The September 11th attacks happened when I was in 7th grade. My middle school was in suburban Florida, and out of the hundred or so people in my grade level, I only knew one whose family was Muslim. The period following 9/11 was awful for that boy. Students made endless jokes, calling him a terrorist. In response, he embraced his role as the school “terrorist,” and used to try to scare people by coming up to them and saying “Jihad! Jihad! Jihad!” and “Death to America!” or muttering “jihadjihadjihadjihad” under his breath in class. He was so committed to it that he managed to be genuinely alarming to people, and in retrospect I admire the guts of this approach.

The climate after 9/11 for Muslims in this country was nasty. Many vivid first-person testimonials can be found in this Reddit thread in which American Muslims describe experiences similar to what happened in my school. Muslim kids were routinely called “Osama,” threatened, or even attacked. Moustafa Bayoumi, in his 2009 book How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America, documented the hate and suspicion that Muslims and Arab Americans faced in the years after the attacks: 

In the eyes of some Americans, [Arab Americans and Muslims] have become collectively known as dangerous outsiders. Bias crimes against Arabs, Muslims, and those assumed to be Arab or Muslim spiked 1,700 percent in the first six months after September 11th and have never since returned to their pre-2001 levels. A USA Today/Gallup poll from 2006 shows that 39 percent of Americans admit to holding prejudice against Muslims and believe that all Muslims—U.S. citizens included—should carry special IDs. Different studies… [have] concluded that the more positively one feels about the United States, the more likely one is to harbor anti-Arab feelings. Hostility remains high. 

Of course, Japanese Americans came under the same suspicion after Pearl Harbor. They were rounded up and sent to camps, and after 9/11, the United States government engaged in invasive surveillance of Muslims across the country, planting paid informants in their groups, monitoring their internet use, sticking innocent people on no-fly lists and singling people out for extra security screening. This was encouraged by public intellectuals, such as Sam Harris, who openly said that the United States was at war with Islam itself, and therefore encouraged Americans to see Muslim people as inherently suspicious. (Harris openly said that there should be profiling of “Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it.”¹ His 2004 book The End of Faith, which advanced the view that Islam was a “cult of death,” spent 33 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.) 

Marx said that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. But what comes after farce? The process of collectively blaming groups for the actions of a small unrepresentative minority of that group has occurred in the same way, over and over. Anti-German fever in World War I became absurd. Sauerkraut was renamed “liberty cabbage,” dachshunds were renamed “liberty pups,” and (incredibly), even German measles were called “liberty measles.” Saloons stopped selling pretzels. The Red Cross stopped individuals with German last names from joining. Orchestras stopped playing Wagner and the German conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra was forced to step down. Streets named Lubeck, Frankfort, and Hamburg, were renamed “Dickens, Charleston, and Shakespeare.” German Americans anglicized their names to avoid recognition. (Commenters in the Reddit thread of Muslims remember Syrians claiming to be Mexican and Mohammeds going by Mike.) An article in American Political Thought explains the extreme hysteria during 1914-18: 

Three-fourths of the states legally restricted the teaching of the German language in some way. Some states even tried to outlaw the German language’s general use, including over the telephone. The federal government labeled German language publications a potential organ of the enemy and required them to submit costly translations of every article printed, driving out of business a once-mighty ethnic press. Those caught reading German publications in public were spat on.

German American culture had thrived before the war but was systematically destroyed, as Erik Kirschbaum documents in Burning Beethoven: The Eradication of German Culture in the United States during World War I. The loss of pretzels might seem a minor, if ridiculous, inconvenience, but there were also acts of direct physical violence.

Cliches lose their resonance because they are overused, but it’s a shame more people don’t think seriously about that famous saying “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” coined by George Santayana. As a review of Burning Beethoven put it, “so much energy and time is spent in times of war to declare everything bad and hostile coming from the enemy side—be it music, language, or culture.” 

And so here we are again in a time of war, and once more humanity’s most stupid tendencies reassert themselves, and not just in the United States. The government of Russia has invaded Ukraine, so the Cardiff Philharmonic has replaced the program of its upcoming all-Tchaikovsky concert, calling it “inappropriate this time.” A 20-year-old Russian pianist who was set to perform with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra has had his performance canceled, even though he is an outspoken opponent of the war in Ukraine. Russian restaurants in the United States are emptying out or receiving hostile reviews, even if their owners oppose the war. In Brussels, university students from Russia “can no longer apply for financial support.” Democratic representative Eric Swalwell has suggested that “kicking every Russian student out of the United States [should] be on the table.”

Again: what comes after farce?

It should be obvious that, especially in an autocratic country like Russia, ordinary people have very limited power to stop the crimes of their governments, and are often the victims of the autocrats. The crimes of Putin’s government are indeed extreme: today’s news contains reports of the worst conceivable atrocity, a strike on a children’s and maternity hospital. There is no defense for the actions of the Russian political leadership and military, who should be tried in the International Criminal Court.

But they are the guilty parties. And judging someone by the country they were born in rather than the position they take on the war is nationalistic bigotry. Damaging a 20-year-old piano player’s career even though he has condemned the war is senseless. We have to be careful about acts of collective blame and collective punishment, because often they are cruel and unjustified. There is a theory behind the punishment of ordinary Russians for the crimes of Vladimir Putin, which is that it will “put pressure” on him to end the war. But while some actions (such as freezing Russian central bank assets) directly target the Russian state, other responses have a far less obvious connection to the goal, and may seem to operate on the questionable assumption that stigmatizing being Russian is an effective way to alter Vladimir Putin’s decisions. Much of this stuff seems to occur because it is satisfying and people want to Do Something rather than because it comes from a careful theory of how policy changes occur. We feel helpless seeing the victims of this criminal war, and while we cannot stop it, we can avoid the Russian Tea Room. 

Many of the economic sanctions on Russia do make sense to me, and are at least vastly preferable to the option of a direct war between the United States and Russia that some are casually proposing. But I also respect the position of Ilhan Omar, who worries about the effect that new sanctions on Russia will have on the poorest Russians. Indeed, sanctions have a history of squeezing the people in a country with the least, leaving autocrats in their positions of power, and failing to change policy (see Iran, North Korea, Iraq). We must be careful that we are adopting measures that make sense and have a theory behind why they’re going to be useful, since in times of war it is tempting to do things that feel good but do not do much good. I think it would have been far better for the young Russian pianist to have dedicated his performance to the people of Ukraine than to not be allowed to  perform.

Collective blame of Russians is especially silly because Russians are important allies in the anti-war movement. Many are getting arrested and risking long prison sentences to oppose their government’s crimes. This takes more courage than it took for those of us in the U.S. to protest Bush, because it is higher risk. The Russian students that Eric Swalwell wants to kick out of the country are the very people most likely to want good relations with us, and who we will want to form the leadership of the post-Putin generation. They are people we will want to listen to us, and who we ourselves will want to listen to and work with. Sending the message that we don’t want anything to do with them, and labeling them pariahs because of something they can’t control, risks repeating the past mistake of treating Russians as inherently suspicious rather than approaching them in good faith as fellow human beings.

It is difficult to have these conversations while bombs are dropping, because the suffering of the people of Ukraine is more important than anything else. It is easy to react to stories about Russian students feeling guilty and alone and scoff: what about students in Ukrainian universities who have had to flee the falling shells of the Russian army? When commentator Krystal Ball objected on Twitter to the Oncology Alert Network pulling out of Russia, saying it wasn’t fair to punish Russian cancer patients for the crimes of their government, one person replied: “[the] Russian army is leveling hospitals to the ground in Kharkiv, Mariupol and other Ukrainian cities and you are concerned that international medical societies are cutting ties with Russia?” 

This reaction is understandable, and can be very hard to respond to. And examples like the shunning of Russian restaurants with antiwar owners and the canceling of the pianist’s concert can seem trivial. Who can shed tears for the Russian Tea Room at a time like this? But as I look back over history, I see how the same kinds of feelings have been used to justify dangerous forms of jingoism in the past. When Germans were killing American soldiers in France during the First World War, people were disinclined to hear complaints about the suppression of Wagner music, even if that suppression came from a toxic kind of Germanophobia.

But it is critical not to see groups as monolithic, because it prevents us from making intelligent decisions about how to respond to the violence and stop it. When racists see people of a certain ethnic group committing a crime, they begin to suspect all members of that group of criminality, and therefore fail to examine the real question, which is why those committing the crimes are so unlike most other people in their group. In other words, racists fail to see that they should judge the accused person’s actions and not the accused’s membership in a particular religious, ethnic, or racial group, or assume that there is something inherently criminal about such a group. After 9/11, the idea that “Muslims attacked us” contained a technical truth: most of the 9/11 hijackers indeed were citizens of Saudi Arabia, a country in which the majority of inhabitants are Muslim. (Although, notably, the event did not generate suspicion of Saudi Arabia specifically.) But the anti-Muslim rhetoric and fear of the “other” that exploded after 9/11 meant that many in the West chose to extrapolate criminality onto an entire swath of people—to the point that Muslims, or people perceived to be Muslim, were seen as anti-American— and failed to see that Islamic fundamentalists’ main victims have often been other Muslims. Measures were taken (such as the Patriot Act and, later, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) crackdowns on Iraqi immigrants in particular under the Trump administration) that alienated the very people who should have been seen as our allies. This was not only stupid on our part but has had devastating consequences for those affected.

Seeing Russia end the war and replace Putin’s government is in the interests of Ukraine, the world, and the people of Russia as a whole. It’s an internationalist project that will require unity between people inside Russia and outside of it. We must not repeat the errors of the past and treat ordinary people as the enemy when it is their governments that commit the crimes.

1. Note how little sense this makes, given that anyone “could conceivably be Muslim” by looks alone, since the Islamic faith is practiced by people of many ethnicities. ↩