THERE’S no fever quite like war fever; when it rises, all becomes clear: it’s us vs them, black vs white, good vs evil, beef nihari vs tofu steaks. I’m sure you’ve gotten the picture.

And so, when the Russian invasion of Ukraine began — a project crafted and initiated solely by the latter-day Czar of Russia, Vladimir Putin, the First of His Name, it was Russia and all things Russian that came in the cross hairs of a righteously vengeful West. This is fair and right, given that the West, moral bastion of liberty as it is, never wages wars of conquest or dominion but instead bombs and occupies countries in a well-intentioned effort to protect freedom, human rights and cute little kittens.

Given that the Russian invasion had none of these objectives and that it didn’t take place in a less civilised, less blonde and notably less blue-eyed part of the world, it merited the harshest possible response. Thus, along with condemnation came sanctions for Russia and military and diplomatic aid for the Ukrainians. Western companies selling products and services, from McDonalds to Apple to Pornhub, quickly pulled out of Russia and sports bodies like FIFA, and the IOC decided to prevent Russian teams from participating in international competitions

How could the world allow anything Russian?

But that wasn’t enough: how could the world in good conscience allow the presence of anything Russian at all? I mean think about it … every time you take a bite of the abomination that is Russian salad, is that not implicit support of Putin’s brutal assault?

So begins an episode that makes the freedom fries fiasco seem like a measured and reasoned response. The European Tree of the Year contest went out on a limb by banning the participation of the Russian Turgenev oak in this prestigious competition, instead giving the top prize to a Polish tree that “had become a symbol of Polish resistance to aggression and its warm welcome to refugees from Ukraine”.

Taking a leaf from their book, the international cat federation banned not just all cats from Russia but all Russian breeds from competing. Stifling Muscovite meows wasn’t enough either, and so Russian music also had to go. From Montreal to Dublin, Russian musicians found themselves delisted from upcoming performances and, in a prime example of how collateral damage works, even 20-year-old Russian piano prodigy Alexander Malofeev, who had condemned the Ukraine invasion, found himself on the wrong side of the ban.

Given that there’s nothing more Russian than vodka, incensed New York state officials filmed themselves dumping bottles of it on the pavement, and bars across the country stopped serving Stolichnaya vodka in an effort to stop the Russian war machine in its imperialist tracks. Only problem here is that Stolichnaya is produced in Latvia (which famously has little love for Russia) and was in fact founded by a critic of Putin who was exiled from Russia in 2000.

Being long dead doesn’t offer any protection either, since your (largely) decayed corpse is also far too Russian to pass muster. The famous Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, who died in 1893, was removed from the programme list at the Cardiff Philharmonic Orchestra, a decision so utterly daft that many initially wrote off the news as coming from a satire site or else being part of Russian propaganda. On that note, reports that The Space Federation revoked awards given to legendary Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin were seemingly exaggerated as all they did was rename a fundraising event from ‘Yuri’s Night’ to ‘A Celebration of Space’.

Some efforts were so asinine that they had to be retracted, such as when a university in Milan tried to cancel a lecture on Russian novelist Dostoevsky but had to backtrack when it became clear that this was so surreally stupid that had Dostoevsky been alive it would probably have inspired him to write another book in his signature satirical style.

But while the Italians may have chickened out (no doubt due to the presence of embedded Russian spies in the literature department) the all-American University of Florida doubled down and renamed its ‘Karl Marx study room’ in protest against the war. Karl Marx was, of course, German. Even that is small potatoes compared to what happened with poutine, that concoction of French fries, gravy and cheese that is unquestioningly the epitome of French-Canadian cuisine. Now, no one does poutine better than the Maison de la Poutine, which has branches across France and found itself on the receiving end of threats from irate customers who thought this dish was named after Putin. While you chew on that, note also that Le Roy Jucep, a Quebec diner that claims to be the birthplace of Poutine actually renamed itself ‘the inventor of the fries-cheese-gravy’. At which point Putin presumably decided to withdraw because it’s one thing to fight the tough-as-nails Ukrainians but quite another to go up against the certifiably insane.

The writer is a journalist.

Twitter: @zarrarkhuhro

Published in Dawn, March 28th, 2022