In the mid-1980s, some of our consumer habits changed at home. Products from classic brands, which we loved, have disappeared from our grocery cart. These brands were part of portfolios of companies that still had activities in South Africa, in the midst of the global anti-apartheid movement.
Posted at 11:00 a.m.
I still remember the beginning of the conversation on the subject, in the middle of an aisle at Steinberg’s. Before arriving at the checkout, I had learned what Apartheid was, who Nelson Mandela was and, above all, what the word boycott meant.
Months later, a new song called Sun City, from the collective Artists United Against Apartheid, entered the charts. Steven Van Zandt, Bruce Springsteen, Darlene Love, Miles Davis, Run DMC, Bono and others sang in unison to denounce the segregationist regime and the South African luxury hotel Sun City, which was emblematic of it.
In a heartbeat, I realized that my parents were in the same fight as these musical giants, and I began to see them differently. Those whom I believed to be reserved and strict have, before my eyes, become committed and rather cool – in their own way. The story of the grocery cart is one that I often tell because it marked me so much and still influences me today.
Impossible then not to agree with the economic sanctions against Russia, imposed since the recent invasion of Ukraine.
I am reassured to see brands, whose products I consume, take a stand against this violent attack led by Vladimir Putin. Many of them have done more than withdraw their marbles from the Russian game: they have also pledged to support various NGOs and their humanitarian efforts, set up to support the millions of Ukrainian refugees.
A member of President Joe Biden’s administration, Daleep Singh is a national security adviser to the United States and the architect of the program of financial restrictions that is now crippling Russia. In an interview two weeks ago, Singh predicted that the Russian economy would soon be cut in half, while expressing in the same breath his regret at seeing the Russian population suffer. “It’s Putin’s war. The sanctions are against Putin. This is Putin’s test, he has chosen to impose it on his people,” Mr Singh concluded.
It’s Putin’s war, it’s true. If Russians – often the least well-informed – support the invasion of Ukraine, thousands of others demonstrate against it. In Russia, at great risk, and elsewhere in the world, where thousands of members of the Russian diaspora carry the same message of condemnation. But not everyone has this luxury.
If some Russian athletes and artists have denounced this dirty war, for example, others have not been able to do so. Not out of support for Vladimir Putin, but rather for security reasons.
And now they find themselves shunned on the international scene, all put in the same basket of undesirables. Despite themselves, they are also now characters from a film that we have already seen. Russians elsewhere in Europe and North America described scenes of Russophobia reminiscent of those of Islamophobia experienced by members of Arab communities after the September 11, 2001 attacks. have been suffered by members of various Asian diasporas since the start of the pandemic. All rich in shortcuts and gratuitous violence. All amputated in nuance.
This renewed Russophobia is a throwback to the future – another holdover from the 1980s, which goes beyond the nod to the hit movie of the time. A cold war on the screen, perpetuated in particular in the cinema, one of the mass media having contributed to the construction of the image of the big bad Russian. From the character of Draco in Rocky IV to that of Lieutenant-Colonel Sergei Podovsky in Rambo1985 was an exceptional year for Sylvester Stallone and for stereotypes.
But also in 1985, in Geneva, almost against the grain of Hollywood and cautiously suggesting some hope that the Cold War was perhaps drawing to an end, a first meeting took place between the then American President, Ronald Reagan , and Mikhail Gorbachev, then General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It was a summit that produced iconic images, announcing to all who saw them that a rapprochement was possible.
From one screen to another
Before Oprah, there was Phil Donahue. In the 1980s, this journalist and host of a daily newspaper was one of the most influential people on television. While Stallone attracted crowds to the cinema, Donahue tried to deconstruct the images projected on the big screen. With his Franco-Russian counterpart Vladimir Pozner co-facilitated and remotely in the Soviet Union, Phil Donahue held his own summit, in two stages.
A first “Citizens’ Summit” took place in December 1985, with an audience in Leningrad and one in Seattle, in duplex – an opportunity to break the ice and for Americans and Soviets to discuss current events.
But it was the second “Citizens’ Summit”, a few months later, that especially marked me.
The audience in Leningrad and the one in the United States (this time, in Boston) were composed entirely of women, connected by giant screens, from one studio to another – like a Zoom before his time. In the ping-pong of questions, often tough – especially on foreign policy – and taken up by Russian and American translators, a question direct from Boston: “What do you have in your handbags? Spontaneously and in her own version of glasnost, a Soviet woman opened her bag to reveal, unsurprisingly, contents identical to that of the American. It didn’t deserve a Nobel Peace Prize, but for millions of viewers, that hour of television was a reminder that beyond politics, more often than not, we have more in common than not.
Our mass media have the power to counter this new rise of anti-Russian stereotypes. It is up to them to choose which roles they will play. Between Rambo and Donahue, the choice is simple.