Demodernization Facilitates Weaponization of Prejudice

Yakov M. Rabkin, Professor Emeritus of History at the Université of Montréal, analyzes how demodernization fuels prejudice and the normalization of Russophobia.

Article first published in Presenza

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By Yakov M. Rabkin

Maintaining religious and ethnic diversity is an important aspect of modernity currently under siege. Ethnic nationalism, tribalism, militancy under the banner of religion, and economic, social, and other kinds of exclusion gain legitimacy in places where relatively stable multicultural and multiethnic societies once existed. These are signs of demodernization—in other words, regression on the scale of modernity.

Demodernization need not be all-encompassing. Estonia and Israel, for example, exhibit technological modernity alongside political demodernization.

Demodernization in Word and Deed

Knowledge is an essential ingredient of modernity. It can create or destroy ideologies and can establish or subvert class dominance. Today, the right to know is being eroded with respect to several foreign policy issues. Demodernization necessarily implies denial of knowledge and a challenge to rational thinking. Renaming streets, removing monuments, and banning languages are part and parcel of demodernization, of attempts to deny history. Language becomes ritualized and is used to cast spells rather than inform.

The use in mainstream Western media of the expression “unprovoked full-scale” to denote Russia’s action in the Ukraine is a case in point. Established experts in geopolitics who suggest that the eastward expansion of NATO provoked the war are promptly marginalized. Their analysis of “the hidden causes”—as Abélard would put it nearly a millennium ago—of Western policies toward Russia is dismissed as “Kremlin propaganda.” Like all sociopolitical processes, the elimination of rational debate results from concerted efforts on the part of political actors. Discreditation, sanctions, and even police are mobilized to silence or sideline respected specialists and thereby undermine scholarly expertise on Russia.

However, the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, which would certainly warrant the appellation “unprovoked”, has yet to be termed thus in legacy media, which have become a tool not only of propaganda but of obscurantism. Understanding the adversary has become a term of opprobrium in Germany: “Putinversteher.” Rational debate about alternative approaches to Russia has been supplanted by partisan, self-righteous, and self-serving rhetoric. Similarly, specious accusations of antisemitism stifle public discussion of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.

Appeals to emotions crowd out rational arguments. Passionate language used by otherwise lackluster State Department and E.U. bureaucrats suggests that demodernization has reached deep into the corridors of power. Articulation of geopolitical interests morphs into claims of moral superiority.

It was Ronald Reagan who introduced the expression “Evil Empire” in March 1983. This language might have been appropriate before the National Association of Evangelicals, which he addressed. Nearly two decades later, in January 2002, “Axis of Evil” appeared in an ostensibly more rational context—George W. Bush’s State of the Union address. It designated countries and movements resisting U.S. hegemony. The emotional charge was preparing the ground for the invasion of Iraq by a U.S.-led coalition in 2003. More recently, the joint U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran has also been justified as a moral imperative aimed at “liberation of the Iranian people.”

A rational argument for both wars exists but is rarely voiced in polite company. They are part of the plan “A Clean Break: Securing the Realm,” prepared for incoming prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996. Western attacks on Iraq, Yemen, Libya, and Iran have made that plan come true. The Israeli connection in unleashing these wars has now become an open secret.

Claims of moral superiority invoke democracy, individual liberty, and the rule of law to prove that liberal democracies are inherently superior to other cultures. These pretensions take the place of the hitherto widespread claims of religious and racial supremacy that provided steady support for colonial conquests. For half a millennium, this legitimized exploitation, violence, and genocide. “Mission civilisatrice,” “White Man’s Burden,” “Support for Democracy,” “Regime Change,” or “Responsibility to Protect” denote broadly similar interventions by “the White Man” in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Paradoxically, the Nazis, albeit known for their frequent appeals to emotions, couched their invasion of the Soviet Union in rational terms: an eastward expansion (Drang nach Osten) in search of living space (Lebensraum). Moreover, they used scientific concepts of the time in establishing a genocidal racial hierarchy.

Demodernization implies lasting degradation of material, health, and cultural conditions in a formerly modernized society—a return to “premodern” forms of life and collective identities. This provokes protests, uprisings, and insurrections. In Russia during the first post-Soviet decade, tanks and, later, electoral manipulation were used to quell them. The crisis in the Ukraine can also be seen from the perspective of demodernization. A vast region once at the forefront of Soviet industrial development underwent demodernization long before 2014, when outside forces transformed grassroots protest into a violent overthrow of the government.

Alternatively, election results can be simply annulled (Romania), manipulated (Moldova), or rigged (Armenia) under the pretext of “Kremlin meddling.” In other countries, popular movements such as the Indignados in Spain or the gilets jaunes in France have petered out without consequences. This reflects the transformation of citizens as political actors into depoliticized consumers, which facilitates narrative control.

Demodernization breeds essentialism—i.e., the attribution to one’s own or other groups of certain immutable properties and values. This enables Israelis to believe that God gave them exceptional rights to the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, and that their army is “the most moral in the world.” According to most Israelis’ essentialist logic, the Arabs understand only force, which justifies Israel’s incessant violence in the region. Current European rulers seem to assume the same about the Russians.

Prejudice and Its Sequels

Normalization of prejudice is another manifestation of demodernization. It is contingent on deprivation of knowledge. Positive information about Russia and the Russians in Western media has disappeared for nearly two decades. This breeds Russophobia, which attempts to present Russia and the Russians as congenitally evil.

While Russophobia has a long history, its contemporary rebirth was the focus of a recent conference held in the medieval Russian city of Pskov in June 2026. It was part of the Forum “On This We Stand.” The title paraphrases the finale of Eisenstein’s film classic Alexander Nevsky: “Go and tell foreign lands that Russia lives. They can visit her without fear. But whoever comes to us with a sword shall perish with the sword. Upon this stood and shall stand the land of Russia.” Produced in 1938, the film depicts the defeat of the knights of the Teutonic Order near Pskov in 1242 and was a thinly veiled warning to the Nazis and their European allies, who, sadly, ignored it and attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941. Pskov was occupied by German, Estonian, Latvian and Spanish troops for over three years. When the Soviet army liberated the city in July 1944, it found 168 original inhabitants out of the population of 68,000 before the war.

Scholars gathered from several countries to explore Russophobia and reactions it provokes. This included a survey of Russophobic phenomena within the Russian intelligentsia. Another paper touched on the ethnonationalist demodernization of several former Soviet republics, which cast “the Russians”—a remnant of the Soviet multiethnic population rather than ethnic Russians proper—as foreigners. In neighboring Estonia, they are often called “occupiers.” Rather than building an inclusive civil nationalism, Baltic authorities cultivate issues of ethnic belonging, which tend to enhance Russophobia. It also results from the positioning of the Baltic republics as NATO’s frontline states on Russia’s borders.

Russophobia is a Western phenomenon. A survey conducted around the world in 2024 posed the question “What is your overall perception of Russia?”. The results showed the exceptional position of the political West. While most European and European-settlement countries show negative attitudes, the Global South—from Egypt and Nigeria to China and India—display a dominance of positive feelings toward Russia.

The conference also discussed reactions to Russophobia. Several speakers showed that Russophobia can provoke anti-Western attitudes and, in turn, lead to isolationism and cultural demodernization. The conference demonstrated a broad range of views being debated in Russia as it faces Western sanctions imposed on it since 2014 and particularly since 2022.

The idea of splitting Europe from Russia and China is eminently rational within the framework of Sir Halford Mackinder’s geopolitical theories. But to sell it, Western powers have used emotional arguments, control of information, and punishment of dissidence. This has led Europeans to believe in their own self-righteous narrative. Bans on cultural exchanges with Russia, boycotting opera singers, prohibiting conferences on Dostoyevsky, or concerts including pieces by Rachmaninov have been normalized. The E.U. broke train and plane connections with Russia, even though these functioned despite political tensions under Stalin and throughout the rest of the Cold War. Being obliged to transit via Istanbul to fly from Saint-Petersburg to Helsinki—a flight which lasted 40 minutes—is a true sign of demodernization.

Thus, Russophobia, like all racism, can veer toward the absurd. A summit on peace in the Ukraine convened in Switzerland in 2014 excluded Russia, one of the belligerents. The organizers would deem an invitation to Russia unthinkable and a step toward “moral equivalence.”

Russophobia as a manifestation of demodernization dovetails with the rehabilitation of colonialism, which relies on excluding and dehumanizing the Other. A few years ago, a French president called on his compatriots to be proud of the achievements that France brought to its former colonies. And at the 2026 security conference in Munich, the U.S. Secretary of State Rubio praised the European colonization of America as “a sacred inheritance.” He also called on Europeans to be “unapologetic in our heritage and proud of this common inheritance.” Comparing Europe to a garden in the jungle by Josep Borrell, then head of the European Commission, fits the same trend.

The late Chief Rabbi of Britain, Jonathan Sacks, once observed that “righteousness and self-righteousness are mutually exclusive.” Russophobia wrapped in claims of moral superiority increases the chances of a nuclear war. So does the fledgling movement to reject all things Western in Russia. Both are manifestations of demodernization. Both pose an existential threat to humanity.

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