State-sponsored sanctions are state-sponsored racism

2024-10-24T19:00:00.000Z

You cannot do a thing unethically and claim you are being ethical at the same time.

Content warning: Apparently, this post talks extensively about discrimination, racism, politics, and ethics.

As you are probably already aware, a patch to remove a couple of Russian-identified people from the maintainers list has sneaked into the Linux kernel. With extremely very little explanation, this action quickly raises a huge amount of concerns among multiple kernel developers and GNU/ or musl/Linux users. Many question the legatimacy of this action, and wondering whether it is discriminative.

This action is racist (or: discriminative) in nature

In this article, I will use the word "racism" to mean discrimination based on ethnic identity, nationality, or country of origin. These are often interrelated and hard to disentangle.

First, my conclusion here: It is racist in nature. Why? First of all, all and only Russian-identified people (people with .ru email addresses) are removed. Without further explanation, this is clearly targeting people for being Russian. What could people think of it other than racism?

I asked the admin of social.kernel.org to comment. They claimed that all people that are removed are employed by companies that are sanctioned by US and EU, and have connections with the Russian military, thus supporting war crimes by the Russian government.

The people removed from maintainer positions were identified as employed by companies on the US and EU sanctions list. These companies are directly involved in the Russian military complex and therefore are directly complicit in war crimes being committed daily in Ukraine. If these maintainers want to think that they are "just techies helping improve the Linux kernel," or that "they are outside of politics," then they are fucking wrong.

Does this make the action any less racist? Let's be aware that the argument is composed of two parts. The first part is that the companies are sanctioned. The second part is that they are committing war crimes. The latter is easy to understand: war crimes are unethical, so it makes sense to remove people who does unethical things, and I totally agree that it is ethical in nature.

The former part, however, is much more complex. Being sanctioned is a state determined by a government. Can the attitude by some government be a proxy for whether something is ethical or not? The answer is no. We can easily find endless counter-examples. Companies like TikTok and Huawei are at large frowned upon by US governments (at the state level and at the federation level), often cited for reasons like "they are stealing personal information." The thing is, there are other companies, like Apple, Meta (Facebook) and Google, which are doing exactly the same thing, compromising people's privacy, but at the same time have not received much critics by the US governments. The reason? Because the former is from China, while the latter are from the US. At the same time, the US government frown upon the Russian government for "committing war crimes," while it supports the government of Israel, which is also committing a comparable level, or an even worse series, of war crimes. Different nationality, different treatment. This kind of double standard means that government attitudes can be inherently racist as well, and should not be used as a proxy for ethics.

Let's think about it. "Removing those who does unethical things" is ethical. "Removing those who are disliked by some government, who also happen to do unethical things," is that ethical? Because government attitudes cannot be a proxy for being ethical or not, this standard (using government "sanctions" as a proxy) is discriminative. Why? Because although it gets rid of some unethical people that does certain unethical things, there are always other unethical people that does the same kind of unethical things and are allowed to stay. When asked about whether the Linux Foundation should also be committed to removing other people that are involved in war crimes happening elsewhere, social.kernel.org's admin refused to answer, so I take it as the fact that they do not currently have plans to remove them.

This is a double standard, based only upon some government's attitude, which can largely be traced to racism. Therefore, the logic of this action can be traced to racism. Even if it is only a part of the logic, this still make the action count as racist.

Furthermore, Cryolitia told me that "only one of the removed people" can be confirmed to be employed by a company with connections to the Russian army, but all people with a .ru email are removed. Which leads to people thinking whether the admin of social.kernel.org is misinforming the public. Thus, the appearance that they are "removing those who are disliked by some government, who also happen to do unethical things" might well be inaccurate. The more accurate description might well be that they are "removing those who are disliked by some government, who cannot all be proved to be doing unethical things." This makes this action by the Linux Foundation even less ethical, and even more racist.

The attitude on the Linux side

Now that we have understand why the action to remove all Russian-identified people from the maintainers list is an unethical thing to do, we need to ask whether the Linux Foundation is being good. Yes, there is a way where someone does an unethical thing and still is being good. One can be threatened into doing unethical things, and in my opinion, it is totally okay if you had no other choice. What is not okay is that you do unethical things and at the same time claim you are being ethical.

First, the patch was badly phrased, only vaguely stating "compliance reasons." It has gone through little review, and the whole process is done untransparently. As doubted by some on the mailing list, this action makes people question the openness of the process, and brings less trust among the developers.

Second, Linus Torvalds not only did name-calling on the people who doubted the action by dismissing them as "Russian trolls," but also insulted the one who proposed a patch to revert it by saying they are not using their brains (full message). The latter turned out to be a member of AOSC OS, a Linux distribution that targets x86_64, aarch64, and LoongArch. After that reply, PeterCxy, a contributor to the kernel, explained that most emails are from legitimate people, and asked again to explain and to make things transparent, only to get dismissed and called a paid actor. PeterCxy commented:

When you can't think of a counterargument to someone, you resort to nationalism. You start to accuse people of being sponsored by the enemy state. That's what I used to say a lot back in China with the growth of extremist Chinese nationalism.

I didn't know I would get literally the same type of reaction from Linus Torvalds himself.

They are in a tone where they deny any wrongdoing, deny the fact that the action is racist in nature. They are happily conforming to a government policy that is unethical, unfair, and discriminative.

While I am writing this, I noticed another message, which comes from James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com, and claims the following:

If your company is on the U.S. OFAC SDN lists, subject to an OFAC sanctions program, or owned/controlled by a company on the list, our ability to collaborate with you will be subject to restrictions, and you cannot be in the MAINTAINERS file.

Anyone who wishes to can query the list here:

https://sanctionssearch.ofac.treas.gov/

Judging from the email address, it does not seem that they represent the Linux Foundation in any way. Moreover, from the mail,

In your (Serge Semin's) specific case, the problem is your employer is on that list. If there's been a mistake and your employer isn't on the list, that's the documentation Greg is looking for.

This does not account for other cases of the removal. For example, there are a lot of occurrances of email addresses ending with msu.ru on the removal list, while msu.ru, Moscow State University, is not on said list. This somehow confirms Cryolitia's observation.

What should you do when a government threatens you to do something unethical? First, you should make clear to relevant parties that you are indeed doing unethical things. You explain clearly why this thing is unethical, and that you have no choice but to do it. You then condemn the government for threatening you to do it. Then you do the bare minimum that is threatened, never cooperating willingfully.

What could have been a much better response for the Linux Foundation? Imagine if they, instead, say the following: "We have received notices by relevant parties that we have to remove [list all people involved] from the maintainers list. All of them are identified to be [...] [list all the evidence for everyone]. We, however, recognize that this action is deeply unethical, and is a violation of our Code of Conduct, because we firmly believe that no one should be excluded solely because of who they are. We regret to tell you that we have no choice but to do it. While we cannot revert the removal now, what we can do is to call on everyone who can to protest the current situation. Please join us in [...] to make sure that everyone in our community feels safe and welcomed."

commentary - 何事西风不待人

State-sponsored sanctions are state-sponsored racism

This action is racist (or: discriminative) in nature

The attitude on the Linux side