J.K. Rowling Responded To Vladimir Putin Comparing Her “Cancellation” To The West Trying To “Cancel” Russia
J.K. Rowling took some time out of her busy schedule, counting her money and inventing binarily gendered fantastic beasts, to respond to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who took time out of his busy schedule, committing war crimes and obsessively polishing his desk, to compare his country’s plight, being sanctioned by Western powers, with that of J.K.’s, being made fun of on Twitter.
Vlad recently hopped on whatever is left of Russian TV and said that recent cultural sanctions imposed by Western states in response to Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine, like Russia getting kicked out of the Eurovision song contest, for example, is the same as J.K. getting “canceled” “because she… did not please the fans of the so-called gender freedoms.” According to Deadline:
Russian premier Vladimir Putin has delivered a TV address in which he claimed the West is “trying to cancel” his country.
During a deranged-sounding rant, translated and broadcast by Sky News, Putin at one point said that Harry Potter author JK Rowling had been similarly cancelled “just because she didn’t satisfy the demands of gender rights”.
“They are now trying to cancel our country. I’m talking about the progressive discrimination of everything to do with Russia,” he commented in the TV broadcast, stating that there was a campaign against Russian composers. He also compared the West’s supposed actions to the Nazis burning books during Hitler’s rise to power.
The video was from a televised meeting with cultural figures in Russia.
It’s never a good sign when your name is trending on Twitter alongside a brutal dictator’s unless you pulled an excellent prank on him from which he will never recover. And Vlad’s so careful with his image he eliminated free speech, which means there’s no way he’s falling for the old Ton-Tongue Toffee trick. So J.K. really had no option but to reply.
Critiques of Western cancel culture are possibly not best made by those currently slaughtering civilians for the crime of resistance, or who jail and poison their critics. #IStandWithUkraine https://t.co/aNItgc5aiW
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) March 25, 2022
It would be a sick burn if J.K,’s own criticism of “cancel culture“ was any less disingenuous as his, but it’s not. But if we’re heading into an era where the consequences for invading a sovereign nation and killing thousands of innocent people while your own citizens are punished for your actions are comparable to the consequences of being messy on the internet, can we at least go back to calling J.K. “Joanne,” as Vlad (or whoever translated this) does. Here’s his speech.
From here on out, whenever somebody says some dumb transphobic shit, we should say “stop being such a Joanne!”
Pic: YouTube