Putin suggested the Harry Potter author's treatment was akin to the Nazis' book-burning of the 1930s.
Vladimir Putin has likened Russia portrayal in the West to the public backlash Harry Potter author JK Rowling has faced for making comments widely seen as transphobic.
The Russian president used a televised speech to launch a bizarre tirade against the ‘progressive discirmination of everything to do with Russia’.
Taking aim at various targets including Hollywood, the US and Japan, he accused ‘them’ of covering up the Soviet Army’s contribution to the fight against Hitler and the American military’s responsibility for the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
He added: ‘So they just cancelled, cynically, this truth. They cancelled Joanne Rowling recently, the children’s author. Her books are published all over the world. 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, this trend that’s unfolding in a number of Western states.’
Rowling has come under fire from LGBT activists for various tweets mocking health advice for trans men and suggesting trans women committing sex crimes is evidence that gender identity is a myth.
The backlash against her has included a secondary school dropping her name as a title for one of its houses, and producers declining to interview her for a Harry Potter 20th Anniversary TV special alongside the film series’ cast, many of whom have distanced themselves from her.
It’s not the first time Putin has waded into the debate. Asked about Ms Rowling’s comments in December, he told state TV: ‘If someone thinks that a man and a woman is the same thing, well let them think that. But there is common sense.’
It’s also not his first foray into the Potterverse. He is believed to have told lawyers in 2003 to try and bring a lawsuit against producers of the films over his apparent likeness to Dobby the house elf.
Mr Putin went on to liken ‘cancel culture’ to the Nazis’ book-burning of the 1930s, adding: ‘It is impossible to imagine such a thing in our country and we are insured against this thanks to our culture.’
The 69-year-old’s speech lamented the ‘public ostracism and silencing of facts, books, names of historic activists, writers who don’t fit into the modern stereotypes no matter how absurd they are’.
He added: ‘This didn’t begin yesterday, we know this very well, in Hollywood they made films where the only country that defeated the fascists was the United States and didn’t say anything about the [USSR’s] Red Army, but if you look at the number of military units fighting in the East that was the Russian units.
‘So they just cancelled the contribution of the Red Army to the defeat of the Nazis. And in Japan they don’t even mention who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or they just say it was done by some abstract allies.
‘The fact that it was the United States who did such an awful slaughter at the end of the war, this fact is not even mentioned.’
Many post-WWII American films largely omitted references to the nuclear bombing of Japan – such as the 1956 remake of Godzilla, which erased the giant lizard’s status as a metaphor for the disaster as seen in the Japanese original.
But the US’ responsibility for the attacks has been widely taught in American and Japanese schools for decades and has been the subject of countless documentaries.
The downplaying of the Soviet resistance against Nazi Invasion is also limited to a selection of Cold War-era Hollywood films, with the topic now part of the UK school curriculum and featured in Western blockbusters such as 2001’s Enemy At The Gates.
Russian authorities, meanwhile, have been repeatedly accused of suppressing attempts to document crimes against humanity committed by the Soviets.
A Russian historian known for uncovering new evidence of Stalin’s mass murder of political dissidents, Yuri Dmitriyev, was sentenced to 13 years’ jail in 2020 for child pornography charges which many Russian public figures say were fabricated.
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