Earlier in June, Czech President Petr Pavel called for Russian nationals living in Western countries to be “monitored” by authorities, similar to how Japanese nationals living in the United States were surveilled throughout World War II.
“All Russians living in Western countries should be monitored much more than in the past because they are citizens of a nation that leads an aggressive war,” Pavel said to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in an interview published on June 15, 2023.
In the remarks he made, Pavel alluded to the historical case of people of Japanese extraction being monitored and placed in internment camps throughout WWII as comparable to what Russian nationals should be currently subjected to in the West. He defended such a proposal as the “cost of war”.
“I can be sorry for these people, but at the same time when we look back, when the Second World War started, all the Japanese population living in the United States were under a strict monitoring regime as well,” he declared. “That’s simply a cost of war.”
During the interview, Pavel made it clear that by “monitoring” he actually meant “being under the scrutiny of the security services.”
After Imperial Japan launched an attack against Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the US sent roughly 120,000 Japanese individuals living in the US at the time to concentration camps. Several decades later in the 1980s, then-President Ronald Reagan issued a formal apology for the internment of Japanese people.
The Czech President’s most recent comments represent the latest anti-Russian proposals being put forth by Western elites who want to punish all Russians for their government’s military action against Ukraine.
Some of these anti-Russian policies have manifested themselves in the form of Russians being prohibited from many international athletic competitions to the cancellation of operas featuring Russian composers.
Unfortunately, the West finds itself still caught up in a fanatic foreign policy agenda where reason takes a back seat to emotionalism. Such petty acts of chauvinism will continue while the structural problems that lead to these conflicts — NATO expansion — continue to be ignored. As a result, geopolitical conflict will persist much to detriment of international stability.