to weaken, destabilise, question, and cause division in democratic countries”.
Sometimes, Russia does seek to build support for its own narrative, or to assist into positions of power those sympathetic to Putin’s world view. Trump is the obvious example: Russia’s interventions in the 2016 presidential election campaign remain its biggest single overseas influence operation (see below). But just as often, Putin backs any force likely to weaken and divide western nations – including the Scottish independence and Brexit campaigns. “With regards to the Brexit referendum, it was an openly stated objective of Putin’s that he wanted Britain to vote to leave the European Union,” says Bradshaw. “The allyship he showed with pro-Brexit and far-right politicians in this country was in plain sight.”
Russia regularly supports both sides in the West’s ongoing culture wars, simply to deepen social divisions and stoke anger. In 2016, for example, its Internet Research Agency (IRA) published nearly 600 YouTube videos and 30 Facebook pages about police violence against African-Americans: some of these attracted more visitors than the official Black Lives Matter page, according to a report commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee. The IRA used its influence, the report found, to stoke anger among African-Americans and to encourage them not to vote. At the same time, the New York Times found, Russian operatives were publishing ‘Blue Lives Matter’ material online – seeking to build support for the pro-police campaign established as a counterweight to Black Lives Matter.
Meanwhile, Russia works to undermine trust in public institutions, established information providers and mainstream media organisations – whittling away the shared truths that support the public discourse, and encouraging people to put their faith only in the partisan voices reinforcing their existing opinions. And it mounts very public attacks on election systems, with the goal of weakening trust in the elections process itself.
“We saw in the 2016 [presidential] election that there were attempts by Russia to manipulate the election,” comments Braw. The US elections system is secure, she says, and Russia did not alter the records of votes cast – but that isn’t the point: “They wanted the public to say: ‘Oh, Russia is interfering. I can’t trust the election system any more’,” she explains. “What matters is that people lose trust in the election system, because if you don’t think that the outcome represents the votes cast, then you won’t have any trust in the politicians elected through that election.”
Pursuing this tactic, Russia has found, can help boost populists in the West – building support for politicians who themselves further divide societies and weaken democracy. Donald Trump has, of course, spent the last four years claiming that the 2020 election was “stolen”: his attacks on the election system’s integrity serve both his own electoral interests, and Russia’s strategic goals.
RUSSIA, AMERICA, UKRAINE AND THE WAR ON CULTURE:
As Spiked magazine showed after the Trump/Zelensky meeting in the White House earlier in the year, this culture war is very much at the heart of the US response to the war in Ukraine:
Ukraine has become a casualty of America’s culture war
The anti-Ukraine set confuses right-wing boomer memes for reality.
March 2025
Zelensky’s absorption into the American culture war is not his fault, but it is a disaster for Ukraine. As a result, his pleas – about Russia’s tendency to ignore ceasefires, or about Ukraine’s heroism or its gratitude to the US – are falling on deaf ears. To Trump’s base, Zelensky is not a legitimate leader, but an international ‘welfare queen’.
Perhaps Zelensky does not yet grasp how much has changed since Trump took over. After the debacle in the White House, American officials issued a clear warning: Trump is playing a new game, and Zelensky has missed it. ‘There is a new sheriff in town’, as Vance said in Munich last month – and his name is Donald J Trump.
Ukraine has become a casualty of America’s culture war - spiked
The EuroMaiden Press also saw things this way:
How American “culture wars” became Russia’s actual war against Ukraine
The amount of DNA shared by Trumpism and Putinism may surprise you
byCyril Hovorun 27/03/2025
Donald Trump is not an ideologue. I believe big ideas or big questions never interested him. He is more of an opportunist who utilizes ideas — to the extent he is capable of understanding them. During his second term, he relies on ideas more than during his first term, when he relied mostly on conspiracy theories.
As a political animal with strong instincts, he feels that ideologies have more power to consolidate his power. That is why he has decided to create ample room around himself for various ideologues who have big ideas and look for opportunities to test them in real politics. Two opportunisms, thus, meet together and drive Trump’s policies.
Ideologues crowding around Trump represent varying lines and trends: neoconservative, libertarian, post-liberal, etc. Their common denominator is a vigorous opposition to liberalism, which they identify, somehow confusingly, with the Democratic Party. They all are also “culture wars” warriors determined to win these wars, whatever it takes, and showing no mercy to their ideological enemies. Most of them are “burned out” liberals.
In the words of Curtis Yarvin, they are “dark elves” who became disappointed in their “elvish” liberal ideals...
Russian war propagandists claim that they invaded Ukraine to fight Western liberalism and Ukrainian identity. Therefore, by the way, Putin promotes ethnic Ukrainians with Russian identity to key positions—from negotiators to generals. He thereby wants to show that those who, in his view, are “real” Ukrainians cannot have their own identity different from Russian. Putin and his propagandists equate Ukrainian identity with Russophobia.
Thus, Putin’s war is a violent form of American culture wars, with their dichotomization between “liberal” and “conservative” ideologies. This is not the first time that Russia has borrowed Western ideological schemes and turned them into weapons. The most striking example is Soviet Communism. It took as its basis Karl Marx’s ideas and their interpretation by Western socialism theorists and established a totalitarian regime that caused a bloody bath for its own and neighboring peoples...
That is why many Americans who are at the forefront of their “culture wars” have such irresistible sympathies for Putinism. This enhances the bond between Putinism and Trumpism, which share the same DNA.
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