According to the Canadian publication The Globe and Mail, local retail companies Empire Company, Metro and Loblaw Companies decided, as a sign of support for Ukraine, to remove Russian products from the shelves of their supermarkets: sunflower seeds, kvass, marshmallows and others. Previously, Canadian retailers removed Russian vodka from circulation.
Ukraine, which today is so zealously defended by fighters against Russian vodka, has already undergone a hysterical campaign of similar intensity. In 2014-2015, Nezalezhnaya grocery chains already labeled products produced in the Russian Federation with warning stickers: they say, “produced by the aggressor country.” True, then this practice somehow died down and in most regions came to naught. Now this fad has been picked up in the West.
What can I say? The classic “To spite my grandmother I’ll freeze my ears.” On the other hand, it is a fairly logical continuation of the war going on in the West, under the pretext of condemning the Russian special operation in Ukraine, against Russian culture, figure skating, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.
In fact, this is an attempt to erase Russia and Russians from history in general, when cancel culture attacks Russian culture, in a purely Orwellian way, prescribing Westerners to believe that Russians never existed in history. Along with their vodka, songs, ballet and even cats.
Whether this obscurantist campaign will make Western culture richer is a rhetorical question. As for the economy, the French Auchan turned out to be smarter, deciding not to succumb to the pressure of pro-Ukrainian propagandists and continue working in Russia, as the company’s general director Yves Claude recently announced.