From the most recent Eurobarometer poll [see also other countries]:
Strange patterns, at first glance. Even just a few years ago, this map would have been unrecognizable, with East European countries viewing Russia with relatively greater hostility than Western Europe.
So what changed?
Well, what I suspect happened is a European version of the return of conservative Russophilia in the United States. As crusty Cold Warriors die off and the USSR retreats into deep history, we are seeing the reemergence of 19th century attitudes towards Russia, when it was hated as the “gendarme of Europe” by liberals and – if not exactly liked, then at least approached cool-headedly – by conservatives.
Essentially, the East Europeans who dislike Russia tend to dislike it for tribal, nationalist reasons, not religious (progressivism) ones like Sweden Yes [15%].
As one Twitter user mischievously noted, there is now a minor Hajnal effect to Russophilia (or more precisely, the lack of strongly ideological Russophobia).
Another obvious pattern is that Orthodox countries tend to view Russia positively. This is not too surprising, since as I pointed out in a PEW poll a few months ago, majorities in all major the Orthodox nations except Ukraine look to Russia to protect Orthodox abroad and even to counter the influence of the West (amazingly, this even describes Romania [47%], which has traditionally had very poor relations with Russia – possibly the worst of any country outside the Baltics).
But Orthodoxy per se doesn’t explain everything. There is very considerable Russophilia throughout the entire Balkans, including in Croatia [50%] and Slovenia [49%], and in the Visegrad nations. Moreover, even there, the conservatism/Russophilia associations tend to hold more often than not: For instance, conservative Slovakia [50%] is far more pro-Russian than liberal Czechia [31%]. Poland is slightly less favorable [27%], but still, the fact that it is now ahead of the major European nations like Germany [20%], France [20%], and the UK [24%] is an amazing development, considering that Poland in general, and Polish conservatives in particular, have traditionally had strongly anti-Russian attitudes.
However, I suspect the Baltics are false friends. Since a quarter of Estonia’s [34%] and Latvia’s [46%] population are Russians who largely remain more loyal to Russia, in practice Latvian Latvians’ approval of Russia would probably be around 25%, and Estonia’s at 15%. Since there relatively few Russians in Lithuania [39%], however, Lithuanian Lithuanians’ approval of Russia should be somewhere around 30-35%. Consequently, even in the Baltics, the correlations still hold: Estonia is the most progressive, secular, and SWPL of the Baltic states, while Lithuania is the most religious and conservative.
Hence, Putin’s recent entry into the fray regarding Orthodox church properties in the Holy land. As I recently explained to a Greek Orthodox friend of mine:
Probably should interpreted these in relation to other Europeans countries you posted to give the interpretation proportion, or drawing conclusions from it.
For example you write about “considerable Russophilia throughout the entire Balkans, including in Croatia [50%] and Slovenia [49%].”
First glance, the numbers like (50%) are in line with a neutral position. But it would depends on the methodology of the survey (which I do not have more time to read up on) – in some surveys 50% might be a strong positive, and other surveys just a neutral.
If we look at the views towards other European countries to put it in perspective, this is probably supported that 50% shows a neutral position in this survey. And below 50% is negative over-all.
Otherwise the Anglophilia, and Francophilia would be off the charts across Europe.
https://i.imgur.com/20hgEYd.png
https://i.imgur.com/ys8K3pn.png
On second glance, they are just directly asking people ‘do you have a positive or negative view?’.
The charts produced above show the positive score – but (it seems?) conjoin negative and undecided into one.
If this is the case, it could be clear one reason the Eastern European countries are scoring higher. The reason that the undecided category in this chart would be counted as the same as a ‘no’. Therefore countries with a greater familiarity (i.e. Eastern Europe), will have a smaller undecided views, which would in a trivial way result in a higher total yes proportion in the chart.
I think I was pretty careful to emphasize that this is not so much Russophilia as a relative lack of Russophobia, but maybe I should have inserted even more caveats about that. 🙂
Edit – my above comment is also not true, as don’t know categories are bizarrely small in their survey.
http://ec.europa.eu/commfrontoffice/publicopinion/index.cfm/ResultDoc/download/DocumentKy/79589
Well it’s at least picking up some support – i.e. Greece and Bulgaria. The conclusion that the Orthodox Church is a lot more successful than Russia Today.
Russia does surprisingly well here. At a glance, it seems to rank slightly below China and not so far below the US. And all this while facing a mountain of bad press and having no soft power to speak of.
Prior to events in 2014, over 60% of western Ukrainians viewed Russia positively.
People don’t think that way, it is not that polarised. Phobia or philia are stronger terms than negative/positive. In Central Europe a lot of people who dislike Western dominance will say that they are ‘positive’ about Russia. That covers a lot of ground: economy, low incomes, migration, liberals pushing LGBT, a strong sense that Western media lies.
What is amusing is that Nato is clearly positioning itself for a potential conflict with Russia, pre-positioning missiles, troops, propagandising populations, economic warfare, etc… But who would be the troops marching on Moscow? There are no willing populations in the east (as we see in the survey), other than maybe Western Ukrainians and some Poles. And Western soldiers simply cannot fight a land war due to not being able to sustain casualties. There seems to be a problem with the willingness of easterners to be cannon the designated fodder against Russia.
What to do? I guess, more propaganda, since that has worked out so well in the past.
Amazed at the British score, we have a very neocon press and have been bombarded by negative stuff about Russia since Putin became President.
Amused Britain has such a bad impression of France, a thousand years of hostilities.
Swedes dislike Russia for tribal, nationalist reasons as well.
Swedes and Russians were consistently at war for seven centuries over mastery of Northern Europe.
The issue was only resolved in 1809, but it has not been forgotten in Sweden. The 200th anniversary The country seriously entertained a proposal from Germany to join the Central Powers in 1914, and Sweden provided considerable aid (up to and including volunteer soldiers) to Finland during the Winter War.
Hostility to Russia is in the blood. Nearly every Swede is Russophobic, and this isn’t new. The country was quite hostile to Russia during the Cold War as well, whereas most Western liberals and social democrats were consistently soft on communism.
The attitudes on Russia of economist Anders Aslund or Atlanticist deep state figure Carl Bildt are almost identical to those American Jews, who harbor a similar ethnic hatred of Russia.
There is also a casual contempt for all Eastern Europeans, whom Swedes view as inferior to themselves. Since Eastern Europeans are white it’s socially acceptable to do so.
Olof Palme was something of an exception here–he had a tendency to be soft on the Soviets, perhaps because of his anti-Americanism.
Addition to the previous post:
Sweden tends to view itself as the appropriate hegemon of the Baltic and has a paternalistic attitude to the Baltic states.
The country provided aid to the Forest Brothers insurgency, and former insurgents who managed to evade capture by the USSR were given asylum in Sweden.
Baltic refugees from the USSR were also accepted in Sweden. My father attended school with some of them in the 50s and 60s.
Sweden covertly supported Baltic governments-in-exile in Norway (the country officially banned such movements in order to maintain its neutral image), and the Catalina Affair involved a DC-3 gathering radio intelligence over the Baltic from the USSR.
The economies of the Baltic States today are substantially dominated by Swedish investors. Something like one-third of the FDI stock is owned by Swedish investors (Finland is second with one-quarter). This is noteworthy given how much larger the economies of Germany and Russia are than Sweden–one would expect them to predominate.
Need to bear in mind that the scales are different in the diagrams posted here. The “positive opinion of Russia” graph tops out at 70%, whereas the range for France starts at 63%.
Percentage of Brits expressing a positive opinion of Russia is 24%, somewhat below the EU average (about what you’d expect I suppose given the massive investment in anti-Russian propaganda and agitation by the usual suspects).
And the percentage of Brits expressing a positive opinion of France was admittedly bottom of the list, but still 63%.
Aka defensive reasons, rightly assessing that Russians have historically behaved as though they have a God-given right to rule over ‘lesser’ nations.
It seems that AK has learnt well from observing our Hebraic friends. There is recognition here that Poles might indeed have good historical reasons to fear Russian designs, no, they are just “anti-Russian.” Russians never did anything to them to make them feel that way; they just hate Russians.
But maybe I’m being too harsh. Perhaps AK was pressed for time, and since these points weren’t really germane to the argument he was making he felt he could cut some corners. I guess he forgot that on touchy national issues like these he will be interpreted as a spokesman for his country, and that therefore, if he wants his country to be liked, it (and he) need to be likable.
Look, Polish nation believes that Russia killed their former pres, by literally blowing up his plane.
According to polls 80% of Poles think some foul play was involved, 30% directly blame Russia. That’s mental. This is a sick society, genuinely Russophobic.
Poles are hardly unique in that regard. Do you really think I couldn’t dredge up polling data that portrays Russians (or any other nation) as sicko conspiracy theorists? That really gets us nowhere.
Geopolitical interests are one thing. You don’t even need an ethnostate to have geopolitical interests. America has geopolitical interests, Australia has them, Brazil has them and so on. None of these can fairly be called ethnostates.
The kind of phenomenon you are referring to does not arise (not with that depth of feeling) from geopolitics. That kind of thing arises from ethnonationalism – the demented idea that teaches, say, a Pole that he has nothing whatsoever of any value in common with, say, a Russian, or a Romanian with a Hungarian. Polls (pardon the pun) are a symptom; this is the disease.
Germany likes France more than the French?
I wonder if the result would be different, if you factored out the North Africans in France. Or whether it is a case of French hating their own government.
My thought is that if they had had a strong historical grudge, they would have joined NATO.
You asked for evidence of Polish Russophobia, and I gave it to you. I’m not particularly interested in dissecting the causes of it. The way I see it, it’s a Polish problem.
Lol Germany lower than Poland, so much for the fictional Russian-German alliance.
And ironically, this is mainly true for the “anti-racist” liberal normies.
The evil nazi racists from Nord Front on the other hand seem genuinely friendly and respectful when they come to Eastern Europe.
Polish national resentment of Russia is natural, but it doesn’t make it any less churlish. The conflicts with Russia are a two way street or does no one else in remember the Polish Muscovite wars. Or that the Polish Soviet wars were a mutual conflict begun by a Polish offensive designed for land grabbing at their neighbors expense. One thing people forget is that being a victim doesn’t preclude one from also being a perpetrator even perhaps simultaneously. Just because Russia, Prussia, and Austria wiped Poland off the map didn’t stop them from entertaining their own imperial ambitions once it was reconstituted.
It is human nature to respect the strong and despise the weak. No matter what the Germans could do to the poles up to and including a literal decimation and culling of children to be aryanized, the Poles could never sustain the animus against them because they tacitly accepted the superiority of the German. A slave can resent or fear his master, but he cannot despise him. Not so for the poor Russian who is the socio-economic inferior of the Pole. On him you can heap scorn for any insult real or imagined.
As well as historical being as rival hegemons, Sweden and Russia – despite very different languages and 20th century history – do also have a lot of cultural similarity. There is differently some similarity of nordic personality, which might potentially appall a patrician-like Swedish view to see themselves in the mirror, or how they would look down a different, less utopian, historical path.
Yeah.
While Croatia and Romania were pleasant surprises, France and Germany are unpleasant ones at least for me. I did not expect the numbers there to be so low.
And Russia needs either Germany or France, preferably both, for a Russia-EU alliance to be possible and/or for the EU to become a truly independent entity.
On the other hand it’s not like there is actual democracy in the EU and the opinion of the people actually matters.
And it’s not like the EU will continue to exist much longer if it sticks to its current path.
In this case they are unique. The experience of Katyn puts them in a unique spot. It was the worst war crime of 20 century before there was the Holocaust. And then in 2010 their government dies nearby going to this place. If somebody wanted to antagonize Poland-Russia relations for another generation or more there was no better way then this. No amount of explanations that this was just an accident will change it. Thus the conspiracy theories are inescapable. So once you are in the realm of conspiracy theories one should ask the question who benefited form this. After asking the qui bono question it becomes obvious it was not Russia.
I agree. Which is why the Russian government should stop whining about Western “Russophobia” and start growing their economy at 5% which would fix the “Russophobia” automatically. Whining like that is so beta.
That’s definitely not true. Suffice it to recall the Nanking Massacre
Such estimates are not very reliable. I, as a Croat, may offer some insights (which are, of course, necessarily subjective).
I depends, very, very much who do you ask. Western liberal types are anti-Russian, but they’re no more than Soros’ mouthpieces. Most nationally conscious & apolitical people are virtually indifferent, yet many have soft spot for Russia being a symbol of anti-faggotry & ethno-nationalist state (which is not the case, but never mind…).
Politically, from what I’ve seen, the majority are very pro-Ukrainian & anti-Russian, but it is not so simple: I would say the consensus would be- Crimea goes to Russia, Russian & pro-Russian forces should go out of eastern Ukraine, Ukrainian suzerainty fully restored (except Crimea) & sanctions should be lifted, with Russia more integrated with the rest of Europe, serving as a healthy corrective to loony multiculturalism, Islamophilia & gender ideology.
This is what, I think, is the majority opinion.
Apart from politics, Russian cultural influence is very small. It was strong during 19th C & 1st half of the 20th C, and Croatia was, during 1980s- I think- a very strong center on esoteric topics like high Russian vanguard culture (literature, painting, films, ..) during 1920s/1939s period. Now, contemporary Russian literature is translated, but I haven’t seen anything on other areas (history, political science, popular science, literary theory, religions,..).
TV is American dominated, with very few movies & shows from other countries, including Russia. The same with popular music, which is virtually non-existent (rap & similar crap).
As for UK, France, Germany…. local people who are in search of better life go to other European countries, especially Germany, Ireland, Switzerland & Austria- but there is no emotional attachment to these countries. All Western countries are, from vantage point of average citizen, something simultaneously highly organized, efficient – and mentally ill (Arabs, migrants, gay “marriage”, feminism,..).
In other words, Sweden tried for 7 centuries to build an empire in the northeastern Europe, lost badly, and they are still bitter. I wish I could offer more help, but historical bitterness lingers.
For Sweden the obvious solution is to replace its population with new, better people from the Third World. That solution is already on the horizon and probably not reversible. A sad way for a culture to go, but after producing the likes of Carl Bildt, I am not sure we will miss the good old Sweden that much. That maniac was a real piece of work. I read somewhere he was a descendant of one of the ‘martyred’ Swedish invaders of eastern Europe in the 18th century.
In genetic terms it is a loss, Swedes have an almost identical genetic profile to the people who they feel so much contempt for. Blood feuds are always among related groups.
Well, that was indeed the prevailing opinion before 1918, and to a large extent before 1945. Russia just “won” that game of musical chairs.
(In apostrophes before the USSR was a cuck empire that transferred resources from Russians to foreigners instead of the other war round).
I must have forgotten the part of my job description mandating PR duties for the Russian Federation.
Saying that people “despise” the weak is too strong; there’s too great an element of repugnance attached to it. The feeling is more like a soft contempt, but a contempt which does not usually freely express itself, because that is regarded as too cruel. And depending on the context, it’s also perfectly natural to feel pity and compassion towards the weak (the sort of thing that sent Nietzsche into fits of rage).
There is a difference between accepting that someone is in a superior position to you – such as someone in a position from which he can harm you – and accepting someone as ‘naturally’ superior. The times being what they were, I suppose it’s barely possible there may have been some Poles who, in their moments of despair, wondered about the possibility of the latter (given how hopeless their cause seemed), but I bet they were overwhelmingly outnumbered by people who accepted the former. And of course it is perfectly possible to combine this feeling with one of intense hatred.
Regarding Poles’ feelings towards Russians, they are in a similar position as Croats were vis-a-vis Serbs: economically superior, but (at the time) militarily weaker. So the Croat could despise the Serb as a stupid, backwards peasant, but he also had to be mindful that the Serb is in a militarily superior position. I think when it comes to responding to a perceived threat towards you, it is feelings of anger and hatred that win out over feelings of contempt, however. So when Poles perceive Russians as threatening them, it is these feelings that come to the fore and whatever contempt they might have for Russians takes a back seat.
(In before Bardon tells me I am an idiot who doesn’t know what I’m talking about because he’s from the region – well so am I!)
And before Nanking (and probably inspiration for it) was the suppression of the Philippine Insurrection from 1898 t0 1902 – thus being a war crime encompassing the very beginning of the 20th Century, causing probably a half-million dead civilians (Mark Twain estimated 2 million, but 1/2 million seems more plausible) by you-know-who!
This is what it all comes down to. People instinctively like winners, and dislike losers.
The Americans dropped two nukes* on Japan and the Japanese love them regardless. Moral considerations are secondary ones, at best. Conversely, if central planning actually had turned out to be superior to markets, instead of a dismal failure, I’m reasonably sure Poles and Balts would love Russians today, a few minor unpleasantries from the 1940s regardless.
Of course the fact that sovoks tend to actively work to make themselves unlikeable doesn’t help matters.
It’s very simple. Poland ceased to exist as an independent country
for almost 200 years, from The Third Partition (1795) to
the Overthrow of Communism (1989), except for the brief
interbellum period. This after being the largest country in
Europe (as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) for 250
years. Why? Because Russia grabbed most of it and simply
annexed it to the Russian Empire. The November Uprising
of 1830 and The January Uprising of 1863 were brutally crushed
by Russia with thousands killed, tens of thousands exiled to Siberia,
and thousands of estates confiscated. In the second half of the 19th
century, when Italy and Hungary already regained their independence,
in Russian-ruled Poland it was forbidden for the Poles to hold higher-
level positions and anyone who taught or studied the Polish language
was in danger of being sent to Siberia (similar prohibitions existed in
the German partition). Universities were closed in order to keep the
Polish population uneducated. I could go into similar detail into the
horrors of post-WW II Poland when Communism was imposed on the
nation by the Soviet Union with the eager participation of the Polish
Jews who were given high-level position, and were over-represented
in the secret police and the torture and execution apparatus.
Based on this, it is surprising that so few Poles burn with hatred toward
Russia for basically stealing the 19th century from Poland. But Poland
is a Christian nation, and Christianity calls for forgiveness. As a result,
I think there is less hatred toward Russia in Poland than in Sweden,
even though Sweden was never brutally occupied by Russia. Partly,
I think it’s because (1) There is recognition of common suffering under
Communism, one of the greatest horrors in European history, (2) There
is appreciation of the Russian role in the defeat of Germany.
And popular culture in Russia become noticeably even more popularist and trashy just over last 10 years. Endless shows about Shurygina has to hopefully be some kind of high (or rather, low) water mark, that can not be surpassed.
This democratization and proletarianization of culture, to reaching new ever lows of trashiness, seems as one of the few ubiquitous long term international trends, and can only be a result of very deep changes incurred from the influence of technology, accelerated by the internet, on our brains.
Is this for real? I daresay Swedes and Russians are on almost opposite sides of the psychological spectrum of the European peoples.
I wouldn’t say Poland is economically superior to Russia. Poland is a medium country, dependent on Western Europe, it has fewer autonomous leverages of growth, while Russia does
Poles dislike Russia for brutality mostly I’d say. But they start to increasingly dislike Western Europe as well, because Russia is really a copy of Western Europe but in the East. Same bureaucratic, tyrannical mentality striving for uniformity
Greeks, Bulgarians and Cypriots know they need someone to protect them from the Turks.
The same reason Armenians have a positive perception of Russia.
I am not blaming Russia for its historical behavior. That indeed was the way of the world back then. For the same reason I don’t blame the Brits for their globe-spanning empire (if anything, I am hugely grateful for it – I really lucked out as a result.) And as much as I despise Israel, I wouldn’t blame it if it did what it was doing, say, 150 years ago. I would just say, well, shit happens; we need to learn from it, and move on. But its oppression and colonization has happened too recently in history, during a period in which the very same thing was being vehemently denounced the world over – most prominently by Jews themselves, no less.
But that brings me to the thorny issue of 1939. It’s a tough one, I admit. Obviously the USSR had some very serious security issues to worry about. So I can’t say I really blame them for invading. I think, though, I can blame them for the rather unsavory, to put it mildly, treatment they dished out after having invaded – much of it motivated by a desire for revenge against the uppity Poles who had bested them twenty years earlier. I mean, ideals of human justice had moved beyond the domain of starry-eyed idealists by that point, so for a regime which justified its entire existence on the basis that it was the savior of the common man, its hatred of Poles is really quite mind-boggling.
Well, if you want to improve neighborly relations (as an ideal), then I don’t think it would be a terrible burden to assume it is.
By the way, since I have your attention and Bulgaria features prominently as Russophilic here, do you put any stock in accounts that Zhivkov and Brezhnev discussed Bulgaria’s joining the USSR in, I think, the late 70s?
The opposite of cold, introverted, idealistic Swedish, in terms of being both different personality from different underlying paradigm, would surely be something like the extroverted but cynical Italians, or especially very extroverted yet cynical Southern Italians.
Russia and Swedish personality, I would – if I might to be allowed to indulge my pseudo-psychologist windbag side – diagnose as being different personalities from a similar underlying paradigm.
Both nordic personalities – with Russia viewed as a kind of a failing utopia and embarrassing shadow* by Sweden’s really existing ‘utopia’.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_(psychology)
But there’s also a feeling, at least among some Bulgarians, that they need someone to protect them from Russia, too. (I’m fairly sure this was the position of the liberalizing Kostov regime in the late 90s.) EU and NATO were supposed to kill two birds with the one stone, but after seeing those organizations’ piss-weak response to the ‘refugee’ tidal wave, I guess a lot of people are having doubts that they’re up to the job of dealing with Turkey.
With some degree of deference to you being ethnic Swedish, I have difficulty believing this is the case.
Does anyone in Sweden still care about Poltava? As opposed to, say, evil Russian oppressors persecuting Chechen homos.
I recall Bildt once yapped something about how the Orthodox Church is the main threat to Western civilization. This is the statement of a pozzed faggot, not someone still butthurt over the Battle of the Neva.
This does tally with my impressions. Also something Germans had wrt Eastern Europe (perhaps until recently, anyway).
Well, for now, all indications are that it is more prosperous. This isn’t necessarily a permanent state of affairs – and it doesn’t need to be for a person or group to develop feelings of contempt towards the poorer party, nor does the wealth disparity have to be particularly significant.
I won’t say you’re an idiot (my mistake of being sometimes too arrogant).
Parallel with Serbs is not completely wrong, but there are essential differences: numerically, Serbs/Croats is something like 1.6/1. It is not such a big disproportion; then, in our wars in 20th C we feel we defeated them: during WW2, we were on both sides & were not defeated by them; in 1990s wars they fled from Croatia proper & we would also greatly reduce their presence in Bosnia & Herzegovina, were it not for Bosnian Muslim national/ideological confusion.
Also, Serbs harbor this victim mentality that we had, in this century, killed ca. 1-2 million of them. This is absurd exaggeration, but it is, nevertheless, a reflection of their fear of us. They see us as bloodthirsty monsters (which is something radically different from Polish-Russian relations).
Also, since Croatian & Serbian are 100% mutually intelligible, we are somehow closer.
As for Serbs & Russia, there is a sort of “kitschy Orthodoxy luuv” expounded by many priests & some fringe politicians. Serbs are, emphatically, pro-Russian, but in real life they are Americanized & don’t care about Russians, except in situations involving political rhetoric. They also emigrate to Canada, Germany, Sweden,… & hardly anyone goes to Russia. Historical ties from 18th C are gone, since Serbs mostly use our version of Roman alphabet & Cyrillic script is no more than 10-20% present in everyday life.
Serbs are, with rare exceptions, mostly irreligious so their “Orthodoxy” is frequently vastly exaggerated (actually, Orthodox priests are the butt of numerous tasteless jokes) .
There were 3 million members of Communist Party in Poland in the 1980’s. All Jews? When 10% of your population joins a party that you claim occupied Poland, I am having some doubts about whether you are telling the whole truth.
And this weird vignette from 19th century:
Really? It is simply not true, schools in Polish language functioned and nobody was forbidding the Polish language (maybe in the German part). Polish aristocrats were very numerous and over-represented in the Russia’s elite. That was partially a function of their large numbers and the fact that Russian tsars honoured their status when taking over Poland.
And those takeovers in 18th century: wasn’t there always a large Polish party that asked for Russia, Germany, Austria, Sweden (whomever) to take over the Polish throne? I don’t recall the details, but I believe the three partitions had a substantial domestic component, ‘schlachta’ shopping around for the best deal for themselves and abandoning the common people and Polish identity.
We all like to blame the evil foreigners for our misfortunes. Some of it is true, but often there are also domestic reasons. In Poland the internal strife has always been an issue. Even today they are ready to tear each other apart.
I don’t think it was motivated by that at all. While the USSR did decimate the Polish intelligentsia, it was merely applying a template that it had developed on its own people, including and indeed starting with Russians.
Considering the preponderance of Visegrad/Balkan readers here – I think they might even outnumber Russians, at least so far as active commenters are concerned – I think that’s happening anyway. 🙂
Huh. First time I’m even hearing about this. Maybe Spisarevski would know more.
Yes this is unpleasant, but very real and natural.
It can be seen very much in our hierarchy of animals. And especially in the mentality of America, the world’s most successful country – as where the eating of predators like dogs* by Koreans, or the hunting of killer whales, is viewed as unquestionable evil, while the eating equally cute (but herbivore) animals like cows and sheep is nothing to write back home about.
Nonsense. There is a lot of hatred toward Germany in Poland,
but mainly among the older generation who were directly
affected by the war. For example, to see what the Germans
did to Warsaw during the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944
was a soul-crushing experience. Not only was the city destroyed
building by building, with the Germans showing special hatred
toward bookstores, libraries, and archives, but over 200,000
people were killed, and hundreds of thousand were sent to
concentration camps, even though the Germans already knew they
were losing.
For many people it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that
the Germans (and Swedes) are genetically predisposed to
violence, and in this sense genetically inferior, because the
Germanics inflicted more suffering on Europe in the last
1200-years than any other group. I mean breaking women’s
legs on purpose in concentration camps to examine how the
bones heal, as well as many other medical experiments?
Who is capable of this kind of violence except extreme
psychopaths, and Germany (and earlier Sweden) were
crawling with such subhuman characters (study the invasion
of Poland by Sweden in the 1650s in which over 50% of the
population of northern and central Poland were killed – if
that’s not genocide, then I don’t know what is).
Swedish fear and loathing of Russia is deep seated, borne of centuries of rivalry, like France England, nothing to do with ideology. Bildt is a CIA agent and regurgitates what they tell him to.
Russia and Sweden share a lot of cultural similarities, very different in some ways though.
Whatever past grievances Poles might have does not explain the proliferation of ludicrous conspiracy theories. It’s a form of collective madness. Polish society resembles the Arab society in this regard.
But you do have some conservative voices who moderate the conversation a little. I can’t think of a single even moderately pro-Russian voice in Scandinavia, which partly explains our hostility.
The little support you do find comes from fractions within the nationalist parties and some immigrant groups. Iranians and people from the Balkan are normally pro-Russian, but also some Syrians, Iraqis, and Afghans (very mixed bag here). I also once met — of all things — a strongly pro-Putin Somali. While a devout Muslim himself, he had only good things to say about Orthodox Christianity; all other Christians would go to hell (and Obama, especially, would go to hell). He also dreamt of moving to Siberia, which I thought very funny, but also strangely beautiful.
Are you Bulgarian? Because this is bullshit. The people who think like this have always been a small minority and I personally always doubt the true ethnic affiliation of such “Bulgarians” like the gypsy Kostov or the pomak Plevneliev.
Of course, brainwashed “liberals” serving the Western elites do exist here, just like they do in Russia, but their numbers are thankfully small.
NATO has never had a positive approval rating in Bulgaria.
Even as a Bulgarian nationalist who is seriously butthurt towards the Serbs for the Second Balkan War and for everything they’ve done in Macedonia, I remember the bitter feeling when Kostov allowed NATO fighters to pass through our territory to bomb Serbia and did not allow the Russian planes who wanted to do an airdrop on some airport iirk.
I don’t remember anyone in Bulgaria cheering for that. Also a common thought was that if the gypsies and/or the turks rise up here, the Americans will bomb us too just like they did the Serbs.
The same Americans who bombed Sofia during WW2 and even threw boobie trapped children toys (!!!), being the psychopathic shits that they are.
He obviously meant “Katyn was the worst crime in Europe.”
Katyn was a major effort by Russia to decimate the Polish
elites. Among those executed were university graduates,
military officers, professors, doctors, etc. The Germans
similarly had lists of the intelligentsia to execute, and did
so systematically in the occupied territories. Both the Russians
and the Germans had a similar aim – execute all highly intelligent
and educated people to cripple Poland permanently.
And people wonder why Kaczynski doesn’t trust Russians.
Westerners don’t find eating dogs appalling because of dogs being “predators”, but because they’re probably the animals most capable of forming a close bond with humans (having evolved with humans they’re capable of interpreting human gestures like few or no other animals)…it just seems unnatural to kill close companions. Real predators like bears and wolves were regarded as a threat and had been exterminated over large parts of Western Europe by the 19th century.
Don’t really want to get involved in this debate, but have to say I find AK’s and your “Might is right” attitude disturbing…definitely counterproductive if the goal is to present a positive image of Russia and Russians, not just preaching to the already converted. There’s a lot of anti-Russian hysteria and ugly stereotypes in the West, but this quasi-imperial contempt for the national sentiments of “lesser” nations won’t help in dispelling that.
Autistic side-note: Assuming that intelligence and capacity for suffering are correlated, I do actually think eating dogs (intelligent), eating pigs (similarly intelligent to dogs), and and hunting killer whales (who are very intelligent), is objectively a lot worse than eating cows (dumb) or sheep (very dumb).
What is it about Somalis being drawn to snow.
Pigs don’t deserve better, because there are plenty of documented cases of pigs eating humans (e.g. there was a case a few years ago where mafiosi fed people alive to pigs). If they had the chance they’d eat us, so it’s ok if we eat them.
Though this is where the similarities also ended.
The Soviets wanted to exterminate the traditional Polish intelligentsia (as they had extermined the traditional Russian intelligentsia under Lenin, and the other Soviet national intelligentsias under Stalin) and replace it with a red intelligentsia.
The Nazis wanted to exterminate the traditional Polish intelligentsia and replace it with… well, nothing. Helots don’t need an intelligentsia.
Sweden has a tradition of neutrality, though it did propose a defensive alliance among only the Nordic countries after the war. Denmark and Norway rejected the proposal in favor of joining NATO.
In addition to wishing to preserve its neutrality and not be drawn into great power politics, Sweden feared that joining NATO would result in Finland being coerced into the Warsaw Pact.
This would then harm the “brother country” (Finland) and result in Soviet troops on the Swedish frontier.
The country did take defense during the Cold War very seriously. For a time the country had the world’s fourth largest air force, and the army was capable of mobilizing 800,000 men in 48 hours.
It’s noteworthy that Sweden is the smallest country which designs submarines and fighter aircraft.
And Sweden was in tacit alliance with NATO throughout the Cold War. The Catalina Affair, for instance, was part of an ongoing cooperative signals intelligence program with Great Britain. The Swedes also provided the locations of Soviet submarines they identified directly to NATO.
Dogs have for thousands of years been companions to people. They have greater capacity for understanding human emotion than even chimps do. Dogs, almost unique among animals, come to humans for help when they are hurt (there are isolated examples of other animals doing so but for dogs it is an instinct), and prefer to die in the company of those they love, rather than to hide somewhere, as cats do.
Thus, killing dogs for food is worse than killing similarly-intelligent pigs for food. It is the betrayal of a friend. It is perverse.
Indeed. It’s obvious that Russia receives much harsher criticism for refusing to bow completely to Homintern simply because it’s a white country. Meanwhile nobody gives a shit that not a single country in Asia has sodomite “marriage”.
We “evil nazi racists” tend to admire Eastern Europeans for being less cucked and zogged than our countrymen.
There’s a wrinkle here in Sweden as well though–a non-trivial fraction of the Swedish far right is Russophobic. In fact some have even volunteered to fight against the Russophone separatists in the Donets Basin.
I don’t say it is right or wrong attitude – but that it is natural, even though unpleasant, attitude.
It’s better to be conscious of these less than idealistic tendencies in us, than to pretend they do not exist.
As for assigning to Russia this attitude. I don’t think any culture celebrates it as openly as America (and that is no particular insult to America, although obviously it can reach idiotic extremes there, as when, for example, Trump says “I like people who don’t get captured”).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSxwR9kCbZ0
According to polls 80% of Poles think some foul play was involved, 30% directly blame Russia. That’s mental. This is a sick society, genuinely Russophobic.
They’re asked a question by a pollster about something they’d have given scant thought to until the pollster called. The response is idle and does indicate something about their defaults, but that’s all.
It doesn’t get ‘sick’ (presuming they aren’t actually correct) bar in circumstances where you have blocs of people producing and consuming outlandish conspirazoid literature. The subculture of Kennedy assassination obsessives is liberally studded with such people. (One of the was the public prosecutor in New Orleans, who flogged the idea that the military-industrial complex took down Kennedy by subcontracting the job to a bunch of French Quarter homosexuals).
and even threw boobie trapped children toys (!!!)
Is this true?
Karlin may be incredulous, but there’s a point to this.
The English journalist Roland Huntford wrote a book on Sweden titled The New Totalitarians in 1971. The basic thesis was that the Social Democrats had successfully established in Sweden a totalitarian state, and the roots of this totalitarianism lay very deep in Swedish history.
Like Russia, Sweden had no renaissance. One can find in the traditional Swedish bruk (only abolished in the 1820s) and peasant strip farms something analogous to traditional Russian serfdom.
One interesting observation of his is that he considered Stockholm to have the feeling of an Eastern European city.
Swedes are collectivists, xenophobes, nationalists, and religious fanatics. The current Sweden Yes! embarrassment is mainly owing to the contemporary religion being liberalism. In the past Swedes were militant protestant fanatics who put Catholics to death instead.
Bildt is a CIA agent and regurgitates what they tell him to.
Memo to Felix Kerevich: here you can almost taste Teh Crazy.
If size difference between humans, and dogs or cats, would be reversed sufficiently that you resemble their typical prey animals, then dogs and cats will happily have you for lunch.
On the other hand, however large a sheep would be, at worse it would trample you to death.
Morality of animals, or lack thereof, gives no specific legitimacy to eating them, or any factor in role in which animals we actually do eat.
Of course, there will be domestic differences in a large
country like Poland. Read about the November and
January Uprisings. All of Europe was shocked by the Russian
brutality in suppressing the January Uprising. That reinforced
the Western European view of Russia as a primitive and an
Asiatic power. Even Marx was effusive about the Polish as natural
revolutionaries, and had only insulting things to say about Russia.
Captain Nemo, the main character in 20,000 Leagues Under
the Sea, was originally conceived by Jules Verne as a Polish
revolutionary whose family is brutally murdered by the Russians
and he takes to the sea with his faithful crew to avenge his
loss by seeking out and destroying Russian ships. So shocked
was Verne in the 1860s by the extreme cruelty and brutality the
Russians have shown in 1863-4. Nobody knew that this was
a harbinger of the brutality of the Bolshevik Revolution,
and the Stalinist era.
Yes, the study of Polish beyond a certain elementary level was
forbidden. Russian was imposed on Poland as the official
language. That’s how you know Russia had no soft power –
when you had to force people to study your language.
Maria Sklodowska Curie, as a young woman in Poland,
was involved in the clandestine instruction of peasant children
in Polish, and was extremely afraid of being sent to Siberia
if was discovered by the omnipresent Russian spies.
Look, when a small country is involved in a conflict with a large
country, it’s the large country that will be blamed simply because
it has more options.
I think it’s been Bildt’s contention that the quotation was a fabrication:
https://euvsdisinfo.eu/report/orthodoxy-main-enemy-of-the-west-according-to-carl-bildt/
Pigs don’t deserve better, because there are plenty of documented cases of pigs eating humans
And plenty of documented cases of dogs eating humans, although at least they have the good taste to wait until you’re dead. “Real” dogs (wolves) don’t always share these scruples.
Pigs don’t, e.g. there were cases in the middle ages in which pigs were sentenced to death because they had snatched some infant or child and eaten it.
Anyway, I admit this is a bit silly…but I need some rationalization to continue eating them 🙂
No one cares greatly about Poltava other than history nerds. Three centuries is after all a very long time.
There is, however, a saying in Sweden, “No one shall deny Swedes the right to quarrel about Karl XII.”
Karl has a reputation in Sweden comparable to Napoleon in France, and my father has a large painting of Karl XII in his living room.
Like many other former empires, Sweden is proud of its imperial past. The time is referred too as the “Great Power Era” (Stormaktstiden), and the death of Gustavus Adolphus at Lützen is a national holiday on which pastries with the great king’s visage are baked. The government attempted to poz this holiday by replacing the pastry with one which did not feature the king’s visage, but fortunately this effort failed.
The point isn’t that Swedes have specific (rational) grievances against Russia, but that Swedes are natural Russophobes. This Russophobia is deeply rooted in Swedish society and stems from deep historical experience.
The fact that many or even most Swedes are pozzed faggots naturally magnifies this Russophobia but is not the source of it. People in my family have been making contemptuous remarks about Russia and Russians for as long as I can remember.
Germans expand on this by also having contempt for Mediterranean Europeans. A key to Merkel’s enduring popularity (prior to her rapefugee blunder) was the savage conditions Wolfgang Schauble imposed on Greece. The austerity imposed on the Greek people is genuinely popular in Germany.
I think they were more ambitious …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost
……………………………..
Percentages of ethnic groups to be destroyed and/or deported to Siberia by Nazi Germany from future settlement areas
Ethnic group / Nationality Population percent subject to removal
Russians ————— 50–60% to be physically eliminated and another 15% to be sent to Western Siberia
……………
Poles —————-20 million, or 80–85%
…
So, basically, all Slavs were slated not “only” for slavery, but ultimately for physical extermination.
Yes, but a lot of people dislike that about America (including many Americans I’d assume). It just seems to me that AK is strangely incapable at times of understanding the national sentiments of other peoples (or maybe deliberately dismissive?)…nobody likes being under the thumb of foreign domination, and some resentment towards a former occupier/imperial power is to be expected. AK should take care not to become like Jewish or Muslim activists with their perennial whining about “antisemitism” and “Islamophobia” and just dismiss all negative perceptions of Russia as due to some completely irrational phobia (though that might seem like a winning strategy given the successes of Jewish and Muslim activists…I don’t think it will work for Russians though).
Probably not. Unexploded submunitions though are generally small, shiny, and often ball shaped so it wouldn’t be surprising if children would gravitate towards picking them up and playing with them to their detriment. The Blu-43 and PFM-1 anti personnel mines used by the US and Soviet’s respectively were even cheaper to make, being a piece of plastic shaped into an air foil with for uniform dispersion across a wide area.
It is. We have a popular phrase in Bulgarian, “играчка-плачка” (can’t really translate it, basically used for warning that playing with something will make you cry) originating from this.
Denounced as “fascist propaganda” by communists and modern liberals, it was described in a factual tone in military reports from the Tsardom of Bulgaria found in the archives, including warnings to the population and descriptions of incidents with children who have lost limbs, etc.
The Anglo-Americans also threw bombs in the form of items someone would pick up like watches, fountain pens, and yes – they did throw a lot of explosives looking like children toys and candy.
In addition to the archive evidence it’s also common knowledge among Bulgarians, especially those whose grandparents lived in Sofia at the time.
The first bolded part is not a factor in modern Swedish society; the second is, but only in that it feeds confirmation bias about the threat of Russian expansionism. In the mind of most Swedes, the Winter War would be a historical footnote if Russia distanced itself from Stalin and its Soviet past.
The absurdity of the first bolded part speaks for itself; the second is more false than true. While we were on guard against Soviet aggression, as well we should, Sweden was no less soft on communism than other European states. We had plenty of public figures supporting Fidel Castro, Mao Zedong and Pol Pot(!), and if memory serves, the Left Party was supported by the East German goverment well into the 1980s (Latvian Womans’s favorite commie, Lars Ohly, once went there on a state-sponsored study tour).
I see it on a more superficial levels – for example, the fact how rich liberal hipsters try to transform themselves into something basically identical as Swedish.
The only different way Ksenia Sobchak would be if she was born in Sweden – that she would probably be Prime Minister of Sweden by now.
German view of the situation is more like “The Greeks with their corrupt political system cheated their way into the Euro, but their politicians did nothing useful with it, just distributed largesse to their clientele…and now they expect us to pay for it so they can continue with their high living at our expense”. Yes, it’s not very generous and rather heartless towards suffering average Greeks…but moral indignation about cold-hearted Teutons also is a bit one-sided.
Anyway, the contempt is mutual, we’re well aware they (and the Italians as well) regard us as northern barbarians and eternal Nazis.
Why would communists have any interest in defending Anglo-American bombing attacks? Seems more likely they would use those for propaganda (“Look at what the imperialist warmongers are doing, they’re even dropping bombs designed to kill children…the glorious Soviet Union would never do something like that”).
Pretty much the same accusation was made against the Soviets in Afghanistan btw…and there at least it was just propaganda (though it had a real background in children mistaking munitions for toys…pretty much like DukeofQin explained).
LondonBob isn’t crazy.
Bildt may not be on the CIA’s actual payroll, but the self-professed “Atlanticist” clearly has substantial ties to America’s Deep State.
Bildt is a longtime advocate of joining NATO, was a member of Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, and was the first foreigner appointed to the Board of Trustees of the RAND Corporation.
The Deep State has in turn taken care of Bildt. He has gained substantial wealth since the 1990s from oil exploration (Lundin Group), finance (Legg Mason), and venture capital.
This sort of profiteering from political power is highly unusual in Sweden and speaks to Bildt’s prominent position in the Western power structure.
Not sure I follow. I don’t think I ever claimed that E. European antipathy towards Russia substantially stems from 20th century experiences – and that there are some Russians who seem insistent on keeping it that way (e.g. Katyn denial, Stalin worship, etc).
In this post, I wrote about the seemingly noteworthy fact that these antipathies seem to be getting smoothed over by the passage of time, and are getting superseded by core West European hostility, as pro/anti-Russian sentiment returns to a 19th century pattern based on ideological values, as opposed to 20th century historical experiences.
Rumor of a rumor from someone who has never been to the East, but I’ve heard there is a meat dog breed with a small head, exceptionally stupid.
Of course, they are actually trying to ban dog-eating in China, for the very practical reason that restaurants send people around to wrangle people’s pets. Often jumping over fences and working in two man teams.
The state television network put out a number of documentaries about the Finnish War in 2009 to commemorate the bicentennial of that humiliating defeat and final destruction of the Swedish Empire. Obviously it’s not a factor in modern Swedish society, but it’s part of the national memory.
Sorry, definitely can’t agree on the Winter War. My family adopted a Finnish orphan from the Winter War. Her parents were killed by Soviet troops and the farm destroyed. My grandfather was at Karlberg at the time and directly knew people who volunteered to fight for Finland. Swedish society mobilized massive charitable aid for the Finns.
The only thing one can say is that it was now a long time ago, but unlike Sweden’s own wars with Russia it’s still part of living memory.
Why is stating that hostility to Russia is in the blood absurd? I’ve never met people so thoroughly Russophobic as Swedes, and it absolutely predates Putin. Even Polish people are more reasonable.
Would you consider such a statement absurd if made in the context of Britons and Frenchmen?
The Palme government was soft on communism (it’s worse than you think–Sweden gave foreign aid to North Vietnam during the Vietnam War and Palme compared America to Nazi Germany on national television), but not on defense. Palme authorized the Viggen and two classes of submarines. This is quite distinct from how other liberal/social democratic parties in Europe operated aside from Helmut Schmidt. And Palme’s role in suppressing the Baader-Meinhof Gang shouldn’t be forgotten.
The East Germany thing gets weirder. East German propaganda reportedly claimed Sweden was allied with the regime, and in addition to various links between the Social Democrats and the SED there were links to Swedish industry. Ingvar Kamprad produced furniture for IKEA using East German prison labor for instance.
Yes, that seems plausible and is an interesting observation. I don’t know though if ideological values count for everything, e.g. I do get the impression that Polish resentment against Russia has always been tempered somewhat by a view of Russians as fellow Slavs and appreciation for Russia’s role in defeating Nazi Germany (same applies maybe even more for Czechs whose negative history with Russia was limited to the 1948-1989 period). So 20th century experiences perhaps still do play some role, even if they’re being somewhat reevaluated.
Most surprising for me is the fairly negative rating for Russia in France, I would have expected it to be higher (but I guess those claims of Russia bankrolling the FN have also played a role there, would confirm your theory).
The communist part is anecdotal, I’ve met communists who claimed that the Tsar government made up stuff like that. What you are saying makes sense, but I am not aware if their party ever expressed an official position on this.
The liberal claim, however, was in the premier local Soros rag (dnevnik.bg) and in Russian context i.e. fascist propaganda from the past like an example of the hybrid warfare that Russia is up to today.
Well, I guess to you I would be a Bulgarian, since I am from Macedonia, although my ancestry is also Serbian, Greek and Vlach.
I Kostov really a gypsy? I find it hard to believe he would have got as much support as he did from an electorate as fanatically gypsy-hating as Bulgaria’s if that belief was widespread. I’m guessing this belief is mainly held by nationalist voters (Ataka, Nacionalen Front etc). And anyway, there are plenty of ethnic Bulgarians who look like him (and are fully accepted as ethnic Bulgarians, despite what Stormfront types try to claim.) As for Plevneliev a Pomak, lol, where do you people come up with this stuff?
Like most Balkan nationalists, you downplay the extent of support for affiliation with the west. I mean, come on, the electoral support for leaving the EU or NATO is in the toilet. I am not claiming the average pro-western Bulgarian is a Russophobe – far from it – but there is (or at least, long was) obviously a widespread belief that Bulgaria’s prospects are better served by affiliating with the west than with Russia. And of course, the issue is one of long standing, not something that has only arisen lately (which is why it’s still debated today, eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibqbUwygQeg)
I tend to like all Balkan peoples, even Albanians (so I’m a rare bird, haha), but I must admit to having a soft spot for Bulgaria. I was raised by pro-Macedonian (but non-nationalistic) parents to view Bulgarians as the great villains of the Balkans, but upon reading mainstream western sources and learning the truth of what really occurred in the early 20th century, I became hugely regretful for Bulgaria’s unfortunate past. It was clearly a travesty of justice that Serbia and Greece were able to grab so much of Macedonia, particularly considering it was Bulgaria who bore the brunt of the fighting with the Turks. But this sense of injustice has caused me to hate ethnonationalism even more, rather than to embrace it. If Balkanians weren’t such demented hardcore nationalist pigs it would have been a much simpler matter to submit the dispute to arbitration, wherein any fair-minded observer would easily have concluded that Bulgaria deserves the entirety of (what became) Yugoslav Macedonia and a good chunk (a third, minimum) of Greek Macedonia and Thrace. The result could hardly have been any worse than the catastrophe of the Second Balkan War. But anyway, I would not support any attempt to change borders today. Best to leave the past in the past.
Btw, if you’re still interesting in talking to me after what I said, have you heard of the claim that Zhivkov and Brezhnev discussed (maybe only in passing) Bulgaria becoming part of the USSR? I think I saw this on a Bulgarian documentary on youtube, but for the life of me I can’t remember which one. Or maybe I read it somewhere, I don’t remember.
Not in my view – that’s rather anthropomorphic. I take the simple view that if it’s not human it’s an animal and different rules apply to animals – consent is not an issue and they are basically there to be used for whatever purpose is considered appropriate. However they clearly do (to varying degrees) suffer and that suffering should be minimised so far as is consistent with human purposes. The infliction of undue suffering for no other purpose than human enjoyment is of course in itself inhumane.
Eating dogs and cats is fine in cultures where it’s considered appropriate to do so. What worries me is the creeping exclusion of traditional food sources like the rabbit – a proliferating pest and a traditional cheap source of food in this country. But too many people nowadays think rabbits are cute pets and shouldn’t be eaten.
I always thought the Irish myth of Cuchulain was quite interesting and possibly shows that people in Europe have had an aversion to eating dogs for a long time. Not only was he “the Hound of Cullen” but according to one version, a death curse fell upon him because he was tricked into eating dog.
Of course, I think a hundred years ago or so, it would have been quite common for people to kill female puppies, as a population control.
Funny story: Lewis and Clark were at first disgusted when they encountered Indians who ate dog. Eventually, when their supplies ran low, they took up the practice. After a while, they developed a taste for it. Moving on, they bought dogs off another tribe (probably in the NW?) who were quite disgusted and amused by their practice of eating dogs.
But the Soviets didn’t shoot thousands of Finnish officers, or Latvian officers, or Estonian, or Romanian, or even German. So why Polish? Did they have something against Poland in particular? I am sure the Poles think so but I find it hard to believe.
Muh 105 IQ future technological superpower. Even Arabs don’t eat dogs. I was about to add Africans, but I recall some of them eat Chimps and Gorillas, which is about on the same level.
http://failures.wikispaces.com/file/view/LRB7%201.jpg/570416863/LRB7%201.jpg
Lol, what bullshit. The expression doubtless predates WWII and what is, in all likelihood, an urban legend (I heard similar stories from my grandparents about “toys” supposedly left by the retreating Germans in Yugoslavia). Just a quick googling reveals a poem written titled Играчка-плачка, penned by one Чичо Стоян – who died in 1939.
Also, the way I understood this term as a kid was as a warning to be careful when playing, because either if play gets too rough or the activity gets dangerous, fun can quickly lead to tears. Even as a kid I thought the saying was stupid; as an I adult, I feel so doubly.
They did kill and deport elites in Estonia and Latvia (and NKVD shot a substantial number of prisoners just before the Germans came in 1941).
Finland wasn’t conquered, and Germany and Romania were just defeated enemy nations, not to be integrated into the Soviet Union like the Baltic states and what was then Eastern Poland (or maybe the Soviet Union had just become somewhat nicer by 1944/45? It did get steadily less murderous compared to the 1930s after all).
There are obvious evolutionary reasons for that, including the fact that probably most if not all surviving human lines of descent came at some point from women taken as slaves and birthing and raising their new masters’ children. If they were unable to get over the understandable initial upset at having their entire families slaughtered around them, that would be rather difficult in practice.
But it does seem to be culturally mediated to some extent. English culture notoriously is much more inclined to look well on a plucky underdog or a sporting loser than American, for instance.
[Must resist temptation to derail the thread into interminable debate about atomic bombings of Japan]
Well you just have to look at him, lol 🙂 This is no sun tan.
To be honest, gypsies who act like Bulgarians are not hated even if they are visibly “от боята” as we say here.
If they are integrated, polite, educated, speak without accent, then nobody gives a shit about their skin color although there could still be some taboo about marrying one. Anyway that explains “ethnic Bulgarians who look like him”. He never said he’s a gypsy but literally anyone here would agree with me that he actually is one. They don’t exactly advertise their origins, especially when they have taken the trouble to fully fit in.
You also have to take into account that ethnic Bulgarians are only about 70% of the population at this point. From the 2001 to the 2011 census the percentage fell off from 83.9% to 76.9% and it has certainly fallen further since then. If you look up the 2011 census you will see a different result at first there was a trick where the only the ones who declared their ethnicity were included in the “official figures” – however among the 10% of people who were undeclared there obviously isn’t a single ethnic Bulgarian.
I don’t – the still high support for the EU pisses me off to no end but I would not deny it.
But we were talking about NATO and it’s a different thing and approval polls for NATO are generally never taken because the few that were done were all something like 52% disapproval 30% approval.
Yes, most people here have heard of this. As far as I know Zhivkov simply made the suggestion, the Soviets were not really interested and/or there was no real necessity for something like that, so that was all.
In addition to the remarks of German_reader, Stalin actually proposing killing the entire German officer corps.
Instead he acquiesced to the plan to hold kangaroo court show trials (Nuremberg Trials). The most ridiculous result of this was Karl Doenitz being sent to prison for doing the exact same thing Chester Nimitz did in the Pacific.
As German_reader noted, Finland was unconquered. The Finns not only avoided occupation in 1940, but they defeated the second Soviet invasion in 1944 (with German assistance).
I doubt Macedonia and Bulgaria are very different in this respect. There are gypsies who look (are) mixed and who for this reason find easier acceptance, and who act civilized and don’t live in gypsy slums or associate much with gypsies can pretty easily ‘pass’, or at least not elicit comment. These people are certainly not hated, and you would probably be reprimanded by your friends if you intentionally made one feel bad. There is still something of a taboo (probably a dying taboo) against mating with one, but it excites nothing like the uproar that mating with a full-blooded, hardcore gypo would.
Still, I would have thought even non-racist (as opposed to actively anti-racist) Bulgarians would consider it a blow to national pride to have a gypsy as a head of government, which I must admit is what led me to doubt Kostov’s gypsy credentials. Bulgaria/Macedonia can’t really be considered ‘pure’ white people. Even those who do look pure white (and there are plenty, of course) are capable of having offspring who are dark (maybe not as extreme as Kostov, but not far off either). You really have to look at the family (parents, siblings, grandparents) to make an informed guess about whether someone just happened to turn out darker, or is indeed of gypsy stock.
The slum-dwelling gypos are another story entirely. You can’t tell me the average Bulgarian doesn’t despise these bastards, and avoid them like the plague. I’ll never forget one vacation I was driving to a monastery near Prilep, and I took a back road through what I thought was a village but which turned out to be a gypo slum. Fuck me, I thought I was in darkest India. I don’t think I ever saw people who looked like that on the streets. I wouldn’t have believed they even existed if I hadn’t seen them. Lol, the Nazis thought the Jews were their misfortune. Fools, I would take Weimar-like Jewish domination in exchange for these hordes of miserable gypos in a heartbeat. Sadly, our misfortune is going to be that we’ll eventually be bred out of existence by the mangals.
It’s weird that I feel this strongly about them, because I have had numerous close gypo friends in my life (been invited to their weddings, christenings etc). I like them well enough, although from what I’ve seen up close, their reputation as lowlifes is well deserved. I just find the idea of being displaced by them so damn repelling – and it’s happening, slowly, slowly, bit by almost imperceptible bit. Pisses me off royally. That is why I can understand hardcore WNs’ concerns, even if I despise their politics.
Yes, this is certainly true. My father is part Serbian and spent a couple of years as a kid after WWII in Kosovo (ie among hardcore Serb nationalists, who evidently pumped his young mind full of lunatic Serbian anti-Croat propaganda). Still, he was very pro-Yugoslav and pinned the blame for the breakup squarely on Croatia, who he viewed as being anti-Yugoslav from day one. He was never able to understand that Croats had legitimate reasons to be upset with the deal they got from joining Yugoslavia. And then on top of that, during the recent wars the whole Jasenovac thing for him justified anything and everything the Serbs did in Croatia and Bosnia. He was a complete sucker for Serb propaganda like the starving Bosnian POWs (made famous around the world) were ‘actually Serbs’ and the Bosnians themselves launched the mortar attack on the marketplace, and too many more to recount. I can’t really hate my father – he is a genuinely kind and warm man (even to Croats) – but he is so obtuse on these issues I can’t even discuss it with him without getting into a shouting/cursing match. When I see the way ethnonationalism warps the mind like this (and my father’s far from the worst I’ve seen), I struggle to understand why anyone would want to be an ethnonationalist, especially since there are other, more reasonable, options available.
Just how bad is the Gypsie problem in Bulgaria? I am only familiar with Romania due to family there, and the issue is quite serious there as it is. The gypsy population has continued to grow steadily, combined with mass emigration and low birth-rates, the country has lost anywhere from 3-5 million ethnic Romanians since 1989.
Romania is easily the most ‘pro-Western’ country in Eastern Europe, both in attitudes and people’s behavior. In my experience Romanians are noticeably self-deprecating and non-nationalist compared to most in region. I’m surprised the anti-Russian percentage is a low as it is frankly.
They’ve no good reason to change, unless their previously stated pro-Russian stance is (put mildly) suspect, as is the case.
Russia and the actual pro-Russian position in Ukraine were left with limited options in confronting the Euromaidan inspired mayhem that included a noticeably influential anti-Russian element.
Appreciate the Russo-Ukrainian fraternizing as noted in this piece:
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/02/21/overhyping-us-russian-differences.html
That bit about Swedish utopia has recently become out of date.
Sweden’s path ends in chaos, poverty, mass violence, and subjugation by Muslims. It will soon be irrelevant what actual Swedes think of Russia, and nobody sensible wants to emulate the Swedes already.
Not for the Siberians.
There’s another part of that history.
Poland attacked and tried to suppress Russian identity in the early 1600s.
In 1812, close to 100,000 Poles joined Napoleon in his attack on Russia.
During the Russian Civil War, Poland attacked former Russian Empire territory in areas with mostly and/or many Slavic Orthodox Christian pro-Russian elements.
There was the 1914 Polish-Nazi non-aggression pact, followed by these two countries attacking pro-Soviet Czechoslovakia in 1938.
The real question for Muslim Sweden’s next generation is whether to maintain neutrality or take a side in domestic Shia-Sunni conflict. Or whether to pick a particular African gang to run Malmo or remain neutral as they fight it out.
The “far” right in Sweden might first want to stop Muslim and African savages raping and groping their women and girls, frightening away their policemen, attacking their firefighters and paramedics, threatening and mugging their elderly, and degrading and destroying their cities.
Then actually have some freeking children to stop their country from dying out as it currently is.
And only THEN maybe turn to the necessary fight against evil Russia.
Then again, all I can boast about my country by comparison is “ha, the USA will be colonized and impoverished and enstupidated by Mexicans, not Muslims.” Not too inspiring.
There were plenty of false anti-Serb narratives in the 1990s, that include the summary execution of about 7,000 or more Muslim males at Srebrenica, as well as the hyped claim of 200,000-350,000 Bosnian Civil War related casualties and Albanians being murdered en masse, with their bodies being put down a mine shaft.
Your armchair freudian bullshit is obviously wrong.
Our views on Germans today are informed very much by our current relations. Germans have made great strides to improve relations with us. Our economic relationship with Germany is 100 USD in trade, which is not a small sum for a country whose total nominal GDP is around 550 billion USD.
I don’t personally don’t despise Russia, but it needs to be said that Russia has been far less forthcoming towards reconciliation. Even getting a proper, official, excuse for Katyn seems beyond the decency for many Russians. By contrast, Germans have shown far more humility.
They were early to engage us after the wall fell and even in the recent spat/feud we’ve had with Israel, they refused to pile on and took sole responsibility for the Shoah. This is not something the Jews wanted, even if it is more historically accurate. Germans are obsessed with appeasing Israel, at least the politicians are, so it was a brave step. Poland also doesn’t exactly have the best reputation after PiS came to power and the subsequent avalanche of bad press they have gotten. Yet Germany didn’t budge.
Furthermore, why should I judge an entire people based on 13 years of madness? German history goes back much further. It is true we often had wars in the past, but so did the Germans and the French. Danes and Swedes are another typical example. This is true of most neighbours.
People in Poland judge Germany and Russia on contemporary behaviour and it has nothing to do with your bizarre freudian bullshit. If Russian behaviour would change, our attitude would change with it. We don’t view them as subhuman or inferior just because we are better off economically.
But I guess this doesn’t fit into your lunatic freudian bullshit narrative.
Wew lad.
This is not true. Russian cinema collapsed into the abyss (it happened 30 years ago), but literature successfully competes with American literature (in Russia). Industry TV series and cartoons also developing successfully.
Painting today is marginal art, but the collapse of communism went to the benefit of painting
http://tot-gallery.ru/images/737234_novoselov-hudozhnik.jpg
For the architecture, too
http://fototerra.ru/photo/Russia/Hrjaschevka/medium-251836.jpg
The Balkans love Russia (in broad terms) because of the Orthodox alignment; but mostly because in 1878 Alexander the Liberator’s Russia stomped the Turk and ended the 500 year old Ottoman domination of the Balkans. Many of the Balkan Slavs also feel a natural linguistic affinity toward Russia, all the more so due to the common Cyrillic alphabet. Moreover, the Balkans are remote from Russia, whereas proximity breeds rivalry.
The rest of Europe, for all its monumental accomplishments, seems to harbor a chip on the shoulder regarding Russia. The Russians – eternally backward, eternally inferior, eternally uncouth – managed to survive and frequently overcome invasions and occupations by Tatars, Teutons, Turks, Poles, Swedes, French, Brits, Germans, Italians – and others. One empire after another found its grave on the Russian planes. It’s an amazing thing how Russia, which gets invaded every 50 years or so, is supposed to be an aggressor nation. To top it off, the Russians – always stupid, always ignorant, always dumb – produced literary, scientific and technological achievements of the highest order. And now all of Europe is basically an American colony – while Russia, backward and poor as ever, remains as independent and recalcitrant as ever.
One more point – Russia remains one of the two greatest American allies in the Republic’s history. (The other is France.) The Russians were sympathetic to the US during the Revolution, overtly supportive during the Civil War, and outright allies during WW1, WW2, and the War on Terror. And in the case of a Chinese-American conflict in the 21st century, the Russians would be far more natural allies to the US than to China. Russian and American interests often align. This makes the rabid Russophobia that has infected American opinion makers all the more repulsive. But perhaps the present madness won’t last forever.
Yeah , there’re some sovoks who’re absurd about Katyn. My overall impression is that official Russia acknowledges what actually happened at Katyn. Off hand, didn’t a Polish prez die in a plane crash involving his going to honor the Katyn victims in Russia?
Interesting what you say about Poles and Germans relative to Poles and Russians. I sense a good number of Russians who aren’t so bitter towards Germany (its Sorosian government aside) as they’re with Poland – a matter having to do with the perception that many Poles don’t acknowledge Polish wrongdoing to Russia.
Somewhat relative to Katyn, were the thousands of Soviet POWs who died under miserable Polish prison conditions during the Soviet-Polish War. In the US, one of the history channels has aired a series called “Apocalypse Stalin”, noting Stalin’s distaste for the outcome of the Polish-Soviet war as a pretext for what happened at Katyn. Of course, this Western produced documentary omitted the particular about the thousands of Soviet POWs who died under miserable Polish prison conditions.
They aren’t so far away from Russia. Ukraine separates Bulgaria from Russia, with Bulgaria being in the same hood as Montenegro, Serbia, Greece and Cyprus.
It’s only in recent history, that much of Ukraine has become formally separated from Russia.
EDIT: Having a sub par day. Bulgaria was only separated by the Russian Empire and the USSR from Romania.
Your response mixes up Verne’s fiction and some personal stories with what seems like an already way underway Western media propaganda. And of course, Marx. Right, we now take his word for what happened. Since when?
3 million Polish communists. Just think about it, in a country of around 36 million. But you have no answer to that, just some ad hoc 19th century yellow journalism.
I fully agree that larger nations pushed around smaller ones. Russia the Poles, Britain the Irish, Germans and Austrians everybody living around them. And Ottomans were by far the worst. We agree, that’s why it is called ‘imperialism’. And Poland did its part when they could, just ask the Ukrainians or Belorussians. So why is it always only ‘Russia’ that’s pilloried retroactively? It seems rather selective and politicised.
May I suggest that sh..t happened almost everywhere, but that exiles exaggerate and often lie, Polish exiles then and now not being an exception. You see, the exiles have both a very strong emotional reason to lie and also a material reason – they like to please their new masters. So I take a lot of those stories about ‘feared to be sent to Siberia’ with a grain of salt. One really never knows and the historical data doesn’t support that exaggerated fear.
Yeah, there was a Polish University with Polish language, very ‘elementary‘. So you just lied blatantly. There were schools on all lower levels in Polish. The administration of the Russia’s part of Poland was in Polish (the Germans were not that nice, it was all in German in the German part). There was also a Polish Parliament, Sejm, advisory and powerless, nevertheless a bit better than let’s say the Irish under the British, or the Bulgarians under the Ottomans.
It was ugly anyway. But it seems that the anti-Russia propaganda wars and the associated ethnic hatreds were fully in bloom. Tell me about the 3 million Polish communists and who held a gun to their head to be communist. You seem to quote Marx liberally as a source, maybe you even have some affinity for his thinking.
Not comparable at all. The Poles were fighting for their continued national survival, the Soviets at Katyn were deliberately trying to exterminate the Polish upper-class.
Agreed, thanks. Whatever one may think about Germany today, nobody can seriously believe Germany will again use armed force to act against the territorial integrity of her neighbors (it’s more likely she’ll become a threat by descending into chaos and anarchy…). Whereas one can’t really be sure Russia won’t return again to such traditional imperial meddling, even if one believes (or hopes) that Ukraine might be a special case.
That doesn’t really seem to be comparable. As far as I know, it has never been established those pows died due to deliberate neglect in the sense that the Poles actively wanted them to die (they certainly didn’t just give them a bullet to the back of the head like at Katyn). And was Stalin such a humanitarian that he cared much about their fate (to be distinguished from the humiliation he may have felt himself)? Seems very doubtful to me, given how little he cared even about those taken prisoner by the Germans in WW2.
Absolutely false. Russians are basically nordic Slavs. (Bear in mind that there’s a large difference between northern and southern Russian psychotypes, but it’s the northern one that is considered mainstream.)
There’s lots of cultural similarities between Russians and Swedes, but one very striking example is how Russians translate Swedish children’s books. Not British or American or (say) Italian, but Swedish. Russians are very picky about their kids’ upbringing, and it turns out it’s the Swedish psychotype that Russians consider worthy enough to emulate.
(E.g., There’s no Dr. Seuss in Russia, but Sven Nordqvist is very popular and always available. Not to mention the Swedish classics from Soviet times.)
Which is ridiculous. Russian literature is among the best in the world. I would only place English or German at similar standing. American literature is not bad per se, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Twain et al were of a high quality, but not quite reaching the best Russian writers. However, standards have completely collapsed in the last half-century. The chasm between contemporary Russian and American literature has become much wider, in favor of Russian literature.
I obviously cannot comment on pop culture but in my view it tends to be garbage everywhere, though there are some places with refreshing pushback. China is one example where there is strict cultural discipline(see the recent and most-welcome banning of hiphop and similar trash). They also banned Justin Bieber.
People may condemn that as authoritarian, but I’ll just point out that the West does a lot of social enforcement policing (often by SJWs) all the time. China is merely condemned because it does so on national-conservative grounds.
Well, the Nationalist maps of “greater Russia” shows that they very much wish for the whole of the Baltics to be swallowed in whole, and of course Belarus and Ukraine are going away, too. I believe even our esteemed host AK has more or less approved of those maps. He euphemistically calls it “regathering of Russian lands”. Who cares what the natives think, right? I mean, while we’re at it, why shouldn’t Germany pull a similar stunt on Austria and parts of Switzerland and why not the Dutch or the Danes too, after all, they’re all Germanic peoples.
So yes, we can’t be quite sure. I would much rather have Russia on our team than against us. I would also want to see the end of US influence in Europe, but as long as there are elements in Russia nurturing these ideas, NATO will be an (unfortunate) inevitable fact of life for some time to come. I never like seeing Europeans against each other.
The only silver lining is PESCO. The long-term withdrawal of NATO would be a good development and should be replaced with a European-only initiative.
My cousin married a southern Italian, she now lives in Sweden. I always think it must be really tough for her, given the polar opposites that are Sweden and southern Italy.
A common mistake people make about Sweden is that it is an overwhelmingly rural place. Most people live in small towns, villages and hamlets at the crossroads in the middle of the woods. Whatever the ruling ideology life remain pretty conservative regardless in such communities. Of course immigration has gotten so high that it is even affecting these places, hence the rapid rise in the Swedish Democrats. My Mother’s brothers are pretty cucked, but my cousins certainly aren’t.
Of course my family are Smalanders so I am aware they are a bit of an outlier for Sweden.
So would I, but yes, caution regarding Russian nationalists seems appropriate. Personally I don’t believe Putin’s regime is out for more major territorial expansion or destabilization of the entire European order, but we don’t know who will replace Putin and what will happen once he’s gone…if some overly enthusiastic nationalists get into power in Russia, it could lead to a very dangerous situation (of course this also means that Western regime change projects against Russia are naive and irresponsible).
Regarding US influence in Europe, yes, given what the US has unfortunately become it’s hard to regard it as positive. On the other hand I don’t see any political figures with the imagination and stature necessary to create a viable alternative. The EU is pretty much hopeless imo, its entire ethos is completely wrong, and I expect the whole project to collapse in a few years time due to the migration and the Euro/debt issues. And the various nationalist or populist forces are unfortunately often pretty dumb and short-sighted as well, and could lead to renewed intra-European antagonisms…hard to be optimistic imo.
I see nothing striking about it, Sweden has produced many excellent children books. I thought that “Karlsson who lives on the roof” and “Pippi Longstocking” are considered classics that are popular pretty much everywhere.
I also grew up with Hans Christian Andersen and the Grimm brothers and it certainly doesn’t mean that Bulgarians have Nordic or Germanic psyches.
However other comments in this thread speculating about similarity between Russians and Swedes did have some interesting perspectives which I hadn’t considered so maybe there is something to it.
If I had to argue for it, what Thorfinnsson mentioned about Sweden being the smallest country that produces its own submarines and fighter jets would be my argument about some fundamental similarity between Russians and Swedes.
What is missing in this view of history is the fact that these uprisings were by the middle classes and landowners of Poland – who were a tiny minority. The peasants did not rise and supported the Russians who treated them better than their indigenous landowners and their (mostly) Jewish overseers.
The Russian laws governing serfdom were far more relaxed in Poland than in Russia itself.
LondonBob isn’t crazy.
Bildt advocated some things you don’t care for and had a seat on a think tank board, ergo you fancy it’s totally reasonable for LondonBob to offer paranoid ass-pulls. Got it.
Sure, the Greek government made some bad decisions. But so did German banks, who bought bad debt. The austerity regime was not a solution to the problem, but a shameless bail out of the banks. So it was a rotten deal for the average man in both Germany and Greece.
Two more ‘brainfarts’ from the master. 🙂
SREBRENICA GENOCIDE DENIER: MICHAEL AVERKO (MIKE AVERKO)
http://michael-averko-mike-averko.blogspot.com/2008/06/srebrenica-genocide-denier-michael.html
I am optimistic, as I am in every Western country. One battalion of Swedes can defeat one division of Mohammedans on the battlefield.
The issue, as always, is other white people.
Swedes are religious zealots, and the current religion is liberalism. This explains Sweden Yes!.
This religion is now crumbling.
There is a good resistance in Sweden as well. The local nationalist party is the second largest party in opinion polls (we’ll see how the election goes this year), and there is even an organized resistance movement with thousands of members called the Nordic Resistance.
I happen to be a Russophile so I hope a redeemed Sweden does not pick a fight with Russia, but it’s not my battle. I’m totally Americanized.
And we Americans would do well to remember that we’re far more colonized than any country in Europe is.
Russian cartoons are excellent (and at about the right linguistic level for slow-learners like me). My current favorite is Пин-код, the sci-fi version of the (more vanilla) cartoon series Смешарики. I desperately wish there were English language cartoons of similar quality, so that my children had something worthwhile to watch.
The Baltics are a different case than Belarus and the Ukraine, which are not real countries. They are even more fake than Canada (whose independence should immediately be terminated). That said the Baltics add nothing to the sum of human existence and their annexation by Russia would be no loss whatsoever and tidy up the map.
And yes, what the locals think is irrelevant.
Austria is even more fake than Belarus. It’s a German country that is only independent because of power politics. The country was even called “German Austria” after the end the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Now Denmark and Switzerland–now we’re talking about actual countries which also contribute good things to the world. They should stay independent.
How does it feel to be wrong?
It was not. There was a power vacuum after Germans have started to withdraw and local populations started to form their own paramilitary units. In Vilnius, for example, both Polish and bolsheviks waited until Germans will withdraw to grab the power. Bolsheviks started first, were defeated by local Polish “self-defense” units, then local Poles were defeated by Red Army, then Polish army defeated Red Army. To paint that somehow was “Poland invaded Russia” is wrong and historically inaccurate.
Well, not really. I know both people despising Germans and thinking they are humourless, evil, stupid and mindlessly following orders, AND people despising Russians for being rude, brutal, evil, stupid and mindlessly following orders. On the same time I know both people admiring Germans for art, economy, efficiency AND people admiring Russia for art, music, soul and courage (sorry to our host, but I have to yet meet a single Pole admiring Russia for economy and efficiency).
I remember reading a story from some Polish diary, with a guy wondering why Polish peasants like Russians more than Germans, when both Russians and Germans ruthlessly rob the country. One peasant answered something in the sense that “Russians when they do it they cry and show compassion, Germans when they do it will just laugh”
Personally I think a lot of Poles like Russians, but they are affraid of Russia. I really like Russians and I always could get fast a common language with them (surprisinly, also with Germans – but not with the Anglos!). However, from time to time I get a nervous tick when I look at the numer of Russian divisions, nuclear bomb, or when I hear some nationalist saying that actually Poland is NATO’s whore who needs to teached a lesson.
Also, the current polls really do not show all the story. Before 2010 there was steady rise in sympathy towards Russia and I was hopeful that we would soon reach majority of Poles having warm feelings towards Russia. With 2010 everything went to hell.
So all of these people, who braved the cold and violence for over 2 months in Ukraine, got it wrong? Really?…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWXRtQG5V_4
Here is an interesting new twist on the Rybka affair that was mentioned here a week or so ago:
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-02-28/belarus-hooker-promises-spill-dirt-trump-if-cia-springs-her-thai-jail-first
Sorry, but I have to disagree. Although, a caveat: I haven’t been reading fiction for at least 10-15 years. However, I did read most so-called “classics” (along with mountains of trash) & I would say that general perception is optical illusion- just because Russians have two supreme writers, Dostoevsky & Tolstoy, who are in company with very few supreme Western writers (Homer, Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe,..), it doesn’t mean that 20th-21st C Russian literature can compete with American writing.
Even during 19th C, Emerson, Melville, James & Whitman (especially Whitman) were great, close to supreme authors. During 20th C American lit. was superior to Russian (Eliot, Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, Joseph Heller, William Gaddis ..) & even brainless authors were hugely popular everywhere (Jack London, Hemingway,..), not to mention sci fi, from Heinlein to Dick &
I have some reservations about Nabokov (in my opinion, he’s no more than great stylist), but sum total of English-language imaginative literature after 1917. is evidently greater that Russian, and Americans dominate this field.
German-language literature is richer than English-language, at least in 20th C (Schnitzler, Kraus, Mann, Musil, Kafka, Rilke, Hesse, two Walsers, Broch, Grass, Freud (as essayist), Canetti, Trakl, Junger..), but it suffers from a fatal defect- it is philosophy masked as fiction & basically nothing happens all the time.
I didn’t watch your video as I hate videos, but I am going to assume this is about wrongists fighting against the separatists in the Donets Basin.
If that is the case, then yes they are wrong.
Fanatically wrong.
The Ukraine is simply Russia Jr. and has no reason to exist whatsoever. It is even less of a real country than Canada or New Zealand.
It’s not, therefore you appear clueless once again! 🙁
https://twitter.com/akarlin88/status/664647482022866944
Then tell me what it is in writing, as I refuse to watch videos.
An interesting one in British politics is David Milliband. He was seen as the next Labour leader, heir to Blair and continually hyped by the media. Amusingly enough his brother Ed stabbed him in the back and just beat him to leadership of the Labour party. Ed went on to oppose airstrikes on Syria after the Turkish false flag chemical attack with parliament voting against the war resolution and the whole regime project failed. David retired as an MP and now earns a huge salary as head of the International Rescue Committee. David would undoubtedly have supported the attack on Syria, the International Rescue Committee is a well known CIA front and parrots the US line on all sorts of supposed humanitarian crises, as well as providing covers for the CIA in foreign countries. Politicians are bought and sold cheaply.
That depends on a period. After the January Uprising I do not think there were many Polish language schools out there.
“Sweden’s path ends in chaos, poverty, mass violence, and subjugation by Muslims.”
Highly doubtful.
Speaking of which, did you get Rise & Fall and if so, will you review it?
The conformism of Swedes is not a similarity with Russians who just don’t put such high value on consensus and don’t have the high deference to experts and thought leaders that Germanic cultures have. You don’t get much ideological conformism in Russia unless you have an NKVD to force it while in Sweden where not disturbing the consensus is the highest cultural value you get extreme conformism even when the people in charge are the least scary “tyrants” that the world has ever seen.
It is much more entertaining to discuss ideology with Russians since they are more likely to be willing to entertain an unconventional opinion and more likely to have their own unique opinions. The downside of not having such a consensus seeking political culture of course is a tendency towards political chaos and strongmen to decide a political direction in the absence of consensus. If those Swedish social democrats were put in charge of Russia the country would cease to exist in a few years…
This is a strong moral argument for pescetarianism.
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-dJF3fY6rSP4/UpYibNasSvI/AAAAAAAAAU8/UG7NdGVbN2w/s1600/trout-fish-anatomy1.jpg
For example, on August 24, 1920, 200 prisoners were shot by order of General V. Sikorski (who today is considered a national hero of Poland at the state level). Although there were no single massacres comparable in size to Katyn, the total number of civilians and prisoners killed by poles was large, probably much larger than the number of victims of Katyn.
That is, for” national survival ” Poland needed the killing of prisoners, Jewish pogroms, mass rapes, etc.? If so, then the lands seized in 39 by the Soviet troops were also necessary for “national survival”, and accordingly any crimes were justified/s
Are there any good studies about this (that is ones not written by Polish or Russian nationalists or communists)?
Peter Oborne, Peter Hitchens, Rod Liddle and Leo McKinstry are all new cold war sceptics. There aren’t really many other actual conservative commentators in the press.
Don’t get me wrong–Swedes and Russians are obviously quite different.
But Swedish culture is much more collectivist and authoritarian than other Western cultures.
All of the “moral” arguments in favor of pescetarianism, vegetarianism, veganism, and other such anti-human dietary doctrines are rooted in liberalism.
Weakness worship, pathological altruism, squeamishness, excessive empathy, etc.
There is no acceptable reason whatsoever to be a pescetarian.
I probably read you too literally. If you put it like that, I don’t disagree. Yes, most Swedes are raised on scare stories about minisubs, honeypot traps, and undercover Spetsnaz troops with fluent Swedish. We also retain some colorful idioms from our imperial days. … annars kommer ryssen och tar dig is an age-old idiom meaning “… or else the Russians will come and get you” (e.g. “Eat, or else the Russians will come and get you!”). In the 90s, the Russian mob and nukes on the loose briefly replaced the former bogeymen, but then it was back to normal again with Putin.
Oh my, it does get weirder … I also once read that the Swedish school reforms of the 1970s (turning a world-class school into a postmodern mess) were based on DDR models. My father told me of similar ideological imports at other public institutions. I’ll ask him to refresh my memory next time we meet.
LondonBob might have referred to the Wikileaks report that Bildt, in 1976, leaked secret information about an ongoing negotiation to a US emissary, who in turn informed the CIA. I don’t believe he is or ever was a spy, but for Bildt and his kind, Sweden’s and America’s national interests are one and the same. In this, he is a rather typical Pax Americana comprador.
About research on the subject of non-Russian and non-Polish authors I do not know. But the fact of the execution to which I pointed out an absolutely undeniable (it is recognized by the Polish side)
Kind of out of date. Recent research shows fish are lot more intelligent than previously thought.
Le based Hitler was vegetarian.
I’m nowhere near as hardcore and just avoid pork.
Well, you forgot to add, that it supposedly was a revenge for death of 200 Polish prisoners murdered by Cossacks (the other version taht it was a revenge for some other murders and rapes by Cossacks)
Most likely not.
You forgot also that there were also Polish PoWs in Soviet camps in 1919-1921 war, and many of them died there too.
Well sure, but one would need to know the context of that event to evaluate it. It’s quite possible, or maybe even likely, Polish forces committed some war crimes in 1920. But Katyn wasn’t even a war crime (there was no ongoing war between Poland and the Soviet Union when it happened), it was just an act of cold-blooded, deliberate mass killing, so it seems doubtful to me the events of 1920 were equivalent.
Anyway, I’m not really qualified to judge those issues…would be great if someday relations between Poland and Russia become good enough that a joint historical commission or something of the sort could look into them without it all being used for mutual accusations in the present.
Melanf,
There is a difference between occasional crimes done by soldiers or officers, which happen in every army; and state policy. Polish state’s policy (or POlish army’s policy) had not consisted in killing prisoners, Jewish pogroms or mass rapes, even though such might occasionally happen. If you really investigated the PoW issue, you surely know that the poor conditions in PoW camps wereof interest to parliamentary commission, which visited the camps and demanded changes, which then happen – the mortality of PoWs drastically fell down (IIRC the commanders of some camps even were punished).
In contrast, Katyń (and other similar crimes) was result of state policy.
Can you share links? It’ll be interesting, given their general lack of comparative neural structures.
To be more precise, it was 199 prisoners. One was pardoned in the last moment because he saved Polish officer.
And I do not think there was ever another such order.
The H-man’s vegetarianism is exaggerated, and as was often the case something he personally played up to burnish his image.
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/food/2004/02/carnifuhrer.html
And while we’re at it, let’s not forget that the H-man was a teetotaler, completely abstained from tobacco, favorably regarded Islam, and hated Giuseppe Verdi.
Well, irrelevant to greatness in the 1990s the book market in Russia is completely dominated by Anglo-American authors. Later, aboriginal literature began a counterattack, and now there is a balance between translated and domestic literature.
As much as we wish it was different, we see this repeatedly. The Gauls probably lived in ways far more compatible in nature and surely had interesting religious and cultural beliefs, but ultimately, our sympathies lay with the Romans who subdued them. There is much high art of the Rape of the Sabines: do they condemn the Romans for their treachery, or do they extol Roman courage and audacity?
Lol, the Japanese despise Americans. Japan also has a rich literature of the “noble loser” – as an American, you couldn’t understand such refinement.
When the British were supreme they were hated across Europe, the American Age brought contempt for America, Jews today are widely despised, Palestinians despise Israelis – the list is endless.
The general reaction of mankind to the “winner” is an almost intuitive understanding that his victory is highly contingent and expresses no natural superiority, and is the result of striving – i.e the “winner” is chiefly distinguished by wanting it more, and willing to sacrifice the good things in life to get it.
But for those who do “want it more”, they cannot have such self awareness. It is also extremely important for the “winner” to believe that others admire him for – that is, in fact, the whole point of it, being validated by others.
We should freely offer validation to such people, to limit their destructiveness.
You are right, Anatoly, we all admire the winner. We bow down.
Perhaps the “winners” can then relax a bit.
Mr. Karlin is Russian.
What parameters do you evaluate? Here’s how for example you’ll be able to compare Whitman to Mikhail Lermontov?
Source for packs of stray dogs eating people? We’re actually smaller than typical wolf prey animals.
Also, when a couple of large/medium dogs want to kill you, they will.
The Gauls displayed skulls of slain enemies in their homes and, at least according to the Romans, had other interesting customs like human sacrifice…but quite apart from that, I think it’s simplistic to claim “everybody likes a winner, losers get forgotten”. There are lots of cases in history where the side that lost is later romanticized, judged to have been in the right or seen as a precursor to later movements. The Gauls were “our ancestors” to French nationalists who created a cult about Vercingetorix. The commies worshipped the Paris commune. Our view of the Pelopponnesian war derives from a historian, Thucydides, who had fought on the side of the losers of that war. The confederacy lost the war, but inspired a whole “lost cause” movement. And so on. “Might makes right” may be true to a substantial degree, but it’s not the whole story.
And I’m not even convinced AK is completely right about his example of Japan, the US and the atomic bombings. Do the Japanese really “love” America? At least those Japanese who read mangas about Imperial Japan winning the Pacific war probably don’t…
What I found staggering about the International Rescue Committee when I checked it out was that it was almost entirely government funded (more than one government). David Milliband’s salary seemed excessive for a charity too. I can’t remember the details.
“Might is right” is usually spouted by resentful nerds with some kind of twisted power fantasy, not the winners. The top brass of the alt-right, who get giddy speechifying about strength and power while being flabby dorks with a track record of always losing, are a perfect example.
Yeah, it’s a bit premature to talk of an “empire with global power projection capabilities” as Richard Spencer does when you’ve got not much more than a Twitter account. Also quite off-putting to “normies”.
There are no absolute parameters. You have to go with, I’d say, informed public, more-or less general consensus & various author’s influences.
Whitman is, in my opinion, enormously greater writer than Lermontov & his book of life is simply vast, it contains both an Upanishadic sensibility, rough & cruel depictions of reality (epic tradition), transcendence & immanence (if you like, though it is an inflated language).
But, that’s my opinion.
As for his influence, he is, along with Baudelaire, the most influential 19th C poet. His heirs are not just English-speaking writers like D.H.Lawrence, Eliot, Hart Crane, Henry Miller, … but also Emile Verhaeren, Neruda & many vitalist poets & novelists, especially after WW1.
Canonization is a process, but Dostoevsky, for instance, was canonized as supreme writer by a host of other writers (Zweig, R.L. Stevenson, Hamsun, Mann, Kafka, Proust, Andreev, Camus, Faulkner, Garcia Marquez, Leonov, Coetzee, Gaddis, Bellow, Philip Roth, ..).
Most 20th C Russian literature, even with its most prominent authors (Blok, Akhmatova, Platonov, Remizov, Sholokhov, Pasternak, Mandel’shtam, Solzhenitsyn, Nabokov (Russian phase), Bulgakov, ..) simply is not a match to great sequence of American authors, going from late phase of Henry James to Gaddis, McCarthy or Updike. American writers are more read & influential, and this is simply a fact.
He has been thoroughly Americanized during his time in America, as his Russian compatriots attest on other threads. He has been assimilated into the Borg.
Life in America is a constant series of assaults to your amygdala – the lizard part of the brain that deals with primitive emotions like status, survival, fear. It’s a traumatic experience that hollows you out from the inside. Few people escape unscathed, and many succumb entirely. It’s how psychopathic behavior spreads – to survive, you must join them. It has claimed our good Anatoly.
It is possible that life in Russia will allow the anxiety to subside, as hits to Anatoly’s amygdala grow less, and he will become less obsessed with being the “winner”. But it will take years.
In the meantime, I for one intend to pacify Anatoly – you are the winner, Anatoly, you have defeated your enemies, we all recognize your unbounded superiority.
Such validation is my contribution to Anatoly ‘s mental health.
More accurately put, the Stalin led Soviets were going after Polish military folks likely with ties to that earlier war in question, that included thousands of Soviets dying under horrid Polish prison conditions.
BTW, when Poland attacked mostly non-Polish inhabited former Russian Empire territory in 1919, it was engaging in imperialism and not “national survival”. See:
http://www.eurasiareview.com/08042016-fuzzy-history-how-poland-saved-the-world-from-russia-analysis/
The series has been dumbed-down console trash since the release of Civ 5.
Still doesn’t make much sense. Deport to Siberia? Sure. Just kill a bunch of people without a trial and then deny it for decades? Highly unusual. In the 1930s, no matter how much of a sham they were, there were always trials with copious paperwork. But not in this case and only this.
The geopolitical considerations make no sense either. Finland wasn’t conquered but a piece of it was, just like with Poland and Romania (for some values of “conquered.”) Besides, from the Soviet point of view this wasn’t like “let’s go and dismember Poland and destroy it forever.” It was “let’s go and retake Ukrainian and Belorussian lands stolen by Poland 20 years ago.” So you expel or deport but why kill?That’s is just not the Soviet MO, not in this way.
But so you know whose MO it is was? Who at the very same time was performing mass executions of Polish intelligentsia, openly as well as secretly?
Nazis.
I am thinking there must have been some kind of secret agreement between German and Soviet governments to murder captive Polish officers. Whose idea was it? Probably German. They seemed to had prepared this for a long time (lists of prominent citizens and so on.) Perhaps they were even invited by the Soviets to do the did. This would certainly explain how the prisoners were killed using German guns, even though there are no records of the NKVD ever owning, acquiring, or ever using these weapons.
In this, he is a rather typical Pax Americana comprador.
I understand your point and I despise you for it.
Stalin was a murdering bastard, who I don’t approve of. That said, it’s not so untypical for abusive parents to be aghast when their children get abused by others. There’s also the matter of two wrongs not making a right, with hypocrisy not being a virtue.
In your select excerpts, there’s only one (not two) brain farts, which I quickly caught on my own. Much better than your record.
I know about Intelligenzaktion, and yes, Nazi German rule certainly was worse for Poles than Soviet rule, and had more radical goals. But Vasily Blochin wasn’t German. Don’t see why there’s supposed to be anything strange about NKVD murdering Poles…they had done much the same with Russians and other Soviet citizens after all.
One troll (you) referencing another, minus any successful rebuke of what I’ve actually said on the subject:
https://sputniknews.com/analysis/201507091024399030/
http://silentcrownews.com/wordpress/?p=4712
Dr. Seuss is untranslatable. Not surprising you don’t find it in Russia.
Modern English children’s lit is too fractured to point to just a few “best” authors. But I checked The Diary of a Wimpy Kid (I own every book in this series.) Yep, it has been translated.
https://pp.userapi.com/c309831/v309831976/3d6e/LSUkuZvE3Fg.jpg
In a number of influential circles, there has been tendency to comparatively exaggerate the cultural/linguistic restrictions of non-Russians in the Russian Empire, when compared to some other empires.
Per capita wise, I sense that more Poles know Polish than Irish know Gaelic. Polish Catholic churches readily existed in the Russian Empire, with Denikin noting that his Polish mother regularly attended services in that denomination.
“Compatriots” who do not actually live in Russia, and apparently Felix Keverich (who does live in Russia) doesn’t count.
Certainly Orthodoxy is a most important factor. The case of Romania and Greece are relevant. If Bulgaria’s, Slovakia’s or Croatia’s sympathies may be ascribed to a vague ‘slavic’ factor (neither Slovakia, nor Croatia are Orthodox countries), this can’t be taken into consideration in Romania or Greece. The case of Romania is even singled out as an anomaly, in view of the otherwise anti-Russian attitudes. But in fact these are due to the identification of Communism (universally loathed) with the ‘Russians’ who brought it to Romania. And also to the western propaganda which has affected the ‘cultured (and semi-cultured) classes’ since the inroads of “Europe” into the Balkans (centuries old), propaganda which was specifically anti-Orthodox and anti-Russian and influenced the politics (Unia).
Russia in fact was the protector of the Orthodox in the Ottoman Empire and the populations never forgot. On the strictly religious, spiritual plan, relations between Romanian and Russian Churches have been intense and profound. In this respect Romania and Moldova should not be considered separately. Romanians know that Russians have been also victims of the same bringers of the ‘golden future’ of ‘Humankind’.
Last year in October the Patriarch Kirill visited Romania and held together with Patriarch Daniel of Romania and hierarchs from the Balkans a common service for the victims of Communist atheist persecutions and it seems that it had a significant effect. The polls were conducted after this event. It might have been even a momentous event (although I still hold my breath).
No.
No.
Civilization went to shit after #4, which remains the best in the series along with #2.
Yes, but their position within the US has strengthened their Russian identity and sharpened their oposition to American values. But you, my dear Anatoly, have been absorbed into the Borg – but you do provide a unique hybrid perspective, perhaps.
And I, for one, acknowledge your superiority.
Both examples would be called kitsch in the West. I have to say that the building is… a bit… over the top, for a modern structure.
They banned Bieber? I never thought I’d agree with the ChiComs on anything important. But THAT’S important.
but ultimately, our sympathies lay with the Romans who subdued them
Speak for yourself. If you haven’t already read it, you might enjoy Terry Jones’ Barbarians (also a BBC documentary).
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Terry-Jones-Barbarians-Alan-Ereira/dp/056353916X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1519868624&sr=8-1&keywords=terry+jones+the+barbarians
I’d like to agree with you there, as you know.
But is there any reason to think that Swedes will suddenly start having a lot more children?
Any reason to think that the Africans, Arabs, and Muslims residing in Sweden will soon stop having enough children to grow their population (and currently at a far higher TFR than Swedes)?
If the answer to these questions is “no”, what is the cause for optimism? Even if the Swedes ended all Muslim, Arab, and African immigration next year — which is very unlikely — the damage that has been done is irrevocable on anything like current trends.
The no-go areas are still growing larger and more numerous across Sweden, with none of them proposed for forcible reclamation by real Swedes.
I understand your point and I despise you for it.
Why the need to be so personal? Do you really think you are so superior to the rest of us? Reading your posts (not all of which are useless, by any means) I am reminded of the saying (attributed to Lord Melbourne, I believe, but no doubt you can correct me):
Would that I were as certain of any one thing as you are of everything.
I for one, respect Art Deco for his pithy trolling talent.
I shall check it out. Thank you for the recommendation!
For that matter, relations between the Russian and Georgian Orthodox Christian churches have been quite good, despite what transpired in 2008, as well as before with Gamsakhurdia.
I don’t disagree with #4 being by far the best of the series, but I do think that RnF has managed to redeem it significantly. While the entire “era score” and “emergency action” concept feels extremely artificial(clearly was taken from a board game), its remarkably effective and actually makes each turn matter feel meaningful and matter again – whereas one of the main downfalls of previous games in my opinion was the “pass the turn feeling” once you had gotten to a level of advancement/power that seemed unchallenged.
It has managed a sufficient level of complexity for it to be fun for me, at any rate. I’m sure that Firaxis will torpedo it soon because any game that isn’t accessible to a moron with 9 working fingers must be simplified.
But in the West, evaluate as a masterpiece painting “Black square” and build such monumental buildings (St Bride’s Church, “one of the finest examples of British twentieth-century ecclesiastical architecture” )
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/09/St_Brides_EK05.jpg
And this Western architectural genius rebuilt Cologne
http://i.imgur.com/3O3CWBu.jpg
Because of this, I don’t care about rating of art in the “West”.
Architecture in Russia has certainly benefited from the fact that now people can build a “kitsch” for their tastes, instead of nightmares Le Corbusier and Bauhaus.
And the painting won, as artists no longer have to paint workers and revolutionaries.
Here the final works of students Of St. Petersburg Academy of Arts in 2016 is Clearly better than social realism
https://yura-falyosa.livejournal.com/1500684.html
Here is Yoshkar Ola a provincial Soviet city.
http://i12.pixs.ru/storage/0/8/5/sdLKOFOT9Q_2632165_29518085.jpg
In the 2000s, the local Governor became a madman who considered himself the reincarnation of Lorenzo Medici. Here are the official portraits of Leonid the Magnificent
https://static.7×7-journal.ru/images/items/94135/files/553.jpg
https://www.rospres.org/media/k2/items/imageart/2ab751909f64ca819022f906cb95ea05.jpg
Can be read “motto” of Leonid – ” He liked the beauty in this surly world”
And here’s how this weirdo rebuilt Yoshkar Ola (before he was sent to prison for embezzlement of money)
http://i12.pixs.ru/storage/2/1/2/B2GsHNIUAI_2317522_29518212.jpg
http://i12.pixs.ru/storage/2/1/8/lSPQckJVOw_7751252_29518218.jpg
http://i12.pixs.ru/storage/2/2/4/oy4zae8XAY_3448120_29518224.jpg
That is, even the work of the madman more interesting than Bauhaus
POLAND HAD NOT ATTACKED RUSSIAN EMPIRE.
It would be more precise to write Red Army which invaded and attacked Poland in 1919 (attacking for exmaple majority Polish Vilnius). The invasion was called “operation Vistula”, BTW. I have described the Vilnius situation above (Polish self-defense units formed by locals, from majority Polish population, attacked by Red ARmy, later Polish army returning and defeating Red Army.
First fights were in majority Polish area near Vilnius. And since Soviets declared Polish partitions as void, it means they recognised the area as not being part of Russia. To describe them as “Poland attacked Russia” would be the same as describing any Polish uprising as “POland invaded Russia!”
I have read the original Peck’s article, to which the article quoted by you was the answer.
In short, both are wrong. Peck’s somehow seems to think that the war was started by Polish offensive on Kiev in April 1919 (!!!), which is, obviously, wrong. It’s hard to say when the war started exactly. The first fights were between local bolsheviks contra local Polish self-defense units (they were called “Samoobrona”). The first I had identified were in Vilnius, in fact in December 1918. Local Poles were then attacked by Red Army and withdraw. One might argue that it means Red Army attacked Poland, since I think a day or two before the first fight local self-defense units were formally declared part of Polish army – and Vilnius area was majority Polish anyway (slightly more than 50% in Vilnius alone, and definetely majority in rural areas around Vilnius).
Later Polish army defeated Red Army and THEN Polish offensive stopped in 1919, because Pilsudski did not want to support Denikin. The last fight was attack in cooperation with Latvia, which succeeded in taking some areas which were then given to Latvia. Then offensive stopped and peave negotiations started.
Then in April 1920 (not 1919!!!) Poland started yet another offensive on Kiev, which was designed to support Petlura state (Kiev was to be capitol of Ukraine). Peck is factually wrong is describing it as “start of the war”.
In fact I think the war was a mistake. In 1919 bolsheviks offered to give Poland Mińsk (!), for example. However, Pilsudski was a dreamer and he wanted to establish Ukraine (allied with Poland). That’s why he refused bolshevik peace offers and went on with war. Some also argue that bolshevik peace offer was dishonest and that after defeating the whites, they would attack Poland.
One thing however is sure, war was NOT started by Polish offensive on Kiev.
One of the venerated saints of the Romanian Church was Antim Ivireanul (Anthim the Iberian ანთიმოზ ივერიელი – Antimoz Iverieli) a Georgian theologian, scholar, calligrapher, philosopher and one of the greatest ecclesiastic figures of Wallachia, led the printing press of the prince of Wallachia Constantin Brancoveanu, and was Metropolitan of Wallachia in 1708-1715. Martyred by the Ottomans in 1716, was recently canonized. In 1709 Anthim was a founder of the first Georgian printing press in Tbilisi; he also trained Georgians in the art of printing, and cut the type with which under his pupil Mihai Iștvanovici they printed the first of Georgian Gospels (1710). A rugby union trophy, the Antim Cup, contested by Romania and Georgia, is named after him.
The love is fake. They are just biding their time.
Their fear of Chinese vengeance for the Japanese invasion and subsequent atrocities is stronger than their desire for avenging the nukings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For now.
There is plenty unfinished business (or unresolved karma) left over from WWII.
He is still upset I pointed out the obvious fact that the Israelis assassinated JFK.
Pilsudski didn’t want to support Denikin because he did an earlier Polish version of Molotov-Ribbentrop as detailed in that Eurasia Review link. Poland under his direction acted more along the lines of an invading imperialist, with the use of a puppet (Petliura), as opposed to some virtuous liberator. In any event, it’s generally accepted by those who’ve studied the subject, that Poland attacked former Russian Empire territory which included areas where ethnic Poles weren’t in the majority. This was done at the time of the Russian Civil War.
As was later revealed, Pilsudski made a then secret pact with the Bolshes, that involved a Polish non-support of Denikin. In exchange, the Bolshes offered Pilsudski a land proposal offer for Poland which included territory that didn’t have a Polish majority.
As noted in the Eurasia Review linked piece, that move by Pilsudski might very well have paved the way for the eventual Communist takeover of Poland. The Whites were willing to ally with Poland against the Bolshes, inclusive of recognizing an independent Poland. At the time of Pilsudski’s secret dealing with the Bolshes, the Whites were on an impressive offensive. The Red commander Tukhachevsky (among some others) is of the view that Pilsudski’s move against Denikin might very well have decided the outcome of the Russian Civil War.
A good read on the subject:
https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=6bCXWouJOdKa_QbOxY-oDw&q=White+Against+Red+Dimitry+Lehovich&oq=White+Against+Red+Dimitry+Lehovich&gs_l=psy-ab.12…11126.36849.0.38966.38.38.0.0.0.0.169.2964.36j2.38.0….0…1.1.64.psy-ab..0.33.2636…0j46j0i131k1j0i46k1j0i10k1j0i22i30k1j0i22i10i30k1j0i8i13i30k1j0i8i13i10i30k1j0i13k1j0i13i30k1j33i22i29i30k1j33i160k1.0.6Y0eaFWPpu4
(1) Poland was under Russian rule for 100+ years, during which there was very inconsistent policy towards Polish. How long was Ireland under English?
(2) The policies were inconsistent, depended on a period and on a region. For example, in Polesie (region in what is modern Belarus) at first Polish was freely teached and used as language of education, then after 1830s it was removed and teached only as a subject while Russian was language of education, then it was more or less reversed, then it was reversed again in 1860s. With catholic churches in 1864-67 there was an open attack, with closing churches, monasteries, changing them into orthodox ones; with forceful conversions etc. Then the politics of open attacks was abandoned; in 1890s there was official decree which allowed more religious freedom, which was however often violated by local authorities; and in 1904 (or 1905??) there was a decree of religious tolerance.
And there were, of course, Polish “secret” unofficial schools and “kółka samokształceniowe”, which occasionally were discovered, dissolved and participants punished. A “proof” that school “secretly teached Polish” was for example that a teacher was Roman-Catholic and had Polish-language schoolbook.
The English dominated Brit rule of Ireland extended for centuries and included the potato famine catastrophe. While it’s true that this tragedy had a natural factor, there’s also reason to believe that the Brit authorities could’ve done more to lessen the number of deaths.
By force, Poland tried to Polonize Russia and eliminate the Orthodox Church prior to what you bring up in reverse. In any event, plenty of Poles in the Russian Empire were fluent in Polish, in addition to remaining Roman Catholic.
Two wrongs don’t make a right, with hypocrisy not being a virtue as well. This point relates to how issues like Russian-Polish history is taught in some circles.
BTW, the Orthodox Church under Polish rule faced discrimination between the two world wars.
But the point is that war was not started in 1920, but in 1919 – and over areas, some of which DID have Polish majority, and definetely NONE had Russian majority. That is: I can understand the position of Belarussian or Ukrainian arguing that we attacked them (which I would deny, but at least I would give them they have some basis for their argument), but not the Russian position which states that because local Poles in Vilnius wanted to join Poland, it means Poland attacked Russia.
Moreover, Pilsudski had not supported Denikin because Denikin was, contrary to what you write, very vague about Polish borders – he said he would only support Polish independence in borders of “Polish kingdom”, which would exclude both Lviv and Vilnius (Lviv: a city with Polish majority, surrounded by area without a clear majority, Vilnius: majority Polish city in a majority-Polish area).
Denikin also demanded that Poles would withdraw armies from Vohlyn and Podole – areas which Polish armies took partly from Ukrainians, and partly from bolsheviks.
There were no oficial negotiations – Pilsudski sent mission which was to gather information and to prepare ground for official diplomacy.
When Poland tried to polonize Russia and eliminate orthodox Church? I mean “Poland” in contrast to “some Polish priests”, “Vatican wanted Poland to do it” or “some private magnates”.
If you mean Smuta (the only example where you could argue for the second, though not for the first position), then remember that at first it was private enterprise of few magnates. Later it’s true that Zygmunt personally wanted to convert Russia into catholicism, but Polish king, while not totally powerless, was opposed in that matter by pretty much all other Polish sources of power – the commander of Polish army, for example, pretty much ignored Zygmunt when negotiating agreement with Russian boyars (an agreement which included demand that Władysław would have to accept orthodox faith before becoming tzar – which angered his father Zygmunt, who was kind of religious fanatic).
What’s your definition of official versus non-official? At the time, the Whites and Poles had known talks much unlike the then secret Polish-Bolshe variant.
Pilsudski used the talks with the Whites as a charade to appease some in the West (like Churchill) desiring for a White/Polish anti-Bolshe military alliance. His mind was set on doing the secret deal with the Bolshes.
In point of fact, I said that the Whites supported an independent Poland, without making specifics on borders – a touchy issue. As you know, Galicia had areas where Ukrainians were the majority. After Petliura sold out the Galician Ukrainians to Pilsudski, the Galician Ukrainian army en masse came under the general commends of the Whites, who treated the Galician Ukrainians as a foreign group albeit with earlier ties to Rus, of which modern day Russia, Ukraine and Belarus are descended from.
Interesting and in line with my understanding of these instances you bring up. Thanks for the follow-up.
Damn, how it’s possible I have missed that part? Sorry for our host that I am doing double reply instead on one. Hope you won’t ban me for that, Anatoly 😀
Agreed.
Kind of. There were churches being taken over and the forceful convertions (so called “re-catholicisation”).
No. Pilsudski wanted to achieve his ideal, unachieveable Federation. He wanted intermarium, with Poland-Lithuania-Belarus-Ukraine, with Vilnius probably being part of independent Lithuania which would be part of a federation. How that would work in practice? Most likely he had no idea.
He negotiated both with whites and reds. Reds offered better terms, so he stopped the offensive. IF whites would offer different terms, he would go with whites – though most likely in very limited sense (see (2) below).
However:
(1) Denikin stance was very unrealistic and unelastic. His stance was basically: we want you to help us, and in return you can keep half of what you already have.
(2) In 1919 Polish army was not, in fact, capable of large actions. I do not say they were totally impossible, but logistical difficulties were a factor which also had impact on Pilsudski’s plans.
Yes, you right. I misrepresented what you have written in that matter, sorry.
However, in place on Poland, knowing only what Poles knew in 1919 and seeing Denikin stance (withdraw from Ukraine! Help us, and in return we will recognise you are independence, but you will have to give back half of what you already have) would you really be so eager to help Denikin?
You may have written Petlura sold out Galician Ukrainians, but he was realist: he knew that he had no much power, he saw that only Pilsudski supported independent, non-communist Ukraine, hence he decided to act realistically.
In fact I would prefer our politicians to behave more often like him: if Pilsudski would act realistically, then the war would be stopped in 1919, with Minsk on Polish side, and without thousands of dead lost in Kiev offensive and aftermath. Not to mention possibility of different outcome of plebiscite in Eastern Prussia or possibility of concentrating on Zaolzie more.
EDIT: official vs unofficial: Polish mission to Denikin had no right to negotiate, agree to anything etc. They were not – I do not knwo ENglish terms – plenipotentiaries.
I shall check it out. Thank you for the recommendation!
By the way, are you aware that Archive.org has a free online lending library of more than 1.5 million books. You can borrow the book at:
https://archive.org/search.php?query=title%3A%28Barbarians%29%20AND%20creator%3A%28terry%20jones%29
Aha, so the (((plot thickens)))…
Not really Mickey, the author, does more than an adequate job of discrediting your biased and inaccurate views:
when you’ve got not much more than a Twitter account
And subject to deletion by people who are in most respects your mortal enemies.
I like much of Bauhaus. Did you mean Brutalism?
Those students’ works are nice but highly derivative (which is fine, as they are students.)
My opinion is, you can’t keep on forever rebuilding Florence or Mad King Ludwig’s castle. Gotta do something new. Or, at the very least, a different kind of old. For example, I think there is not enough Art Deco in the world.
The Polish monarchy was elective. The Sejm (Polish parliament) was made up of the country’s allodial landowners. The Polish nobility were not feudatories of their monarch, as nobles in western Europe were. Rather, each was like a petty king on his own lands. The liberum veto was often an obstacle to action. When, for reasons of rivalries amongst themselves, the Polish nobles could not agree on the election of one of their own as king, as a compromise the crown was sometimes offered to a foreign prince.
Thus, in 1573, the French prince Henri de Valois was elected king of Poland; he served from 1573 – 1575, abdicating after his elder brother Charles IX died and he succeeded to the throne of France as Henri III. From 1587 – 1668, several princes of the Swedish house of Vasa served as kings of Poland.
The election of a foreign prince did not entail the surrender of Polish sovereignty to a foreign country. The Polish monarch enjoyed relatively limited powers, rather like the doge of Venice. He had, for example, to obtain permission from the Sejm to travel outside the country. Poland was in practice governed by its aristocracy, rather than by its king.
You are comparing literature in your native language vs. literature in translation.
It is unlikely you know much about the 20th century Russian literature. For example, some of the best books written in Russian in the last 70 years are the WWII novels – Bondarev, Bykov, Vasiliev, Kurochkin, Nekrasov (the other one,) Kazakevich, etc. Some of these books had even been translated (John Derbyshire had read a few of them.)
“agreement with Russian boyars” were tricked, with the goal of capturing Moscow. As soon as Polish troops entered the city the agreement was violated.
It was violated because Polish army which entered Moscow was at that point mob of undisciplined fighters who thought they are invincible ubermenschen, so they started to behave as stupid thugs in a conquered and subdued state – the hetman who signed the agreement IIRC was disgusted too by their behaviour.
Factually, there’s absolutely nothing in that troll’s screed which successfully refutes what I said.
Pilsudski wanted a Polish version of the Soviet dominated Warsaw Pact, in the form of subservient countries lacking power to challenge Polish aims. There’s a reason why Poland’s relations with Lithuania and CzechoSlovakia between the two world wars weren’t so good.
The bottom line is that Pilsudski nixed the idea of a Polish-White alliance that might very well have changed the outcome of the Russian Civil War, in addition to improving Russian-Polish relations. Denikin in particular had openly been critical of some of the Russian Empire’s policies towards Poland.
Minsk has no business being part of Poland. Petliura needed Pilsudski, because Petliura didn’t have such great support within the former Russian Empire part of Ukraine. In turn, Pilsudski was seeking an anti-Russian puppet in Ukraine. Petliura agreeing to let all of Galicia go was icing on the cake for Pilsudski.
I’m not not aware of Denikin saying in 1919 (as well as before or after), that Pilsudski should withdraw from half of all the land Pilsudski got where Poles weren’t in the majority.
If you wonder why people sometimes consider you a troll, this is it, right here.
Trolling is the very best thing about the internet, and trolls should be praised rather than condemned.
The agreement was immediately violated by the Polish king (who decided to become tsar instead of Wladyslaw)
Well, I did that already – that Zygmunt was angered by the agreement and wanted to become tzar personally.
Just stop the false equivalence. Pilsudski never wanted to impose (Jewish-run) dictatorships on the other members of the Intermarium like Stalin did with the Warsaw Pact states. There was a good reason for an alliance between the Intermarium countries as they were surrounded by much larger, agressive neighbours.
Large numbers of Poles lived there. A Belarusian state wasn’t viable, and Belarusians were certainly much better off in Poland than the USSR.
Concerning the pre-Soviet period, most ethnic Belarusians would disagree with your assessment that they were better off under Polish rule than that of the Russian Empire or pre-Mongol Rus period. Poles weren’t the majority in Minsk, as well as not being the majority in all of Belarus.
The period between two world wars is generally understood to haven’t been so good towards non-Poles in Poland. That said, I don’t disagree that the USSR of that period wasn’t (in overall terms) a more desirable place to live.
Believe what you want. The Lithuanians, CzechoSlovaks and Ukrainians en masse didn’t think so positively of Poland in the inter-war years. The initial Soviet entry into Polish controlled areas in 1939 didn’t see much opposition from non-Poles. On the other hand, the Nazis faced greater resistance when they attacked, on account that they went into comparatively larger concentrated ethnic Polsh areas, willing to fight for Poland.
You’re giving a romanticized Polish version of how people like Pilsudski saw Poland relative to some others. He was mistaken for thinking that Poland could either fully acquire his desired goal or maintain it for a long period. A country like Russia is just too big and strong, while having a sufficient patriotically inclined population to resist imperial negativity against it.
Russia has had some periodic down and out moments, only to comeback.
Just to confirm further that your understanding is the correct one and why:
“The Panagia Portaitissa (Greek: Παναγία Πορταΐτισσα; Georgian: ივერიის ღვთისმშობლის ხატი) or the Iviron Theotokos is an Eastern Orthodox icon of the Virgin Mary which was painted by Luke the Evangelist, according to the Sacred Tradition of the Eastern Orthodox Church. The icon is referred to as “Wonderworking” meaning that numerous miracles have been attributed to the intercession of the Theotokos (Mother of God) by persons praying before it. The original of this image is found in the Georgian Iviron monastery on Mount Athos in Greece, where it is believed to have been since the year 999. The synaxis (feast day) for this icon is on February 12, as well as on Bright Tuesday, and also on October 13 for the translation to Moscow of the Iveron icon”.
[The Moscow one is actually an exact copy, commissioned by the Patriarch Nikon in 1648]. “Almost immediately upon its arrival on October 13, the icon was “glorified” with numerous miracles attributed to it by the faithful. The Iverskaya Chapel was built in 1669 to enshrine the icon next to the Kremlin walls in Moscow. The chapel was the main entrance to Red Square and traditionally everyone, from the Tsar down to the lowest peasant would stop there to venerate the icon before entering the square. After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the chapel was destroyed by the Communists and the fate of the icon is unknown to this day”. Copies of it continue to perform miracles even today (like the copy of the Montreal Myrrh-streaming Iveron Icon, presently in the Church of Holy Theotokos of Iveron Russian Orthodox Church in Honolulu, Hawaii).
The fake buildings in Yoshkar-Ola are incredibly ugly though, especially from close up where it becomes obvious that they fakes (modern buildings) made to very low quality standards to parody old ones.
The only people who would fall for it are people who have never visited a real historical city. It is like a low quality, cheap parody Disney Land, that could fall apart from poor construction standards.
When people make those fake buildings, it just makes you wish you visit real historical buildings and not the fakes. I.e. to visit a real city, and not a fake one.
As for Bauhaus – it is a movement from the 1920s. The real Bauhaus buildings are quite interesting, as they capture the philosophy and world-view of the 1920s people.
They also made some interesting things like chairs and furniture which you can see if you visit the museum in Berlin.
The movement which is really ugly is the Brutalist school movement in architecture which dominated from the 1950s.
This is not rebuilding Florence.
It is just making fake historical designs on the exterior of the buildings. It is a Disneyland or film set.
So that if you take a blurry photo from a distance, it looks at least not terrible, just like Disney.
But if you go closer it is, then you realize it is a film set and not a real building, and with really bad taste.
(Click on photo to enlarge)
https://varlamov.me/2015/jola_ploh/05.jpg
Popular culture (masses’ culture). Fine arts is not popular culture, but high-culture (elitest culture).
Size of audience of high culture is shrinking around the world, but also quality of popular culture itself is becoming for ever shorter attention span and greater shocks/trashiness. Much of the television shows get worse all the time, although some TV series and documentaries can be getting better.
In the area of cinema, there are still talented directors, but this is not reflected in ticket sales or official attitudes.
Why in places like Oslo, the average modern architecture are just simple and quite functional, and designed for living needs.
https://www.google.ru/maps/@59.9281153,10.7278328,3a,75y,320.72h,93.42t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s5-nfOoQG7Wenif__ZtHp5g!2e0!7i13312!8i6656
You can walk around whole city – they fit together modern and older buildings quite simply there.
This is the normal way people build for centuries. It doesn’t offend, but serves the purpose.
The problem in the modern architecture, is the megalomania of architects, combined with their bad taste.
The solution is for more humble architecture and simple tastes.
The issue here is that architecture is a public art-form and should be pleasing and functional – it’s not like a painting or ‘personal artform’.
Saker sounds like he doesn’t even live in a different country, but in a different universe from one the rest of us inhabit.
He grew up in America? But he says in an earlier post how he lives in Moscow – so really he is an inhabitant of a more civilized state within a state.
Says the half-Catholic Buddhist Cathar.
Disgustingly. Here is a village for rich people near Moscow
https://c.radikal.ru/c31/1803/43/9ed5ee9df9eb.png
https://d.radikal.ru/d33/1803/f7/fc743f98a9d4.png
https://c.radikal.ru/c32/1803/ff/f3a5cffa5e09.png
https://b.radikal.ru/b40/1803/7e/d8af049cafdd.png
https://a.radikal.ru/a11/1803/64/66046a10b5a8.png
https://a.radikal.ru/a01/1803/4d/7190854dbcb6.png
https://b.radikal.ru/b16/1803/74/2fc02fbe31ac.png
https://a.radikal.ru/a21/1803/fa/0d8390eda3e2.png
https://a.radikal.ru/a20/1803/67/83a785d39372.png
The Norwegian people with their money had to build something like that. But they’re building improved “хрущобы”.
I am not a fan of this project. It is too much, over the top, fake French architecture. .
If I have the budget to buy in that project, I would prefer to buy in real historical building. And not pretend to be French nobility of the 18th century.
The authenticity is important in architecture.
If a building is new, why would it pretend to from 18th century France .
Architecture should represent the historical spirit of the time from when it was built.
Also exteriors of the khrushchoby were not so bad when they were new, and they represented the historical period – the problem is quality of construction, total over-repetition of the same design, and now their urban decay.
Oslo buildings do not look like this or have decay. They represent the different historical periods in a simple way and the people keep it in good conditions.
Walk around for a few minutes in Oslo – the city is attractive, clean, and buildings represent different historical periods and history of city.
https://www.google.ru/maps/@59.9281153,10.7278328,3a,75y,320.72h,93.42t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s5-nfOoQG7Wenif__ZtHp5g!2e0!7i13312!8i6656
I agree with inertial on the topic of the 20th century Russian literature. It is awesome. I discovered some of it only due to university lectures, and those were among the best books I’ve ever read. Profound, thought-provoking and quite often heart-rending in a way I hadn’t thought possible for works of literary art to be. I’m not speaking about the most prominent, i.e. the best-known, authors though. Being more influential does not always equal being better.