Banning Tchaikovsky is not the way to win a war. Last week, the Cardiff Philharmonic Orchestra removed the composer’s popular "1812 Overture" from its forthcoming program due to the invasion of Ukraine. The work noisily celebrates Russian resistance to Napoleon’s invasion.
This absurd decision — Tchaikovsky was seen by his nationalist rivals in the 19th century as a westernizer — follows other cultural bans that combine modern cancel culture with old-fashioned war hysteria. One Italian university has even tried to withdraw a course on the great Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
At the outbreak of World War I, the English novelist Graham Greene recorded that anti-German feeling was so fierce that a dachshund was stoned on his local high street. (The U.S. Kennel Club renamed the breed “The Liberty Pup,” and the British rebranded German shepherd dogs as “Alsatians,” a name which stuck.) Should we now fear for the safety of borzois on the streets of New York and London?
