Czech President Wants West To 'Monitor' Russians Like Japanese During WWII

Czech President Petr Pavel just took anti-Russian xenophobia to a new level, saying this week that he's in favor of Russians living in Western countries being "monitored" by authorities, akin to what happened with Japanese people living in the United States during 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 told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in a fresh interview published on Thursday. 

In the comments he actually directly invoked the historical example of people of Japanese descent being monitored and placed in internment camps during WWII as comparable to what should happen to Russians, defending it 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 said. "That’s simply a cost of war."

Pavel in the interview clarified that by "monitoring" he means "being under the scrutiny of the security services."

Following the Pearl Harbor attack by Japan in 1941, the US has sent some 120,000 Japanese then living in the US to prison camps, with up to half of these being children. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan issued a formal apology while President Biden in February called it "one of the most shameful periods in American history."

As for Russians, the Ukraine war has resulted in everything from Russians being banned from many international sporting competitions to cancelations of operas featuring Russian composers, to even attacks on Russian restaurants and tea rooms.

For many in the West, the one form of racism which is "OK" is discrimination against Russians just for having Russian ethnicity or nationality, apparently.

Last year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky urged Western governments to implement a blanket ban on all Russian travelers, given his rationale that the "whole population" of Russia was responsible for the invasion.