Russian tourists as threat: Notes on weaponising moral outrage

My wife and I have spent some time on a beach in Thailand recently (if anybody noticed the temporary absence of my column here - writers need rest, too). And there we have encountered episodes that really made our days (and evenings, and mornings). The beach hotel was inhabited, at first, only by Europeans, and Europeans are nice people, saying hello to you all the time. Then they, naturally, asked us where we were from. And then they stopped saying hello. We were from a country that ravaged freedom-loving Ukraine but showed no remorse (and felt none), we were swimming, and eating, and laughing just like them, noble Europeans. That simply could not be. And then more Russians arrived at our hotel, the whole glorious Chang island began to fill with our compatriots, as usual, making at least a quarter of strollers and eaters there. Europeans looked shocked. To remind, some nations in Europe have denied entry to our tourists completely, while others try to make visa applications a humiliating process. Not to mention all these endless shows of moral outrage in venues like OSCE –Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, with its talk shop called the Parliamentary Assembly. You cannot easily kick Russia out of that now-useless thing, so the host country, Austria, was being pushed into not giving visas to Russians wishing to attend. But Austria refused to do it, so Europeans suffered yet another shock, seeing our MPs roaming free among them. But then, when they start speaking, one can always walk out of the hall noisily, can one? A Westerner is supposed to do such things all the time. You may have thought that the main weapon of the West against Russia was economic sanctions, a way of exerting physical pressure on the whole society. But there was also a weapon that the Western ideologists thought to be stronger. That’s moral pressure, demonstrations of collective outrage. The big idea was, most Russians would grieve at being excluded from the outside world, and stage a revolution at home. The result was really shocking. Yes, there are not as many of our compatriots having fun in Europe, but in Thailand we are in the top ten national groups, between the British and Cambodian tourists, with 435000 arrivals. And that was 2022, while now we are getting back to our top position at least in Pattaya and Phuket.

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Also Read: Other articles by Dmitry Kosyrev

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Same with Turkey, where Russian tourists are taking the second position, right after Germans, with 5.2 million annual arrivals. The Turks, after their murderous earthquake, have issued a special invitation to Russians, asking us to come over and spend some money. Same with Malaysia, where my wife and I went after Thailand, same with Qatar, where we also spent a nice day. In fact, everywhere but in the West we see crowds of Russians, having fun and feeling no shame, being welcomed by all the local folks. We also observe all these Westerners, whose moral duty is to boycott us, seeing that the world is not following their example, and feeling deceived. It was a truly enlightening experience, that obvious failure of a shaming campaign. Yes, we all are hearing ugly stories about cancel culture and other type of collective harassment, first tried in Communist Russia or China, and now applied to social engineering inside the US and Europe. They were sure it should have worked outside of their world, in fact, everywhere. So why has it failed so miserably? One of the answers came to my wife and me in Qatar. We remembered how we felt in around 2017, when that tiny Arab state had quarrelled with most of its neighbours, and it came to an economic blockade and the rest of near-military horrors. We also remembered that it never occurred to us to start wondering about who was morally right or wrong in that conflict. Our only concern was not territorial or other claims of states of the region, but our own economic convenience. We liked the Qatar airport as a good transfer point for flights to South East Asia, where we used to go and still go frequently. The airfares were (and still are) acceptable, the link time was decent, and duty-free shops and smoking rooms were abundant. So all we really cared about was keeping to our habits of using that airport again and again. It looks like most of the world’s reaction to the current Ukrainian crisis is the same. We all are having problems with neighbours, but we do not expect others to be the eternally correct moral judges for us, we only really want our livelihoods to stay the same, not dependent on ideas coming from Moscow, Beijing, Kyiv or Washington. So you cannot weaponise your real or fake moral outrage, at least not on a global scale. Attempting to do that was a mistake. More, that mistake has brought unexpected results. To repeat, the big idea was to convince the Russian population that the whole world was shaming us, and we should have stayed cowed, depressed and repentant. The result proved to be the reverse. There is a fresh poll, taken by Levada Center in Moscow, an agency renowned for its opposition stance. But, opposition or not, it cannot afford to fake polling data. So it has just been reported that, in early 2023, 64 per cent of respondents felt optimistic about their future. While only last September it was close to 50 per cent. More, recent months have broken the trend when the inexperienced youth, having no previous personal encounter with upheavals, was more pessimistic than the seniors. Now there is almost no difference between various age groups, all are similarly sure of their future. So who is depressed? It’s worth quoting the commentaries to these figures, written by ladies I know personally. Irina Alksnis, the stern daughter of a military family: “Pressure of the West has made us stronger”. Vicky Nikiforova, the playwright: “Being Russian is becoming cool and fashionable, it’s tomorrow’s style.” The author is a columnist for the Russian State agency website ria.ru, as well as for other publications. Views expressed are personal. Read all the Latest News, Trending News, Cricket News, Bollywood News, India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.