During world war two there was quite a rise of xenophobia against Japonese because of the acts of the Japonese empire, do you feel like xenophobia against you has increased in the past years?
You you are also from a ““enemy”” country from the US, you may also give away your experience.
Not really. Mostly online there’s some bloodthirst that can be disappointing, but I know how this works so I get it, it’s not the worst thing happening right now.
I think casual counterproductive xenophobia with e.g. Linux kernel banning russian maintainers supposedly as opposed to people explicitly involved with the war or gov’t is also disappointing.
Back before the war, a lot of my western friends in the UK were either Putin apologists, whenever I’d bring up my persecution as a trans person in Russia, they’d laught if off or say something like “I just like Putin, he’s so funny”. It’s been enjoyable watching them be silent now. It’s been less enjoyable to see them follow Farage and Trump and similar paternalistic populist “charismatic” leaders though.
No quantity of “I told you so” will ever get through to them, a lot of westerners are too close minded and westcentric and they don’t always have the capacity to have discussions about geopolitics that don’t necessarily relate directly to them.
At the outset of the war, literally on day 1 iirc, I was dating somebody from Ukraine, and we had a lot more common ground and ability to discuss geopolitics, probably helps both of us were really engaged leftists at the time.
Hugs, hope you are in a safer place now! I hope that that Putin hits the dust soon.
Thanks! Yeah I’m in the UK, not great, not terrible, and I hope whoever comes after is better but I honestly can’t even begin to speculate how you could actually permanently fix Russia’s jingoism.