The weak should fear the strong.
- Richard Hanania had a podcast with Sean McMeekin about his new book. (I made some comments on that post).
Incidentally, I have started reading Stalin’s War. Not far in, but my initial impressions are that McMeekin is weak on military realism – he seems to think that Allied Lend-Lease that went to the USSR would have instead translated into the Anglo-Americans freeing the Polish death camps had those resources been devoted to their own war effort instead.
On another note, @devarbol does point out that McMeekin performs a useful service in highlighting that American elite anti-Communism only began after WW2.
- Claire Lehmann and James Lindsay had a Twitter spat over white genocide. My brief Twitter takes here. (Spoiler: Talk of white genocide misses the point).
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Paul Robinson on Ukraine’s Bidensliv.
-
Large new IPSOS survey of LGBT attitudes internationally. Summary. Interestingly, if not entirely surprisingly, India has the highest percentage of people who identify as non-heterosexual.
* Adam Tooze on Vasily Grossman.
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@Nemets speculates that 20C leftist aesthetics would have looked radically different if not for the Latvians.
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French smart fraction performance in math has plummeted over the past generation. You’d better hope we get to AGI and/or genetic editing for IQ sooner rather than later, or we’re not having much fun the next few centuries.
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Trump: Time to go back to McDonald’s, anon.
This is the current Open Thread, where anything goes – within reason.
If you are new to my work, start here.
Commenting rules. Please note that anonymous comments are not allowed.
In the US, this would have a fairly simple explanation: Very smart kids — if their parents are also smart — no longer go to state-run schools, or even typical private schools that teach the state’s curriculum, so they are in no position to take those tests.
In France, I don’t think that this is the case. The more likely explanation is the dumbing-down of the curriculum itself. That is, the smart kids are not being taught what they need to know to attain a high score.
Of course, France’s demographics have gone to utter shit over the past 30 years. I was in Paris in 2018 and happened to see a French elementary school trip to the Louvre. There might have been two white kids. The other eighteen were black or Arab. No surprise, then, that French test scores look like Morocco’s.
Climate- The Western US is in a severe drought. Tree ring studies ( and California has tree rings that go back to when Julius Caesar ruled) show these are episodic but can last for a century or more. It also happens that Brazil is experiencing a severe drought. Good news for Florida orange growers I suppose but not for many others especially Las Vegas.
Nevada was known for earlier Boom turned to Bust turned to Ghost Towns but never anything the size of a Las Vegas but if the Colorado river turns into the Colorado creek or a dry river bed in the coming years Las Vegas can’t continue to exist. There is no other water source that can sustain a city of 2 million people plus the tourists.
It may not be ‘rising sea levels’ that are the problem but falling ground water levels that are devastating.
Are Europe and Russia are incompatible? Have a say on it.
European Parliament threatening sanctions on Russia over Belarus.
Less and less Russians see themselves as european.
https://www.rt.com/russia/519115-european-identity-collapsing-youth/
According to PIAAC, France gets one of the worst migrants in Europe.
This is real:
https://twitter.com/Pride/status/1400113455214985218
https://archive.is/siFF7
Two things I want to mention.
Apparently the drought in the Western U.S is getting worse. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/hoover-dam-reservoir-hits-record-low-sign-extreme-western-us-drought-2021-06-10/ What are the geopolitical implications of this?
Second, it seems like the poor and middle class will be forced to deal with inflation. The only real anti-inflation asset I see out there is real estate. Precious metal isn’t doing bad but not great. Now that I think of it stocks are a pretty anti-inflationary, but alternative news website readers have a doomer bias and think they will come crashing down soon. The upper classes can avoid inflation because they can afford real estate. The real estate question ties back into the drought question, what happens when overpriced real estate becomes worthless because there is no water. But droughts come and go.
Honestly the best anti-inflation asset might be potable water, or better yet stock in companies that have purification or desalination technology.
I was about to throw out there as food for thought the idea of the U.S invading Mexico, but in a non-military way, NGO, protests, referenda etc. But then I remembered Mexico also has water issues in its northern regions. So invasion for water would be ridiculous. Canada might be a better target, but that would probably just be some water treaty.
Third subject, I almost forgot. According to science elevated CO2 makes us dumber https://archive.thinkprogress.org/exclusive-elevated-co2-levels-directly-affect-human-cognition-new-harvard-study-shows-2748e7378941/ buy houseplants people!
Agree that this result is likely something to do with curriculum or a measurement artefact. I’d lean to the latter – smart kids do pretty well regardless of what teaching fad predominates.
My assumption is assortative mating is a real phenomenon and that high-end performance will prove relatively resilient regardless of immigration trends for a while yet.
Australia has one of the more eugenic immigration policies in the world and has still experienced a drop in PISA results across the board over the past few decades too. Smells like something other than raw ability changing.
https://twitter.com/BelarusPolicy/status/1403661984252502021?s=20
Stocks are anti-inflationary? Only when the Fed wants them to be. Otherwise, after the crash, their core businesses will be nearly wiped out by plummeting purchasing power.
A lot more things that are productive on an individual level (tools) or barter goods are also anti-inflationary on lesser level. It depends on what anyone want to do during the episode of high inflation, and after that.
Dumber but better for plant-growing. It isn’t as innocuous and there has to be trade-offs (even when a persistent trend in global warming is conclusively disproven)
You actually don’t realize the existence of a third, anti-state faction in those globalist states, whether diminishingly small or rapidly increasing.
Cue HK oppositionists demanding US troops to invade and liberate the territory after ramping up the sanctions on China, possibly up to a trade embargo, after sending all their money offshore and even moving to Pacificist bloc countries.
(US stopped treating HK as having separate political and economic status so it will hit HK too)
You miss the point yourself. (Perhaps you’re too caught up in your regrets that you missed the CRT gravy train to think straight.)
The point is that CRT has real negative effects on real white people, including the damnable white fools promoting it. It’s not all just fun and games, you know.
Weird kind of “supremacy” that makes life worse for its supposed beneficiaries (and their descendants, in those increasingly rare cases they actually have any).
Poles are belligerent low IQ retards and would never do anything that’s in their best interests. And neither Poland or Hungary are “christian populist.” They are both just stupid degenerate American puppet states. Something like 20% of Hungarian women are pornstars or prostitutes and Poland has the one of the lowest fertility rate in the world.
It mostly harms the upper middle class whites, which is a good thing. The primary political conflict in the USA is class war between lower class whites and higher class whites, so the non-sjw lower class whites should want the higher class whites to be harmed by their own woke doctrines.
The real war is elites fanning ideological conflicts between upper-middle class and lower classes (and actually regardless of race), so they will be exhausted and unable to form an united front in opposition to Globalist policies.
(Most HKers are actually minimizing their personal loss from their wanted attack on the territory by emigrating with their money. This is some kind of scorched earth strategy only conceivable by rootless cosmopolitans HKers are, one that was unwittingly imposed on the Jews after Roman repression in the 1st century.)
I think assortative mating is primarily driven by educational institutions herding together the smart people when they are about to do family formation. Let me add ‘at scale’. They do it at scale rather than the amateurish versions of country clubs or whatever.
If so, then perhaps it’s a passing fad. E.g., if universities add too many strange and/or sub-par animals to their herds then the assortative mating will become assortative in other directions than, say, intelligence or talent.
Regarding PISA, revealed in mid-2020 but I hadn’t noticed until now: it turns out the improved PISA 2018 results for Sweden were founded on sorting away the 11% of students who didn’t know sufficient Swedish, after at least one year of study, including foreigners from various odd countries but also some born in Sweden. (The permitted limit is apparently 5%.)
At least one school motivated this with they ‘wanted to focus on what is best for the student’. Lol, yes, education is primarily about the emotions experienced by those in the classroom.
A couple of links (in Swedish):
https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/qs/sveriges-pisa-framgang-bygger-pa-falska-siffror/
https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/Ga9d24/sa-kom-sveriges-pisa-resultat-i-snalblasten
Yes. Supporting CRT can be beneficial on a personal level in a much narrower sense, the way that Judenrat members benefited from supporting the Nazis. Ultimately you might be shot with the rest, but until it happens, you had a higher level of personal comfort.
https://twitter.com/akarlin88/status/1275203120537223168
I disagree with this. The point of Kevin MacDonald’s body of work was that Jews as an influential elite group with disproportionate power in certain important fields could put their thumbs on the scale and stop the pendulum in one extreme in perpetuity. Actually the previous bioleninist episodes never had such absolute dominance, nor did they last for so long so universally across the West. It’s a kind of a ratchet where things are going faster in some periods and slower in others, but it never seems to stop. I would also bet that it will, at some point, but there’s no law of nature which says it must. The smaller whites are as a percentage of the population and the elite, the less likely that it will change. Hating an irrelevant small minority or extinct population in perpetuity is possible.
Because CRT is adding new groups to the elite, like Indian Brahmins and similar, it’s far from guaranteed that this situation would change at all.
http://www.occidentaldissent.com/2021/06/07/breaking-points-groundbreaking-study-proves-culture-wars-kill-class-politics/
http://www.occidentaldissent.com/2021/06/11/poll-support-for-white-nationalism-surges-in-oregon/
https://i1.wp.com/www.occidentaldissent.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/E3lKAb7XIAA971q.jpg
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
Robin DiAngelo made bank. Promoting CRT seems to have worked out pretty well for her.
High status Whites who promote CRT benefit, at least so long as they don’t drink the Kool-Aid and do things like move into Black neighborhoods in solidarity. (This is where “Does it have good schools?” comes in). But that is just another one of life’s myriad IQ tests, high status Whites did not generally become high status by failing them.
Equities perform poorly in high inflation, better than most things but they aren’t good. Margins get destroyed and disposable income goes on the necessities, only commodities and gold do well, the 1970s was a long and brutal bear market for US equities.
Maybe, maybe they’ll use the poison for their short term benefit, but what about the children? There’s quite many cases of children of well doing families getting radicalised historically. Even in Czarist Russia, which as a country was not, how I should say, not very woke? You know life is not just one big IQ test, people go through different phases, change, grow and degenerate among other stuff.
Anyway if one lacks of common sense like not thinking the welfare or future challenges of one’s progeny, then one is lost, no matter how high IQ one’s got.
So a good time to accumulate if you are not close to retirement and have a steady income.
New ideology just dropped.
https://twitter.com/LatransCanis1/status/1402296680171589638
https://c8.alamy.com/comp/2C0AGTG/best-ww-pictures-homeless-russian-boy-with-his-cat-1942-2C0AGTG.jpg
In Australia I think it is a case of the teachers being dumber than the students, and dumbing down the curriculum to a level they can cope with but which bores the bright kids, so the kids tune out. They could get some old textbooks or search online for excellent materials and educate themselves in their spare time but it’s more fun playing video games.
And yes we have worked out an effective way to identify and attract clever, hard-working, high-achieving people. Quality of life is suffering because rent-seeking has made everything so bloody expensive but the clever migrants from developing countries don’t seem to mind and adapt better than the ‘legacy’ locals – social Darwinism in action.
God bless Lying Ted!
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Epk1huUUYAE4JzW.jpg
Never trust a HongKonger!
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSs7S2LaerLLSRoDQAEz9QTiZZ32sFltleQtobqQCkdtH_6vz3JAGfylf5r&s.jpg
Painful memories of the time I once sided with them (being totally delusional about having the US hand on HK then). Gladly I came out of that neocon-shilling by escaping the local information bubble.
We know from Gregory Clark that class is amazingly stable historically, being mostly rooted in biology, even maintaining its internal structure from one political regime to another even as its exterior forms change.
I suspect their children and even their grandchildren will be just fine, and if anything, even higher status than their ancestors (“white privilege” being more of a thing in, say, Latin America, than the US).
Is there a Russian Gregory Clark, who has studied persistence of social class through both Bolshevik and Oligarchic revolutions? In the latter case, it is clear, in the former case less so.
co-ordination issue, there’s no Khalsa for them to collectivize beyond the state to affect society.
So, then it becomes a question of being high status for 1 gen or 0 gen.
Society is fucked anyway many will say so might as well have my shine?
This is the mentality of people cursed to live in ADharmik society & why it is Seva to change this||
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
Consider paradigmatic changes in economic structure (including from feudalism to capitalism and from capitalism to techno-feudalism)!
It was prestigious for Old Bolsheviks to marry women of the former aristocracy, so there was some continuity even there (much less so for men ofc).
I just saw our host’s tweet on shorting Aeroflot. Clearly the airline industry will not recover in 100 years (which means practically forever), since what allowed the exponential boom in international air travel (mainly market economics lowering fares and generating demand for tourism/business trips) is being superseded by everyone’s perceived need to remain in place (which means controlling people’s movement for the elites, and settling somewhere to weather out the chaos/resisting vaccine passports for helots and plebeians).
There’s never a need to mourn what had always been a privilege and an abnormal transplant of your physical self into places you don’t belong, as a tourist/person on business. We are simply reverting to the historical norm of chasing after the best land, and sticking more or less firmly on the soil upon finding the right spot.
(I had not left HK since 2017 despite all the civil unrest in 2019)
Well there were no such dramatic changes in the racial composition of the USA, UK and France, and I really dont believe you if you will claim that classes stayed stable through Russian and Chinese revolutions.
Most Old Bolsheviks met their dooms in the purges of 1930s. There was btw poetic justice in that!
Clark showed that (after a period of turbulence) descendants of old elites are even now richer than average in Communist China. There has been no study in Russia but I suspect a similar phenomena. Among elite Russians I know, one sees things like descent from a priest who hid his former vocation, a merchant family from the Volga who moved to Baku after the Revolution to become proles down there as a way of “laundering” their former status before returning to another Russian region where they and their descendent had brilliant careers ( including in the Party itself lol), etc.
There was certainly disruption and many talented people were needlessly killed, but the survivors found ways to eventually succeed.
If Stalin’s only victims were various Bolsheviks in the purges he wouldn’t have been such a bad guy.
Few cases are not the whole class, some of my ancestors were wealthy Buryat landowners, but most were exterminated during and after the revolution, still I would not claim that what happened to some of my ancestors was a rule, but such incidents were quite a common thing for landowners. During the Chinese revolution millions of landowners, with their families were exterminated, or so Chairman Mao himself claimed, therefore it is odd to argue that they as a class survived, when in reality only some survived, and even fewer got later prosperous.
One of my scientific colleagues is the grandson of a priest-martyr. Bogolyubov was the son of a professor of theology. Bogolyubov was the most high-status moral sponsor of getting permission to restore the old church in Dubna, during the 1980s. Also, some of Fr. Pavel Florensky’s descendants were eminent scientists and also faithful to the Church:
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A4%D0%BB%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%BD%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9,_%D0%9F%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%B5%D0%BB_%D0%90%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BA%D1%81%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B4%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%87
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A4%D0%BB%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%BD%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9,_%D0%92%D0%B0%D1%81%D0%B8%D0%BB%D0%B8%D0%B9_%D0%9F%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%87
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A4%D0%BB%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%BD%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9,_%D0%9A%D0%B8%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%BB%D0%BB_%D0%9F%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%87
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A4%D0%BB%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%BD%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9,_%D0%9F%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%B5%D0%BB_%D0%92%D0%B0%D1%81%D0%B8%D0%BB%D1%8C%D0%B5%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%87
Wrong. Upper middle is 100% on the same team as elite. And the other races do not matter. They are only pawns in the American white class war.
You are deluding yourself. Progressives’ aim is to end “neighborhoods” altogether. They are tantamount to segregation in their view. So, should their kool-aid work, they won’t need to move into black neighborhoods, because black neighborhoods will move into them. (I say this as a mere analyst, without any personal predisposition against such an outcome.)
You try to reconcile nationalism and IQism. It’s impossible. Nationalism is a defense of an ethnic group. It makes no difference to nationalists whether their ethnic group is high IQ or low IQ. They will defend it anyway.
Talk of white genocide misses the point
Assuming white genocide does play out, and I’m guessing that it would be a long drawn out process, wouldn’t that make a serious cut into the supply of SWPL? And if the supply side is cut back, then the existing SWPL will become increasingly valuable. If I can hold on for a few more years, my personal cache of SWPL might provide a tidy inheritance for my descendants.
Good, building cities that big in a desert with notoriously unreliable water supply is stupid
I’ve started a no grain diet. Aka minimum to no bread at all or rice, even potatoes. Just meat, dairy, fruits and vegetables. Gotta say – it’s pretty good.
The point of Kevin MacDonald’s body of work
I will defer to you if you tell me that you have read him extensively, but my reading of TCOC informs me that his point is that Jews have been (are) successful in intergroup competition because they are better at being a group than others.
Short the Jews, go long on Brahmins, of which there is a huge reservoir. Use Mandarins as a hedge, since there are so many of them that at least some of them will figure out to be smooth-talkers.
Let me make this as simple as possible for everyone:
https://feastoffun.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/scrooge_mcduck.jpeg
Businesses with franchise characteristics (the ability to raise prices with losing marketshare) and modest capital requirements benefit from inflation. Coca Cola is a classic example, and indeed Coca Cola performed very well in the 1970s (though it did this for most of the 20th century regardless of economic conditions).
Competitive businesses, and especially competitive businesses with high capital requirements, do poorly with high inflation. These businesses have a very limited ability to raise prices and see sharply increasing input costs.
Lastly, central banks have much less power of this than people think.
https://equitablegrowth.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/inflation-target-alt.png
https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/qe4people/pages/105/attachments/original/1473406553/inflation_forecasts.jpg?1473406553
Equities as a whole did not perform well during the great inflation of the 1970s, but there were standouts during this period. Teledyne and Coca Cola for instance. And in the mid-1970s a remarkable boom in small-cap stocks, which rose over 13% pa from 1976 – 1983.
It should also be pointed out that there was a brutal bear market in ’73-74 which put a damper on the period, and equities far outperformed bonds and cash. True enough that the real stars of this period were gold and oil, but there’s no guarantee during inflationary periods that commodities will shine in real terms.
I also don’t get the picture that people in the 1970s were only spending money on necessities. Look at vintage advertisements of the period–normal consumption continued:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/72/82/fa/7282fa93ad58c50b55c65acf204a2d1d.jpg
Today personal luxury coupes (pretty much the opposite of the necessity) barely even exist.
Remember that it was a period of high inflation, not hyperinflation.
Well, better than elite whites (who are obsessed with their status vis-à-vis their white inferiors, but don’t care for true outgroups like Indian Brahmins – perhaps as a result of their long history of dominating such outgroups with ease?), and also as smart as elite whites. MacDonald also states that Northwest European whites are already susceptible to ideological manias, but those are usually episodic and rarely long term trends. The madness of the French Revolution quickly gave way to a more conservative period lasting decades, and the next era of revolutionary upheavals gave way to a period where elite opinion was strongly influenced by Social Darwinism.
However, I don’t think Jews will have it good. Eventually they might be considered just another white group. Not only by nonwhites, but also by fanatical SJW whites. I think there were some signs of it already during the last Gaza War.
One of the possibilities of a return to white supremacism would be to condemn any “historically oppressive” groups, or any groups which aren’t perfectly following the SJW fads of the day. That would actually mean hating on anyone not a white liberal (with the possible exception of some East Asians, but perhaps they could also be hated because of nationalism in their home countries back in East Asia). I mean, Latinos and blacks are not sufficiently accepting of homosexuals, or they are not doing enough for The Environment, etc. But it’s possible that the suicide cult will indeed result in the collapse of the power of whites in the elites, getting replaced by Brahmins or whatever.
Posting pictures with minimal text and assuming everyone will know what you mean is midwit behaviour.
Sad!
They’re on the same team, but the upper-middle class is sincere while the elites understands the true intention.
And who can be sure the Blacks won’t fall from grace once their systemic dominance is secured, since critical race theory is a phantom that will always find new classes of the oppressed to overturn the newly found Black privilege? It is racial-cultural perpetual revolution.
It was still very bad for them as a group. So supporting the Revolution was a suicidal thing for those who did so. Probably it’s not much better supporting CRT for white elites.
We’re talking about much higher inflation than the 1970s and possible currency resets, which will filter out unprepared businesses.
(Official data is systematically suppressed if you trust Shadowstat or Chapwood Index, so those graphs are weak proofs)
Nice 2nd post, but we’re talking about further-reaching problems than high inflation this time.
In fact, as we speak smooth-talking yellow-white babies are being bred in the US, so marquis de posade’s meme is right on the money for the hedge.
During the Alaskan pipelines years there was Governor Wally Hickel, who was always thinking of things that the northern areas had but some in the lower 48 didn’t. He proposed a water pipeline heading south to California several times and was laughed off the stage by the Feds. He said Canada could join in and add some to the pipeline. , since he saw a shortage coming , back in the 70s. The USG has been so dysfunctional when it comes to avoiding future problems, that even that town Flint Mich has no decent water , and it’s been a decade. It’s not the US Gov and never was – it was always the NWO scam. Every Fed government employee, in it for themselves.
https://youtu.be/isHvU9cVvAw
https://youtu.be/6dw5LDXqm1Y
Real Soon Now
It’s worth pointing out that Shadowstat has charged the same nominal price for its subscription service since it launched.
There was a sharp increase of M2 money supply (and this is the monetary indicator correlated with increases in inflation in Friedman’s 1960s research) in response to the pandemic, but the rate of growth has since stabilized. Most of the reported inflation thus far has been driven by a limited number of reopening sectors and the global semiconductor shortage.
See this Barron’s article: https://www.barrons.com/articles/dont-be-fooled-by-aprils-inflation-jump-its-being-driven-by-reopening-quirks-51620847392
A breakout of 1970s inflation, which was more driven by political factors than monetary ones, does not strike me as likely at this point. Hyperinflation isn’t on my radar at all. We’ll see what happens as the reopening continues. May inflation was also high, but down from April.
Many people in the hard money, dissident, and doomerist crowd have been predicting currency collapse for my entire lifetime. Actually, long before I was born. When does shame set in?
That said, it does seem that the wheels have started to come off on fiscal responsibility in the last few years. As the likely response to every crisis is now massive stimulus, perhaps something will give in the future.
I strongly believe the US, federally and locally, should strictly regulate water use and population in the South Western states. It is insane, driving through Utah, seeing golf courses rising out of the pink dust. That the Colorado river now doesn’t make it to the Gulf of Mexico is criminal overuseage and wastage.
Is this finally affecting Vegas?
How much new money was created because of the covid pandemic in the US? 2-3 trillion?
How much more does Biden want to print to fund his ambitious infrastructure plans? 3 trillion.
This kind of spending and creation of money is unprecedented in my lifetime How can you be so sure that this sort of spending wont eventually translate into hyper inflation? Isn’t it interesting that most people claim that paying a mortgage or rent accounts for the largest part of their monthly budget, yet the incredible rise in home prices is not included within the calculation of the CPI?
America’s currency will collapse, but it takes a very specific line up of domestic and geopolitical events that haven’t happened or reached their full maturation yet. It would take a large dedollarization of oil (while steps are being taken, it is obviously not the case yet) and\or some kind of mass calamity (the current crisis not really counting.) Otherwise, the system is able to print its way out of anything, with little actual issue that would affect those doing the printing and for whom it is done (I.e., not the majority of people.)
UBI & infrastructure spending + actual productive capacities being rapidly shuffled and replaced (devalorization of capital) + domestic and international de-dollarization + quasi-civil war & international full-spectrum warfare = …
(And we aren’t speaking of currency resets, which can happen without serious inflation or any of the above. It only takes political will and enforcement)
Slightly late humor.
https://twitter.com/drefanzor/status/1403759636101025793/video/1
The whole stand should sink into the sand!
You try to reconcile nationalism and IQism. – No, he does not. To be a nationalist you must love your people. His previous post revealed that he hates Russians just like Hitler hated Germans in 1945 because they did no meet his expectations. Karlin believes that 90% of Russians are idiots because they did not accept Putin’s magnanimous generosity of flooding the whole of Russia with free flu vaccines though he forgets to mention that Putin so far release enough vaccine to vaccinated 10% of Russians only. If tomorrow the 90% all died he would be happy because the remaining 10% of vaccinated could enjoy their life.
Fewer! Russians are a countable entity!
…I think.
Ein Volk, ein Reich, eine Grammatik!
I agree with nearly everything your wrote, but I don’t understand why you think what you say implies he is not trying (unsuccessfully) to reconcile Nationalism and IQism. He explicitly explained that (perhaps in somewhat different terms) in an earlier text:
Nationalism Is Implicitly Transhumanist
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/transhumanism-2/
Aside from that, the only other point on which I disagree with you is your overconfidence that Putin has provided vaccines for only 10% of the Russian population; I took you up on that point in another comment:
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/dying-from-corona-in-russia/#comment-4717608
I wish better for Russians than other peoples, but my consistent principle has always been that idiocy must always be brutally punished. They deserved the consequences of 1917, they deserved the consequences of 1991, and (albeit on a drastically smaller overall scale) some of those who made incorrect choices in the past few months will have to live, or in many cases die, with the consequences of those choices. At this point, I consider my personal convenience (e.g. uninterrupted access to gym, food court, park benches) vastly more important than their lives or welfare, which they evidently don’t value much themselves. That is, in short, I have come to the rightoid way of “thinking” on this matter – now that, unlike in 2020, most people outside the Third World now have a choice on whether they want to get Corona or not.
What is the substitute for chocolate chip cookies?
I can do without the rest but I have wracked my brain for close to two years and have been unable to crack this nut. : (
Politics is always personal. Politics is always tribal/class based. Names, Flags, Hymn and The Narrative change, but people won’t.
Many of the Communist leaders (Ho Chi Minh, Giap et co.) and local Vietminh/Vietcong commanders are from the lower elite/upper-middle class – the rural mandarins, who lost status/income when the French colonial administration finally remove the vestiges of the Imperial feudal system. They became the new elites after 1954/75 and never looked back.
Turbulences -if they they do not reach Ghingis Khan-level- only hit the upper elites (who could not go into exile early enough) and portion of the upper middle-class. Portions of the lower middle-class benefit great from the new system as they are going to get those new middle-management positions.
Few younger people seem to know that there were many people who really believed in Communism and Socialism as scientifical truths, which were inevitable on the road of progress, later during the Brezhnev era most commies lost their faith and became cynics, but before him and his gerontocracy, vast majority of them tuly believed that they were possessors and guardians of scientific truths. From such perspective Lenin’s and Stalin’s policies were purely rational and repression was just punishing of people who were against progress, in other words such people who dared to threaten inevitable scientific progress, were backward idiots and punishing of them in the name of the progress was just for the benefit of the Soviet Russian nation.
Sadly I now notice that this same spirit, which animated inhuman Bolshevik policies, is still alive in some Russians. Only fools think that bolshies did their crimes because of some metaphysical evilness or twisted pseudo-religiosity, no, not at all, commies just saw that they are more rational than others, that they were just doing what was historical and rational inevitability and necessity.
Merry sunday everybody!
Good Salo!
Solid dark chocolates?
Since the Communism of today is Western Supremacism, it is quite likely that I will be amongst the brutally punished if it wins.
However, it would not mean that I wouldn’t deserve it.
Is that actually true? I don’t believe so.
The first Red Scare took off in 1919.
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1919/02/05/97069134.pdf
During WW 2, the USA supported the USSR; but that was a temporary marriage of convenience.
as someone who has a bit of a sweet tooth myself – i got a compromise solution:
since carbs and basic sugar is quickly processed, and results in a sudden burst of activity – i only eat it when i go on my daily walks, or before exercising. This nips the insulin spike induced slowness right in the bud (something very important to me as a type 1 diabetic – since basically every goddamn meal results in an insulin spike due to the nature of how insulin injections work).
tldr use chocochip cookies to power your workouts
Putin promised 700 milion vaccines to the world while by mid May they managed to produce 33 million only out of which 15 million was exported.
33-15=18 million vaccines is 12.5% of Russia population. One month later vaccination in Russia is at 10% level.
You must account for logistic delays between production and vaccination. Between May 13 and Jun 13 (see the graph in the link) they vaccinated (2nd dose) 5 million.
It is easy to imagine that the greedy, cynical and conniving Kremlin elite wants to sell more of its vaccine for the hard currency under the guise of political objective of improving Russia image and rubbing America’s nose. Is it possible that the same elite who just cares as much about Russians as Karlin does in his incontinent comments created an appearance of vaccine oversupply to be able to blame regular Russians for being ignorant obscurants who do not want to be vaccinated and they can add the argument that Russians do not need or deserve vaccine because they are stupid. Keep in mind that the same elite is behind cynical anti-vaxxing campaign in the West that is going for years.
They know what anti-vaxxers are and how to manufacture them. Possibly they can produce them faster than they can produce vaccine, so they can sell more vaccines for $Bucks.
This is very interesting. So, are members of the postwar elite in the Soviet Union more likely (relative to their share of the population) to be Russians from non-Russian areas (some of whom underwent status laundering) than Russians from Russian areas (where status laundering was possibly less common)?
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/SpcAAOSwuxFY2U~o/s-l300.jpg
https://www.blivenlawfirm.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/bigstock-Dried-Salted-Fish-Vobla-Lies-O-305566933.jpg
the thing is SJW politics wants
full communal integration
and those two things combined lead eventually to every white child going to a white minority school
now that may not seem like a big deal to people who didn’t go a school like that because the media and academia cover it up but mine was like 5% white and involved extreme amounts of anti-white gang violence (ignored or in some cases incited by SJW teachers) including constant (violent) pressure on white girls for sex so…
whether intentional or not SJW politics is genocidal.
use them for workouts, long hikes etc
Sub 1.5% 10 year Treasury is telling us people fear deflationary recession (once stimulus support expires and supply chains recover) far more than they fear hyperinflation.
From what I have seen, the biggest component of high CPI print has to do with cars (rental companies went bankrupt during pandemic and are now scrambling to rebuild their fleets), and this is very temporary.
Something similar happened in 2009 with Cash for Clunkers – government paid you to buy a new car. Sales jumped for a time and then declined. I expect car demand to decline shortly, which will drop CPI back below 2%.
As far as housing goes, rising prices make homeowners feel good, and investors such as Blackrock, and also mortgage backed securities traders rich. It does hurt poor people but they don’t count on the account of being poor.
Get a hold of yourself. They, the people you are talking about are people not figures in a video game. Snap out of it. Try to be a mensch not a punk who makes incontinent pronouncements when frustrated.
And most importantly we should not forget that your premise that dying is optional in Russia is false. The supply of vaccine is on the level of vaccination with small positive margin that is left there to create a false impression of oversupply and the meme, on which you seem to work very hard, that Russians do not want to get vaccinated. Let’s’ look at stats in July and September and you will see that Russians will be getting vaccinated unless Kremlin decides to sell all vaccines abroad.
https://lastday.club/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Menyu-vyzhivalshhika-Borts-vyalenoe-myaso-po-mongolski-Last-Day-Club.jpg
https://www.ugluu.mn/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/115d6d11663874571f93706486046324-1.jpg
Борц is better…
Though Buryats do eat smoked Baikal Omul.
Taking the Knee
Re: Below Tweet & Article
Russia hating scumbag Slava Malamud doesn’t take into consideration that:
Malamud grossly distorts the reasoning behind not taking a knee. If I’m no offhand mistaken, this act was initially in response to a racist act in the US – not Russia. He cherry picks some Russian bigots giving their explanation for not taking a knee, while ignoring a prevailing view in support of not taking a knee. Are people automatically not racist by taking a knee? Conversely, is everyone choosing to not conform with a perceived PC trend a bigot for refusing to take a knee?
Malamud’s ethically flawed Twitter rants are noteworthy. Of Moldovan Jewish background, he says nothing against Kiev regime controlled Ukraine designing a jersey with a slogan that was popularized by Ukrainian fascists during WW II. These particular Ukrainians committed violent acts against Poles and Jews. Following WW II, the same pro-Stepan Bandera Ukrainians have been at the forefront in expressing bigoted anti-Russian views.
https://twitter.com/SlavaMalamud/status/1403792964737015824
https://www.rt.com/sport/526450-england-fans-ignore-fa-boo-take-knee/
Things in Moscow close due to covid? Why?
Alcohol poisoning kills 3 million globally every year (more than corona, imagine that) and not once have I heard booze stop flowing in Russia, even during the glorified Yeltsin years when Russian males actually lost a decade of life.
I guess Sputnik V was a hoax.
In other news I liberated a DJI consumer drone… A hackRF picked up all frequencies. 4 frequencies in the 2ghz and 1 in the 5ghz. My objective is a proof-of-concept to hijack the video stream with gay porn. If it works I can deploy it as my house anti-drone system. Its limited range will prevent interference with unintended devices… I hope.
What a facinating modern age we live in.
If one pedo is ever found with a handful of these drones near a school I imagine licensing will be enforced to even the under-250gram drones.
Space junk problem is a very important topic that will be growing more and more prominent as time goes on. But fear not! Russians are on the case. Two important papers on the subject have been published by Moscow State Technical University.
First deals with the orbital mechanics of the intercept for a piece of junk launched from Cape Canaveral, USA, and a garbage collector launched from Vostochny, Russia.
https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/analiz-dinamiki-pereleta-kosmicheskogo-musorosborschika-iz-ploskosti-svoey-orbity-v-ploskost-orbity-fragmenta-musora/viewer
Mission parameters:
Time to intercept – 24 hours.
Orbit: 400 km – 2000 km range.
Garbage collector specifications – 20 kN thrust, 1,500 s ISP. (Definitely interesting one – thrust is like nuclear thermal, but ISP is much higher. Russian RD-0410 was like 35 kN thrust, 950 s ISP). Nuclear thermal will top out at 1,000 s most likely. This looks like VASIMR or MHD type engine, electric plasma accelerator, but with ability to dump large mass of propellant.
But what to do if space junk refuses to be collected and attempts to perform evasive maneuvers? Or what it its too big (I’m thinking Starship sized here)? Fear not! Russian garbage collectors come with powerful lasers just for your convenience.
Second paper addresses the problem by providing targeting solutions to laser cutting through large rotating and evading object.
https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/analiz-dinamiki-lazernoy-2d-rezki-krupnogabaritnogo-obekta-kosmicheskogo-musora-v-nevesomosti/viewer
Whether space junk resists it or not, important and valuable parts can be extracted from it by the humble garbage collector. Please remember to recycle and Russians will help you to keep space neat and tidy!
OK.
You and the other fellow and I may be in agreement here. Chocolate chip cookies are only one step in power below vagina. Only Marcus Aurelius could resist and even he not absolutely.
And high status non-whites benefit even more.
The prosperity of current white collaborateurs does not make CRT which undermines their ability to defend their status against non-whites anti-white.
https://quillette.com/2021/04/09/georgetowns-cultural-revolution/
This Red Scare did not seem to have lasted long, though.
https://twitter.com/CandideIII/status/1399827111548919808
*not anti-white.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/7d/1d/1d/7d1d1d84b6f3dac79b1235b02302449e.png
https://cs11.pikabu.ru/images/big_size_comm/2020-06_6/1593503325123086016.jpg
https://cdn.fishki.net/upload/post/2020/10/23/3454511/1603420236132243197.jpg
McMeekin possibly does overemphasize the importance of Lend-Lease to the Soviet war effort. But otherwise, his book is absolutely outstanding, with his exhaustive archival research fully confirming the basic reality of the Suvorov Hypothesis more than three decades after it appeared, and numerous other crucial WWII issues. Here are a few of my comments drawn from the extremely long thread that reviewed his book last month:
https://www.unz.com/article/barbarossa-suvorovs-revisionism-goes-mainstream/?showcomments#comment-4672101
From the excellent Толкователь Telegram Blog of Pavel Pryannikov:
That’s about Karlin’s thesis that former elites often end up becoming future elites by adapting and surviving through the Times of Troubles. Patrushev recently said that RusFed needs to build up a “Neo-Aristostocracy”…
BTW the Russia Day (an official holiday in RusFed) was put on June the 12th because it was the date of Yeltsin’s election as the president of RSFSR in 1990.
https://cdn.otkritkiok.ru/posts/big/12-iyunya-prazdnik-den-rossii-pozdravlyayu-vsex.gif
https://cdn.vdmsti.ru/image/2019/92/18ukbb/mobile_high-1m4h.jpg
1.) Couldn’t the same be said about the automobile? Or even any technological advance in travel, going back at least as far as the wheel? By your apparent logic, couldn’t you argue that traveling farther than is possible by riding an animal is “abnormal”?
2.) If one were to remove the qualifier “physical” from your statement, couldn’t it be applied to any form of telecommunication? Including the one that all of us reading and participating in this thread are using: the Internet.
Related motif pic:
https://cdni.rbth.com/rbthmedia/images/2020.06/original/5ede965815e9f973c81e6872.jpg
I’m not one of the people who denies the importance of Lend-Lease, to the contrary it included some vital components (high octane aviation fuel, copper cables, etc.) that the USSR did not produce in bulk itself and I think there’s an excellent chance the Eastern Front would have gotten stalemated without it. I was getting at McMeekin’s point that the supplies destined for the USSR could have significantly contributed to faster Western Allied advances (I think McMeekin argues this, at least that’s the impression I got having done some quick skimming of the book) with the corollary being that it was a “free” giveaway to the USSR. This is wrong, because the Western Allies were superbly supplied with materiel as it is. It was not a significant constraint for them. What was a constraint was limited manpower, much lower combat effectiveness than the Germans (adjusted for logistics/battlefield conditions, US Marine divisions were about as effective as Wehrmacht reserve divisions), and the fact that Germany was making massive capital investments into its industrial base that – in the absence of the Eastern Front (by either not attacking the USSR, or defeating it in 1942/43) and Allied strategic bombing – would have by 1944-45 brought up German war production to near-American scales and assured it total conventional military hegemony over all of continental Europe.
Anyhow, I’d rather first finish reading the book before engaging in much more detailed discussion of it. This was mostly just a throwaway “first impression” of it, hence why its a brief note on the Open Thread, not a separate post.
Suck-up.
I remember reading Suvorov’s books in the early 2000s and my impression was that it absolutely made sense. Soviet Union was a proto-Globalist project that was supposed to expand its ideology and system as far as possible. At the times, a war was the only way for it to happen.
It is only after the war, after US dropped the A bombes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the USSR lost 25 million dead and got its most productive regions devastated, that the Communist project had to become less brazen in its prospects.
Then Soviet elites started talking about detente, coexistence and convergence. By the end of the 1970ies they decided to drop the Communist ideology and integrate in the Globalized West that had moved forward with the capitalist Globalisation. But either Communist, or Capitalist or some mix of both (the Chinese model) Globalism was the outcome we were moving towards ever since the defeat of the Nazi Reich.
Soviet Russians were used as cannon fodder by the worldwide early Globalist elites in the 1930ies. Today it’s the Americans’ turn to play this role. Probably tomorrow it’ll be the Chinese…
In what sense? I never hid that I disagree with Ron Unz on multiple WW2 questions. It is however obviously true that there’s no point in me discussing McMeekin’s book in detail when I’ve only read the first three chapters and skimmed over a few other parts of interest (on the basis of which I wrote this comment to Hanania’s post).
Don’t know. But one wouldn’t necessarily have to change republics, just change cities. Move from a village where one was a kulaks’s or priest’ s child to a city far away, and become a former peasant, current factory worker. Then as such get into a medical institute, or join the Party, etc. The same genetic gifts associated with former status will be helpful in terms of regaining status in the new world. These games are of course inefficient and wasteful on a societal level of course.
As I posted before, I have played (and usually lost) online chess against hundreds of Russians, and they tend to favor what chess players call “quiet moves.” U.S. players are more impetuous, and even reckless. I wonder whether my “quiet moves” observation can be extrapolated to the slowness to adopt vaccination. Or to Mr. Putin’s slowness to produce doses.
This is a classic picture. It is presented like a diagram, and it could be used to illustrate Adorno’s theory of the culture industry.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/72/82/fa/7282fa93ad58c50b55c65acf204a2d1d.jpg
Arrangement of the picture is like a circuit diagram, and its format looks more complex than the normal “Pavlovian conditioning” arrangement.
There is a picture in middle of the animal’s “reward” – wedding day with your beautiful girlfriend, run on the beach.
And at the top, of the older attractive wife looking at you with admiration, remembering your witty comments, as you drive home from a dinner party.
These pictures are the “reward” for the ape. But we put in front of them the expensive piece of metal, and the difficult to understand instruction or “recipe” text that he has to read.
Picture of the car and the written instruction is presented as if it XNOR gate. Animal needs to reach the happy people on the beach, anticlockwise, but we imply it can only get to that part of the picture by solving the first picture and the written instruction.
An octopus would have no problem with these traps, ignoring the metal object, and swimming to its mating ritual. But we have the bypass installed for receiving instructions, even such pitiable ones where Madison Avenue has added diagrams of a mating ritual to include pieces of metal their client wanted to sell.
Of course, this is not some accident or contradiction to society. It’s one of the main raisons d’êtres of 1970s America: very cool automobiles, if downsized by Arab oil embargoes after the Yom Kippur War. Perhaps, god has created us to produce automobiles not happy families.
Breaking News:
A great person who was friend to whistleblowers and dissidents and truthtellers has passed away. Technologist, security expert and organizer Kevin Gallagher (age 35) was discovered deceased in his San Francisco apartment on June 10. Early word from the local coroner is that he passed away June 5, his birthday.
He was active in both professional and activist circles across the US, where he was known as a digital security specialist and committed to curtailing abuses of government power (his website domain ‘cointel.pro’ references the infamous FBI surveillance and infiltration program). He was a certified Linux systems administrator who aided many projects like the Library Freedom Project, the Calyx Institute, and Transparency Toolkit as well as companies like Cloudflare and Pandora.
In 2016 he testified in defense of Lauri Love, a UK-based hacker who once faced extradition to the United States. Gallaher’s journalism played a role in drawing more attention to the Stratfor emails, which were indexed by Wikileaks and are still searchable to this day (https://search.wikileaks.org/gifiles/).
Gallagher was among the early proponents of ‘cryptoparties,’ events aimed at training people in cryptography tools and personal computer security. He also wrote in Medium, The Daily Beast, The Guardian, HuffPost, Vice Motherboard, and DailyDot to raise issues he cared about.
Nearly 1 in 5 young adults say they’re not straight, global survey finds [NBC News, June 9th, 2021]
Related:
Audacious Epigone, April 27th:
Interest in Open Relationships by Sexual Orientation
Steve Sailer:
LGBT Recruitment Drive Succeeding Wildly (February)
My Review of “Irreversible Damage: the Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters” (March)
Why do you say “not entirely surprisingly”? Some reason particular to India?
Will be interesting to see how it pans out, but my guess is that people aren’t simply choosing from the pool of people who attend college. I am confident that elites will quickly adapt and find new status markers to keep assortative mating humming along once tertiary education becomes a less reliable signal.
Most modern young people aren’t thinking about marriage at all until 25-30yo, at which point profession becomes a big part of identity. The majority of people find partners on dating apps now, and they all show your job. Most high earners discriminate liberally – my impression is that among top the top 20% or so, assortative mating is becoming even more efficient.
Thinking of 5 closes couple friends I know (all late 20s or 30s);
– Doctor & doctor
– Finance guy & dentist
– Govt drone & govt drone
– Finance guy & finance gal
– Lawyer & lawyer
When I cast my mind further afield the same dynamics are at play. Maybe my peer group is unique (many first gen migrants, almost zero ‘old money’) – but the trends are striking to me.
I was just coping with the apparent changes in what is available and what isn’t (and I have a lot of sympathies with the agrarian folks)
The real virus is neither SARS-COV-2 nor globalist state authoritarianism. It is liberalism which spawned all the ill in the world, capitalism, socialism, fascism, nationalism, and the twin of 2020.
On the topic of “transhumanism”, or more accurately, the idea of quantifying everything in life, I’ve been using the Muse 2 for quite some time as a neurofeedback device that monitors brainwaves and confirm a kind of meditative state for the user. It also comes with a host of other feedback monitors, including the heart rate.
I’m happy to say that I’ve accomplished something recently that I had not expected, given that my regular practice only started late last year(and the Muse 2, only around March) – I’ve actually found myself able to lower my heart beat at will, and by a considerable extent: to the mid-60s from the 90s which was my normal rate.
This was such a massive change that I doubted it and reconfirmed separately with another app, which also confirmed the lowered heart rate. So it appears to be true, and I’m pretty amazed by it.
All in all, I definitely recommend the Muse for anyone looking into a neurofeedback device.
I am really prone to making hasty pronouncements and picking up a lot of poor (or what seems to be right) thinking, but yeah, some of those have grains of truth in it and I’ve learnt good things.
https://katehon.com/en/article/carl-schmitt-xxi-century
Good addition to my booklist to wash away the taste of Arendt.
You clearly have a great understanding of Humanity.
https://youtu.be/A-b7-fLOjlY
Have you read it?
https://www.unz.com/jthompson/costly-immigration/
To me it would be most odd if someone as cautious as Stalin would have contemplated attack against the West after the fiasco of Winter War and Purges of Red Army’s officer corps. Stalin was not a gambler like Hitler. Even his rise to power was through careful attention to details and planning, he was too wary and risk averse to really contemplate such shenanigans as grand surpise attack to the west. Or why else he did so many purges? Because he was not as sure about his position as Hitler, and had not as much trust in his state’s institutions.
I haven’t, but (this is a viewpoint floating in the emigrant-pitching part of HK web) who won’t want a millions-strong pool of hard-working and usually intelligent immigrants?
Let’s see how it turned out for every country welcoming the Jews. (but at least HKers aren’t hostile to their new hosts)
It’s okay.
I like your blog and I wouldn’t want to see you end up in the shit-can with Peter.
Careful readers can penetrate the saccharine aura of this webzine and see that it makes an invalid claim to the “moral high ground” in journalism vis-a-vis the MSM.
What “Peter”?
I am still not getting your point. FTR, I have full editorial independence on my own blog. If you’re implying I could be “ejected” for disagreeing with Unz on various issues, well that seems rather unlikely, given that many of the bloggers and columnists regularly disagree with him (and each other) on all sorts of issues.
This is a valid observation. But Stalin was also well aware that it is best to fight an offensive war on the enemy’s territory. Also, the war between Soviets and Nazis was inevitable anyway and Stalin was well aware of that, even though he publicly pretended otherwise. And Stalin was also well capable of taking quick and decisive action when needed if he thought that the time was right. In fact, by his “gambling” aggressive move on the 22nd June of 1941, Hitler might have (inadvertently?) done the only thing that prevented the total victory of the Soviets in Europe which Stalin carefully planned for.
In case you didn’t read it:
https://www.litmir.me/br/?b=576530&p=1
I would say that Suvorov’s “The Last Republic ” was even more important and convincing from my personal point of view.
https://www.litmir.me/br/?b=26360&p=1
What “Peter”?
Dang, you Russkies are good at the unperson thing.
Peter Frost
that seems rather unlikely
Write a review of McMeekin’s book with special attention to Sokurov ‘s thesis vis-a-vis mainstream historians.
See if you are allowed to tell your readers that there is no cat, hell, there’s not even a bag.
I mean, there are many Peters, LOL.
From what I recall, Peter Frost banned Unz from commenting on an article on Unz’s own website. That’s a rather extreme thing to do so it’s hardly surprising that things turned out the way they did.
Yes, I’ll probably do that.
Yesterday I skipped a bunch of chapters ahead and specifically read the sections on the immediate prelude to Barbarossa as well as the first month after it. As I expected, there is no crypto-endorsement of the Suvorov Hypothesis – namely, the specific claim that Stalin had concrete plans to strike first and that Hitler preempted him, not observations such as that USSR had militarized at a breakneck speed (well, so had Germany from 1935, that’s what you generally do when you expect a big war, regardless of whether you want to start it) or that the Red Army was obsessed with offensive operations (by that standard, you can blame WW1 on France, LOL).
McMeekin clearly does want some soft variant of the Suvorov Hypothesis to be true and to this end spends a lot of pages recounting the Soviet paper superiority in tanks, aircraft, and artillery in order to give a certain impression while not saying it out loud. But the basic and more relevant fact is that the Red Army was vastly less combat effective than the Wehrmacht, due to well-known human capital deficiencies and institutional problems, so it would have been eaten up just as quickly and perhaps even quicker even it had managed to attack first (basic military rule: defense is easier than offense). Also, even from purely material considerations, the German forces were much better equipped with munitions (making the Soviet advantage in guns irrelevant) and they were much more motorized from the beginning to the end of the war (people like to cite 600k horses used in Barbarossa, what they cite less frequently is that the Germans likewise had 600k motor vehicles, the Soviets only reached that number in Jan 1945, LOL). Once one starts looking at these important details, the Soviet de facto material advantage over Nazi Germany plummets, and in between that and the Red Army’s intrinsically lower combat effectiveness (i.e. adjusted for material factors), what happened in 1941 was inevitable.
Yes, I’ll probably do that.
Good, I like being proven wrong sometimes.
so it would have been eaten up just as quickly and perhaps even quicker even it had managed to attack first
No doubt, but would that have paused Stalin if he had decided to go. Obviously he was waiting and hoping the Allies would degrade Germany’s military might, just as Roosevelt and Churchill were counting on the same result from the Eastern Front. They almost miscalculated the timing for D-Day and instead of meeting the Red Army at Berlin they almost allowed the Red Army a clean shot to the Channel instead.
I think that you might let your hatred of the commies cloud some of your thinking on The Great Patriotic War.
I see your obsession with one of the many Phony War / Sitzkrieg fanciful allied plans continues, and that you seem to think this is some kind of gnostic knowledge. Other allied schemes from this period involved landing troops in Northern Scandinavia, on the pretext of assisting the Finns, to stop Swedish exports of iron ore to Germany.
In reality this plan is routinely discussed in WW2 histories. I just read two WW2 books, and both bring up the plan. The first is Richard Overy’s The Bombing War, and the second is Niklas Zetterling’s Blitzkrieg: From the Ground Up.
Here’s the text from Overy’s book:
And here’s the text from Zetterling’s book:
Zetterling’s footnote, incidentally, references a German book published in 1975.
The plan is not some hidden from us and is in fact ordinary knowledge among WW2 historians and buffs.
What I can’t figure out is why he pushes such nonsense.
It’s not like he has to convince “us” that one can’t blindly trust the MSM.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9684497/Priti-Patel-accuses-England-footballers-gesture-politics-taking-knee.html
See, what the solution is – import more brown people from Indian subcontinent, so they won’t be afraid being called racists after speaking out, lol 🙂
Anyway, any bets on who and when will become the first UK PM from former Indian colony – Priti, Rishi or Sajid?
You’re entirely correct that the 700 page Overy book published in 2013 devotes most of one paragraph to the planned Allied attack on the Soviets in early 1940, and the 2017 Zetterling gives a full 78 words to the same topic, while referencing a 1975 book published in German. David Irving also briefly mentioned it in one of his Churchill books, and I’m sure there are other exceptions as well.
When the issue came up a year or two ago, and several people tried to locate references via Google, those book didn’t come up, presumably because they were so scanty. I suspect unless you’d actually read the book, you wouldn’t have noticed them.
Operation Pike, an extremely detailed 250 page monograph on the subject, was published in a very respectable military history series in 2000, at which point concealing the facts obviously became increasingly difficult. But even so, Chris Bellamy’s 800 page Absolute War, regarded as a very authoritative account of Soviet Russia in WWII, was published in 2007 and contains not a single mention of those facts, and the Bellamy book seems very typical in this regard. The 2015 article published in the National Interest shocked its readers and brought the facts to a more general audience, putting further pressure on historians.
Still, I think it’s undeniable that an Allied attack on the USSR in early 1940 would have represented the entire turning point of the war, and it appears that such an attack was about to take place before Hitler successfully attacked France. Unless I’m mistaken, the planned strategic bombing campaign against the Soviets would have been the largest in world history to that date, and Overy would have looked very foolish if he had totally excluded it from his history of WWII bombing. So he gave it most of one paragraph.
My guess would be the a large majority of WWII historians have been aware of the facts all along, but were very reluctant to ever mention them, for obvious political reasons. Indeed, McMeekin told me that he was hit very hard in the British press for his substantial discussion of Operation Pike and related matters. I wouldn’t be surprised if the few pages he devoted to the topic were greater than the combined total words of all the other thousands of English-language WWII books published over the previous couple of generations.
It’s obviously a matter of personal opinion whether that constitutes a “cover up” of the likely turning point of WWII.
As an exercise, I wonder if you could locate for me the longest coverage of Operation Pike in any mainstream English-language history book published until the last few years. Overy gave it most of one paragraph, so perhaps you can find an author who allocated a single full page, which would match the casual discussion in the 1952 memoirs of Sisley Huddleston, which is where I first discovered it.
haha, “white” reaction was quick:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9684497/Priti-Patel-accuses-England-footballers-gesture-politics-taking-knee.html
Operation Pike did not actually take place, which is why you do not find it extensively written about. Is this mysterious to you? Perhaps you find it very interesting that historians are deeply reluctant to write at length about Operation Felix, the proposed Axis assault on Gibraltar which never took place.
The plan went through numerous conceptions as most military plans do, but it would have been one of the larger strategic bombing efforts in world history to date by virtue of the fact that prior to the German Blitz most strategic bombing efforts to date had been quite puny.
The plan would have failed completely in its objectives given the state of technology at the time and the small forces involved. As you rightly point out it could have carried catastrophic political consequences as well.
There is no turning point stemming from Operation Pike because nothing happened. I’m not really sure why you think historians refusing to devote themselves to events that never took place constitutes evidence of a coverup.
The reason I provided the excerpts I did is that those two books are quite literally the last two books I read. I’ve been reading WW2 literature for over two decades, and while Operation Pike certainly is not mentioned in every book it’s not something that’s intentionally hidden.
Overy could I suppose be accused of concealing British plans to wage war against Germany’s food supply with anthrax, because Operation Vegetarian is not discussed in his book. But once again, this is something that never took place (and Overy does mention other British plans to use chemical and biological weapons).
Does this mean that Ukraine will give up its claims on territories lost to Russia in 2014?
https://twitter.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1404512788966514689
No country with territorial disputes can be a NATO member if I remember correctly, unless Zelensky means becoming a NATO partner which is a whole other thing.
https://twitter.com/JonLemire/status/1404520361849413642
Soviet WW II Intent
Major powers of past and present have all sorts of hypothetical military planning which may or may not be likely to happen.
Stalin entered Molotov-Ribbentrop knowing full well that a future Nazi-Soviet war was still possible at some point.
He entered that arrangement after the West rebuffed his offer for an anti-Nazi alliance. Upon the Nazi attack on the USSR, the Soviets were sending aid to Germany. Stalin grossly miscalculated, ignoring his own Intel and that of the West.
Stalin was cautious to engage in conflict with Germany at that point in time – 1939 early 1940s. He probably considered what happened in WW I, when Russia early in that war struck into Germany at a time when Russia wasn’t so militarily well prepared.
Consider the difficulties the Soviets had in Finland and the purges of the 1930s, which included the Red Army officer corps.
familial nepotism is why those countries are poor
(and being hard-working and intelligent makes it worse)
i don’t have a view on the broader question but the Bolsheviks did invade Poland in the 1920s and we know Stalin wanted to invade Poland and Finland because he did
so at a minimum i could see him thinking on how to get Poland without war with the west.
Hey it was the Poles who attacked Soviet Russia. Soviet invasion of Poland in 1920 was a result of Polish aggression, just like Soviet invasion of Germany in 1945 was a result of German aggression.
You’re making yourself look foolish by denying the obvious. Germany and the Allies were at war, and Gibraltar was an obvious strategic target. A German assault might have been successful or not, and might have been cost-effective or not, but that’s an entirely different scenario than an Allied attack on the USSR in early 1940.
You say the silence is explained by the fact that it never happened. Okay. Yet oddly enough, all the history books provide substantial mention of the German plans for a possible invasion of Britain in 1940, which also never happened. Attacking the USSR and bringing it into the war would have been far more momentous.
And the planned attack wasn’t merely one of those endless military “hypotheticals.” Unmarked Allied planes were already illegally overflying Soviet airspace to select initial bombing targets. Detailed negotiations were taking place with the Turks and the Iranians to enlist them in the attack on the USSR. Target dates for the attack had been set on several occasions and then postponed. It appears that the main reason the attack never took place was the German conquest of France. The Germans then seized and published all the secret French documents so that every well-informed observer soon became aware of the plans.
And it sounds like you admit that the strategic Allied bombing offense would have been the largest in world history, intended to entirely destroy the Soviet oil industry, thereby perhaps causing a famine that would overthrow Stalin’s regime.
Consider something that is always mentioned in almost every WWII history book. The following year, the British government repeatedly attempted to warn Stalin that Hitler was planning to attack, but Stalin disregarded those warnings, and the books tend to explain this as due to Stalin’s “paranoia.” But Stalin knew perfectly well that less than a year earlier the British had been planning an all-out attack against the USSR, and surely that was a contributing factor. Yet not a single history book ever mentions this obvious and important fact, and I doubt whether even 0.1% of the readers are aware of it. You argue that’s not a cover-up, so I guess you believe that the books lacked space for an additional sentence or two of explanation.
Here’s another example. It seems pretty solidly established that the Allies tried and failed to assassinate Charles de Gaulle and the Americans decided to assassinate Chiang Kai-shek, but later changed their minds. Your theory is that these incidents were excluded from all the history books because they never happened. Okay, but it seems pretty likely that Sikorski, the leader of the Polish government in exile, was assassinated in exactly that same way, and the reality of that particular incident has also been excluded from all the history books.
It’s hardly the most surprising thing in the world for a nation’s historians to cover up very embarrassing aspects of their major wars. And to completely deny that reality makes someone look rather ridiculous.
You remember correctly, there’s an article like that in NATO’s rules, but it’s BS, because both Estonia and Latvia had territorial disputes with Russia in 2003, but it was no obstacle for joining NATO.
Stalin’s war with Finland cam after he offered the Finns a strategic land swap before choosing the war option. At the time, Stalin likely figured Finland to be a Nazi ally in a war against the USSR.
As a result of Molotov-Ribbentrop, the Nazis took Poland which had been part of the Russian Empire. This facet shows that the USSR regarded itself as not being so strong against Nazi Germany.
1939
The overall knowledge on that conflict is typically limited.
https://www.eurasiareview.com/08042016-fuzzy-history-how-poland-saved-the-world-from-russia-analysis/
“concealing the facts”, “cover up” – The only reason for not dwelling on the Operation Pike too much was to conceal the fact from the general public that the USSR was an ally of Nazi Germany for the first 21 months of WWII during which time it attacked Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Rumania and supplied Nazi Germany with strategic raw materials. During that time communist organizations on orders from Moscow all over the world were to not engage in anti Nazi propaganda or activities. Communist organizations in occupied France were denouncing anti-German activities of pro-London French Resistance to Gestapo. Communists in the US actively supported America First Committee and the isolationist position. And when June 22, 1941 happened the order from Moscow was reversed 180° and whitewashing of what people did and said before began. This was a true Orwellian moment of WWII.
Example: Almanac Singers with Pete Seeger pulled their May 1941 anti-war album from distribution and those who had already purchased copies were asked to return them. Pete Seeger “Washington Breakdown” vanished form memory
Pete Seeger continued to sing about unions and then recorded another song to Franklin D this time titled “Dear Mr. President”:
Concealing Operation Pike was easy because it was just a plan that was never implemented. However it was known (your unawareness of it till recently is surprising) but not really discussed in terms of what the world would looked like if it was implemented or were French and British really serious. Was it just a plan devised on military command level while the higher up politicians knew from the very beginning that eventually the honeymoon of Hitler and Stalin would be over?
https://i.ibb.co/GcStBXM/Stalin-Htl.png
Roosevelt was counting on Russo-German war and having Russia as an ally against Hitler. In November 1938 Ambassador William Bullit, Jr. said:
Anyway if Stalin would have let Germany take all Poland he would have been an utter idiot, especially when Poland created by Pilsudski, was for whole interwar era, more hostile against USSR than any other country in the world.
Im just wasting time with you…
What’s your opinion of this?
https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1404518201300598788
Thanks.
Finland had bad relations with Germany before 1940, and was very Western, not Germany, oriented, as Franco-British plans for help during the Winter War show us, anyway Stalin’s demands were seen too excessive in Finland, and Stalin by his policy choices and aggression forced Finland into German camp little before operation Barbarossa.
Remember that Finns had two separate wars against USSR, first defensive war, alone against Soviet aggression, and second war with Germans as allies in invasion of USSR.
Why is it an entirely different scenario?
Germany was dependent on imports of oil, many of which came from the Soviet Union.
Likewise, Germany was dependent on imports of Swedish iron ore which is why the allies also drew up plans to intervene in Scandinavia (never mentioned by you).
The allies had defeated Germany in WW1 through economic strangulation, so these strategic targets were obvious enough to allied planners.
Well, this is a reasonable point, but I would state the discrepancy is explained by the following:
• Germany and Britain were at war
• Britain had been driven from the Continent
• There was an actual Battle of Britain intended as a prelude to invasion
Yes, it’s quite ordinary to engage in detailed planning and reconnaissance in advance of projected military operations.
German planes were also illegally overflying Soviet airspace prior to 1941, and for that matter Soviet aircraft were illegally overflying German airspace. In an era at which radar technology was in its infancy, illegal overflights were routine. And of course illegal overflights continued for many years after the war as demonstrated by the CIA’s illegal U-2 overflights of the USSR.
Neutrals were throughout both World Wars endlessly beseeched by the belligerents to try to enlist them in the war. The cajoling of Turkey and Iran is therefore nothing unusual, and Britain (and Germany) would continue trying to seduce Turkey through the entire war. Iran for its part ended up suffering a joint Anglo-Soviet invasion.
A hypothetical allied bombing of the Soviet oil industry would have been the largest in world history to that time in the same way that the Ford Model T was the fastest production sedan in world history at the time of its introduction.
If you understand the analogy, it’s a true but irrelevant or misleading statement because the absolute power of the “world’s largest strategic bombing offensive” in mid-1940 is trivial. It wouldn’t be until 1943 that RAF Bomber Command evolved into a terrifying instrument of urban mass destruction as demonstrated by the Battle of the Ruhr and Operation Gomorrah (the firebombing of Hamburg).
An allied attempt in 1940 to bomb the Soviet Union would have done very little damage indeed, and probably many of the planes would be unable to reach their targets. Indeed this was the experience of the RAF in its efforts to bomb Germany in ’40-41. While the Soviet oil industry would be undamaged, such an attack could potentially have motivated the USSR to join the Axis.
Actually it’s a fairly standard explanation that Stalin did not trust the British, though to your credit I’ve never once seen this tied to Operation Pike. It should be pointed out that Stalin also had ample reasons for distrusting the British beyond Operation Pike.
Your last point is a strawman. My basic contention here is that most WW2 historians and buffs do not find Operation Pike to be as interesting or significant as you do, and that explains the lack of coverage.
Frustration with de Gaulle and “Cash-my-Check” is a common staple of period histories which focus on these regions and/or personalities. The successful murder of Admiral Darlan is another WW2 assassination conspiracy.
You’re on firmer ground with the murder of Sikorski, where there probably is a coverup. Means, motive, and opportunity all point to this.
I have no disagreement with this as a general point, but in my view it doesn’t apply to Operation Pike. Operation Pike is embarrassing, but not in the way you imply. It’s embarrassing because it was a foolish scheme doomed to failure, and doubly so because it was indicative of Anglo-French unwillingness to directly attack Germany.
Such a cuck. This guy is still a prime minister, and the lampposts are empty?
I’m sure that you feel silly after reading the responding comment.
Yes.
Militaries make plans for everything. Planning exercises are fun and the bread and butter of the commissioned officer. Military historians know this. I guess some amateur “sleuths” don’t, and get extremely excitable when a particular plan suits their particular agenda.
I knew the Chinese had it in them 🙂 A national movement of Bartleby the Scriveners. One must remember this is the nation that gave birth to Taoism. Bravo China!
https://www.insider.com/disenchanted-chinese-youth-join-a-mass-movement-to-lie-flat-2021-6
And more good news from America –
https://www.axios.com/resignations-companies-e279fcfc-c8e7-4955-8a9b-47562490ee55.html
Is the world changing?
Your first link:
More and more Chinese 20-somethings are rejecting the rat race and ‘lying flat’ after watching their friends work themselves to death
I wish them well.
Interesting.
Your second link:
“Great resignation” wave coming for companies
Who could take exception to a sentiment such as that? We would all love to be able to support ourselves by doing something we enjoy. The reality, however, is that often (and likely more often than not) is simply not practical or realistic.
I wanted to make sure you were aware that Audacious Epigone had finally responded to the questions and concerns concerning moderation that we had recently voiced at his blog.
כל טוב
Well, until fairly recently I had never closely investigated WWII, and therefore relied upon the standard history texts and contemporary media articles, none of which ever hinted at Operation Pike. I’m not sure you can find two paragraphs on it in any English-language book published in the last 70 years. So if no one ever mentioned something so momentous as a planned 1940 Allied attack on the USSR, how was I to ever suspect its existence?
I doubt I’m alone in that regard. I suspect that if you took a sample of upper-end well-educated Americans, say the top half of Ivy League graduates of the last 50 years, and described Operation Pike to them, 99+% would have never heard of it, and probably denounce you as a “crazy conspiracy theorist” for believing in such nonsense.
I’d think most professional historians, especially those specializing in WWII, are at least aware of it, but perhaps treat it as a semi-forbidden subject, as McMeekin discovered when it became the main focus of the attacks on his book.
I’m not sure, but it is probably based on de jure (i.e. what the US says to be) borders?
(But [South] Cyprus, only controlling 2/3 of its de jure territory, isn’t in NATO. Turkey is in NATO since it is actually Northern Cyprus’ business, but Ankara has some minor territorial and EEZ disputes with Greece as well that stem from the aftermath of Greco-Turkish War)
Well yes, that’s because Germany was preparing to attack the Soviets and the Soviets were (probably) preparing to attack Germany. Similarly, the Allies were preparing to attack the USSR.
Military hindsight is 20-20. The Allies were absolutely convinced that their strategic bombing offensive would totally annihilate the Soviet oil industry. They were mistaken.
Exactly! The crucial point is that Operation Pike would have ensured an Allied defeat in WWII. That’s why I entitled my article “How Hitler Saved the Allies.”
As I just suggested above, I think you might have a very difficult time finding even two paragraphs discussing Operation Pike in any English-language history book published in the last 70 years, with 99% of them not mentioning a word. I consider that a cover-up.
And if you told the story to a large group of upper-end well-educated Americans, 99+% would probably regard you as a nut for believing in a “crazy conspiracy theory.” Sounds like a very successful cover-up to me.
I was the first to brought that “lying low” sentiment up in Karlin’s open thread. It’s just the redux of Japan’s low-expectation society, with an additional but light stain of resistance to the system and the establishment. That’s the reaction to the high-pressure form of Capitalism practiced in East Asia.
For the 2nd link, your quote put it quite well. Now wait for the inevitable high inflation + UBI…
We are indeed moving away from the Capitalist ethic of accumulation for accumulation’s sake, which is much more fundamental than what Schwab can imagine.
Well existence of Croats and Poles is one of the best proofs against the existence of God, without those fiends it would be highly likely that whole Slavdom would be united under Russia’s eternal loving and happy embrace, and Slavs would now have bases on moon, maybe even on Mars, but no, Polish and Croat slave mentality prefers German lords over Slavic brothers.
Thanks.
Incidentally, I wondered whether anyone would recognize the photo.
Quite tangentially, how much, if at all, might linguistic differences between English and Russian account for the use of the single term children to include adolescents as old as eighteen? Granted, such an inclusive usage would seem entirely consistent with several of the definitions for child found in reputable English dictionaries, both American as well as British.
Still, does such a usage not sound awkward? Would not the greater precision and clarity of an alternative such as children and adolescents…; children and teenagers..; or simply youth…, or youngsters… make for a smoother, more common, more standard usage? Does the Russian language make less of a distinction between children and adolescents than does English?
But in general many aspects of the early period of WW2 are not well known to the wider Anglo public and have started attracting deeper interest from English language historians only in the last 20-30 years.
If you stated that in early 1940 the French Army was considered one of, if not the most, powerful and feared land force in the world many educated Americans would probably also think you were quite crazy.
If you stated that early in 1988 the USSR was often seen as the most stable political entity in the world, many would you think you were completely nuts.
People see through hindsight. This is normal and not evidence of a cover-up or really anything at all.
Russia and NATO are often illegally flying over each other, but they clearly have no intention for an actual war.
Please consider that while you can read historical evidence, you lack a lot of necessary expertise in evaluating it. You aren’t to know how ordinary it is for militaries to plan everything, and, yes, conduct fly-overs to flesh out those plans; but you should at least understand that there is a lot you don’t know.
That’s powerful. But it’s not like the rest of the Slavs are that eager to be united under Russian rule.
So, both of us agree that Operation Pike was a real operational plan. I’m a little more skeptical that it would have been launched than you are, given the skepticism of the British Cabinet as well as the absence of any “strategic” formations in the French Air Force. But it’s certainly possible. The British after all launched ships to mine Narvik before the Germans launched their invasion of Norway for instance.
The real issue is that you think this was covered up because it’s somehow embarrassing. Would you mind sharing why you think this is embarrassing? My understanding of you is that you think it’s politically embarrassing for some reason. What is the reason for the coverup?
My experience from many years of reading WW2 histories is that Operation Pike comes up about as occasionally as other operations never carried out such as Operation Catherine and Operation Tannenbaum. The major exceptions to this are Sealion and Operation Downfall. I decided to check this on Google Ngram, which you can use yourself. Be warned that the tool is case sensitive.
I selected Operations Felix, Tannenbaum, Pike, and Catherine. Two German, and two allied. Here are the results: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Operation+Pike%2COperation+Catherine%2COperation+Felix%2COperation+Tannenbaum&year_start=1940&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2COperation%20Pike%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2COperation%20Catherine%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2COperation%20Felix%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2COperation%20Tannenbaum%3B%2Cc0
Felix dominates, but all have been written about at a low level since the end of the war. Pike has picked up a bit in popularity since the end of the 20th century.
As for the possible consequences of Operation Pike, it may very well have motivated the USSR to join the Axis. That’s a very interesting alternate history, but it belongs to fiction and is in the realm of Harry Turtledove and Stuart Slade.
Lastly, there’s the conjecture that Operation Pike would be rejected as a conspiracy theory by upper income, well-educated Americans. Maybe so, since they’re trained to reject anything not presented by the media as a conspiracy theory. But I think they’d be more likely to accept the reality of Operation Pike than, say, the evidence that FDR was involved in fomenting the European war.
Has this Sabaton ‘Defense of Moscow’ video been mentioned before? I haven’t read comment threads in a while. I’m guessing that they are trying to release songs for Hearts of Iron IV. It’s appropriate especially because WW2 was mentioned above.
I would argue that an all-out Allied strategic bombing attack against the neutral USSR in early 1940 is vastly more significant than those other examples you give, and yet according to the NGram chart, it’s coverage was almost non-existent until a couple of years before the publication of Osborn’s landmark 2000 monograph based on his exhaustive archival research. So for roughly 50 years it was almost entirely excluded from all English language books, usually receiving perhaps 1/50th the discussion of Operation Felix, something very minor by comparison.
As I said, I think you’d have a difficult time locating even two paragraphs in any one of the tens of thousands of WWII books published until the last few years. Chris Bellamy’s authoritative 800 page volume on Soviet Russia in WWII provides not a single hint, and it appeared in 2007, years after the Osborn monograph. I’ve looked at other, equally weighty volumes with a similar focus and discovered the same total absence. Given the ferocious attacks that McMeekin told me he endured for discussing it, the silence of these other writers is hardly mysterious.
Of course it was a cover-up, the facts are obvious. For exactly similar reasons, McMeekin only very briefly mentioned Suvorov once in his book, and David Irving’s name is often completely excluded from WWII books very closely connected with his own work.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Kantokuen%2COperation+Pike&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2CKantokuen%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2COperation%20Pike%3B%2Cc0#t1;,Kantokuen;,c0;.t1;,Operation%20Pike;,c0
Here’s a graph comparing Operation Pike with Kantokuen, a projected Japanese assault on the Soviet Union. Perhaps you rate the significance of this as much higher than the previous examples.
Is Kantokuen being covered up?
You state that “of course” there was a cover-up, and that the facts are “obvious”. I can’t agree with that, and the existence of other cover-ups (such as the 21st century suppression of David Irving) does not indicate Operation Pike has been covered up.
My previous question to you was perhaps overlooked. What exactly do you think is so embarrassing about Operation Pike? What is the incentive for covering it up?
I doubt Americans would be extremely interested in a hypothetical Japanese attack on the USSR, compared with a fully planned and almost implemented Allied attack against that same country in 1940. I suspect that the former might get more attention from Japanese historians.
Regarding coverups in the American media and historiography, the number and magnitude are so enormous as to almost seem ridiculous. As just one example, if you haven’t already done so, you might want to read one of my many articles on the subject from a couple of years ago:
https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-john-mccain-jeffrey-epstein-and-pizzagate/
And with regard to the original topics of my comments, it’s quite remarkable that Suvorov became probably the world’s best-selling military historian soon after his original book appeared in English, but it took two decades until his work became available again in the Anglosphere. Since his views were almost never mentioned in any English-language publication, only an infinitesimal number of ordinary Americans ever became aware of it.
Still, you have to give him credit: he crams an impressive amount of specious reasoning into his effort posts.
It’s a “gift.”
Viktor Suvorov is a traitor and defector, such people are not trustworthy and deserve nothing else than…
Yes, and I notice that the language always heats up in areas unchallenged.
E.g
A plan, among multitudes, with some flyovers, transforms, in the absence of opposition, but with no evidence, to “a fully planned and almost implemented Allied attack”.
Another foible is trying to make his claims ordinary by tying them to all of the extraordinary claims of the American Pravda series. As if a hundred extraordinary claims, weakly linked together, are therefore more substantial – like junk mortgages in 2008. This is necessary when only circumstantial evidence is presented, or only NINJA loans can be made.
I don’t doubt his good faith or his intelligence, but I also don’t think “egotistical” is unfair as a description.
Stealing from Karlins’ twitter, BNE has a decent article on tool industry in Russia.
https://www.intellinews.com/long-read-russia-s-sanctions-soft-underbelly-precision-machine-tools-213024/?source=russia
It’s a good article as far as history goes, but there has been some significant improvement in Russian manufacturing business since 2014-2017.
Also, this:
Advanced manufacturing and precision machinery are a very small fraction of overall economic activity even in the leading producer countries. The biggest challenge is to create guaranteed market for the product so that manufacturers don’t go bankrupt. Once that’s done, human and capital investment is rather trivial for any major economy.
Yes, I agree that people will always have to work jobs that are intrinsically unappealing. What I’m objecting to is an economic climate that allows bosses to make jobs unnecessarily shitty, by paying low wages and being abusive and tyrannical on the assumption that workers have no option but to put up with it.
The economic climate changing to give more power to workers is a positive development.
Of course, it could go too far in the opposite direction and workers with too much power can hold employers hostage and cause economic stagnation.
But right now, the problem in America is that capitalism is too ruthless.
Beyond that relatively moderate position, anthropologist David Grabber has convincingly shown – to me, at any rate, and perhaps a few others 🙂 – that the majority of jobs in a modern economy are “bullshit”, and create solely out of our elites fear that providing people with a sense of economic security that will make them less easy to exploit.
Graeber argues that in fact, we have already lived through a “silent” automation revolution that has rendered much work for many people obsolete, but our elites have for various philosophical and self serving pragmatic reasons chosen to hide this fact.
In this context, the increasing celebration of the ruthless Chinese model – on the part of both right and left, even though for ostensibly different reasons – becomes particularly insidious.
Thank you, I did not see this! I had a strong suspicion that Ron Unz was behind it (lol :)), but I thought I had asked AE to clarify in the past and he ignored my question, which made me think perhaps not. Perhaps I misremembered.
Anyways, thanks for your efforts in this regard!
Yes, YA, you were indeed the first to mention this here, and I should have given you credit.
However, this is the first time I’ve seen it picked up by English language media.
It’s an important development. Our elites in the West are now trying to push the China model in a new attempt to “reframe” economic exploitation as in fact benign, and to this end they push this absurd myth that ordinary Chinese are thrilled to work crazy long hours under bad conditions, and that Xi’s policies enjoys the support of over 90% of the Chinese populace, who exist on a state of harmonious rapport with their exploitative elites.
This is at a point where support for unbridled capitalism in the West is beginning to falter, so elites are trying to rekindle enthusiasm and shore up the tottering edifice.
It’s a sophisticated campaign with messages meticulously tailored to particular groups core concerns. For instance, on Unz, there is a concerted effort to convince White Nationalists that the harsh economic conditions lower class Whites face are engineered by Jews, and that adopting a Chinese model based on racial unity between the elites and lower classes will lead to the harmonious rapport Chinese workers feel towards their elites – and presumably, American Whites will be willing to “sacrifice” for White overlords and lovingly work long hours for little pay for their elites benefit, as perhaps happened in a mythical Middle Ages.
For the more technocratic minded, the Chinese model is held up as being more “efficient” than the messy and chaotic American model which is unwieldy and dysfunctional by providing more freedom and protections for ordinary people.
Ron Unz, for instance – supports both Hispanic immigration and the China model, a typical elitist position adopted for self-serving reasons.
The goal, of course, is for both China and the US to converge on a global model of elitist exploitation.
It is good to see that this likely won’t happen. I hope both China and the US extricate themselves from this ruthless model of exploitative capitalism designed to benefit the elites, and that both people’s can live an ampler and more easeful life not based on the frantic pursuit of money, “efficiency”, or “growth”, but on enjoying the good things in life.
There was a massive bait and switch performed on the American workers in my cohort.
We were recruited into competing in a rat-race. There would be a bunch of losers; but there would be a few winners.
Turns out it was sysyphus pushing boulders up mountains and none of us were going to win anything. Our head would stay above water and we wouldn’t drown if lucky. Meanwhile 100% of our life’s energy was appropriated.
Screw that!
I have adopted Dave Ramsey’s philosophy. Debt free baby. Mortgage. Look it up.
Old French mort gage (“death pledge”)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mortgage
Germany at the time didn’t want to upset the idea of a nonaggression pact with the USSR, which was viewed by Berlin as one of temporary convenience.
In the greater scheme of things, it could be reasonably deduced at the time that Finland would support Germany in a Nazi-Soviet war situation.
As I mentioned further up this thread, the USSR offered a land swap which Finland (by right) refused. The Soviet reasoning had to do with a hypothetical Soviet-Nazi war, with Finland as a Nazi ally.
The one American engineer who worked in the USSR whom I can think of off of the top of my head is the father of the Koch brothers, who helped develop the USSR’s petrochemical industry under Stalin. He later claimed to be anti-Communist; but that didn’t stop him from cashing their checks.
This doesn’t take anything away from the Red Scare, which focused mainly on domestic left wing groups. The fact that the father of the Koch brothers made so much money in the USSR is cold comfort to the IWW, and other left wing groups who were harassed, and persecuted by law enforcement agencies. It certainly didn’t help Eugene Debs.
Finland had no motive to join German war efforts before losing Karelia to USSR in the Winter War, Finnish irredentists were a small minority, and largest parties were very democratically minded Social Democrats and Agrarian League. Mildly put Nordic SocDems were not known for their Nazi sympathies. Winter War forced Finland to become Germany’s ally. I know that Stalin feared that Finland would be used for invasion of Russia’s northern flank, but Stalin’s paranoia made it reality.
There was a German-Finnish WW I/Russian Revolution era connection, in conjunction with Mannerheim having some clout before the aforementioned Winter War.
I’m not sure that it’s fair to describe Kantokuen as a “hypothetical” and then in the same sentence refer to Operation Pike as “fully planned and almost implemented”.
I haven’t read the monograph you refer to, so perhaps there’s more information there I’m not privy to, but to my knowledge the most detailed “plan” for Operation Pike was a detailed study by British Air Ministry from April, 1940.
Forces were never actually sent to Middle Eastern bases for the proposed operation.
Meanwhile the Japanese, by dint of geography, had millions of troops in Manchuria and Korea on the Soviet border. Japan’s Tripartite allies were also engaged in a land campaign in the USSR at the time. Additionally, significant factions in the Japanese elite had long harbored aggressive designs on the Soviet Union and there had been skirmishes just two years before.
A Japanese invasion of the USSR in the summer of 1941 could have tipped the scales in favor of the Axis, so perhaps you could publish a successor piece titled How Hirohito Saved the Allies.
It’s not wrong to describe the operation as hypothetical, because it was, but to suggest Operation Pike was more likely to take place is misleading.
I’ve been reading and enjoying your essays for many years now. I do not always agree with your conclusions (though I frequently do), but they are always well-written, interesting, and thought-provoking.
As for Suvorov, maybe he was suppressed. His work is poor, but poor work is no barrier to success–just look at the late Stephen Ambrose. There exists substantial pressure to maintain the narrative that Hitler was both uniquely evil and uniquely responsible for World War 2. I certainly recall Pat Buchanan’s book Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War was highly controversial. Is it your contention that the existence of Operation Pike undermines popular anti-Hitlerism and was covered up for that reason?
I think most standard history books usually discuss the internal conflicts within the Japanese military and political leadership between those who wanted to strike north against the Soviets and those who wanted to strike south against the Western powers. From what I recall, a top priority of Soviet agents in both Japan and America was to help redirect the Japanese southward, and they succeeded. McMeekin’s book discusses this in considerable detail.
So although the term “Kantokuen” is quite uncommon, the idea is widely known. I’d certainly read about it dozens of times over the years, while until you mentioned the Japanese name for the possible operation I don’t think I’d ever seen it. Meanwhile, the notion of an early 1940 Allied attack on the Soviets was been almost totally removed from all Anglophone historiography for two or three generations, an entirely different situation.
Stylistically, perhaps. On the other hand, his work was absolutely revolutionary and seminal, and it completely overturned the established narrative of World War II, while McMeekin’s exhaustive archival research has now confirmed that Suvorov was essentially correct. Meanwhile, Suvorov’s books sold many millions of copies, and established him as probably the world’s best-selling military historian.
I think both your characterization and my own are correct, but I suspect that mine has greater long-term significance.
But Mannerheim didn’t have political clout before the Winter War which is the whole problem. It would be entirely reasonable to expect Finland to have pro-German sympathies based on decades of pro-German sentiment and pro-German World War I collaboration by almost the entire political and cultural elite but it would be ridiculous to expect any based on any assumed clout by Carl Gustav Mannerheim who at that point was over 70 years old with a lifelong career as an anti-German influence.
This was especially visible during the revolution when he fought a series of bitter power struggles against Germany and its puppets in Finnish politics, only to lose all of them and end up having to resign from the Finnish White Army when it was taken over by the Germans. Stalin of course closely followed all of that and he could see that Finland was close to Germany ever since 1918 – not because Mannerheim was winning clout but because kept losing.
Mannerheim wanted to take the territorial exchange (actually he had already tried to make that happen during the Civil War with Yudenich). The government rejected that advice. After WWII Stalin demanded show trials for those members of government who he blamed the most while giving Mannerheim immunity. The man that Stalin seemingly blamed the most was the de facto leader of Finnish Social Democrats since 1918, Väinö Tanner, who was of course found to be a “social fascist”.
Many Finnish Social Democrats were always pro-German which wasn’t a problem for Bolsheviks before the revolution when they were all eager to trash the Tsar’s war against Germany but it became a problem in 1918 when the Germans invaded and leftists had to choose between the Finnish Red Army and the Germans. Tanner and many others chose to collaborate with the Germans and it worked out very well for them, they got Germany to destroy the White movement in Finland, their pro-Bolshevik rivals in the left were destroyed and friends of Germany got a huge career boost in politics.
(That was Stalin, though. IMO the biggest problem was and is that much of the elite that funds politics is ethnic Swedish and German and most of them are going to side with Germany for ethnic and cultural reasons regardless of whether it’s Nazi, monarchist or SJW. One Mannerheim can’t convince them to change.)
Hah. “Nordic Social Democrats” were in many ways very close to Nazis politically. The biggest difference is philo-Semitism vs. anti-Semitism. But then, in Finland Jews would happily fight for Operation Barbarossa under the swastika banner so…
The tripartite economic system is exactly the same as under fascism with the difference that it’s not enforced by brownshirts because you don’t actually need brownshirt enforcement when you have jantelaw consensus conformism.
Then there was the same eugenics and race biology. Völkischness is there with the folk-home ideology – difference was that it tended to focus on keeping the country as the folk-home that it already was instead of merging with World War I revanchism and the need to conquer more. You could say that parliamentarism is a big difference to Nazi Germany but I personally don’t think so as I don’t consider parliaments more than a cosmetic thing.
Who’s the most famous “Nordic Social Democrat”? Must be Olof Palme. Did you know that the Palme family was already prominent in 1918 and they were a key force organizing the Swedish volunteers in the Finnish Civil War? Those guys who showed up here marching under the swastika banner, supposedly on the White side but often doing something entirely different than what they were supposed to do (ie. lots of atrocities and backstabbing)? Olof Palme actually died in the Finnish Civil War… an uncle of the famous one.
I haven’t yet read McMeekin’s book, though I intend to after completing the book I’m currently reading. There was indeed an internal conflict within Japanese leadership, and the Strike South faction won out for a variety of reasons. These included the army being bogged down in China, the decisive Soviet victory at Khalkin Gol, the greater availability of needed raw materials (especially oil and rubber) in the “Southern Resource Area”, and rapidly deteriorating relations with Britain and the United States in the aftermath of the occupation of French Indochina.
I’m not sure to what extent Soviet agents played a role in this, but Western and especially US diplomacy was certainly critical. A watershed moment was when Dean Acheson exceeded the President’s asset freeze orders to embargo all oil exports to Japan.
Operation Barbarossa upended this balance by creating a new opportunity for Japan to strike north, which the army was very much in favor of. The failure of the Germans to achieve a strategic decision in Russia during the summer (or at all) ultimately caused the new plan to be shelved. This is comparable to Operation Pike in that the rapid German success in the west caused that plan to be shelved.
The problems with Suvorov’s work have been well explored in these comment sections many time, so I won’t belabor the point, but the basic issue is that he inappropriately ties procurement decisions to strategic intent. The same logic could be used to claim that Germany was not pursuing an aggressive foreign policy in the runup to the war because its armored formations were small and mostly equipped with inferior tanks.
Suvorov was indeed very popular, which is not indicative of quality. He filled a popular hunger for anti-Soviet and also revisionist WW2 literature against the stale narrative. The most successful American WW2 historian in my lifetime is probably the late Stephen Ambrose, whose books were terrible and also guilty of plagiarism.
Suvorov’s thesis may have been new to Anglophones, but the thesis was not new. The same debate took place in West Germany in the 1950s, and the theory was originally advanced by German leadership during the war after encountering unexpectedly massive Soviet resistance and military power. German Eastern Front veterans commonly espoused the idea after the war.
To close this, you still haven’t definitively stated what exactly you think is so embarrassing about Operation Pike so as to motivate a coverup.
https://twitter.com/JenniferJJacobs/status/1405124334549704705
You mean “prefers German lords over Russian lords” don’t you? BTW, which Slavs are living a better life today, the German lorded Slavs, or the Russian lorded ones, anyway?
Oh, I forgot, most Slavic countries today left the Russian lorded camp long ago, AND AREN’T LOOKING BACK.
Alas, nobody wants to be “Little Russians” anymore.
Most German lorded Slavs have assimilated into the German nation long ago. Thay’s where the 30+ % of haplogroup R1a in East Germany comes from. Probably it was even higher before WW2 in Eastern Prussia. The Lusatian Sorbs are an (interesting) exception to the norm.
OTOH most Russian lorded Slavs ended up achieving national statehood. Russians are notoriously bad at assimilating other ethnicities. The Mordvinians, Komi and Udmurts are still here and a man of Tver Karelian ancestry is the president of RusFed after all…
At the time of the Tsarist Russia, when the “Little Russian” ethnonym was used, only around 48% of Russian elites considered Russian language as their native tongue. 28% were Polish speaking, you had around 10% German speaking aristocracy (with a total population of Germans in the Russian Empire being 2%), you had Caucasian aristocracy (Georgian mostly, but also Tatar / Kumyk etc). You even had the descendants of the French Royalist emigrées . The “Great Russians” were actually great in numbers, but not that great in their influence on the Empire’s affairs with the immense majority of them being illiterate peasants only freed from serfdom for a couple of generations. And with the late Romanov being of 90+ % Germanic ancestry, it is actually not surprising at all. Fits all right with Karlin’s IQ observations.
Addendum:
https://twitter.com/Peter_Nimitz/status/1405022189070405635
Peter Nimitz recommends Toland’s book The Rising Sun as a background on Soviet-Japanese relations in the period as a companion to McMeekin’s new book.
On the psychological level it could be very simple. Think of Monsieur Jourdain. If he had ego of Ron Unz he would suspect that the fact that he spoke prose all his life was kept from him must have been due to intentional concealment
Operation Pike was embarrassing to Soviet Union and its Western allies who did not want to be reminded that Soviet Union was Hitler’s ally for the first 21 months of WWII.
Well there were Masurians not long time ago, also many Lutheran Kashubians or Pomerelian Slavs identified with Prussian Germans.
Again you are telling these facts like they would be unique to Russia, nobility was quite international and partially Germanic or foreign almost everywhere in Europe after the Migration period. Some places had it much worse, Baltics, Ireland, Medieval England, Austrian lands, Osman state etc…
Italy is an exception, they always kept their native aristocracy, even when French or Latinized Gauls were ruled by the Franks, senatorial class was still alive and well in the Ostrogothic and Byzantine Italy. Though some Italian dynasties had their origins in France or Spain, like Bourbons of Two Sicilies.
I think that our spineless commenter Altan had in mind modern nation/states of Slavs, like Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs, Croats, Bulgarians and others that forsook the Russian dominated Soviet Union, for Western alliances, rather than tribal Slavic assimilation that took place during the medieval period. To try and characterize the wholesale abandonment of any Moscow based centrifugal alignment as being “one of the best proofs against the existence of God” is the height of blasphemous folly. All of the above named nation-states were allied with the Russian dominated Soviet Union (and before that with Russia) for quite a long period of time. They decided that enough was enough, and when the time was right made a quick departure and have not ever looked back. Just to put things into perspective and show how ridiculous Altan’s views really are, has there been any sort of clamoring by either any of the states or peoples mentioned above to realign themselves today with Russia?
RusFed is not Russia. If it was Russia, then the well-being of Russians would be the top priority of RusFedian Kremlins. We both know that this is not the case. Everyone running away from Kremlins is of course understandable. Who in their sane mind would want to be ruled by these people? The same logic applies to the Ukrainian counterpart of the RusFedian elites and the Bielorussian potato dictator.
Mr. Hack are you really such a simpleton? It was a joke, isn’t that clear? anyway I respect you quite a much, because you are a honest Christian. No matter if we have greatly differing viewpoints.
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/5iwAAOSwu-BWP8TJ/s-l640.jpg
I neither read Russian nor know anything about this image. Only that it ties-in, tangentially, to at least three themes here:
Cats, education, and, of course, Russia.
The kid is supposed to-do homework, but instead he spent an hour looking at the cat only to find out that during that hour the cat did nothing at all.
BTW it is entirely true that cats often will try to lay down for a nap on a book when one is reading. Cats like to impose themselves as the to the attention of their pet humans…
It is becoming clear that Biden is not up to non scripted interactions, which is why Putin was given such a platform with his marathon solo press conference at the end of G7.
Biden is not going to last very much longer before a policy of restricting access to him is imposed. The way his wife publicly took him by the hand and led him away when he was apparently wandering lost is something my mother would not do with my 86 year old dad. It’s proto dementia, and he has less than a year.
Kitty is focusing you on the important thing in life: herself
https://twitter.com/RNCResearch/status/1405195442867130368
Republicans with the big “no u”.
Ideal cats according to my tastes:
https://mymodernmet.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/siberian-cats-alla-lebedeva-26.jpg
Ideal cat according to madame Bashi’s tastes:
https://www.purina.eu/sites/default/files/2017-12/cat_cornishrex_400x378.jpg
I have already told her several times that she will have to divorce me before she brings one of these degenerate mutants home.
Right now our cat is a respectable Siberian and I will make sure it will stay that way.
https://images.saymedia-content.com/.image/t_share/MTc0Mzc0Nzk3Mzg2NzIwOTAy/hereditary-diseases-of-the-siberian-forest-cat.jpg
This one is quite similar to the cat that accepted our family as pets. It gets well with our dogs too (it is a very generous animal to share its house with all of us).
And the problem is …
In Russian politics news of the week, politician Larisa Shoigu has been killed by coronavirus – she was only 68 (https://www.pnp.ru/politics/umerla-deputat-gosdumy-larisa-shoygu.htm).
The younger generation of the political family is economically expanding. https://pasmi.ru/archive/314095/
Just because you don’t like the current crop of crooks and oligarchs running the show in Russia, this doesn’t mean that it isn’t Russia Most countries in the world are not run by a class of leaders and politicians that are working for the best interests of their constituents. Some are better and some are worse than others, but it all boils down to “мы имеем то, что имеем.”
I suspect that PLC elite was much more Polish, Lithuanian and Ruthenian (all natives) than were the elites in Russia (initially Rurikids, before they assimilated, many of Tatar descent, to which were added plenty of Germans, Poles, Lithuanians, some Georgians). PLC had the Swedish Vasa dynasty, but Romanovs were Germans for far longer than the Vasas ruled Poland, which had outstanding Polish or Lithuanian rulers like Sobieski.
England’s Norman situation was even more extreme (eventually the Norman invaders basically wiped out the Anglo-Saxon elites, and Norman French was the English court language for generations), but it seems like Russia otherwise had the least native elite of all non-occupied European countries. And this phenomenon continued after the Revolution, which replaced the elite of largely Rurikid, German, Tatar, Polish descent with Caucasians, Jews, and Latvians. Since the time of Catherine II, Russia wasn’t fully ruled by real Russians until the Khrushchev era.
You need to get one of these:
https://i.redd.it/5apnumfndit01.jpg
https://static.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/pallas-cat-manul-10__880.jpg
They are from Russia and Central Asia.
People have bred domestic cats with Bengal cats and Servals to produce domesticated hybrids. Some Russian needs to start a breeding program to produce hybrids with these guys. For the glory of Russia. This would be much better use of money, and much cheaper than a huge yacht.
The wrong people have money in Russia.
This is true, but one has to be careful about definitions, first one should define what exactly would be a state that would qualify as a “Russian National State” and then one should see if this definition is applicable to the RusFed. And of course, to define any National State we first must define what is its “titular nation: and how it is different from other nations and peoples.
I have already mentioned once that in my opinion, Russia ethnos, formed mainly by the North-Eastern Slavic tribes (Slovene, Krivichi etc.) and the Finno-Ugric tribes (Muroma, Messhera, Chud’ etc.) under the leadership of the Vladimir-Suzdal branch of the Rurikid Rus princes, did not evolve to complete its nation-building before the Bolshevik takeover. Various historical causes prevented from the arising of a clear national identity among the large Russian masses during the reign of the Romanov dynasty. Russian nationalist movement was rather limited in the Empire days.
After the Bolshevik takeover, completing this nation-building become impossible, because a Soviet identity was imposed from the top. This nation-building should be completed today, with Russians finally becoming the masters in their own land, where they form more than 80% percent of the population. But it is the opposite that is happening right in front of our eyes, we witness a demographic and spiritual weakening of the Russian ethnos. A weakening that might well lead to a collapse of Russian ethnos in the next 2-3 generations.
Therefore, unfortunately the nation-building of Russians is far from being a done deal and is perhaps something that might never be completed. And given that there cannot be a Russian Nation State in the absence of a Russian nation, we have to logically conclude that the current iteration of Statehood in the ancestral Russian lands is not Russia, but is something entirely different.
That is why I (and some other Russian nationalists) prefer naming it RusFed (or even more sarcastically in Russian; Ресурсная Федерация – РесФед). Interestingly enough in official RusFedian lingo, the citizens of RidFed are not Russians, but some undefined Rossiyane, who can be of any ethnic origin whatsoever. This confirms that RusFed is not Russia.
I have read that Mauls have a terribly aggressive behavior and are completely impossible to domesticate. Although I don’t know if anyone tried to breed them with domestic cats.
I agree about the wrong people having money (and yachts) in RusFed.
I would add that Khruschev and Brezhnev had probably more sympathy towards Ukrainian regions than towards the Russian hinterland. I would say that the first true Russian in charge of Russian affairs was Gorbachev, who destroyed the Soviet Union. Yeltsin was also Russian, but his wife was Jewish. Putin is Russian, but is of Ugric ancestry as is the Patriarch Kiril. Of course these distinction are not really important, these are details. But still, these details are kind of revealing.
If you want an ethno-state, grant minority-majority regions much greater levels of autonomy. Like what the Qing Dynasty or the Ottomans once did.
I’m not talking about Russia’s southern neighbor, BTW. That’ll be crypto-separatist.
Tho modern nationalism isn’t compatible to the traditional Chinese concept of all-under-heaven. Rather than ethno-states in the European sense, there was a large civilizational sphere, usually with a central imperial authority, then some more peripheral kingdoms adopting Chinese civilization wholesale and states further field for trade/tribute. India was similar, but much more decentralized and multipolar. It was still the case in the Qing Dynasty when the ruling elite was foreign but nativized.
Then the Revolution imposed crude modernism and the principle of Five Races Under One Union (五族共和) which was Sun Yat-sen’s attempt to coalesce the 5 races (Han predominance + Hui, Mongol, Manchu, Tibetan) into one nation ideologically. The CCP kept with the program but added its own Soviet mentality of occasional neutral negligence and occasional compulsive assimilation. That was the wrong road – you could either be Chinese and be incorporated into the imperial state; adopt Chinese culture and social institutions wholesale while keeping your own language; or accept suzerainty and retain the native ruling class and culture (this was how Great Qing dealt with non-Han).
Just as planned, like how Kamala is the VP!
I was planning to add to your reply with some basic understanding of Chinese nationalism, but Unz.com ate my comment and otherwise it might have led to a break-in by National Security. I didn’t advocate for separatism in that comment, but the topic is sensitive enough (ethnical minorities in China).
Well, Altan wrote once that ethnic Russian and Chinese nationalism should be suppressed because ethnic Russians and Han Chinese must serve as Empire-building human ressources.
Don’t know about the Han Chinese, but for ethnic Russians the Empire-building was a mixed blessing. It was literally built through their sweat, blood and tears for them to end up often bossed around by ethnic minorities, including in their own capital.
Something clearly went wrong. Perhaps something should change in RusFed to ensure the long-term survival of Russian population, of its genotype, its psychotype and its culture.
Aren’t the people mostly at the top levers of government Russians though? So in fact we have a majority of Russians voting mostly for politicians of Russian ethnos, all situated within “their own land”. Again perfection is hard to find and “мы имеем то, что имеем.”
BTW, your second paragraph is a gem of conciseness and I couldn’t agree with you any more. What you’re in effect saying is that the Russian nationality never really had the opportunity to evolve to completion because the vagaries of imperialism, whether in the Empire period or in the Soviet one, stood in the way of normal nation/state evolution. Similarly Ukraine, never really had the opportunity to evolve fully into a normal nation/state too, due to the same forces of imperialism. Both Russia and Ukraine are chugging along well into the 21st century as incomplete nation states. Then there’s the ever present pressure of globalism that is working towards arresting the development of all forms of nation/state development. Not really a whole lot to remedy this situation that will need more than vyshivankas and balalaikas to turn things around. Nationalism doesn’t always sell well when one needs to put food on the kitchen table.
I think it’s more easy to explain. Of course, today Russians are a majority and titular (but only in name, without other privileges) nationality of the Russian Federation, among other nationalities that can be more or less successful than the majority nationality.
Adding to the complicated relationship, is that imperialism in Russian context was so successful in terms of land extension, that it has resulted in federation which includes nationalities derived from non-European, nonslavic nationalities (that can seem difficult to assimilate without losing European identity), sharing the same land borders, without a sea that separated many other empires from their colonies (e.g. British Empire, Spanish Empire). This is the life of a federation, union, empire, etc.
There are sweet and bitter fruits of imperialism. You conquer historically foreign lands (good news for the power of the elite), but you also become responsible for the different nationalities and sometimes their exotic, non-assimilable culture and religions, which still live on the land which you conquered from them (and this not always unambiguously good news for the ordinary people on both sides, and eventually results in you becoming married to those nationalities, and them to you).
If a national self-determining Russia ceded from areas that has nonslavic nationalities, and tries to minimize the existence of nonslavic nationalities in the Russian areas, then the country should be more governable, European, and not slave to the considerations of federal appeasement.
Nationalism is based on the concept of self-determination of the peoples, and in the Russian context the result is a national liberation for both the non-titular nationalities, and for the titular nationality, that had become bound together by historical imperialism. Self-determination of Russians, also implies the ability of the self-determination of nonrussians – national liberation is more like a negative liberation: the liberation you experience after “divorce” from a toxic relationship.
The late stage of imperialism, results in the titular nationality, having no more privileges, than the non-titular nationality. And in this sense, all sides share the negative consequences of the bad marriage which was created by the imperialism of the elites of previous centuries.
However, I doubt that (even in this unlikely nationalist scenario) the reality of national self-determination for and from Russians, would match the rosy expectations, as we see in Ukraine.
Ukraine is 98%+ slavic populations, and needless to say something every child would predict – there was no utopia in Ukraine.
Being a European self-determined country, is not an instant shortcut to e.g. Swedish, Swiss or Netherlands living standards, which were based on a centuries of good governance and hard work.
Similarly, there are plenty of examples of multinational places (including with majority third world origin nationalities e.g. Singapore, Bermuda), which are great places to live – usually as a result of a historical European tradition like the English legal system, that was carried to them by imperialism.
This is two centuries after Tenochtitlan, entered the Spanish Empire, after the massacre of the Aztec aristocracy. (Ancestors of the Aztecs, possibly originating in oriental races that were assimilated centuries later in the Russian Empire).
A difference is that the Spanish imperialism had a sea between it, and in Russia all land. But in the 21st century Spain has been reflooded with the peoples from its former colonies, as in Russia is flooded with e.g. Uzbeks and Armenians, after those nationalities became nominally (but not economically) independent.
If these distinctions really are not that important, then what is it about them that is so revealing to you? Is there really some sort of coalition among Russians into Ugro-Finnic groupings vs more Slavic ones, as you seem to suggest?
As we well know, PLC was a personal union, in the Lithuanian part Ruthenian and Lithuanian native elites got Polonized, well at least culturally and religiously. You are such a PLC fan boy that it doesn’t even matter what I will write, but in the Lithuanian part elites increasingly spoke not Ruthenian or Lithuanian, which were the native languages of Lithuania, but Polish, also outside of ethnic Lithuanian lands majority of population was Orthodox or Greek Catholics, therefore elites of duchy of Lithuania did mostly not share the language nor the religion of their subjects, in such way the situation was more extreme than in Russia, same could be said of Ukrainian, Volhynian and Galician parts of Poland. As numerous Ruthenian/Ukrainian revolts and massacres of local Poles and Jews show us, there was no ethnic-cultural or religious unity in Poland.
AP England herself was ruled by Dutch and German kings from the time of William III to, well to present era. Does Glorious revolution or Hanover say anything, for 18th century English kings usually spoke better German than English…
PLC is one of the shittiest European major powers ever to exist, by the means of a lucky marriage, Szlachta gained an empire made by Lithuanians, had it’s heyday only for a century, before getting utterly devastated by Sweden and Cossack revolts, afterwards continuous strife between unruly members of elite, who were ready to sell their country for the highest bidder, periodic civil wars, weak kings, PLC was an eastern European proto-oligarchy, utter trash and waste.
Oh wait what were the Bourbons and Habsburgs of the Spain? Or the current royal dynasty of Sweden, which was established by one of the marshals of Napoleon? What about Greeks, Romanians and Bulgarians who were ruled by men who were fully German by their heritage.
Stop AP this sillyness, Russia’s situation was no way extreme.
And Bashi your history narrative makes niggers out of the Russians. “White man enslaved my ancestors,” just replace white man with German or something and then you have Bashi’s view of Russian history!
No, I wrote that nationalism is like a salt and should be used in moderation, that a too strong ethnic identity is bad for Slavs, as we all can notice from the present state of Slavic fragmentation into so many separate countries. There is safety in unity and common identity, in my opinion there is really no good reason for every Slovenia, Bosnia and Montenegro to exist. It is a honor for Russians and Han to be the foundation of great empires, just like Romans and Hellenes once were in their greatest glory!
But yes, all neo-nazis and other such trash should be repressed.
You got it wrong. The Great Qing was quite an aggreasive in it’s sinification of minorities of Sichuan, Yunnan and Guangxi, unlike the Ming with it’s Tusi system, who let the Southern and South Western tribal leaders to rule and keep their native laws as long as they continue paying of tribute to the emperor. Mongols and Tibetans were an exception to the rule in the great Qing, Mongols because they were the junior partners of Manchus in ruling of China, and Tibetans, because the emperor was a Dharmic universal ruler, or Chakravartin and therefore protector and patron of the Buddhist faith. There were many wars in which Manchus wisely forced imperial institutions upon tribal wildlings, like all Miao wars or Jinchuan campaigns. Also little before Xinhai revolution, Manchu ambans started to micromanage more and more local affairs in Tibet and Mongolia.
Well the completion of nation state development did whole lot good for French, Swedes and Germans! Sad that some people got his strictly linear pseudo-Hegelian view of progress… Like there are phases that every nation must go through, and without such developments they will be forever crooked or something!
But maybe I was too quick to condemn Bashi’s historical narrative. Such narrative can be utilised/weaponised and used for Russia’s gain. Bashi, yes you are correct, Russians are PoC, who were exploited and enslaved by the white people through centuries. How Merkel condescendingly dares to demand something from the Russia, when her ancestors killed 25 million Russians in the Russian Holocaust, also known by the name of Second World War, and for generations kept Russians like cattle in inhuman conditions of serfdom. Reparations now! Russian Lives Matter# SlavNotSlave#
The obvious differences is that people from the former Spanish colonies are of partial Spanish descent and share the Spanish language and religion. Spain was the most successful of all colonial Empires in terms of spreading its culture without simply replacing the natives as the Brits did.
It reveals that Russian ethnos was not really good at suppressing and assimilating local minor ethnic identities. Russians as a people were never interested in that. As I wrote a couple of times that part of my family were villagers from the Penza region. The village (a typical poor hinterland Great Russian village in the Tsarist Russia days) was in the part of Penza oblast’ were Slavic (that is ethnic Russian) villages are interspersed between Tatar and Mordvinian ones. It was in Muscovy times the marches protected by defensive notches against the frequent Tatar raids and 600 years later each ethnic group there was still aware of its ancestry.
That has always been the typical Russian attitude: I basically don’t care who you are, what you worship or how you organize your life as long as you don’t interfere with my life and don’t get on my nerves. This attitude is a world away from the typical normative, standardizing, unifying and suppressing nation-building European attitude.
https://www.heritagedaily.com/2020/04/arkaim/127669
And yes, Harrappan Civilization were the trading partners of Sumerian / Acadian Mesopotamia, Elamites and BAMAC, this is a well known fact. Later on (during the Bronze Age collapse) the Middle Eastern / Anatolian derived Etruscans would bring their cattle to Italian peninsula.
Well, she is a woman:
‘Standing up for the sisterhood against systemic misogyny and patriarchal subjugation. Interest in borders and patrilinear descent is rape culture’.
‘
These are the kind of subsequent moves someone invested in intersectionality is likely to make. Also, any reaction to these claims is just a manifestation of male privilege preserving epistemic pushback.
These are a couple of reasons not to spread this kind of ideology.
I thought my comment wasn’t published! That was indeed the case, and these smaller tribes were ignored even in ROC times (remember what I said 5 Races under One Union?)
What went wrong for China is the same as Russia (under the Soviets as in now) – trying to do homogenous ethnic nationalism over the remains of a multicultural empire. It was simply substituting the identity of (late) Osman Sultan with the majorities’ national identity.
To build French nationalism Occitan identity had to be rolled over. German and Italian unification dealt the final blow to countless local “dialects” first leveled by the selection of a unified language. If you count local language and cultural identity as possible nationalism, ethnical nationalism has always been a dream since there isn’t a coherent ethnos within a “nation”. You can make a Rothbardian case of secession down to the commune and hamlet.
This is why replacing the Westphalian nation-state with collections of smaller units under a cultural sphere (or the other way around – putting a nominal authority above all), will be better for civilizations. I don’t mean the EU model!
(This is a historical analysis, not political statement. I DO NOT advocate separatism or overturning CCP’s authority)
Contrast this with the acculturation-ist attitude of China. Study the Classics and go to the Exam; marry local women and have kids (in much earlier periods where whole swarths of Yue land was assimilated). Either way you’re Chinese.
https://i.redd.it/wy8xdzxi89y41.jpg
Yes the Western European, Russian and Chinese approaches have always been different. And the mentalities that explain these approaches have been and still are different. I think that if Christianisation wouldn’t have occurred and if Islamization would have been avoided (two “big ifs” making this alternative time-line improbable), then the Slavs would probably ended up with something similar to Hinduism with Nordic characteristics.
As I like to sometimes (half-jockingly) mention: Rus + Hindu = Bhai, Bhai because Hind = Wend, so perhaps RusFed would be an Eurasian-wide Wendustan in that time-line with a Svetovid dominated pantheon of 200 million “divine” entities down to the local forest “Leshyi” spirit and the local river “Russalka” spirit. But alas, the Abrahamic people and Western European people are quite convincing, while Slavs are probably easier to acculturate and assimilate than their Hindu counterparts.
Bell Beaker Culture was the canonical rape culture with 90% of conquered males exterminated and all women kept for the Bell Beaker overlords. That’s how the Central European populations kept their phenotype after the Bell Beaker conquest: through the Corded Ware mothers. Same thing probably explains the prevalence of Indo-European languages.
The Bell Beaker is the typical “White male rapist “, while the Slavs are POC and “dindu nufin”.
Let me put what I’ve said in a “socialist” perspective: Mao should have remembered his 1920 piece on the Hunan Republic and referred to the Soviet system. It should have been a Chinese People’s Union, with at least a Han Federal Socialist Republic, Inner Mongolian Socialist Republic, Tibet SR, Uyghur SR and Zhuang SR. Each republic gets a local communist party, Soviet style.
8964 would have been much more dangerous, so my NatSec-conforming post fails.
Any idea of the proportionate mixture of these two seemingly different ethnic tribes that added their DNA to the development of the Russian ethnos? I suspect that it wasn’t until the displaced Rurikid princes and their retinues ventured from the south in search of new patrimonies in the north that the Slavic element began to math the Finno-Ugric masses in the north.
Both Slavs and Finno-Ugric populations in modern day RusFed territory are mostly Corded Ware derived. The linguistic split was due to the influence of Unetice Culture on proto-Balto-Slavs and of Seima-Turbino and Akozino-Malar (Akozino-Ananiyno in Russian) on the Finno-Ugric populations.
People tend to forget that ancient Rus proto-State started around Novgorod and Old Ladoga at least a hundred years before it moved to Kiev. And Novgorod stayed an important center of Rus identity until Muscovy broke its neck and destroyed its republican system (which was the archaic Slav system BTW).
Finno-Ugric and Slavic tribes cohabitation in Novgorod lands goes back to at least around the early 7th century CE, while the proto-Corded Ware Y haplogroup R1a populations are dated to some 15 000 years ago in Karelia. We are native in this land from the Elbe to the Xinjiang. We have always lived side by side with those whom we have come today to identifying as Finno-Ugric or Turkic populations. Genetically speaking, most of them are our distant cousins remove by perhaps less than a hundred generations.
That is why the narrow-minded view held by some Svidomites of Moskaly/Katsapy as being “Ugric ” mongrels or by some Russian Supremacists of Khokhly being “Turkic ” mongrels is completely misleading. Genetically speaking all these populations are very close. And they are also culturally compatible. That is if we adopt the attitude we had for thousands of years: live and let live. Collaborate when needed, fight when it cannot be avoided. Then work together again…
Eliminating sovok federalism (de facto) has been one of the defining goals of Russian nationalism for decades. There have finally been major successes in that respect in the past few years, with Russians (and Bashkirs) in Tatarstan no longer being obligated to learn Russian. Promoting regional autonomies is a traditional foreign agenda that has always had the breakup of Russia as its ultimate goal.
Yet again, it is unsurprising that Bashibuzuk “thanks” this comment.
That is correct. Ethnic Russians are about 65% even of the “economic elites” (billionaires) and probably something like 85%-90% of the political ones. Yet another Bashibuzuk fantasy.
Japan declined to join Barbarossa b/c they
1. Were taught a lesson at Nomonhan
2. Felt betrayed by not being notified in advance of Barbarossa (also they grew highly suspicious after the Hess Incident)
3. Were focused on cutting off supplies to Chiang in the China War and securing materiel for themselves
Also— Hitler specifically did not inform Japan b/c he
1. Thought the campaign would be finished in weeks
2. Wanted Japan to tie up US/UK in the Pacific
Japan was only able to make war in China on the part of US materiel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Sino-Japanese_War#Foreign_aid_and_support_to_China
Considerable. Both KMT and CCP were originally groomed by Soviets. I’ve commented here on Chiang playing off Japan and Soviets
https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-black-muslim-capitol-cop-killer/#comment-4572114
Soviets may also have had considerable role in Xi’an Incident, which led to KMT-CCP United Front.
Chiang Kai-shek’s “secret deal” at Xian and the start of the Sino-Japanese War
https://www.nature.com/articles/palcomms20143
The only regions posing a governance problem are DICh – tribal confederations that were only incorporated into Russia in mid-19C (so an extreme case and one where some arguments could be made for ditching them).
So far as today is concerned, based on half a century of capitalism. Czechia was as rich as Austria in the 1930s.
This is new to me that I have to look into. That said, from 1943-45, Chiang considered on occasion of cutting a separate deal* with the Japanese.
*Of course Germans also tried to mediate in 1937/8 between Chiang and Japan, but that was kiboshed for various reasons.
There’s politically nothing as perennial as Imperialism, but your Archeo-Futurism is nothing else than a dream.
Do you know about Haplogroup N?
It’s shared by 60% of Finns/Estonians and about 10% of Hans/Koreans/Mongols
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liao_civilization#People
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_N-M231#Ancient_peoples
The founders of Sui-Tang dynasties, of mixed Han-Xianbei ancestry, were Haplo N
https://i.imgur.com/RK58DYql.png
I guess Bashibuzuk won’t be happy untill 100% of Russia’s citizenry becomes homogenized into the new Russian clan man? On the other hand he states:
that indicates that other non-Russian ethnicities can live in harmony with the Russian ethnos. This would mean that the 100% homogenization process I allude to above is not necessary for a “real” Russia to exist, and what appears to already be in place. He’s an incredibly intelligent guy, whose comments I love to read and contemplate, but he does seem a little contradictory here?
What are you implying about my ideology? I have never liked those “HK Independence” or “Free HK” types.
Look at my comments history, I have written about Y haplogroup N a couple of times.
Mr Hack, reality is inherently dialectic. One has always to achieve a balance. Too much or too little are both wrong. I believe that the best possible conditions for the survival and development of native genetic lineages are the goal that should be pursued by Russian nationalists.
The majority of these lineages are Slav derived, all the better, but those which are not Slav-derived are not worse (or better) and should also be taken care of to ensure their future.
I mean, each of our genetic lineages has a billion years’ evolutionary struggle behind it. It I to be respected.
Sadly, I don’t think that the majority of the genetic lineages found on the current RusFed territory will make it to the twenty-second century. Partly this is due to people thinking in outdated terms.
https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/gnypr/
Enemies of the people
Abstract
Enemies of the people were the millions of artists, engineers, professors, and affluent peasants that were thought a threat to the Soviet regime for being the educated elite, and were forcedly resettled to the Gulag, i.e. the system of forced labor camps across the Soviet Union. In this paper we look at the long-run consequences of this dark re-location episode. We show that areas around camps with a larger share of enemies among camp prisoners are more prosperous today, as captured by firms’ wages and profits, as well as night lights per capita. We also show that the descendants of enemies are more likely to be tertiary educated today. Our results point in the direction of a long-run persistence of education and a resulting positive effect on local economic outcomes. A 28 percentage point increase in the share of enemies increases night lights per capita by 58%, profits per employee by 65%, and average wages by 22%.
Yes but the elites were primarily natives. It is their privilege to choose whether they or their people will be pagan or Christian or what language they speak. Russian elites were to large extent of non-native descent (German, Norse, Lithuanian, Tatar, Georgian) speaking Russian, those of PLC were natives, locals, who often chose to speak Polish in Rus and Lithuanian
lands. It’s an interesting contrast.
You are narrowing the subject to royal families. I was speaking of entire ruling or elite classes. Yes many countries had foreign kings but few had such a foreign ruling class. Only England after the Norman invasion was more extreme, when it comes to independent countries.
It was a rough neighborhood. Hapsburgs were more successful, but PLC outlasted the second and third German Empires who were in a similar place.
So, a nation state, as you envision it probably will never come to fruition, making the current state structure in Russia not truly a Russian state. How do you recognize “the demographic and spiritual weakening of the Russian ethnos” today and who exactly is behind it and for what reason?
It’s really none of my business, but I suspect that you might be having some kind of “inter-familial” strife that you’re dealing with. When you try to figure out why Junior is behaving oddly, you probably pinpoint the malady to some sort of receding Bell Beaker gene that is unexpectedly flaring up. It couldn’t possibly be due to your own pure Corded Ware input to Junior’s genetic make-up. Although slightly murky, don’t most researchers consider Celtic DNA to be closely related to Corded Ware?
I share your interest in ancient peoples and genetics, but isn’t this taking things a little bit too far? 🙂
Yes I believe that a Russian nation state is a vision that will never be realized. I actually came to this conclusion many years ago (around 1996), around the same time that opted to exit from the Russian Orthodox Church and for similar reasons. The State and Church structures are nowadays coopted by self-serving elites which are fully integrated into the globalized economy. Their interest is to increase their share of the pie, they don’t care much for anything else.
The globalized economy has a center and a periphery, RusFed is the provider of natural ressources on the periphery of the globalized economic system. It is in the interest of the RusFed elites to minimize wages and infrastructure expenditures, hence the joke that: Зачем Русским деньги ? (Русским денег не давать). Also, these elites are well aware of the functioning of the globalized economy and they want their offspring to live in its center, not on the periphery, hence the outflow of up to 1,5 trillion US $ since the downfall of the Soviet Union. These moneys would have led to a considerable increase in living standards if they stayed in RusFed.
Finally, these elites, for a variety of reasons (some of them purely psychological) are comfortable with a cognitive, psychological and therefore spiritual decline in their “controlled population ” just like a farmer is perhaps interested in dumbing down its cattle a bit. Cows and sheep are after all easier to manage than aurochs and big horn rams. This whole situation ends up crystallized in lower TFR, emptying hinterland, childless couples in megalopolises and a dumbed down and neurotic populace.
Of course, this is also common to other Globalist ruled countries and nations, but the difference are 1) RudFed elites are pretending that they’re not Globalist, 2) some Globalist-led countries are closer to the economic core and are therefore more affluent than the periphery.
Should be:
Hard to criticize your well thought out opinion here. It would be real interesting to get Karlin to chime in here, or anybody else for that matter! Thanks!
The ‘Aryans’ who migrated to the Indian Subcontinent were not ‘Iranic’. Instead both groups have a common predecessor.
I’ll note the contrast here with the pre-Bolshevik elite. During World War I they felt that it was their duty to support their country and sold foreign assets and properties, bringing money back to Russia. Of course this meant that as a result of the Revolution they became impoverished. The Soviet system produced a different sort of elite.
British settler colonies was usually sparsely populated prior to British settlement. More densely populated colonies kept mostly indigenous paradigms. The Spanish and Portuguese was generally much more successful at spreading their culture, language, religion and genes in densely populated regions.
Unfortunate this Russophile attitude, although entirely sincere and genuine, had only manifested in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Before that the Tsarist Imperial Russian elites were rather happy riding on the back of the muzhik all the way to Southern France villas as their contemporary counterparts do. It was a bit too little too late as a realization on behalf of the Russian nobility.
Moreover, this attitude took a dozen of generations to materialize after the Raskol and the Peterine reforms which cut the Moscovite aristocracy from its ethnic roots and transformed it into a cosmopolitan elite much more at home with their French, German or British counterparts than with their Slavic serfs. This is one of the many reasons why the peasants had no problem in killing the landlords and burning their mansions during the Revolution. For most peasants, Баре did not really belong to the same people.
You Slavs need to keep running around in your own circles and leave us Celtics alone.
I was going to reply to this part:
…that the Bell Beaker people manifested here some typical POC behaviour:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bantu_expansion
The original and archetypal rape culture environments were the campuses of Harvard, Yale and other Ivy League universities in the 2000s. I remember that the level of sexual violence being reported from those places was higher than in many large northern US cities like Detroit and Baltimore.
Here is a more serious question, is it known what happened with the modern Finnish population, how they ended up with such a small male gene pool at one time? It is said to be about 4,000 years ago, and the reason they have high rates of dwarfism and other rare genetic diseases. Could it have been warfare or some sort of plague or natural disaster involving a small population?
A perceptible and rapid dumbing down does seem to be taking place. Since the Woke thing started off and on I have been reading some books by famous Frankfurt School authors, the other night I started Dialectic of Enlightenment. This will be a slow read.
Current Social Justice literature is not like this.
Yes the Bell Beaker folks behaved like the Bantu, but they did it in the Early Bronze Age. And already at the time their culture was way more esthetically pleasing than Bantu culture ever was (and probably will ever be). I am always kind of sad to read that ancient Zimbabwe (built in fourteenth century CE IIRC) was the pinnacle of ancient Bantu architecture. I mean, MENA and European populations built way more complex structures in the Neolithic (it’s embarrassing really).
Regarding the Finns, it’s a very interesting question. The Y haplogroup N males there ended up replacing the majority of the other Y haplogroups. I have also wondered how this bottleneck happened. The Akozino-Malar Y haplogroup N folks did not in general act in a Bantu-like manner. They had not replaced the male genetic lineages derived from the Corded Ware or other ethnic groups in other Permic and Ugric populations, so how did it happen in the Finnish population ? Frankly I have been puzzled by this for quite some time and have no answer.
Perhaps some Finnish reader could clarify this ?
https://d1l5jyrrh5eluf.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Celtics-1040×700-Web.jpg
Correct, but even in that case non-Anglos were more likely to leave mixed traces, like the French speaking, Catholic Metis people of Canada.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A9tis
Russians were also mixing and assimilating with the natives in Alaska:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/alaska-russian-heritage-smithsonian-journeys-travel-quarterly-180959449/
By far the strongest living legacy of the Russian colonial era is the Russian Orthodox Church, most of whose worshippers are Alaska natives or the offspring of Russian-native unions. Intermarriage between Russian colonizers and indigenous people from groups such as the Aleut, Alutiq, and Athabaskan was widespread, and today roughly 26,000 of their descendants—known since the colonial era as Creoles—worship in nearly a hundred Russian Orthodox churches statewide.
“That number may seem insignificant, but consider that about half of Alaska’s population [of 740,000] lives in and around Anchorage and that there are entire regions—the Aleutian Islands, Kodiak Island, Prince William Sound, and the Kuskokwim-Yukon Delta—where the Orthodox church is the only church in town,” says Father Michael Oleksa, a leading historian of Russian Orthodoxy in Alaska.
::::::::::::
In contrast places where Anglos moved tended to be just cleared of Natives.
The article about Russian Alaska is quite fascinating:
Tracing Alaska’s Russian Heritage
From onion domes to tsarist-era Russian dialects, evidence of the Russian colonialism remains
SQJ_1607_Alaska_Russia_01.jpg
Russian Orthodox crosses in the time-and-weather-worn cemetery of Ninilchik’s Holy Transfiguration of Our Lord Chapel are a testament to the heritage of the village. (Nathaniel Wilder)
By Fen Montaigne
SMITHSONIAN JOURNEYS QUARTERLY
JULY 7, 2016
1038
Every summer a conga line of tourists in campers and RVs chugs the 220 miles from Anchorage, Alaska, to the town of Homer, a picturesque fishing port with panoramic views of Kachemak Bay. About three-quarters of the way into the trip, the travelers descend a hill and cruise into the hamlet of Ninilchik, population 880. A few visitors turn off the highway to photograph the village’s Russian Orthodox church—a graceful, white wooden structure with a green metal roof, five golden onion domes, and a commanding view of the icy, 10,000-foot volcanic peaks of Mount Redoubt and Mount Iliamna, 50 miles across Cook Inlet.
FROM THIS STORY
VIDEO: Russia Gave Us a Discount on Alaska
Most tourists, however, drive on, not realizing that Ninilchik’s unremarkable facade—a convenience store and gas station, a couple of restaurants, a motel, several low-slung office buildings, and a collection of modest houses—belies the village’s extraordinary place in Alaska history and culture. That hidden history lives on in a handful of elderly residents who speak a Russian dialect that has been passed down from generation to generation since the village was founded in 1847, when Alaska was part of the Russian Empire.
Ninilchik Russian is, in some respects, a language frozen in amber, with vocabulary and expressions dating to an era when Russia was engaged in a tenuous colonial enterprise in the vast territory that would eventually become America’s 49th state. This tsarist-era version of Russian—along with other Russian customs and habits—remains in use because until the Sterling Highway connected Ninilchik to the outside world in 1950, Russian descendants here were largely cut off from other communities. They lived an isolated, subsistence life in which a trip to the nearest trading post meant a 40-mile mush on a dogsled.
During several days in March, I visited some of Ninilchik’s Russian speakers—people such as Joe Leman, 96, a slight man with a full head of gray hair. Leman is a descendant of Ninilchik founder Grigory Kvasnikoff, a somewhat obscure figure who may have been a lay missionary and an employee of the Russian-American Company, the tsars’ colonial arm in Alaska. Leman and the other men and women who still speak Ninilchik Russian are of Russian-Alaskan native heritage, and so I was accompanied on my rounds by Tiffany Stonecipher, the elders outreach coordinator for the Ninilchik tribe.
Leman smiled when he saw Stonecipher at the door and invited us in.
“Zdrastvuite,” I said.
“Zdrastvuite,” Leman replied, beginning a conversation that mixed English with both modern and archaic Russian. He recalled an early-20th century boyhood that was as much Siberian as it was Alaskan—a life in which the Russian Orthodox Church played a central role, Russian foods like salmon pie, or pirok, were frequently on the table, and the village’s oldest residents could remember a time when Alaska was governed not from Washington, D.C., but from the imperial capital of St. Petersburg.
Preview thumbnail for video ‘This article is a selection from the Smithsonian Journeys Travel Quarterly Alaska Issue
This article is a selection from the Smithsonian Journeys Travel Quarterly Alaska Issue
Discover the culture, history, and breathtaking geography of this far frontier and what it reveals about America in the 21st century
BUY
Next year will mark the 150th anniversary of Russia’s sale of Alaska to the United States on October 18, 1867, for $7.2 million, or about two cents an acre. Although Russia’s colonization of the territory remains a relatively obscure chapter in world history, the acquisition of Alaska by the administration of President Andrew Johnson has had enormous economic and strategic value for the U.S. In the history of American land deals, it is second in importance only to the Louisiana Purchase.
For Russia, the sale was the logical conclusion of a colonial venture that had begun with the first Russian landing on Alaska’s shores in 1732. This endeavor, based on a lucrative trade in the luxurious pelts of sea otters, had become shaky by the early decades of the 19th century, when 700 Russians, strung largely along the coast, were trying to exert sovereignty over hundreds of thousands of square miles of territory in the face of increasing British and U.S. encroachment. In the words of Ty Dilliplane, an archaeologist specializing in Alaska’s Russian period, the remote territory was the “Siberia of Siberia”—a place hard to supply and even harder to defend.
Not everyone in the U.S. saw the Alaska purchase as a bonanza. Critics of Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward, who oversaw the negotiations with Russia, derided America’s purchase of this northern territory—twice the size of Texas—as “Seward’s Folly,” “Johnson’s polar bear park,” and “Walrussia.” But today—given Alaska’s key military and strategic importance in the Arctic, its huge stores of oil and gas, its enormous quantities of salmon and other fish, and its seemingly limitless expanses of wilderness, which cover most of the state’s 663,000 square miles—it’s hard to imagine the U.S. without its Last Frontier.
To celebrate the acquisition of Alaska, officials in Anchorage and Sitka, the former Russian colonial capital, are planning a grand sesquicentennial bash in 2017. Some residents are even suggesting it might be an opportunity for the next U.S. president and Russian leader Vladimir Putin to mend tattered relations and hold an Alaska summit meeting.
Russian Orthodox church in Kenai
The Holy Assumption Russian Orthodox Church in Kenai is one three designated National Historic Landmarks. (Melissa Lake, Smithsonian.com Photo Contest Archives)
Today, a century and a half after the Russians decamped, vestiges of the tsars’ colonial enterprise remain. The most obvious legacy is on a map, where Russian names mark point after point, from the Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea to Baranof Island in southeast Alaska to all the streets, cities, islands, capes, and bays in between with names like Kalifornsky, Nikiski Chichagof, Romanzof, and Tsaritsa.
By far the strongest living legacy of the Russian colonial era is the Russian Orthodox Church, most of whose worshippers are Alaska natives or the offspring of Russian-native unions. Intermarriage between Russian colonizers and indigenous people from groups such as the Aleut, Alutiq, and Athabaskan was widespread, and today roughly 26,000 of their descendants—known since the colonial era as Creoles—worship in nearly a hundred Russian Orthodox churches statewide.
“That number may seem insignificant, but consider that about half of Alaska’s population [of 740,000] lives in and around Anchorage and that there are entire regions—the Aleutian Islands, Kodiak Island, Prince William Sound, and the Kuskokwim-Yukon Delta—where the Orthodox church is the only church in town,” says Father Michael Oleksa, a leading historian of Russian Orthodoxy in Alaska. “Small as we are numerically, we cover a huge area.” These legacy communities are supplemented by newer settlements of Old Believers, a Russian Orthodox splinter group that arrived in Alaska in the second half of the 20th century.
Three of Alaska’s Russian Orthodox churches have been designated National Historic Landmarks, and 36 are on the National Register of Historic Places. One of them is the Holy Transfiguration of Our Lord Chapel in Ninilchik, built in 1901. On a blustery March afternoon I stood in the cemetery next to the church, where weathered, listing white Orthodox crosses were interspersed among more modern gravestones bearing names like Oskolkoff, Kvasnikoff, and Demidoff. From the bluff above the village, I looked down on a ramshackle collection of wooden houses and across Cook Inlet to the towering, snowy peaks of the Chigmit Mountains. Gazing past the onion domes, I found it easy to imagine that I was not in the U.S. but in some rugged backwater of the Russian Far East.
Russia’s expansion into Alaska was an extension of its rapid eastward advance across Siberia in the 16th and 17th centuries. Cossacks, joined by merchants and trappers known as promyshlenniki, hunted ermine, mink, sable, fox, and other furbearers as they subjugated, slaughtered, co-opted, and extracted payments from Siberian indigenous groups. By 1639 the promyshlenniki had reached the Pacific Ocean, and roughly a century later the tsars dispatched navigators such as Vitus Bering to explore the Aleutian Islands and sail deep into Alaska waters. What they found in abundance were sea otters, whose furs would soon become the most sought after in the world, used for everything from the collars of tsarist officers’ coats to jackets for Chinese nobles. The Russian-driven slaughter of the otters would eventually nearly extirpate the original population of 300,000 in the waters of Alaska and the northern Pacific.
By hostage-taking and killing, Russian promyshlenniki subjugated the indigenous Aleuts, who were skilled at hunting sea otters from their kayaks, and pressed them into service as the chief procurers of otter pelts. Government support of the promyshlenniki’s efforts in Alaska gradually increased, culminating in 1799, when Tsar Paul I granted a charter to the Russian-American Company to hunt furbearing animals in Alaska. In effect, the company ran the colony until the territory was sold in 1867.
“Alaska was certainly a colonial venture, but without a strategic plan,” says S. Frederick Starr, a Russia scholar with the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies who has studied Alaska’s Russian period. “The Russians groped their way into it, with the government supporting these venturesome guys who were basically after pelts. The whole story suggests a kind of haphazard, unfocused quality, though there are moments when they try to get their act together and send out bright people to turn it into a real colony.”
SQJ_1607_Alaska_Russia_11.jpg
A 1741 chart traces Danish explorer Vitus Bering’s voyage from Kamchatka to North America. Tsars dispatched explorers as part of the process of Russia’s eastward expansion. (Universal History Archive/UIG/Bridgeman Images)
Unearthing remains of the Russian colonial period has fallen to the likes of archaeologist Dave McMahan, a soft-spoken 61 year old who served from 2003 to 2013 as Alaska’s state archaeologist. Long fascinated by the colonial period, McMahan became especially intrigued by the fate of a star-crossed Russian vessel, the Neva, which played a pivotal role in the Alaska colony.
A 110-foot frigate, the Neva was one of the first two Russian ships to circumnavigate the globe, an expedition that lasted from 1803 to 1806. During that voyage the Neva stopped in Sitka, where it played a decisive role in a Russian victory over the native Tlingit. It later became one of the vessels supplying the Alaska colony from St. Petersburg.
On January 9, 1813, the Neva was within 25 miles of Sitka when it ran aground in thick fog. It was pounded against the rocks a few hundred yards off Kruzof Island, a 23-mile-long link in the Alexander Archipelago that’s dominated by a dormant, 3,200-foot volcano, Mount Edgecumbe. Thirty-two people drowned in the frigid water; 28 made it ashore, where two soon died. Twenty-four days later a rescue party from Sitka picked up the survivors.
The sinking of the Neva was legendary in Alaska maritime lore, not least because of rumors that the ship was carrying gold. “Like all good shipwrecks in Alaska, the interest was all about the wealth that supposedly was on board,” says McMahan. However, he notes, no Russian-American Company records support the claim that the Neva was laden with precious metals.
Using survivor accounts, satellite and aerial photographs, and the tale of an abalone diver who’d seen cannons in the waters off Kruzof Island, McMahan calculated where the ship likely had gone down and where the survivors might have huddled onshore. “Everything pointed to this one spot,” he says.
In the summer of 2012 McMahan and his colleagues went ashore on a storm-tossed stretch of beach. Above it, on a terrace, their metal detector got a major hit. Digging down, they found a cache of nine Russian axes from the early 19th century, identifiable by a distinctive barb on the blade’s head. “We were just in shock,” recalls McMahan.
Confident that they’d found the survivors’ camp, McMahan and his co-workers sought permission to explore further from the U.S. Forest Service and the Sitka tribe, whose traditional territory encompasses the area, and secured funding from the National Science Foundation. It took three years to clear those hurdles, and last July, McMahan and a team of eight Russians, Canadians, and Americans returned to Kruzof for an arduous dig, plagued by near-constant rain and a handful of grizzly bears that kept wandering past their camp to feast on a rotting whale carcass at the water’s edge. The team uncovered dozens of artifacts that pointed to a group of people struggling to stay alive until they were rescued: a crude fishhook made of copper, gunflints that had been adapted to strike against rock to start a fire, musket balls that had been whittled down to fit guns of a different caliber. They also found part of a navigational instrument, ship spikes, and food middens.
The team will return this summer to continue digging and to search offshore with more advanced sonar equipment. They hope to locate cannons or other artifacts from the sunken ship.
The Neva’s intended destination was Sitka, known then as Novo Arkhangelsk (New Archangel). The outpost served from 1808 to 1867 as the headquarters of the Russian-American Company and for a time was the largest port on the Pacific coast of North America. Rising above the center of the present-day city, population 9,000, is Castle Hill, the site of the company’s buildings, now long gone. McMahan was the lead archaeologist on a dig at the site in the 1990s that turned up roughly 300,000 artifacts, many of them attesting to the cosmopolitan nature of Sitka in the 19th century: Ottoman pipes, Japanese coins, Chinese porcelain, English stoneware, and French gun parts. Sitka then had its own museum, library, and teahouses and became known as the Paris of the Pacific—hyperbole, to be sure, but Sitka was the best this untamed land had to offer.
SQJ_1607_Alaska_Russia_02.jpg
A 19th-century engraving shows New Arkhangelsk, former headquarters of the Russian-American Company, now the city of Sitka. (De Agostini Picture Library/Bridgeman Images)
One of the residents with a direct link to the town’s Russian history is 79-year-old Willis Osbakken. His grandmother—Anna Schmakoff, whom he knew as a boy—was of Russian-Alaska native descent. She was born in 1860 and before she died, in 1942, was one of the last people alive to have witnessed the historic 1867 transfer ceremony on Castle Hill, when the Russian flag was lowered and the U.S. flag raised. Schmakoff, then seven years old, recalled one thing above all, Osbakken says. “She didn’t really understand why all the Russian people were crying. But her impression was that they were crying because the American flag was so much prettier than the Russian one.”
In the heart of Sitka sits the handsome, gray wooden St. Michael’s Cathedral, built in the 1840s and long the seat of the Russian Orthodox bishop of Alaska. The cathedral burned down in 1966, and later was rebuilt and restored to its original condition, with sailcloth covering the walls and silver, brass, and gold icons glittering under a graceful dome. Attendance at St. Michael’s has dwindled to a few dozen regular worshippers. But Father Oleksa says that although Alaska’s Russian Orthodox Church is losing members in larger towns and cities, it’s still going strong in rural areas and native villages.
“Secular trends are not as powerful,” he says. “The simple reason is that whether it’s agrarian living or subsistence hunting and fishing, the more your life depends on a direct relationship with the natural world, the more religious people tend to be.”
The church’s continuing strength among Alaska natives is largely because the church defended indigenous rights during the Russian period, frequently clashing with the Russian-American Company over its mistreatment of the native population. Church leaders, particularly Ivan Veniaminov, later canonized as St. Innocent of Alaska, supported native culture and held church services in indigenous tongues—all in contrast to many future Protestant and Catholic missionaries.
In the last decades of Russian rule the Russian-American Company supported the church and its schools and began to treat the indigenous people more humanely. But by the 1850s Russia’s Alaska adventure was becoming increasingly untenable. Sea otter populations had been nearly depleted. In 1856 Britain, France, and Turkey defeated the Russians in Crimea, and Tsar Alexander II was preoccupied with paying for the war, enacting military and legal reforms, and freeing Russia’s serfs. The California gold rush, which began in 1848, also drove home to the tsar that if gold ever were discovered in Alaska, there was no way the feeble Russian presence could hold back a flood of Americans and Canadians.
“This was just one step too far for them, and so they said, To hell with it—we’ll sell,” says Starr. “It was an offer of real money at a time when they really needed it.” And by selling to the U.S., a close ally, Russia would forever keep Alaska out of the hands of Great Britain’s Canadian dominion.
When Russia transferred Alaska to the United States, the tsar handed over sovereignty of the territory, but the property rights of Alaska natives were ignored. For the next century the indigenous peoples and the U.S. government battled over the issue. It was finally resolved in 1971, when the U.S. Congress passed the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, under which the government paid nearly a billion dollars to Alaska’s indigenous peoples and returned 40 million acres to native groups.
In effect, the American government bought Alaska a second time. And on this occasion Washington had to dig far deeper into its pockets than it had 104 years before.
In Ninilchik the Russian era lives on through people like Joe Leman, his wife, Selma, and their nearby neighbor, Nick Cooper, who gets together with Leman from time to time to drink a beer and speak Russian. They reminisce about their hardscrabble boyhood, when families with 10 or 12 children survived on salmon, moose meat, and vegetables from their gardens. And they recall outsiders taunting them because they were of Russian-Alaska native heritage and spoke a foreign tongue, which some called the devil’s language.
As a former Moscow correspondent who speaks Russian, I found it both strange and fascinating to converse with people speaking a dialect dating back to the time of Alexander II. When Leman and I chatted, he used some words I’d never heard in Russian. “Moose” in Russian is los, but Leman called the animal a sahat, a variant of a Siberian word for moose that’s almost certainly linked to the Siberians who played a key role in the Russian-American Company. Speakers of Ninilchik Russian also occasionally use words that haven’t been used in Russia since Chekhov’s time, such as chihotka for tuberculosis. They call a toilet a nuzhnik, literally the “necessary place.” When local residents traveled to Russia in the 1990s and used that expression, the Russians were taken aback, but they nevertheless grasped the meaning.
For nearly 20 years Wayne Leman, Joe’s nephew, and the husband-and-wife team of Andrej Kibrik and Mira Bergelson, two prominent linguists from Moscow, have been studying these and other distinctive characteristics of the time capsule dialect. They’ve compiled a dictionary of roughly 2,500 words, pieced together by speaking with old-timers. “It was a tremendous surprise,” recalls Kibrik, who works at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Linguistics. “We saw people who did not know how to write a single Russian letter speaking good Russian. But they were somewhat reserved, because they had been told by some people that their Russian was substandard.”
Leman, Kibrik, and Bergelson hope to publish a complete Ninilchik Russian dictionary, including recordings of the village’s speakers, in conjunction with next year’s sesquicentennial celebrations. The project holds special meaning for Leman; in his 66 years he has seen Ninilchik transformed from a Russian village into a community where the Russian period is little more than a faint echo. “When I grew up in the village, Russian was still spoken fluently by many people,” he says. “Back then people would say, ‘We are Russian.’ We were certainly culturally Russian. Those who were members of the Russian Orthodox Church maintained religious holidays. We ate Easter bread. People sang in Old Church Slavonic.”
Hmm, well yes, but Sakas, who are better known by exonym Scythian, and who were direct descendants of the Andronovo culture of Central Asian Aryans, were linguistically and culturally more closely related with Iranic people, than with the Indo-Aryans of Northern India. Aryan invaders of India originated from the Andronovo culture. Achaemenid Iranians called the land of these people by the name of Turan, but image gets more complicated, for it’s probable that stories of Rig Veda are about the conquest of the areas situated in Afghanistan, where BMAC culture had many fortresses similar as those described in the Rig Veda, which according to that holy scripture were destroyed and conquered by Indra, there are no such 3000-4000 year old fortresses found on the subcontinent. Thus it’s possible that Early Vedic people were already mixed with the native populations of Aghanistan before descending from the highlands of Afghanistan to fertile river plains of Punjab. By the way according to Zoroastrian texts Saraswati river, or Haraxwaiti, is situated in Afghanistan.
It is also good for us to keep in mind that in those times Northern and Southern Afghanistan were culturally very different, Northern part, Bactria was open to steppes, but areas south of the Hindukush, had ancient and close contacts with the Harappan civilization. During Achaemenid empire, Bactria was inhabited by civilized Saka/Scythians. Therefore it is quite revealing that two first converts to Buddhism were two travelling Bactrian merchans, Trapusa and Bahalika, and they even asked Buddha how they can honor him, and Buddha instructed them that they should build a Stupa in the style of ancient Chakravartin kings. Stupa is nothing else than the Kurgan of Aryan kings of the steppe.
There is a memorable Youtube video on that subject:
Particularly at around 1:05 and 2:00 when some architectural and artistic comparisons are made between Great Zimbabwe and a contemporary European building, and some sculptural works all roughly contemporary with each other.
I notice that they have been getting around the questions things like this may raise with some talking points about the achievements and contributions of other African civilisations; Egypt, Carthage, Roman North Africa etc. These will all come up during Black History Month.
It would be interesting if someone has seen any explanations of what happened with the Finns, Ed Dutton mentions it in one of his books but doesn’t offer any explanation, just that the male gene pool suddenly became very small, only 2 or 3 lineages.
You are correct about Turan being basically Scythian Land. But the term Iran itself is an Arabic derivative of the Airyanem Vaejah = Land / Stronghold of the Aryans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airyanem_Vaejah
Interestingly, in Old Slavic Вежа (Vezha) = Stronghold / Fortress.
Also the Persian Padishahs called themselves “Aryan son of Aryan, Persian son of Persian, King of Kings).
Persian people of Old were Aryans.
According to the Michael Witzel, Airyanem Vaejah of Zoroastrian texts was located in Highlands of Afghanistan, he btw makes an excellent case for it, anyway people of Iran-Afghanistan were mostly Iranic-Aryan, not Turanic-Aryans, latter were closer to original Aryans. Persians of the old were Aryans in somewhat same sense as Indo-Aryans were, especially inhabitants of Parsa and Media, they must have gone through heavy mixing with the native Middle Easterners like Elamites and Hurrians, which possibly explains why Zoroastrianism progressively became more fananatical and persecuting of other faiths. Assyrians who had great cultural impact and whi were were conquered by the Persians, had quite similar ideas about their god as ancient Israelites had, that there’s a national god above other gods, and so on. Yup, Ashur was the proto Yahweh, who conquered and defeated other gods. Read more about the influence of Assyria and Aramea upon the Persians, and you will understand that Achaemenids had lost much of their Aryan heritage in cultural and religious sense, even genetically, already long before of the coming of Arabs. Zoroastrianism was always more intolerant religion than Hindu Dharma ever was, religious intolerance is not Aryan, but Middle Eastern trait! Only in the eastern Iranic lands people retained closer connection with the people of steppes, and were closer to their roots, there Dharma and traditional forms of Aryan religion flourished. I now mean lands like Bactria, Sogdia, Khorasmia.
I mostly agree, except that the Elamite people were not typical Middle Easterners, they were dark skinned and their descended today have more Y haplogroup R1b than surrounding populations.
https://iiwiki.us/mediawiki/images/thumb/b/bb/Elamite_Woman.jpeg/300px-Elamite_Woman.jpeg
Probably an Early Afanasievo/Yamnaya migration interbred with (proto)Dravidian populations. Something similar might have happened with the Yamnaya ancestors of the early Bell Beakers in the Maghreb before their invasion into Iberian peninsula and the rest of Europe. Hence their swarthy phenotype.
Are you reading in German language, or translation to English?
I would read it with you, as I have bought a copy of the book. However, I had bought the Verso translation to English, which is apparently like a machine translation. So it might be a bit of a painful bookclub session.
I should have bought it in German, but my German reading skills were not there sadly. And at the time, I didn’t know the problem with the text’s apparently poor translations.
I don’t think the average 1944 Western leftists, were reading “Dialectics of Enlightenment”.
Most leftists would instead read optimistic books by writers like Lenin, which are not very difficult to understand, and most of them would probably not have had much German language skills.
For 1944 (when there books would be banned in Nazi-occupied Germany), Adorno and Horkheimer were primarily writing for German-speaking exiles and refugees. Such German-exiles, would on average have had a degree of classical education and no difficulty understanding the references to Homer or Hölderlin.
Headquarter of Arya today is Anandpur Sahib।।
If you’re unarmed then all opinions invalid।।
Corded Ware Whoreish Bear, I give a fk I’m Jatt।।
Raaj Karega Khalsa Aaki Rahe Na Koi।।
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ
I think you’ll find it excellent.
McMeekin makes a strong case that the machinations of Soviet agents were an important factor behind the American decisions that provoked the Japanese attack. He also argues that the failure of the Germans to take the Japanese into their confidence regarding Barbarossa was crucial in shifting the Japanese towards the Southern strategy.
Putting the USSR on a full wartime economy in 1939, investing in the production of gigantic quantities of purely offensive weaponry while neglecting defensive efforts, and positioning those enormous offensive formations right on the border, merely awaiting a signal to attack, seems pretty indicative to me. Suvorov pointed out those obvious facts while others did not.
Well, I’ll just quote the title of the original 2015 National Interest article, which represented the first mainstream Anglophone coverage of the story in 75 years: “Operation Pike: How a Crazy Plan to Bomb Russia Almost Lost World War II.”
Governance problem is not specific to particular regions, but the whole country – which is to say, it is a governance “problem” relative to aspirations to be a self-determined European* nation state, that people like Mazzini aspired to.
If the aspiration is an late-stage of imperialist, multinational federation, sending resources to a “khanate” or “court” in Moscow; then there is no “problem”; politics in Russia is well organized and coherent for maintaining the current system.
In my opinion, it probably could not be so different than what it is. This is what is inherited (late-stage imperialism), and the politics system is working within such limits that were inherited by history.
–
From Yeats, Byron, Herzl or Janacek , a dream of nationalism is usually more animating when supporting small nationalities that are occupied by empires, rather than the large nationalities which operate empires.
That’s the point. Czechs have been a culturally (if not geopolitically) advanced nationality for centuries, although under ultimate occupation of foreign empires.
And in Kafka stories of Czech settings, more than a century ago, the characters are businessmen and insurance agents, going to work by train in industrialized cities.
Czech Republic’s success today was not a result of some special magic dust, whether nationalism or capitalism. Although EU funding and living next to the economic supergiant of German, has not exactly harmed their financial position.
Look, I’ll freely admit that until the last decade or so, my knowledge of WWII came from mainstream Anglosphere history books and MSM articles. Since virtually none of them had ever mentioned Operation Pike in 75 years, I’d been entirely unaware of it until just a few years ago.
It sounds like you were far ahead of me in that regard. Just out of curiosity, when and how did you find out about it given that it was almost entirely excluded from English-language books and media for nearly three generations?
McMeekin makes a strong case that Soviet agents in DC were behind the decision to assassinate Chiang.
Sure, the Latin American nationalities, have been intermarried with Spanish settlers.
But of Latin American immigrants in Spain today (that have “flooded” Spain, if that is not viewed as a negative way to phrase it) -it looks like the level of Indigenous American peoples’ ancestry would be high.
Mass immigration from Latin America to Spain, is not mainly a return of unmixed ethnically and culturally Spanish people.
Rather, it is economic immigration (like any of the 21st century mass immigrations) of people whose ancestors had been partly culturally assimilated by the Spanish Empire.
So in parks Madrid today, you see people playing Mesoamerican ballgames. There is something that seems like a “revenge of Tenochtitlan”, in the way of historical irony that is common with the “reverse colonialism” to the capital cities of other empires, such as British, French and Russian empires.
–
There is also a layer of immigration which probably has majority ratio of Spanish blood, i.e. – bourgeois immigration to Spain from its former colonies.
When Peruvian bourgeois writers like Vargas-Llosas immigrate to Madrid, probably it can not be seen as “revenge of the Incas”. And his wife (also immigrant to Madrid) is Philipino, but of Spanish ancestry, as is still common among that country’s elites.
So in repatriation of the imperial elites. Imperialism has resulted in Peruvian and Philipino bourgeoisie, despite being on other sides of a Pacific Ocean for multiple centuries, looking like the same Spanish natives.
https://static3.abc.es/media/estilo/2016/02/03/hola-revis–620×420.jpg
What weaponry is “purely offensive?”
Did a military historian really make this distinction? It would mark them out as totally clueless as regards strategy and tactics.
Edit: I was confused writing this paragraph. I realized it must be a Basque game people are playing? (I confused this in my mind with a native Mexican game, as it is the Latin American looking people that are playing it)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basque_pelota
It sounds like you’re totally unfamiliar with the Suvorov Hypothesis or the massive amount of evidence supporting it. That’s hardly surprising since the subject has been almost entirely banned from the world’s English language media and history for thirty years. If you’re interested, a good starting point might be my own article from three years ago:
https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-when-stalin-almost-conquered-europe/
But to answer you question in very simple terms, parachute forces are almost solely useful for military offensives, and Germany had a large force that they used very effectively during their 1940 victories. But the Soviets had roughly 100x as many trained parachutists as the Germans.
Stalin had also produced many thousands of specialized tanks designed to move at very high speeds using paved highways. The USSR had no paved highways, but they were ideally suited for the German autobahns, so they’re sometimes called the “autobahn tanks.”
The Soviets also built many thousands of amphibious tanks, rather useless on the defense but perfect for crossing rivers and establishing bridgeheads during an offensive drive. These tanks would also have been able to cross the English Channel, and thereby help repeat William the Conqueror’s success of 1066.
Although not solely offensive, tanks in general were especially useful in that role. In 1941, Soviet tanks were as good or often better than the German ones, and far superior to any others in the world. And the Soviets also had several times more tanks than Germany and every other country in the world combined.
Anyway, read my article and you’ll discover some of what you haven’t been told in the mainstream accounts of the last thirty-odd years.
So now we see how Spain’s humanism has rewarded her in the end. Catholic, Spanish-speaking ex-colonials of partial Spanish descent are a lot better than the descendants of victims of French and British third world imperialism who are all over Paris and London.
My point was that a defensive campaign, properly conducted, will have a lot of offensive actions within it. Anyone with the slightest clue about military operations would know that.
Ideally, in a defensive campaign, most combat will be when you are on the offence, as it allows you to concentrate your strongest forces against their weakest. You have the initiative.
I don’t know to make my point any clearer. It is extremely basic stuff. This is why I was astonished that a military historian would write as if he doesn’t know it. It is completely discrediting.
Opressed small nations rarely have same potential to do harm in realising their national aspirations as large nations with huge resources and armies. Nationalistic great nations can end on road of madness and cruelty, as the examples of Empire of Japan and Nazi-Germany show us. When non independent nations fight for their nation, it is often by means of guerilla war, protests, public campaigns, etc, not by genocides, wars of conquest, jingoism, though there are exceptions, like massacres of Poles by Ukrainians, and other similar incidents in Balkans.
The woman in your photo is clearly not of Dravidian origin, but African, in coastal areas of Iran there live many folks of African descent, brought by slave trade, just like Siddis of India. Don’t you notice how she clearly has East African facial characteristics, not Dravidian or Australoid?
She’s tagged as Elamite, that’s all I know. I also remember watching a documentary a decade ago about Iranian archeologists digging out a Tell in the Elamite region and finding a well preserved circular Elamite fortress. I was really surprised then about the many local folks being really dark skinned, I didn’t know then that the ancient Elamite were dark skinned. I understand better now why some of the famous ancient Persian “Immortal ” soldiers depicted at Susa are Black skinned. The “Immortal ” guard was formed of ethnic Persian, Mede and Elamite soldiers and Susa was the last Elamite stronghold to be conquered by Indo-Iranian Aryans.
http://danamotor.ir/media/Achaemenid_Elite_Immortals_Archers_Susa.jpg
Compare their facial features with the features of the Elamite lady in the picture from my previous comment.
BTW, I was reading about Elam on Encyclopedia Iranica yesterday and it appears that there was a time when Elamite kingdoms controlled the whole of the Iranian plateau. That was something I personally didn’t know, that they held the plateau in its entirety for a long time.
https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/elam-i
I highly recommend Encyclopedia Iranica on everything Iranian and Persian.
Now that I think of it, we have no idea how BAMAC folks looked like. Perhaps they were dark skinned too ?
https://twitter.com/TheDeadDistrict/status/1405513781426405376?s=20
Okay, the BMAC people were probably White:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/ec/60/b1/ec60b10022bcc9c0d787f1967e9550b9.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/29/Seated_Female_Figure_LACMA_M.2000.1a-f_%281_of_3%29.jpg/144px-Seated_Female_Figure_LACMA_M.2000.1a-f_%281_of_3%29.jpg
I find some semblance of the Sumerians here. And their genetics are partly Middle Eastern and Mediterranean+ Caucasus derived (they were really diverse genetically).
So they don’t fit the description of the Dasa in the Vedas, but ancient Elamite do as well as Dravidas.
Elamites were swarthy, but they were not East African(Zangis, Somalis, etc) like woman of your photo, as I said previously, there are many communities of African origin living on coast of Iran. Dont you see the shape of her skull? Pure cushitic type. Iranicaonline is okay in my opinion, but not always very accurate, but then I have mostly looked just articles concerning Buddhism there.
So, you would ostensibly characterize the Celts as being representatives of the Bell Beaker umbrella, that expanded from Western Europe into Eastern Europe. Most historians assign a positive role to the Celtic peoples as a vanguard of knowledge and industriousness and yet you howl with disgust towards the Bell Beaker propensity to expand into Corded Ware territories?
And you’ve created your own dynasty made-up of elements of both civilizational groupings? 🙂
(I’ve always admired the beautiful outward appearance of Irish women, the French/Celtic admixture must be quite pleasant to look upon too)…
This woman is tagged as Elamite on Wiki and her facial features are compatible with the depiction of the Elamite Immortal soldiers in Susa. Regarding the Cushitic type: BMAC people had Y haplogroup E in the mix. Natufian Y haplogroup E folks from the Levant were mostly haplogroup E just like the Cushitic people today. Who knows what type of Neolithic migrants roamed the region…
WTF Bashi?
“IIWiki is an online, web-based, free encyclopedia for the creation and display of fictional content produced by members of NationStates. It is unaffiliated with NationStates.”
https://iiwiki.us/wiki/Elamite_people
https://iiwiki.us/mediawiki/images/b/bb/Elamite_Woman.jpeg
https://iiwiki.us/wiki/File:Elamite_Woman.jpeg
It is a photo taken in Yemen, there are millions of people of African origin living in Yemen, and Yemenese natives have interacted closely for thousands of years with the people of Horn of Africa and Somalia.
Really Bashi, really? Did you not hear the alarm bells ringing? Elamites are dead culture and language just like Sumerians, if somrone would create a photo with label Sumerian woman, would you take it seriously?
the original Celts
Nice to know someone has a handle on this.
Especially with all the faux Celts about.
The problems with this “evidence” have been been covered in many previous SH-related comments threads.
Number of paratroopers on paper are one thing (e.g. North Korea today supposedly has the world’s largest special forces). The Germans had 8x as many Ju-52 transport planes as the Soviets had Li-2s (the main Soviet transport plane), and many more gliders. More importantly, they also had a record of successfully using them in complex combined arms operations, such as this amazing operation (capturing an entire Belgian fortress, outnumbered, with just 6 fatalities), and the Battle of Crete a year later. In contrast, the Soviet “paratroopers” that participated in the Winter War served as conventional infantry, which is indicative as to their actual capabilities outside of set-piece exercises. In fact, here is what happened on the couple of occasions that the Soviets did try to do small-scale parachute operations in the Winter War: https://forum.axishistory.com/download/file.php?id=129149&sid=12ef9c8aee20bf238c2ecb36b6d368e2
There is no such thing as an “autobahn tank”. All tanks can use paved roads. You generally don’t want to in the face of significant opposition, though, since it is easy to set up ambushes along them. Tank destroyers are much cheaper than actual tanks.
Soviet amphibious tanks were light tanks that were of no use except in limited recon roles. There was a good comment about them here from Vendetta: https://www.unz.com/article/debunking-myths-of-red-brown-alliances/?showcomments#comment-3239590
The English Channel is ~100 meters deep, they were not crossing it. There are no tanks that can do that or anything like that today, let alone in 1941.
A small percentage of the Soviet tanks were new and better in some respects than the German tanks, but the great bulk of them were thoroughly outdated models. (Technology moved much more rapidly in the 1930s-40s, tank and airplane models were becoming obsolete after just a few years, it’s not like today where you can take an airframe from three decades ago, upgrade its avionics, and have it perform almost as well as a 5th generation fighter). Comparing like to like, the Soviet advantage becomes much more modest. But more importantly, few tanks crews had been trained to use the newer tanks and they did not have radios at the beginning of the war. This made complex combined arms operations of the sort that the Germans excelled at impossible, any Soviet attack would have just been chewed up by the Germans, and if anything, at a faster rate than the rate at which it actually happened.
On the more general theme of Rezun having been “repressed” – well, when I visited Romania a couple of years ago, I noted that approximately 1/3 of the WW2 books in a typical bookshop were translations of his work. So he was obviously successful in Romania. His is a narrative that Romanians like, for reasons that should be quite obvious, so there is commercial demand for his narrative. There is, or was, no such analogous demand in the Anglosphere, hence discussions about his theories remained largely confirmed to low traffic military history boards (though perhaps that might soon change in light of the incipient New Cold War between NATO and Russia/China).
Is Rezun prosecuted, or even blacklisted? No. To the contrary, he is getting positive interviews with The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/29/ex-soviet-spy-viktor-suvorov Hardly a honor that will be extended to any actual “dissident.” Like many other GRU and KGB defectors, he has done well for himself peddling conspiracy theories that Western right-wingers like – other examples include Bezmenov (SJWism as long-running KGB plot), Golitsyn (who claims that the USSR collapse was fake), and Lunev (who insists that the GRU smuggled hundreds of suitcase nukes onto US soil).
This does not mean that the Anglosphere is particularly immune to pseudohistorical fads. For instance, about a decade ago, Gavin Menzies’ 1421, which claimed that the Chinese treasure ships visited the Americas before the Europeans, spent several weeks in the history bestseller charts. His approach was rather similar to Rezun’s, gathering a wide range of circumstantial evidence that would support the idea that the Chinese visited the Americas first, some of it actually not unimpressive, and forcing it all into a predetermined narrative without deigning to mention the vast number of much stronger countervailing pieces of evidence (Bed of Procrustes fallacy).
the incipient New Cold War between NATO and Russia/China).
Say what?
So, you’ve decided that you don’t need the UR as an outlet for your writing any longer?
You are right about this picture, probably some Afrocentrist fake. But again, I saw with my own eyes a documentary about the archeological excavations of an Elamite fortress city that I mentioned earlier. And the locals shown in the documentary were way darker than the average Iranian I have ever met (and I have met some). That was at the time when I was completely unaware of the fact that ancient Elamite folks were dark skinned. It is only later that I have learned that they were melanoderm.
Many ancient populations were dark skinned, I have zero problem with that. Black = mostly backward is only true since the Bantu expansion. Bantu people are indeed mostly aggressive and backward, but it doesn’t mean other Blacks necessarily are. And speaking of Yemen, yes they were intermixed with Cushitic and Ethiopian people since times immemorial, but they were also a rather developed urban civilization in the Antiquity. Same thing about the Berber, mostly Y haplogroup E, clearly linked with the Afro-Asiatic populations, but not dumb at all before their Islamization. Probably ancient Somali people weren’t the worst of folks before Islam either. Earliest natives of Greece were haplogroup E, does that make them any stupid?
If what Bezmenov said was true, it was extremely successful – tho when the fruits are ready to be reaped the Soviets are long gone.
(It’s a plot, but genuinely American-Atlanticist and directed at everyone, including the elites themselves!)
“In 1941, Soviet tanks were as good or often better than the German ones, and far superior to any others in the world. And the Soviets also had several times more tanks than Germany and every other country in the world combined”
Well did you know that in 1940, before the fall of France, French had larger tank forces than Germans had, and their tanks were also as good or better than German ones? This historical fact is sadly often forgotten…
Though Soviets had originally developed the precursor of Blitzkrieg tactics under marshal Tukhachevsky, they were not employed during the first year of German invasion by the Soviets, probably because of the mass purges of officers. Instead Red Army used WW1 style tank tactics, tanks not operating together in masses, but as infantry support during battle. Same in the Winter War.
I am not arguing about swarthiness of some people. Many Iranians of southern coast are very darl, similarly most Indians in India are on average darker than Indians immigrating to the west.
Possibly the swarthier Iranians are descended from the Elamite folks ?
Oh please could you do the nazi flying saucer bases in underground caverns in Antarctica next?
Also: somebody needs to make CGI video of these land/sea battle tanks swarming across the English channel. It’s like world of warcraft -> alternate reality game. It’s practically a straight line from the Fulga Gap to the Thames.
Why not? People of the Gulf are darker than Northerners, and Elam was situated near marshes of Iraq and Gulf. It’s not like Aryans massacred elamites or something.
https://c8.alamy.com/comp/AR8P1M/marsh-arabs-shatt-al-arab-iraq-AR8P1M.jpg
Marsh Arabs of Tigris-Eufrat estuary, other Iraqi Arabs often insult them by calling them Indians, because they are so swarthy.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/1b/9b/29/1b9b29695a5fc8952d527615d098979a.jpg
This is how they live in the marshes of Southern Iraq, people probably lived similarly in Nile estuary of Lower Egypt, before urbanisation and extreme population densities.
Well, I have exactly the same esthetic preferences as you do Altan, but I am doing my best to be honest about Dravidian and early Afro-Asiatic people being fully capable of building complex civilizations. The early Afro-Asiatic folks were mainly Y haplogroup E, which is sometimes referenced as the “modal Mediterranean haplogroup ” because it is found all around the Mediterranean bassin and they were also present in BMAC (this place was some kind of melting pot really). They have greatly contributed to the Egyptian civilization of which their population was one of the formative groups. They have also contributed around 1/3 of modern Jewish male lineages as well as 1/3 of Greeks, 40% + Albanians etc. And both Einstein and Hitler were most likely Y haplogroup E (which is kind of funny in an ironic way).
Finally:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002929707641081
And Elam was all of the Iranian plateau, not only the area close to the Mesopotamia marshes area. The Iranian plateau is full of non-escavated Tell most probably remnants of the ancient fortresses. Many of them might date back to the Elamite era. Bottom line: ancient Elamite folks were not typical Middle Easterners probably a mix of Yamnaya and Dravidian populations as I wrote in my earlier comment.
It’s true that this patriotism/jingoism was a strong (and surely disastrous to the extent to contributed to the First World War and Russo-Japanese war) feature of the elite in Russia Empire in the beginning of the 20th century (as in the other great empires – German Empire, British Empire – where it inspired to some great music at least, e.g. Elgar). The way you wrote the sentence is very funny though.
Doesn’t this way you phrase it, remind of the rich man, who says “I’ve fallen into poverty; I even had to cash in one of my bonds this week”.
Doesn’t it also contain elements of one of Freud’s famous jokes:
‘A. borrowed a copper kettle from B. and after he had returned it was sued by B. because the kettle now had a big hole in it which made it unusable. His defence was: “First, I never borrowed a kettle from B. at all; secondly, the kettle had a hole in it already when I got it from him; and thirdly, I gave him back the kettle undamaged.”
Emergence in late 19th century and early 20th century of patriotism in the great empires (British Empire, German Empire, Russian Empire, Ottoman Empire, French Third Republic, Austro-Hungarian Empire), was a disaster for Europe, as its teleological goal seems to be revealed at Battle of the Somme, Battle of Tannenberg – ideology of “Dulce et Decorum est”, is being a young man, lying in the mud, missing your arms and legs, or with your intestines hanging outside of your body.
Another superior feature of the late Tsarist era elite that AP describes, and a reminder of what we lost with its liquidation, is that there was none of this all-pervasive, soul-crushing cynicism which the post-sovok nomenklatura uses to rationalize its own apatride rootlessness and penchant for thievery.
Elites in great empires have often cultivated jingoism, patriotism and militarism, with disastrous consequences for Europe in the 20th century.
But this imperialist jingoism, is not part of, and based on different principles, than the nationalism that has inspired artists like Puccini, Byron, Dvorak, etc.
Legitimate nationalism, is a desire for all peoples to be self-determined, and free from foreign occupations. This is kind of liberty, and nationalism was historically born from liberalism, and had tried to rest on universal principles.
In nationalism, there is also belief in importance of local cultures – and connection to the lower classes, who are more geographically immobile and develop more distinct behaviours and traditions.
Belief in importance of local differences, also requires a principle of pluralism (in style of Max Weber), where you accept that people can have their own values, and that they should be allowed to develop without interferences. This was again, part of a tradition of liberal thought.
Another excellent comment Dmitry. Funny how people have a problem distinguishing nationalism from imperialism. They should know better: after all Roman Empire already ended up destroying the ethnic Roman core. This happened time and again, but some people do not understand something simple: a genetic lineage grows from a clan and into a tribe, then into an ethnic group, a people and a nation. An Empire does not grow into a nation, it uses a sum of ethnic groups to expand beyond a ethnic core’s boundaries and achieve maximim elite power projection. This is of course great if you are part of the elite, but if you are not, then it is useless and can be outright negative for your well-being.
Well you got quite an idealist view of early Nationalism, Hungarian or German revolutionary nationalists of 1848-49 did not tolerate the rights or aspirations of self determination of other nationalities living in the Reich or Kingdom of Hungary. Also early nationalists made everything that regional dialects and regionalist attitudes would wither away, and unitary culture with common myths would be born.
But if you read literature of the 19th century, – intelligent (I don’t mean someone like Rider Haggard) writers were mostly far more cynical people, than is typical or socially allowed to be today, or in the 20th century.
Even Freud’s joke above, was – a final product of the 19th century (” Interpretation of Dreams” – 1899).
Extreme cynicism that was part of the literary culture, could have been a preservative of the 19th century’s common sense, that allowed peace for Europe – in contrast to the disasters of the 20th century.
Almost all of the great 19th century writers, were cynical, bitter, difficult people, who had a genius for anti-glamourizing – as was the tradition of the realism school that came from Paris.
And Tolstoy may have seemed a more of crazy cynical religious man in later years, but his horror at the jingoism in the early 20th century, is from any point of view a sign of prophetic common sense for 1905* – and has blamed for it the rise of newspapers.
Retrospective of the events of the 20th century, can rather not say that Tolstoy was a delusional pensioner, but rather a person of common sense, that would have preserved the country from disaster.
More cynicism in the general culture might not have been enough to avoid disasters of the 20th century in Europe, but perhaps they could have avoided some of the excesses of stupidity.
Part of the danger that we saw in the 20th century, is that there is increasing democratization of culture, increasing role of newspaper, increasing printing of cartoons (that are enemy to critical thought), as well as an addition of new introduction of technologies (such as radio), that access the brain with less critical barriers than written prose like the novel – that by that time had a culture of connoisseurship and literary criticism, that helped to filter away the most untruthful books.
–
I would take your blueprint for imperialism and wholeheartedly apply it towards the Russian Empire’s historic experience. The big difference in Russia’s approach in regards to its ethnic minorities was a very pronounced emphasis in russifying the masses, all of the masses as far as I’m aware, in contrast to the approach of some other classic imperial systems such as what was practiced in the Roman and later Habsburg empires.
I dont know much about Elamites, but Australoid features are very distinct, even in diluted form in Dravida people, so I dont believe that Elamites were such people, for even darkest Iranians, who are as dark as Omanis or Marsh Arabs, dont look at all like that. I don’t believe that Dravidas have much of Australoid heritage, maybe in some exceptional cases of some tribal forest dwellers like Veddas of Sri lanka. Australoid-Negritos were culturally and technologically extremely backwards, and had very low population densities.
Some dark skinned people are clearly capable of high civilization, Tamils are a good proof of that, they produced many great philosophers, dramatists and logicians, and are among few people who created native corpus of literature in the classical era, so called Sangam literature.
Wrong as always, Chinese are a product of an empire, similarly Germans are a product of first and second Reich and likewise Byzantines were product of the Roman Empire, as well Iranians and whole nation of Iran are products of thousands yesrs of empire building, original Persians inhabited only a small part of Iran. Well I can continue this with Indians, who are also only united because of Imperialism, the nation of Turkey is the remains of the imperial core of the Ottoman Empire, and modern day Arabs are too a result of ancient Islamic empires. It tells lot about you, when Ukrainian tribalist continuously agrees with you.
But you are a tribalist; you support the subjugation and destruction of non-Muscovite Eastern Slavic peoples and cultures (such as those of Novgorod and those of Ukraine) by the Suzdalians/Muscovites/Great Russians. You oppose other tribalisms while praising your own as “Imperialism.”
This is true among Mazzini and Young Italy movement, as their project includes not just self-determination, but moreover a national unification.
Italian unification project, requires that local identities would be dissolved enough, that the larger nation state project can subsume them.
However, the opposite among movements like Czech national revival, Polish national revival, where local customs and dialects are catalogued and celebrated.
I was writing just about the ideas, not the behaviour of the people who associated to it. Nothing is going to be so “ideal” when you judge it by the people who believed it, – it will always looked “crooked”, to use the phrase of Kant from his famous essay of the 1780s.*
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Wrong, I support unification and integration of Slavic people under the Russian aegis, naturally loyal subject nations could locally continue using local variations and dialects of the Common Slavic tongue, also known as Russian language. Such policy would be less repressive than the French one, and more similar with the Spanish, Iranian, Indian or German policies, but rebellious and ungrateful subject nations should be treated harshly for the welfare of all.
Was recently reading “Weapons of Mass Instruction.” Not very far into it, and so far it doesn’t seem very HBD-friendly, but one thing blew my mind: proponents of mandatory public schooling were seemingly in large measure eugenicists. And, partly, they rationalized themselves by believing that increasing education would be eugenic.
The idea was that dumb people would be socially stigmatized into not breeding, and smart people would assortitively mate – in actuality, the cult of education has become the single greatest mechanism of dysgenics and blank-slatism that exists.
Probably a good demonstration of how our political instincts arise first, and then we rationalize them. Anyway, a lot of the other justifications by academics of the time are disturbing – about separating children from their families and cultures, making a more pliable population. And those still hold.
Absolutely. My claim was the “repression” of Suvorov’s work was almost entirely confined to the Anglosphere. The millions of copies he’d sold in Russian, German, and 20-odd other languages had established him as (probably) the world’s best-selling military historian, with international conferences having been held to debate his theories. That’s what makes the total unavailability of his works in English for decades so remarkable and suspicious, especially since the book had first appeared in English in 1988. The analogy with Solzhenitsyn’s 200 Years seems a close one. Are you also denying that Solzhenitsyn’s book has been “repressed” in the Anglosphere?
Even after the prestigious Naval Academy Press finally published an English edition of Suvorov’ book twenty years after it went out of print, it was never reviewed or discussed anywhere in the English-language MSM. Note that your Guardian interview came only a decade later, and presumably appeared only because they desperately needed a GRU defector to support their claims on the Skirpal case. The article ran 3,000 words of which 100 dealt with the Suvorov Hypothesis.
If Suvorov wasn’t “repressed”, what’s the most prominent coverage of his works you can find in the Anglosphere between (say) 1990 and 2015. We’re talking about the world’s best-selling military historian, whose theories turned WWII on its head, and have now been largely confirmed by McMeekin’s extensive archival research.
I think the evidence for the Suvorov Hypothesis is overwhelming, but others can certainly disagree. However, anyone who denies that Suvorov was totally blacklisted in the Anglosphere is just denying obvious reality.
Actually, I forgot to mention the most hilarious element of that December 2018 Guardian article you linked:
So the Suvorov Hypothesis now has “broad acceptance among historians”…despite the Guardian and every other Anglosphere MSM publication having never once mentioned it to their readers in 30 years.
It’s a little like when the most powerful mobster in Hollywood died, and the Los Angeles Times ran a huge obituary on him though they’d never once mentioned his existence to their readers in three decades.
What are you disagreeing with? Minority ethnicities within the Roman Empire had much more latitude to use their own languages even within the legal institutions, and surprisingly enough at times even within the military. Russian imperial policy and implementation of a Russian language milieu was much more draconian. As late as the 19th century, authors that wanted to publish anything in their own native Ukrainian language had to undergo very strict censorship often times in St. Petersburg and not even within Ukraine. The Habsburg empire was quite progressive in its handling of its minorities, and even supported school curriculums to be taught in the local language.
Sadly I can’t read German. I borrowed a copy from the local library to see what the book is like before buying a copy, I am looking at an old UK edition from 1973. The translator is John Cumming, possibly it is the same text as the Verso edition because it is hard to read and occasionally it looks like the syntax totally collapses. It is also a dense read, probably in German there are specific terms that will be more easily recognised and understood by readers of books in this field, whereas in English this doesn’t come across.
In the Amazon reviews it says the more recent Stanford translation is clearer and easier to read. It might also have some explanatory notes.
This is very likely in the 1940s and 50s. I was thinking more of the 1970s when texts like this were being published in English and were attracting a somewhat broader readership (for example, they have copies in my local public library that were bought at that time) and comparing with the impression I got from looking at some important texts in CRT or Intersectionality.
The public library still has a surprisingly good selection of books on politics, there are books by Adorno, Marcuse, Althusser from the time English translations started appearing, Lukacs, Gramsci, plenty of Lenin, and translations from the opposite end of the spectrum printed in the 1930s (Mussolini & Gentile, for example). Other places I have lived the public libraries mostly never keep so much for so long.
As I previously mentioned Russians are terribly bad at Russifying ethnic minorities. There are two reasons for that: 1) Russians as a people do not feel the need to convert others to their standards, they have no problem in accepting other ethnicities with their culture, faith and language as long as these ethic differences do not interfere with the everyday life of the Russian majority 2) the Russian State (Tsarist or Bolshevik) had no long term, logical strategy for assimilating minorities. The Russification efforts were not thoughtfully and thoroughly implemented and were not sufficiently long-term strategies.
Also, one has to remember what general Yermolov said to the Tsar when the Tsar asked him what recompense he wanted for his outstanding service: “Your Majesty, please make me a German ” replied the general. There were minorities who had more rights than ethnic Russians. And it was not only Germans, when Armenians settled in the Russian south, running from the Ottoman oppression, the Tsarist government gave them lands it took from the local Cossack population. Armenians received twice the acreage per family than an average Cossack family had. I have no idea whatsoever why the Tsarist government did such a thing. And it became even worse under the Soviets who opposed the “Great Russian Chauvinism ” with all their might and imposed Korenezatsia even in the regions where ethnic Russians were an outright majority.
I think the problem for people who perceived the dangers immanent in these developments was that the new tendencies were too powerful to be easily contained and an unusual kind of politician would have been needed, something like a conservative who was prepared to adopt some radical policies to preserve moderation. They are not always around when needed.
I’m sure that at the local Russian level, most Russians are probably quite tolerant of others, and guys like you and me, if we physically lived as neighbors would have absolutely no problem in accepting each other’s language, cultural and religious peculiarities and preferences. But assigning this sort of laisses faire attitude to government circles in St. Petersburg or Moscow does not accurately portray the reality of societal organization within the provinces. Looking at the whole of the 19th century, one quickly can see the high and mighty hand of Russian bureaucratic weight slanted squarely at the destruction of the Ukrainian language in all spheres of governmental and cultural life. Getting any book published in the Ukrainian language was more that a herculean feat, where the official policy from the center (St.Petersburg) clearly shows a “longterm strategy for assimilating minorities” The Ems Edict (1876) was a continuation of the draconian measures presented within the Valueve Circular (1863) that put into motion the eradication of the Ukrainian language in favor of Russian:
Contrary to what you state, one can easily see a lot of thought put into these measures and the ability to implement these policies into a thorough policy of Russifying the Ukrainian masses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyotr_Stolypin
And his murderer:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitry_Bogrov
When Stolypin was killed a notable faction of the Russian Imperial elites sighed a sigh of relief, because his reforms directly menaced their agricole income extracted from the mass of the impoverished and landless peasants.
Interestingly, they only managed to kill him the second time, the first terrorist attack did some 100 victims, among whom 27 were killed on the spot, while 33 were severely wounded and many later died.
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%B7%D1%80%D1%8B%D0%B2_%D0%BD%D0%B0_%D0%90%D0%BF%D1%82%D0%B5%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%80%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BC_%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%82%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B5
Among the victims of the attack was Stolypin’s daughter who had both her feet blown. Her nanny was killed, her younger brother was slightly wounded.
https://biography.wikireading.ru/70150
All the “progressive ” thinkers of the time applauded the “courage” of the perpetrators (the usual mix of Russian, Jewish and other minority Socialist Revolutionaries).
Slavs are inherently tribalist. We are not Empire building people. We should have lived as a confederation of tribes. Unfortunately this is no longer possible, because our Empire building neighbors infected us with their centralizing mental disease and denatured the culture and mindset of our people.
The ideal Slav polity was Novgorod the Great. This is how we should have evolved into the future, we would be today a gigantic confederation from the Elbe and Triglav to the Urals with a 500 million population. Sad that the popes, the princes, the great dukes, the kings, the khans, the sultans and the tsars interfered with the natural evolution of our people, destroyed our faith, polluted our mind, enserfed and weakened our people.
There is no way back, but if there was it would have been better for the Slav to kill on sight anyone who contributed to bringing us where we are now.
Не забудем, не простим Ретру и Аркону !
https://otattu.ru/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/83666474_2763109023765204_5834428658281337679_n.jpg
Слава Роду!
All people are tribalists in the beginning, it’s no good to stay forever as children of nature. Man is a creature capable of overcoming his nature, yes it’s hard, yes, the results are often not ideal, still we strive against all odds, and often in the end beat those odds. Of all creatures of the world, ours is the nature of change. Go be a monkey or papua-guinean if you like, forever stuck in stasis, but I choose to be a man.
https://i.sunhome.ru/religion/102/simvol-buddizma-koleso-dharmi.3350.orig.jpg
It’s much easier to see what drives the (mainly American) instinct to detach from the public school system and homeschool in this light. That is the logical conclusion if any true improvement is sought.
Confucianism was spread mainly thru the Imperial Examination, a great many small schools and self-suffocating candidates.
What you’re dreaming isn’t the historical India.
We could have been the greatest Kangz of all time, had not been for all those real kings.
Literature that used something that was similar to what was spoken by the large mass of Ukrainian peasantry didn’t start until Kotliarevsky’s “Eneida” in 1798. This new written language evolved slowly and evenly until the mid 19th century. Before this time, Ukrainian authors wrote in either Russian or Polish in the Western half of the country. In either case, because Ukraine’s social policies were being directed from foreign capitals, there was no strong impetus to help develop a language based on the language of the common folk, so there was really no need to create any edicts to prohibit the publication of Ukrainian materials initially in the 19th century.
Shevchenko’s writings and his involvement with the Cyril Metodius brotherhood caused his first few editions of “Kobzar” to be banned after the promulgations of the Ems Ukaz and the Valuev Circular. I couldn’t pinpoint any data on the publication numbers of the first few editions of “Kobzar”, but I do know that after the ban in the Russian Empire, publication of such books was done in within Galicia and the Habsburg Empire and then smuggled into Kyiv and Eastern Ukraine. Later, many publications appeared in Europe and found there way into the Russian Empire. Here’s one interesting method used that originated in Geneva:
The Catholic/Huegenot wars in France were of a religious nature, not a national one. In Ukraine, national and religious issues came to the fore in the 17th century that culmnated in the Khmelnitsky revolution. Fortunately, Russia and Ukraine have never gone to war over religious matters.
I really don’t see the relationship between French Huguenot/Catholic wars in the 16h century and the grievances between Russia and Ukraine today. But I’ll have to agree to a large extent with you on your characterization of the fervent attitudes of Ukrainian nationalists today, and their focused attention on achieving their own nation/state. 🙂
These are two recent quotes of yours that I just can’t seem to square? They should have been written by two different people, not by one person. I could possibly be persuaded to agree with the sentiments within the first quotation, for it points to democratic ideals and the real possibility of the existence of an autonomous Ukrainian polity. The second quotation, seems to be written by some black shirted bigot that can only see the world out of the darkest sunglasses imaginable, where Ukrainian patriots would be summarily shot and killed, or perhaps carted off to some dark and evil place within Siberia for long term “rehabilitation”. Please help me to understand this huge dichotomy in the nature of your thinking patterns? 🙂
Yes, that is the Verso one. Reviewers are saying it is like reading “Google translation”, although perhaps he had access to an early version of the software, as in 1973 even Babel fish does not exist.
I guess I should buy the better translation, but I might try to read this Verso one – the book itself looks really nice in terms of its cover and the print.
I guess it is what fashionable nerds in the 1970s library were reading (Adorno, et al)?
Also I guess in the public library has more books that young people wanted to read, as older people have enough money to buy the books themselves by the 1970s.
But nowadays, incomes in the West are high enough that anyone can buy books, and most of people you see in bookshops might even seem to be young people and students.
I don’t think Bashibuzuk is a Russian nationalist in any meaningful sense of the term. I would describe his ideology as “Racial Bolshevism.”
As this is after all an “open thread” and you’ve invited me to alert you whenever I view a good film, well here goes…Last nigh I viewed a really good, nay, I should state excellent film noir film titled “Sudden Fear” starring Joan Crawford, Jack Palance and perennial film noir femme fatale, Gloria Graham. Joan Crawford really steals the show and puts in a truly emotional and artistic role as the ‘spurned lover”, or more accurately the spurned wife. The plot is gripping and provides for some well placed noirish turns, and the photography is outstanding:
I know that you like noir films, so I would highly recommend this one as a “must see” *****
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2d/Sudden_fear-1.jpg
The version that I viewed within YouTube was very sharp and crisp (important elements for you). I even remember comparing Joan Crawford’s nostrils on a close-up, that seemed to not be very even. 🙂
Hmmm…”racial bolshevism”? That’s a new one for me. Is that something that you’ve coined? 🙂
You want your tribe to dominate the others but are willing to allow then their dhimmitude to a greater extent than did the French tribalists who essentially wiped out the Breton, Corsican, Burgundian languages. As long as they do not demonstrate too much ingratitude to their Suzdalian/Muscovite/Great Russian tribal masters, in that case they will be destroyed as was Novgorod.
True and less destructive Imperialism was practiced by the Hapsburgs; the tribalism/nationalisms of the French, Russians and Germans led to the destruction of Europe.
Habsburgs tried to Germanize all inhabitants of empire before Austro-Hungarian compromise of 1867, and after that Hungarians tried to Magyarize all minorities in the Transleithania. All that happened under the Habsburgs, not forgetting bloody repression of numerous Hungarian revolts like in 1848-49.
Russian Empire was only European Empire which had no major problems with integration of Muslims and Orthodox, such tolerance was not found anywhere else in the West. You could as well claim that French Liberalism led to destruction of Europe, and if we’re honest it led to destruction of traditional Europe and her values.
In my vision Russians are the foundation stone and glue that keeps empire together, but Russia as whole would be much more than just Russians or Slavs, it would also be fatherland of Armenians, Tatars and other various nationalities that by fate share their destiny with the mighty Great Russian nation. I very much admire Putin’s solving of the Chechen problem, such people can be utilised beneficially on behalf of the empire, continuing the old Russian tradition, remember Savage divisions! I can dream that one day restored empire can give North Caucasians and other similar brave folks, a healthy outlet for their impulses, like pacifying Polish towns…
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%BA%D0%B0%D0%B7%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%8F_%D1%82%D1%83%D0%B7%D0%B5%D0%BC%D0%BD%D0%B0%D1%8F_%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%BD%D0%B0%D1%8F_%D0%B4%D0%B8%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B7%D0%B8%D1%8F
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Et7k2eeXIAYGoEL.png
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EyIq_slWEAMXiUv.jpg
https://avatars.mds.yandex.net/get-zen_doc/1654267/pub_5e8d3665c8100861080da27e_5e8d38095fdea526818c4825/scale_1200
How wonderful is the friendship of nations under a one empire! Isn’t that right Bashi?
И гений паражоксов друг…
The reality is dialectic. Linear deductions end up in a dead end.
To AP
You are just idolising Habsburgs just because Galicians got a special treatment after they showed their bloodlust in killing of their Polish lords during Galician slaughter of 1846 and the mad year of 1848, classical divide et impera.
Dont mistake me, Habsburgs had a nice empire, but it was not as exceptional with it’s treatment of minorities as you claim, Finns, Tatars, Armenians, Balts and so on had as good situation culturally in Russia as Czechs and Croats had in Austria. The religious tolerance was also much better in Russia, Habsburgs had a long history of fighting against all expressions of protestantism, but Russians had no problem with building of Protestant churches in St Petersburg already in the beginning of the 18th century, but yes, Habsburgs were much more tolerant of Jews than Russians were…
Being a fan of Habsburgs and the Spanish empire is in my opinion quite understandable, I can sympathize with your views in this matter, but PLC on the other hand…
НОРНа
https://nice-books.ru/books/nauchnye-i-nauchno-populjarnye-knigi/politika/191816-petr-xomyakov-programma-norna.html
https://taynoeznanie.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/2-18-300×225.jpg
When asked where the moneys come from, Ramzan Kadyrov answered: “Allah gives !”
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xli554
(Н☆х такую дружбу…)
Russian weren’t tolerant towards Catholics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_of_Che%C5%82m_Eparchy
But they were tolerant towards Protestants and Muslims. This is not an improvement over Hapsburgs.
I’m as much a racist as Karlin is a Russian nationalist (e.g., not that much).
And dont forget Buddhists.
This is just your personal bias speaking. Generally speaking and for longer time Russians were more tolerant, I dont want to insult your faith, but in my possibly erroneous view uniatism is just product of Catholic power politics, anyway better for us not to dwell too much in the subject of Eastern Catholics, you probably already know what is my opinion in this matter…
But about Catholicism generally, well members of the uniate churches were given a choice to return to Orthodoxy or become “normal” Catholics, there was no overt repression of Catholicism in the 18th and 19th century Russia, there are even Catholic churches from that time period in St Petersburg and Moscow.
Well I have nothing against Habsburgs, some thinfs were bettwr in Russia, some in Austria, at least people were generally wealthier in the latter, but then Hungary and Central Europe have always been fertile and temperate lands.
BTW, thanks again for providing the link to that fascinating Guardian interview with Suvorov.
I mentioned it to McMeekin and he was just as astonished as I had been. The Guardian, a leading global pillar of the liberal MSM Establishment, declaring in 2018 that the Suvorov Hypothesis “now has broad acceptance among historians.”(!!!)
I wouldn’t be surprised if that one short paragraph was just about the longest discussion of the Suvorov Hypothesis to appear in any Anglosphere MSM outlet during the last thirty years.
An absolutely Orwellian transformation of reality. “We have always been at war with Eurasia”…
I do not place Buddhists in the same category as Protestantism and Islam. There is no argument against tolerance of Buddhism, it causes no real problems anywhere.
No, they were barred from becoming even Roman Catholics until after 1905.
Aw, gee, thanks!
If you say so, but wasn’t treatment of Catholics better before Polish revolts?
There are several possible reasons why Rezun’s theories did not get much traction in the Anglosphere. The one you advance is that he was “repressed” – that is, that his works were not given the level of coverage and interest that you consider that they were owed based on their objective merits.
But there are alternate hypotheses. The most banal and obvious one is that Anglo-American audiences are not as interested in the Eastern Front as Germans and Russians and other East Europeans. This is both obviously true, and understandable. Historians who write about the war as a whole (e.g. Richard Overy, William Shirer) or focus more on the Western Front (Stephen Ambrose, etc.) will get more attention than Eastern Front specialists. When we compare like with like, I do not even see evidence that he was blacklisted as such. During his moment of fame in the mid to late 1980s, Google Ngram suggests that he was mentioned about as often as Ambrose and Shirer, and vastly more so than people like David Glantz. (Link).
So Rezun’s theories made quite a splash in the 1980s in the Anglosphere, but then interest faded way – either due to suppression, or to other factors.
Now perhaps it was political/ideological reasons as you claim. Blacklisting. The question here is, why? It’s not like Westerners were brimming with Sovietophilia after half a century of the Cold War.
Or maybe mainstream historians thought the idea of “autobahn tanks” and crossing the English Channel in these things:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8d/T-38_tank.JPG
… was just genuinely bonkers, and gradually stopped paying attention to Rezun’s powerful theories.
Or perhaps there was just no popular “debate” within society that elevated the issues Rezun raised into something of more than narrow academic and enthusiastic amateur interest.
Perhaps there was some element of all of these.
Let’s look at what that “debate” looked like in the three regions where Rezun’s work did enjoy greater popularity during the 1990s and afterwards as comparators to the Anglosphere.
(1) 1990s Russia. Here the reasons were obvious, the late 1980s to early 1990s were a period of “dramatic” revelations about the Soviet regime, ranging from the accurate (e.g. Katyn) to the sensational (60 million victims of the Gulag, “one rifle for every two soldiers”, automatic imprisonment or death for liberated POWs, etc.). Its complete discreditation was a major goal of the pro-Western liberal reformers who surrounded Yeltsin and, with Russian pro-Western sentiment being high back then, no popular pushback. From the 2000s, there was a shift away from this “blackwashing” of the USSR, and Rezun gradually lost his popularity (though his books weren’t banned, you can still freely buy them). In the WW2 “pop history” stands in Russian bookshops, Suvorov was replaced with people like Starikov, a sovok polemicist known for masterpieces like “Stalin: Remembering Together” who denies Soviet culpability for Katyn amongst other pseudo-historical revisionism. (So far as I know, he is not being translated into English, and for reasons that I assume do not constitute a conspiracy, even though his books probably sell in the millions in Russia). Happily, there is now a lot of serious history as well, though it tends to sell 10x less.
(2) East-Central Europe. Are not exactly Russophiles, for understandable reasons, so the idea that Stalin had concrete, imminent plans to strike first resounds with many of them. For Romanians and Hungarians in particular, it makes their involvement in the German campaign much less of a bad decision, and certainly a morally defensible one. The Poles and Balts certainly have no shortage of legitimate reasons to dislike the USSR and Rezun merely provisioned a new one (though this certainly shouldn’t be taken to mean they became fans of Nazi Germany, at least that certainly goes for the Poles). Today, ECE is the only region where Rezun remains popular. (Though I am not actually 100% sure about Poland. Perhaps a native Pole could chime in).
(3) Germany. I am less familiar with its specifics, but according to Thorfinnsson, it drew upon an earlier debate they had in the 1950s:
Rezun, I assume, reignited that debate. I am not qualified to answer to what extent he remains popular in Germany today, it would be nice if German_reader could pop up to offer his first person perspective, but I would be very surprised if he was still much discussed. I just checked and he isn’t mentioned in the index in the one German language WW2 history I own (Ploetz Geschichte der Weltkriege, 2002).
Returning to the specific question of blacklisting. Most obvious point: the actual books were never banned, they went out of print. Unless it can be shown otherwise, I assume it was due to lack of demand, not political interference… if people banally don’t want to read you, that is not a conspiracy against you. Nor am not aware of historians or journalists being “canceled” or “deplatformed” for endorsing the Suvorov Hypothesis – for that matter, the Guardian article I cited is direct evidence against that (Luke Harding, you might be interested to know, is a strongly anti-Russian and anti-Wikileaks British journalist, rumored to be MI6’s main conduit for leaks from The Guardian, whose latest grift was Russiagate… so, not exactly an obscure hack, and something to possibly bear in mind when enthusiastically endorsing his interpretation). Rezun’s newer books weren’t translated into English, but you need money for translations, why would you pay someone to translate something if people weren’t interested in buying him anyway? A few years ago, Kindle versions of the Rezun books that were translated came out, making the main thesis much more accessible. This doesn’t make sense if the goal was to prevent or slow down the spread of his shocking revelations. Conversely, there are a number of important and influential Russian political/philosophical works that I consider highly influential and rather important to have translated – Ilyin’s Our Tasks (key work of the thinker whom Putin quotes most frequently), Shafarevich’s Russophobia (one of the key texts of modern Russian nationalism, and quite short as well), a bunch of stuff by Galkovsky (whom I don’t regard highly but do acknowledge as influential, more so than Dugin whom Westerners are obsessed with), Vekhi (the main manifesto of late Tsarist liberal-conservatism). However, I don’t regard the failure to translate them as a conspiracy. Academics who specialize in Russia can read Russian… the casuals will not read it anyway.
“Icebreaker” was published in 1989, if he was getting much attention in mid-1980s it was for other reasons.
He wrote his first seminal article about it in 1985: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03071848508522704
That said, I acknowledge that’s a good point. It’s not clear how to quantify Icebreaker-specific mentions.
The major Hungarian uprisings all ended in some kind of a compromise, in 1849 with an 18 year delay, earlier with a compromise peace treaty. Also in 1703-11, the same compromise achieved in 1711 could have been achieved several years earlier (1707? 1705?), if not for the ambition of Prince Ferenc Rákóczi II.
Hungarians were treated much more humanely by the Hapsburgs after their revolts than were Poles or Ukrainians by the Russians were after theirs.
They were simply treated decently. Poles still had an advantage over them.
Galician slaughter of 1846 occurred near Krakow and involved pro-Hapsburg Polish peasants slaughtering Polish gentry nationalists.
You are biased against PLC because it was opposed to your tribe’s domination of that part of the world. PLC was also non-tribal and until after Khmelytsky’s uprising generally tolerant.
But that’s false. The USSR spent less than 20% of its national income on defense, belligerents typically spent 40% or more. Also there was a world war starting in that year, with all European countries increasing defense outlays, so it was reasonable for the USSR to also raise spending. Moreover, the USSR did invade several of its neighbors in 1939-40, one of which invasions resulted in the Winter War.
So it’s not really evidence of any Soviet intentions to attack Germany. It could be an evidence of a Soviet intention to defend itself from a potential German attack.
So here’s a question. Now that you realized that the German paratrooper force was in fact several times stronger than the Soviet paratrooper force (many more transport planes, gliders, etc. – the bulk of the Soviet paratrooper force was not really paratrooper at all, rather just a glorified infantry), will you retract this one point?
There are of course more points here.
Afaik the “wheeled tanks” were light tanks capable of moving with the tracks removed (i.e. as just wheeled armored vehicles), but of course it wasn’t a very useful function while fighting. (The whole point of a tank is its off-road all terrain ability.) Now wheeled vehicles (including wheeled armored vehicles) were used deep inside the USSR by the Soviets, the Germans and all the other belligerents. So clearly this tank is not evidence of anything, as wheeled vehicles were useful deep inside the USSR. Will you also remove this argument?
Given that the USSR often had no bridges strong enough for tanks, those would have been useful deep inside the USSR. Also during counter-offensives. It’d be insane to build an army incapable of crossing a river.
Also:
Just admit that it would have been impossible.
That’s just wrong. The German tanks had radios and the Soviet tanks rarely had them. The Soviet tanks had poor visibility from the inside. They were also uncomfortable – a very important disadvantage as crews got tired and made lots of stupid mistakes. But overall this point is not very important, as it’s unlikely Stalin knew or cared for the exact technical specifications of the tanks, much less being capable of comparing them to foreign designs.
Bashi don’t take me wrong, even if I mock your views sometimes, I think it would be wonderful if all people could live in equal confederations of different ethnicities like the Swiss, but to me it sounds very utopian. Swiss are a small people united by similar geography and way of living, but Slavs on the other hand are a multitude, from mountains of Tatra to Pomors of Arctic, if such policy would be united, it would need a strong central administration, and who else among Slavs has such imperial traditions of administration and defending of отчество as Russians?
It’s been so long time ago when I last read about persecution of Orthodox Christians in PLC, but IIRC in the beginning of the 17th century Poles tried their very best in the destruction of Orthodox Church in the lands of PLC, the situation was so bad that there was almost no church hierarchy left. Also Counter-Reformation in PLC was very combative and persecuting against the Protestant Reformation which flourished in some parts of Lithuanian and Polish inhabited areas.
Wikipedia days that areas around Tarnow were most affected, in those days there lived lots of Ruthenians in there, am I right?
If you want to write about my tribe, then you should know that I am for multiple tribes, a collection of tribes, not just for one tribe, isn’t tribalism rooting for a one particular tribe? I am not claiming that PLC was tribalist, Im claiming that modern Ukrainian nationalism is largerly Tribalist, the cultural differences between Ukrainians and Russians are more tribal than national in their nature, religion, language, history and so on, it’s not like there’s as vast difference as between French or Germans, or Poles and Russians.
Oh well, maybe Ukrainians will come to their senses in a decade or two, sadly what will be then left of Ukraine population wise? Heck we need an Ukrainian man to be a leader of new Russia, maybe that would make Khokhols content and Canada style federal solution?
Okay, you naturally know more than me about these matters, but could you tell us how cruel or harsh the Habsburgs were in putting down various rebellions and revolts in the Hungarian lands?
Altan, I always appreciate your comments and I don’t mind at all being mocked and ridiculed online. I don’t take teh internets in general seriously and I mainly post humorous /ironic/ sarcastic comments myself, so I am always ready to receive a “portion of my own medicine”. My comment about the “Slav Swiss-Hindustani” ideal confederation was in part ironic, perhaps it was lost in translation (despite me agreeing with iffen that mine was a “we were kangz” type of comment).
This being said, I actually believe that just like the other populations directly derived from the CWC folks (that would be Finno-Ugric ethnic groups) Slavs are not naturally Empire-building people. That doesn’t mean Slavs are not capable of conquering vast territories or waging terrible wars (sometimes against each other), quite the opposite. It just means, that they are not naturally geared towards organizing large Imperial projects. Slavs tend to work better as loose networks of communities, not as a rigid frame of an Empire state.
Germanic (in a large sense) people are better suited for Empire-building business. It’s not a coincidence that Tsarist Russia had such a strong Germanic elite and such a downtrodden mass of enserfed Slsv peasantry. Romanovs (who had a legendary Old Prussian ancestry) ended-up mostly Germanic through dynastic marriages. Russian Imperial army and bureaucracy were full of Russian Germans (Baltic Germans mostly but also immigrants from Germany itself). These people were often exemplary Imperial subjects and made great soldiers: Baron Von Ungern comes to mind.
In the end, the war between Russian , Austrian-Hungarian and German Empires was a war between Germanic dynasties for the control of the central-eastern part of the Eurasian landmass. It was mainly waged on Slav territory, with Slavs being a great part of the cannon fodder, but it was not a “Slav war”. And this is something that had contributed to the Russian Revolution too.
BTW, Karlin is a typical Russian German family name, derived from Carl in Russian transliteration. So perhaps Anatoly has some of this Russian Germanic ancestry.
So it’s not really evidence of any Soviet intentions to attack Germany.
Just to be clear, you are not saying that it was not Stalin’s intention to attack Germany after Germany was sufficiently weakened and the Soviet military buildup had reached a point of readiness for the operation?
You are very wrong, best imperial builders in European continent after the fall of the Roman empire have always been the Slavs, even among the Germanics. As you probably knew Germans east of Elbe and especially German Prussians were Germanised Slavs, there was no ethnic cleansing of local Slavic population in the eastern part of the Old Reich, but a slow process of Germanization, minor prt of population was migrating German nobles, merchants, townfolk and priests. But what about Austrians, who were the powerbase and source of soldiers for most emperors of the Old German Reich? They too were Germanised Slavs! The lands of Austria proper were still fully Slavic speaking in the 9th century, Austria proper, or Lower and Upper Austria is not territorially same as modern Austria, which has other lands like Tyrol and Kärnten, but even so Kärnten too is a land of Germanised Slavs. Ha, ha Bashi, you make this too easy. Western Germans, like Rheinlanders and Hessians are not known of their imperial ambitions, but of their love of simple bourgeois life with wine qnd song.
Do you know ther Deutcher Michel? The original personification of Germans, a peaceloving and meek man, who just wants to live in peace, little slow and quite friendly, Michel’s character very much resembles the historical characteristics of people of Western Germany, the land of poets and philosophers, it was only when German blood was infused with Slavic virility, the Germans found their expansionist and martial spirit!
https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/yuliya212/77974394/1145339/1145339_1000.png
“German Michael”
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4d/HRR_10Jh.jpg
Germany in the 10th and 11th century. Striped areas are marches, originally non-Germanic and Slavic, except March of Verona in Italy. You probably notice that seeds of both Austria and Prussia were Slavic!
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/Old_norse%2C_ca_900.PNG
Approximate extent of Germanic languages in the early 10th century.
Yes I am aware of the Wendish influence on the ethnogenesis of Prussian Germans. I wrote about it myself previously among the many comments I made about the Wends. Now, the Wends were even more warlike than most other Slavs, one of their tribal confederations was even named Lyutichi from the Old Slavic “Lyuty” (Лютый) – the Fierce. After all, people who successfully raided the Norse were probably quite combative.
I am also convinced that the Wends were the main part of the Varangian Rus. So I wouldn’t write about the Wends being peaceful hippies or incapable of establishing feudal kingdoms. But an Empire is entirely different, it is another scale of social organization. The Wends conquered most part of Eastern Germany, but they lost it to the German Drang nach Osten. The Wends were not Empire building people. Varangian Rus neither. Rus became Empire builders after they had learned the Empire-building from the Golden Horde and they became excellent at Empire expansion after the Peterine reforms only.
Regarding Austrian-Hungarian Empire, these lands were as much Celtic and Germanic as they were Slavic. It is true that Slavs held some of these lands for a few generations, but they did not alter the balance of populations there. Although ancient Noricum might have been (proto) Balto-Slav even before the migrations period, something impossible to prove 100% today.
Bottom line: Slavs + Germans or Celts + Germans or Slavs + Turkic people seem being the most efficient Empire building mix. Slavs alone not that much.
Well we just need to get Central Asia back and push NATO to Elbe, and behold we have a potential of creating Slavic-Turkic-German masterrace which will rule over whole world island that is Eurasia forever, and maybe later whole world!
The orange color is what ?
Rus as a Norse language?
For the people who called their princes Qaghans and who were described as “Turkic ” by early Islamic traders on the Volga?
That’s Germanic supremacism alright…
Pushkin saves the day? 🙂
What happened to the large swath of Finno-Ugrics in the north country and in the Hungarian plain? No room for them in your formula for successful empire builders?
I’m a bit agnostic about the issue, but I think that Stalin probably thought that he would eventually attack Hitler once he was sufficiently weakened by several years of war against the Anglos. I don’t think he planned it in 1941, as Hitler’s Germany was in its prime at that time, and Stalin was usually more circumspect in his foreign policy adventures, always taking pretty calculated risks. Unlike Hitler, who was a gambler.
My point was however much simpler. Stalin may or may not have planned to attack Hitler, but the amphibious tanks or the hundreds of thousands of parachutists are not good evidence either way.
Perhaps that’s what the Soviets would have ended with if their elites were not as inept and corrupt.
The Seima-Turbino, Akozino-Malar, Sargat Finno-Ugric cultures were certainly capable of conquering territories and holding their ground against Indo-Iranian neighbors, but they were not Empire building people their social organization was probably similar to (proto) Balto-Slav with confederations of tribes and elites clans ensuring the coordination of their populations. Mordvinian and Tcheremiss tribesmen were also great fighters, Mordvinians managed to hold their ground against the Mongolian invasion better than Rus did. Hungarian conquerors were influenced by the Turkic people they interacted with. And Magyar Kingdom has not become an Empire on its own.
There is a difference in thr level of complexity between Kingdoms and Empires. Ancient Celts had Kingdoms in most of Europe for a time, but they never got organized and unified enough to make an Empire out of them. It took the Anglo-Saxon and Norse adding to the Insular Celtic mix to produce the Empire-building British. It took the Francs added to the Gaulo-Roman to produce the Empire-building French. It took Germans in Russian Empire to make it into a true Empire and before that Tatars to transform Muscovy into a Tsardom.
And with that I rest my case.
Those events were done at the local initiative by local Rus princes and Church hierarchs who changed their allegiance to Rome. It was not forced by Poles (as the Russians and Soviets later did to Greek Catholics). Importantly, the policies were reversed by around 1630, and once again Orthodox monasteries and churches were being well-funded and protected.
This was good – look what Protestantism did to Germany when allowed to go unchecked.
Tarnow is only 96 km east of Krakow. It was not part of the old Galician Kingdom and was west of the Ukrainian-Polish ethnic divide. The people there were all Poles.
Difference between Ukrainians and Russians are like the differences between Germans and Dutch. Less than between French and Germans, but more than between Swedes and Danes.
Both Ukrainian and Russian nationalisms are tribalisms.
Well, we all know where from Bolshevism originated… In a new Russo-Eurasian Empire such folks should be kept out of power…
Hungary comes to mind because it tried to incorporate large areas of Slavs (both South Slavic, Slovak and Ruthenian) throughout its history. And of course even Romanian areas. But of course, Hungary was primarily a land locked country with no real pretensions to conquer anybody outside of its own neighborhood.
No, those mostly were germanised western Baltic (Prussian) tribes.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/be/Idioma_prusiano_antiguo.png
http://donelaitis.vdu.lt/prussian/lang.htm
If you consider the bribes made to the Orthodox hierarchy that would join the union and prohibition of anybody of the Orthodox faith from advancing in any civil service positions as not being “forced” then I guess you’re right. Polish influence in propagating the Union was immense and was just a part of a long term plan to help Polonise Ukrainian areas within the Commonwealth.
You are now confusing different historical Prussias with each other. The Brandenburg-Prussia, which unified Germany and was known of it’s militarism, her people were mostly from Brandeburg, Silesia and Pomerania, all those three lands were originally Slavic. Before partitions of Poland, Brandenburg-Prussia or later Kingdom of Prussia, controlled only Ducal Prussia, or the eastern half of medieval Prussia. But why then, you may ask, Prussia was called Prussia? Well dukes of Brandenburg had a desire to elevate their status from mere duchy to kingdom, and Ducal Prussia, which they Hohenzollern dukes had gained from PLC, was outside of lands of Holy Roman Empire, HRE had a law that only Bohemia could be a kingdom in her own right, therefore rulers of Brandenburg titled themselves as “kings in Prussia,” even though Duchy of Prussia was not connected with their lands, and less than fifth of their subjects lived there, so with the help of legal loophole in the laws of the Reich, they rose to ranks of kings.
As has already been noted, although Suvorov had first developed his thesis in an specialized academic journal article in 1985, his seminal first book Icebreaker was published in 1989, and heralded by a review that occupied nearly the entirety of the august London Times book review section and described it thus:
During the 1980s Suvorov had been a well-known and popular author of numerous successful books on the Soviet military and special forces, which surely explains his 1980s NGram bump. Yet his NGram numbers vanished almost as soon as he published Icebreaker, by a vast margin his most popular and important work.
And what’s even more “odd” is that small initial English run soon went out of print, and was never reprinted, even though Suvorov’s translations began selling millions of copies in Russian, German, and a couple of dozen other languages. And although his theories became the heated topic of international academic conferences, they were almost never mentioned in any Anglosphere publication. Suvorov soon became the world’s most widely read military historian, but his book remained unavailable in English, with used copies of that $20 first edition selling for more than $500 on the Internet.
https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-when-stalin-almost-conquered-europe/
https://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Chronicles-2010apr-Navrozov.pdf
And as I already noted upthread, in your link the totally establishmentarian Luke Harding, writing in 2018 in the totally establishmentarian Guardian, states that the Suvorov Hypothesis “now has broad acceptance among historians.”(!!!)
Yet I wouldn’t be surprised if Harding’s one short paragraph about the Suvorov Hypothesis is greater than the combined total of all the words the Guardian had allocated to it over the previous three decades. I’m not claiming that Harding is necessarily a reliable source, but his statement was utterly Orwellian.
Perhaps you would similarly claim that it’s just “lack of interest” that explains why Solzhenitsyn’s book Two Hundred Years is still not available in English 21 years(!!!) after it was first published.
Personally, I think the evidence in favor of the Suvorov Hypothesis is absolutely overwhelming, but certainly admit that others might disagree. However, anyone who claims his book was not “repressed” in the Anglosphere is just making himself look ridiculous.
I acknowledge that you know more about the history of PLC, but still if my memory serves me right, there were Orthodox martyrs who died for their faith, and policies of Catholic nobles and Jesuits produced quite much discontent and frustration among the Ruthenian subjects of PLC.
Mistakes were made, but in my opinion Calvinism was much worse than doctor Luther’s doctrines. Btw without Protestants there would have never been Counter-Reformation, which had quite a positive effect on Catholic Church, am I right?
Okay, maybe I was wrong, according to the map in Wikipedia, “Galician Slaughter” also affected Ruthenian areas, though marginally.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Rabaccja_galicyjska_a_powstanie_krakowskie.jpg
This is again just my opinion, but to me Danes and Swedes differ quite much in mentality, and in language as much as North-West Germans with the Dutch.
Maybe it is so, but then I have never claimed to be a Russian nationalist, unlike Bashi and our esteemed host Karlin. I am just an old styled imperialist, though thanks to pinkos and other commies that word is not very trendy, ha ha!
https://www.zum.de/whkmla/histatlas/germany/prussia17631786.gif
Kingdom of Prussia in the 18th century. Western Prussia, acquired in 1772, had a Slavic majority by then.
Your link to the Navrozov review states that Icebreaker had a run of 8,000 copies in Germany. Thanks, this would seem to confirm my hunch that Rezun didn’t make particularly big splashes in the German market either, and that the “SH debate” was an overwhelmingly Russia-specific thing during the 1990s, at a specific conjuncture in its history when the old truths of the Soviet order had fallen apart and all kinds of conspiracy theories and mystical mumbo-jumbo were in vogue (this is after all the environment that produced the “New Chronology” theory that past centuries were a medieval era fake, Galkovsky’s theories that that the world is run by old European aristocratic houses, etc).
I mentioned Starikov above. His books in Russia currently sell hundreds of thousands of copies. This includes classics such as “Who Forced Hitler to Attack Stalin?” and “Stalin: Remembering Together.” There are no translations of these or his other works in English. Is Starikov getting repressed in the West?
Personally, I think the evidence in favor of SH is extremely tenuous (namely: the hard version that Stalin was planning an imminent attack and that a “desperate” Germany got the jump on him), as I think has been convincingly and repeatedly demonstrated both here and in the replies to previous posts on this topic, hence why mainstream historians haven’t spent much time on it (though I did previously mention that Chris Bellamy devoted an entire chapter picking it apart in Absolute War, published in 2007). Mainstream historians also haven’t spent a lot of time on, say, Gavin Menzies’ 1421 theory that the Chinese treasure ships visited the Americas and Australia before the Europeans got there. It could be an attempt to repress that theory, but the alternate explanation is that they don’t see it as being worthy of their time and energy.
I really doubt SH or WW2 for that matter is something that Luke Harding thinks or reads a lot about. I suspect it was just an off handed comment and a pretty ignorant one at that (despite our different views on SH, both you and I would agree that it most certainly does not have a “broad acceptance among historians”).
No, you assume wrong, this clearly is driven by politics. 200YT has become so associated with anti-Semitism thanks to the mutual efforts of Jewish ethnic activists and Naziphiles that it’s not something mainstream publishing houses would want to touch with a 10 foot pole. It’s rather funny, because 200YT is a very moderate, balanced book that aproportions blame for the Bolshevik Revolution broadly across the constituent ethnic groups of the Russian Empire. It’s not some latter-day “International Jew” or Rodzaevsky’s “Last Testament” that many imagine it to be.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/billspringer/2021/06/10/exclusive-photos-reveal-russian-billionaire-roman-abramovichs-455-foot-long-secret-superyacht-solaris-underway/
(Russian expletives untranslated…)
It’s a book of very uneven quality. In particular the military history sections often contained several pages long descriptions of battles almost entirely based on Rokossovsky’s memoirs. He sometimes uses some works by Glantz. (Actually maybe only When Titans Clashed.) But he very often used Rokossovsky only, for some reason that was his favorite source for all the battles where Rokossovsky participated, which is a very bad decision, as memoirs are by far the worst quality primary sources, and normally you don’t want to use just one source for several pages describing a major event.
I can’t remember in detail the part about the Icebreaker hypothesis, having read the book over a decade ago, so cannot comment on that.
Union was initiated by Orthodox hierarchs in Ukraine who were upset by Moscow getting a Patriarchate and Constantinople cracking down on some corrupt activities by the hierarchs. Several Orthodox noblemen went along with the Union but the big fish, Ostrogsky, backed off and condemned it. This resulted in an intra-Rus religious conflict. Overall it was not about Poles imposing this Church on Ukraine.
I think you are mixing up events in the end of the 17th and the 18th centuries with those prior to Khmelnytsky’s uprising. Yes, towards the end of the Commonwealth there was real discrimination against the small Orthodox minority, in part as a backlash to the brutal anti-Catholic massacres during Khmelytsky’s uprising (in which both Greek Catholics and Roman Catholics were killed) and also because with the Left Bank gone, there were much fewer Orthodox left, it was no longer as large or important constituency. Not only Galicia, but most of the Right Bank became Greek Catholic. The persecuted Orthodox were holdovers.
I think you are anachronistically mixing up Polonization attempts by 19th and 20th century Polish tribal nationalists (who really did try to Polonize Ukrainians) with a different country, the PLC. People responsible for policies in Ukraine within the PLC were local lords, not Poles. Many chose Catholicism, some stuck with Orthodoxy. Prior to Khmelnytsky’s uprising, Orthodoxy flourished within the PLC, this was when the Kiev Academy became prominent and monasteries were well funded, even by a convert to Catholicism such as Prince Jarema Wisniowiecki. Orthodox themselves were using the Polish and Latin languages there. Indeed, Polish language flourished in the Hetmanate, how can it be blamed on the Poles?
https://shron1.chtyvo.org.ua/Timothy_David_Snyder/Ukrainians_and_Poles__en.pdf?PHPSESSID=hunu5klob2guvrt6g96apjtun1
The Cossacks, like Ukrainian churchmen, had adopted Polish modes of thought, but this did not mean that they wished Polish rule for themselves… In the 1690s, the Polish option remained, as a cultural model in Ukraine and as a potential ally for Muscovy. In the Hetmanate, nostalgia indeed increased with time. Cossack officers hazily recalled the Polish period as one of freedom, appropriating for themselves the liberties of Polish nobles. Cossacks accepted the myths of Sarmatian or Khazar origin now widespread among Polish nobles…
The Hetmanate under Ivan Mazepa (r. 1686–1709) revealed that Polish cultural influence could increase as Polish political power waned. Mazepa himself studied in Warsaw and served King Jan Kazimierz of Poland. As Hetman he funded the reconstruction, in baroque style, of ancient Ukrainian churches at Chernihiv and Kiev….
You’re right, I did conflate events within right bank Ukraine in the second half of the 17th century with those of the 16th. Ironically, this conflation of events shows that the end result of the Unia did not workout very well for the lower class Ukrainians. The Unia was originally thought up as a way for the Ruthenian magnates and higher class sczlachta to maintain some semblance of their Orthodox roots and traditions and at the same time ostensibly enter into the larger Catholic Polish world. Unfortunately, many in the higher classes never really felt that they needed this “bridge” but felt more inclined to make the great leap over in one step. The Orthodox bishops that accepted the Unia (in Byelorussian territories where the Orthodox church was really in bad shape) were lured by the ever present Jesuit missionaries by promises of enhanced educational opportunities and also promising the Orthodox bishops privileges equal to those of the Polish bishops, including equal representation in the Polish Senate, if they would acknowledge the supremacy of the Roman Papacy. Unfortunately, these promises were never kept…
Thanks for the article by Snyder – I look forward to reading it in the near future.
Unia was evil, brother attacking his brother, nothing else.
Orthodoxy is the true native Church of the Slavs, Glagolitsa and Cyrillic scripts, medieval Slavic Autocephalic Churches with their Patriarchs are veritable proof of this great fact.
That’s possible, though I’d note that in 1849 there were mass executions, which upset the Russian Tsar Nicholas I, who thought that the proper action would have been to sentence these people to death as a lesson, but then commute the sentences to prison terms and let everyone out within a few years. It was also pretty embarrassing for the Tsar, because the bulk of the Hungarian forces surrendered to the Russians and not the Habsburg troops, and then were transferred to the Austrian troops with a personal request from the Tsar to be lenient towards them. However, a formal guarantee to spare his life was only obtained for General Görgei (or Görgey, he never legally changed his name in his revolutionary fervor to remove the y signaling noble status, just started using the version with the i without legal formalities), who was thus smeared as a traitor for the rest of his life as a result.
There were a lot of issues with the Habsburg case. One was that in April 1848 King Ferdinand himself signed into law the creation of the de facto independent Hungarian government, which henceforth had to answer to the new National Assembly and not to the king. The king obviously didn’t have the right to just withdraw laws at will, and when he sent troops to put down the Hungarian government, the troops were legally obligated to obey the orders of the government. So technically speaking it wasn’t even a proper rebellion, rather the king trying to unlawfully and violently abolish a law which he himself had signed.
But it got worse after the mentally challenged King Ferdinand was forced to resign and his nephew Franz Joseph I was declared king without even consulting the Hungarian National Assembly. The new king also didn’t even get crowned, so he didn’t take the usual oath to keep the Hungarian constitution. Since he also didn’t uphold those laws, arguably it was not unreasonable to consider him illegitimate. The earlier rebellions (or abortive wars of independence) were more proper outright rebellions, but the Habsburg military position was not as strong because of external factors like the Ottomans and the French.
My impression is that the Habsburgs mostly treated Hungary better than the Tsars because they were never nearly as strong relative to Hungary as the Russian Tsars were relative to Poland (especially Congress Poland). And also because the Tsars started to tilt to Russian nationalism over time, while the Habsburgs never had much nationalism as they never had such a strong core ethnicity and thus embracing nationalism would’ve quickly destroyed their empire.
St. Cyril became a Basilian monk and died in Rome.
The Union also occurred because the local Orthodox hierarchs were upset at Constantinople for cracking down on them for some of their excesses and for supporting the Church Brotherhoods, while granting Patriarchate status to Moscow.
Second class status of Greek Catholics may be somewhat misunderstood. It was based on class rather than confession. Greek Catholic gentry were treated the same as Polish ones. But commoners (including priests, who weren’t of gentry origin – though about half the Greek Catholic priests are of gentry origin) were not.
Ironically, the children of the Orthodox magnates who had refused Union became Roman Catholics.
One point where the Habsburg prosecution might’ve had a point was that the Hungarian National Assembly declared that the House of Habsburg was to lose the throne for perpetuity. It’s questionable if the National Assembly had the right to do so, though like I wrote the Habsburg government was far from lawful itself. But certainly Kossuth made the legal position of the former members of the previous Habsburg military much more difficult.
It must be noted that the Habsburgs executed Count Batthyány, who was prime minister before October 2, 1848, and then broke with the revolutionary government after that while insisting that the Habsburg troops and government were also breaking the law. He was essentially executed for upholding (or trying to uphold) the law signed by the king, and nothing else. He was captured in January 1849 after he basically went back to Pest (by then controlled by the Habsburg troops), because he tried to contact the Habsburg commander Prince Windisch-Grätz.
So what? In the 9th century Rome was still in communion with other patriarchates, from the Orthodox viewpoint she had not yet fallen into schism and heresy.
Yet conflicts leading to the schism were already evident in the 9th century despite no formal break yet (Pope Nicholas I (858–867) made it clear that he believed the power of the papacy extended “over all the earth, that is, over every church; 879–880 Council of Constantinople the Eastern Orthodox Church anathematized the Filioque phrase, “as a novelty and augmentation of the Creed ) – and St.Cyril chose to become a Basilian monk and settle in Rome. We can not be sure either way where he would have stood.
That’s absolutely correct about Germany, but once it caught fire in post-Soviet Russia, it took off there and everywhere else except mysteriously in the Anglosphere. For example, a few years later Dr. Joachim Hoffmann, a highly-regarded and fully mainstream military historian, generally endorsed Suvorov’s analysis in this excellent 1999 book Stalin’s War of Extermination, though he to choose his words very carefully to avoid being sent to prison under German law.
I’d never heard of Starikov, whom you characterize as a low-quality Stalinist polemicist, and can easily understand why his works would have little interest in English. By contrast, Suvorov has lived in Britain for nearly a half-century and published numerous, highly-successful English-language books on Soviet military issues even before his seminal Icebreaker. His blacklisting is exactly similar to that of Solzhenitsyn’s book 200 Years.
I did previously mention that Chris Bellamy devoted an entire chapter picking it apart in Absolute War, published in 2007
Bellamy’s substantial discussion of Suvorov is extremely rare among English-language historians, and although he ultimately leans against that thesis, he also highlights some of the strong pieces of evidence in its favor. His approach seems perfectly reasonable, and even perhaps a bit courageous given the Suvorov’s radioactivity.
On the other hand, as I had emphasized upthread, it’s shocking that Bellamy’s supposedly authoritative and comprehensive 800 page volume never even hints at the reality of Operation Pike, which surely must have enormously influenced Stalin’s decision-making in 1940 and 1941. From what McMeekin has told me, Operation Pike is far more radioactive in Britain than Suvorov, which perhaps explains that puzzling silence.
St. Cyril died in 869, after his death in 886 a Frankish Bishop under Roman pope banned the Glagolitsa and imprisoned students of St. Cyril and St. Methodius. Those saintly brothers were sent to Slavic lands by the rightful Roman emperor and Patriarch of Constantinople, we can only guess what St. Cyril would have thought of banning of his script and mistreatment of his students.
Well maybe Bashi is right and Slavs are the negroes of Europe. White man even banned Slavs of writing down their language! By the powers of Hegelian dialectics maybe pan-slavism can be realised by the Slavic nationalism movement? Slavic National Congress, Slav(e) liberation, it would be quite humbling moment for various “oppressed minorities” of US when Slavic Americans will march through the streets and shout that the word “slave” is racist and discriminating, that only Slavs can use such words, and so on….
Something similar has already been tried in the mid 19th century, and it was called the Brotherhood of Saint Cyril and Methodius, but alas it was severely squelched by the Russian Czar and his bureaucrats (the same czar that you hold in such high esteem):
The Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius (Ukrainian: Кирило-Мефодіївське братство, Russian: Кирилло-Мефодиевское братство) was a short-lived secret political society that existed in Kyiv, at the time a part of the Russian Empire…the society sought to revive the ideals of the traditional Ukrainian brotherhoods and envisioned a Ukrainian national rebirth, including national autonomy within a free and equal Slavic federation. It was quickly suppressed by the government in March 1847 with most of the members punished by exile or imprisonment…The goals of the society were liberalisation of the political and social system of the Imperial Russia in accordance with the members Christian principles and the Slavophile views that gained popularity among the country’s liberal intelligents..,The society goals included the abolition of serfdom, broad access to public education, transformation of the empire into a federation of free Slavic people with Russians being one of the equal rather than the dominant nation and, according to Mykhailo Hrushevskyi (1866-1934), the implementation of the liberal democratic principles of freedom of speech, thought and religion.[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brotherhood_of_Saints_Cyril_and_Methodius
I remember that book. Not reading it, of course, just being annoyed at the bad pop-culture revisionist nature of it. A professor of mine who taught Chinese studies laughed about the actors he saw in China who would re-enact characters from this book on the side street, beguiling people with tales of how they were the first arrivals in Yingzhou/Jin Shan.
I think my linguist friend who taught in China and Taiwan said it best though, “Even if they did (and they didn’t) China lost all rights to claim they landed their when they burned the ships and the records connected to them.”