Population is power, so it pays to keep track of it (along with national IQ and GDPcc), for those with an interest in geopolitics and futurism.
I used to spend way too much time poring over statistics almanacs and the CIA World Factbook during my school years, so I have a pretty good fix on the populations of major countries.
That is, when someone names “population of-“, the first number that leaps to my head is:
- Germany – 82M
- France – 65M
- UK – 65M
- Italy – 60M
- USA – 320M
- Russia – 145M
- China – 1.3B
These are all broadly accurate, though China is now converging to 1.4B, the US is at 330M, and some other minor discrepancies.
They are also major countries so I “update” them more frequently.
In the case of smaller countries, I am less accurate, because the information is less important and because I update it more frequently. For instance, earlier this year, I was shocked to discover that Serbia’s population was 7M, not 10M. I had obviously kept conflating it with all its rightful territories territories still intact. But such cases are rare, at least for Europe.
But this becomes much less accurate when you expand into Third World countries:
- India – 1.1B
- Indonesia – 230M
- Nigeria – 150M
- Bangladeshi – 150M
- Egypt – 90M
- Turkey – 80M
- Iran – 80M
- Ethiopia – 70M
- DRC – 50M
I know in my head that all of these populations are larger, but those are still the first figures that tend to come to mind when those countries are named.
In reality, the differences can be pretty stark: India is converging with China to 1.4B, Indonesia is at 270M, Nigeria is approaching 200M, Egypt is at 100M, Ethiopia is at 110M, and the DRC is at 85M.
The Third World countries are underestimated, twice over for two reasons, first because they are changing much more quickly so it is easy to be left behind, and second because they’re less important so mentally updated less often anyway.
Then there are a few countries, mostly in Eastern Europe, which have instead lost quite a lot of people. For instance, Ukraine is probably around 35M now, but “mental image” is still at 45M or so.
This is something that affects me and that I find amusing. Also probably quite an important phenomenon as a source of bias (failure to update), and it doesn’t just concern demographics. It’s an even bigger issue so far as perceptions of economic development, or military strength, are concerned. For instance, many “analysts” seem to believe that China outside its eastern seaboard, and Russia outside Moscow, are a twilight zone of peasant hovels and dilapidated post-industrial ruins, respectively. Which may have had some element of truth in the 1990s but are absolutely outdated today, serving as cope for insular Westerners.
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This is widely believed among Bluestan journolists inside the US about the rural red areas. Continuously bolstered by “exiles” via the university system.
When the opioid crisis actually verified this stereotype, the left-media engaged in textbook victim-blaming. There was an explicit attempt to frame it as an “Appalachian” issue, ignoring the similar high rates of abuse in New England. Outside of the Dissident Right, the racial issue was ignored except to blame “racist doctors” for not prescribing to blacks.
216 is dead on, this is not an anti Russia or China issue, it is just that the kind of people who become MSM journalists don’t think of not metropolitan areas as being real.
If they were born in the hinterlands, they make sure to be ashamed of it.
I’m sorry, but equating raw population numbers with military or economic power is so profoundly stupid I don’t know where to start.
In the 19th century, China – a country about the same size as the United States – had about four times the population. But the post-frontier low-fertility rate United States had developed high per-capita wealth, and China at the time was just a mass of malnourished peasants wallowing in the mud. Who do you think was the stronger nation? Of course the United States – 19th century China was a geopolitical weakling easily bullied by relatively tiny nations with well-fed and well-equipped militaries.
A million desperate malnourished peasants, a billion, who cares? If all they can do is barely stay alive, they are not capable of projecting power of any kind.
Russia today has fewer people than Nigeria – and if the Russians really cared (they don’t) they could conquer Nigeria with hardly a second thought.
Yes all other things being equal, God is on the side of the bigger battalions. But all other things are not always equal, and just breeding like rats without any consideration of resources or infrastructure etc. historically does not lead to supremacy but to poverty and corruption and stangation and weakness.
Population matters, only when you scale it up in consideration of bio-capital. Having a population of 100 million whites is a blessing, its what allowed the US to become a superpower after all. Having a population 100 million blacks is a curse.
The entire 1.3 billion strong continent of Africa has contributed less to science, technology, art, culture and literature than the puny 17 million strong country of Holland. Even most of what passes for ”African” intellectual output is mostly the product of whites living in Africa, mostly in South Africa.
Having 100s of millions of low iq blacks, inbred arabs and sub-human dravidians is not a blessing. India for example should be a world power considering it has 120-180 million 110+ IQ brahmins. But the country despite 7 decades of independence and enlightened liberal rule has remained a backwater.
It rarely produces elite science, its industrial productivity ages behind that of China and 60% of its population is still composed of penniless farmers and day laborers. The addition of hundreds of millions of dravidians to the population has only had a negative effect on India’s fortunes.
A lot of people seem to believe that the Brazilian favela society is a blueprint for success in the future. Particularly Richard Spencer and the FBI/Marxnats of twitter. Whites, Asians, Brahmins and Jews would rule over vast a negro-mestizoid population that does little other than manual labor and collect welfare checks.
They reckon that such a society can still continue to be a superpower and produce elite science and maintain world class institutions. Its essentially official American policy as outlined by all the CIA-aligned think tanks like the Brookings institute.
They’ll import a billion salvadorians and Nigerians to keep a level footing with China and maintain a colossal GDP. While importing all of Nigeria may marginally improve GDP, it will catastrophically reduce state power.
These populations contribute nothing to the increasingly cognitive economy where physical labor is more and more obsolete due to automation. They only commit crime, eat up the money of the productive population, exhaust natural resources, create squalor and generally bring the level of society down.
The brahmins of India might’ve been a world superpower if they had a country exclusively for themselves. But since they have to live with australoids, the quality of the society collapses across the board. Corruption, incompetence, religious backwardness, violence, resource leeching and a general pervasiveness of low standards hemorrhage the country.
Its the same with Brazil. Brazil has 5-10 million Germans, some 20 million North Italians and some 3 million Japanese.
When looking at raw numbers of high iq populations, Brazil has a high intellect fraction of at least 30 million. So by all rights, their intellectual output should be greater or at least equal to that of Scandinavia. Yet, the reality could not be more different.
I think its obvious that addition of low functioning populations drastically reduces the intellectual output and overall state power of a nation. After all, America in 1990 was far more functional and capable that America today. Even though it had a 100 million fewer people, it was 70-75% white. At that age, general competence and power projection were far greater.
Today America has the same number of whites but only at 56%. Consequently, America today is far less functional and has far less of an ability to project power than before.
I think there should be some study into this matter as to how much a low IQ population reduces the overall state power of a country.
There should also be some efforts to make a list of countries by biocapital, i.e how much useful population does a country have? Holland has a 12th of Nigeria’s population, but it has vastly more useful people that can contribute positively to cvilization and state power.
My rough ranking would be:
How reasonable are the UN’s Africa 2100 predictions? Two things make me question them:
1.) The rate of urbanization predicted – Lagos of 100 million – seems to presuppose an East Asian or even supra-East Asian organizational capacity. I’m not even sure Euros could do that, with their hollowed-out, invaded cities.
2.) In 50 years, massive declines are predicted in the population of the developed world. And it will be massively older. So much so that the elderly might become a stone around the neck of the young. At that point, political changes might be necessary to move things away from the welfare state. And if it is a case of feeding grandma or Idi Amin, they might pick grandma.
*Slight correction to the list.
No 1o. should be South Korea
There is some good news in regards to Africa.
https://saidit.net/s/debatealtright/comments/7r69/cautiously_optimistic_about_african_birth_rates/
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/AFR/africa/birth-rate
https://www.newsecuritybeat.org/2016/04/changing-narrative-fertility-decline-africa/
https://www.pnas.org/content/116/8/2891
In the past twenty years, Africa’s birth rate has gone down from 38 to 32, declining about 1% each year. There might still be a chance at averting the Afrocalypse.
Three out of four of Africa’s demographic heavy weights have seen a steep reduction in birth rates.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/NGA/nigeria/fertility-rate
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/ETH/ethiopia/birth-rate
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/ZAF/south-africa/birth-rate
Bear in mind that the actual replacement fertility for Africa is significantly higher than 2.1. They do have a large issue with child mortality, so the effective replacement fertility should be higher. For example, in the Roman Empire it was estimated that the TFR had to be 5-6 kids per women to actually sustain the existing imperial population.
As usual female empowerment and education seems to be leading the charge in the decline. The UN is ironically doing good work in this regard. The more empowered women are, the lower the birth rates get.
But I think an even bigger issue is the steep decline in African sperm counts.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5637027/
I think it can be attributed to their absolutely irresponsible and senseless enviornmental practices. Africa is undergoing the largest deforestation in history. Millions of acres of beautiful, verdant forests being cut down to feed kangs and sell wood for furnitue.
https://www.un.org/africarenewal/magazine/january-2008/saving-africa%E2%80%99s-forests-%E2%80%98lungs-world%E2%80%99
For example, 96% of Nigeria’s forests are gone.
https://www.vanguardngr.com/2018/09/deforestation-nigeria-has-lost-96-of-its-forest-ncf/
They along with Brazil’s niggers and wiggers are setting the stage for a global environmental catastrophe. God knows what the consequences of destroying both the amazon and the congo basin forests will have…
In addition they have a massive plastic pollution problem, one that is clogging their rivers. This is probably the main culprit behind declining sperm count, along with mycotoxins in the food supply.
https://www.greenpeace.org/africa/en/blogs/11125/africas-exploding-plastic-nightmare/
If black irresponsibility in these fields wasn’t enough, they also have mass soil erosion. Almost 40% of their soil is now degraded.
https://www.thoughtco.com/soil-erosion-in-africa-43352
Honestly, without White, Asian or Jewish help, Africa would suffer mass starvation and return to the stone age within 50 years.
Seems to me that the mistake with Próspera is that they picked Hondorus rather than Mexico (which is a few IQ points higher) to start with. You want to test out your ideas on a more Mestizo country first, IMO.
2100 is about when Saudi Arabia runs out. Might be a lot more expensive to make fertilizer at that point.
Hungarians’ view of Ukraine is greatly influenced by Subcarpathia. (Based on Hungary, where Budapest is richer, people usually accurately assume Kiev to be richer than the rest of the country.) Now this is one of the poorest regions of Ukraine, but it is not usually assumed to be so, see my next point.
Since Eastern Hungary is poorer, it was extrapolated to the former USSR, and in the 1990s there was a widespread belief that Russia would be even poorer than Ukraine (and thus Subcarpathia). Since then many people have learned that Russia is richer than Ukraine “because of oil,” but it’s still often believed to be much less developed than Hungary (reality is maybe 15-20% lower GDP per capita).
My parents had a world atlas from the early 1970s, and I was reading the wildly out of date datasets and looking at the out of date maps for a long time.
I guess that for an African country having a bigger population still usually translates into bigger military power. Provided that it can avoid a civil war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Nigeria#Vital_statistics It is rather unclear whether Nigerian TFR has really decreased in the last decade. All those “projections” are meaningless.
It’s a cope. Your people feel the need to look down on someone, since they have massive inferiority complex vis-a-vis Western Europe.
Objectively speaking the average Hungarian is better off than some 70 or perhaps 80% of humanity. Including the majority of Russians. (Though probably not Muscovites.)
The average Hungarian is not familiar with any of these stats. The average Hungarian is afflicted by a strong sense of inferiority relative to real Europeans.
I was recently caught using 20 year old, highly out of date, data in an online debate, it was very embarrassing. So there’s some comfort in knowing that others, smarter and more knowledgeable than myself, fall into the same trap.
The point of this post was how people use obsolete data in their mental models of reality. I added that often such things are based on using the wrong heuristic (“going east means poorer”) and extrapolating from the wrong data (“Subcarpathia must be similar to the rest of Ukraine”).
Perhaps, just like the average Russian. So how is that relevant here?
Karlin is great when it comes to a lot of things…. Except for military analysis. But you gotta take the rough with the smooth. Or else I wouldn’t keep coming back.
Today, I said that the earth’s human population was 7B. Someone corrected it to 8B despite of COVID! Happened so fast.
Well he didn’t conflate it with military power. You must be confusing it with another article regarding, well, military power.
Funnily enough, it’s the Dravidian states in India that are the richer, more productive and high IQ.
The entire muh Aryan north Indians is some west European pseud cope because they jack off to le ebin powerful Yamnaya chariot riders despite the fact that the Indians adopted an Indo-European language simply out of convenience because they probably had some New Guinea type every other village is it’s own language family type situation, and the Indo-Europeans in the area were more like a service minority with a monopoly on transport of goods and services because they were “netural” and nomadic
The idea that “going east means poorer” doesn’t come from any particular data set, but from Hungarians’ very own deep, emotional feeling inferiority vs Western Europe. “mental models of reality” are contructed to support this emotional state. Data that contradicts the emotion is disregarded.
Inferiority complex itself is a product of Western-centric worldview, and thus correlates with pro-Western politics. It’s most present in Eastern European liberals and svidomy types, which is basically Hungarian political spectrum. Russian vatniks are not afflicted by it. Vatniks are emotionally healthier individuals.
Yeah, the gross numbers Anatoly uses are a starting point, but he could do something like his CMP-type adjustments to them. For example, he has the USA at 320m or 330m (probably actually about 350m with all the illegals), but only about 200m are the white people who are what most think of as what makes the USA the USA. Still, that’s the largest number of white people ever in one nation-state. (And since that number is peaking now, it may be the largest number that there ever will be, unless Russia can win the long game.)
Similarly, he has Russia at 145m, but only, what, 100m are actual Russians? Still, 100m is the second most white people ever under one flag, and if Russia can overcome near-term fertility problems, it is not boxed in to an ideological/structural dead end like the US is. So Russia may have good prospects in the long term, if it can solve the short term.
France at 65m, but maybe only 45m of those are actually French, while the rest are mostly imported bulk filler. Germany at 82m, but probably only 70m actual Germans (still third most whites under one flag). The French have had about a century long paranoia about their weak demographics compared to Germany. After WWI France was (justly) worried about Germany’s 3:2 demographic advantage (and 5:2 in the coming draft-age cohort). So their post-WWII solution was to bulk up with a lot of foreigners, especially Arabs and Africans. Ironically, this solution to the threat of German demographic overbearance has simply created a greater threat of internal xeno-ethnic overbearance. Meanwhile the actual threat from Germany has dropped to approximately zero. On paper, France can congratulate itself on having chiseled Germany’s demo advantage down to 5:4, but strip away the filler and the ratio is still the same old 3:2, and now France has imported a huge semi-hostile underclass to achieve this paper parity. So France now suffers a much bigger internal threat as a result of trying to solve an external problem that no longer exists.
So what would be the Capital coefficient to the Labor factor à la CMP? Well, The Alternative Hypothesis guy did a good back-of-the-envelope on net tax contributions (i.e., raw contribution to state capacity) of different US ethnes. Basically, each US Hispanic, on average, cancels out the tax contribution of one US white or US Asian, while each US black cancels out the tax contribution of two US whites/Asians. So viewed this way, the actual demographic heft of the USA adjusted for ethne is 215m whites+Asians minus 50m Hispanics minus 40m (×2) blacks equals 85m net white equivalents (and sinking). So Russia and Germany suddenly look pretty competitive. Of course a similar (though less devastating) calculation could also be performed for each of them, perhaps using ethic IQ to size the contribution/detraction to state capacity. Germany, for example, would probably be something like 70m white Germans minus 12m Turks/Kurds etc. equals 58m net white equivalents. Russia would be a little trickier since the Russian whites are arguably not quite as valuable to the state as the US or German whites, and the non-Russian minorities are a more disparate melange.
Amazing input. This deserves more than just a “thanks”.
I wish, but doing something like that would be flagged as racist.
I never stopped.
2020
Pakistan 225,200,000
Philippines 110,141,154
Vietnam 97,580,000
Thailand 66,639,342
South Africa 59,622,350
Myanmar 55,294,979
Argentina 45,808,747
Algeria 44,700,000
Malaysia 32,767,930
Nepal 30,378,055
Sri Lanka 21,919,000
Kazakhstan 18,914,096
Zimbabwe 15,790,716
Cambodia 15,552,211
Rwanda 12,955,768
Haiti 11,743,017
Israel 9,342,700
Papua New Guinea 9,122,994
Lebanon 6,769,000
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTxrjR5_lxDj0E22HlvxSDpCXA7xkwLYgFArA&usqp.jpg
I love Wikipedia, makes it so easy.
Excellent idea on ”substracting” blacks and hispanics from whites and Asians in the US. I’d add that 72 million out 80 million German population is actually white. The number of Germans is probably something of the order of 64 million.
As far as France, the white population is about 51-54 million. France has had extensive european migration, primarily from Italy and Spain for the last two centuries. The percentage of actual French, i.e Gauls, Bretons, Franks and Occitan is a mystery. Though I read an estimate that its about 40 million or so.
So yes, the Germans still have that 1.5:1 advantage over the French.
Russia is far better off that it seems. Its roughly 85% white when you count Russians, Ukrainians, Germans and Greeks. That amounts to some 124 million people. Its diversity isn’t that toxic either. The largest minority is Volga tatar who have an IQ near identical to Russians and is genetically about 70-80% Slavic.
Other minorities like Tajiks, Udmurts and other eccentric groups are nowhere near as toxic as American Blacks, and to a much lesser extent, hispanics.
The American hispanic contingent is a mixed bag. Around half of it is Castizo supposedly, 75% white(mostly Iberian) people that identify as hispanic for the diversity points. They are borderline white.
I think if you count only the mestizos or Amerindians, the net tax impact will be far worse.
Japan also has significant human capital, as does Korea.
But China probably has more human capital and ”effective population” than the rest of the world combined. 1.3 Billion 105 iq Han Chinese.
There are a lot of fantastic narratives about Germans or Britons trying to conquer the world or America or the USSR overrunning the planet. None of them ever had the human capital to do it.
China however has the potential to be strong that they could take on and defeat the rest of the world combined and truly conquer and subjugate the whole planet. The CCP for its part however, has not been too successful in harnessing this potential.
China’s technological or scientific prowess is still behind the US and its achievements in culture and architecture is nothing to write home about. Though this could change in the coming future. My guess is that the CCP impedes China’s true potential by piling on marxist baggage.
If the CCP reformed and dropped marxism altogether and became a full on national socialist state which glorified and promoted Chinese history, tradition and religion instead of suppressing it, it might achieve far greater wonders
Then you must be something else, not a vatnik, because you seem to harbor deep insecurities yourself. Chill out dude, Hungary is like 7% the size of Russia (in terms of population), you don’t need to care so deeply about what Hungarians think.
Well within Hungary it’s certainly true that the westernmost big cities like Szombathely, Sopron or Győr are significantly richer than the easternmost big cities like Miskolc, Debrecen, Szeged or Nyíregyháza. Of our neighbors the westernmost one, Austria is also by far the richest. The easternmost Ukraine is the poorest. Slovakia to the north (in between the two) is in between in terms of wealth as well. Of our southern neighbors Austria is richer than Slovenia, which is richer than Croatia, which is richer than Serbia and Romania, which are both richer than Ukraine, so the only exception to the rule is Romania being richer than Serbia. But even there it wasn’t true before the early 1990s.
What does “svidomy” mean in a Hungarian context?
Well a country of 100 million should in theory be capable of mustering a 1 million strong army. However that’s far easier to do on paper than in reality. It takes an ungodly amount of logistical competence and efficiency to fully maintain and field such a force.
Seeing Africa’s state capacity, the ability of their leaders to field such a force is practically nil. If anything such a large army could start fighting itself over inter tribal feuds.
Nominally the Nigerian government rules over 200 million blacks but in reality they have littel control over most of them. Its borderline impossible to get a population as inbred and low iq like sub saharans to overcome tribal difference and act as a coherent national unit.
Though they look like large compact blocks on the map, in reality African countries are divided into hundreds if not thousands of semi-autonomous tribes and sects.
They are still suppressing their history, religion, and traditions?
Russia needs to be loved. So even small Hungary counts.
Correct, but North was for a very, very long time ruled by Muslims, unlike the South.
More like 115m.
You should read the first paragraph of the article again.
Karlin not including Crimea here to make Russia’s population 147 million.
For some on here that could be problematic and unsurprising.
Sad! Many such cases.
The “fulcrum point” IQ for citizenship in a modern nation-state seems to be around 95. Above that you can nation-build. Below that and you can only stave off fissiparous collapse through various illiberal means.
Thanks. So 8 million Slavs, Balkans, Italics, non-German Germanics (Swiss, Austrian, Dutch, Scandi)? Any idea what the non-German white composition is?
Yeah, France is deliberately ethnic-obscurantist. Though I would count two-century old Latin immigrants as effectively French now. 11-14 million of those? That leaves another 11-14 million Arabs/Africans. That doesn’t seem quite so bad as I’ve been hearing … but then, higher birthrates.
Thanks. These kinds of subtleties are the reason that I didn’t venture to calculate Russia.
Yes, “Hispanics” is bastard category peculiar to the US. It’s nominally based on language (although many “Hispanics” don’t actually speak Spanish) and mixes higher caste Cubans and South Americans with lower caste Central Americans, plus Dominicans and Puerto Ricans muddying things further. It is a lousy theoretical categorization, but in practice it tracks pretty well between whites and blacks.
Agree. On paper Japan should be more powerful than the US, though the East Asians punch above their weight compared to everyone else, they still punch somewhat below their weight compared to Europeans. OTOH, the Japanese and Koreans are on some of the most resource-poor real estate in the world.
Yes, China is the sleeping dragon: the largest high-IQ mono-ethne in a unitary nation-state. On paper, they should be wiping the floor with the rest of us. Maybe they will, eventually.
Well, compared to the famine-wracked dystopia of a couple generations ago, they’re not doing too badly, and unlike the West, they are still on an upward trajectory.
The Assamese in the North-East were never under Muslim rule, but today the average Assamese is economically behind the average Indian.
Hah, this post made me laugh, for this is an activity I too have wasted too much time on. It got worse when I discovered the Angus Maddison dataset around 2010, because now there were historical stats I considered it important to memorize as well.
That’s one country I’ve consistently gotten wrong (and also consistently never cared much about). For some reason, I’ve always had it stuck in my head that it was 40 million even when its official figure was 50 million. Whenever I’d see the official figure, I’d be surprised it was so high, only to quickly once again forget it and go back to 40 million.
As a kid, I had a set of Funk and Wagnall’s encyclopedias (deliberately mispronounced fuckin’ wagnalls, of course) from the early 80s, making them already somewhat outdated by the time I got stuck into them in the early 90s. But it really annoyed me that I’d come across entries saying things like “the population in 1973 was xxx,xxx.” I’d think, shit, aren’t these people experts, is it really so hard for them to get more up to date information? Whatever the deleterious sociocultural effects of the “digital age” (growing more worrisome to me with each passing year), I’ll always be grateful to the internet for doing away with this particular problem.
He probably included it, but rounded the 143.7 mil number to 143 (population without Crimea) and the 2.4 mil Crimean population to 2 million, so 145 even though it should be above 146 and with migrants and whatnot it can be rounded to 147.
Within both Hungary and Poland going East indeed means going poorer (with Warsaw being an exception for obvious reasons). Historically – at least, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, prior to Communism, Galicia was the wealthiest part of Ukraine while the Russian-ruled parts were poorer. And then of course, Poland and Hungary have been and continue to be poorer than Germany and Austria, yet richer than their eastern neighbors (Russia, Ukraine and Belarus).
The fact that you deny these obvious facts suggests that you, not the realistic eastern and central Europeans, have some emotional issues regarding inferiority vis a vis Western Europe.
That indeed seems to be a pretty stupid take. Good thing I didn’t make it.
Nothing is caused by just by one reason alone, similarly the Muslim rule is not the only reason for the backwardness of the North, but it is clearly a major or main reason for it. There are parallels in Europe, where for most of the 20th century those regions, which were longest ruled by Ottomans, were the poorest ones.
Nepal too has never been under a direct Islamic rule, but on average it’s more backwards than India, but both Nepal and Assam have a very harsh geography, not long time ago almost all of Assam was jungle, full of malaria, and Nepal’s geography is even harsher, full of mountains and hills, oh and not forgetting the malaria that plagued Terai or the southern half of Nepal.
Still there’s even more important factor explaining these matters for Assam and Nepal, both lands are peripheries of Indo-Gangetic plain, therefore the flow of inventions and products is from the heartland to periphery, if the heartland is sick, or under an anti-scientific regime, there will be less new innovations and trends flowing to periphery. Scandinavia is a periphery of Europe, Assam and Nepal were peripheries of Muslim ruled Hindustan, therefore one can’t make any rules based on the examples of some remote peripheral countries. Even before the Muslim rule, the economy of ancient Assam, or Kamarupa, was intimately tied with the Bengal, same with Nepal and Gangetic plain. What would happen to Wales if England would become Islamic, and Wales would continue as an independent and Christian Welsh state and such situation would continue for 700-800 years? I don’t know, but maybe pondering such questions will give you some perspective?
The Republics – probably. It has seen an economic collapse because the war has destroyed much of it. Luhansk is now well below average, but what is left of Donetsk is doing well. During later Soviet and post-Soviet times, easternmost Ukraine was once the richest, other than Kiev of course. But this was because it had coal which led to steel, the greatest source for the country’s hard currency, and was heavily invested by the Soviets. Not because the East was more highly developed or educated. It was analogous to some African region being blessed with a lot of oil. Intact eastern parts such as what is left of Donetsk oblast (Mariupol) continue to be wealthy by Ukrainian standards.
Until Maidan, Zakarpatiya was the poorest region in Ukraine. Its neighbor Chernivtsi is now the second poorest province in Ukraine.
In the 19th century, Galicia was about 20% wealthier than Russia (per capita Galician GDP in 1890 was $1,947 in 2010 dollars, versus $1,550 in Russia); it was also wealthier than the Balkans, and Portugal. From 1995-2000, Ukraine’s per capita GDP in 2010 dollars was lower than Galicia’s in 1890!
Here are Ukrainian wages in summer 2019 – they have increased since then, probably more in the West than in the East:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f6/AverageMonthlySalary2019.png
Poorest region is Kherson in the South, followed by Chernivtsi in the Southwest. Zakarpatiya is above average in terms of wages.
I think Americans may be the most woke to demographics.
In the past 20-30 years, the world almanac numbers for many European countries have hardly altered. They’ve seen the changing faces on the street, but not the big factbook changes. Contrast that to America, where someone who went to school 20 years ago was taught we had a population of 248 million and someone who went to school 20 years ago was taught 281 million, and, boy have we seen the changes on the street!
In fact, I’ve often wondered if any past demographic model even predicted where we are now. You look at the future models, and none of them seem to show the same rate of growth. Almost like they are trying to disarm people.
kept conflating it with all its rightful territories territories still intact.
So let it be written, so let it be true.
I was recently caught using 20 year old, highly out of date, data in an online debate,
That’s what you get by trying to use facts in a debate. There is a way around that which works beautifully and is used by most debaters.
The average Hungarian is afflicted by a strong sense of inferiority relative to real Europeans.
Wait a minute, aren’t you Slavic?
LOL
I wonder what the long-term consequences of a malarial vaccine would be on demographics. Seems like it would possibly be a big disruptor. I can imagine all sorts of changes.
Might make it easier for Africans to travel North. Might encourage greater discipline, as their would be less of an excuse for sick days. With some simple tech, maybe they would get rid of the sickle cell mutation, which would give them more endurance and make them better soldiers and workers.
On the other hand, historically, malaria was a lot of what kept the non-Africa settlers out. If it were gone, then the natural protection blacks have might also be gone, and other people might carve up Africa, this time for real.
If you’re thinking in terms of cognitive skills this is pretty easy to look into using https://piaacdataexplorer.oecd.org/ide/idepiaac/ which Anatoly has previously talked about.
They don’t have a lot of developing countries though(Using something like Becker’s IQ database I think one could calculate it for every country pretty easily using a NORMSDIST function in google docs or the like. Not sure if the database already has population numbers, otherwise one would need to add that.).
For example, if you look at the percentage of countries with numeracy above level 4(roughly an IQ of above 120 in white terms, so this is more smart fraction than total useful fraction) there’s roughly this many millions of them(although about 35% less than this would be working age, ideally I should’ve used working age population numbers):
26.4 United States
20.2 Japan
10.8 Germany
10.2 Russian Federation
5.6 England (UK)
5.4 France
4.0 Canada
3.5 Republic of Korea (Dragged down by old folks who grew up poor I believe)
3.2 Poland
3.0 Australia
2.7 Netherlands
2.4 Italy
1.9 Spain
1.6 Sweden
1.3 Mexico
1.2 Hungary
1.0 Austria
1.0 Czech Republic
1.0 Flanders (Belgium)
1.0 Ontario (Canada)
0.9 Finland
0.8 Norway
0.8 Israel
0.8 Quebec (Canada)
0.8 Turkey
0.8 Denmark
0.7 Singapore
0.7 New Zealand
0.6 Slovak Republic
0.5 Alberta (Canada)
0.5 Greece
0.4 Chile
0.4 Ireland
0.3 Peru
0.3 Lithuania
0.2 Kazakhstan
0.2 Slovenia
0.2 Northern Ireland (UK)
0.1 Estonia
0.0 Ecuador
(Note: This is based on age 16-54 from 2012 rather than 16-65 because I wasn’t interested in how people who are now pensioners did. Also I used generously rounded population numbers, sometimes from memory.)
East Asia in general is a dump resource wise. It’s only good a s a giant labor pool to be unleashed
Where’s China?
Didn’t participate, but would surely be number one.
Now that I think about it Becker’s database must have population numbers since they calculated the worldwide average(88 or something?). Anyway, I’m too lazy to make anymore lists.
Anatoly, what the hell are you doing standing there on building’s edge? Where was THAT? I’ve jumped outta perfectly good airplanes, worked 50′ in the air fixing wires and speakers and shit in creaky work stands, I’ve even jumped unhurt twenty feet onto the lawn of Pop’s house, none of it gets to me.
But I see people standing on edges of buildings that are tens of stories up and I worry, heh.. Careful!
Yeah, tax measurements, but that means nothing competitively. When you consider population by competition, how do you calculate the useless EEOC hires of women into HR, academia and government? Instantly calculate at a minimum, 80-90% of the US population of women is and has always been an enormous liability. They get useless degrees, they have useless, make-work jobs, they create nothing with their relatively new-found equality and power. Everyone knows this. Elizabeth Holmes and other failures are the rule, not the exception, by the way.
College-educated white females are well-nigh worthless because you get nothing productive out of them. No inventions, no engineering, they don’t make decent wives, they don’t have babies, they’ve come out with no great works of music. They scarf up their loans for their shitty degrees, they cause enormous grief everywhere they’re employed, they’ve ruined our legislative processes EVERYWHERE and they are a net loss to society in every way shape and form, it’s just never been calculated.
I don’t know HOW you calculate what blacks cost while ignoring the enormous drag, cost and societal destruction of Western-educated white females. I’d bet they are the bigger loads by far than blacks. By FAR.
Maybe the “enlightened liberal rule ” is exactly what India held back compared to China. Maybe one should not play multi-party democracy and the accompanying quadrennial election festival coupled with traditional bombings and assassinations while millions of your population still poop on the street. Maybe there should be a rigid bureaucracy sorting things out until production, distribution, and communication systems are established at the national scale, and further, the population is technically as well as ideologically ‘educated’ so that most citizens share the same outlook and broadly follow the same rules, since if not, they vote for their ‘tribe’ and not for their preferences anyhow.
Perhaps, we should follow the advice of Bono and Tony Blair and increase foreign aid.
And then transform foreign aid into an ambitious, technologically-advanced department of Victorian-style ethnography – a department of HBD. Seems to me a lot of these African countries could use help taking censuses. Why not include craniometric, IQ, and SNP data, as well?
I don’t really know much about urban politics in India, but I was thinking that the Próspera model might be attractive there.
That is, you create a city that is less democratic, with the intention of making it more functional and livable. The government farms out taxes to you. You collect a lower rate, but with lower levels of avoidance. I understand that tax avoidance is very high in India.
Claiming Felix or russians in general have some inferiority complex with true Europeans is laughable, and I’m not sure the same can be said of Hungarians to Germans:
With the Americans and anglos we are among the biggest travellers/tourists on the planet. We go to the west, and show zero inclination to stay there after holiday. Even our guys in Karelia who cross the border into Finland all the time don’t show any Inferiority complex.
This is maybe even more obvious in Kaliningrad where our guys do plenty of food shopping and visits to neighbouring EU states, but show f**k all interest in staying there. The depopulation stats for Kaliningrad are far less ( actually I think the population increases) than for the majority of russian regions,despite the easier chance of moving to the EU – so your inferiority theory is BS.
The population of Hungary would be about 243 if they had the same climatic extremities as in Russia
Russians are probably the proudest and most secure in their culture of any people’s on the planet. Can Hungarians claim any of that, particularly with the German influence?
As for “living conditions superior in Hungary, except for Muscovites” – Moscow is 20 million people, SP 5 million, Kazan far higher living standards, Krasnoyarsk, Ufa, Krasnodar, Lipetsk, Tyumen, Yekaterinburg, Sochi and many other places with a population dwarfing that of Hungary that have a superior ( OK let’s be diplomatic and say equal) standard of living.
But their tea is wonderful and strong.
And yet, there you are, writing from England Gerard. The irony.
I think genetics makes all the difference. Asturias was a mountainous backwater that remained independent and Catholic, while the rest of Iberia came under Islamic rule. It was the periphery of the Iberian peninsula, but it became the launchpad for the Reconquista.
A big part of the economic difference between North and South India is the difference between being near the coast and not being near the coast. In any large country – China, the US, Russia, India – the parts nearer ports/more easily accessed are generally richer than the inland/less easily accessed parts.
This is not to say that Islam or marrying your cousin helps. Or a that a port is everything. Detroit is a reasonably good port.
I accidentally clicked agree and not Thanks button. So thank you for your effort.
Spain probably has natural latitudinal IQ differences, even when you don’t consider admixture.
His writing manner though seems way too much coherent compared with Gerard’s usual stream of consciousness style with plenty of childish namecallings.
Assamese and Nepalese population is mostly mix of Indo-Aryan and Sino-Tibetan(and Kra-Dai in Assam), with a bit of Dravida genes, I really don’t follow your logic. You can’t compare Asturias puny hills with the highest mountains of the world, found in Nepal. Also are you implying that Asturias genetics were somehow better? For most of recorded history of Iberia, the South has been more developed and technologically advanced.
The real reason for Asturias success, is same as it was with other people of harsher and remoter areas, lower population density, more animal protein in food, higher level of cohesion(asabiyya) than that found among the more settled and urbanised people, oh well there are many reasons, but I would not say that people of Asturia are by nature more intelligent Catalonians or something, but I don’t live in Spain, so I can’t surely say, maybe, maybe not. Or are you claiming that Afghanis are genetically better than Indians? After all Afghanistan has been the “launchpad” for repeated conquests of India. Though Medieval Indians wrote about Turki invaders, vast majority of Islamic conquerors were of Eastern Iranian/Pashtun origin, or more accurately, the armies of Turkic conquerors were mostly composed of Afghan tribesmen.
Nothing new there. Based on this kind of “analysis” Napoleon and Hitler underestimated Russia, whereas Japan underestimated China. Their “analysis” came to bite them all in the butt. Served them right.
Orissa is one of the poorest regions of India, it’s an extremely poor place, and it’s on the coast! Well Muslim rule there was quite short, but British rule was long, just like in Bengal and Bihar, which both are poor places.
I wasn’t around for the 1990s, so indulge me, please:
To what extent was there an “At least we’re not Russia” (or outright “Get fucked, Russia”) attitude amongst the Warsaw Pact countries after the collapse of the Soviet Union?
It seems to me that there would be a fair bit of schadenfreude at Russia’s fall from dominant Soviet power to a third-world shithole after the Union’s disintegration, especially if the former WP countries were concurrently being welcomed into “the West”.
This would, in turn, create an inferiority complex amongst some Russians, which is now being vented – i.e. resolved – due to yet another reversal of fortune (Russia’s economic rise).
This would explain a fair few of the “many such cases”, but I’m curious as to how grounded my theory is in reality.
This seems about right. And the obvious point is that African countries haven’t ever shown much ability to project power into one another. Ethiopia (not even an especially dysfunctional African state) couldn’t keep or conquer Eritrea despite having a 10x or more population advantage.
A point could be made that Nigeria has intervened in some civil wars, e.g. Sierra Leone, to apparent success. But I think that Nigeria’s ability to project power is much more an effect of its petroleum revenues ($39bn in petroleum exports in 2019 is the stat I see) than its ability to tax a dirt-poor population.
For a petrostate, it seems the population is basically a liability — you have to spend money to keep them happy and yet they produce nothing of value. So why can’t petrostates ever seem to control their population growth? I have to think the House of Saud would be in a more secure position if the population of its subjects hadn’t skyrocketed.
He is slightly more careful with language, but themes are the same. Gerard once mentioned that he was from Kazan. It seems obvious he is desperate to be here.
Economically, Russia caught up to the Warsaw Pact countries in the 2000s and early 2010s but has fallen behind since then, although it has not remains economically very comfortable. Moscow is in all ways a wealthy first world city surpassing Western capitals in almost all metrics. Currently it’s per capita GDP surpasses only Bulgaria’s, among the Warsaw Pact countries.
Russian HDI = 0.824
Turkish HDI = 0.820
Russian GDPPPP per capita: $29.485
Turkish GDPPPP per capita: $32.278
Russian skinhead: “Torkoy third world, Roshiya first world.” Lol you bald role-playing assclown.
I have a hunch that it’s easier/cheaper to pay off your population than it is to genocide/reproductively-cripple it. Thus, it would be the preferable strategy for an extractive (literally, for a petrostate) short-term-oriented elite that can stash their loot elsewhere.
The pacified populace does what any population does, and grows to the extent that it can afford, causing spiraling costs at a later time; by then the original extractive elites are long gone, and their replacements fight to keep the enterprise afloat for enough time to get theirs and leave, as well. Eventually, something blows out, and everything collapses, leaving European charities to pick up the pieces.
Russia is still recovering from Communism.
Prior to Communism, Czechia had about the same per capita GDP as Austria. Even now, 30 years after the fall of Communism, it is only at 75% of Austria’s per capita GDP PPP, 3/4 to where it should naturally be. Russia’s circumstances probably reflect a similar if not even more negative skew because it experienced Communism for longer. So this would bring Russia to Spain’s level – much higher than Turkey.
Turkey does not have the excuse of generations of Communist filth to hold itself back; its current condition is its natural one, as a respectable mid-range civilization.
I see. Two questions:
Is the per capita GDP catch-up/fall-off in USD terms, or in terms of purchasing power parity? Exchange rates can do funky things, especially with sanctions in play.
(Original question) Was there a common feeling of schadenfreude amongst the Warsaw Pact countries at the reversal of Russian political and economic fortune after the Soviet collapse, and, if there was, how widespread/vocally-expressed was it?
P.S., who is Gerhard, and why does he sound like Andrei Martyanov?
I suspect Bihar is explained partly by being inland, and Bengal by being densely populated.
Orissa is a mystery to me but I am reluctant to blame the British. In Africa, I believe colonialism is associated with higher per capita. Anyway, I’m not sure that they had good control of the tribal areas. Seems to be growing quickly now, though?
Where does Indonesia rank here? IQ in the mid-80s, or maybe high 80s, with a very large population of 270mn, with a 1 trillion dollar economy, and decent industry. And has an OK military for its size.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/84/Russian_poster.JPG/1280px-Russian_poster.JPG
Yes, I’d peg France at around 10 million Afro-Arabs (from Malagasy to Moroccans to Caribbeans), maybe even a little less.
But that’s still an enormous quantity – and indeed, higher birth rates mean this group (including second generation) probably accounts for 175k-200k of the annual 725k births. Everything isn’t so black and white though, to pardon the pun – there is a large and growing mixed population in France, I know people in the following categories and all of them pass as European and are people you would want to help build a country in terms of behaviour and intelligence:
Agree with the previous commenter that both Russia and the US aren’t as bad as they seem on paper due to groups like ‘Hispanics’ and ‘Tatars’ being more nuanced than most people realise
Yep, USAtan’s future would not be so bad if there wouldn’t be members of hostile academia and financial elite purposefully agitating the flames of ethnic and racial conflict there. Which is so fricking puzzling? Don’t they understand that they are playing with fire? Well suits me!
Quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat
In 2012, (which does not seem like a long time ago for me), GDP per capita was actually higher in Russia than in Hungary and Poland in some measurements.
The difference has re-emerged just in the last few years, where Orban has been economically successful and attracted a lot of foreign investments (although sadly for Hungary’s old people – pandemically incompetent political leadership) while the Russian income has stagnated due to fall in the world commodity prices.
https://i.imgur.com/hFV6nsm.jpg
That must be painful for Hungary, when their ex-husband Austria climbed into the wealthiest countries in the world, while their own incomes closer the Balkan hinterlands they used to rule.
https://i.imgur.com/dq5Sirx.jpg
The equivalent of “Hispanics” is not Tatars, but migrants from Central Asia
The geography of wealth is only partially on east-to-west or south-to-north vectors. It has more to do with how close a region is to the center of the prevailing economic power.
In Europe wealth peaks in the economic core of London-Benelux-Paris-Lyon-Switzerland-northern Italy and western Germany. That core has been more developed and richer for centuries. At times more marginal regions like Midlands, Berlin-Silesia, even Vienna-Prague-Budapest caught up, but that was driven by local specifics and long periods of peace. There are exceptions (e.g. Stockholm) but in general a region’s wealth based on how close it is to the European core area.
Inside countries we see the same dynamic on a smaller scale: Subcarpathia has always been remote from the center – today Kiev, but before Prague-Budapest-Vienna, Western Hungary, e.g. Gyor (great city) is closer to the European core region, to Vienna and Budapest. Prague dominates Czechia, the south-west Slovakia around is 2.5 times richer than the east. It is also true about Moscow in Russia, Chinese east coast cities.
This reflects a little appreciated core attribute of wealth: wealth is what the powerful people say it is. Powers tend to live in geographic centers and are able to produce or assign wealth. Lately often only as fiat wealth; they declare that something, some note, are valuable and the rest of the world follows. It could be low self-esteem or simple conformity, but people follow and validate the central wealth creators. And the core prospers.
That makes change hard. But change happens, over time realities on the ground prevail, virtual models are discarded and people rediscover that wealth is what they can consume in their lives, what is available to them – more or less physically. At that point centers often collapse and mental models readjust. In the meantime living well and using simple arbitrage to game the flaws in the prevailing mental models is probably the best individual strategy.
Yes sure, there is always a reason when it is the other side. Russia was Communist therefore we have an excuse, Holocaust was Hitler, not Germany, Native Americans all died because of disease, Congo was the personal property of Leopold, the god damn list of excuses never ends.
How about the fact that ~100% of Turkey’s trade deficit coming from energy imports? Now imagine who would be where if Turkey had 1/10th of Russian oil/gas. Russia is where it is despite all that raw resources and energy, imagine where you would be without them -> Belarus.
Over long-term history, Turks defeated Russians far more often than Russians defeated Turks. You all want to focus post-1750, how about before that? Russia was being handled by the vassals of Turks, not even Ottomans themselves. How many times did Crimeans sack Moscow? Maybe post a few comics about those too.
Turkey is now in the middle income trap, but their GDP developed successfully with quite diverse manufacturing sectors, without oil or gas – until the last decade, similar to China.
If you consider that Turkey has a much faster growing population, yet their GDP per capita climbed in the same extent as the Russian Federation had in the upswing of the commodity supercycle of the 2000s.
However, Turkey’s growth is dependent on the growth in the EU economy. EU economy was booming between 2002-2008, and pulled Turkey upwards with it. I doubt there is such optimism for the EU economy in the 2020s, to repeat its boom of the 2000s.
https://i.imgur.com/5i03Tcn.jpg
There is not exactly such a thing as “natural” income level in economics – it is dependent on things like trade, natural resources and policies, which vary depending on decade.
Turkey’s economy was booming, when the EU economy was booming (2002-2008). Their economy is set in a way that makes very dependent on neighbouring economies on which they trade.
Moscow and St. Petersburg seem like better places to live than Istanbul.
As to the first world: IMO, the only currently fully first world country is Japan. I don’t think the US should be considered to be first world anymore.
Of course, that creates its own problems about where to rank it. It wouldn’t do to call it “second world”, and yet I think “first and third world mixed” really loses something – that is what you might have with apartheid or segregation or non-universal suffrage. By themselves, price barriers in real estate only offer minimal protection to a lot of negative factors.
I wish the Japanese would develop a country-ranking scale to shame the woke West.
From the late 16th century onwards Ottomans usually sent large Janissary contingents North of the Black sea, and most strategic fortresses, like Azov, Özu and Akkerman were under a direct Ottoman control.
In labour market dynamics and social standing yes agreed, but that wasn’t my point – rather I’m saying that both in the US and Russia there are large groups numbering in the millions (Tatars, Hispanics but also I guess groups like Lebanese Christians or Georgians) which on paper give the ‘mental impression’ of a non-European element which is in rigid contrast to the majority European population.
However, this is not always so clear-cut and there is overlapping and leakage across these groups – for instance, there are of course many millions of Hispanics who are either totally Spanish/Italian in origin or Tatars who look and act almost entirely Russian and intermarry with children being absorbed into Russian ethnic.
This is nonsense. The first clash with Turkey in the 16th century (the campaign of the Turks on Astrakhan) ended with the annihilation of the sultan’s army. The second major clash (the war of the Turks with the Don Cossacks for Azov) was also extremely unsuccessful for the Turks. Then there was the war for Chigirin (actually a draw), the War for Azov (lost by Turkey), the Prut campaign of Peter the Great (Turkish victory), and the war of 1732-35 (heavy defeat of Turkey). As you can see your statement is incorrect
Not once (in 1571, the Tatars were able to cause a fire in wooden Moscow, but Moscow was not captured)
Barbary pirates can serve as an analogue of the Crimean Tatars. Can we say that the Ottomans were stronger in the 18th century than England, as barbarian pirates plundered English ships?
90 percent of Latinos in the US are basically low-end laborers right? This means their ancestry is unlikely to be largely European.
90 percent of Latinos in the US are low-end laborers. Middle class and above Latinos in Lati American are unlikely to immigrate to the US.
If the CIA Factbook was worth its salt, it would tell us in which countries gays and trannies have the most power. And, perhaps, where they are the most concentrated. (some countries take in deviants as “refugees”)
Also, blacks.
I wholeheartedly agree with the most of your post, except this:
England wasn’t such a superpower in the 18th century, like it was in the 19th, and Ottomans were militarily still quite equal with the European powers.
Here in S. California, a general contractor I know became a multi-millionaire by expanding the occupancy capacity of residences. When L.A. decided to give drivers licenses to migrants, twice as many people showed up as had been expected. No one knows the actual population of S. California. I suspect the same is true of the U.S. as a whole. Or, if someone knows, he’s certainly not saying, and will never say.
Communism impoverishes and sets back every place it touches, not only Russia. Compare the Koreas, the Germanies, Czechia and Hungary to Austria. So clearly it is a Communism problem, not a Russian problem, an explanation and not an “excuse.”
True of Mexicans but not true of Cubans, Venezuelans, etc. Their upper and middle classes come to the USA.
Also, the really impoverished Latinos tend not to leave because they don’t have the money to pay smugglers nor the wherewithal to successfully undertake the journey; they tend to be working class rather than poor. Much of the Mexican immigration has consisted of small farmers or small shopkeeper types.
Here is a group photo of Kazan Tatars
https://s41.radikal.ru/i094/1008/da/d5592ecb9344.jpg
They cannot be called a “non-European element”. The same applies to education, culture, etc.
Russians permanently neutered the Turks as a significant military force on par with other European countries of comparable population.
The long term effects on the Turkish nation are both physical as well as psychological. Deep down inside Turks realize they just don’t really have anything that was once present and try to cover it up by making a lot of noise and engaging in grandstanding both in their individual capacity as well as a nation.
But we can all see through this..
The observational decline of America, and especially of California, seems to contrast this “Latinos aren’t so bad” or “are almost white” line-of-thinking, which AP and some others seem to favor.
I might also say that future, state-level predictions are pretty bleak, even if one counts 10-20% of Latinos as “white.” And CRT means that any lower-performing group will embrace the racial narrative which confers them status.
You do realise that India is the third largest economy in the world, has it’s own space program, nuclear weapons, the third largest army and is a leader in science and technology?
90% is overstating things. All we can go on is statistics and observations – 66% of Hispanic Americans identify as ‘white’.
Now I think we would both agree there is no chance that 2/3 of Latins in the states are ‘white’ (if we define that as 85%+ European) but out of a total 60-million I would say it’s reasonable to say approx 10 million fall into that category and more if you include the millions of ‘mixed’ people with Hispanic and Anglo/Slav/Italo parents. It’s underreported but the highest US ‘inter ethnic’ marriage combination is non-Hispanic white male with Hispanic woman of any race.
I won’t ramble on since I’ve written about this before if you care enough to check my comment history.
The sample of this study of Mexican-Americans was 57% European genetic contribution, 39% Native contribution, and 4% African descent:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3131689/
Native ancestry in Mexico varies by region and northern Mexico and central highlands contributed to immigration to the US:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Geographic_ancestry_distribution_of_Mexico.png
Ok will clarify one last time – I’m not disagreeing with you. My point refers to armchair statisticians who would look at Russian demographics on Wikipedia and see “tatars – 5% of population” and think this is some kind of asiatic entirely non-European group…without the knowledge that in reality, many tatars can and do blend into modern Russian so that a tourist may not even know whom they have met in Kazan or Moscow…like the people in your photo
Most Latinos tend to be uneducated, but they do work. My area around the pool and spa was redone by Latinos. My roof was changed by Latinos. Some of my trees were cut and others trimmed by Latinos. In a place where I wash my car 80+% of workers are Latinos. Cleaning staff in most US hotels and motels are Latinas. This is in sharp contrast to another group of woefully uneducated people we all know, who only look for freebies (be it welfare or “reparations”) and prefer criminal activities to honest work.
Cope. Seethe. Dilate.
https://twitter.com/guineboud/status/1386259620038017025
https://twitter.com/derinhisse/status/1386029902047195137
There aren’t many Moldovans in Russia, but they would be a closer analogue than Central Asians because they speak another Indo-European language and are not of a different faith.
You’re wrong. Even “white Hispanic” countries like Argentina are significantly mixed with Amerindians. Look at genetic studies if you don’t believe me. There are very few Hispanics who are totally Spanish or Italian. If I take a trip to Brazil, I would probably have an easier time finding purebred Germans than I would for Portuguese.
Italians Americans are swine whose largest contribution to American culture has been in the sphere of crime. The result of more “white Hispanic” immigration is that instead of Italians mixing with people of Germanic/Celtic extraction, which at least creates a diluted Italian mix, you get more Italians mixing with Latinos. It’s a race to the bottom.
Why people think the corrupt “White Hispanics” of Latin America are in any way desirable is itself puzzling. These people have a horrible track record of running countries.
Have you been to Catal Hoyuk or Gobekli Tepe?
Lucky folk seem to be in control of as valuable a chunk of culture capital as exists on the planet. I hope they manage it better than the Egyptians.
Rich Chinese from major cities think exactly the same thing about everywhere else in China…
Both, although due to ruble crashing the nominal decline relative to Warsaw Pact was greater.
My impression is that there wasn’t much. Eastern Europeans tended to see Russians as fellow victims of the evil Communist system and didn’t dislike them them as people or revel in their misery.* Russians became more disliked under Putin, when Eastern Europeans noticed that they like Putin, that many Russians have nostalgia for the USSR, that Stalin had a high % of popularity etc.
*Baltics were a different story because unlike Poland they were subjected to the presence of Russian colonists. So Russians were dislike there.
I’ve visited Azerbaijan but never Turkey.
This is what a mental population looks like.
https://twitter.com/27khv/status/1386759734968012801
Russia’s demographics are really quite enviable imho. Yeah, maybe it’s “only” 80%-85% Slavic nationalities, but the other groups are pretty much all cold weather farmers or pastoralists of one sort or another. Buryats, Tatars, Tuvans are all great assets to have in a country. How could anyone object to having these Asiatic girls who work at the Moscow McDonalds? It beats the hell out of having 20% archaic admixture tropical-blooded savages like the USA and now France are cursed with, and crippled by. Even Russia’s kebab-eaters are relatively high IQ and have their uses. Russia was able to dispatch Chechen military police units to Syria, maybe useful for policing Sunni areas, or maybe I just fell for the propaganda. My point is, when you consider how bad human biological capital can be, and you look at Russia’s portfolio, it looks fantastic frankly.
Russia will solve the birth rate issue sooner or later. As a smart man says, media gives you root access to people’s brains. The Russian state has root access to the brains of it’s higher IQ women. It’s just a matter of refining the meme cocktail to get TFR up to 3.0.
Fancy stuff. I don’t see it as schizoid, people always say that their enemies are “in decline“, weaklings about to collapse. Hitler called Russia “colossus on clay legs“. You do that when you plan to fight, it motivates the troops.
People also badmouth what they have lost. A girl who got away is a loser, a form of self-medication. It is only embarrassing because Brits now inexplicably parade their mental weaknesses in public. (I suspect it’s the gender thing, no dignity or balls left.)
Depends. Whenever a Latin American country gets taken over by Leftists (e.g., Cuba, Venezuela), its middle- and upper-class flee to the US en masse, and typically become American rightists. And there’s plenty of ordinary background immigration by the middle class just seeking higher wages in the US for their skills (e.g., engineers, accountants). Among the upper class, they don’t exactly immigrate so much as establish a US residence, second home and bank accounts/investments, so that if their family is on the losing end of the next coup/revolution/civil war, they have a first world bolt hole prepared.
But yes, the majority of immigration, certainly the majority of illegal immigration, is low-end labor. I don’t know if it is 90% though. The middle class immigrants are less evident in the US because they assimilate pretty well. The upper class immigrants are less evident because they don’t want to be noticed.
Agree with first paragraph. Second paragraph, I hope so. But Russia has been slow to impede Twitter, Facebook, and other “newmedia” access to the Russian market and so degenerate Western memes have already taken hold.
Like what and quite a few others you say about America?
Also, Hitler was right. He just managed to stir up the Eastern Slavs against himself. Even a colossus on clay legs can defeat a suicidal one.
It’s how some Russian nationalists cope with the loss of Ukraine.
Unfortunately, Armenians are VERY familiar with those screenshots you just posted, LMAO.
You also fail to ‘update’. We are not living in the 19th century.
I don’t consider Republican voters to be “rightists.” Just one example, while Cubans voted about 38% for Clinton 1996, in 2000 they only voted 17 percent for the Democrats. Why the big change? Did Cubans hate Al Gore that much? It was because of the Elian Gonzalez saga. The “rightist” Cubans were unhappy the U.S. was sending back an illegal alien to Cuba. So yes, Cubans are rightists in the sense that they are open borders Reaganites.
Their children are even less Republican though. Democrats have gotten over 40% of the Cuban votes in the 2012 and 2016 elections. 2020 was totally different, as Trump’s vote tallies among Hispanics went up considerably.
This is an argument against economic overcomplexity and the terminal stage of capitalism we’re living in. Some sort of degrowth (or reversing overdevelopment) is good for the individual and the local (and probably inevitable now that globalist elites are imposing their version of “right-sizing” the global economy to prepare for the post-human economic system), but not for the reason the main proponents of degrowth argue.
Hugh stretches of Japanese rural areas are more dilapidated than Flyover Country.
It is. Or you could even say that it is easiest to cripple your population by paying it off.
Broke: concentration camps and death marches.
Woke: free air-conditioning and sugar drinks.
Many a formerly hardy Bedouin tribe has succumbed.
Actually, I don’t think that Petro-governments are this Machiavellian. I think that in reality what happened is that as clans/tribes gained petro-wealth, they also became paranoid that the same thing that happened for the last 6000 years would happen again: their neighbors would steal it. So they bigged up their population every way they could.
Only in the last generation or so did it occur to the rulers that maybe having a million surly young men divorced from their traditional way of life but without any meaningful new purpose or even real allegiance to the petro-state was not in the rulers’ best interest. The Arab Spring concentrated their minds. They’ve been casting about for solutions ever since. In Saudi Arabia, MBS tried opening bread and circuses to the masses while looting his royal competitors. Seems to have worked for now.
Rather than increase military spending, the UK should be repatriating its subversive minorities.
It’s actually more nuanced than this. Best Korea was actually more developed industrially than South Korea until Pak’s coup, but they were rebuilding on a pre-war industrial base established by the Japanese. Austria has always been much wealthier than Hungary even in Habsburg times, and until WWI Czechia too. But the argument holds for East Germany and Czechia, the most industrialized parts of the Eastern bloc which would be at the level of their capitalist neighbors.
Bear in mind Britain had growth rates comparable to the Eastern Bloc, which ended up poorer than France and West Germany in 1980 from the vantage point of Scandinavia and Switzerland immediately post-war. Those were the years with strong central planning and the Empire seized by the Americans. Also Yugoslavia had respectable growth rates on paper until 1980 with its market socialism (Slovenia nearly converged with Austria by 1980 and diverged afterwards).
Soviet-style central planning has a colossal knowledge problem that (from a libertarian standpoint, but also true from other free market economic theories) could never resolve without turning into its antithesis (decentralized market decision-making or Smith’s “invisible hand”).
Oh, boy AP:
I just knew you would come out and say it one day. You better don’t visit Germany, it is considered a crime there.
The rest of your response is your usual “not me, you” kinder-garden level stuff.
An urbanized area in the US where the GOP isn’t dead is a novelty.
The GOP in Congress is far to the right regarding fiscal policy versus their own base median, let alone the Hispanic median.
Yes it is. But I don’t think once the levels of complexity are layered in a system like today they can be scaled back gradually. It is more likely to reach an absurd level and then implode. Most of it is financial and that reflects the fact that modern capitalism is centered around the “idea of money” so it will naturally grow in that direction, more and more, until it becomes too disconnected from reality to exist.
The complexity of our system is also a symptom of its artificiality. The current attempts to “degrow” the global system are doomed to failure because they are addressing what is easy (weather, movement of people, power relations) and not what is really destabilizing the system (financial overgrowth).
The White Hispanic Southern Cone (Argentina especially) were high-income (but underdeveloped relative to that level) countries up to the 1st quarter of 20th century.
Argentina’s economy was as big as Canada’s before WWII with comparable populations, but Argentina had faster population growth and was starting to fall behind per capita even in 1900. The same can be said of Uruguay and New Zealand in 1870 but Uruguay mostly stagnated after that point with only occasional booms (1905-1912 & 1943-1954). Chile grew from one of the poorest parts of South America on independence to the level of Northern Europe in 1913, and crashed in the Great Depression. (I’m mostly looking at Maddison Project for these numbers)
The main reason they grew richer than South America was high resource-to-population ratios, like Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and all these countries followed a similar development model of resource extraction and export (Wheat and cattle in Argentina & Uruguay, saltpeter and copper in Chile). The only HBD relevant part is their failure to fully industrialize like Canada, and even here the HBD is a bit weak since the same issue also afflicted New Zealand. Purely economic (import substitution) and institutional factors (unstable governments) are the biggest explanations here. But the difference between New Zealand (which is poorer but stayed high-income) and the Southern Cone (stagnating into upper middle-income levels) can be easily explained by HBD (or its PC equivalent, human capital), and Southern Cone institutions are downstream from historical and current HBD as well.
You need to replicate the implosion of Big Tech’s credibility in the US for that.
Researcher Joe Francis casts doubt on the official story on Argentina. In particular, he doesn’t think the data is of good quality. Some examples from his blog:
https://www.joefrancis.info/argentina_decline/
https://www.joefrancis.info/argentina-in-1800/
The GOP fiscal policy as far as I can tell is to run up the deficit in office, and then claim to want spending cuts when the Democrats are in office.
You have localists, agorists and agrarians who are regaining economic perspective on a more human scale and often isolating from the teetering financial edifice. Sort of a people’s degrowth.
He was right when in your words, Hitler called Russia “colossus on clay legs.” As evidenced by the massive Soviet collapse. But he managed to defeat himself with his outrageous treatment of the Eastern Slavs, giving them something other than Soviets to fight for. There is nothing controversial about that observation.
Are you claiming to be a Russian nationalist now? Your lies take unexpected turns.
You wrote:
“People also badmouth what they have lost. A girl who got away is a loser, a form of self-medication”
And, as I wrote, it’s exactly how some Russian nationalists cope with the loss of Ukraine. Some of them even insist Ukraine without Russia has become a Somalia.
Yeah, Cistlethania, with a focus on Austria, was the Industrial Region to the naturally complementary and agrarian Translethania (which included Hungary). Of course, Galicia and Budapest both existed.
The Two Koreas both followed that trend. A natural relationship (resource rich mountains, rice-basket lowlands), severed and forced to change by economic and political necessity.
As for population…
A small smart fraction still needs the large population that supports and protects it in a natural environment. Chinese elites exist because of the wider sea of Chinese people, and China’s people prosper because of the elites it has birthed. Economically productive geniuses are only as economically productive as they can be because someone is around to fix their plumbing, so they can get busy inventing space ships, and someone exists to sell that plumber a hotdog on the street and laugh and drink with them, so they don’t fucking shoot themselves from loneliness, because that super-genius probably isn’t going to hang out with them at a barbecue and laugh about a cartoon. It’s a waste when the super-genius has to spend his time attending to tasks someone else could do just as well.
If India’s Brahmin’s existed, free of the seething masses of India, they would have been utterly god-damned exterminated by some enterprising Afghan raider. In the modern-era, they would have been invaded by the Chinese and turned into Xinjiang Nan…well, realistically, they would just be another small tributary state. They would also have to spend time trading and farming and killing that they could spend developing satellites or the number 0.
I know you’re referring more to dead-weight populations of other races, but even then, an Africa with 800,000,000 Africans is better for itself than an Africa with 40,000,000, because it’s more likely you’ll get enough Africans sensible enough to run the show in that mega-group than one would in the smaller group. Even then, because there are so damn many of them, it’s hard to directly annex them like in the old days. Now it’s all “soft”-glove corporations instead of Zulu-Wars. Now, no other country would benefit from taking on those Africans (and it would be soooo meannnn to take the bright ones), but a larger population does, indeed, help them.
Quality of people is, of course, important. Humanity will do best when it has seething trillions of people spread throughout the galaxy, forming a strong bedrock from which enlightened God-Beings can rise. We’d also have enough room then for everyone to have 6 acres and a mule, and time to think.
Yes, it is. But the trend of Communism holding countries back holds.
Yes, but Hungary fell even further behind under Communism.
Using Maddison:
https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/historicaldevelopment/maddison/original-maddison
In 1990 dollars, 1948:
Austria’s per capita GDP was $2,764. In Czechoslovakia it was $3,088 and in Hungary it was $2,200
In 1990 dollars, 1989:
Austria’s per capita GDP was $16,360. Czechoslovakia’s was $8,768, Hungary’s was $6,903.
After about 40 years of Communism, Czechoslovakia went from being richer than Austria, to having slightly more than 50% of Austria’s per capita GDP. Hungary went from having 81% of Austria’s GDP per capita to having only 43% of Austria’s GDP per capita.
Sure, but it was at a very high base which means that although the rate of growth was about the same (if not slightly lower) in the UK versus USSR, the increase in $ was considerably greater. In terms of 1990 dollars, UK added $10,500 per capita PPP from 1950 until 1989 while the USSR added less than $5,000 during that time period.
Yugoslavia did fairly well but as you note it did not practice full Communism (or, correctly, Soviet-style central planning) .
You’re pretty much spot on with how existing economic gaps were widened between neighboring countries with contrasting economic systems and new gaps were created between countries with similar levels of development.
Capitalist Eastern Europe would have been on the same convergent trajectory as Southern Europe or Yugoslavia before the 1980s (and indeed the most industrialized parts like East Germany and Czechia should have actually kept up)
Well, this is true, but “non-European” peoples represent other ethnic groups (not Tatars). There are places where “Asian” (according to the American classification) ethnic groups make up the majority.
https://egov-buryatia.ru/upload/iblock/3db/3db78259c7df5d24cdcf64c10960609f.jpeg
https://vilcollege.ru/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/IMG_4710.jpg
But it will be more of a distant analogue of the American Indians in the United States and Canada, not Hispanic
You have no right to ramble until you explain how Turkey with better statistics than Russia is third world while Russia is first world. Until then it is you who is coping.
Also recall that a lot of Germans were deported from Czechoslovakia after WW2. That was presumably a blow to the old human capital.
It is not luck. We could as well go to Russia and the history would be completely different. Ancestors looked around for the best land possible, they chose Anatolia and took it. Not a joke, it is exactly how it happened. Russians also think the same, but they were incapable of invading the South. So they cope by imagining things about Istanbul and tell themselves things like Turkey is third world and Roshiya is powerful. I attribute all this bad mood to the shitty climate they live in. If you notice their arguments gets darker and more negative as the summer gets closer. Add in the fact that they couldn’t have vacations in Turkey the last year, and it is not hard to see why Anatoli is so butthurt. He just needs some sunlight. Instead, he will have to join reserve forces for military training with millions of other poor folks Dostoevski so nicely described. Hence the anger.
Aren’t you supposed to be shitting on the streets? That’s healthier than commenting nonsense on the internet. For a slave people, who had been slaves for centuries (to no one other than the great Turks first, then for a shorter time to Brits) until Britain finally decided to let you go, you sure talk big.
Speaking of which, in a recent session of Illuminati, the Grey Wolves almost managed to take over the Swedish Green Party.
I believe the custom is to take a loan to make the trip, or perhaps get chain migrated at a later stage.
Quantity has its’ own quality.
But still low income people in similar countries like Vietnam, Phillipines are better off.
It would not be a surprise if India ends up stratified like Brazil.
You misunderstood, I meant that the easternmost neighbor, Ukraine, is the poorest neighbor of Hungary. Most Hungarians are aware of that (and like I said extrapolate from Subcarpathia), but they know next to nothing about the relative wealth of the different parts of Ukraine, they usually just assume (or did so in the 1990s) that it’s similar to Hungary, i.e. poorer in the east than in the west.
Now that’s a third recalibration of my internal model. I remember being surprised when I saw data which showed it to be poorer than average (I think it was around the time of the Orange Revolution), maybe I misremember something? Before that I had always just assumed that it was more developed than the rest.
I would not be surprised if Turkey, without Islam, would be economically somewhere near the level of Greece in GDP per capita. So in my opinion AP you are somewhat wrong. During the Byzantine and Roman times Anatolian peninsula was much richer and developed than the mainland Hellas, if I recall correctly the richness of Ionia and Asia(Anatolia) was even noted by Greek authors of the Hellenic Era, before the Roman rule. Genetically most Anatolians are very similar with Armenians and Greeks.
It’s a scientific consensus that from the ancient past to present era there is no discontinuity in Anatolian genetics. No amount of Greek and Armenian wishing or self-deceiving can change the harsh reality that Anatolian turks are their close relatives.
Please. You guys are taking that 120-180 million 110+ IQ Indians comment seriously? You do realize those numbers would mean India would have the world’s highest numbers of top geniuses right? Look at the reality, does it look like a country with even 50 thousand geniuses? All you need to run a brutally effective government is a number much than 50.000. Does India seem like a well-governed country? Where are all these Brahmin geniuses when India needs them? I know: begging the world, claiming all should send help to India because they were not capable of not celebrating Divali or not allowing major sports events well after a year pandemic has started.
Countries like Vietnam are better off because the average Viet is significantly smarter than the average Hindu. They know shitting on the streets isn’t healthier. They know you don’t organize huge events in the middle of a pandemic. They know you can’t make 150 million citizens second-class at this age. Their country is also better managed and it will be like South Korea before the end of the century.
Talking Turkey?
Anatolian Turks are genetically Greek, a conquered and converted people ashamed of their own blood.
Centuries of inbreeding have made you relatively violent and stupid.
Turk scientific achievements in Turkey are what exactly?A few radio controlled drones?
To think you are the generic descendants of people who could create the Antikythera mechanism a millennium and a half before anyone else.
But its part of a pattern the genetic ancestors of Afghans produced Panini etc. look at them today.
Turkey is already on par with Greece if you look at PPP. Greece would be far behind if it wasn’t for hundreds of billions they scammed from the EU. They should thank German taxpayers.
Also no, Turks are not genetically most similar to Greeks or Armenians. You must be a butthurt antiturkic to make such claims. Do you have genetic data from 1000 years ago to compare modern populations? No. As far as I can see, Turks are identical looking to other Turkmens.
https://www.google.com/search?q=turkmen+people&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjjy5jX7J3wAhXOHc0KHWtMAV0Q_AUoAXoECAEQAw&biw=1920&bih=897
Are they all Greeks? Or could it be the other way around? Turks were settled in both Thracia and Anatolia much before 1071. They also went to settle in Greece long before 1071. Byzantines settled Pechenegs to Anatolia due to depopulation. You do realize unless the land was significantly empty, there is no way small Turkish groups could make all the way to the other end of Anatolia and establish states there correct? These are all historical records and what proof do you have?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzachas
Russia would have conquered the Tsargrad if not the Perfidious Albion once again doing her very best in the service of the Devil.
https://cdn.britannica.com/90/126290-050-83E2BDCD/Benjamin-Disraeli.jpg
Behold, the gifts of England, the first Neocon ever to walk on this Earth!
-Right my fellows, we need to support corrupt Middle-Eastern regimes, and meddle in local politics? It’s of paramount importance to England and her security!
Instead of speculating about shames of other people you should put some skin whitening cream and wonder what causes shit skin color; is it Aboriginal mixture or Andamanian?
This strikes me as incoherent, it’s like saying that Hitler was right about the Jews because a lot of Jews were communists, not because there was anything inherently wrong with Jews per se. The same ideological basis that lead to the underestimation of Russia also motivated the brutality towards Eastern Slavs, you can’t separate them out for your convenience. Though I guess this is how you rationalize being geopolitical house niggers to Western powers who, in reality, view you with nothing but contempt.
So Turks don’t go on and on about being ‘European ‘ despite geographically being only 5% in Europe and Muslim?
Turks didn’t change their script to the Latin alphabet to try to fit in with Europeans?
I suggest you make up with your first cousin and begin to make love not war since you haven’t been very good at it post the industrial revolution.
Russians hunted the whole lot of you for sport for the past 250 years.Crimea doesn’t count as that was a British and French victory.
I, unlike you impostor, I have a real Altaic blood, and many friends who are truly Türkic, like Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and Tuvans. Not like you whose ancestor was raped thousand years ago by some Persianised Turkoman. So yes, you have little bit Altaic blood, but probably as much as your average Afghani.
I have met in my life Turkmens, and to me they don’t look like Anatolian “turks.”
Look I don’t want to waste time with ignorants. We are not European and we don’t want to be European. We are better.
We didn’t change our script to fit with Europeans. We got rid of it because it wasn’t fitting our language. Arabs have only two 3 vowels we have 8.
Why do you care who hunted who from India? If necessary we fight with Russians, if necessary they hide their women from us, if necessary they fight with us but why any of you is your business? You focus on China and Pakistan. Bye, have a nice life.
You are ignorant. I highly doubt that you are Turkic. If you were, you’d know that there are major branches of Turks and that Turks expanded in all directions. Not all Turks were East Asian even 2300 years ago; Chinese documents mention red-haired blue-eyed Turks. Russians themselves call Kumans, Polovtsi meaning blonde. Even Chingis was green-eyed. We are a great nation only comparable to a few. Why suck up to Russians when even great Turkic leaders like Nazarbayev are distancing themselves and a new Turkic Empire is slowly rising?
This is so bizarre to argue with you about Turkicness or who is more Altaic. When my great grandmother still lived, she worshipped Tengri, I’ve with my own eyes seen and felt real Altaic spirituality, unlike you with your Semitic tribal god. Though I am not a follower of Tengriism, but a Buddhist, we still revere the old gods, and they are not to us evil spirits, like they are to you Muslims.
Even Buddha is Burkhan to us, and Burkhan, as a category of highest beings or spirits, was already mentioned in Chingghis Khaan’s Secret history of Mongols. The highest Tngri, Khan Khormusta(cognate of Ohrmazd) is equated with the Indra of Vedas, so we can be both Buddhists and followers of Tngri! Unlike you with your Arab faith!
Interestingly, there seems to be a positive correlation between “Dravidian” (actually “Ancestral South Indian” as coined by David Reich) admixture and HDI.
https://i.imgur.com/hJS0rYY.jpg
Although the most dysfunctional parts of India are located in the BIMARU states while the North-West states like Haryana and Punjab are pretty decent.
Pakistan is likely very backwards due to the corrupting influence of Islamism, it used to be a fairly advanced country until Zia ul-Haq brought about sweeping Islamisation measures which radically transformed the fabric of Pakistani society for the worse.
I don’t believe in Semitic religions. We should return to Tengrism. Which is monotheistic and actually a far more humane faith than any other. The respect it shows for all life is comparable to few other religions.
This comment is very interesting. This sort of a we were much better under our pre Islamic belief system is something I have seen expressed by Persians but no other people originating in Muslim countries.
Is this sort of a unique self realization in your individual case or are there a significant number of Turkish citizens who share this belief?
Not Turkic, but half-Mongolic.
I’ve known a few Anatolian “turks” in my life, and they really don’t have same relation or attitude with truth and honor as Russians have. So I’m not writing because of some anti-turk internet memes, but I’ve really learned in my life that you guys have such a cognitive dissonance and identity crisis, that you are not to be trusted. Also spiritually you really feel more Middle-Eastern or Caucasian than Iranic, Indic, Mongolic or Slavic. I don’t hate you guys, you have really been brainwashed by your state, I have heard what they teach in your schools etc. You should build a healthier identity based on the Ottoman Empire and Sultanate of Rum, and not on the empires of the steppes. There is nothing shameful about Ottomans, militarily speaking, why it’s not enough for you guys? Why to try to appropriate Götürks, Huns etc? Even Anglos, who have substantial Germanic heritage, don’t larp as Germans or Goths. In some form, you have a thousand year old history as a nation, it’s more than enough for most people. Russians and Hungarians are not much older, even England in the modern and somewhat unitary form begins after the Norman conquest.
Tengrism is not monotheistic, there are many different types of Tngri, different types of gods and spirits etc. But they probably lie in your schools and history books that Tngri was just some kind of proto-Allah.
Vishnugupta such attitudes are common among turkish nationalists. Though in my understanding, the Turkmen conquerors that came to Anatolia were already Muslim. So real native religion of Anatolian turks is heavily syncretic form of Sufi Islam, with strong Shia influences.
What a silly excuse, you could just added different vowel marks or letters, or something.
Or as Vikings!
I don’t really know. I have known other people who thought the same. The more they learn, the more likely they think this way. For a very long time, Turkish Islam was heavily under Tengrist influence as well anyway. That’s why so much affection for birds, animals, and even trees. So people were fine, but as Islam’s influence started overtaking Tengrism, more people started getting dissatisfied with the religion.
Very true, this “generational lag of accepted biases” colors the worldview of the majority of those who care of such things.
To them “Western Europe” still equals “Safe, tidy, prosperous, free places”, and “California” equals “the best place on Earth”, and today’s post-Western post-Democracies are still viewed as Western Democracies.
Places like Thailand, Turkey, and Mexico are viewed not as industrial powerhouses, but as places exporting at best bananas, tomatoes, and whores.
The development of the ASEAN corner of the world is still below the notice of most.
Or where the middle class is shrinking and the working class is doing fentanyl, and where the middle class is growing and the working class is confident.
https://www.walshaccountants.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Geographical-Shift.png
Also the facts that India has its own functioning Mars Orbiter Mission, and has acquired (with Russian assistance) the capability of building its own supersonic cruise missiles, or that Brazil belongs to the exclusive club of countries producing their own jet airliners.
Or that India’s “Forward Caste” is around 300 million, and its members can kick the ass, civilization-maintenance wise, of any corresponding 300 million from the current USA.
Incredible shifts are happening in Black Africa as well (aside from the useless feral chaps in South Africa, who have the civilization-building abilities of Detroiters).
Rwanda
https://www.businessamlive.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Ghanaian-investors.jpg
Kenya
https://umaizi.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Kenya-Nairobi.jpg
The only places which seem to be really unchanging, and indeed stagnating, is places like Argentina, Columbia, that lot.
And one wonders, the USA being so enthusiastic about steering the world’s development, why don’t they first make their own continent safe and prosperous first… They’ve been a dominant super-power since what, 1945? How long can it take to fix their neighborhood?
Sorry, a mistake, not among moderate nationalists, but among the Turanist far-right.
Mongols are not Turkic, but some Turkic tribes are more mixed with Mongols.
Not all Turkish citizens are Turks. I can clearly tell who is a Turk and who is not in one glance. Not sure what you mean by truth and honor relations, not sure how you deduce it from few ‘Turk’ who might not even be Turks.
You met the wrong Turks. I actually wouldn’t trust Russians, how do you even know whether they were awake or drunk when they said something?
We aren’t building a step empire. But it is just continuity, why should we reject our ancestors because a Mongolian doesn’t like it? Seljuks were still mostly nomadic. So were the majority of Turks in the Sultanate of Rum. A good portion of Turks was finally forcibly settled by the Ottomans in 19th century.
It is not appropriation. Gokturks put the first significant written Turkish text up. They called themselves Blue Turks, I mean, I am a Turk why shouldn’t I claim Gokturks when they called themselves Turks? Huns were precursors to Gokturks.
Basically, all you wrote reduces to I met some Turks, I didn’t like them. I met a Mongolian, I thought she was Chinese. It didn’t end with me claiming all Mongols are Chinese.
Tengri is above all, and he created everything. I blurted that it is monotheistic due to that, I must be tired, but yes, there are a lot of spirits and gods. No, they don’t teach it at schools as proto-Allah. It was an honest mistake on my end. Still, it can be adopted monotheistically. Not that I actually advocate returning Tengrism. More for cultural reasons. It is easier to explain to people a single creator than many gods if they really need a god.
Nominally for the most, for a long time. Tons of shamanic influences continued living among common folks well into 20th century. Even today, some influence is there. Tying knots on trees for wishes, the evil eye for newborns (protects from Al Karisi, that’s why it is blue the sky color), and so on.
We liked it better.
Your culture is based on the rejection of your ancestors. Who were your direct ancestors?
Linguistic affinity is not same as genetic affinity. Or do you claim that French speaking Africans are automatically relatives of French? But maybe after one thousand years there will be some negroes claiming that they were French.
Turkic peoples, who genetically most resemble ancient Turks, are Tuvans, Yakuts, Yellow Yugurs(Buddhist Uyghurs), and Kyrgyz, they are also extremely close culturally and genetically with Mongolic people, unlike you Anatolians.
There’s a slight cultural and genetic continuity, I can’t deny that, but it’s not substantial. Turks were quite different after Islamisation, as the history of Karluks and Kara-Khanids show us. You are a new nation and people, born from mixture of Byzantine, Steppe, Persian and Arab influences.
Although what you wrote seems obvious, the lag happened under communism and there had been significant recovery after the end of communism, so I don’t think it is so, at least not to a great extent. Czech human capital doesn’t seem to be much different from Sudeten German human capital.
Paul Kagane took his relatively tiny band of Tutsi rebels and overthrew the government of Rwanda – and this was after half of his people, who were a minority in the country to begin with, had been genocided by the Hutus. He then proceeded invade Congo and wreak havoc there for over a decade. The Tutsis probably are higher IQ than most of their African neighbors, and Kagane in particular seems exceptional.
It’s not that deep, I didn’t discuss his personal reasoning but simply his statement:
Soviet Russia was brittle because Bolshevik rule was terrible on various levels and its people hated it. Accordingly, it fell like a house of cards until the Germans convinced its peoples that they, the Germans, were even worse rulers than the Georgian and other non-Russian masters whom the Soviet peoples served as slaves.
So yes, Soviet Russia was indeed a colossus on clay feet when Hitler described it as such. He was right in that description. Disagree?
Adoption of Russian nationalist sour grapes approach towards peoples to the West who rejected Moscow’s rule.
Biocapital can be overridden by other factors. Russia has trouble reaching its biological potential because it is a low-trust society.
Brahmins are over-rated. I’ve met some who are brilliant, but others who are idiots surviving on their caste privilege. Endogamous castes are India’s curse, and will prevent it achieving its national potential.
I agree. It’s the same with Serbian, Macedonian and Bulgarian Slavs. Turks are Turkic, as Balkanoids are Slavic.
Depends how you want to define ‘white’ – from the pov of a multi-national colony/empire like the US, the word ‘white’ does have a meaning and I think you can probably define it as an individual with 85%+ European ancestry. If we use that definition, then it’s fair to say there are millions of ‘white Hispanics’.
I’m writing from Europe, where the ‘white’ concept obviously makes less sense, but in the US it’s significant in the context of understanding the ‘Hispanic’ label which is too broad. Anyway, we all have our idiosyncracies; and mine is that I’m more sympathetic to Hispanics than you are, because my experience with them has been very positive on a personal level and I think the US is ‘lucky’ to have 150 million Mexicans to its south compared to the billion Africans south of Europe.
A good point. Maybe. However:
Most of the converts were Anatolian peasants, whereas to a large extent Greek merchants and such (better educated Greeks) didn’t assimilate and continued to be Greeks under the Ottomans. Constantinople had a huge Greek population, who returned to Greece. So it may be that smarter and more competent strata of Byzantine society stayed Greek, in comparison to those who became Turks.
I would probably add Kurds to this mix. Also there was a flow of settlers from the Balkans, such as Bosniaks, as the Ottomans retreated. And the descendants of Slavs captured over the centuries. So you have a mixed population of native Anatolians, ~10% Turkic conquerors, some Bosniaks and Albanians, some Arabs and Persians, some Slavic. An interestingly heterogeneous people.
There are many Tngris, with different roles. When a practitioner of Tengrism is just speaking about Tngri, without being specific which Tngri, it is conceptually more similar to Chinese Tian or Heaven, than some monotheistic concept of God. Tengrism can’t be adopted monotheistically except maybe among the fantasies of turkish Grey Wolves, then it would be some another religion and not Tengrism.
Holy trees are part of Islamic and Sufi tradition, evil eye or nazar is not an Altaic tradition, but Middle Eastern. Evil Al spirits are a Caucasian tradition, which you share with such people like Armenians and Georgians. Thank you for proving that your spirituality is wholly Middle Eastern, and not in anyway Altaic.
He is an Anglo supremacist who thinks America had gone downhill since it let in all those Italians, Poles, Irish, etc. If one hates the presence of Italians, naturally one would also lament an influx of Latinos (who are more like Italian peasants than they are like Anglo farmers). If you are a fan of Italy you would probably not mind Latinos too much. I live in a part of the country without a lot of them, but friends who moved to Texas are happy with the Mexicans in their state.
I’ve noticed that educated Latinos (often Cubans and South Americans) mix well with Slavs. On average they are a bit more dramatic, a bit more sexualized, they prefer rum over vodka – but there is a certain closeness of spirit; Anglos and Germanics are more distant. The Slavic and the Mediterranean worlds are sympathetic cousins.
There is a class barrier with less educated Latinos, but I imagine they are not too dissimilar to hardworking Slavic peasants from 100 years ago. I hear that in Chicago, Polish-American proles often marry Mexicans living nearby.
That having been said, a mass influx is disruptive, I do not support open borders.
It depends on wholly on what we choose as our historical reference point. To me the historically most authentic Turks are Göktürks, who were first to call themselves Türks, and had the first recorded Turkic language. Written language is necessary for people to be truly living in a history, and not in pre-history. So my reference point is the 6th and 7th century Göktürks in regards of who are the most authentic Türks of history, and all other Türks derive their level of Türkicness in relation of how closely they are related genetically and culturally with the Göktürks and their Türk Khaganate. Thus we must choose a historical reference point, or loci and look how things relate with it. This is of course just my personal way to establish the truth in regards of such worldly matters as which ethnicity is more authentic as a Türk, or as an Aryan.
Were not the first Slavs with a written language Bulgars? Did not Greeks call them first by the name of the Slav? Are they not then the Ur-Slavs of the history? Or is your classification of who is the most original Slav different? Of course the Slavic Urheimat was probably somewhere Between modern day Germany and Russia, I understand if people of those lands are in your opinion the most original Slavs.
I had the good fortune of accidentally locating a copy of Akhatanhel’s Krytmsky’s “History of Turkey” while meandering the streets of the Podil area in Kyiv. Krymsky was a world class Orientalist and linguist (of Tatar ancestry) whose intellectual acumen was only rivaled by Michael Hrushevsky. He was a staunch Ukrainophile, who ended up paying dearly for his beliefs:
His “History of Turkey” delves into much detail about the ethnogenesis of the modern Turkish nation (The Turkish government to this day hold the man in great esteem), and offers insights into its histroy like no other book on Turkish history that I’ve read. It’s a great crime against humanity that nobody has been able to publish his six volume history of the Khazars!
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/54/Stamp_of_Ukraine_s104.jpg/220px-Stamp_of_Ukraine_s104.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahatanhel_Krymsky
A good short schematic about Krymsky’s life
Well, I am from a southern Italian family, so there is your answer ha –
But sure, this is not a paean to open borders for the United States. What I meant is simply what I said; if you have greedy soulless neo-liberals running your country and determined to replace your neighbours, then I’d rather the wheel of life puts me next to Jose and Maria, not Abdulkader and Khadija.
I believe there are lots of hardworking people in the third world, but it is still the third world.
Of all the eccentric ideas I have heard here, the idea that most Latinos are from the hidalgo-class, and that the lower class ones cannot “afford to migrate” is the most amusing.
I do not think it holds up if one looks at any number of factors, like rates of obesity or single-motherhood.
There are two million Dominicans in the US. They came from an island, and they are black Latinos.
Provided they don’t outstrip Malthusian limits.
Is there any reason to suppose humanity will be better at staying within Malthusian limits at the galactic scale than it was at the terrestrial scale?
Also, I note that most human achievement seems to come not from isolated and idle pastoralists but from active and civilized urbanites. Nothing against pastoralists. That is my own preferred mode. I’m just reporting reality as I see it.
I think that’s owed to the congress government prioritizing South India’s development for decades. It received far more in infrastructure spending and education than the north. Perhaps they reckoned it was more urgent to develop these regions owing to separatist sentiments there and because they’re adjacent to the sea and thus the main nodes of export and import
Most white immigrants in Germany are slavs. IIRC, 2-3 million poles, 2 million Russians, 2 million Balkan slavs and several million people from the rest of the EU(Spaniards, Greeks, Italians, Romanians etc).
Its ironic. Hitler once invaded the east to defend Germany from the slavic hordes, yet today, slavs are the only thing keeping Germany from being as terrible as France. They are now the most welcome guests
The Indian elite is way too leftists to allow something like that.
Fair enough description, although I don’t really value English people over Scottish or Dutch for example. I wouldn’t mind the Irish if they weren’t corrupt anti-English papists. Some Ulster Scots mixed with local Irish people, and I have so-called Scots-Irish background so it is quite possible I have Irish ancestry. Poles are ok personally, the kindest person I have ever known in my life was a Catholic American of Polish ancestry, but I think the entrance of large number of them introduced an undesirable foreign element. On the other hand, mixes of British with Poles tends to produce entertaining results. See Mike Ditka for an example. Germanic Swiss people were the best immigrants of the Ellis Island era.
I’m more of a cultural supremacist for Protestant British Isles culture as it evolved in the Americas and a pseudo-Nordicist. So Poles are much higher in my totem pole than Italians.
There are differences between Italians and Hispanics. In particular, sex crimes. Italians may have murdered each other a lot in the past, and been involved in all sorts of corruption and vice, but they’re not commonly rapists, child molesters, or gropers. Hispanics are. This is always ignored by people who talk about how great Hispanics are. Sex crimes against strangers in the United States is mostly a crime committed by Blacks and Hispanics.
California Hispanics have tended to be more troublesome than the ones in Texas. Puerto Ricans in New York have historically been criminally inclined and involved in gangs. Florida is a mixed picture compared to Texas or California.
There are more important things in life than a shared affinity for sour cream.
My takeaway from Japan, as an American who spent a few very enjoyable weeks there and did some traveling in suburbs and smaller cities: a lot of the real estate and infrastructure just looks bad. Even in a lot of prosperous-seeming parts of Tokyo. I have to think a big part of this is that no one wants to invest too much capital into renovating real estate in a country where the population is declining 0.4% per year, so the real estate is just going through a depreciation process even in parts of the country where the population is holding up for the moment.
I would guess another factor is that in the US there is an active desire to signal that places are good and safe, not “sketchy”, because it’s a more dangerous country. I recall going to a dilapidated and dimly-lit train station in Japan at night that, had it been located in the US, white people wouldn’t dare set foot in the place, imagining they’d be extremely lucky to not get mugged. Instead I saw, among other things, a 10-year-old girl alone there in her school uniform, standing about fearlessly.
Though, to be clear, I’d still take crappy-looking real estate over migration-driven population growth.
Huh? As seen on Google street view the roads look to be in good condition, and even minor roads in remote areas are paved, compared to the US where the rural areas are a large part made up of gravel roads, like in Wisconsin, Montana, or Wyoming, very small towns in the Western US do not even have paved roads, unlike in Japan.
Can confirm.
Land is often expensive in Japan, so it does not seem to be related to declining population.
The Japanese build differently. Homes are not built to last. They are often not re-sold but demolished and built again after 25 years. Their postwar culture has always been this way. Maybe, it has to do with mass bombing of cities – is government incentivized to promote the building industry. Maybe, it has to do with Buddhism?
Seems pretty wasteful. I think any move to pro-natalism would probably require some sort of housing plan.
IMO, the Japanese are afraid to do what it takes to increase fertility because of their constrained geography, even though they probably have the state/societal capacity to do it. You can’t make a spiritual appeal and ask for replacement fertility of 2.1. To turn things around, you’ve got to go all-out – make a total propaganda/economic effort.
In fact Japanese infrastructure may be overbuilt for its population, especially in the countryside, because the government uses infrastructure spending for pump prime the economy, and also provide construction jobs, like what China is doing.
90+ percent of Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu are mountains. Go to a Tokyo suburb and you see how small the houses are compared to what you see in US suburbs, or even English council housing. And housing in Japan is still quite expensive in the big cities, even after the post-1989 housing decline, a high population growth rate would cause it to rise again. Most Japs would find Hokkaido too snowy and cold to settle in.
This is at odds with our overlords’ thinking. Corporations need sales growth and so immigration driven population growth is inevitable. You either breed or get replaced. There is no alternative.
https://www.ft.com/content/29d594fa-5cf2-11e9-9dde-7aedca0a081a
Japan loses 500k natives and replaces them with 200k migrants per year. This is of course a bit foolish because that Thai construction laborer or Philippina maid won’t have the same consumption power as a native Japanese, and they don’t breed those anymore. But beggars can’t be choosers, so it will be some sort of Basic Income in Japan too, so that migrants can support consumption.
I think a lot of egalitarians would accept urban autocracy, if they could test drive it.
Ise shrine is the most holiest place of Shintoism, the shrine of sun goddess Amaterasu herself, and it’s demolished and rebuild once in every twenty years.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-japanese-shrine-has-been-torn-down-and-rebuilt-every-20-years-for-the-past-millennium-575558/
Another good reason, historically speaking, for shabby Japanese building, is that historically there’s been lots of earthquakes and typhoons, why build something lasting in such situation?
Funnily oldest, not rebuild, surviving buildings in Japan are all Buddhist temples or shrines, same is true with China.
Turkish drones have been genuinely impressive as of late, one should give them that. Otherwise, there’s unfortunately been a lot of difficulties to Turkish achievement, which is interesting because it does feel like the human capital is there but the overall culture seems intellectual stifling.
After WW2, in addition to all the destroyed cities, over 6 million Japanese were repatriated into Japan. Japan should have tried to hold on to Manchukuo, rather that move South.
IIRC at that time the Slavs that had come down had not yet become fully absorbed by the natives so there were still discrete unmixed Slavic population down there, rather than as now, a Balkan population of 20% Slavic descent.
Basically the former Ottoman Empire is the homeland of LARPers. A bunch of Thracians or Albanians pretending to be Slavs and a bunch of Anatolians mixed with Arabs and Persians pretending to be Turks. Only Greeks, Albanians and Armenians are straightforward. Kurds also.
Pffft Turkish fear in this thread. Russians and their lackeys are reeking it badly. It doesn’t matter what some random nobodies on the internet claim about Turkish ancestry (in which they love to claim Turks are mixed with everyone else, but somehow every enemy of Turks are pure race nobles lol). Turks will eventually unite, and that will be at the expense of Russia. Whether you like it or not it will happen. If you want to investigate some people’s origins, perhaps you should first start with scraping the Orthodox paint and find your Tatar roots.
From the Bears website:
https://web.archive.org/web/20071220123238/http://www.chicagobears.com/tradition/hof-ditka.asp
Mike’s childhood name was Mike Dyzcko. His father was one of three brothers of a Ukrainian family in the coal mining and steel manufacturing area in Western Pennsylvania. The name Dyzcko was too much of a tongue-twister in Carnegie, PA., where Mike was born on October 18, 1939, so the family name was changed to Ditka.
(His mother was an Anglo I think)
Any links? I suspect that a lot of any difference can be explained by the much younger nature of the Latino population. But I could be wrong.
Lol. And mayonnaise. Cubans and Colombians love my wife’s olivie salad.
But the affinity between our peoples is about more than just the food.
Yes indeed which is why I have pointed that out as a significant achievement but they are not in the same league as stealth UCAV drones about to be deployed by major powers this decade and the Turks will be dependant on foreign inputs in terms of jet engines for their production and satellite networks for their navigation if they ever attempt to build something similar.
Your observation is true wherever Islamic culture takes root.
Take Armenia (Artem Mikoyan,Boris Babian and half a dozen other technical greats of the USSR) and Georgia(World leaders in Phage therapy) on one hand and the good for nothing Muslim inhabitants of the Caucasus.
Take India and Pakistan,Serbia and Albania.All over the world it is the same story.Wherever this religion/culture establishes itself intellectual and scientific capabilities generally declines.
You certainly don’t make yourself very likeable.
https://i.redd.it/v28nd6xk6be61.jpg
I only have a moderate understanding of the teaching and history of islam , but how can some military leader of Pakistan islamize the country when it majority of the country is muslim.
If you’re talking about next door neighbors, there is absolutely fuck all guarantee that Jose and Maria are going to be better people. (Picture some squat, tatted up indios who blast ranchera music, speak hispano-retardo grade English and toss their trash on your lawn – you want that scum for neighbors?)
If you’re talking about the entire neighborhood going either spic or muzz, in my book you’re screwed either way. And though middle class spic would be preferable to middle class muzz, the latter aren’t necessarily a complete horror show.
It doesn’t matter. Turkey’s position is not much different than China’s. Unless we do everything outsiders want us to do, they will continue attacking Turkey for this or that reason anyway. You just don’t get fazed.
There should be a separate world almanac for civilized countries, with such statistics as:
-number of rocket launches
-tons to orbit
-sq. kilometres of land reclaimed
-# of Africans deported
Hard to find up to date info for China, but I’d estimate that they’ve at least reclaimed an area equivalent to the Kantō Plain, since WW2. If only the Dutch could build windmills that would deport undesirables.
It was mainly Sufi and partly Shia. He forced it to become more Salafi.
https://cdnuploads.aa.com.tr/uploads/Contents/2021/02/10/thumbs_b_c_4ecf191534c8c343cc0e87ead42e071a.jpg?v=201151
Ukraine’s Ambassador to Turkey Andrii Sybiha (L) recieves a gift during a conference held to commemorate the Ukrainian scholar Ahatanhel Krymsky, also known for his studies on Turkology, on the occasion of his 150th birthday at the Ulucanlar Prison Museum in Ankara, Turkey on February 10, 2021. Photo: Rabia İclal Turan – Anadolu Agency
Krimsky has posthumously been honored elsewhere in the Asian world, including Pakistan. His erudition was immense, he fluently could converse in 16 languages and had a working understanding of 52. He wrote mainly (but not exclusively) about Ukrainian, Turkic, Persian and Arabic historical and literary topics. A well known and admired orientalist in Moscow too.
Look, I actually have a rather positive opinion about Turks. But Altan is right: you are mainly Mediterranean and Anatolian. There should be no shame about that, these people built Gobekli tepe and Çatalhöyük. The earliest civilization was born there and nearly half of your population still carries their genetic lineage. Your people is quite gifted because of that, not some Akhal Teke riding Kipchak whom were only good at imposing themselves upon the more civilized people and exploiting them.
BTW if you go and read my comments, you will find that I wrote a couple of things about the Ashina Clan Tokharian roots and the genetics of early Huns and Avars.
Feel free to educate yourself…
Thanks Mr Hack, I will have to look into this.
There’s actually a good amount of information that you can find about Krimsky through google and the internet. Like I said above, I have a copy of his “History of Turkey” in Ukrainian and find it a great addition to my personal library. I’ve tried to obtain a copy of his personal memoirs including information regarding hist first trip to the Middle East, but alas to no avail. 🙁
Those would only be his neighbors if he himself was a tattooed up, meth using white dude with a lot of missing teeth. In which case it’s hard to say who would be better or worse.
Yeah, that’s why China has a plummeting currency and moribund scientific contributions while randomly antagonizing its neighborhood for no reason.
Wait, China is none of those things.
I don’t know about the rest, but Wiki keeps track of numbers for launches.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_in_spaceflight
For orbital launches this year, Chinese had 10 launches for 9 successful, Russians 7 for 7, Indians 1 for 1, and Americans 16 for 16, of which 11 was Musk.
Say what you will about Musk, but he keeps those Falcons in the air.
Turks in Turkey are mostly a mix of Greek, Armenian, and Georgian – not Arab or Persian.
They are mostly descended from the peoples of antiquity, except they have a minor East Asian component which came from the Turkic invaders of Central Asia.
There is regional variation as well. Western Anatolian Turks have more European (from Greece and the Balkans) blood and less East Asian than their compatriots further into the heartland.
Turks in Eastern Anatolia have more Armenian blood:
Have you read this book by any chance?
https://www.amazon.com/Story-Waiting-Pierce-You-Mongolia/dp/1890350214
If not you might be interested. Kingsley’s text is only 84 pp but he has 90 pp of fine print endnotes. His inferences are a little stretched but oh my. He has:
Pythagoras’ mentor was an Avar;
Genghis Khan performed a disinfecting action on a corrupt continent that was utterly stagnant before him and subsequently blossomed;
The Tibetan Buddhists genocided the shamans and stole all their best ideas (all the best ideas of the Tibetan Budddhists started out as the best ideas of the shamans they destroyed).
He has a saintly portrayal of Genghis Khan. GK conquered the most luxuriant cities and immediately retreated to his tent/camp because he was only at home out in the wild. He went here and there at the direction of some celestial messenger. &c. There is an anecdote about the European trip and some Euro soldiers who were completely spooked after they captured one of GK’s scouts and he was an English army guy who had been banished and GK had taken him right in.
It is one of the more interesting alternative histories I have seen. A couple days after I read it I had to go back and read it over again half as fast.
Oh, sure. Hopefully that elite fraction can lend some guidance, but a Malthusian Africa is less likely to be walked over than Jungle-Bush Subsistence Africa (I’m not a fan of Africa. I’m just saying they would be literally harder to take over, much as a billion American Indians would be harder to take over than however many there actually were.)
Oh, I don’t expect everyone to opt for settling in a brave new world with 6 acres and a mule. I expect most people to live and stay and develop mega cities, or the free fields of tomorrow to become the arcologies of next Wednesday.
As far as Malthus is concerned, if humanity hits the galactic scale, we’re likely some level of a post-scarcity society, or even outright free-energy (no science fiction does justice to the possibilities of that). That, and even if resources are a concern, it will be a much longer timeline and much higher limit till said scarcity becomes an issue, on the galactic scale, when we can mine asteroids, let alone other worlds.
They tried.
https://i.redd.it/tk6x05zhql041.jpg
Even if 80% of Imperial Japanese Army troops had remained in Manchuria, I don’t think it would of mattered to the Red Army. If the Wehrmacht failed, good luck to the dwarf devils.
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcS3CWP043JrCtic9idD8LbYaHrksXpMsnRm6w&usqp.jpg
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DbtqsbMUQAIQEVV.jpg
https://youtu.be/momB9-4qAXk
Those would only be his neighbors if he himself was a tattooed up, meth using white dude with a lot of missing teeth.
Or they are retired normal non-wealthy Americans living on a fixed income and can’t really move elsewhere when their neighbourhood is invaded. Or their formerly decent suburbs saw Central Americans, often groups of single men, move into one overcrowded house, then another, and another, making life miserable for normal families, who then see their property values decline giving them few decent options. Or they lost their formerly good jobs or small businesses due to COVID or some other reason, couldn’t pay the mortgage and had to move to poor area where they are outnumbered by hostile aliens.
There are many reasons why people end up having to live round those they don’t get along with. Not all poor or downwardly mobile people are the trash you think they are. (I note your fellow Ukrainian-American Mr. Hack agrees with you. Maybe it is a Ukrainian thing, which is odd, given that many Europeans see Ukrainians as the poor white trash of Europe).
Those religious buildings were designed to be earthquake-proof.
He is an Anglo supremacist who thinks America had gone downhill since it let in all those Italians, Poles, Irish, etc
Funny how Anglos (plus Germans & Scandinavians) who prefer their own nations and ways are never just ‘patriots’, just nasty ‘supremacists’.
If you are a fan of Italy you would probably not mind Latinos too much
I spent parts of the winters of 2018 and 2019 in Lombardy, Emilia-Romagna, & Veneto. Maybe next time I’ll try Guatemala or El Salvador, after all if you are a fan of Italy you probably won’t mind those places too much.
A second launch occurred on 1 February 2021, at 08:15 UTC (16:15 Beijing Time) from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center with 6 unidentified satellites but failed to reach orbit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-Space_(Chinese_company)
I wonder what role Russian and Chinese private space companies will play in the industry over the coming decades? Or are both destined to always be state dominated?
Modern Greek are also quite mixed after the long post-Antiquity years. Lots of Slavic and Albanian blood, not the mention Illyrian, Thracian and Anatolian ones, have blended into the old Hellenic stock.
Near East (Greece included) has always been a melting pot of sorts.
The Russian military was impressive, but my idea is that Japan could have conciliated the US, while holding onto its circa 1932 territories, presenting itself as a bulwark against communism.
The Americans and probably even the Chinese could have lived with that, but the Americans are never good at negotiating such things. They never explicitly accepted “spheres of influence” or a right to colonies while they themselves considered the whole of the Americas (and later also Europe and East Asia) their exclusive sphere of influence and also conquered colonies for themselves. But an at least as big (if not bigger) problem was that Japan at the time was incapable of reigning in its officers and thus was agreement incapable anyway.
Do you mean that Japanese should have not have attacked Southern British, Dutch and American hold territories in 1941, or not attacked China in 1937?
German leadership entertained such dreams in the early 1945, but Western Allies explicitly denied all chances of separate peace in the West. Also USA was very Anti-Japanese and moderately Pro-Chinese. Japan was seen as a strategic threat on the Western pacific.
They should have attacked neither.
They should not have started the war either. Germany was the dominant power in Central Europe, and over time it could have built nukes (just like Japan and eventually nationalist China), so that now we’d have a truly multipolar world.
Maybe then we’d have had the Second World War in the 1970s and it would have been so much more destructive, so maybe it’s good that it didn’t happen. I’m just trying to think about scenarios where globohomo didn’t become so dominant.
Pakistan was intended as a Muslim state, one where the majority of the inhabitants are Muslims, and not an Islamic state where the laws reflect Sharia.
When Pakistan came into being in August 1947, it’s official name was the “Dominion of Pakistan” and it was only in 1956 that it became the “Islamic Republic of Pakistan”, but even then there were no laws brought about for such a name change to he justified, it was only in the late 1970s that this process began under General Zia, who himself was a pious Muslim and thought his actions would improve Pakistan’s national cohesion and prominence in the Islamic world.
If I would be an Anglo, I would think that USA has gone downhill since 1861. Personally I just want that the current USAtan, with it’s missionary liberal and universalistic ideas will fall. I don’t much care if it will happen by your country changing into Brazil or into Anglo nationalist state, though isolationist WASP regime in America would probably be better for whole humanity.
I’ve never given much value to Latin America. What else that god forsaken place has given us philosophically than just new strains of socialism like the heretic salvation theology? Culturally Latin America is a dead end, and they don’t even have same excuses or biological limitations as sub-saharans have. I know that many here on this site disparage various Muslim nations, I tooI feel disdain towards them, but no one can’t deny that they have given much to humanity in regards of architecture, poetry and aesthetics, though not really much in matters of spirituality(or if one wants to claim that endless nitpicking about trivial matters is spirituality then what ever), but what have Latin Americans achieved, even though they have a large and fertile continent, where they have resided for five centuries Look what Americans did just in two centuries! Or what Russians did in inhospitable Siberia, Central Asia and Urals, even Arabs developed interesting and highly distinct culture in Maghreb and Sahel.
Also the backwardness of Latin America is not just because of them being mixed or something, one of my close relatives lived for couple years in Uruguay, which is the most European/White country of South America, and he told me that people there were always late, had no proper concept of time, the place where worked, was often closed, because there were constant labour strikes. From his words I understood that Uruguay was a shitty country of lazy people, and that same relative had lived before, because of his work, in Ukraine and Russia, and he has never complained about those countries in such way. Slav is an Empire builder, as the histories of Bulgaria, Russia and Poland show us, but Latin American is nothing else than a colonial peon.
While it’s true that 3rd Dalai Lama and Altan Khaan ordered all human sacrificing shamans to be killed if they continue sacrificing people and burning women on funeral pyres, I still would not call such an act by name of genocide, it’s justice and nothing else. Pre-Buddhist religions are still living faiths in Mongolic and Tibetan lands, and substantial share of their people are not Buddhists, but Tengrist Shamanists or followers of Bön religion.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-F_8er6aqZCg/T0XjNGTCGsI/AAAAAAAAAZo/v0yoEHjxzk8/s1600/IMGA0493.JPG
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/Hallaj.jpg
http://www.amaana.org/ikhwan/IkhwanSafa1287.jpg
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/media.archnet.org/system/media_contents/contents/91086/original/IAA103981.jpg
https://simerg.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/icdubai02.jpg
He thinks that Italians are inferior trash, that is the difference. Have you even read his posts?
A friend who regularly visited Italy spent time in Costa Rica this year and loved it. He has also enjoyed Peru very much.
I know a few such people and they have never had this problem. There are plenty of tidy trailer parks with old white retirees on fixed incomes. Do you know anyone who has?
I do know places that have gone downhill due to meth/opiate problems among white people though. I suspect this is as much of a problem. For some reason Anglos and Scotch-Irish succumb to this stuff more than do Polish-American proles, who just drink.
Nice literature and music count for something. Liberation theology is no worse than the original Bolshevism.
Do you think the same of Spain? What has it done culturally in the last 300 years? Latin America is Spain’s child.
You think the Muslim world is better than Latin America? LOL.
Mexico:
https://cdn.havecamerawilltravel.com/places/files/2016/10/mexico-city-sacristy-in-mexico-city-metropolitan-cathedral-74-copyright-havecamerawilltravel-com.jpg
https://cdn.britannica.com/44/145944-050-BE46FA53/Metropolitan-Cathedral-Mexico-City.jpg
https://media.tacdn.com/media/attractions-splice-spp-674×446/07/98/25/11.jpg
You are too easily impressed imperial authority, treating it as some summum bonum of human existence, regardless of the goods it provides (or bads it prevents). In other (imo more sensible) value systems, imperial authority isn’t even a good, let alone the highest one.
Outside of ‘high culture,’ Latin America compares quite favorably to the Arab world, the Hindoo world, and to southeast Asia. Consider two examples, sport and music. Latin Americans leave Arabs, Hindoos and Asians in the dust when it comes to sporting success (broadly, not just soccer). Sporting success rests on much more than raw talent and spontaneous individual effort; its consistent production requires certain cultural values and social technologies, and Latin America has performed well in this area.
If global tastes are anything to go by, popular music is another field in which Latin America has excelled. Large numbers of people across the world, particularly in the west, listen to Latin American music despite not understanding the words. Arab music has its non-Arab fans, and I’m sure that’s also true of Hindoo and Asian music, but I suspect it’ll be a very long time before any of it is played in a popular nightclub.
Have you compared the GDP per capita of Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina with Germany’s?
Being played in a popular nightclub should not be the yardstick of whether a cultural good is worthy. Arabic-Persian music is rhythmically and melodically complex. There are many interesting rhythms sometimes in non-common time which is not what can say for popular Western music which is almost always in 4/4. Also, there are many scales or modes one can use to build a melody which again is not the same for the Pentatonic and major/minor scales of Western popular music. They even have microtones which are generally not played in the West. There are popular and classical forms of music in this part of the world. This is not to belittle the achievement of Latin Americans either.
Latin American has not only produced pip music. It’s Baroque music is very nice:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NPfwfxspyRA
Islamic art ranks as an impressive achievement and obviously outclasses anything produced by rebarbative globohomo “artists”, but how long can you remain fascinated by what is mostly geometric patterns? Personally, I get bored within minutes. In contrast, I have spent hours (cumulatively, not in one sitting) viewing the middlebrow (at best) artwork produced by a Latino like Boris Vallejo.
I really can’t comment on the poetry, since I don’t know anything about it, nor am I even much of a poetry lover. I enjoy reading a poetic line or two, but, philistine that I am, poems as a whole just bore me. The good thing is, you lose nothing by simply reading a few favorite lines in isolation from the rest of the poem. Even though both music and movies have some segments that are better than the rest, you can’t really listen to or watch just those alone – or if you do, the effect won’t be as good as listening to or watching the whole thing. (Not true of classical music, where you actually gain from skipping boring movements.) So my only yardstick for judging the quality of Islamic poetry is how seldom I’ve ever heard anybody quote selected portions of it – eg in a post, an article, at the beginning of a book chapter.
I’ve written about my neighborhood here in Phoenix AZ several times. It totally breaks the meme mold that you’re trying to propagate. I moved into this neighborhood about 20 years ago, when the Mexican element was not more than 15%. Its grown whereas today its about 30%. Among the whites, there are some Italians, Ukrainians and the usual assortment of “Heinz 57” mixture. All of the houses are single story one family homes built all together just over 30 years ago. It’s really a nice quiet neighborhood, all the yards kept up quite nicely. My new Cuban neighbor has spent the last year really doing a number on his house, including all new landscaping, and it really shines. Once in a while, one of the Latino families breaks up the quiet monotony in the neighborhood by throwing a party that may go on till midnight. If I’m lucky, I’ll get invited and get a chance to meet some nice family oriented people, play with their kids, listen to some good salsa music and eat a plate full of great Mexican fare and have a beer or two. I’d say that all of the house values are in the same ballpark, valued around 300k in this real estate bubble that we’re in. My home, that I bought (fully furnished) for 110k, is today worth, according to willow, 330k. NO GANGS HERE EITHER!
The two neighboring neighborhoods that I can walk to to take advantage of their lovely parks are interesting too. One, where the houses aren’t as nice or as big as those in mine is very quaint, and all of the front yards are kept up quite nicely. One Latino house even has a nice Roman Catholic shrine built in their yard including a statue of the Virgin Mary that I bow to when passing by on my way to work.
The other neighborhood is even nicer than mine. Home values here probably average around 500k with a few probably selling close to 1 million (that are huge houses and include large yards). Just last year I paid a little over $1,000 in property taxes for the first time! What’s there not to like, and I love my Mexican neighbors – they’re a hard working bunch that show their gratitude for living the American dream and are proud to own their own homes.
Both, really. I think the negative perceptions of Japan mostly came from two ideas: 1.) that they were a destabilizing influence on China, 2.) that there was no effective limit on their territorial ambitions.
The second may not have quite been true, but the easy way to show it would have been to not expand past their 1932 borders. Probably not a good idea to attack European colonies and consolidate strategic resources, (I think postwar Japan shows that they did not need these resources, if not on a war footing) but definitely, not a good idea to try to give the US a bloody nose, and believe it would sue for peace.
And something like the “Nanjing Massacre” was a PR disaster.
Perhaps, the populace of Japan was too fired up with war sentiment to make peace easy. Maybe, the wrong party won and choosing peace was impossible in those circumstances.
How do Slavs cope, then?
Anyone that loves music will enjoy the lively music of the Mariachi bands, no Amigo? If you’re ever in Arizona during the Christmas season (or in Texas or New Mexico too) go to one of the numerous concerts featuring live Mariachi music – you wont regret that you went and you’ll leave as a convert to Mexican culture. 🙂
That is great video!
Have you ever seen this stuff for real?
Well it’s all state dominated in the US too – all those “private sector” entrepreneurs feed off government contracts, mostly military, and play by their rules.
Like poor Momentus that can’t get a break because it’s too Russian.
https://spacenews.com/lockheed-martin-removes-momentus-from-nasa-technology-demonstration-mission/
Or like that time when Elon Musk charged Pentagon $300 million for two launches because “it needed infrastructure” lol. It is no different from that Vostochny subcontractor that Russians caught in crystal studded Mercedes.
What is called ‘corruption’ in Russia and China is ‘private sector initiative’ in the US. But its not all bad. Government and large corporations are increasingly bureaucratic and focus more on woke stuff, so it takes them forever to deliver results. If some guys want to skim off government contracts and become rich, but deliver results faster, it is well worth it.
Yeah, Japan does have pretty good roads. I was mainly talking about buildings. The comment on “infrastructure” was more about public buildings, train stations and the like. I didn’t see anything that was as bad as the worst you can find in the US, but also saw very little that would qualify as “good” in the US.
I think a big part of the drive for new investment in private space companies came from servicing the International Space Station, a project from which China was excluded.
This year, China is scheduled to launch the Chinese large modular space station. It is different from their previous space labs which were only meant to be temporary. A modular design fundamentally encourages a longer lifespan, with upgrades and additions. It encourages scheduled servicing and resupply. It is only meant to be about 1/5 the mass of the ISS or about equal to the size of Mir. But once you start a modular design, it is relatively easy to add on to it, especially if expanding modules are used.
Axiom Space actually has a plan to make an annex to the ISS with private modules, and then detach, when the ISS is retired and deorbited, and become their own commercial space station. I’m not sure if it is practical – I think the commercial potentiality of space stations has generally been overestimated, but I do believe that the new Chinese space station will encourage more state investment in private space companies in China.
Reading this bizarre comment, I understand the logic behind Generalplan Ost..
<3
I have to imagine that a Hitler who stopped after taking Austria and the Sudetenland would be more of a Franco-like figure, and viewed perhaps as someone whose bark was worse than his bite. Germany softens and de-Nazifies within a few decades anyway, and once it breaks free of Nazism it overcorrects even harder to the left. But it does keep those territories, and East Prussia, into the present day.
A Germany that somehow mostly fulfilled Hitler’s vision (which, to be sure, I view as mostly an insane vision) and won WW2 would probably be a different animal. For a variety of reasons, I think Nazism would have persisted longer if it succeeded in seizing its lebensraum.
Is it all about which madrassah group you fund?
In general, Pakistan seems to be getting worse and worse with time.
Islam is pure poison. I agree completely. The Abrahamic mind virus destroys human potential wherever it goes.
I am really hoping that Islam, Judaism and Christianity all slowly die out over time.
It’s about the mindset. Different Islamic sects have quite different mindsets. Wahhabi / Salafi are the most regressive. They are now the dominant force in Pakistan, therefore it is not a surprise that the country is going down the drain. Of course there are other reasons : economic, demographic, environmental. But the mindset is in my opinion paramount. Always and accross all the cultures…
We need to keep the grain and throw out the chaff. There are positive aspects about Abrahamic Creeds, but it is true that they are first and foremost viral memetic packages. And some memes are obviously more benign that others.
The basic idea is that most state-building – or empire-building – fail because of too much ambition, they collapse because of indigestion. But in the case of Germany and its allies it was inevitable and driven by a key objective:
The lebensraum was not a dreamy concept of somewhere nebulous in the sky. Lebensraum had a firm geographic meaning: take the land where Poles, Czechs, Belorussians, Ukrainians and Russians live and replace them. That was what was driving the German Nazi geo-politics and not abstract concepts like fighting Bolsheviks or anti-semitism. Germans simply wanted the Poles, Czechs, Russian, etc… out by any means and the land to become a part of Germany.
That plan failed when Germans were defeated by Russians. That is why Nazism lost. The West had a strong sympathy for the Nazi plans in the east and collaborated – or at least didn’t mind. Then the West has spent almost 70 years trying to rewrite this reality out of history. We get endless attempts to trivialise WWII, confuse the timeline, turn it into anti-semitism only, make-up some stuff and omit other, e.g. the Munich treaty with Hitler or French-Belgian-Dutch divisions fighting in the east.
It is a lie. And given the bloody history of WWII it is one of the most inhuman lies there ever was. If the West persists for its petty reasons in pushing this lie, they play with fire. They will eventually hit a wall and things will go boom.
Game Over man! Game Over!
Yeah, exactly. That’s why when Germany invaded Poland, Britain and France simply said to themselves, hah, let them fight it out, who cares, it’s not our problem, if Germany wins, all the better for us. I agree, it’s downright criminal this aspect is left out of mainstream western histories of the war!
It’s a common misconception to think that the lebensraum plans were realistic. In the 1930s Germany had extremely low number of births, the fertility rate was less than 2.0, and later during the war Germany lost huge share of it’s young and middle-aged men, proportionally more than any other age groups. Because of constant labour shortages, Germans brought millions of French and Ostarbeiters to Reich during the war. I think that Lebensraum plans would have gotten botched or there would have been a milder form of colonization than in the wildest dreams of the NSDAP. Germany just had not enough men or children, to realistically colonize Eastern Europe in a grand scale. We also should not forget that Rosenberg and Goebbels were quite sympathetic towards the Slavs, Goebbels even had a Czech lover, though Hitler forced him to break his relations with his mistress and made him reconcile with his wife. So there were many variable factors and cliques inside the NSDAP, lot of would have depended when Hitler would have died after the war, and which clique would had won control over most important institutions of state.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033102/fertility-rate-germany-1800-2020/
I have many Shamanist relatives, and I have seen some Shamanist rituals, but no, I have never seen when Shaman goes to trance and acts as a medium or speaks with spirits. I don’t much like Shamanist rituals, there’s often animal sacrifices and drinking of alcohol. Drinking is not a problem to me, but it does not belong to religion, in my opinion, and animal sacrifice is just evil. Anyhow, the Shamanism of Mongolic peoples, Tuvans and people of Altay is influenced by Buddhism, though how much, depends on a shaman. so it’s not wholly like in ancient times. Surprisingly Shamanism flourished during the Communist times, unlike Buddhism.
But, I have seen two times how a Tibetan oracle goes into “trance” and let’s a Lokapala, or worldly guardian spirit, speak through him. Now probably some Christians among you think how satanic sounding this is? Well, those worldly spirits are not good beings, but strong entities subjugated over thousand years ago by ancient Buddhist masters, and bound by vows and mantras to protect our religion, we do not worship them, and they are seen as quite dangerous. When oracle is in trance, the Lokapala will communicate through him with a high lama, and lama will treat that spirit like a servant and ask him about various things. So lama will act as a successor of ancient master.
Well, I don’t much care about oracles, if they are beneficial for some, then good for them, maybe I’m too westernized or modern to give importance to such things, still I will always keep my mind open.
https://thefemalebuddha.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/img_05903.jpg
Oh Spain has given us so much during the last 300 years, extremely much, in matters of art, aesthetics and literature, among other various other things. How anyone can forget such masters like Goya, Dali or Picasso, just to mention few most famous. Spanish or Catalonian Modernism is world famous, so are Neo-Moor or Neo-Morisco and Bombaline style of Portugal. I don’t know much about Spanish literature, but Garcia Lorca comes into mind.
Everything you show about Mexico is just Spanish or Peninsular architecture, it’s like you would show Spanish churches in Philippines and say, “do you see the achievements of Pinays!” Though I agree that Mexico has been more successful than other Latino countries, in creating of distinct and independent culture, but you should have shown some shitty artworks by Kahlo, or better artworks by his fat lover, which are quite nice examples of socialist art.
One thing that really hurts my aesthetical sensibilities, is their carnivals, they dress like a silly hybrid of tropical parrot and whore. Ugh, such a bad taste. Oh, and if you people think that our western intellectuals love socialism, then look there, it’s unbelievable how in love they are with the socialism.
Just check the historical population densities of Andes, or how fertile Amazon area is, and compare them with the steppes of Karaganda and tundras of Yakutia and Yamalo-Nenetsia. There is no comparison, none at all. Southern Canada and Scandinavia are much more fertile and hospitable for human existence than most of Russia or former USSR. Even Calgary and Edmonton in Canada, are much warmer places to live than whole of Siberia, and Vancouver is warmer than Kiev.
https://i.imgur.com/WdhNwdr.png
France and Britain were just playing out some mega 4-D chess moves in 1939/1940 culminating in the master stroke that was the fall of France.
If Christianity is a virus harmful to human potential, why then when Christianity is disappearing in the West, the culture and fertility of westerners is stagnating or even decaying? By your logic human potential of Post-Christian West should be higher than it has ever been since Pagan times. For some reason it does not look like so.
Goya was good. Dali was very entertaining and a good self-promoter, but not much else. Picasso had some talent but his works were ugly.
Latin America produced Borges, Sabato, Cortazar, Marquez. There is a flavor of Russia in Latin American literature, and perhaps not coincidentally educated Latin Americans have a fondness for Russian literature.
That’s like dismissing St. Petersburg as just Italian or French architecture.
Brasilia is a showcase of modernist architecture:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cf/Catedral1_Rodrigo_Marfan.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Teatro_Nacional_Cl%C3%A1udio_Santoro_-_Brasilia_-_DSC00311.JPG
The artwork of Mexico is vibrant and a mix of Spanish and local Indian customs. In November, the locals celebrate the “Day of the Dead” where families congregate at local cemeteries and pay homage to the memories of their dearly departed. Ukrainian Orthodox Christians have a similar holiday (Providna Nedilia) exactly one week after Easter, where they gather at the gravesite of their dearly departed at cemeteries too, praying to God Almighty to accept their souls into paradise. Priests and supplicants perform the formal prayer ceremonies as they inhale the wafts of incensed air and hold a lit candles. My mother would always leave candies and fruits at our family’s gravesites. I’m not sure whether this custom is also maintained in Russia?
https://youtu.be/8OOBabrw_S4
A case of life imitating art, or the other way around?
Latin America produces some fine soccer teams who compete at the highest levels in the world cup. Brazil and Argentina are two prominent ones; Mexico and Uruguay perform admirably as well. Smaller Latin-American countries don’t however. I assume the success of Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Mexico comes from their more comparatively developed state, which in turn is derived from their larger fraction of European-origin peoples. The developed state of those countries keeps environmental factors such as malnutrition and lack of training facilities from inhibiting talented athletes. I noticed, for example, that sub-Saharan nations do not perform well in soccer tournaments, despite the well-known sub-Saharan natural talent for athletics. Blacks in European teams like Germany and France, however, perform as well as you’d expect, and are over-represented way beyond their population (2018 World Cup, France’s Team Composition: 33% White, 52% Black, 11% North African, 4% Southeast Asian). So the environment plays a key role in determining performance in sports, not just genes. And the relative importance of nature vs nurture will vary based on the sport we are talking about.
I think it’s indisputable that Latin American music is fairly popular around the world, at least compared to Arabic or Indian music. But, so is African-American music. I would put that down to their comparative proximity to the world’s gigantic megaphone called the USA, rather than relative quality of composition. So it’s unfair to compare them to more distant groups (I know Indians and Arabs are present in the US; but their numbers are nothing compared to Hispanics and blacks).
I agree with Agathoklis; mass appeal shouldn’t be used as a proxy for quality. There is no perfect way of judging excellence in music, but Charles Murray’s method of seeking expert opinion is the most reasonable imo. I’m no expert, and I’m not aware of any, so I can’t give you a consensus opinion on the merits of Arabic vs Indian vs Hispanic music. But I’m broadly familiar with “high” Arabic music, and my own opinion (if it’s worth anything) is that it’s A-grade stuff compared to Latin American or Indian music (Disclosure: I’m Egyptian so I may be biased). Here’s Umm Kulthum, for example, who is widely considered to be the all-time best singer in the Arab World:
She’s good, but her songs are never going to appeal to the masses around the globe. She doesn’t sing pop culture trash, she’s conservatively Muslim, and she’s not attractive. Not exactly the best formula for mass appeal. On the other hand, I think some pretty Christian singers from Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon can reach a wider audience around the globe – if they were allowed access to America’s huge megaphone.
Here’s a few potential examples:
Julia Boutros (Lebanese Christian):
Faia Younan (Syrian Christian):
Carmen Suleiman (Coptic Egyptian):
Marian Layousse (Lebanese Christian):
Some less conservative Muslims could as well:
Dalal Abu-Amneh (Palestinian):
Yasmin Ali (Egyptian):
Asala Nasri (Syrian):
Hela Melki (Tunisian):
Other Classical Music:
Andalusian:
Saudi Arabian:
Persian:
The fall of Christianity and the decline of Western Civilization are interconnected. The Abrahamic Creeds thrive into the minds of the faithful. When the overall vital energy of the “host population” declines, the energy available for the use by the memetic package declines.
Religion is not as strong anymore because the people who internalized and perpetuated this religion are becoming weak. The West is losing its vital energy with each passing day. But we both know that “la nature a horreur du vide” or as Russian saying goes : “Свято место пусто не бывает“. And we both know how it is going to end.
There will be a rebirth of Abrahamic Faith in the West and this time it will be an even more aggressive “variant ” with a strong Islamic influence. I believe first Muslims and Jews will come to an understanding, then they will enforce a “renewed Abrahamic concensus ” on their neighbors. And it will save the West from a genetic annihilation. But it will only save it for a time…
When plans fail it is easy to call them unrealistic. In the 40’s it was quite realistic, Germans had the manpower, the desire, and passive Western support. Anglos or French wouldn’t move a finger or sacrifice anything to fight Germans in the east – they sat down in 1938 and basically directed Hitler towards the east in Munich. Many in the West – possibly a majority – quietly preferred for the eastern Europe to be controlled and occupied by their fellow German kin, and not the damn Slavs. This was obvious at the time, West spent decades obfuscating their ugly behaviour. Some here still do it.
Germans actually started the colonisation of lebensraum during WWII: Auschwitz was a new German city and there were dozens of them in the occupied east. Germans planted settlers in Crimea (always a primary price) in 1942-3. They were serious. A lot of serious plans are unrealistic in hindsight.
Germans are a Western kin, Slavs are not. Poles and others can blow until they are blue in their faces, that is not going to change.
Well, the one thing that the US didn’t do after mid-19th C is go downhill.
I don’t blame Eldnah for thinking that the US would have become even more prosperous if it had only accepted Anglo-Germanic immigrants but I don’t know how possible that was at a time when it sought large amounts of settlers for its frontier lands and workers for its growing economy.
And perhaps it would have also become more liberal, like Northwest Europe. The current woke movement looks full of Puritan and Anglo-Protestant streaks to me.
This has started thousands of years ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tollense_valley_battlefield
Japanese have a particular attitude* to buildings (low investment and transitoriness) which is represented in thee Shrine and response to their destruction in earthquakes, tsunamis and typhoons, as you said, however – they also don’t have shabby buildings, if you can ignore messy overhead wiring, so I’m not sure where this conversation is coming from.
Some Americans are delusional if they are saying that American public spaces are as good as public spaces are in Japan on average.
The public spaces in Japan are much better than in America, on average. (In America, the best places are private spaces).
When I’ve been in America, I’ve seen a lot of crazy and scary things in the public spaces, whereas in Japan everything in the public spaces was carefully maintained, well designed and functional, although usually unaesthetic.
Public spaces in America are often more like something from a Second World country, than First World country. That’s not to say as a criticism of America, as this is their own prioritization – private wealth; public squalor.
In America, has a different attitude to the public sphere, and it’s a country which is very successful in providing a large of luxury to it private sphere. If you design a country to maximize supply of private luxury at the expense of everything else, then it will be quite like America.
–
For example, when Thoreau wants to retreat from the world, he goes to a wooden house.
Compared with the Western European attitude – biographically, Yeats, retreated, to a stone tower, as does Montaigne, as does Jung.
Also Japanese prefer destroying old buildings and replacing them, because of the regularly updated seismic buildings codes, which become more strict with every generation.
This means the newer buildings will comply with stricter seismic codes, than the older ones.
So Japanese view that the more regularly you demolish old buildings, the more protected you will be during earthquakes. This is also pumping demand for the construction industry.
But it seems to me that America’s attitude could be similar to the Japanese one – also could often have a more a transitory attitude to buildings than Europeans.
I know there’s the West-European permanence of buildings in Beacon Hill of Boston, or the Brownstone buildings in New York.
However, the archetypical building of the American people until recently, was – wooden, clapboard house.
Wooden American houses, can sometimes appear more similar to what they built in Japan or Russian Empire (before Soviet times), than in Western Europe.
https://i.imgur.com/ZIWaeuZ.jpg
Traditional American buildings can sometimes appear very un-European, and more like Russia or Japan.
https://i.imgur.com/mm9kxdL.jpg
American building like in the Russian Empire.
https://i.imgur.com/X3qi1F1.jpg
And the most fashionable shopping street in Los Angeles (Melrose), is like something from a provincial Japanese village in terms of its build quality.
https://i.imgur.com/KHHw28H.jpg
A large part of the new construction seems to be more like this stone, permanent, high quality, square, heavy buildings, of oversized dimensions.
https://i.imgur.com/8S67nKI.jpg
This is probably related to resource availability. With wood generally being more readily available in America, Russia, and Japan (mountains), than much of Western Europe. I think Finland is similar? Maybe, the Northern Scandinavian countries? But in Japan it is also a better material for earthquakes.
However, America used up a lot of its best wood as time went by, and its population increased. Still many trees, but lumber is more expensive and the type of wood inferior, much of it is now glued together.
This is related to fires in cities. They banned wooden construction in the dense parts of some cities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Boston_Fire_of_1872
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_New_York_City_Fire_of_1845
But stone construction, as opposed to brick, I think it partly a display of wealth. But maybe brick too? Last year, I was traveling on a dirt road in a very rural part of New England near mountains and saw an old (at least 170+ years) brick house, and was very shocked to see one, so far from any village center, in a pretty hilly area.
Wooden houses can last a long time, if they are well-maintained. The one I grew up in was nearly 200 years old, and a few miles away, I know there was one about 300 years old. There are many old wooden churches, but a few more seem to burn down with every year.
Japan has the world’s oldest hotel. I don’t know how much of the structure dates back to 705 ad. It was probably Ukrainian.
You are right that they don’t have shabby buildings, I don’t know why I used that particular word. Low investment and transitory, used by you, are better descriptors for Japanese architecture.
I should clarified that I meant the sphere of culture and individual liberty, and not how strong power USAtan is politically in the world. Early USA was a very free society, with low governmental interference, and states or local government was more important than nowadays. I admit that culture is a highly subjective topic, so if one cherishes more mass Hollywood culture and Modern American Pop music, yes then America is now culturally more powerful, or better. As it’s said, “beauty is in the eye of beholder.”
Running in parallel to this is the collapse of technological civilization. No amount of Westroika will save it, because its destruction is written in the hubris of singularity. You can never defy the transient nature of existence.
And this means demographic collapse, not the kind of replacement or Soviet-style brief fall, but on the scale of Black Death or mass extinction. Any talk of “mental population” is no longer relevant then.
How much of the Empire is good for its subjects?
Germany was defeated by a multiethnic, polyglot empire, ruled by a psychotic Georgian. The epicanthic folds seen on “Russian” soldiers raping German women in 1945 were…prominent.
Russians also have such custom, though I’m not sure about date, they’ll go to cemeteries, with food and drink, it’s probably same as Ukrainian custom.
Isn’t day of the dead a pagan custom, what’s the opinion of church?
Christianity has been declining in the West since the 18th century. As western Europe secularised it reached the height of its power and influence in the 19th century.
The decline of Christianity also coincided with extraordinary western European achievements in art, literature and music.
The decline of Western Civilisation coincides with the rise of the United States to global dominance.
Yes, Wokeism does seem to be just the latest manifestation of Puritan insanity.
Well obviously there was the possibility. Birth rates might have increased – Nazi Germany was one country where having lots of children conferred prestige, and the economic situation would have been pretty favorable after winning the war.
But then when Hitler actually occupied Prague they issued a guarantee to Poland. Had Hitler been less of a gambler, he’d have been deterred from going further. But when he ignored it, they actually went to war with him, forcing him to start a campaign in the West.
Your idea that the western powers actually preferred (or even accepted) Eastern Europe under German rule is contradicted by western behavior. They actually declared war against Hitler when he tried to conquer Poland.
Is Sufism anything else than Neo-Platonism in the garb of Islam? Were there no holy men before Islam? What Islam has given to humanity in spiritual matters, that did not exist before Islam? Stuff like Imamate, Jihad and Caliphate serve just Islam, not mankind.
You very well know, that Christian and Zoroastrian Middle East would not be a worse place to live or practice spirituality.
Though religion like Confucianism has not given globally as much to humanity as Christianity or Buddhism, it has immensely contributed on such things as societal stability, honesty, civil organisation, education etc, etc, in Asia, and made a society a better place both for Confucianists and non-Confucianists.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c8/LifeAndWorksOfConfucius1687.jpg/1200px-LifeAndWorksOfConfucius1687.jpg
Far from it. Franco didn’t have an ideology except some kind of a vague conservatism and Catholicism, and he was ruling one of the poorest countries in Europe, an absolute backwater. The Spanish middle class obviously looked abroad for how to behave, and with the USA being the dominant superpower they became shitlibs. Those who didn’t looked at the other superpower and became communists. Germany, on the other hand, would not compare unfavorably to France in terms of living standards (and many in France found Germany an example to emulate already in the 1930s), and it had a proper ideology.
I’m not denying that that’s a possibility, but the whole German leadership consisted of Nazi true believers. Presumably the political leaders would have been vetted for ideology, much like how they were in the USSR, where each communist leader up to and including Gorbachev were communist true believers. The issue with the USSR was the glaring economic inefficiency, by the late 1960s or early 1970s at the latest it became clear that the economy needed a serious reform. However, the economic system stood at the core of the ideology, so reforming it was very difficult. Gorbachev’s 1987 reforms resulted in an economic crisis, but then proved impossible to roll back. Then he started to focus on political reform to prevent his overthrow by hardliners in the wake of the economic crisis his reforms caused, and also because the communist system didn’t quite live up to its promises of democracy and rule by the toiling classes (instead of a class of permanent bureaucrats).
Nazism wouldn’t have faced any of these issues. It was economically way more efficient, and it would have been easy to reform anyway, since economy was not central to the ideology. Göring and Speer preferred some kind of central planning, but probably only in the context of preparation for and conducting a total war. Many other committed Nazis like Otto Ohlendorf found it repulsive and supported the free market.
So it would have been different from both Franco’s Spain and the USSR, and less likely to collapse than either.
One big danger would have been rather the opposite. In a Nazi Germany softly dominating Central and Southeastern Europe between Germany and the USSR a future Nazi leader might’ve concluded that National Socialism was not living up to its ideals and that it should strive to conquer Ukraine and Russia, resulting in the exact same world war which destroyed it 1939-45. But perhaps after a dangerous period each great power would have managed to build nukes, and then there would have been enough sanity to prevent this.
Most of the soldiers were Russians, though there were some people like Buryats. I was investigating the grandfather of an acquaintance, who was a Soviet officer stationed in Budapest during the siege in January and February 1945, and and an amateur historian friend found a division command post in the street where this was happening. The story (the grandmother wouldn’t talk about it, but as relayed by one of her friends) was that the officer was “the commander of the reconnaissance division.” (There’s no such thing as a reconnaissance division…) Unfortunately the commander of the division was a Buryat and thus not the grandfather. The grandfather could’ve been a captain or a lieutenant colonel.
Interestingly the grandmother was a 16 year old girl who didn’t quite volunteer to sleep with the officer, but she then fell in love with him.
I don’t understand? Do you mean that has it been good for average Americans that their country is global eminent power?
I should clarify that in my opinion the word empire has different meanings depending on a context, when I’m rooting for empires I’m rooting for traditional tellurocratic empires, and I deeply detest mercantile thassalocracies. The purest and highest form of an empire is what was traditionally understood as an empire in classical Indian, Roman and Chinese context, where temporal and sacral power are united in the personage of the Emperor, Augustus, Huang Di or Chakravartin, of course we don’t have anymore such rulers, so I’m then supporting those countries which somewhat resemble empires of old in a corrupted form. In a modern world we often need to choose the option that is the least bad for all.
To me America is not an actual empire, but some kind of culture or religion that is spreading it’s way of life and weltanschauung to the rest of the humanity, in other words, a contagious mental disease, a rabid beast that should be put down for the welfare of all. There’s a very important thing in empires that always differentiate them from democracies, there’s always someone in the empire who is the ruler, who has the supreme authority, at least nominally, and that person is very visible. So there’s a clear hierarchy and rulers are not so easily replaceable or ephemeral as in democracies. Also empire is always a collection of nations, therefore modern Russia, with Putin and China with Xi, are more of an empires, than other types of states.
He has a very narrow, parochial view of those events. The west threw Czechoslovakia to the wolves, therefore they were secretly pro-German/anti-Slav all along.
The bigger x-factor is what the Soviets might have done and the western response to it. Would they have attacked? If they did, the western powers would have come under considerable pressure to back the Germans, I think. It’s hard to believe they would have joined in on the Soviet side, anyway.
The population of Turkey is over 80 million officially (IIRC 83 million). If you add Syrians (at least 7 million) and others it’s probably over 95 million.
Both are big X factors. It’s also hard to know who would have built the bomb first and what would he have done with it. For example imagine it’s the British, but the Germans follow suit in a couple years. Then the Germans might decide that with the bomb they were strong enough to attack east as the bomb would deter the west from intervening. Or the Soviets might have been second with communist sympathizers in the western nuclear program helping them. They didn’t attack America with its many more nukes, but perhaps they’d attack a nuke-less Germany?
Thassalocracies and tellurocracies are two sides of the same coin. Centralizing powers extending their control and influence over vast extents, often and increasingly with force. And little folks are ants in the eyes of Leviathan.
A truly good government going with the Tao (natural order), if there has to be any at all, must be decentralized and vests little power. Smaller states, maybe even down to the size of hamlets, is the Taoist ideal, and that is one of the points libertarians treaded the way of the Tao; the end goal is even the same – letting individuals and the people flourish according to their natural instincts, their ways of life, the spontaneous order.
You are quite ignorant if you think that imperialism is incompatible with the letting people live in such a way as they want. For example ancient Persians and Romans ruled over multicultural empires, where there existed many different religions, laws and native traditions, they were truly multicultural, unlike the modern west, that just play acts being a multicultural society, but in reality the multiculturalism pursued by the west is similar to the Soviet one, more based on superficial differences in cuisine and fashion, than in way of living and inner values, only difference is that the West uses soft, effeminate power in realizing it’s goals, unlike Soviets who used force and violence.
A traditional empire is rooted on piety, loyalty and honour. Using Anglo political models in explaining how traditional empires worked? Ha, ha, like Roman patron-client model of relations would had have any resemblance with the model espoused by Hobbes’ Leviathan. Roman Augustus was the patron of all his subjects, and the highest priest of the Roman state religion.
I have had enough of rootless modern Chinese(a particular variety of Han people), go talk libertarianism and “taoism” with the people of California or something. One could as well say that Taoist would not care what happens in the society, or that society is what it is, and Daoshi has more important matters to tend. Or are you honestly claiming that there is some kind of political theory propagated by Taoism?
I believe population decline will be progressive. BTW, it is not only a Western trend: 2020 has seen a population decline in China and we both know that Japan and South Korea also have declining populations as well as all the European FUSSR republics, with the notable exception of the Muslim ones. There will be replacement too, ethnic as well as cultural. The mind-set that would allow best surviving and having an above replacement reproduction level will progressively become the dominant one. Islam offers this type of mind-set as does Haredi Judaism.
European people were still deeply religious a century ago. Americans were mainly religious 50 years ago. The fact that Voltaire wrote anti Church pamphlets doesn’t mean that the masses were becoming secular. I would say the French have only become definitely secular adter 1968.
That was just cashing in on capital acquired as Christians. This powerful train still had a lot of momentum left. And the European peoples weren’t fully secularised in the 19th century.
France encapsulated it all: it was the leading European power as a Christian nation, had the Revolution, went out in a blaze of glory (unfortunately infecting Europe with its secularism disease while doing so), then was a declining secular and spent shell of its former self.
Because America is the last Christian (albeit heretical) Western power.
Middle classes were already losing their religion in the 19th century, though middle class of that period was much smaller than modern one, and large share of nobility and intellectuals were already non-religious in the 18th century, but in the 17th century religion was an utterly hegemonic power in society. It’s not like French or American revolutions happened in a vacuum or something, most American founding fathers were Deists, not traditional Trinitarian Christians, and some like Paine, atheists, same thing with the French revolutionary leaders. Though it’s true that masses were religious for a very long time.
Well now I’m confused which model is the correct one? One espoused by you, or dfordoom’s? Both of you have made good arguments.
Early Ismailism was deeply neo-Platonicist.
Sufism is completely different:
“Were the world the possession of a single man, it would not make him rich … [B]ecause it is passing away.”
“Burning the Paradise and extinguishing Hell so that only Your Presence remains “.
“I saw my Lord with the eye of my Soul. I asked Him: “Who are you ?” He replied: “I am you!”.
“Two steps lead to the door of the Friend. You are walking with the first step”.
Typical Sufi thoughts. Even just believing in one’s personal existence outside of the Divine Presence was seen as Shirk (the worst possible sin) by many Sufis. Life is transient and illusive, but God is nevertheless closer to us than we are to ourselves. God is transcendent and immanent, it is beyond all categories. They longed for reunion with God. Once the illusionary veil of egotism falls, only the Truth remains. It could actually be seen as a trend towards Islamic Monism. That is why the Wahhabi see the Sufi as heretics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabia_of_Basra
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Hallaj
Hard to argue with that, but I don’t think it can be completely ignored either. It might help to substitute the term “universality” for mass appeal. Is universality a desirable feature? I think it generally is. That’s most obvious when it comes to moral principles. “It’s wrong to kill someone just because you feel like it” – even the most emphatic relativist would be aghast at a society in which that principle didn’t prevail. Less obviously, if Egyptians had invented soccer – a sport recognized by all as having universal appeal – I’m sure you’d consider it a point of pride; why would that be if there wasn’t not something inherently desirable about universality?
You put the broader appeal of Latin American music down to American marketing expertise (the “megaphone”), the major ingredient of which you consider to be the sex appeal of the performer. That’s certainly a factor, but I’m not sure it can account for the entirety of the phenomenon. (Was sex appeal really a major factor in the Bossa Nova craze in the 60s? Then again, that wasn’t really a mass phenomenon either.) I think a larger part of the explanation lies in the universality of its “message.” I don’t mean the lyrics (though perhaps those too), but something in the music itself. Or perhaps it’s not in the music itself, but occurs via associations formed in the mind between the music and the culture which produced it. Either way, though, there is a tendency to feel certain music is intended to speak either specifically the members of a given cultural group (ie it’s particularistic) or, alternatively, to whomever happens to be listening (universalistic).
Now, music marketers, whatever their own musical sensibilities, are businessmen. The realities of the marketplace force them to make assessments of the potential appeal of a musical style. That’s not say these assessments are always accurate (eg Ford Edsel, “New Coke” – literally textbook examples of marketing failure), only that if they’re not, the market will quickly let you know. When it comes to Arab music, one of the first hurdles an enterprising music marketer hoping to generate mass appeal runs into is not the relative conservatism of its performers, but the fact that the singing voice is too reminiscent of muezzin calls (and all the negative associations that come with that). Mass appeal requires the listener to be able to imagine the music is speaking to him, that if he wants he can “adopt” it as part of his personality. With Arab music, my guess is that most people will not be able overcome the impression that they’re just outsiders, listening in. There’s no way I can prove that, of course. But I don’t think I’m wrong in supposing that, if the potential were really there, marketers by now would have exploited it.
Well that sounds just like Neo-Platonism to me, there is the absolute and truly real, it’s the basis and source for all, the rest is ephemeral and transient.
In wireless communication Arikan (inventor of the polar code for 5G telecommunication) from Turkey is next to the Shannon God. The Americans seem unable to grasp the performance of the invention, even when Arikan offered to work with the American Qualcomm. Only the Chinese can see the commercial importance. There is no IP stealing. It was published openly and Arikan did not patent the idea. Huawei board took only 20 minutes to decide initially to spent USD$600 million for the R&D on the 5G polar code, the rest is history.
In reality, France didn’t “go out” at all. Scientific, technological and economic advances carried on all throughout the nineteenth century, and by the end of it France had acquired a global empire second only to Britain’s. Hardly my idea of a spent force. But it did indeed lose ground to Germany, and the demographic factor there could well have been influenced by the decline in Christian belief. (The Franco-Prussian war occurred remarkably close to the point – within a few years, iirc – at which the Germans achieved demographic parity with France.)
You make good points here, though I guess Arab music getting rejected because of its association with the unpleasant aspects of Islam (I would add Muslim immigrants who loudly blast more or less similar music in their cars) means that perhaps its rejection has little to do with the inherent qualities of the music itself, so in a way it is consistent with the point raised by Yahya, that the music itself might actually be higher quality than Latino music.
Hollywood has produced the best ‘serious’ American music for decades now. It’s only obscured by the often trashy films it forms the soundtrack of. Take the theme from Psycho. That’s not really a trashy movie, but it makes it harder to appreciate the quality of the music. Remove the music from the film though, and you’d think you’re listening to Stravinsky. Or take Star Wars. Much as I loved it as a kid, I find it unwatchable as an adult. But the score, oh my, you think Wagner would have been ashamed to put his name on it?
Okay, so you are a big fan of the Catholic Church and Islam? Clearly those modern superhero movies made by Hollywood are “inherently more desirable” than something else.
You are right that some American movies have a superb soundtrack, but music to me is not the most important, or even a third, fourth, tenth, etc, important thing in a life.
In a devotional (Bhaktic ?) sense peehaps.
But the One, the True is also immanent in Sufism.
It is “closer than one’s jugular vein”.
OTOH in Ismailism it is completely transcendent.
https://ismailimail.blog/2017/11/14/sujjawal-ahmad-ismaili-doctrine-of-god-beyond-being-and-non-being/
As of 2019, 40% of Americans believed that man was created by God in his present form and did not evolve. An additional 33% believed that evolution was a process guided by God (the position of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches):
23% of Americans with a university degree believe that man was created in his present form by God and did not evolve. An additional 40% of Americans with a university degree believe that evolution was God’s process.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/261680/americans-believe-creationism.aspx
That’s projecting from past trends, which Martin Armstrong will deeply disagree.
Pardon my ignorance, I still have a long way to go in my life and learning.
(been talking older than I actually am)
That’s because it still had a Navy and the technology to overcome primitives in other parts of the world. But it fell behind not only Germany but also Britain and Russia. Indeed, it’s global empire was dwarfed by Britain’s.
It’s just Neo-Platonism with an inward mental spin. Neo-Platonism is not necessarily about that there is more real or ultimate forms of those things that we perceive through our sensory organs, but that there can be thoughts and ideas that are closer to the absolute, or even different levels of bodies(that we as beings have different layers in our soul or body), more subtle ones. So a Sufi or a Platonist, penetrates through different layers of reality, or different emanations of absolute, until he has reached the ultimate divine, which is beyond all in this reality, and is the source of all. If you think, that Buddhism has something similar, or that Alaya-vijnana even remotely resembles such way of thinking, then you are seriously mistaken and lost, but naturally I believe that you have not made such conclusions.
I’m not sure about the “Day of the Dead” and Roman Catholicism, although there is definitely some Christian symbolism involved, but within the Ukrainian Orthodox and Catholic traditions “Providna Nedilia” is perfectly intertwined with church dogma. This church holiday coincides with the reading of the gospel relating to St Thomas (although I couldn’t tell you the exact reason for this). The holiday had its roots in pagan times, Springtime and renewal. Orthodox Christians always pray for their dearly departed, not only on this holiday, for before God nobody is ever dead. This tradition varies in the different regions of Ukraine, but in most areas food and bread are consumed at the cemetery. The church does not encourage drinking alcohol during this holiday, although the pagan spirit still seems alive as many participants do imbibe a bit, so Altan you’d feel comfortable participating and fit right in. 🙂
Don’t worry, it’s my style to be sometimes a bit too aggressive in a debate. I humbly thank you for your time.
Before WWII the French high culture was dominant in Europe, and French language had the same position as English has now. Culturally France was probably most important power in the 19th century, while its true that the French had problems with achieving the same level of industrialization as Britain or Germany, France lacked native sources of coal, which at least partially explains why her growth slowed.
Well, actually rethinking this, perhaps the 18th century was more the French century, whereas by the 19th century French literary importance had begun to stagnate? German intellectual development seems to have reached lofty heights in the 19th century. If I were in my 20’s I could have given you a precise answer here, when I diligently studied European history, but alas time has moved on as has my memory. 🙂
The 19th century was one of French decline. German, Russian high cultures eclipsed France’s during this time. French (like Latin before it) retained the status of diplomatic language long after the country itself declined in importance; Versailles 1919 was the first major treaty where English and French were both used.
Thank you for the charming quote by the last truly legitimate ruler of Germany.
Have you read my comment 281#?
“I don’t much like Shamanist rituals, there’s often animal sacrifices and drinking of alcohol. Drinking is not a problem to me, but it does not belong to religion, in my opinion”
The language of diplomacy and international organizations was French in the 1930s. Before the war it still had more prestige than English, and much more than German.
I think that peaceful Nazi Germany would have had more stability than post-Franco Spain.
Because they had a large pop, and therefore could maintain a larger cultural complex, to self-perpetuate their system of values. I mean, if you think about it, Germany used to be the second biggest market for Hollywood movies, and they often kowtowed to German censors during the production process.
A peace-orientated Germany would have been able to devote more resources to cultural production, and the result would have been significant.
Yes, there is a lag between a decline and usage as an international language. French did not eclipse Latin until the late 17th or early 18th century.
The Treaty of Westphalia (1648) was written primarily in Latin. The primary language of 18th century diplomatic treaties was French.
The Versailles treaty as written in both English and French. English fully replaced French after World War II.
Sorry, no. The Soviets intervened to prevent exactly this. Chiang was initially focused on eradicating Commies in the Encirclement Campaigns
“Japanese are a disease of the skin, Communism is a disease of the heart“.
Then Zhang Xueliang kidnapped Chiang at the Xi’an Incident to force him to form a United Front. We know now that the Soviets had a role in this,
Chiang Kai-shek’s “secret deal” at Xian and the start of the Sino-Japanese War
https://www.nature.com/articles/palcomms20143
The Soviet Union and the Xi’an Incident
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2949871?seq=1
In New Orleans on All Saints Day it used to be a huge holiday where all the Roman Catholics went to the cemeteries and whitewashed their family crypts. The water table in New Orleans is about 4″ below the ground in New Orleans and they don’t have graves; they have crypts and it’s pretty cool. Each person doesn’t get a crypt. All the family’s bones ended up shoved into a big pile.
https://tulanehullabaloo.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/DSC_0225-900×600.jpg
Ch’an is not about thinking…
This is somewhat mischaracterization. Japan was seeking to turn North China into another Manchuria. Chiang knew war was going to break out anyways, rather than getting bled out, he had a better chance by seizing the strategic initiative, by picking the place of battlefield at Shanghai, in accordance to German advice.
I once again refer to this map.
https://imgur.com/TMoKFUB
You should know this of all people, both Yongle and Manchus* attacked Lower Yangtze via the Beijing-Shanghai axis, which is perfect flat calvary country with no natural barriers.
Japs could have sent 2 pincers at Beijing-Shanghai and Beijing-Wuhan axis, Chiang could have been trapped in the middle, or swept out to sea.
But by seizing initiative, Chiang „traded space for time“, by drawing Japs to Shanghai-Wuhan axis, you can see that’s much more hilly.
This way he delayed the Battle of Wuhan by about 6 months, so he can also have time to retreat further to Chongqing which was the originally designed redoubt.
*The Mongols attacked via 3 pincers, 1. Shanxi-Sichuan, 2. Central Plains-Hubei 3. Beijing-Shanghai. Japs tried to do 1, but Commies had a good guerrilla ops set up in Shanxi.
US was their top materiel supplier until 1940. When the embargoes started, Japs can either barf up all their conquests, or seize British Malaya.
They also falsely assumed that US would go to war to defend British colonies.
If Japs pulled out of China Proper, US/UK would have simply sailed up the Yangtze and regained old imperial/extraterritorial privileges.
I don’t get your point. Songbird wrote that Japan should not have attacked south, and I was puzzled what he meant by that. Did he mean by south, China or colonies of western powers? What am I mischaracterizing?
There are many rivers on central plains, and man made artificial waterways or channels, Chiang could have fortified riverbanks and destroyed bridges, but maybe he did so, I’m not very knowledgeable about the early course of the Japanese invasion. At least he did flood the Yellow river, which shows that he had real resolve and courage.
I don’t know how much I care about culture and art, other than music, where yes, I do think that the US and Anglo production were well above any other during the 20th century.
Just like commenter Martyanov once said that for him the ultimate measure of a country’s power was performance at war, for me GDP per capita is the ultimate measure of a country’s power and success. No society wants to remain poorer and more undeveloped than its neighbors so, regardless of its limitations, GDP pc is the best metric we have to assess a society’s success. And in that respect, the US has had and still has a lot to teach the rest of the world.
One may argue that the US derives some of its economic power from its political and military supremacy but one should be careful not to confuse cause and effect. A large and economically successful country can hardly help being also militarily powerful. And, by the same token, I guess an economic superpower also gets to export its cultural production and even arbiter which other countries’ cultural production gets exported.
What you’re describing has been my experience of Latins in the USA as well. Over the last few years, I’ve spent some months at a time across various parts of California.
Didn’t quite know what to expect based on some of the online chat and whilst I’m sure there are some genuine ‘La Raza’ troublemakers, drunk Aztec dwarves and problems with drug gangs, pretty much all I met were decent people – and compared to first-gen immigrant Indians, Vietnamese, Arabs, etc. out there, just a lot more ‘normal’ and it didn’t feel like Mexicans as a people had an ‘angle’ or trying to hustle you, like other groups tend to do.
Actually they declared a war and did nothing. That’s exactly my point – look at the behavior. Western powers didn’t fight for the east. They let Poland collapse, any idea that they were going to fight in the future is unsupported by their behavior. Not a single Westerner died for Poland. That is always the case.
Once Germany attacked Soviet Union in 1941 most of Western Europe joined in: from Italy to Spain, Belgium, Norway, France, Holland, of course Austria… West fought with Hitler against Russia and some of the worst atrocities and fanatical troops were Western European volunteers. (Most Eastern countries joined in too but that is a different discussion.)
It is the Western behaviour and not their speeches after the war that I was describing. We understand that it was divisive, that there were many others who were anti-Nazi. Eventually, once Russia won everyone quickly switched to being anti-German. After 1945 they started to rewrite their own shameful history.
America got extremely lucky geographically and geopolitically, it’s almost like Britain, but a hundred times larger, a continent sized island, with vast oceans on both sides as impregnable walls defending it from all invasions. Some great states like Sparta, Qin or Russia grew in a harsh terrain, surrounded by enemies, and with little resources(true for Russia till late 18th century), but still overcame bad odds by sheer willpower and resolve, don’t confuse America’s extraordinary luck as a sign of cultural greatness.
To be perfectly honest, in the States here I’ve never seen anybody drinking alcohol at the cemetery during this holiday or the religious ceremonies. I don’t even recall people eating any food there either, although plenty of people would leave some bread, or fruit and candy by the gravesites, as I’ve mentioned above. I do plan to resume eating meat and dairy products (eggs) this coming Easter Sunday, after services in Church in a home setting with my family and friends and drink a few alcoholic beverages and will be sure to drink at least one to your health, Altan!
One aspect of WW2 that is sometimes lacking in some Western accounts is the role of France and the French armed forces in 1940. In the inter-war period France was supposed to be one of the world’s foremost military powers, and in theory the French/British/Polish alliance should have been able to defeat the newly reformed Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe comfortably.
As I understand it after the small Saar incursion during the Polish campaign, when the French command was too cautious to mount any major offensive into Germany, the Franco-British alliance, with the assumed support of Belgium and possibly Holland, was still understood as being more militarily powerful than the German forces and capable of defeating them.
The family that prays together, stays together! 🙂
With the notable exception of Márquez, the Latin American personages you mentioned are all of entirely European ancestry. Borges was Spanish-Portuguese-English, Sabato was Italian, and Cortázar was Spanish-French-German. Márquez’s ancestry is uncertain, but his ancestors were mostly from the Sucre region as well as the Valledupar-La Guajira region in the northeast; I think it’s safe to say that he was mostly descended from Spanish colonists, but had significant Zenú and/or Wayuu indigenous ancestry. Niemeyer, despite his surname, was of almost entirely Portuguese ancestry, with the exception of one distant German ancestor.
The only Latin American Nobel laureates in literature who have significant indigenous ancestry, aside from the aforementioned Márquez, are Gabriela Mistral and Octavio Paz, which gives non-European Latin America only one more literary laureate than the Middle East and North Africa. The reality is that human accomplishment in Latin America has been largely carried out by a small European (and East Asian) minority, with the mestizo and indigenous people less relevant. The colonial architecture is entirely Spanish or Portuguese in origin; mestizos and indigenes were mostly just laborers. As AltanBakshi pointed out, most of the exceptions are from Mexico, which unsurprisingly had its own large civilization before Spanish colonization. Nevertheless, the vast majority of important early artists in Mexico were of entirely Spanish descent: Juan Rodríguez Juárez, Cristóbal de Villalpando, José de Ibarra, Francisco Clapera, Luis de Mena, Rafael Ximeno y Planes, Manuel Tolsá, etc. (exceptions: Juan Correa, Miguel Cabrera); the Mexico City Metropolitan Cathedral you posted pictures of was designed by a Spaniard, and the paintings inside were mostly painted by Spaniards. The vast majority of later artists, however, were mestizos: Juan Cordero, Hermenegildo Bustos, Felipe Santiago Gutiérrez, Casimiro Castro, Saturnino Herrán, José María Jara, José María Velasco, Félix Parra, etc., and of course the famous muralists and Frida Kahlo.
In scientific Nobel Prizes, the European dominance in Latin America is total: Milstein (Ashkenazi Jewish), Leloir (French-Basque), Houssay (French), Medawar (Lebanese-English, moved to England at the age of 3), Benacerraf (Sephardic Jewish), and Molina (Mexican of uncertain ancestry, but his family was from the Veracruz elite; he was probably of entirely Spanish ancestry). On the other hand, the Middle East and North Africa has Abdus Salam (Physics 1979), Ahmed Zewail (Chemistry 1999), and Aziz Sancar (Chemistry 2015), all Muslim. Latin America does better however in elite scientific research (726.94 on the Nature Index compared to only 440.08 for the entire Muslim world). Latin America excluding Puerto Rico also has a higher nominal GDP per capita ($7,413) than the Middle East and North Africa including petrostates ($7,205). Excluding petrostates it’s $4,856.
Saint Petersburg’s Baroque architecture was also almost entirely designed by Westerners, and built in a Western (not Russian) style. Italian and Italian-Swiss architects in Saint Petersburg included Giovanni Maria Fontana, Nicola Michetti, Domenico Quadri, Giacomo Quarenghi, Carlo and Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli (founder of Rastrellian Baroque), Antonio Rinaldi, Carlo Rossi, and the Trezzini family, most notably Domenico Trezzini (founder of Petrine Baroque) and Pietro Antonio Trezzini. French architects included Jean-Baptiste Vallin de la Mothe and Jean-Baptiste Alexandre Le Blond. German architects included Georg Johann Mattarnovi, Gottfried Johann Schädel, Andreas Schlüter, and Georg Friedrich Veldten. Russian architects included Mikhail Zemtsov (trained by Domenico Trezzini), Pyotr Yeropkin (trained by Trezzini and Michetti), Alexander Kokorinov (who built only two buildings), Savva Chevakinsky, and Ivan Starov. The city’s neoclassical architecture is also in a Western (not Russian) style. So I think it’s more appropriate to say that Saint Petersburg’s historic architecture is Western and not Russian, with the most important contribution being Italian. Of course there are exceptions, like the Church of the Savior on Blood, but these are exceptions.
Note to Anatoly: I would greatly appreciate it if you could refrain in advance from republishing my comments as separate posts or reposting them anywhere outside this comments section. Thanks.
I didn’t mean to correct you in specific, just the general characterization of a planned 1937 Japanese invasion, as in German invasion of USSR 1941.
There was no such Japanese plan, it just spiraled out of control from a number of „incidents“. Otherwise they wouldn’t have been so clumsy and incompetent at the strategic level.
I’ll tell you everything you’d want to know, lol
First, let’s look at historical precendants
Below are the maps for
1. Jurchen invasion of Song
2. Mongol invasion of Jin and Southern Song
3. Yongle’s Yingnan Campaign
4. Manchu invasion of Ming
5. CCP Commies Huaihai and Pingjin Campaigns
https://imgur.com/a/BaixFQN
https://imgur.com/a/vsLDzMC
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b6/Jingnan_Campaign_%28English%29.svg/422px-Jingnan_Campaign_%28English%29.svg.png
https://imgur.com/a/EjFzN7B
https://imgur.com/Me6Z7IK
You can see that each one of the offensives was launched from Beijing, 1 and 3 were Blitzkrieg style calvary pincers on the Beijing-Jiangnan axis. In 2, 4 and 5 was consolidation on the North China Plains, before moving South.
This is a tried and true strategy since antiquity because Central Plains is the ideal terrain for military operations.
Thank you Mr. Hack, I will also drink one for your health and a second one for your family’s health, and even a third one for Ukraine’s wellbeing, without any political implications! It’s always good to have reasons for drinking…
The classical Puritan types were hardline Calvinists, with a dark view of the inherently sinful nature of humanity, and convinced of the need for very strict discipline and harsh ascetic morality. The woke and SJWs are more like some kind of inversion or mirror image of this, the only thing Puritan about them is the way in which they try to enforce their particular code.
Otherwise, the classic examples are lewd and sensuous materialists, fixated on worshipping individualistic, impulsive criminal types and engaging in histrionic, self indulgent displays of emotion and outrage. It seems like they have embraced for themselves the old Calvinist ideas of witches and witchcraft and fused them with some of the darker elements of African folk religion and fetish cults, then they seek gratification by pursuing this in a bizarre puritanical way.
I really do love military historical maps, thank you! It’s news to me that Jurchens crossed Yangtze and advanced so far in the south, interesting. Strange that Jin did not try annexing the lands between Huai and Yangtze.
I disagree. I believe that composers like Rachmaninoff, Mahler, Sibelius, or Richard Strauß are worth more than whatever was created in the US. I say that as someone who does listen to some kinds of popular music created in the US.
That’s exactly how French-British behaved. There are two possibilities:
– West didn’t fight Nazis in 1939-40 because they didn’t think any casualties were worth saving Poland
– West didn’t fight because they were ok with Nazi Germany as long as it attacked only east.
It was a combination of both. In May 1941, one month before Germany’s attack on Russia, Hitler’s second in command, Rudolf Hess, flew to England and offered an alliance or cease-fire so Germany can focus on fighting Russia. It is not clear what deal was made, but it is a fact that England stayed out of the war in Europe for exactly 3 years from June 1941 to June 1944.
It takes real hypocrites in the West, after 1938 Munich treaty with Hitler and de facto Europe ceasefire with Germany for 3 years in 1941-44, to criticise retroactively Russia for having a 2-year ceasefire in 1939-41.
But what choice do they have but to lie? The reality of the Western behavior in WWII was too ugly, so they lie and hope people forgot.
“Population is power, so it pays to keep track of it (along with national IQ and GDPcc), for those with an interest in geopolitics and futurism.”
What did I miss? Yes you qualified it – national IQ and GDPcc – but the raw statement that population is power is so wrong that even later qualifications don’t do.
Power is the net productive capacity of a society in excess of subsistence, coupled not so much with mean intelligence (except perhaps negatively at the lower extremes), and with a work ethic, respect for the rule of law, and sense of common interest especially amongst the elites.
There were basically two types of European settlement in America:
– Puritans who were settlers coming to work – this also fits the later arrivals who went farming to Midwest…
– “Virginia” type based on people coming so they wouldn’t have to work – they had indentured labor and slaves from the very beginning.
Today’s America is a majority Virginia type society with an admixture of Puritan work-ethic and self-righteousness. The Virginia type migration is people going where life is easier, expecting some sort of indentured or slave labor to help them live well. It is a plunder mentality.
The woke people are an ugly combination of both: unable and unwilling to really work, but with a Puritan style. It was bound to happen eventually – the dynamic was always there. Now it is here and it isn’t pretty.
Generally agree with the excellent comment but:
Does this not resemble the inherent and essential evil of privileged whites in their ideology?
Woke are having less sex than previous generations. Sex has often become litigious and involves public condemnation. In extreme examples, among trans, people even remove their sexual organs.
It’s a good thought — a regime’s long-term success depending on coherent ideology and cultural self-confidence among the middle classes, which Spain lacked but perhaps Germany could have retained. I’ve puzzled over the matter of Franco for a while, as he was viewed as a hero for many anti-Communist Catholic conservatives, yet all his efforts came to naught. Was there anything he could have done?
But I suppose that while, as you observe, economics was Communism’s fatal flaw, if Nazism possessed an equivalent flaw, it was aggression and militarism. Though Hitler did make many peaceful statements from 1933-1939, promising that he and the German people did not want to repeat the horrors of WW1. If Hitler himself could not be counted upon to preserve peace for very long (imagine instead that he dies early), perhaps a successor could take Hitler’s peaceful statements and say that he was upholding the true vision of Nazism as revealed by the Fuhrer-as-statesman, a man who had reformed and evolved beyond the author of Mein Kampf with his demand for lebensraum. But such a leader would surely have a militarist wing of the party to contend with.
Our Pinocchio is at it again:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Malta_(World_War_II)
The Siege of Malta in World War II was a military campaign in the Mediterranean Theatre. From June 1940 to November 1942, the fight for the control of the strategically important island of the British Crown Colony of Malta pitted the air forces and navies of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany against the Royal Air Force (RAF) and the Royal Navy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_invasion_of_Sicily
9 July – 17 August 1943
The Allied invasion of Sicily, codenamed Operation Husky, was a major campaign of World War II, in which the Allies took the island of Sicily from the Axis powers (Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany). It began with a large amphibious and airborne operation, followed by a six-week land campaign, and initiated the Italian Campaign.
The Allied land forces were from the American, British and Canadian armies, and were structured as two task forces. The Eastern Task Force (also known as Task Force 545) was led by General Sir Bernard Montgomery and consisted of the British Eighth Army (which included the 1st Canadian Infantry Division). The Western Task Force (Task Force 343) was commanded by Lieutenant General George S. Patton and consisted of the American Seventh Army. The two task force commanders reported to Alexander as commander of the 15th Army Group
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Avalanche
Operation Avalanche was the codename for the Allied landings near the port of Salerno, executed on 9 September 1943, part of the Allied invasion of Italy. The Italians withdrew from the war the day before the invasion, but the Allies landed in an area defended by German troops. Planned under the name Top Hat, it was supported by the deception plan Operation Boardman.
The landings were carried out by the US Fifth Army, under American General Mark W. Clark. It comprised the U.S. VI Corps, the British X Corps and the US 82nd Airborne Division, a total of about nine divisions. Its primary objectives were to seize the port of Naples to ensure resupply, and to cut across to the east coast, trapping the Axis troops further south.
I think that you may be confusing cause and effect here too.
The US has some of the most beautiful, temperate, fertile and resource-rich lands in the world. But is that not why so many Europeans decided to emigrate here in the first place and expanded their presence from one ocean to the other?
I see very little of coincidence and thus of luck there.
OK, disagreement acknowledged. But if I’m not mistaken, the classical music composers that you mention were all born in the 19th century and continued composing pieces inspired in the romantic movement characteristic of that century.
If we talk about new styles of music that appeared in the 20th century and quickly became popular in most of the world, the US looks like the clear winner to me.
When it comes to classical music, I much prefer composers from the classical period anyway.
The autistic guy strikes again.
Obviously I was talking about continental Europe, I don’t have to spell that out for you, do I? Malta? Seriously? At this point you are just self-mocking. Even Sicily and south of Italy were very marginal.
Where were the brave Anglo fighters when Germans were massacring millions of Poles? How come the Canadians didn’t invade? Maybe, just maybe, it didn’t really bother them that much…
For jazz music, sure. For garbage such as rap or hip hop, yes. But the British probably produced better rock music than did the USA (from “classics” like Beatles, Rolling Stones, Queen, Led Zeppelin to punk or post-punk) and rock music would seem to be more significant than jazz.
Italy isn’t in continental Europe? And didn’t Britain ever bomb the Germans before June 1944? Will you now claim that Germany isn’t on the continent either?
Let’s recall, liar, that you wrote: “ England stayed out of the war in Europe for exactly 3 years from June 1941 to June 1944.”
Just one example of England staying out of the war in Europe until 1944:
Bombing of Lübeck
28-29 Mar 1942
The first major bombing by the Royal Air Force Bomber Command was conducted against the port city of Lübeck. The city dated back to the Hanseatic days, thus many buildings were made of wood; Harris said that Lübeck was built “more like a fire-lighter than a human habitation”. 234 Wellington and Stirling bombers dropped about 400 tons of bombs. Though German defenses were light, 12 of the RAF bombers were still lost in the attack. The damage inflicted was heavy. The first of three waves of bombers used the new “blockbuster” bombs to blast over the building roofs and windows, allowing subsequent bombers and their incendiary bombs to contents inside of buildings on fire. 1,468 buildings were destroyed, 2,180 were seriously damaged, and 9,103 were lightly damaged; together, this represented 62% of all buildings in Lübeck.
You not only lied about the details you also got the big picture wrong.
Britain was driven out of the Continent and was too weak to mount an invasion of France. Germany wasn’t making at attempt invade England either, you know. The last time someone successfully attempted such a thing without already having a foothold may have been in the 11th century, IIRC.
So it bombed German cities, and worked over the soft underbelly, fighting in North Africa, then Sicily, then the Italian mainland.
They were massacring German civilians from the skies.
If you were honest you would have just mentioned that the Western allies were timid and didn’t help Poland in 1939. But you couldn’t help yourself and made up a bunch on nonsense, as is your usual habit.
Although Nazi Germany was in below replacement fertility rate during its twelve actually existing years, which is partly why its propaganda focused on natality, and tried to make having more children seem prestigious, as happened in the Soviet Union as fertility rates fall below replacement 30-40 years later.
Cultures which are obsessed with water – can be a sign that they live in desert.
For example, political idealization about antiracism – usually an indication of multiracial countries with a lot of racism, i.e. USA, Brazil. Political idealization about anticorruption – the corrupt countries. Idealism of natality – the low fertility countries. Etc.
There is such a situation though, when people (especially people like journalists) seem to often confuse the causes and responses, and they might believe that Ancient Greeks were a harmonious culture because they idealized harmony when it might indicate the opposite.
France and Britain did try to fight the Nazis in 1940, but they were impressively defeated.
From what I have read the original plan in 1939 was for a major French offensive while the Germans were fighting the Poles, but the French command would not take the risk of waging an offensive war outside of their extensive and very expensive network of fortifications. It’s true in that way that the French politicians believed that a defensive battle was more acceptable to public opinion, and in the years leading up to the declaration of war and during the ‘phoney war’ period the French electorate was very divided and fractious. But it was also believed that the great battle that was meant to happen on the Maginot line would lead to the total defeat of Germany, the end of the Nazi regime, liberation of Poland and so on.
After 1940, Britain lost its only field army and was lucky to save the personnel. After that the preoccupation was defending Britain itself and the Empire, which came under attack from multiple sides. An important thing here was military and industrial unpreparedness in the pre-war period. Also, a correct appreciation that any British attempt to invade mainland Europe without very significant American support would be defeated by the Germans (tested at least once at Dieppe in 1942). These are the kind of reasons put forward as to why Britain stuck to strategic bombing and building up forces in the 1941-44 period.
From what I know of the understanding of geo-politics in that era, neither Britain or France could easily accept Germany establishing control of the USSR, that would have meant German control of the ‘great continental landmass’, making Germany top European power and giving them the scope and resources to later dominate India and the Middle East.
I’m not certain how much interest there has been in the Nazi-Soviet Pact in either Britain or France, this whole early war era is generally not a popular topic, apart from Dunkirk because there is the legend around that. AFAIK the main interest in that issue seems to have come from within Poland, the Baltic states, and Romania towards the end of the Communist period. I only read up on it myself after talking about it with Romanians, for example.
Final golden age of creativity of European music can probably be plausibly marked as the 1910s, as Scriabin premieres “Prometheus”. Schoenberg was leaving behind the late Romanticism of “Verklarte Nacht”, and writing his theory of harmony.
Prokofiev’s First Symphony feels like a sign of the lateness of the times, as the brilliant young composer senses a need to retreat to writing in style of a century before he was born.
And then after that, the main volume of creativity in creating original music, was no longer Europe, but from North and South America.
By the 1940s, the most creative music is more being heard in jazz bars in Harlem, Buenos Aires or Havana.
While Europe falls into exhaustion, America has breathed new winds into music across the 20th century, although even the new forms like Jazz are collapsing by the 1970s. Jazz had an unfortunately very accelerated lifecycle, in my opinion. (By the 1980s, Wynton Marsalis is already like Prokofiev at start of his First Symphony, who self-consciously acts like he was born too late).
The big difference I would see is that the original Calvinist Puritans would have seen original sin as part of a universal human condition, so blacks were as much in need of discipline and humility as any other person.
And, the original sin of whites in the Woke ideology, at least on the surface, revolves around temporal things like inequality in the standard of living of different racial groups, or perception of mental well being and ethnic pride, as opposed to something spiritual.
This is true, I was thinking of some of the Woke ‘celebrities’ (like the Youtuber Vaush) as I was writing that. There is an unusual thing, while they are having less sex they are in some way doctrinally committed to protecting and promoting the kind of sexual behaviour the Calvinists Puritans would have found highly depraved, even if it is only in theory. People who are supporters of either chastity, no fap/no e-thots or who are too enthusiastic about exclusive heterosexuality seem to be proscribed.
France was surely the most culturally fertile in the 19th century, and produced much of the world’s best literature, visual arts and architecture (as well as dominating consumer trends like design).
If you compared to Russia, then the only area which reached above France overall in 19th century, was those performance aspects of arts like piano playing and ballet pedagogy, where Russia becomes world leader. (Russian piano pedagogy became the most hardcore of the world in the late 19th century). But in terms of composition of symphonic music and opera, than 19th century the body of works which France produced across the century, can be second only to German-speaking world and Italy.
French is also surely overall superior to Germany in 19th century in visual art and the novel.
However, German peoples were the most creative nationality in music and philosophy from the late 18th century, and all of the 19th century
In terms of the novel, perhaps France, England, Russia were leaders in the 19th century. I think the best novels I’ve read were by French writers.
I’ve only read one 19th century German novel, so I’m not qualified to give any opinion about their novels.
If you said on balance what was the most culturally fertile nationality of the 19th century, then it will be either France or Germany. And I guess you could only say Germany was superior to France if you prioritized symphonic music and philosophy.
Oops I wrote this sentence confusingly. I meant in this sentence that the most culturally fertile epoch for France, was the 19th century, not that France was the most culturally fertile country of the 19th century (although the latter is also likely).
I guess it is possible that someone who especially prioritized philosophy and symphonic music (and other humanist academic disciplines like history), could believe that German-speaking world was even more culturally fertile than France in the 19th century.
Although hardcore in terms of the teaching strictness; the form of the teaching was derivative of German world’s teaching, and with the best teachers and methods imported from Germany.
Right. Exactly as I said: Britain stayed out of the war in Europe from June 1941 to June 1944. So did US, Canada, … the bombing and the minor marginal operations in Mediterranean – let’s not forget “Malta” – were not fighting a war in a meaningful way, they were two orders of magnitude less than the war on the eastern front. For those 3 years only Russia fought. And not only Germany, but most of Europe that was allied with Germany.
Did Britain quietly made a deal when R. Hess came in May 1941? It certainly looks like that, maybe Britain should show its archives. Hess went to ask for a 3-year land cease-fire on the Western front – and Britain stayed out for 3 years. Coincidence?
Poles would not exist today as a nation if Russia didn’t sacrifice half a million soldiers to defeat and push Germany out of Poland. Is that enough sacrifice for you? Or would your sick mind prefer that they were all dead?
Lots of evasive words to cover up the fact that neither French nor British were willing to fight Hitler as long as Nazis were attacking eastern Europe. There are always “reasons“, but that doesn’t change what happened.
This is so obvious that the desperate attempts to deny it are embarrassing. But then Anglos like to live in a make-believe world where their myths replace reality. Today they are doing it again.
Repeating a lie does not make it true.
Britain was bombing European cities, which are in Europe, and attacking where it could, in Italy. Which is also in Europe.
First you wrote “England stayed out of the war in Europe for exactly 3 years from June 1941 to June 1944” and now you add this “in a meaningful way.”
Germany almost won on the Eastern front. Every little counted. How much of its forces were diverted to deal with the British “distraction?”
Correction: Poles would not exist today if Germany hadn’t attacked its friend and co-conspirator, the Soviet Union. Which didn’t seem to mind German killing of Poles prior to be attacked by Germany. In fact, the USSR killed about 100,o00 Poles of its own during this time. After having killed about 150,000 within its own borders during the 1930s.
You think they sacrificed for Poland? Are you lying to yourself as well as to us?
Sorry, I am not like you Beckow, who views the deaths of millions of Boomers from Covid with glee. Your mind jumps to the idea of someone wishing millions were dead. This is your pathology, not mine.
Having had your face rubbed in your own BS that you provided, maybe you will shriek about autisms? It is all you have left. LOL.
In the 19th century Russia easily surpassed France in literature.
Here is a “top ten list” of books of the 19th century. It is not authoritative, of course, but such lists always end up being dominated by Russian books:
http://toptenbooks.net/books/top-ten-books-19th-century
Only one book by a French author, Madame Bovary (I personally found that it paled in comparison to Dostoyevsky). 50% of the these 10 books were Russian. Even if Balzac were added, Russia would still dominate.
Another list; Russians dominate the 19th century here, also:
https://thegreatestbooks.org/
Music? Germany was the leader. Also in philosophy. But France did clearly dominate the visual arts. Architecture? I am not an expert, admittedly my knowledge is rather parochial to the USA, which produced the first skyscraper in Chicago in the late 19th century. But this random list does not suggest French dominance:
https://www.thefamouspeople.com/19th-century-architects.php
A declaration of war is a pretty big thing. Even Hitler, one of the biggest gamblers in history, couldn’t ignore that, and was forced to attack France soon after his victorious campaign in Poland. The formal declaration of war meant that there was no way Hitler could have conquered the East without first conquering the West.
But it’s even better because the western powers believed that the mere threat of a declaration of war would be enough to deter Hitler from attacking Poland. So in fact they did what they believed was enough to prevent Hitler from attacking Poland. This is the polar opposite of being cool with Hitler conquering the East. Now when Hitler went on to attack Poland anyway, they realized that they would have to fight a war. They knew that time was on their side so didn’t want to start a battle too early in the game, but how does this mean that they didn’t want to fight Hitler at all? They literally ensured that it would happen, and were preparing for it.
BTW the naval blockade in itself could have destroyed the German war effort if the USSR didn’t start to suddenly supply Germany with lots of war materials like oil and similar.
Now like I wrote above, the whole German campaign in France was the direct result of the western declaration of war. But even before that, during the Saar Offensive, the French lost 2,000 men, probably a third of whom were killed, that’s several hundreds of Frenchmen dying during Hitler’s Polish Campaign. There was also a naval blockade of Germany and German ships were sunk by the Allies – obviously Allied ships were sunk by the Germans in exchange.
Now you can say that the westerners didn’t do enough. But they still did sacrifice thousands of men already in the first months of the war (many of them drowning in the sea) and were running the risk of a German campaign into France (which eventually did happen and resulted in an early German victory), so it’s a falsification of history that they wanted Hitler to conquer the Slavs. They weren’t even okay with it, or else they wouldn’t have gone to such lengths to prevent him from conquering those Slavs.
The reasons for this are pretty obvious. A Germany which conquered the Slavic lands up to the Ural or beyond (and populated it with tens of millions of additional Germans) would have become a superpower, potentially more dangerous to Anglo world supremacy than the USSR ever was. So that’s why they didn’t like the idea of Hitler conquering his Lebensraum.
Except for Austria, which was a part of Germany at the time, this was a small number of volunteers. More Russians than Frenchmen served in uniform the Germans. This is a blatant falsification of history.
A very small number of people. The vast majority of soldiers from Western Europe outside Germany actually fought against rather than for the German cause. Again, a blatant falsification of history.
The Anglo powers were literally at war with Germany, in the case of Britain since day three, while the Americans started to supply weapons to the USSR the moment Hitler started Barbarossa and American ships started sinking German ships earlier than that.
Again, a blatant falsification of history.
Lots of evasive words to cover up the obvious fact that if Britain and France truly didn’t want to fight Hitler, they simply could have not declared war on Germany. The choice was entirely their own. Nobody put a gun to their head and forced them. America would have been perfectly content with their decision. The Soviets wouldn’t have been surprised by it, but what they thought didn’t matter anyway.
You deserve points for creative interpretations, but if we’re both allowed to take such liberties with the facts, I could argue it’s just as great a historiographical scandal that Britain and France’s declaration of war on Germany is the event that has come down to us as “Germany started World War II.”
I kinda sorta agree, but they could have screwed up their situation. Russia eventually got into a good position by 1913, the only thing they needed was keeping the peace. But even so, they could have ended the war as a victor. Instead… we all know what happened.
Also, America seems to be screwing its own situation right now.
They were strong, but the French military wasn’t really built for a modern offensive campaign. France was also too small and not protected by a sea or ocean, so after the first lost battle they never got a second chance.
Germany dropped below replacement fertility during the Weimar years (interestingly it kept dropping despite the economic boom in the late 1920s before the Depression), but then reached replacement levels by the late 1930s. This despite living standards being lower than in 1928, due to the burdens of rearmament.
However, the outbreak of the war resulted in a drop in fertility, for obvious reasons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Germany#Statistics_since_1900
Alternative view is that the security guarantees and declarations of war by British and French were a ruse to lure Poland into a trap, similar to what was done to Czechoslovakia which also had guarantees but ended up being invaded by Germany and Poland and Hunary together post Munich.
If Poland realized how weak it was and there were no security guarantees, there was a possibility of Poland capitulating to German demands and surrendering Danzig corridor. This would have slowed down Hitlers’ March to the East and that wasn’t Western plan.
Poland was already a hubristic aggressive dictatorship, it wouldn’t take much to goad them into a fight they were certain to lose. As for Hitler being deterred, Danzig was like 80% NSDAP and had a Nazi mayor, it was more pro-Hitler than Hitler himself lol. There was no way to avoid fighting there because even if Hitler didn’t invade, Danzig would revolt and chase Poles away, at which point they would reunite with Germany on national and ethnic grounds. And Poland didn’t have an argument against them because Poland annexed Zaolie from Czechoslovakia also on national and ethnic grounds.
So to any contemporary observer, it was clear that Danzig Corridor would be going to Germany simply because of the local situation and no deterrent would have stopped it. The only question was, would the rest of Poland follow?
Of course, Soviet Union saved half a Poland with Molotov Ribbentrop pact by intervening two weeks after Germany. If you were a Jew, being in the Soviet occupation zone was like winning a lottery. The worst massacre was Katyn which was only 20,000 dead, rather small as far as massacres go. Germans were killing what, a million per year. And Americans were burning 100,000’s of people alive with napalm (Tokyo bombings) and nuclear fire. Overall, you were much better off getting overrun by the Soviets.
That’s only true if you’re referring to originality rather than quality. But if quality matters, people like Ennio Morricone, Nino Rota, Maurice Jarre, Vangelis were hardly bums. As I said earlier, their quality is obscured by their association with movies, but the quality is assuredly there (remember, movies today are the opera of yesteryear).
Also, “unless you’re number one, you’re exhausted” – spent, done for, stick a fork in it – is rather flawed logic.
I don’t think this is true. The data I’ve seen show per capita GDP to have recovered its level of the late 20s by the mid-30s, and exceeded it handsomely by the end of the decade. Rearmament didn’t use slave labor, so even if consumer goods were fewer or more expensive than people might have wished, they had the option of saving their income.
Some 40% of German war production went to the air force (including the air defense), at least two thirds of which was committed to fighting the western Allies. Another 15% of the war production went into the navy, which, as you can imagine, was also fought predominantly the western Allies. Now the army wasn’t exclusively fighting the Soviets either, probably at least some 10% of the German Panzerwaffe fought in Africa.
So well over a third, close to half, of German war production went against the western Allies. And let’s not forget the western Allies supplying weapons and other war materials (like airplane quality high octane fuel or copper cables for field telephones, or radio sets etc.)
I very much like Debussy and Ravel in music, though if I had to choose, I’d choose German music which has more to offer. There are a number of lesser French composers who were also good, just perhaps not as good as the best Germans. For example I only know one symphony of César Franck, which is very good, but I’d like to learn some other pieces from him.
France also produced one of the best national cuisines in the world. I think it also matters somewhat.
So French culture was still on a very high level. But overall they didn’t dominate.
If there would have been a great war without participation of Russia, it would had likely ended in the victory of Central Powers, in such situation Russia’s position would have been extremely precarious in the 1920s and 30s.
Taxes were much higher, and Germany was spending 20% of its national income on defense by 1938. German post-tax wages thus remained below their pre-Nazi peak.
But you might have a point in that the extra children might have come from the lower middle class and below, while the living standards might’ve actually improved, and the middle class, upper middle class and upper class bore probably the brunt of the higher taxes. Yes, there was also deficit spending, though it was not the main source of the defense outlays.
“In the 19th century Russia easily surpassed France in literature.” – Nobody in the 19th century would say so. But what you are saying might be true only in the retrospect in the 20th century in particular in the Anglophone world in terms of literary canon which promoted Russian literature while always being in a fierce competition with the French. Stendhal, Balzac and Flaubert preceded Russian writers and had broad and deep background of secondary French writers while Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Chekov who came later and who were outstanding were like a spurious growth on the desert that suddenly bloomed and somebody took a notice.
Interest in Russian literature among the elites who promoted it had something in common with the phenomena of promotion of Italian cinema in 1950s, Czech cinema in 1960s or Iranian in 1990s and Korean cinema in 2000s. You had to be somewhat exotic and yet universal. And what is universal if not what are the Western values. The recognition of Russian literature was a reward for it paying a homage to the West, its values and its methods of writing narratives.
Total tax receipts are largely accounted for by the top earners, so whatever increases their were shouldn’t be expected to have had much dampening effect on fertility (which was the original reason you brought up prosperity). The fact that 20% of income was going to defense is irrelevant to the question of post-tax wages.
In 1938 Ambassador Bullitt in conversation with Ambassador Potocki (November 1938):
In 1945 Herbert Hoover talked with Joseph Kennedy:
https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-understanding-world-war-ii/?showcomments#comment-3478185
Correct. This would have been a good argument for Russia to have joined a Franco-German war on the French side. But of course that is not what actually occurred
First a big shoutout to Erdal Arikan for his breakthrough in information theory.
Now you might ask where were the US corporations in this 5G race how could they completely miss it.
I’ll tell you how.
That’s where the money went enriching the executives who bought back company shares to bump up their options. If this isn’t rigging the market I don’t know what is rigging the market. It’s all in accordance with their ‘maximizing shareholder value’ philosophy which hides the fact that the executives of these companies are the biggest beneficiaries of these buybacks. Add to that Private Equity terrorists who stripmine firms playing such mind bogglingly complex financial games that it would take an army of forensic accountants and lawyers to figure out what’s going on. Research & Development are such quaint old fashioned terms.
From the link.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/stock-buybacks-have-totaled-53-trillion-over-the-past-decade-has-that-contributed-to-us-pandemic-failures-2020-07-29
This’s legally approved corporate malfeasance of course made possible by decade long QE by the Fed.
You are not Polish I take it.
The problem was they got it 5X.
1 Russians take over and do plenty of killing
2 Germans move in and do a lot more killing
3 After the main German Army mass moves on angry Poles kill every Pole who cooperated with the Russians in step 1
4 Russians move in again and do a lot more killing
5 After the main Russian Army mass moves on angry Poles kill every Pole who cooperated with the Germans in steps 2 and 3
This also happened in the countries north and south of Poland. Not too many people were doing anything like cashing lottery tickets. The people in the German occupation zone actually got one less episode so there is an argument they got a better deal but that is like would you rather die by fire or by drowning.
The people in the German occupation zone went into camps where they were killed at 10 times the rate on the Soviet side. Going to GULAG in Siberia from Poland 1940 was the winning move (unless you were rich and could afford tickets to London). Only around 200k died in there as I recall, and that was over extended period of time. GULAG was relatively nice.
https://youtu.be/XPw19AGleDI
Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan seem to have come to blows over water rights:
https://tass.com/world/1285143
I wonder if this foreshadows anything in the dispute between Egypt and Ethiopia.
Say my name.
I would normally agree. But your failure to even mention the almighty Pink Floyd prevents me from endorsing this proclamation.
I wonder if it brings back the old Aryanem Vaejah vs Turan type of conflict. Especially now that Erdogan seems bent on trying to bring to life Turkish nationalist “Turanian Army” project.
Also, Americans are probably watching these skirmishes with a lot of interest. Once they’re gone from AfPak, from NATO perspective the whole region would be better put ablaze to upset China and Russia (in that order).
Isn’t Chinese border like a few hundred miles from the place where the Tadjik – Kirghiz fighting is ongoing right now?
https://www.ibtimes.com.au/sites/au.ibtimes.com/files/styles/v2_article_large/public/2021/04/30/kyrgyzstan-tajikistan.jpg
SEA countries in Indochina have not had much change in their populations recently, speaking of Burma, where are all those brand new weapons that the Kachins have come from? Is China supplying them to keep the Tatmadaw from dominating Burma? And where are they getting all those uniforms? Hardly the ancient Lee Enfields that the Afghan rebels had in the 80s?
Seems to be related to an awkward border – an enclave. I’m not sure it will really lead to anything big.
Central Asia has never been an interesting place to America. I can’t really see a political impetus for getting involved there. I don’t think most politicians here could find either place on a map.
The frontier was long settled by the time Italians, Irish, Ashkenazi Jews, and eastern Euros were entering the U.S. in massive numbers. They came in as laborers, created ghettos, and had the effect of making the natives leave the cities for other places, which fed more into the “need” for labor. It’s the exact same pattern Blacks had in northern cities. A smaller amount of labor in northern cities would have necessitated higher wages for natives, and probably would have increased fertility. The interests of industrialists should be not be assumed to be the same as the country as a whole. Moreover, the problems these people brought were larger than these supposed economic benefits.
The most harmful effects of liberalism are mass immigration and increased crime. The Ellis Islanders were a group of immigrants who caused a large increase in crime(or rather, subsets of them did). So whether the U.S. would be more liberal or not, the entrance of these people has had a radical and negative effect.
Personally I do not think the U.S. would be more liberal without Ellis Islanders. The first reason is because there would be less Jews. The second reason is that the logic of how liberalism operates is to find a minority/victim group and organize them to undermine a majority. With mass immigration you not only get more members of minorities, but you have a less cohesive society as a whole, the latter state being not only a result of the newcomers competing with the older stock, but also competing with each other.
The U.S. being more like Denmark is hardly the worst outcome one can imagine.
Descendants of Puritans are less powerful and culturally significant by the day, but somehow the frequency with which they are blamed for various ills is increasing. It is at the point that any movement which is moralistic and activist that people don’t like can be called Puritanical. Classic Puritanism has been dead since the latter half of the 18th century, and its New England theology mutation died in the 1880s. The last President who was a New Englander with Puritan roots was Calvin Coolidge 90 years ago. The last intellectual movement I can think of which originated with or was centered by Puritans would be the American eugenics movement.
If I look to immigration reform, I see a lack of Puritans. The Hart-Celler Act which replaced the Coolidge administrations restrictions was created by Jews, and brought into being by Kennedy and his various Irish-Catholic appointees(some of whom later regretted what happened). The Reagan administration’s immigration reforms are another example. Neo-conservatism is a movement from Jewish former Trotskyists. The turn in anthropology away from biology was started by a Jew. Refugee resettlement has been dominated in order by Jews, Lutherans, and Catholics. The next group, Methodists, have been very much a distant contributor compared to the first three. Hollywood has never had much Puritan influence, and since the end of the silent era has been mostly purged of old stock Americans of any sort. Most of the social science “disciplines” which inspire wokeism, I won’t bother to name them all, are European, particularly Jewish imports. In the art world, you will struggle to find many Puritans contributing to modernism art. Instead you see a whole lot of French and Spanish, and an over-representation of Jews.
I fail to see any evidence that Puritans are behind the decline of the United States. It’s closer to the opposite. After WW2 their influence was reduced effectively to zero and everything has been downhill since.
American pop music is actually a carbon copy of British synth pop, which was influenced by German electronic music.
Mestizos from Mexico and Central America aren’t trying to scam. They’re mostly a laid back, passive people in daily interactions. However, people from South America are not the same.
Are you talking about WASPs? Because WASPs managed to maintain their predominant status in US society until WW2, and perhaps a few years after 1945, arguably into the early 50s.
Until the rest of the world stops investing in the U.S., any crisis in the U.S. is likely to have more catastrophic effects outside the U.S. Due to its unprecedented factor endowments and relative isolation, the U.S. can afford more destructive behavior than other countries. Just look to Europe for example. The last major world financial crisis begun in the United States but was most catastrophic in southern Europe. American actions in the Middle East have had little impact on Americans but have been a disaster for countries in the Middle East and have been a disaster in Europe via the rapefugee problem.
I see the chances of an isolationist WASP regime as approaching 0%.
Perhaps.
But how much does it matter? You can clearly see in the data that in the 1920s the fertility rate kept dropping despite the improving economic situation, so the economy alone cannot be the reason.
I don’t feel as strongly as you about this matter and, as I said, I don’t dispute your major point about Anglos and Germanics.
I do know, however, that my Basque countrymen came to the most desolate and sparsely inhabited parts of the US West at a time when lawlessness was still quite rampant and the Mexican population pressure in the Southwest was a concern for the US governments (eventually Mexicans won the population battle in New Mexico and parts of Texas and California). They brought with them much needed hard work ethics and honest business practices. Many others came after them, especially Anglos and Germans, who are now a majority in the parts of Idaho and Nevada where you hardly found anything but Basques in times past.
But I won’t argue that whatever my countrymen did in the West could not have been done even better by other population groups.
Perhaps a strict Anglo/Protestant immigration policy would not have been optimal though. It would have deprived the US of many valuable Europeans, including Swiss, South Germans and even some Anglos, and it wouldn’t have done anything to prevent the arrival of some unruly British proles that still to this day tend to cause havoc wherever they go in Europe.
It’s probably not just Puritanism but American Protestantism in general. I live surrounded by people with New England roots. They are very good neighbors but I don’t envy how they make their lives unnecessarily miserable. Everything has a moral and sinful aspect for them. They are tremendously preoccupied by how everybody else conducts their lives and are surprisingly naive at the same time. They honestly think that American military interventions abroad are carried out for humanitarian reasons.
It is not too surprising that a movement like Wokeism was born in a society where these tendencies are prevalent. I don’t see how it can ever take any deep roots in southern or (even less) eastern Europe. Unfortunately, it has made a tremendous headway in the Basque Country though. But I know very well why that is. Even though we are predominantly agnostic/atheists these days, we have always been the Puritans of Catholicism and the cradle of Jesuitism. Again, nothing too surprising.
Except by creating the war they ensured France’s fall (so the French must not have been in on it), and also ensured that Hitler had basically no chance of winning against a coalition much mightier than what Germany with its weak allies could muster.
In short, these devilish westerners’ plans had the direct opposite effect, and even a child could have foreseen it. I mean, by issuing the security guarantee and then declaring war, the westerners ensured that the Slavs would never be ruled by the Germans. Instead they destroyed the Germans.
Shallow roots are enough if the full might and prestige of the planet’s predominant superpower and its enormous web of alliances are behind it.
I certainly don’t believe economics is the only, or even the major, influence on fertility. But to the extent that it is a factor, then it seems unreasonable to point out that fertility was declining in the twenties, because the 1920s in Germany are notorious for their economic difficulties. (Or maybe that was a typo, and you meant 1930s?)
The obvious point is that neither your nor my nor anyone’s immigrant ancestors were needed. It was a great country before they ever arrived, and it would have been a great country had they never arrived. Why not just get over it and admit this? You won’t vanish in a puff of smoke, I promise.
It wouldn’t have compensated for the immigration. An America of only Protestant British, Germans and Dutch would have had, perhaps, Britain’s (white) population. This would not have been enough to create the industrial juggernaut that America became. Moreover, the black population would have been the same you would have a country that was 70 million Anglos/Anglo-ized Germans and 44 million blacks. And that’s without immigration from Latin America. But no pizza restaurants, mafia, and corrupt Irish cops.
It wouldn’t be because Ellis Island didn’t bring in the slaves. Rather, US would be like Brazil except more segregated and with Anglos rather than Latins in charge. A weird alternative England with some significant South African characteristics.
The lady who came up with the idea of White Privilege was a WASP whose entire background was stereotypically WASPy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peggy_McIntosh
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that such ideas are most popular in places settled by Puritans, in institutions founded by Puritans, etc..
Wasn’t the Temperance movement a Puritan thing?
It’s surreal and bizarre to say that Russia could be somehow above France in literature – it’s not just that the greatest novelists of the 19th century are French (Flaubert, Huysmans, Victor Hugo, Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, Dumas, et al), but also direction of inspiration, writing technique, and trends – which was from France to Russia.
I would say the standard of French novelists are the highest of any nationality I have tried to read, and obviously France was the dominant country in 19th century literature even above England.
Because these are recent American lists, that reflects the taste of current American college students.
I think normal Americans don’t read French literature much, because they are told by critics that they have to read the books in the French original language, and this raises the barrier to entry to small circles of sophisticated French reading people. Educated people were expected to know French even in America (which was partly result of the relative prestige and high quality of French literature).
On the other hand, ordinary Americans are happy to read Russian literature in English translations, without feeling pressure that they have to read in the Russian language (as unlike French language which was expected to be common knowledge for educated people everywhere).
There’s an strange influence of the Cold War with American evaluation, so their confrontation with the Soviet Union, has forced them more to compare themselves to Russian culture, which like America was also a junior culture, lower than the European one.
To compare American and French culture, would be too much of embarrassment for American culture.
But Russian and American culture have been more parallel levels, as both are late arriving students of Europe, and Russia’s cultural flowering has preceded America by some decades.
Hence, the American cult around Van Cliburn, and the highest honour for 20th century American culture, was when Van Cliburn won the International Tchaikovsky Competition in 1958.
This is when American culture felt like they had finally succeeded in the world, and today American classical musical culture and pedagogy remember it as their ultimate moment of glory: one of their “native guys” from Texas has been recognized Russia, the better and even more high-achieving, because insecure, strict and hardcore student of European culture.
Because “total fertility rate” doesn’t measure what the fertility rate of the actual people was, but just how how many births were timed in each year relative to the age groups. It has a predictive value at the time, but if you look at the final fertility rates (cohort fertility rate), then Germany was just below replacement fertility apparently through all 1930s.
https://i.imgur.com/e7JHMIS.jpg
Also note that at this time replacement level was higher than today’s 2,1.
Germany is only seems to just temporary climb just above replacement fertility after the Second World War.
Techniques and fashions in literary production, also takes time to move from the core to the hinterland, and it could arrive a generation or more later in some of the less developed countries to assimilate the fashions in the core countries.
More latecoming writers in the hinterland can be even more sophisticated than the original in the core, as they are writing at later time in history, and have access to a larger body of previous literature that show the techniques that they are imitating.
Latecoming writers in the provincial hinterland can ironically be more sophisticated, than the writers they imitate from the cultural core, but they can also have a flaw of self-consciousness, derivativeness and oversophistication.
The most oversophisticed, self-conscious, products of European literature, came almost a century late, in the former regions of the Spanish and Portuguese Empires. Writers like Borges in the antipodes of Buenos Aires, and then the “Latin American Boom” literature of the 1960s.
Although even the elites of the Russian Empire, were in a cultural hinterland compared to Paris; French was a primary language of educated people in Russia, and by the 19th century there was a fast-track for French literature and fashions to arrive into Russia.
Because of cultural fast-tracking from France, probably it can be said that Russian golden age writers were more “mediumcoming” than “latecoming”.
Russian golden age writers had advantage of balance of sophistication (of an imitative culture) and being still quite close to the time when these techniques were original. There was also the advantage of distance, in being able to synthethize multiple different trends from Europe, including both older trends, and the most recent ones – for example, Pushkin is the example of the synthesizing hinterland writer, who could try to write in a median way between successive European fashions of classicism, romanticism and realism (latter becoming a fashionable trend in Western Europe among writers of his own generation).
Famous works of Berlioz, Saint-Saëns, Fauré, Franck, Bizet, are still nowadays at the top of popularity with listeners, if not always the most fashionable ones with critics.
Berlioz was unfashionable for a long time, but now he became fashionable with critics again in the early 2000s, especially after recordings like Minkowski’s one on period instruments.
Probably even Saint-Saëns’ Symphony No. 3 will become fashionable with critics in a few decades.
France was the dominant culture in literature, visual arts and design.
German-speaking world was the most fertile in music across the 19th century, except in opera where Italy is dominant, France second, and Germany only third. Overall, there was a absurdity of musical riches from the German-speaking world across the century.
Germany also was the dominant country in philosophy from Kant onwards, which probably had more influence on other areas of culture, than its domination of music.
But despite Germany’s position in philosophy and music, contemporary writers of the 19th century view that France was the culturally dominant country. Nietzsche writes often about this sense of inferiority to France , saying it is constant in German culture.
Well French just didn’t expect Germans to drive around the Maginot Line. But otherwise their plan was sound – build a giant invincible megafortress and hide behind it while Germans march east. My understanding is, that Maginot line was no joke and there was no way for Germans to take it head on.
Keep in mind that USSR was rather weak in the 1930’s. A lot of their military hardware was obsolete, purges ruined leadership, and they just lost proxy war in Spain to Germany. So if it came to dying against French forts or pushing against weak Slavs for lebensraum, the choice was easy.
And I forgot that we can also add half a Chopin, to the popularity of French composers with current listeners.
Well perhaps it is controversial, whether France or Germany is in second position in opera, depending on how you assessed “The Case of Wagner” (in terms of his operas themselves – obviously Wagner’s important influence on other composers and the progression of harmonic techniques, cannot be disputed).
Famous operas of Richard Strauss were only written in the 20th century, while of course Mozart’s were written in the late 18th century – so we could exclude them.
So for the German 19th century opera, we have Beethoven’s “Fidelio”, and Wagner – and then nowadays not fashionable ones by von Weber and Meyerbeer (latter can probably be half for the French side since he worked half of the career in Paris).
You are a Francophile but it is so.
Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky stand well above them all.
The pattern is true of non-American lists also.
Here is a UK list:
“top ten list” of books of the 19th century.
https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2018/100-must-read-classic-books.html
British authors dominate, but Dostoyevsky comes in at 10th place. Dumas at number 49.
Britannica places Anna Karenina in the top position:
https://www.britannica.com/list/12-novels-considered-the-greatest-book-ever-written
(no French authors but they have Toni Morisson who is merely a sub-Faulkner)
This list is interesting:
https://thegreatestbooks.org/lists/28
Top 100 Works in World Literature by Norwegian Book Clubs, with the Norwegian Nobel Institute
The editors of the Norwegian Book Clubs, with the Norwegian Nobel Institute, polled a panel of 100 authors from 54 countries on what they considered the “best and most central works in world literature.” Among the authors polled were Milan Kundera, Doris Lessing, Seamus Heaney, Salman Rushdie, Wole Soyinka, John Irving, Nadine Gordimer, and Carlos Fuentes..
Russia wins the 19th century. Dostoyevsky has more books than any other author (4). Russia has 9 (including Gogol) from the 19th century. France only has 4. England also has 4.
::::::::::::::::::::::::::
I understand that in Russia they emphasized French literature, which may have inflated its image for Russians. My wife has a bizarre over-valuation of Dumas, for example.
I have never heard of this. No normal American has been told this.
From the middle of the 19th century and onward, Russia compares fine with any European culture. Its writers are arguably the best.
Your writing is convoluted. You defend the English-French by coming up with marginal explanations. What is that about “material” production, or a few thousand drowned sailors, who cares? It was an existential struggle of tens of millions against tens of millions, your mini-facts are marginal and change very little. You use them to fog up the picture. It was messy, we oversimplify, but let’s focus on what mattered and not on minutia. As a Magyar your identity was half-way, sometimes with Nazis, sometimes not, and there was no German plan to exterminate Hungarians. There was one for Poles, Czechs, Russians…
You use ahistorical assumptions: how in the world would France know in September 1939 that they were going to lose in a war with Germany? That is nonsense on its face, France thought they had the most powerful army, they had England with them, colonies, and they won WWI. Their decision to declare war on Germany – and then not to fight it – was based on feeling of strength. The fact that they didn’t fight tells you that it was not about stopping Germany’s attack on Poland. It was either a face-saving gesture or actually an attempt to goad Germany into going all the way since there was no reason to be diplomatic after the declaration of war.
There was also no way in 1939 to know what Germany would do to Poland and how they would behave in the war. You are assigning motivations based on what we know today, at that time the frame of reference was more WWI and how France-Britain defeated Germany in WWI.
Mal response says it well: West constantly prodded and pushed Hitler to fight towards the east. They officially dismantled Czechoslovakia, then they made sure that Germany attacked Poland. Then they played games trying to direct the next German attack against Russia. The fact that it didn’t work well, and that Germany very quickly without effort defeated France was not in the plan. Is that so hard to understand? West sacrificed the east and also screwed themselves in the process.
This was not a uniform Western policy, they were divided and as the horror of what they unleashed became clear and the fact that Germany was steamrolling the continent, the forces that were more aligned with the east took over. I said so – but my point is about the beginning of the war. Your minimizing the Western contribution to Nazi attack on Russia is also wrong – there were divisions of almost all Western nations there, you can’t just write it out of history as “minor”. That is not for them to decide. Why were they there at all?
I have always argued that motivations are hard (or impossible) to know for sure, they change over time, they are complex, and different members of elite in the same country have different views.
But if France-England declare a war – then not fight it as in 1939 – and it results in a massive almost unopposed attack by Germany on the east, one needs to consider that maybe that was what was intended.
For Germany to have free hands in Poland, they had to be in a state of war with France-Britain and without any military activity on the western front. That’s exactly what happened. We can derive motivations by what happened, how else would we know? What is creative is to work as hard as you do to not see the obvious. The West has become an expert in doing it, lots of words and confusion to avoid seeing the obvious.
The German economic situation kept improving 1923-28, but the fertility kept dropping.
Now I don’t deny that there were economic difficulties in Germany even in 1928-29, at the top of the economic cycle (it wasn’t a very high peak and many sectors were still doing badly), but it was certainly better than 1922-23, which was the time of the famous hyperinflation. Also it’s not like the 1930s didn’t have their own set of economic problems, for example the 1935-36 winter brought with it coal shortages (many people used coal to heat their homes), and in general there were surprisingly basic economic difficulties for large sections of the population, like being forced to eat vegetarian because they couldn’t afford meat.
So I think that the increase in fertility in the 1930s cannot be fully explained by economic factors.
You are making assumptions about fertility rates without immigration, when it’s likely that immigration lowers real wages and increases housing costs (not to mention other costs like the need to move away from immigrant ghettos when they spring up around you – perhaps they could stay in the middle of some little Poland, but they didn’t feel comfortable and so as Poles moved in, they felt that they needed to go), and I would be surprised if it didn’t actually depress fertility. As far as I know, even as it is, American whites’ ancestry is roughly half Anglo, so your estimate is probably way lower. But yes, it’s a big question what would have happened with blacks in such a scenario.
One point raised by EldnahYm is that the last big movement of New England WASPs was eugenics. So perhaps there’d have been more sensible policies regarding blacks.
These are all good points, but I’d say it’s still an open question whether such an explicitly pro-natalist ideology did or could have made an impact on long term fertility trends. They certainly didn’t last for a long time, and half of it in wartime, so we cannot say how it’d be longer term.
You were caught lying by several people and now try to pretend that the scale of your lies wasn’t a big deal.
More than a third of German military production was spent on the fight against the Western powers.
Your words: “Not a single Westerner died for Poland.”
Complete lie, thousands died.
“Britain stayed out of the war in Europe from June 1941 to June 1944.”
Complete lie, Britain bombed Germany (in Europe) massively, Britain invaded Italy (also in Europe).
This is Britain staying out of Europe, according to Beckow:
Battle of Ruhr, 5 month bombing campaign in early 1943, Over five months 34,000 tons of bombs were dropped. Following the raids, steel production fell by 200,000 tons, making a shortfall of 400,000 tons
Operation Gomorrah, 24 July 1943 and lasted for 8 days and 7 nights. It was at the time the heaviest assault in the history of aerial warfare and was later called the Hiroshima of Germany. Almost 40,000 Germans killed.
Britain stayed out of Europe?
Without America and without Germany having to also fight Russia, France-Britain would not have won World War I, and this time there was no America and USSR was helping Germany. Now you are making up a story where UK and France believed that they could defeat easily Germany without America as an ally and with the USSR being friendly with Germany so a declaration of war wasn’t a big deal to them.
They did fight. Thousands died. They should have done more, they did not make a mass invasion, but they did fight and their actions resulted in the fall of France.
You dismiss British killing of 10,000s of Germans and invasion of Italy as “minutea” but now the approximately 7,300 Frenchmen. 7,000 Belgians, 54 (!) Brits who fought for Germany were significant.
Vlasov’s pro-German Russian Liberation Army had about 120,000 men total, per Russian wiki. Another 30,000 Russians served in an SS Cossack Cavalry Corp led by a Don Cossack. In addition to these, a separate force of White Russian exiles with 11,000 men fought for Germany. So 160,000 Russians. This does not include less organized formations.
So, several times more Russians fought for the Nazis than did French.
According to Wikipedia, 72 million Americans have majority British (English, Scotch, Welsh, Scotch-Irish) ancestry. So my estimate was indeed too low, but was not far off the mark. There are also about 3 million Dutch Americans, he doesn’t mind those, they are Calvinists like the Scotch.* So about 75 million. I can’t speculate about whether or how much greater fertility would be. Anglos in Australia, Canada and Britain had similar fertility in the 19th century and it was probably about the same as those in the USA.
So if America just had British and Dutch it would be 75 million of these, plus 44 million blacks.
Would such a small population (effectively, 75 million) have been able to keep out a flood of settlers coming in from the South?
That was considered progressive. Also Prohibition, womens’ suffrage, and civil rights. New England WASPs had been the bedrock of the anti-slavery movement. I’m not sure that such an America would have been a racist place but it might have been – Southerners would have been a larger share of the population but Yankee progressives wouldn’t have to deal with Irish and Italians.
*German Lutherans would add more population more but I think EldnahYm doesn’t like those, too progressive and socialist.
Since the Maginot Line didn’t cover the French border all the way to the sea, they expected the German attack somewhere through Belgium. The surprise was the exact location of the German breakthrough, they expected a modernized version of the Schlieffen Plan.
Again, even a child could see that as long as there was a state of war between Germany and France, Germany would not attack the USSR, they’d try to finish France first. In fact, it came as a surprise to many when Hitler attacked the USSR before finishing off Britain.
I don’t know. The Germans captured the Belgian fortress Eben-Emael with surprising ease, so I find these claims overconfident. But like I wrote above, the Maginot Line didn’t extend all the way to the sea.
But being in a state of war with France meant that they were not going to attack east at all. They would need to destroy France first. Even a child could see that.
That just doesn’t make any sense, there would be an economic crisis in Europe and Gulf monarchies, but if USD loses it’s value, it would have most horrible implications for USA.
Countries like India, ASEAN and East Asia are not so dependent on USA, and for some countries like Russia and Iran, America’s fall would be quite helpful. There could be 5-10 years economic depression, just like the 90s in Eastern Europe, but nothing permanent. Some short term pain for the healing of the humanity in the longer run, is not bad price to pay. But for Gulf monarchies and Israel it could very well be a similar experience as the North Korea’s after the fall of USSR. Saudi implosion would be quite likely.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/35508/35508-h/35508-h.htm#OBSERVATIONS
It’s hilarious how to Franklin, Swedes were not white, but swarthy, same thing with the Southern Germans. Clearly some of the founding fathers were practically hard core fundamentalists on racial matters. Funny how things change. Now Americans have gone full circle from one extreme to another, or not yet, but the direction is clear.
I think every German general and political authority in the 1939-40 period was also convinced of this basic strategic fact. This is why the Germans chose to attack in the West before doing anything else in the East.
The lessons that the French military had drawn from WW1, that fire is much more powerful than manoeuvre, the defence is much more powerful than the offensive, dictated their strategy, which was centred on luring the Germans into set piece WW1 style battles where ideally the French forces would also benefit from being behind the most powerful modern fortifications. This is mainly why the French were strategically inactive in the sitzkrieg period. The French commanders were also convinced that the Germans had to attack Westwards anyway.
Then the Germans adopted a high risk strategy in attacking France through the Ardennes, which paid off beyond their expectations. Their more conventional or cautious generals had been expecting something like a re-run of 1916-18 with more advanced weapons, what actually happened changed the course of the war.
What we are unfortunately witnessing here on Dmitry’s behalf is the typical Russian inferiority complex. Many Russians have this ingrained belief that they cannot be as good as the European Белые Люди in any field at all. And if Russians somehow manage to compare and compete, then it’s because they have been taught well by the Europeans and / or stole from them some cultural abilities, technologies and scientific achievements. Some Russians do not only have this inferiority complex towards French, German and British, but they even have towards the Poles who are seen as more Westernized and therefore superior to the more backward Eastern Slavs.
Any inferiority or superiority complex is of course laughable. People should look at historical achievements and failures with a calm and reasonable attitude.
In the second half of nineteenth century, after Pushkin, Russian literature has indeed become increasingly gifted and more profound than many other famous European authors. Same with Russian classical music starting with Tchaikovsky. Russian ballet was of course outstanding due to direct Imperial patronage. The end of nineteenth century and early twentieth century were called the Russian Silver Century for a reason.
At the same time, some 70% of population was illiterate, partly due to wrong decisions taken by the Imperial Government itself which for centuries deprived the peasants from any education (interestingly enough, the Old Believers were nearly completely literate in Church Slavonic, as were also the people of Novgorod before the Muscovite conquest). Therefore the higher culture, produced by Russian writers, poets, painters and musicians did not reach the masses.
This was an abject failure of the Tsarist Regime and unfortunately, I must admit that it was due to a feature of the system, not a bug. And it probably contributed to the downfall of the Tsarist Empire…
There were up to 1,6 million local Hiwis on the Eastern Front. And that is why some Russian nationalists have sometimes described WW2 on Eastern Front as “the Second Civil War ” (Вторая гражданская).
I don’t think any other novel has ever been as influential on philosophy…There’s no parallel to this in the Orient
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brothers_Karamazov#Influence
This let to hubris I think vis a vie Russian Campaign…I alluded to this previously. By August 1941 it becoming clear that the same concentrated armor spearheads wouldn’t work as well as in France
This video (by an Austrian) summarizes some points I’ve made before. Japan declined to join Barbarossa b/c they
This was new to me— Hitler specificly did not inform Japan b/c
1. He thought the campaign would be finished in weeks
2. He wanted Japan to tie up US/UK in the Pacific
No, no, it’s about two competing cultural narratives, one is the Anglo-American perspective espoused by AP, and one is the (Classical) Continental, espoused by Dmitry and me. It’s a fact than in continental Europe, the France was the gold standard of high culture, for whole 19th century, and for large part of the 20th. This question is a matter of perspective, and not black and white question who is wholly right, and who’s utterly wrong. It’s just that in the modern era the cultural power and pull of America is so strong, that people outside of Europe, or in outlying lands, get confused and mistake it as a dominant cultural narrative in all of the West. Dmitry is indeed suprisingly sophisticated fellow, whose knowledge of European high culture surpasses the rest of us. Though I can’t understand what so interesting he sees in the American popular culture.
I say this as a great fan and admirer of Russian literature.
I agree. But this often was the case of the more Westernized Russians, they would know and love European culture more than they would Russian. Unfortunately, they often end up estranged from their Russian cultural origin. And this is especially true for those among them who like Dmitry have Jewish ancestry. I am of course writing it in purely neutral terms, it is just something that I have personally witnessed around me when growing in the Soviet intelligentsia milieu.
Of course Dmitry was born in the Urals, so at least he doesn’t have the Piter / Moscow snobbish attitude about him. Some of the “Children of Arbat” and “Piter Yidds” (to use the literary borrowings from Rybakov and Strugatskys, who were Jewish) have this big city people condescending attitude on top of their cultural alienation. Sometimes it’s quite annoying to the average ethnic Russian from an old Russian glubinka town, who has no “chosen people ” background to brag about, but has a deep feeling and appreciation of the Russian mentality and cultural references.
To love and appreciate Russia, one has to do what Anatoly did: travel to the inner glubinka provincial towns. Meet with people who are not from big urban centers, hike the woods, spend time on the rivers and lakes. See and touch the old churches and monasteries. That is how one gains the intuitive understanding of great Russian writers, musicians and painters. Intellectual knowledge is often not enough, actually it is sometimes counterproductive. The truth is often best learned through the heart.
https://www.openculture.com/2012/10/albert_camus_talks_about_adapting_dostoyevsky_for_the_theatre_1959.html
Camus first read Dostoyevsky when he was 20 years old, and later called it a “soul-shaking experience.” He was moved by the moral weight of Dostoyevsky’s words. When the horrors of Stalin’s purges came to light, Camus refused to look away. As he later said, “The real 19th century prophet was Dostoyevsky, not Karl Marx.”
Nietzsche – “Dostoevsky, the only psychologist, incidentally, from whom I had something to learn; he ranks among the most beautiful strokes of fortune in my life.”
Hemingway – “I’ve been wondering about Dostoyevsky. How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and make you feel so deeply?”
IIRC Freud also considered Brothers Karamazov as the greatest novel ever written.
I don’t think Dumas inspired similar reverence from so many people?
On this I agree. But it doesn’t mean he is correct in his overvaluation of French culture. The large sample of lists I provided contradicts his personal opinions, no matter how well developed they are.
Though I grew up in the Anglo world I did not study literature nor was otherwise really influenced by the American society when it comes to such things, probably because American culture doesn’t value them much. I don’t think any of the American kids I grew up with read something that wasn’t assigned in school (Shakespeare, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dickens were the only ones I remember) other than something trendy like Clockwork Orange or Stephen King. We listened to music, had bonfires, went shooting at a friend’s rural property outside town. My non-American grandparents had me read Shevchenko and Franko. They had a large library I took many books from, without direction I was reading Jules Verne, Jack London as a kid, later I discovered Hesse, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Junger, and Camus (they had a Central European perspective, having spent years in Vienna and Munich), and then I met a bunch of Russian foreign students at university, marrying one of them, through my wife I discovered Bulgakov…
So I don’t think I have an “Anglo-American perspective,” I’m a bit of an autodidact…
On the other hand, Anatoly Chubais telling that he hated Dostoievsky because his writings presented the Russian mentality as something original and distinct from the Western mentality. Dostoievsky thought that Russia must find its own spiritual path, its own social organization and this is something Russian westernizers cannot forget and forgive.
In Chubais own words:
https://rg.ru/2004/11/19/chubajs.html
Dostoievsky is a marker: if someone despises, rejects or downplays his insights, then this person is mentally speaking incompatible with traditional Russian personality. Of course this traditional Russian personality is now seldom seen in the bigger cities of RusFed…
IIRC he is only 1/8 or 1/16 Jewish. But he seems to have spent most of his life abroad.
My impression is that he may be dazzled by the technical skill and entertaining plot twists of writers but is not as sensitive to the spiritual aspects of their works. Technically, Dostoyevsky was clumsy but his works were brilliant and unsurpassed I think.
Much of this can be found in and near Moscow.
I’ve visited the Urals, the woods and quarries are nice but the city is just a city, too. I’ve only been to villages in Ukraine though, not Russian ones (a dacha village doesn’t count).
⁹
Correct. It is just that in Moscow people are often distracted from it by the bustling urban life. One needs quiet atmosphere to appreciate old things.
I remember my first visit to Vladimir and Suzdal when I was perhaps twelve years old. Suzdal was quite run down at the time. But it seems to have been much upgraded since:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.rbth.com/travel/331046-suzdal-golden-ring/amp
Of course it has a “touristy ” feel about it as do all old Russian Golden Ring towns. But places such as Uglich or Kostroma are still well worth visiting:
https://russiatrek.org/blog/cities/ancient-russian-town-of-uglich/
https://www.tripadvisor.ca/Attractions-g298482-Activities-Kostroma_Kostroma_Oblast_Central_Russia.html
Kostroma is a typical old Russian provincial town as described in Dostoievsky or Ostrovsky writings. If one day I could return to the old country, I wouldn’t go back to Moscow, although we still have our apartment there, I would either settle in Piter that I am deeply attached to and where some of my family live, others being in Moscow, or choose one of these old provincial towns to end my days.
I find these old towns profoundly charming. They have an authentic feel about them and the cost of living there is rather low. Of course chances of my dear wife accepting to live in Russia are rather low as well, so it will probably (unfortunately) never happen…
From what I remember Italians were known for organized crime, rather than the petty crimes and muggings Latinos are known for.
Russian inferiority complex is an important topic, and the key that unlocks a lot of recent history and current politics (although it’s not as much as the American inferiority complex and German inferiority complex).
Cold War cultural contests, were mainly in this question: who is better student of Europe – Russia or America?
I don’t feel it too much on a cultural level, probably because it’s only a minority eccentric hipsters like us that even go to the bookshop anymore. And when you go to the most prestigious bookshop in Western Europe – it’s full of Russian books; when you go to the classical music shop, it’s full of Russian composers.
Russian culture reached the premier level, just in time to join the European conversation, when European culture was still fertile; unlike America, who arrived just too late.
My favourite composer is Scriabin.
Inferiority complex would be if we said that Scriabin was more significant than Beethoven, and with our view decided because of his nationality, rather than e.g. his chord voicings.
Historically, Scriabin at the end of the harvest of European music, and perhaps a bridge to the modern jazz piano that emerged in the 20th century.
But if we talk about Russian classics (i.e. in the 19th century) most everyone agrees that there is great Russian literature, and that it is one of the most important ones of the 19th century.
For the 19th century, Russian literature is even compared with English literature, and nobody was more literature connoisseurs of the 19th century than England.
But claiming 19th century Russian novels (I mean prose novel, not in Pushkin, Lermontov) is somehow above France, makes no sense.
On subjective level, my experience has been that the best novels I’ve read were from 19th century France, and I don’t even read in French (so they must be even better in original language, for people who can read French).
I just chose to read a few French books quite randomly – e.g. I read one a not very famous book of Zola, and yet it was a masterwork, as good as any famous novel I read.
On objective level, the techniques and schools of literature, were imported from France. France was the centre of literature development and trends, for the world at the time, and the Russian literature was inspired by the great French novelists in every page
This is indeed how the Russian novel developed almost fully form and mature – because French literature was read immediately and almost as much by the literate society in Russian Empire as in France.
Some of the imports are successfully adapted, and Russia is able to make great contributions within a short time (classical music, prose novel).
In some, Russian inferiority complex, makes the most hardcore training in the world (piano pedagogy – imported from Germany; ballet – imported as a fashionable item from France, but turned into a strange religion locally).
And then in others, like philosophy – imported from Germany, just like you might install a Microsoft Windows, and then disastrous local attempts to edit the BIOS has irreparably crashed the whole system.
Lol, brilliant analogy.
Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are very fashionable among the hipsters in America and England, and this shows when you sit in the bookshops there.
French prose novelists (apart from maybe Proust, Huysman and Flaubert) is not fashionable in the American and English bookshops, and I see this myself. I live in an area which is an intellectual centre of the West, and you can see what is fashionable with the students.
These bookshops don’t much promote Zola, Hugo, Stendhal or Balzac, even though these were heroes in the 19th century.
On the other hand, if you go to the bookshops in Spain or Italy, then there is much more popularity for French novelists and also some German writers.
So the fashion for the novelists still varies a lot depending on the country you are in, with Russian classics being fashionable particularly in American bookshops, due to the American college professors’ and students’ tastes.
If you lived in Madrid or Milan, you might have read more French novelists. If you live in New York – then the Russian novelists are more fashionable there.
Nietzsche has made Dostoevsky indispensable reading for his followers – which included Freud and Heidegger, because he believed that Dostoevsky is one of the few writers who supports his own positive pro-life philosophy, as opposed to the pessimism of Schopenhauer.
Meanwhile, Nietzsche completely hates Flaubert, as he views Flaubert as a pessimist, that wants to reject life.
But it’s not clear how much Nietzsche reads Flaubert, or what his level of French was (Obviously Nietzsche reads Greek and Latin at perfect level, but he is famous for his low level of English reading ability, despite claiming that he was fluent in English).
I can semi-read French, but my French is not at high enough level to Flaubert in French, and yet everything I read from him seems like a work of genius. So I can only imagine how witty Flaubert must be for people that read him with a high Frencher ability.
“Great Gatsby” is a really good novel, in my opinion. But look how late arriving the best works of American literature can be – it is published in 1925.
So America’s version of Stendhal’s “Red and Black” (1830), arrives almost a century later.
It feels like Russia climbs on the last carriages, while America has more or less missed the train of European culture, and by the time of America’ cultural flourishing – the cinema is displacing the role of both painting and prose novel.
I don’t think France is lacking “spirituality” in literature.
Under the surface with Flaubert, you can sense the most extravagant romantic writing, but under some kind of surface rubble of pessimism, depression and cynicism.
That is an interesting video, I hadn’t thought about this issue of why the IJA didn’t also join in Barbarossa from the East.
Various more recent books (published post 2000) I have read on Hitler’s war strategy explain that after the fall of France he became convinced that the Red Army could be destroyed quickly in another rapid campaign, so that one major motivation behind the attack on the Soviet Union was the demoralisation of Britain. Hitler apparently believed that Britain was only remaining in the war in the hope of a future alliance with the USSR and had started taking Soviet defeat for granted to the point that this is how he was envisaging the goals of the campaign.
The German high command also seems to have had flawed intelligence on both the size of the Red Army and the Soviet industrial base and level of organisation.
Thanks for compliment.
Fashion for novels in bookshops in England and America, is definitely promoting Dostoevsky and Tolstoy at the moment. While a lot of famous French novelists, do not seem to be promoted much there (except Flaubert and perhaps Huysmans, – Huysmans seems to be popular with hipsters).
If you ignored French novels because they are currently not the most fashionable , you would be missing the largest quantity of great novels that the 19th century has produced.
Last year, I bought randomly an a less famous novel of Zola – and it was one of the best novels I have read.
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Although at least the fashions in literature, are less volatile than in the world of classical music.
In classical music, changes in fashions can be really radical ones: Bach was not viewed as an interesting composer until the 19th century.
Mahler and Rachmaninov were very unfashionable in the years after their deaths, and Scriabin was almost forgotten.
Wittgenstein said that Mahler should not have written music. Today Mahler, is almost the most beloved composer among music fans, and Rachmaninov is also one of the most popular composers, and Scriabin considered one of the most interesting composers.
Wittgenstein’s comments about Mahler seem completely idiotic to us today, but when he was writing in the 1940s these probably seemed uncontroversial to himself as the fashion was against Mahler at that time (mainstream people only begin to appreciate Mahler in the 1950s; Rachmaninov in the 1960s; Scriabin in the 1970s)
https://i.imgur.com/m8rCNHt.jpg
But many French themselves agree that Dostoievsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov are amazing writers and are certainly comparable to the best French writers.
I read French literature in French (my French is way better than my English) and of course Hugo, Flaubert, Balzac, even Mérimée (who is today less known) and others are excellent writers.
But to say that they are somewhat superior to Tolstoy, Dostoievsky, Chekhov is plain wrong. I wouldn’t say that Russian writers are superior though, both literary traditions being quite different.
Russian writers are “soul searching ” authors, French are more superficial (in my subjective opinion), although their style is more descriptive and more socially accurate perhaps. But Gorky was also quite descriptive and social. And speaking of social life descriptions, Garin Mikhailovsky made a superb description of the post-Crimean war life in Russian Empire through his autobiographical series.
Basically, I cannot find any reason to rank Russian writers as inferior to their Western counterparts. And Westerners themselves recognize that some of the Russian writers are top tier.
Something I have noticed, is that Russian rationalist types, who are also often westernizers, often dislike the type of soul-searching that is somewhat characteristic of Russian writers, such as Dostoievsky and Tolstoy, while they are more at ease with the more descriptive style of Western writers. I am not a rationalist by any stretch and I am not a westernizer at all, so perhaps that plays a role in my literary tastes.
I agree with these observations, it is even more the case outside of places like Oxford, Cambridge, maybe around some of the other top UK universities.
I don’t think it was always like this, it is something that seems to have grown sharper in the last two decades. On another thread you mentioned Sartre’s novels, I remember that when I was around 16-17 Sartre’s Nausea and the Roads to Freedom series made an impact on me, these were copies belonging to my parents or a friends’ parents, a legacy from the influence of Sartre in the 1960s and 70s.
Apart from Sartre, in his small collection of classic novels my father also had Malraux, the classic Camus, Stendhal, Balzac, Zola and lower ranking French novelists like Jean Larteguy. My paternal grandfather, who was a stone mason with little formal education, used to like to read, mostly history and genre fiction, but his favourite novelist was Georges Simenon, who was really popular in the UK in the 50s and 60s. Apart from Don Quixote, I think all of the other classic novels on the family shelves were Russian, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and Pasternak’s Quiet Flows the Don.
Later on, when I had learned to read French, most of my reading for years was French classics, among novelists Mme de Lafayette, Balzac, Zola, Stendhal, Laclos, De Sade, Fromentin, Simenon again, Dumas, Flaubert, Celine, Huysmans, Proust and more contemporary, Michel Houellebecq. These were the kind of writers you could still find in British libraries or on sale in British and Portuguese bookshops about 20 years ago. There is also a substantial amount of memorial literature in French that is still highly readable; Saint Simon and Madame de Sevigne, Chateaubriand. As well as writers like Brantome, his book ‘Les Vies des Dames Galantes’ is hard to forget, a 16th century Red Pill.
This was all 15-20 years ago, I think that may have been towards the end of an era in terms of the strong influence French culture used to exert in Britain, it no longer seems to be referenced as much any more. After all those ‘French years’ I only started getting into British authors again as I got older.
Larteguy is excellent. He is less renowned probably because he was right wing and never hid his OAS sympathies.
Perhaps you wanted to write Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago and Sholokhov’s Quiet Flows the Don, both excellent books about Ruddian Civil War, and both recognized as exceptional by the Nobel prize committee.
Reading French writers I find they can have what feels like a kind of formal or detached style, which lends itself to readily irony, also bitterness. From what I can tell Russian lends itself more easily to direct expression of emotions and Germanic languages lie somewhere in between. Formal English at times has a French feel, probably because of the French/Latin vocabulary influence, whereas popular dialect can sometimes be more vivid and would probably be better for writing about emotional or existential subjects if it was in some way formalised.
I was walking earlier today and heard a woman saying to her children who were running off the pavement ‘Yers a gaana get run ower’, ‘You are going to get run over’ doesn’t convey the same feeling.
I’m not saying that as an individual writer, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, are somehow less talented, than Flaubert and Hugo, et al. These are all influential artists, which still delighted readers today. Can you say that Degas is more talented than Renoir?
Rather I was arguing with the claim of AP that French prose novels were not the most important and dominant tradition of the 19th century, and that Russian classics could be somehow considered above French novels for the 19th century.
If people receive that impression today, it is a result of a current fashion of the bookshops and universities in England/America (I think this fashion is possibly related to the Cold War?**).
French writers were the most influential on development of the novel in the 19th century, and Russian writers were primarily influenced by the French novelists. (In turn, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky have an influence on English and French writers. For example, Dostoevsky was of the first to experiment with very slow pacing – first hundred pages of Idiot is one night only. In the early 20th century, under the influence of Dostoevsky – Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, extended this: Mrs Dalloway and Ulysses both novels contained completely in one day.)
Moreover, – aside from the direction of innovations and influence – of course, France has produced a larger volume of great novelists. France must have produced at least 10 genius novelists in the 19th century.*
In Russia, there are 2-3 really great novelists of the 19th century, and 2-3 really great short-story writers.
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*Of course, the novels and short-stories are not the crown of Russian literature – the greatest writers in Russian of the 19th century are Pushkin and Lermontov, but poetry doesn’t travel across borders so well as prose. I couldn’t try to judge French poetry.
** For example, Dostoevsky’s “Notes out of the underground” is very fashionable with hipsters in the West. But Flaubert has written a quite similar book much earlier (“Diary of a madman”), almost no-one knows.
Tolstoy’s great genius is in descriptive writing (when he goes into self-indulgently into his views on agricultural reform, I have to resist a temptation to skip pages).
And the genius of Dostoevsky is page-turning, addictive sense you are inside a dream world, you do not want to wake from.
I don’t think there is much similarity between their talents though. Tolstoy, Chekhov and Turgenev seem more similar between each other, and not too far from realist writers in France of the time.
That’s interesting. I wonder what is causing the falling fashion for French literature in Great Britain and America?
Perhaps another reason for it can be related to declining exoticism of French writers, because England and France are so close by train, and France does not seem exotic enough for English readers nowadays?
If you look at the stereotypical Millenial/Generation Z hipster bookshops in London, it seems there is a trend now is for writers with exotic Nigerian, Chinese, Indian and Vietnamese names.
https://www.libreria-subscribe.com/shop?page=2
As you write – France used to produce an excess of great writers. And you forgot to mention even Baudelaire and Montaigne.
I recommend a lot to read Baudelaire’s “Le Spleen de Paris” – it gives a dark and sinister view on the 19th century.
Baudelaire is amazing as was Rimbaud.
The French were always great at conveying a feeling of decadence and a transcendent spiritual hopelessness.
But if someone wants to have a really dark feeling about the early French Belle Epoque, one should read Lautréamont’s “Les Chants de Maldoror”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comte_de_Lautr%C3%A9amont
Also, in the twentieth century Jean Genet was a great writer in the French decadent tradition of De Sade and Lautréamont. His “Our Lady of Flowers ” is quite striking.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Genet
Interestingly, Michael Gira of Swans is a fan of Genet. He has often mentioned reading his books in an Israeli prison when he ended up in Jerusalem as a runaway teenager. Not very surprising when you think about it.
https://www.electronicbeats.net/swans-michael-gira-sounds-off/
Today, with the exception of Houellebecq, I am not sure who the great French writers are. I have the feeling that French culture feels entirely fake, that France is culturally moribund. Perhaps this is why people read less French literature, because they feel that French thought is exhausted, that French culture feels weak. Of course all around the world culture is regressing, but perhaps it is just me getting older…
They were indeed very different, both in style and substance. But they had their “soul searching ” in common: the spiritual dimension. Tolstoy’s “Resurrection ” and Dostoievsky’s “Idiot” are two very different books, but their message feels somewhat similar: going somewhat in the same direction. Of course this is very subjective, it feels that way to me, it doesn’t mean at all it is indeed what the writers wanted to convey.
BTW, I always found “Idiot” as much more striking than anything else Dostoievsky has written. Again, it is also just a subjective appreciation.
Rock is an American style of music, like jazz, though nobody would deny very considerable British contributions to it later (from ’60s on). It is subjective but there are plenty of American bands to match with the ones you named– the Beach Boys, the Mamas and the Papas, the Jefferson Airplane, Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Grateful Dead, Velvet Underground, etc. etc. etc. and these are just a few of the more well-known mainstream acts.
Likewise jazz is American in origin and spirit but there is a great deal of good European jazz.
Other American popular music also has a wide reach:
It is an interesting question.
Bashibuzuk has mentioned the relative decline of French cultural power, which I think is one cause. But even in relative decline France seems capable of maintaining a comparatively high level of cultural production; as far as I can see Houellebecq is probably the most significant Western European novelist at the moment, listening to France Culture, the main French speech radio station, it is still a level above the BBC equivalent in terms of content, French sociologists and political commentators continue to seem to be ahead of a lot, but not all, of the British ones and so on. (Compare, say, Eric Zemmour with his rough equivalent in the UK, Peter Hitchens.)
Thinking about it I came up with a couple of ideas:
After the ‘retreat from empire’ era 1945-65 British governments chose to consciously orientate the country towards Europe, at the same time there was a general movement to raise the cultural level of the population and widen access to high culture, France particularly was seen as an important source of high culture and Germany had been somewhat compromised by the Nazi era. I wonder if things like this explain why it was especially significant for my parent’ generation.
But France’s relative prominence in the world has continuously diminished since 1945; the end of the French empire, later the end of the Cold War, dominance of the US and the rise of the world outside of Europe have contributed to undermine the perceived status of French (and more generally European) culture.
At the same time it seems to be the case that the quality of popular culture started to gradually fall after the beginning of the neo-liberal era in the 1980s, and this hasn’t stopped since. French literature has likely proved too cerebral or complex for this new context, and there has been a stronger emphasis on more popular and commercial American derived forms.
Lastly, education in Britain has become less humanistic in some way and is more standardised and systematic, orientated to quantifiable outcomes and producing stats. Complicated things don’t lend themselves to this as much.
On this point, I went to a Waterstones for the first time recently since lockdown eased, it is a big branch near to one of the top UK universities and there was a similar selection of books on display. And for younger readers lots of books by American authors of colour. Selections like this may reflect the interests of potential readers (who are more likely to be female than before and may be interested in race issues due since the BLM thing emerged), on the other hand the choices may not be being arrived at wholly organically. Similar to the way in which there are now a lot of Afro-Caribbean looking people in TV adverts.
Another French writer who was not a novelist but may deserve a mention, especially in Woke times, the Duc de la Rochefoucauld.
I happened to glance through this very long and interesting comment-thread, and that particular claims jumped out at me as being extremely implausible. What’s the source?
Indian-Americans are surely an ultra-selected sample, and I find it very unlikely that even their Brahmin slice has a mean IQ of 110, so the notion that’s the case with their 120-180 million co-ethnics back home seems totally ridiculous.
I’ve never looked into it, but based upon the overall mean Indian IQ, I’d guess that the Brahmin sub-population has an IQ somewhere around 95-100, certainly not bad by global standards, but hardly making them the highest IQ large population in the world.
One thing I’ve discovered over the years is that people are extremely gullible when it comes to believing IQ numbers they find published somewhere on the Internet. Meanwhile, I’ve also noticed that Indians on the Internet are notoriously boastful. Combine those two facts together, and you get lots of silly claims.
I agree about “Idiot” being the most enchanting Dostoevsky novel, and especially much for teenagers – but in school the only Dostoevsky set is prestupleniye i nakazaniye, and I think only about half of people like that.
They should put “Idiot” in the school instead. I read this book when I about 19 or 20, and I feel I was still just young enough to be enchanted with the romance part of the story.
Dostoevsky also didn’t write his later novels, but has spoken them to his secretary – who transcribed them. His production method, was like you are inventing the story to help your children sleep at night.
Dostoevsky’s unusual method of speaking the stories, instead of writing them – has resulted in quite a different kind of story; perhaps more unconsciously written than Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgenev (who were mostly word perfectionists).
Well, I have not read “Resurrection”, but look at the dates of the publications: “Idiot” (1869), “Anna Karenina” (1878) , “Bratya Karamazovy” (1879).
Apologies to sound Hegelian, but one of the things I notice in both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is a sense of the energetic excitement of the time, the rapid development, which is in the country, and whose spirit is felt in the world-art of that time.
So if we look at world-painting, or even listen to music of the 1870s-80s – I perceive a similar spirit that find in the novels of that time, regardless of the national origin of the author.
For example – if we listen to a Brahms symphony of the same decade – don’t we feel something of the same historical spirit, that is felt in “Anna Karenina”, when you listen?
Or that paintings of American socialites in the 1880s, could be used as illustration material for different characters of “Anna Karenina”?
This is 1880s art by John Singer Sargent, from Philadelphia.
Yet this art of socialites in the American democracy, – also brings to consciousness same atmosphere of the cosmopolitan elite society that was the subject of both “Anna Karenina” (1878) and “Idiot” (1869).
https://i.imgur.com/vIBagCM.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/BcW2xGK.jpg
Another thing you can notice in the bookshops (and perhaps would have a witty psychology insight about this Le Rochefoucauld), is that often the most politically unacceptable writers become some of the most fashionable and promoted ones: e.g. Drieu La Rochelle, Ernst Junger, Yukio Mishima.
Something that liberal hipsters will probably always consider fashionable to read, is fiction written by ultra-conservative writers, including ones which killed themselves with a samurai sword after a failed insurrection.
I’m not going to answer each of your points, just a select few. Here’s the first one.
The German attack couldn’t have been the result of the British and French declarations of war, since it preceded them by two and a half days. Actually, the British and French declarations of war were the results of the German attack on Poland. Had this been what the West desired, they could have instead just… done nothing.
My point was much simpler.
After France declared war on Germany, Germany was not in a position to attack farther east as long as France was undefeated. Defeating France was a precondition for the German attack on the USSR.
What follows from this is that whatever were Hitler’s original plans, he was going to attack France before attacking the USSR. Had the attack been unsuccessful, Hitler would never have attacked the USSR, he would have been defeated in 1940, a much less dramatic and more farcical end to National Socialism. The only way for Hitler to the USSR after September 3, 1939, led through the corpse of France.
Of course the French didn’t plan their defeat. That was precisely my point: had the French plans been successful, Germany would never have attacked the USSR. You have to posit that the French planned their own defeat and destruction at the hands of Hitler to believe that they were planning for Hitler dominating the Slavs.
In my experience at least Yukio Mishima and Ernst Junger are both fixtures in British bookshops, Junger in the WW1 section usually. Often there was also a copy of Mein Kampf on sale somewhere. I don’t think I have seen them on the promotional tables at the front before. Maybe Junger could feature in a WW1 anniversary promotion.
I have never seen Drieu La Rochelle in a British bookshop though, never mind on promotion! I had to have a look to see if there are English translations currently in print.
There does seem to be some rise in interest in right wing titles though, at least online.
I so happen to have looked into the inventors in the American company Qualcomm and the number of granted patents they were involved in. Most 4G mobile phones have either the Qualcomm or the Samsung chips and both involve significant number of Qualcomm patents. Among the top 20 inventors half are Chinese/Korean, there could be only two with South Ansian ancestry, one at rank 11 and another at rank 13.
Name=Qualcomm, NInventor=9688 | 1990-06-19 | 2021-04-27
Rank| NPatent | Name
1| 961 | Peter Gaal
2| 906 | Wanshi Chen
3| 844 | Tao Luo
4| 592 | Junyi Li
5| 577 | Hao Xu
6| 501 | Marta Karczewicz
7| 487 | Tingfang Ji
8| 369 | Yongbin Wei
9| 368 | Aleksandar Damnjanovic
10| 366 | Juan Montojo
11| 339 | Durga Prasad Malladi
12| 314 | Xiaoxia Zhang
13| 307 | Naga Bhushan
14| 293 | Jing Sun
15| 247 | Joseph Binamira Soriaga
15| 247 | George Cherian
17| 232 | Jing Jiang
18| 227 | Ye-Kui Wang
19| 223 | Gavin Bernard Horn
20| 217 | Simone Merlin
Yes, he has this..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dostoevsky_and_Parricide
I read it with a translator. My German skill is at the monolingual dictionary level. Freud is too abstruse just in English 🙂
https://www.textlog.de/freud-psychoanalyse-dostojewski-karamasoff.html
Has there ever been a Jewish intellectual that has found Dostoievsky’s novels to his liking?
I doubt it…
He is difficult to categorize. The establishment right-wing in Japan was pro-US and anti-Soviet / Red China. He was sympathetic to the anti-US-Japan military alliance protests, coming from nationalists that would be considered left in Japan. At the same time he had a realpolitik streak.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukio_Mishima
Kishi is Shinzo Abe’s maternal grandfather and part of Japan’s WWII ruling class that largely preserved their power unscathed in exchange for being in US camp in Cold War.
His parents were both sinologists, but Mishima is very distinctly Japanese. He knew German and wrote this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Friend_Hitler
Dating back early Showa/WWII period, there was an Imperial Way Faction Kodoha, representing left-leaning ultra-nationalism that culminated in February 26 Incident, where Kodoha attempted a coup and was quashed. Mishima related that to left-wing Nazis Röhm and Strasser and their purge by Hitler.
But he had less in common with Röhm than with I would say with Stauffenberg, in that they both came from aristocratic origins and associated spirituality with patriotism. If you believe Stauffenberg’s actions were motivated by „aristocratic code of honour, Catholic doctrine or Romantic poetry“. Then there is a parallel with Mishima. With the distinction of a a more delicate and sensitive Japanese sense of aesthetics, combined with predilection for reckless folly.
Today you can’t really rehabilitate Röhm, and Stauffenberg is presented in a sanitized version in Tom Cruise’s movie. Mishima with his anti-materialism, anti-modernism, and anti-Americanism (plus his sexual orientation) I can see appealing to hipsters.
Aside from Nietzsche, certain secular Jewish intellectuals, was one of the reasons that Dostoevsky was so hyped in the West at the beginning of 20th century.
Freud, Wittgenstein and Einstein were hypebeasting about Dostoevsky in the West in the 20th century. Secular Jewish philosophy Lev Shestov and later Emmanuel Levinas brought him into French philosophy.
Middle class, non-elite, non-visual, non-aestheticist, religiously tortured, Dostoevsky, was more assimilable for a secularizing 19th century Jewish provincial-origin intellectuals, rather than those visual, subtle, aristocratic, elitist connoisseur writers like Flaubert or Henry James.
As a writer Dostoevsky is usually less visually interesting than other Russian or French classics (even when he discusses painting), and more focused on moral questions, and topics like abandonment of man by god, and of prophetic dreams and biblical visions.
The secularizing provincial-origin Jewish intelligentsia of the late 19th century, didn’t have the connoisseurship for language, high society and subtle social differences, but the world of visions and prophecy had still been the native expertise of their grandparents, and the secular Jewish literature that emerged had then developed more in the Dostoevsky than Turgenev style.
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Where in the 19th century, the line of Dostoevsky was placed in the local version of German “Kultur vs Zivilisation”, that was imported into Russia from Germany by a Belinsky et al, can seem today ironic, as there is no other Russian writer that travels so well outside Russia than Dostoevsky, and found his home in the hearts of distant peoples and cultures.
That is, when I met a Mexican people, they were asking me about Dostoevsky. I don’t think that Henry James or Turgenev is fashionable in Mexico, but apparently Dostoevsky is read among cactuses. (Although far more surprising for me, was when I found recently that Bazhov, is beloved in India).
Although what is fashionable is not right-wing writers, but rather – fascist writers. For hipster bookshelves, a right-wing writer is not likely to be fashionable, but the fascist writer can be pretty cool.
I’ve also seen in the hipster shop, stylish books of D’Annunzio, Schmitt and Marinetti.
I was interested in a book of Marinetti’s essays, but reading it for 10 minutes in the bookshop was making my head hurt – it was like reading some Italian version of Nietzsche, minus the German writer’s irony, morality and intelligence.
Premature ending to Mishima’s biography, must be one of the more extreme versions of an aestheticist person becoming lost in politics. If we judged politics by aesthetic and artistic criteria, then his views seem quite sensible, and we really need to return to a world of samurai and knights (needless to say, there is nowhere less suitable for people to apply artistic criteria than politics, except perhaps the professions like aviation safety, bridge engineering, food hygiene, etc). Artists’s view of the world often seem to be as realistic for politics, as interior decorators and fashion designers would be working in a coal mine.
Fascists writers are not conservative, but they are right wing.
I remember that some of these authors (D’Annunzio and Marinetti) were available in larger bookshops in London, Oxford, Manchester and so on 20 years ago but like Junger and Mishima mentioned earlier they would be more single copy titles, where there would only be one of the relevant book on the shelves, unless it was a set text for a course.
Apart from Junger and perennials like Mein Kampf, this new wave doesn’t yet seem to have made its way into the provinces.
I do see that there are new editions of these authors (and others like Moseley, Spengler), and new, recent translations of people like Drieu and Schmitt, and Julius Evola on amazon.co.uk, you hear people discussing them on right wing Youtube and podcasts, so there is obviously some sort of growing trend. If you are also seeing them on sale in better bookshops, it must be going IRL now.
I think it is some sort of reaction to identity politics and the anti-liberal stance within Wokeness.
I enjoyed re-reading the Maximes of La Rochefoucauld yesterday, that book had a very big influence on me when I was around 19-20, but at the moment seems out of step with the times. I recall being struck by the fact that behind the grand seigneur was the preacher;
Thanks for making the term ‘hypebeast’ known to me. I would have probably hypebeasted La Rochefoucauld in a small way.
On Marinetti, the most available of his books used to be the Futurist Manifesto, this is the only one I have read. The other thing was actually his strange cookbook. He was known for poetry as well but I don’t read Italian well enough to appreciate poetry, I think I would have been too young to pick up on the influence of Nietzsche but the connection seems clear when you mention it.
The most interesting Futurist poet I came across was Alvaro ‘I want to be so tall I can fit through no doors’ de Campos. Portugal was a small and marginal European country but occasionally produced literary giants.
Why? You are making an assumption that is not supported by what happened. For Germany having an “armed, inactive conflict” in the West was about the same as having no war there. France didn’t fight. If they didn’t fight for Poland, they would definitely not fight for Russia. Germany was in no danger in the West and they figured that out very quickly after Sep 39.
The liberal West had a position that if Germany and Russia were in a war (great for them!), they would let them bleed and wait to see who prevails (Truman even said so at that time). That meant sacrificing the buffer nations like Poland, Czechoslovakia – and West sacrificed them.
That changed with Russia defeating Germany and its Euro-allies in 1942-43. It became imperative to make sure that Russia doesn’t win by itself and take too much territory, e.g. Germany. So they jumped in the last minute. Normandy in June 44 was less than a year before war’s end and by then Germany was thoroughly defeated.
For whatever it’s worth, my father decided to build a wall library for the family in the seventies. He was a businessman with a technical engineering background born in a small Basque village and a little bit of a Francophone, having spent a year in France. One of the library sections was dedicated to the Russian Masters. There was (and there still is) no other section like that for French writers or any other nationality.
I read most of these Russian novels as a child or young teenager and I even remember taking a Russian novel to a summer camp when I was 13. Russian novels were definitely popular in late Francoist and early democratic Spain, even though atheist Russia had been demonized during the Franco regime. However, part of that popularity may be due to Jules Verne’s Michel Strogoff (Miguel Strogoff in Spanish), which is very famous and many people probably think was authored by a Russian.
So did these Jewish intellectuals find Dostoievsky’s writings to their liking ?
That’s the question here : can Jews truly appreciate Dostoievsky and his weltanshauung ?
Because it is in fine a Russian Orthodox mindset that Dostoievsky brings forth.
Unlike Tolstoy, Dostoievsky in his later years truly was an Orthodox Russian patriot.
And he also was antisemitic, although not in a vulgare “pogromist” sense of the term.
https://community.middlebury.edu/~beyer/courses/previous/ru351/studentpapers/Anti-semite.shtml
How can a Jew enjoy the writings of a man who (prophetically) wrote in his diary : “The Jew and his Kagal are to be the end of Russia?”.
A very late addition to demographics issues:
Yi Fuxian, a long time critic of one-child policy and proponent of his thesis on massive demographic data doctoring (he claims to cover births, deaths, cohort size, and basically everything else) by the Chinese state, produced his own ballpark estimate a few days ago of only 1.26-1.28B PRC Chinese in 2020. He did that after the releases of statistics for the 2020 census is delayed again and using his own thesis to attack the integrity of Chinese demographic reporting and policies.
Anyone still on the topic to pick his methodologies apart and see if he is a crackpot or not?
He was not an anti-semite, and by claiming such things you are making a service to the enemy. Anti-Judaist is the correct term, who, unlike anti-semites, does not see Jews as essentially evil or bad, but believes that their religion and culture are deeply flawed or sinful.
Anti-Judaism has been a part of European tradition since the beginning of the West, since the time of Romans and Hellenes, but Anti–Semitism is modernist and partially Social Darwinist invention. Romans, Byzantines and Russian Empire were Anti-Judaist, but Hitler’s Germany was Anti-Semitist. Anti-Judaist believes that every Jew is a human being like all men, that they too can be redeemed and saved, but it’s the Judaic faith which is the problem.
To notice this distinction between the two is very important, critically important.
It is pretty damn well supported by what happened: both France and Germany started preparations for a German attack on France, and then Germany did indeed proceed to attack France in May 1940. That’s what they thought would happen (though no one predicted to quick German victory, not even the Germans, certainly not Hitler and the majority of the German generals, except maybe Guderian and von Manstein), and that’s what did happen.
That’s a pretty stupid statement.
First of all, Germany was cut off from maritime trade. Since Germany was not self-sufficient in terms of raw materials, oil, or foodstuffs, it needed to import a lot of things. From late 1939 its main supplier of these things was… the USSR. So waging a war against the USSR was basically impossible. (It got easier after the fall of France, as the British blockade became leakier, and also there were some raw materials in Spain and of course there was food in France and Denmark. Romanian oil also became easily available after Romania was no longer a French ally due to France being destroyed by Germany…)
Second of all, France increased its military spending enormously in 1939. Already after Munich both they and the British raised defense outlays (obviously a new European war became a distinct possibility), but after war actually did break out, they set their economy on a war footing, and started producing (and importing from America) weapons at a pace not seen since 1918.
So France got significantly stronger by 1940 (and presumably would’ve gotten much stronger still, had Germany not destroyed it in 1940), and so it was way more dangerous than in September 1939. You must know (but you don’t know, because you are not interested in history, and just make up your theories without knowing anything about the period in question), that militaries need mobilization before they could be deployed in combat. French mobilization was pretty slow (like in the First World War), and they were surprised by the speed of German operations in Poland (but they nevertheless didn’t modernize their thinking, they only thought that the Polish military was that much weaker, which was true to an extent), so in September they weren’t nearly ready for an attack on Germany. A few months later the French army was already fully mobilized, so had Hitler started Barbarossa, they could’ve easily attacked him in the back.
So no, after France declared war on Germany, Germany was no longer in a position to attack the USSR, as long as France was undefeated.
Truman also added that he didn’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances. Moreover, Truman’s position wasn’t very widespread, as evidenced by the fact that he is the only one quoted over and over again. He was a senator, not an administration official, and certainly you cannot divine from the words of an American senator what the French or British politicians thought. You know, they were different countries, there was no internet, no airliner jet travel across the ocean, so these people didn’t meet nearly as often as in the early 21st century.
You must know (well, you don’t, because you even forget what I have wrote you in previous debates, and you aren’t interested in the period in question, so you don’t read any books about it at all) that the British-American bombing campaign drew and increasing amount of German resources (tens of thousands of the famous 8.8 centimeter air defense guns – each of which could be used as artillery pieces on the front…; over half of the German air force by 1942, two thirds of it later; obviously the German navy in its entirety), not to mention the decreased production due to bombing. Also the war in Italy (over a million German soldiers were needed suddenly in the summer of 1943 when Italy looked dropping out of the war – one of the reasons why the Kursk Offensive was stopped was that a couple elite SS divisions from there were needed to be sent to Italy), or before that the war in Africa (in Tunis almost as large a German force was destroyed in May 1943 as the German force at Stalingrad, mostly Panzer and motorized divisions), or in February-April 1944 the Luftwaffe was destroyed, mostly by the American Eighth Air Army (so that on D-Day the Luftwaffe flow maybe a hundred sorties against some twenty thousand sorties by the Allied air forces…), etc. etc.
Anyway, I don’t think it’s very productive to debate someone who knows nothing about a historical period, and doesn’t even try to address arguments. Like, if westerners were so cool about Hitler dominating Slavs, then why didn’t they just… not declare war on him on September 3, 1939?
Saul Bellow: “First of all, I would make a distinction between Dostoevsky and anybody else because he was the greater writer by far”
Wiki calls Wittgenstein a “devoted reader” of Dostoevsky and he apparently knew whole passages of The Brothers Karamazov by heart (in what language, I don’t know).
Maybe these people were simply faking their admiration but there really seems no reason for them to do so.
As AltanBakshi points out, his attitude towards Jews has more of criticism than hatred in it, and wise people know how to take criticism.
Most of the 19th century artists and writers were antisemitic in their private writings, as that was the fashion of the time (it would be surprising to find one who was not antisemitic, in France, England, Germany).
Even many writers (unlike Dostoevsky) which were antisemitic in their published writers – some in a brutal way, including Schopenhauer, Marx and Wagner, who wrote that Judaism has to be destroyed.
Despite that, they were still beloved figures by the secularizing Jews of the time, who were themselves rebelling against their Jewish backgrounds. This is different after the holocaust, when previously the topic of a “Jewish question” had been far less sensitive and not sinister, without any blood on its hands.
Whereas in writers like Gogol, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, etc, there is antisemitism contained n the published fictional text.
The reason that private antisemitism of 19th century writers, musicians and artists, becomes a dominant topic today, is because among the small minority of people who still consume European high culture, there is a very high proportion of Jews, and people with Jewish roots, many which have relatives that had survived the holocaust.
I wouldn’t be surprised if people with Jewish roots are 1/3 of the consumers of historical European high culture today, even if they are only 0,02% of the world’s population.
That’s why if you listened to any podcasts about classical music, they will usually begin to talk about to talk about Jewish topics half way through the podcast.
If you go on the classical music forum, the users there have a very high proportion of Jews.
For example, the most important classical music listeners’ blog is “Slippedisc”. The host there is Jewish, and so it’s often posting about some obscure racism of composers against Meyerbeer or Offenbach.
Similarly, in the art world, the only people interested in reading diary’s of Manet’s niece, are probably Jewish. And therefore – this kind of article, which assumes the readers will not want to read a book which contains antisemiticism: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/08/books/review/growing-up-with-impressionists-julie-manet-diary.html
The most successful and famous promoters of European classical music on YouTube, for example, are TwoSet violin – two Australian-Chinese musicians. https://www.youtube.com/user/twosetviolin.
Well, I don’t think Marinetti had any insight or intelligence.
But if we were decorating a hipster’s apartment, then we would need such books on our shelves. (Although preferably they have to be Italian language versions).
https://www.amazon.com/Futurist-Cookbook-Penguin-Modern-Classics/dp/0141391642
https://www.amazon.com/Critical-Writings-Filippo-Tommaso-Marinetti/dp/0374531072
Writing style just copied from “Twilight of the Idols”, “The Antichrist”, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”. But like reading Nietzsche filtered through a much stupider and less interesting person.
However, there is something original (very Italian) in the love of speed, racing cars, aeroplanes, and industrialization:
“We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath … a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.”
“We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-colored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds.”
http://bactra.org/T4PM/futurist-manifesto.html
20th century prestige of Russian classics in the West was also likely boosted by the fact Soviet Union was one of the world’s only two superpowers, and the alternative and contrary of American superpower.
That is,Russian classics could be viewed as something “deep”, as an alternative to “shallow” American culture, and as part of an actually existing geopolitical rival that opposed American capitalist society after the Second World War.
Meanwhile, Germany was a broken country, and culture that had been thrown into shame, while France and Great Britain were decolonizing and almost lost their status as Great Powers.
That connection of the prestige of French literature and French national power, had already been discussed in the 19th century; when defeat in Franco-Prussian War had been celebrated by German writers as an indication the ascension of their culture over the French civilization.
Geopolitical power of the Soviet Union also had an effect in China, where Russian classics and even popular music, has developed great prestige in the second half of the 20th century. (And in China, the prestige of Russian culture, has eroded with the collapse of the USSR – but still exists in Chinese politicians like Xi Jinping who had formative youth in that epoch).
You are correct. He probably did not see Jews as inherently corrupt (that’s would have been beneath his intelligence. Judophobic perhaps.
What percentage of German forces was destroyed by Russia? And what percentage by Britain-France-UK? And I mean the soldiers, not the material. There is your answer.
80-90% of losses that Germany suffered happened on the eastern front. Between June 1941 and June 1944 – the key period of the war – almost all fighting happened in the east. (Not all, but don’t slide into autism.)
For whatever reason you are unable to see the forest for the trees. Your attempts to hide behind “i am an expert” are the usual attempts by people who lose an argument to escape into minutia. You did the same when defending magyarization policies by Hungary before WWI. Now you pretend not to see what lebensraum was all about.
How convenient.
You don’t think an airplane is more deadly than a single infantryman, and that therefore fighting involving airplanes is more important relative to the human casualties involved, than fighting involving infantrymen?
You don’t think that if all the airplanes and artillery Germany lost or was forced to use against the Western airplanes, were instead thrown at the USSR, Germany would not have won the war?
Records go until December 1944 and place the actual number at slightly below 80% (77%). This is probably the closest you ever came to being accurate. But if one includes 1945 it becomes 70% to 75%. However this is just loss of personnel (primarily Wehrmacht and SS), as has been explained to you.
Repeating your lie doesn’t make it true.
You didn’t address my points.
Also then why not count civilians as well? The British and to a smaller extent the Americans were massacring German civilians pretty enthusiastically, in July 1943 killing some 40,000 in a couple days in Hamburg. Its military worth is somewhat questionable, but Beckow has already stated that he doesn’t care for military worth, he just cares for the number of people killed. Then why restrict oneself to soldiers? Of course bombing industrial facilities did help the war effort a lot (the Ruhr bombing campaign in the first half of 1943 stopped the growth of the German war economy for several months), but Beckow doesn’t care for that. Fortunately for the Germans, the British were also less concerned with military worth, stopped the Ruhr campaign and instead enthusiastically started massacring German civilians, most prominently in one of the least Nazi cities of the Reich, as mentioned above.
Beckow put forward the theory that the anti-Slavic Anglo/Western/Germanic supremacists wanted Germans to rule the Slavs. Well, the Anglo powers were pretty enthusiastic about massacring German civilians (even to the detriment of the war effort, though they falsely believed that massacring civilians was an effective way of destroying German war making capacity), and they even relatively spared the Slavs even where they would have found ample reasons to attack Slavic civilians: the Protectorate was an important industrial center of the German Reich until April 1945, yet the western Allies only rarely bombed it, and strictly the industrial and never the residential areas of Czech cities. Almost looks like the Anglos hated the Germans and even preferred the Slavs over them.
In fairness, before D-Day the percentages were probably closer to 90-10 (at least excluding civilians, including them might push the Soviet contribution below 80%), and that’s what he was saying.
Your points are minor compared to the point I was making: 80-90% of German losses were in the east. Russians in effect won the war and saved millions of people who were eventually going to be displaced (often killed) in the desired lebensraum, primarily Poles and Ukrainians, but also others. That is what WWII was all about.
The material help, bombing of civilians, or even invasion of “Malta” are very minor compared to that. You want to focus on it (why?), I think it is simply used to foggy up a very clear picture of what happened in WWII: Russia decisively defeated Germany.
Happy Victory Day!!!!
Of losses of personnel (primarily infantry), not of losses of fighting capability. Less than half of Luftwaffe losses were suffered in the East. How many infantrymen with a rifle are worth a pilot in his plane or a bomber crew in their bomber?
You are cherrypicking a detail to exaggerate your point.
The saving millions of people was a consequence of Hitler stabbing his Soviet ally in the back and the resultant victory. Soviets certainly weren’t lifting a finger to help any of those people until Hitler attacked them. In fact, they were busy killing those people too, on a much smaller scale but still on a horrific one. So let’s not pretend this “saving” was any sort of altruistic act or deliberate helpfulness, it was the completely unintended result of German defeat after Germany attacked the USSR.
Tying up at least half the air force is hardly “very minor.”
At great and unnecessary human cost due to its own incompetence, the USSR defeated a much-smaller opponent.
I can agree to that, German victory would have been even worse than the Soviet victory.
I have already explained to you numerous times why without the western contribution the USSR could not have won. So that point is simply wrong. My points are correct.
That is probably true, but as with all what-if scenarios it is unverifiable. There are always contributions to victory, Vietnam would not win against US without China and/or Soviets. France wouldn’t probably not win WWI without US contribution, etc…
My point is that Russia won WWII, any contributions by others were secondary. When you deny it – or people like AP try to deny it – you are on a slippery slope. See here:
https://www.unz.com/article/barbarossa-suvorovs-revisionism-goes-mainstream/
The views of July 20th plotters were I think instructive, von Stauffenberg, von Tresckow, et al would have had a cold, sober-minded view of the strategic situation— they believed that the war was certainly lost, but if a separate peace could be made with the West, then a stalemate* can still be forced in the East.
*I don’t think they still believed this just before the assassination attempt, i.e. shortly after Normandy and launching of Bagration which decimated AG Centre. But to demonstrate their resolve Stauffenberg and Tresckow still went ahead with it.
Of course the West had no interest in dealing with the Prussian Army aristocrats or conservative nationalists like Goerdeler. Even if means wearing down both Germany and USSR. Which I think goes to support reiner Tor’s point.
In general, I would agree that Nazi Germany could not have been defeated with only two out of three, United States, Soviet Union and British Empire.
Likewise, Japan could not have been defeated with only two out of three, United States, Soviet Union and China.
Unless you believe in Suvorov, Hitler saw the Great Purge and Red Army’s performance in Winter War as signs of weakness to take advantage of. (but apparently did not see Soviet performance led by Georgy Zhukov in Nomonhan as sign of strength)
The other question is why Hitler declared war on US after Pearl Harbor, since by that time AG Centre was already in a precarious situation, he’s opening up another front.
It may be he’s doing so to show solidarity with Japan, but this is after having signing Nazi-Soviet Pact and launching Barbarossa without telling Japan.
Or it may be that by that time Kriegsmarine was already de facto at war with Allies in the Atlantic.
In any case I would say Germany’s declaration of war after Pearl Harbor, was expected by FDR, but probably was not expected by Japan, who were going to play their own game anyways.
You just proved that you have no idea about the topic. “Al karisi” is just one way of saying it, it is Anatolian. Origins of it is Shamanist, not from Caucasia. Chechens took is from the Turks, it is related to Albis. In case you didn’t know, Almas also exist in Mongolian folklore. And NO. There are NO Islamic concept of holy trees. You have no clue about what you are talking about. Turks believed from the time immemorial that trees were holy, especially beech. Umay descended the world with beech. Turks also believed the first man was created under a tree with nine branches. Oguz Han believed to have found one of his wives on a tree. Kipchak, a Turkish tribe’s name means “Tree Hollow.” Turks even believed a great tree connected earth and sky, it is called Bay Terek (Great Beech).
There are absolutely zero holy trees in Islamic tradition. Do you think Arabia was full of forests? Sufism also doesn’t have a concept of holy trees. You are already beyond your depth.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidrat_al-Muntaha
It [the Sidrat al-Muntahā] is a very large Tree (شَجَرَة – shajarah) beyond the 7th heaven. It is named the Sidrat al-Muntahā because there terminates at it whatever ascends from the earth and whatever descends [from heaven] including what comes down from God, including waḥy (divine inspiration) and other things besides.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_life_(Quran)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E1%B9%AC%C5%ABb%C4%81
“In the Middle East, as in North Africa, a saint’s grave is closely connected to a sacred tree; trees beneath which saints are buried are regarded as “sacred trees” [[56]:93]. The identification of the sacred tree with the saint’s grave imparts to it the miraculous and magical powers of the holy man [[58]:264; [56]:94; [57]:71; [59]:176–177]. Westermarck [[60]:74]”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1500805/
Stop embarrassing yourself anymore, beech tree does not even grow in Central Asia, Mongolia, Dzungaria or Altay, only in the fringes of Pontic Caspian steppe does the beech tree grow. How the fuck ancient and real Turks did believe that beech is a holy tree, if there were no Beech trees found in the lands populated by Turks? Please leave me alone and go bother your Arab or Greek brothers or something? Oh, wait a minute, even they are full of your idiotic lies!
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/46/Fagus_sylvatica_range.svg/1280px-Fagus_sylvatica_range.png
Here is the distribution of European and Oriental Beech trees, there are other beech tree species, but they are only found in China (proper), Vietnam, Japan and America.
You are embarrassing yourself by insisting on arguing about something you don’t know. Do you even realize that Turks did not live near Mongolia alone and had been migrating back and forth between modern-day Russia? Also, what is the point of posting modern-day distribution maps? Did you know the world hadn’t been the same for the last 2500 years? Habitats do change for plants as well.
Go read this whole thing: http://www.face-music.ch/bi_bid/historyoftengerism.html
You claim to be Mongolian, but don’t even know Mongolian equivalents of stuff I mentioned here.
And no; trees are not holy in Islam. The fact that Qur’an mentions one tree does not change the fact. That tree is in heaven, not the world. Qur’an also mentions the Nerium tree, which is poisonous and is supposedly it is the food for those who go to hell. Turks and Shamanists, on the other hand, believed not only in mythical trees but also believed spirits dwelled trees in this world. There is nothing in Islam that gives trees a spiritual or holy status any more than in Christianity. There are no traditions or rituals involving trees in Islam. Since you cannot believe anything unless you see an Asian do it, here, now claim this guy who is tying a fabric to the tree is from Caucasia or Middle East:
https://www.facebook.com/TengriTuruk/videos/ben-k%C3%BCrt%C3%A7e-konu%C5%9Fan-bir-alevi-ailenin-%C3%A7ocu%C4%9Fuyumbizim-k%C3%B6yde-bir-dilek-a%C4%9Fac%C4%B1-vard%C4%B1r/938286482922190/
Contrary to your bullshit claims, Islam FORBIDS any rituals involving trees or objects. It is considered heresy. But how would you know that?
One step ahead of you wacko!
Where was the original homeland, or Urheimat of the Turks? Somewhere in Altay-Siberia-Mongolia region, and for thousands of years the climate there has not been suitable for the survival of beech trees.
Contrary to your Wahhabi/Salafi bullshit, traditional Islam has had no problem with holy men, holy books and some holy objects, if those before mentioned things derive their holiness from Allah and that those things are not worshipped.
I know you are touched by angels, but this Southern Siberian Turkic man is tying a knot in a birch tree, not beech tree, notice? Many cultures revere trees, it’s not only among proper Altaic people like Altays, Mongols and Kyrgyz, but also among Bedouins and ancient Celts.
See, many Arabs also tie rags or knots in the trees, are they Altaic? Actually in my opinion they are more Altaic than you guys are, at least their identity is not established on lying and confusion.
You are a stubborn one, aren’t you? Getting trashed here still insisting on arguing on things you don’t know.
So what? Are people not allowed to develop culture beyond or outside of their initial homelands? I already told you Turks kept migrating back and forth between Europe and Asia. What, there were no beech trees in entire Asia from Mongolia to Desht-i Kipchak?
Lol, Salafi? I don’t even follow a religion moron. No. There are no holy men, books, or objects in Islam. Islam attributes no divinity to any objects or ordinary men, other than prophets. Those holy men, trees, and whatnot popped particularly after Turks converted to Islam; they were extensions of Shamans who could supposedly communicate with Tengri and had special powers. But how would you know that?
The point isn’t the genus of the tree or that Celts or Africans also have similar traditions. The point is that you attributed all these traditions to Middle East and other non-Turkic people, now you are getting forced to eat the bullshit you spewed. This was you:
So what have we established? Albis, Almas, Albasti etc. are all the same thing, they are part of pre-Islam beliefs of Turks, and some even shared by Mongolians, and that there are no holy trees in Islam or Sufism, but they exist in folk beliefs of Celts, Africans, Turks and apparently some Bedouins. In another word, your pathetic attempt to claim that all these traditions were non-Turkic has been invalidated. That’s the end.
In regards of trees I should have written are also part of Islamic and Sufi tradition.
Russians are more closely related with the ancient inhabitants of Kipchak steppe, than you are.
I have linked you multiple well established sources supporting my position, but you still continue to deny reality. Continue believing as you wish. You guys are brothers to no one, those of your blood want nothing to do with you and your identity crisis, and those who you claim to be your brothers, have no patience for your lies.
https://cdn.britannica.com/24/135524-050-EFD9CABE/Abdulhamid-II-1890.jpg
One of your last Padishahs, what a fine example of Altaic physiognomy!
Still showing your ignorance. Yes, I agree Russians are more Turkic than they realize. You got it right for once, but do they accept it? As for the image of the Sultan, it is well known that they are very mixed. Abdulhamid’s mother was a Georgian, not even a half Turk. No one claims that Ottoman Sultans were the finest specimen of Turks after 1500s. But again, how would you know that?
Gotcha!
Isn’t that just true with everyone in your nation?
It’s a rhetorical question, we already know the answer.
Erdogan has Laz roots, your Mustafa Kemal had Balkanlar roots, your famous Turanist Far Right politician Alparslan had Cypriot and Armenian roots.
You haven’t gotcha anything. How ignorant are you? No. It is not true for everyone in the Turkish nation. Nomads did not even marry settled Turks, let alone foreigners. Mixing with others was on a limited scope. Where Turks migrated and became a minority, they ended up getting assimilated. I don’t want to debate on roots of individuals now. You don’t know anything, you just keep talking. Yes, it is true Erdogan has Georgian roots. But it is not a secret. Most Turks do not have non-Turks in their extended families. This is just a claim that is being made on the internet recently. Because everyone is afraid of Turkic identity. Iranians are worried about 30 million Turks in Iran. Russia has its own Turks. Greeks, Armenians, and others do not want to see a nationalist, larger Turkey. So all of them keep pushing this nonsense claim that somehow 50.000 Turks assimilated millions of Romans. But also, when the table is turned to them and asked if their nations are also largely mixed with Turks suddenly they turn into pure race nobles.
I understand their anxiety, however, I don’t get why would a guy who claims to be Mongolian be so obsessed with proving whether the roots of Turks are actually Turkic or not. I repeatedly explained that Turks were never just East Asian. But it is not getting through your skull.
Well we don’t have just lots of genetic samples from old corpses, there’s many surviving depictions of Seljuks from 12-13 centuries Iran. You know the folks you claim to be descended from?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/10/Male_royal_figure%2C_12-13th_century%2C_from_Iran.jpg
https://i.pinimg.com/236x/7a/5b/ee/7a5beea1ae0d6b55cd774750dbe24022.jpg
https://i.redd.it/ty7fvh5uobo61.jpg
They don’t quite look like your average Mehmet or Mustafa in Antalya or Izmir?
Well this is a Greek or Armenian problem, not mine. Russians and Chinese have no problem of admitting that they potentially have Turkic blood. Actually many Russians do believe that Cossacks have some Turkic blood, real Turkic, not Anatolian. Greeks probably dont have much, because those who intermarried with Turkish, almost always converted to Islam, and became you guys. Armenians may have a little bit, for during crusades many Turkomans were Christians and employed in the service of Frankish crusaders or Armenians.
My answer to your problems is that you guys should forget all this steppe non sense, and embrace your Ottoman identity. It’s not like majority of Hungarians believe anymore of being descendants of Huns, or being racially Altaic/Turanic. Ottoman Empire is one of the greatest empires of human history, there is no shame in Osman legacy(except genocides). Now be a good gazi and go wage Jihad somewhere else.