We cringe today at those episodes in history when wars have broken out, and the response was discrimination, reprisals, and other mistreatment against the people and cultures from “enemy” nations. World War I saw an explosion of anti-German sentiment ranging from the ugly (charges that “hyphenated Americans” were disloyal, mass killings of Dachshunds) to the absurd (renaming towns and streets from their Germanic originals, sauerkraut becoming “liberty cabbage”). World War II saw racist propaganda against ordinary Japanese Americans and the freezing of their bank accounts, before they were finally rounded up en masse and put into concentration camps.

We think of ourselves as living in more enlightened, civilized times, when we would never fall victim to this kind of hysteria. But developments since the Russian invasion of Ukraine should give us pause, with the horrors of the war threatening to fuel an indiscriminate Russophobia around the world with echoes of the shameful errors of the past.