Sometime in the 1990s, a critical mass of the American cognitive elite – that part of it which controls the bullhorns, anyway – must have decided that gay marriage was great. Now those people are usually well-spoken and articulate, with very high verbal IQs, while their opponents… tend to leave much to be desired in that department. So by the early 2010s, they had also convinced conservative intellectuals (Charles Murray was expressing support by 2012), and in the process once again demonstrating the neoreactionary dictum that conservatism is merely liberalism with a lag time of ten years. They had also convinced a symbolically important 50% of the population – no mean achievement, that, since male homosexuality is naturally repellent to the average person. The State Department formally adopted the Homintern agenda: “Gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights,” as Hillary Clinton explained in 2011. Gay marriage became legal across the US soon afterwards in 2015.
If you’re in the Western media-intellectual sphere, there doesn’t seem to be anything you could do to arrest these trends, regardless of how conservative or religious you are at the outset. Take Poles and Utahns. When polling on the topic began, they were only marginally less “homophobic” than Russians. Even so, a majority of Utahns now support gay marriage, as do 38% of Poles. While Warsaw wages a conservative culture war against Brussels Values, it appears that actual Poles are going in the other direction.
Russia was of course implicitly hostile towards LGBT during the 1990s-2000s, but without any particular zeal. It was just another anodyne conservative place like Utah or Poland, where the idea of LGBT marriage proked more in the way of befuddlement and bemusement than angry opposition. However, it’s already low figures collapsed even further at around the time of Putin’s conservative pivot at the turn of the decade. It is worth mentioning that this collapse seems to have been pretty universal across social strata – while a poll registered 34% (!) support for gay marriage in Saint-Petersburg in 2008, as of a 2011 poll, it was at 21% along with Moscow, versus 11% for the country as a whole.
That said, it’s worth pointing out that in both policy and practice, Russia remains considerably less conservative than Poland in most aspects. Russians are much less religious, at least in terms of active practice, and the ROC is less influential than the Catholic Church. Abortion is legal, while it is not in Poland – and the conservatives there want now want to make these restrictions all the more total by even banning “eugenic” abortion. I suspect such cack-handed policies and the general unlikability of Polish conservatives, with their constant idiotic statements and conspiracy theorizing, are actually fostering the spread of liberalism in Polish society.
As I have pointed out, despite its cool nationalist marches, Poland is now actually one of the least “based” societies in Eastern Europe, less so than even Czechia with its top of the charts atheism and per capita porn star production rates. They are the only country in the region where a majority are comfortable with their children being in a relationship with Blacks (see map right). They also have the most people who think it is “time for a gay leader.” At the rate things are going, I would not be surprised to see gay marriage legalized in Poland by 2028.
Recipes to keeping the Poz at bay: 1. Kick out Western NGOs, Western media, promote cultural anti-Americanism; 2. But don’t be an insufferable lout and get in people’s faces.
Yes, but the Polish right isn’t going to do that, because they’re obsessed with Germany and Russia and America is their big friend across the ocean. Right now they’re apparently preparing to sue Germany for WW2 reparations…through US courts. They’re of course living in fantasy land if they think their idea of an ethnically largely homogenous, ultra-Catholic Poland is compatible with the values the US promotes nowadays (btw is it true that Jaroslaw Kaczynski claims his brother was murdered at the Smolensk crash? I didn’t pay much attention to this and only noticed recently…does he really push that theory?)
Agree about the abortion stuff…insane, you don’t win with such craziness. And when the Catholic church in Poland starts hopping on the “refugees welcome” train (pretty much unavoidable eventually imo given how the Catholic church is with Bergoglio at the top), it will be all over for them, they’ll lose people left and right in no time, it will be like in Ireland.
So yes, your prediction seems quite plausible.
I think we can mark that point as the 1992 Democratic National Convention. Pat Buchanan responded to its pro-homosexual tone with his famous Culture War speech:
and the rest was history
The Polish tolerance of being in a relationship with a black is pretty much all one needs to know where it will end. Poland is now where Britain was in 1960, that means that Warsaw will be majority non white by 2060 and all of Poland majority non white by 2120. However with the acceleration of the third world migrations and the acceleration of race mixing propaganda, one can easily cut those numbers in half and predict that Warsaw will be non white by 2030 and all of Poland by 2060 or so.
btw is it true that Jaroslaw Kaczynski claims his brother was murdered at the Smolensk crash? I didn’t pay much attention to this and only noticed recently…does he really push that theory?
Not only Jaroslaw Kaczynski.
That’s really stupid (and dangerous). Thanks for the link.
According to those that believe that Putin really did murder him, what was the reason for this?
I imagine same as for this: http://www.currenteventspoland.com/news/symbolic-violence.html
In Poland nobody (aside from 2-3% of society that listens to Radio Maryja) cares what church has to say on non-religious topics. And even on religious it’s 50-50.
It was in the context of a detente with Poland, when Putin declared responsibility for the Katyn massacre (Yeltsin already did it before, but he personally hadn’t talked about it before) and even had it condemned in the Duma. That’s how the Poles got invited to the remembrance ceremony in the forest. That’s why their plane was flying to the military airport temporarily opened for the occasion.
And by the way, how did the Russians organize that some top politician went to the cockpit, which then could be used as the probable cause of the accident? The Polish minister is using Occam’s Butter Knife hard.
Occasion for the flight that crashed were commemorations of the Katyn massacre; I’d suppose the reasoning is that Putin with his Chekist background just likes to kill Polish patriots.
So over million non-whites will immigrate to Warsaw within 12 years?
London is still majority white (though not for long).
Yes, essentially a NATO government is accusing the Russian government of state terrorism and downing its diplomatic airplane in Russian airspace. This could be used as casus belli, if it was taken seriously.
Why is that so hard to believe? Merkel already invited a million on a whim in one year. Poland will be forced to take in immigrants by the EU, and the numbers entering Europe can only increase with each year. The population is already embracing cuckservatism (which as it was already stated here, is only 10 years behind the SJW leftism), so the floodgates of non whites hitting Poland are closer than you can imagine.
With the influx there will no doubt be white flight, as the non white population hits a certain critical mass it will snowball, just like it did formerly white cities, and ever more non whites enter as ethnic ghettos bring in more of their own kind.
A long time now since the era of Polish warrior King Jan III Sobieski, saviour of Western civilisation at the gates of Vienna in 1683
At least Sobieski still has some good vodka named after him
The Poles, they wuz kangz
Yes, but in Germany that didn’t happen out of nowhere, it was the culmination of a process that dates back to at least the early 1980s when numbers of asylum seekers increased massively for the first time; ever since back then a large part of the left basically wanted to use the asylum system as a backdoor for mass immigration (they suffered some setbacks in the early 1990s, and the issue seemed to have receded, but their pro-asylum/mass immigration networks remained and gained influence even within the Christian Democrats which led to the events of 2015). There’s no comparable tradition in Poland, so 2030 is certainly too early for the scenario you described. But who knows how it will be in 30 or 40 years.
Poland is becoming wealthier. Only a matter of time before a substantial number of them moves there.
Surely you cannot deny that the rate of change when it comes to politics is accelerating, and the acceleration is going in only one direction. You say there is no comparable tradition, but I am looking at the charts presented here and what I see is that Poland is racing to be a brown diverse vibrant nation at light speed.
Not sure about this. A lot of the current SJW nonsense in Europe is certainly an American import, but, on the other hand, America generally keeps its military allies on a very long leash wrt their domestic policies; justlook at turkey, Saudi et al. I think a distinction needs to be made between the US military and US cultural orbits. Though Poland is in both so the point is moot.
This is fraudulent propaganda of the type The Economist and Foreign Affairs puts out. As a resident of the second most populous Polish city, Chicago, in the heart of its Polonia, I have yet to meet a single Pole from 18 years of age onward who reacts to black-white couples with anything but a cringe and who supports abortion.
A distinction also needs to be made between white and non white nations. In America non whites find immunity from many things that whites do not, the same applies to white nations and geopolitics. Do you think that if Russia was black the US politburo could target it like it could a white nation?
Exactly. This is a meme that can be played very easily in Poland and I suspect many believe it. It will be played by the pro-American faction that wants Poland to be an American wedge between Germany and Russia. Now let’s suppose for a moment that it was not an accident. I would exclude Russia as a chief suspect because it happened on Russian territory though some Russian outfit, possibly GRU, might have been involved. So, who possible could have benefited from it? One possibility is that it was done against Russia to implicate Russia and destroy the reset that Obama was working on since 2009. Polish president was just a prop. He was not a target. Nobody had anything against him. His term was about to end and his polling was not very good. But he was useful as a victim because he was anti-Russian and allegedly Putin did not like him (for Georgia and Ukraine). Smolensk happened just two days after the New START treaty was signed in Prague by Obama and Medvedev. General Petraeus was in Warsaw a day before the Smolensk and met the president Kaczynski. Imagine that some American/neocon/Israeli faction wanted to destroy the reset and jump start the cold war or possibly overthrow Putin. Possibly the same faction that was later responsible for 2014 Maidan. Obviously some Polish special forces had to be involved. Possibly Israeli outfit. Possibly GRU as well. But in 2010 it did not work. Cooler heads prevailed though there were very tense moments similar to Cuban crisis. The whole Europe became a no-fly zone under the pretext of Eyjafjallajökull eruption. Obama played golf to show his coolness just like Khrushchev and Politburo made themselves seen at Bolshoi in 1962. No foreign leaders (except for Medvedev) came to the funeral presumably to show the disapproval to a government and country that was implicated in the killing of their own president. However the decision was made that it was an accident blamed on Polish pilots. There was a love fest in Russian media and Polish media to patch up the relationship. Main Polish paper Gazeta wrote an editorial in Russian and Russian TV showed the movie Katyn by Wajda. Following this event Putin and Shoigu started a major shake up of GRU structures and some GRU units were reassigned to FSB. In the process several GRU generals came to strange demise (car accidents, drownings). In Warsaw all surveillance films were confiscated. Till now no films or photographs were shown showing the departure of the delegation from Warsaw. The wreck of the plane that allegedly crashed in Smolensk remains in Russia and not much access was given to Polish investigators.
One can imagine that all involved parties have dirt on other participants. Putin can prove Polish and, say, Israeli involvement and Poland can prove some Russian involvement.
But on the other hand it could have been just an accident.
That’s certainly much more likely than any alternative explanations.
I doubt this really plays a role. On a domestic level, identity politics is useful for forming voting blocks and shutting people up, but the point stands: Counties in the us military orbit can do as they please domestically, counties in the us cultural orbit get Americanised, and one negative side effect of that is that they’ll end up importing SJWism. There is a lot of overlap between the two, but they’re not the same thing.
You might be right. The business of polling is too important to leave it to chance.
Obviously true. But how exactly do you promote cultural anti-Americanism?
And will the Americans allow you to do it?
Poland is in the US cultural orbit, just like the rest of the EU.
ITT:
A bunch of people who really don’t understand Polish culture nor the Polish mentality.
Karlin, you really really need to stop putting so much faith in polls. Do some ground work, visit these places, talk to locals.
Such things can change relatively quickly, who would have thought 30 or 40 years ago there would be homo “marriage” in Ireland or Spain, of all places?
The chart may have been misleading. Was this the source for the poll?
https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/7olfzd/how_comfortable_europeans_are_regarding_love/
If so, it was % comfortable plus % indifferent.
Ireland is a surprise, Spain though isn’t. Spain has long had a strong anti-clericalist constituency and pockets of social liberalism. Read up on social policy in Anarchist-run territory during the Spanish Civil War to see SJWs running amok armed with guns enforcing all sorts of nonsense.
Poland is Catholic and Slavic. Slavic nature is to say ‘fuck you’ to anyone telling them how to run their affairs. You have to beat them over the head repeatedly or actually kill a good chunk of them to effect change. With the Czechs this resulted in their atheism. It was a giant ‘fuck you’ to foreign rulers who ravaged their lands during religious wars.
The Poles right now are for the first time actually confident of their national condition and position and the illiberalism there is only gaining ground despite what bullshit polling tells us. There was an excellent piece a month ago (I have it somewhere) where British politicians were quoted as saying that they were hoping that Poles living in the UK would go home and tell their fellow Poles about how great life in the UK is and how they should adopt similar values. But instead Poles went home and told them how utterly shit multicultural UK life is. Unlike Ireland and Spain, Poland does see an enemy to its immediate east in Russia and does see a former oppressor to its immediate west in Germany (Ireland and the Irish have made their peace with the UK despite minor nationalist groups). Poles reject Russia by being staunch Catholics. Poles reject Germany by being socially conservative. Neither of these things will change any time soon.
If we were to believe in polls we would have to believe the nonsense that over 30% of Croatians support gay marriage simply because of the referendum result in which the shitlibs did all they could to bring out as many people as possible while the anti-gay marriage side didn’t even bother campaigning other than at Mass on Sunday knowing full well that they had the numbers to win. The actual breakdown is 90/10.
It’s interesting that you point this out because Andrew Joyce also mentioned something similar in his article.
I think religion unfortunately has a lot to do with the acceptance of miscegenation. The Pope has been endlessly touting the good graces of migrants, and how everyone is “a child of God.” It seems like when religious people are forced to choose between their race and the Almighty they choose God.
Unfortunately, God won’t be protecting them from those horrible IQ point drops.
Sure, that’s true, but there also was a genuine mass revival of Catholic piety under Franco’s regime. That seems to have been mostly hollowed out by consumerism and a resurgent left though in recent decades, and nowadays Spain is probably one of the most liberal societies in Western Europe. I have my doubts whether something like this can’t happen in Poland as well. You may disagree, but moves like this tightening of abortion law (prohibiting even abortions of “damaged fetuses”…I assume this means ones actually incapable of life in any case?) seem like overreaching to me, something like this must lead to anti-clerical resentment.
Anyway, thanks for the reply.
This is (naturally) interesting to me, of course, so I can’t resist chiming in.
First, I personally don’t care about gay marriage per se. It’s not an issue to me. Then again I am not religious either. I believe you take gay marriage as a proxy for how “based” a society is, but I think this is a Russocentric approach.
This is because Russia is deeply homophobic. It is a mistake, however, to think that this translates into other venues. This is from the recent CEE survey from Pew Research:
http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2017/05/05161334/PF_17.05.10_centralEasternEurope_homogeneity420px.png
See Russia at the bottom there? Russia may be “based” on homosexuality but it is much more cucked on immigration/diversity. Which matters more?
As for your survey, there are two problems with it. First, it was taken pre-refugee crisis. It’s hard to imagine the results would be as consistent post-crisis.
Second, and perhaps more important, Czechia may not be as based as you think. There was a discussion on this issue over at /r/Europe.
https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/7olfzd/how_comfortable_europeans_are_regarding_love/dsad1jd/
I haven’t bothered to check the questions in Polish, but it’s possible that it is the same for us.
I freely admit that I don’t care about homosexuality, though that sentiment may or may not be universally shared around here. I do care a lot more about having a homogenous country and in that regard, at least according to the latest (and if our Czech friends are correct about the older poll, more robust than the one you’re using) Pew Research poll, Poland has a much higher public support for having a homogenous society than Russia has. You can take all your “basedness” on gay marriage for that if you want. It’s an exchange I’d gladly make 🙂
I wouldn’t say that. It largely depends on age. Kaczyński is approaching 70 years of age. The German reparations is largely a PR stunt to have leverage over the Germans (which I think is a delusional tactic, but hey, I’m not making the strategy in Warsaw) due to the coming fight in 2018 over quotas.
Young Poles, including right-wing Poles, are not really obsessed with Germany. To the extent we bother to care about you, it is to debate/discuss the ongoing Third Worldification of the country. Very few under the age of 40, regardless of political persuasion, view Germany as an enemy or even neutrally.
CBOS, our most prestigious polling institute does regular surveys on how we view our neighbours and the scores for Germany is quite high, with 2 to 1 or even 3 to 1 positive views. This increases even more for the younger generation. Given that PiS and Kukiz’15(the two main right-populist parties) won a majority of the youth vote in the last election, it is implausible that this would be any different for right-leaning youth.
There is still, paradoxically, support for the idea of reparations across the Polish public, but this is because it is felt, justifiably IMO, that Germany got away with peanuts in the post-war period. Poland lost a huge amount of civilians and saw its country destroyed to ruins but it didn’t start the war. Germany lost a huge amount but that is the price you pay when you try to conquer a continent. It’s high risk/high reward. After the war, the Soviet-implanted government basically washed its hands of any reparations and it’s felt that this was done by an alien regime (not wrong). After the fall of communism, the focus was on getting into EU and NATO and so any feathers with Germany were not ruffled on purpose.
It also has to be said that Germany did, to its credit, reach out to us and worked to do reconciliation post-1990. I’m fully aware that not only Poland has legitimate grievances. A lot of Germans were ethnically cleansed from what is today Western Poland. That’s why I don’t support these reparations, but I can see the argument for them. I think that is true for a lot of Poles. Ultimately, I don’t think PiS will seriously attempt to push for reparations. It will probably be used as a pressure tactic/negotiating ploy. Though I personally view it as a waste of time.
“Green light for transsexuals in the Polish Army”
http://www.defence24.pl/722459,zielone-swiatlo-dla-transseksualistow-w-wojsku-polskim
I agree that “based” Eastern Europe is not going to last and a major reason for that is that they’re failing to foresee the cuckservatives. It’s easy to imagine keeping blue haired feminists and smelly antifas out of power but then one day you wake up in a country where your generals, priests and conservative politicians are taking the side of LBGT activists, fake “refugees” and every other form of poz.
In the next few years we’re going to see the militaries of Eastern Europe become one of the biggest promoters of poz because they’re tasked with turning themselves compatible with the United States and in the US the officer class is heavily pozzed. Locals will not see this coming as they imagine the military to be a right-wing stronghold.
This seems to be a pretty common belief. A Polish colleague was showing me youtube clips around 2011, purporting to show missile contrails etc
I work in tech, so conspiracy nuts are at a higher than average frequency. It was hard to argue with that guy though, because in that part of the world conspiracies do happen a lot – polonium poisoning, dioxin poisoning, assassinations etc
Turkey needs NATO much less. Poland strongly believes it needs someone else to hold Germany down and to keep Russia out which means Poland needs NATO much more than the Americans need Poland and hence the dynamic there is going to be one where the Poles will try to please the Americans to keep them in the deal.
Turkey has no credible threats – an expansionist Russia would go after different targets first and even then it would likely take Russia generations to build another empire close enough to get Turkey worried – but Turkey is in control of an immensely important location. Thus the dynamic there is going to be one where the Americans try to please Turkey to keep them in the deal (and not teamed up with Russia or China).
You pose an interesting hypothetical. If I was forced to choose, I’d probably go with the 100% homogeneous society, and accept gay marriage. I feel like multiracialism/multiculturalism is far easier to exploit by politicians, to pit people against one another.
Suppose it was a son or daughter who was a homosexual, versus a son or daughter in a mixed race relationship.
We do? News to me. Germany has fewer tanks than we do and their standing army is a joke. Nobody in Poland thinks Germany is a threat in the conventional sense. We’re much more worried about their attempts to push 3rd world migrants onto the rest of us.
No. Look at it from the US perspective. You cannot defend the Baltics (effectively) without having Poland in NATO and without Poland in NATO, nothing is stopping Russia from walking all over Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in a serious crisis. It’s not even about probability, it’s about deterrence. Poland is the the biggest Eastern European country in the EU and sits at the crossroads of the region that a country like Ukraine does not. It’s the same reason why Turkey is unlikely to ever get booted from NATO, because their geographic position is important to the region. Same with Poland re: Eastern Europe.
You have to place this into a wider context as well. We’re living in a time when America is losing out strategically to China in the SCS and the ECS. Whenever a wounded superpower is losing importance on a structural basis, there is a need to shore up credibility elsewhere, not just to demonstrate to other allies but even to itself to some extent. That ‘elsewhere’ will be where the competition is less tough and that is Eastern Europe, where Russia’s strength is not as overwhelming as the gathering Chinese strength in SCS. If the US was losing influence in both East Asia and EE at the same time, that would deal a heavy blow to its credibility.
In addition, the sheer amount of fixation/Russophobia in the US more or less assures support for NATO. Look at recent polls. Support for NATO is actually rising in the last few years among Americans, and especially among democrats (who will likely rule for the coming decades due to demographics).
Then there’s the “Poland is no longer a democracy, why should we support it” thesis that some come with. A good test of this talking point would be the recent sales of the latest version of the Patriot missiles. As you know, this has to be done through Congress. Congress is a lot more liberal than Trump is, including the GOP members. Yet despite years of wailing about “authoritarianism”, Congress approved the sale with overwhelming and huge margins. Look at the recent arming of Ukraine as an example as well. Azov Battallion and the Right-Sector can justifably be called fascists. Yet you barely see a discussion on this in the US media.
NATO is actually something I’m not worried about at all. A bigger problem down the line is the EU, but that’s another debate.
the flaw in all this sort of thinking is mistaking diversity for a cause instead of an effect.
Diversity is a product of the collapse in real social relationships leading to the sort of hedonism fags engage in. Gays are like an exemplar of degeneracy.
LOL.
I’m an atheist and as such I am atypical of the Polish nation. Gay people, to my mind, will always exist. It’s a biological fact. The only question is if they are above or below ground. I try to think of it the same way I do about prostitution. It will always exist. Do we regulate it or let it stay in the underworld? “Regulate” in the gay context would be to give them full rights along with their heterosexual brethren. I don’t exactly feel oppressed because a gay person can marry someone just because I as a heterosexual can. It’s not bothering me.
I would be against pushing homosexuality in a disproportionate manner. They are around 2-3% of the population and to the extent that popular culture will reflect them, it should be in that proportion. From the US pop culture, there is a huge over-representation of gay people, probably because many writers are gay. That’s wrong. I would also oppose the decadent “pride marches”, but not because the people marching are gay but because the behavior is often degenerate. I’d feel the same if it was a march mostly consisting of heterosexuals.
I oppose multiculturalism for the same reason you do, it’s an effective tool to divide a nation the way dividing people on sexuality just is not. Also, race/culture/religion is a much stronger identification marker than sexuality is. Only in homogeneous countries does sexuality become a prevalent ID marker. Same with gender. I think a lot of the West’s fixation with gender and sexuality in the 60s came out of this fact. As they have gotten more multicultural, a lot of the debate has begun to shift to race, immigration and religion (especially Islam). This is what happens once a society becomes diverse.
One should also mention that Polish elites have historically used diversity for these very purposes. Jews came into Poland on the invitation of the Polish nobility and their king in order to become a middle-layer to extract wealth from Polish peasants. That’s why there is such a strong resistance to PiS, because they do not come from the traditional Polish elite. Kaczyński lives in a modest villa in the suburbs of Warsaw, among the people, and not among other well-heeled elites. Unlike them, he identifies more strongly with the working-class and the lower-middle class than he does with them. Don’t bother looking at the elite’s words. Look where they live to see what they truly feel about the people. An elite become extractive when it becomes unmoored from the people it rules over. Once you no longer identify with the people, it becomes much easier to view them as interchangable with foreigners. The Polish neoliberal class is the same class whose parents climbed the greasy ladder in the communist era. For them, the only difference is which capital to serve and whatever the people think, is of no concern. Yet the idiots are still unable to understand why PiS is at 40-45% and their parties can barely breach 20%.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/why-suwalki-gap-keeps-top-u-s-general-europe-night-n469471
There is a precedent for whatever happened in Smolensk.
Poland’s president Boleslaw Bierut went to Moscow,
“caught a cold,” and died (in 1956) under mysterious circumstances
which to this day remain unexplained. I believe a number
of leaders died in Russia under suspicious circumstances.
Theoretically, the Turks were able to capture and loot a Wien, but to destroy “Western civilization” in 1683, the Turks had no chance. Perhaps such danger was in the 16th century but in 17th century Turkey was already in deep decline.
Army defeated the Turks in 1683, was two-thirds German.
For Russia this is a completely false interpretation of the survey about “diversity”. In Russia a strong antiimmigrant mood, but absolutely normal relations with indigenous peoples, Finno-Ugric, Turkic, etc. origin.
As an analogy – imagine that the feelings of the people of Berne to the people of Geneva will be interpreted as love Swiss to African migrants. .
Bierut might have been murdered (or committed suicide – another distinct possibility), but it happened when Poland was a Soviet satellite. The murder of the whole leadership (okay, half of it) is something different. The complicity of the Tusk party is another, quite unprecedented thing. If it was murder, then the whole NATO leadership must have been in on it.
There are also a large number of circumstances pointing to an accident. The Polish president had once tried to force a previous captain of the plane to change destination, but he refused and flew to the original destination (which was the right thing to do, as the then conducted investigation revealed). Though he was rewarded with a medal afterwards, it was rumored that his career broke as a result. At Smolensk the commander of the Air Force entered the cockpit (this was already against regulations), and pressured the captain to land regardless of the circumstances. This must have resulted in very high stress levels in the cockpit.
Then the previously landed Polish aircraft (with the president’s journalist pool) reported to the presidential plane that the conditions were horrible, and that they were probably the last one to land.
The airport was not well equipped for a civilian airport (I think there were even some issues with what equipment they had, like lightbulbs not working), and the pilots forgot to disable the auto pilot (which would’ve worked in a normal airport but not here), the air traffic controllers couldn’t speak English (it was not a requirement for a military airport), the captain was the only person in the cockpit with a sufficient knowledge of Russian (but was also flying the plane as the most experienced member of the crew under adverse weather conditions), and probably the air traffic controllers made a few mistakes (minor ones in comparison to the mistakes by the cockpit crew, but still). Under the circumstances, any responsibly thinking person would have diverted the plane to another airport, and this was exactly the proposal of the air traffic controllers. What would have been the explanation, if the plane went elsewhere?
I think it’s quite a stupid conspiracy theory. But is irresistible to the kind of people who believe in most conspiracy theories.
Bosniaks and Croats think of Serbs when asked about a multi-ethnic country. Probably despite all the wars and mass murder going on back and forth for the past century, on some level they still feel some affinity for each other. (I know this of Croats and Serbs living in Western Europe. A Croat also told me he thought Serbs were much better than Bosniaks, because of decades of Saudi financed Wahhabi propaganda among the Bosniaks.)
I don’t know about Russians, but it could be a similar dynamic going on there, too.
I used to think like you, but probably I was wrong, just as probably you are now, too.
“Gay rights” lead to the emergence of a gay identity, gay activists and disproportionate gay representation. Gays don’t have to raise families or even support wives with lower incomes, so they have more money and time on their hands than heterosexuals. They will also strive to degrade the institution of marriage, and weaken society to strengthen their own gay identity. Even if most gay people initially (while “oppressed”) showed no interest in any of those things, and were willing to be nationalists. Coincidentally, gay rights cause physical destruction among them, allowing them to live promiscuous and hedonistic lifestyles. Gays in the closet cannot engage in hundreds of sexual relationships per year, as Patient Zero did.
Not to mention the explosive issue of adoption.
Gays don’t interest me much, but probably it’s better for both them and us to live under “oppression”.
You can take all your “basedness” on gay marriage for that if you want. It’s an exchange I’d gladly make.
That raises an interesting question, can you have openness to gay marriage without overall “diversity”? I can’t find any obvious examples, can you?
I lived in Ireland (west coast) from 1989-1995, and when I go back to visit now it is a shock how much the country has changed in barely a generation. A lot of this probably has to do with a backlash against the “sins” of the Catholic Church, which presumably isn’t a factor in Poland, but still the change in attitudes is incredible. In the village in which I lived in County Clare, 83% voted in favour of gay marriage.
Thank you. Wonder why W. Safire didn’t include this gem in his great speeches book..
The Guardian wrote a piece two years ago about the crash investigations and the title implied that there was something unknown about the tragedy. The article itself says it was an accident.
Russians and Poles were both highly sceptical of gay marriage in 2010 (14 and 16 percent approval, respectively), so there is not much in this data to suggest that Russians are somehow inherently more homophobic than Poles.
How, then, to explain their dramatic divergence in attitudes since 2010?
You seem to argue that the Polish are now better informed about homosexuality, and therefore less sceptical, and that this change in attitudes cannot be solely attributed to ideological pressure from above, for if it were, we should expect to see similar changes in attitudes toward immigration.
This is not a bad argument, but it leaves out the logic of creeping liberalism. The typical run liberalism has had in western Europe since universal suffrage is feminism -> LGBT rights -> multiculturalism, the logic being that conservative nuclear families are a major obstacle to mass-immigration and that feminism and LGBT rights slowly erode this element. Another argument against it is that we know that political campaigns pushed from above are sometimes very effective. I seem to recall, for instance, that anti-abortion/pro-life attitudes in the US rose steeply in the early 1990s as a direct result of conservative campaigns to sway public opinion, and what’s more, they rose not only with conservatives but also with liberals.
“Polls,” like other statistics, are the plural of “anecdote”. Much better than IRL conversations.
That said I will likely spend 2-3 weeks in Austria, Czechia, and Romania this year.
Presumably the map is based on those stats, though I first saw it at either /r/europe or /r/mapporn several months ago.
Thank you for finding the source.
Not sure why this clarification of methodology would make the poll misleading – being comfortable or indifferent is clearly the progressive position here, being uncomfortable is the “racist” one.
Alternatively, it was exactly in line with the opinion polls.
https://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/map-east-europe-support-for-gay-marriage.png
Russia is about 20% non-Russian, whereas Poland is about 98% Polish, so naturally you’re going to find higher support for non-homogeneity among Russians, since pretty much all of that 20% are going to support it.
And you can’t really conclude from that very general question that Russians are more pro-immigration than Poles. When Russians say they prefer non-homogeneity, that just means they prefer their country the way it is, not necessarily that they want to import lots of Uzbeks, let alone Africans.
Bierut and others foreign communist leaders who allegedly were killed in the Soviet Union are not a precedent for Smolensk. Say, poisoning of Beirut, if that is what has happened, was just a part of a peculiar practice of the Soviet/Comintern Human Resources Department. They did not just fire you, they killed you, right? Basically it was an internal affair of the SU. Smolensk, on the other hand, would belong to entirely different category. Poland in 2010 was a member of NATO. Several NATO generals died in Smolensk, right? Killing the leadership of Polish state would be a serious casus belli for Poland and the whole NATO. Exactly for this very reason I have constructed a conspiracy narrative in which a chief perpetrator could not be Russia but somebody who wanted to implicate Russia to destroy the reset and at minimum to cast Russia as an international pariah criminal state.
After the 2014 Maidan when the reset policy of Hillary and Obama was definitively over, Putin was transformed into a new Hitler and Stalin incarnate in the West but nobody in the West raised the issue of Smolensk. You could impute Putin anything, you could slander him with impunity but there was a total silence about Smolensk. Russia was accused of shooting down the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine but nobody made a squeak about Smolensk. Why not? Even if it was just an accident it would be an excellent black PR to insinuate and accuse Russia for Smolensk. There was an open season on Russia, yet it did not happen. The question is why? Possibly because Russia was holding the evidence that could lead to true perpetrators of this event. Ask yourself a question why in 2014 Polish media did not start a campaign of insinuations that Russia was responsible for Smolensk?
Basically I am saying that if it was not an accident, Russia should not be considered as a chief culprit. If you want to look for perpetrators, start with Warsaw. Keep in mind that I am not claiming it was not an accident, I am just exploring the consequences of the assumption that it was not an accident. This exploration leads me away from Russia. This leads me to Warsaw.
And rightly so. The Malaysian airplane was clearly downed by a Russian or pro-Russian soldier — accidentally, of course, but still — whereas the circumstances of the Smolensk crash were far less clear.
Both statements are false. The Russian Orthodox Church looks down in great disfavor on people who “attend church” instead of actively leading a sacramental lifestyle. (Meaning: a weekly regiment of prayer, fasting, confession and eucharist.) There’s no way you can compare a militant sort of Christianity like in modern Russia with weaksauce “cultural Catholicism” like in Poland.
As for ROC’s influence, you really do need to step outside the cryptosemitic, philosemitic and outright plain-old-semitic 1%.
The Church is the only institution that’s present and active everywhere in Russia instead of being scattered in isolated urban pockets. It’s also the only political force that can challenge the Kremlin and win.
And the poll doesn’t reflect the reality on the ground where the split is roughly 90/10.
LOL. It is a very bad taste among professionals to use names such as Ben Hodges as a source of a strategic wisdom. But then again, for the nation which had for years such a nutjob as Antoni Macierewicz as MoD it seems natural. I omit here the incredibly unlikely and stupid scenario of Russia for some unknown reason deciding to occupy Baltic shitholes. Your remark on Bundeswehr was rather revealing in a very funny way.
P.S. My friendly advice, if you want to contribute anything of value here–do not use NBC as a source of any info, let alone on serious military-strategic issues.
Defending the Baltic states is hardly a US core interest though. You can find arguments in US media quite often that letting them join NATO was a mistake because they don’t add anything to the alliance and that risking a nuclear war with Russia for Latvia would be grotesque (and it’s hard to disagree tbh). If Russia ever tried taking over the Baltic states by force, it’s far from clear imo that NATO would react with full-scale war; and in all probability it couldn’t do much to stop a Russian invasion at the start of a conflict anyway.
Acceptance of LGBT, gay marriage, etc… is also a sign of a disintegrating society. It starts with younger people who are disoriented and often redundant in a global-open borders economy. Poland has plenty of those, they tend to drop any norms or standards. It is about ‘what feels good’ and survival, so anything goes. It happened in the West in the same way.
Czecho-Slovakia stands out in the charts as a traditionalist haven. Some of it is caused by more blunt personal attitudes that are part of the culture – people generally don’t give a sh..t what others think about them. To be ‘outrageous’ is a social plus, that explains how the semi-retarded Vaclav Havel got the notoriety that he had. He was a clown, but very outspoken, and that is appreciated in Prague. They have a ‘Black Magic’ theatre (yes, fully black, you don’t see a thing), made movies 50-60 years ago that were filmed backwards, etc… it is just a part of the culture. So saying that gays, blacks, Asians are not welcomed is often a pose.
But Czech Republic and Slovakia are also consciously becoming the ‘old Europe’. There is a strong reaction against what people see as an incredibly stupid and self-defeating behaviour of their Western neighbours. People lump together open borders, Third World migrants, NGOs, LGBT’s, Western meddling, gay marriage – and they don’t want it. 2-3 years ago I would had thought that Brussels-Washington would just roll over it and suppress any resistance. I don’t think so any more. This will get very ugly as the all out Western liberal fanatics collide with assertive traditionalism and deep European identities in Central-Eastern Europe.
Up until this year all the party leaders in Scotland were self proclaimed gay or widely assumed to be of that orientation (SNP). The two big parties were led by women.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/apr/05/tartan-rainbow-why-great-to-be-gay-in-scotland-lgbt-rights-kezia-dugdale
Didn’t Bierut die of shock when Khruschev held his speech denouncing Stalin? Anyway, as reiner tor has pointed out, the two situations are hardly comparable. The death of General Sikorski in 1943 would be a more fitting parallel (is that analogy sometimes drawn in Poland?). But there just seems to be nothing to indicate the Smolensk crash was anything but an accident.
I am not one to hype Russian military capabilities (Martyanov will confirm) but Russia’s current relative dominance over the Baltics is far greater than China’s over the SCS.
This is also RAND’s assessment. They see Russia overrunning the Baltics within 5 days at the outbreak of serious hostilities, but believe that China will only stand a chance from 2025 at the earliest.
Respective reports: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1253.html, https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1140.html
Voila’
P.S. I love late Frank Zappa but not in a ministerial position;-) I do generally agree with your post.
Western countries are un-diverse. All of the wars and population transfers 1500-1945 made sure of that. The diversity (and the attendant “vibrancy”) are confined to working-class ghettos. It’s no different than the sugar beet plantations of old.
#AgreeingWithTheNarrativeButPuttingYourOwnSpinOnThings
Pozland??
No one can defeat America, Serbia was crushed and then elected a lesbian leader. Democracies that accept Nato ‘protection’ are too easy to topple, even Sorosian subversion can do it.
If this is true, this is a great position to be in. The ROC then can have significant influence in policies without actually being involved in running things directly.
Peace.
Looking at this map some more I realize it makes my point even more strongly.
A decade ago, the Ukraine was more homophobic than Russia – around 5% support for gay marriage (at most), versus 15% in Russia. Can’t be bothered digging up the opinion polls, but can, if someone insists.
But nowadays the Ukraine is twice as homophilic as Russia. Sure, they hate the gay pride parades the West forces them to have in Kiev and Odessa, and openly gay men are even probably more likely to be beaten up in Kiev than in Moscow, yet even so, the propaganda is making itself inexorably felt.
5 days? Only if Russia was taken by surprise. If Russia was the initiator, I think, it would take 5 hours max.
No poll, ever, reflects a reality. The only difference between them is a margin of error. On 30 July 2016 on one of major Russian military forums I predicted Trump becoming a President. I knew it using a completely different set of metrics which doesn’t even go into all those polling so called “techniques”. Having said all that, polls could be somewhat instrumental in giving a general impression which may be one of pieces constituting a much more complex awareness of reality.
I wonder if the “Slavic” business is real (or whether it was ever real, outside 19th Century political theories.) I made a joke to a Pole once, that “we Slavs must keep together” (it’s funny because they knew I was a Joo, the only thing Slavic about me being that I speak Russian a̶n̶d̶ ̶a̶m̶ ̶a̶ ̶h̶e̶a̶v̶y̶ ̶d̶r̶i̶n̶k̶e̶r̶.̶) They didn’t get it.
It is delusional…I really don’t quite understand what they’re hoping to achieve with that. It is very unlikely that any German government would agree to such reparations, not least because it would set a precedent for other potential claimants like Greece. And it won’t work as a tactic for deflecting demands regarding the “refugee” issue.
Depends which part of Germany one is thinking of. But yes, I can see that there are reasons for the Polish position, given all the atrocities and destruction committed by Germans in Poland, and the fairly nice lives people had in post-war West Germany, whereas Poles had to live with the consequences of a war they hadn’t started. It’s also probably true that Germany didn’t always acknowledge German crimes against Poland enough, and in an ideal world there would have been more German reparations to Poland. But still, making such demands now seems very misguided to me, the German public (a significant part of which feels like the country is being destroyed anyway due to Merkel’s escalating “refugee” invasion…not exactly good conditions for self-criticism over past sins committed a lifetime ago) will react negatively.
But anyway, it’s good to hear that the younger generation in Poland isn’t fixated on being anti-German. One shouldn’t forget the past, but one can’t captive to it forever, especially so given the massive threats all Europeans face today.
His statement about comparing Bundeswehr’s, granted for now it being sunk in huge problems, with the Polish “capabilities” was revealing. Obviously he missed the point that Budneswehr for all its gigantic ills is an off-spring of the German industrial power-house which, should it ever rediscover its own German balls, can increase its land and naval capability (Luftwaffe is a somewhat different game here) dramatically within several years, say by getting its military a 4-4.5% of its very real GDP. Obviously, he wasn’t also bothered by the fact that Poland’s tank forces today are equipped primarily by German Leopard-2. Yes, folie de grandeur, as incomparable Corelli Barnett noted.
This is largely because Czechs are very difficult to be put to shame. Actually they are pretty much shameless. I mean chiefly Czechs not Slovaks. The socio-techniques that work on people with rudimentary morality that goes back to chivalry and Christianity do not work on Czechs that well. You can call a Czech that he is a coward, a traitor an opportunist, a racist, a homophobe, an a-hole and he won’t be too offended. They are not proud of being cowards, traitors, opportunists and so on but they stoically accept it as facts of life.
there’s a far-right–wing theory which posits that the whole Slavic identity is artificial and even the moniker Slav is due to a medieval copying error. To be clear, that’s not what I’m saying and I reject the validity of it and the intention behind it (to rationalize German imperial meddling in EE and the Balkans.)
Gayness is to be rejected (but in a smart, non-nasty way, i.e. the opposite of how the Christian Right in America did it.) It’s an artificial identity that encompasses three vastly different types of individual – passive and active male homosexuals as well as lesbians. Passives are feminine men who prolly have some kind of hormonal disbalance. Actives are just sexual opportunists who prey on the first group.
I think there are no, or very few, men who are not excited by women or are in actuality disgusted by them. The spherical male gay in a vacuum, being a person who is in all respects normal except his mate-selection algorithm just happens to be buggy, does not exist in the wild. Most importantly though (as if I care when people adopt artificial identities), gayness is what the globocapitalists use to promote their agenda of social disintegration, runaway hedonism and substitution of personal freedoms for political ones.
You are half-way there :). Actually Vaclav Havel was an incredibly bad play writer. He was a rich kid whose family made lots of money collaborating with the Nazis. After WWII they lost most of their properties except a fancy penthouse apartment in the center of Prague that Havel eventually leveraged to become popular with artsy locals who loved to party. And foreign journalists. Havel was also bitter about all the property they lost and communists eventually discovered that he was a useful idiot who could be used as a transition figure – as in ‘transitioning‘ the huge state properties into their own hands.
Havel’s silly infatuation with Frank Zappa was another sign of his infantilism. He was an end-of-liner, a useless clown who once claimed that Czechs are really ‘Celts’.
True, it is a form of weary cynicism and fatalism. They will say anything, but usually fight for nothing. In today’s world it makes them one of the toughest nuts to crack for the Western PC multi-cultural globalists.
Though the media campaign made it look like as if no other military ever shot down a civilian airliner by accident. When in fact even Ukraine did so, and they downed a Russian airliner, to boot. Not to mention the US and Iran Air Flight 655.
The Russians had the mitigating circumstance that they were being bombarded from the air by the Ukrainian Air Force, while the other accidents happened in peacetime.
There is a correlation between society’s disintegration – especially among the young – and the approval for LGBT. In Ukraine the young are basically f..ed. They either shoot at each other, emigrate, or sell themselves. There is no viable and realistic future path for most of them in Ukraine.
(I know the likes of AP will tell us about all the young IT entrepreneurs in Lviv and the NGO hangers-on in Kiev, but statistically in a country of 40 million that is insignificant.)
In Russia, for all its upheavals and issues, there seems to be a functioning society for the young. They can study, work, start families, get housing, etc… It is hard (too hard), especially in big cities, but the generational sell-out by the baby boomer asset owners or oligarchs is not paralysing the society. I think the attitudes and normalcy reflect that.
I personally incline toward the view that it was
an accident. However, epistemologically speaking, based on
the evidence alone,we still don’t know. That’s why I said, “whatever
happened in Smolensk.” For example, Russia continues to refuse
to return the wreckage to Poland. But the problem is much
broader than that. Russia is not a very transparent country,
and prominent figures (and not just journalists) continue
to die in Russia under mysterious circumstances
There was no concept of collaborating or not-collaborating with the Nazis in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. All Czechs took an oath of loyalty (publicly) to Hitler and the III Reich. Havel’s family did what they always did under any regime. So your bringing up “the Nazis” totally misinforms and manipulates. A cheap shot aimed at an ignorant target.
Bohumil Hrabal in the Closely Watched Trains gives you an idea on the level of Czechs resistance to Nazi’s which was (1) getting rid of a German breed of pigeons and replacing them with a Polish breed by the state master and (2) engaging disrespectfully in sex on the couch that was a state property.
I’m not taking a stand on gay marriage (which is complex)
but let me give an example from Poland. Google Robert
Biedron. He’s an openly gay mayor of Slupsk, a city in
northwestern Poland. He is handsome (obviously), charismatic,
and has a Ph.D. He appears to be very popular. It is people
like him who can shift the whole country’s opinion on the
question of homosexuality. I think it helps that northwestern
Poland is closer to Berlin (with its strong gay subculture)
than it is to Warsaw. People in that area often make weekend trips
to Berlin just for the fun of it
Re: Baltic shitholes
Okay, take Lithuania, for example. This
Eurozone country has reached the figure of
$34,000 for its GDP (PPP) per capita,
much higher than that of Russia, and is growing
rapidly. At its current rate of growth Lithuania
is likely to be the first country from the former
Soviet Union (and Soviet Bloc in general) to
reach economic parity with Western Europe.
Lithuania is a shining example of what happens
when a country liberates itself from the Soviet
influence. Belarus and Ukraine are watching.
And, by the way, I’m not Lithuanian
Yes, doing it now is IMHO too late. It should have been done in the 60s and not the ridiculous sums being bandied about now. I’d have structured it in a way to only make infrastructure investments(railways, roads, bridges) for maybe a period of 20 years to make up for all the destruction. The sums would have been quite small and possibly some of them just concessional loans.
But in 2017, it’s much too late for this debate.
If I can sum up the sentiment among the young, at least on the right-side of the political spectrum, it is one of pity and perhaps even bewilderment(“they have so much… why are they throwing it away?”) rather than hostility. But the higher up you go in the age bracket, the more hostile the feelings get, which is natural since many of those in their late 60s, 70s etc were either born during the immediate aftermath of the war and/or their parents perished during it, largely due to Germans.
Taiwan has approved gay marriage. Is Taiwan ‘disintegrating’? Czechia also has more liberal laws on homosexuality than Poland, yet it is more right-wing on immigration. The fallacy here is thinking that social liberalism in some sectors will automatically spread uncontrollably in others. That’s not what we see. Russia is very homophobic yet much more tolerant of immigrants from muslim-majority countries than Poland is.
Right, but how do you then square the fact that Czechs are quite comfortable with gay marriage but very uncomfortable with non-white immigration? It doesn’t follow your logic.
https://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/map-east-europe-support-for-gay-marriage.png
Russia on the other hand is very uncomfortable with gay marriage but quite comfortable with more diversity, non-Russia immigration, as shown in the Pew poll I showed earlier in the thread.
I disagree. Territory is the only thing one can never produce. Therefore, it is the most valuable. Infrastructure can be rebuilt. New people can be born to replace the dead. But the territory is gone forever, and it limits the size of the population, which is the ultimate source of both the infrastructure and wealth and of the new people being born. It is, for example, probably no accident, that the post-war population growth rates were lower in Germany than in Poland.
That said, given the incredible population losses in Poland, and how they lost the eastern half of the country, and then were forced to live under communism for decades, they didn’t gain much in the war, so I can understand the resentment. But it’s now old history.
Yes, it is. It had a higher base to fall from, but its pretty much a joke country that’s dying literally(0.9, at one point, the world’s lowest replacement) and ridiculous brain drain, with hopeless politics that do nothing to actually focus on the economy but rather on various liberal signaling virtues.
On the upside if living standards fall fast enough, then you won’t need to have any other barriers to immigration!
Yes, you are also not an economist or a good handler of issues of scale and proportions. I am sure Vilnius is a very desirable place for living for any holder of Moscow, St.Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Crimean or Krasnodar, among many, even modest, real estate. I am sure they flock to Lithuanian embassies with applications for permanent residence as I type this. Of course, there is much more what comes into it than per capita GDP, however important. Education? Heard of that?
According to the commenter Daniel Chieh, whose grandfather was, if I recall correctly, a Taiwanese air force general, yes, it is disintegrating and gradually losing any ability to resist the People’s Republic of China.
Well, you were faster…
Yes, Poland’s bad luck was that the Cold War prevented something like this. In general it probably is true that the West German state did try to evade financial responsibility for German WW2 crimes, especially of course towards countries that were then in the Eastern bloc. That was a mistake imo, but one that is hard to rectify now due to the distance in time. And the present political climate in the EU makes things much worse since Poland is now vilified by all the “progressives” in Germany for not showing “solidarity” on the refugee issue, whereas right-wing Germans are fed up with the increasingly insane national masochism.
That’s perfectly understandable.
That is pretty much a common recipe–that is creation of local Parnassus–which is one of the major factors in formation of mostly self-proclaimed “intellectual” elites.
Yes, they are misguided and they are really not to be taken too seriously. In 1965 Polish Bishops wrote the “We forgive and ask for forgiveness” letter to German counterparts. This was a true spirit of reconciliation. The communist government was furious but Polish Catholics supported the letter. Demanding reparation is not really a thing most Polish Catholics would like to do, but humans are weak and can be easily corrupted when tempted particularly when a Iago is whispering to their ears. This weakness and corruption will have consequences. After making demands to Germany how Poles will be able to find moral and principal resolve to keep rejecting the Jewish claims? My prediction is that Poland will get zilch from Germany and create a lot of bad blood as any product and by making these claims Poland will weaken its resolve against the Jewish claims. So, who will benefit in the end? Poles should ask who is the Iago who planted the idea of reparations in the minds of Polish officials? This is the most important question.
I have heard that the Jewish international organization demand c. $70 billions from Poland. Recently American Senate advanced a resolution that will work towards forwarding the goals of these claims.
I’m quite aware of the issues of scale. That’s
one reason why Lithuania has moved ahead of
Poland on a per capita basis. With its population
of about 3 million Lithuania is basically equivalent
to Warsaw, and the latter’s GDP per capita is in the
$50-60,000 range. Nevertheless, the propaganda
value of Lithuanian success is immeasureable. It’s
saying to Belarus and Ukraine: see this is what happens
when you liberate yourself from Russia and cast your
lot with Scandinavia and Western Europe.
No value whatsoever. Lithuania produces next to zero, with some very minor exceptions, of any real hi additional value product. Poland, despite also being largely de-industrialized country, is in a different league with Lithuania, so is Belarus. If we get to PPP RGPs of Russia, Moscow is more that 52 000, Tyumen is somewhere around 70+ thousands. GDP structure, structure of the labor force are huge factors in defining how people live. Lithuania is overwhelmingly service economy nation and will remain such for a foreseeable future. Let’s not over-blow here the “value” of an example–the glitz of Moscow, St.Pete or any other major Russian urban center is just one factor. In the end, take a look at small Switzerland which has a viable serious manufacturing sector.
NATO has and is using homos as part of their information operations against Russia, no surprise homo popularity has dropped in Russia.
No Pole I have ever met cares about Russia or Germany, Polish politicians, some like Tusk very obviously so, will be on the CIA payroll and that is why they say what they do. Blowing up the Smolensk jet makes as much sense as poisoning someone with polonium, but people are easily fooled and can be made to believe anything.
Havel’s uncle made propaganda movies for German Reich. Havels took over the Barrandov movie studios and enthusiastically entertained German occupation officials during WWII. That was a level of collaboration way beyond 99% of the other Czechs. I don’t think it is a ‘cheap shot’ to point that out. All Czechs by the way knew this about Havel family. Some cared, others thought that it was just opportunism. I think foreigners in general had no idea about Havel, his background, or how he was used and perceived.
Hrabal liked to create absurdist scenarios to provoke, that was his schtick – it wasn’t about reality. There was the assassination of Heydrich in Prague in 1942, that was more ‘resistance’ than e.g. French or Belgians ever managed.
Weimar Germany pioneered gay rights in Europe. It is a symptom of a deeply unhealthy society.
Can’t imagine sorting out body parts is fun or easy.
But it was orchestrated from London. And no such high value targets in Paris or Brussels. The French did kill a number of collaborationists, including at least one minister. But for the plot against Heydrich to be successful, they also needed Heydrich to be so foolish. He drove without armed escort, in an open top car (not armored), and always on the same route, and when he was attacked, he told his driver to stop and started to engage his attackers in a firefight with his pistol. Then when he got injured and was rushed to the hospital, he had the bad luck (good luck for the assasins) to be treated by a prominent SS doctor who didn’t believe in the efficacy of antibiotics. Which, to my surprise, were actually already available in Germany at the time, albeit for small quantities only. But it should have been no problem for the treatment of such a prominent patient, it really was the stupidity of the doctor.
To some it up, the Czechs organized it from London, had a prominent target, who behaved foolishly when attacked, and then was treated by a high ranking but stupid doctor. The French, on the other hand, killed a number of German officers and attack least one collaborationist minister. The Czechs basically had this one murder going for them, and very few other acts of resistance.
I will take Daniel Chieh word about Taiwan. Last time I was there 2-3 years ago it did seem undergoing a socially liberal transition, but I am not familiar with the data.
I wasn’t actually claiming that. I agree that on different issues there will be quite a bit of variance based on local conditions. What I was saying is that the economic circumstances of young people, their ability to have families, homes, children, is a good predictor of their attitudes towards non-traditional lifestyles, like LGBT, gay marriage, etc… As their lives disintegrate, with housing out of reach, jobs not paying enough to support a family, hyper-competitive job markets (made worse by migrants), they will often stop caring about maintaining normalcy. If their lives are not viable, then anything is just ‘live for the pleasures of the moment’, and extreme tolerance is a part of it.
Liberal social attitudes can combine with resistance to open borders. I can see how that is confusing and how easy it is to manipulate people in that poor economic state. That’s why this is such an uphill fight. E.g., I have noticed that some of the most enthusiastic pro-migrant people in Germany are young natives who think that they can make a ‘living’ teaching migrants German or working as counselors. They are desperately looking for a place in the society and the migrant crisis is an opportunity. They ignore what is going on to the society at large, they ignore that their own plight is made worse by mass immigration.
That’s right, but in fairness, I think common people were far more level-headed about this than the talking heads on television. I was actually in Lviv only a week or so afterward, and I don’t remember anyone suggesting that the plane was shot down on purpose. I’m sure there was anger, but I remember sorrow more than anything.
Doubt it. The Dutch inquiry said Dutch intel indicated the rebels had only medium range SAM systems and that is why high level commercial could fly across the conflict zone, the Ukrainians had BUKs but not the rebels, all the Ukrainian aircraft shot down before were shot down at around ten thousand feet and below, I just don’t see why the rebels would have been supplied with a unwieldy BUK that could only be supplied by Russia. There is a reason why we have never seen any evidence except slick but provble fake photos by Bellingcat types despite BUKs being so detectable. False flags are more common than you think and Russia has been on the receiving end of a number, culminating in Russiagate, where we find supposed Russia expert and Litvinenko handler Christopher Steele once again involved.
The more common scenario is that they work 10 hours a day for peanuts and live with their granny until getting hitched. Very few young people I have met would entertain working as cleaning ladies in Warsaw.
It must be noted that the Ukrainian authorities also bore some responsibility for not closing the airspace of the area where they were fighting a civil war and conducting air operations against rebels they suspected of having some air defense capabilities. After the tragedy the Ukrainians claimed to have had some prior knowledge of the rebels’ acquisition of a Buk.
Man, in 10 years gay marriage will be one of the smallest of our concerns, with all the debt and demographic problems
Karlin had a long article on this maybe a year or so back. Do look it up. From what I remember, he found that nearly all evidence for Ukrainian involvment originates with unreliable Russian sources, while there is plenty of circumstantial (and verifiable) evidence to suggest separatist/Russian involvment.
To be sure, but Ukraine’s leadership was (and is) a dysfunctional mess, so I wouldn’t read anything into this, as I believe some people have.
Gay marriage is a symptom of the same morass leading to the debt and demographic problem. It’s all tied together.
The stable family unit is further and further eroding.
Peace.
I agree with what you write, but in 10 years Europe will be a total mess because of debt explosion and inner conflicts, who cares what happens in 10 years. Russia will be in a state of neo-bolshevism with all the lumpenproletariat outside Moscow and Petersburg
Well, you are right that Heydrich behaved foolishly and was unlucky. Technically he died from poisoning from the car seat cover that got into his wound. But Czechs shot him – he was the highest ranking German official assassinated during WWII, a potential Hitler’s heir. One detail I would add that his assassins died when flooded in a church basement where they were hiding. It was the Czech firemen who obediently flooded them.
But, Czechs had no people joining Germans in the war. Unlike French and Belgians who provided thousands of volunteers. I once heard from a French official that more French died fighting for the Nazis than died in resistance. So in the WWII resistance ranking, I would place Czechs above the French. Not that it matters much today.
I’m certainly not reading anything into this, other than the fact that they bore some responsibility. Some person in the higher leadership, who could have initiated the airspace over rebel territories to be closed, knew or should have known that it could easily lead to a tragedy. Yet he did nothing. It’s not a strong defense when one is accused of criminal negligence that he’s incompetent anyway and never even cared.
No, the Pew poll did not mention immigration, and was so general you cannot conclude from it that most Russians want more diversity than they already have, just that a slight majority express an abstract preference for a non-homogeneous society over a homogeneous one. It’s quite possible that many or most of the same Russians who say they prefer a non-homogeneous society, would also support a reduction in Muslim immigration.
None of what you say addresses my points. No doubt the Russians did organise a less competent information op against the chosen narrative on MH17.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02684527.2012.699294?src=recsys&journalCode=fint20
How did he calculate Free French losses? The bulk of French losses in that war came from fighting the Germans by regular troops, mostly in 1940 (over 100,000 deaths in six weeks) and in 1944-45 (another almost 100,000).
By the way the Germans didn’t want to recruit Czech soldiers. But Czech industry kept producing high quality weapons for the Germans in large quantities up until the end – it counted for more than a few thousand soldiers.
But you are right – it just doesn’t matter much anymore.
enthusiastically entertained German occupation officials during WWII – how was this enthusiasm gaged? Did he wet his pants out of joy and somebody saw a wet spot on his pants? The language you use clearly show you have an ax to grind agains the Havel family and have no sense of the actually reality in Prague during the war. Havel’s family probably was just like any other Czech family except that they were rich. I mean you do not understand the reality of the so-called German occupation in Prague. No Czech business closed down because they did not want to conduct business with Germans. Prague was perhaps the best place to be during the WWII. No ally bombings, no anti-German resistance activities, no threat of military draft. Czechs were exempt from military draft. If they did not read papers they would not know there was a war. Just business as usual before the war only in slightly different decorations. German officers and soldiers vacationing there because this was the safest place in Europe for them. Yes, Barandov was working at full blast just like all Czech industries, chiefly the military one like Skoda factory. Barandov was producing chiefly entertainment of escapist nature. Germans were no more into propaganda movies than Brits, Americans or Soviets. Only three full feature anti-Jewish movies were made during the whole duration of the III Reich. Most movies were escapist, not related to politics or war. I used to know a Czech woman who dated a German movie director while he worked in Barandov in 1943/44. Czechs did not consider it as any form of collaboration or betrayal. Was she “enthusiastic” about this relationship? Probably, but was it wrong? Certainly she did not have regrets and nobody was reproaching her.
If you want to bring up something against the Havel family you must be more specific.
There was also a substantial number of French civilians killed by Allied bombing in 1944 (more than 60 000 iirc).
Yes, I meant military losses.
The French losses fighting for the Germans were rounding errors.
Most Russians prefer what the russian elite prefers. Russians care what the West has to say about them. Recently Putin laughed at those who encourage lifelong marriage and rejected restrictions on abortion. Russians might be against the LGBT, because they still allow their natural instincts to come to the surface, but otherwise Russians are similar to Westerners. Raised to be obedient and servile. They only start to question the elite when their self-preservation instinct kicks in, so sooner or later they will have to fight Putin
In the 1920s, both feminism and immigration restrictionism made advances in the U.S. In the 1950s, feminism was on the retreat, while antiracism progressed. In the 1960s, immigration opportunities were vastly expanded shortly before the whole LGBT movement even came into existence.
So, no, it’s not one big, sticky ball rolling down the hill and growing bigger on all sides all the time. And it’s easy to see that there is an anti-immigration majority among the U.S. population now, whereas it’s highly questionable that other issues of the social conservatives are equally successful. I don’t see Trump really championing any of them apart from genuinely working to reduce migration and apparently trying to get transgenders out of the combat forces.
The Netherlands’ Military Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD) reported that the only anti-aircraft weapons in eastern Ukraine capable of bringing down MH-17 at 33,000 feet on July 17 belonged to the Ukrainian government. MIVD made that assessment in the context of explaining why commercial aircraft continued to fly over the eastern Ukrainian battle zone in summer 2014.
MIVD said that based on “state secret” information, it was known that Ukraine possessed some older but “powerful anti-aircraft systems” capable of downing a plane at that altitude and “a number of these systems were located in the eastern part of the country,” whereas the MIVD said the ethnic Russian rebels had only MANPADS that could not reach the higher altitudes.
Why are you ranking countries or nations in terms of their resistance to German occupation? Do you think it was good to resist Germans anywhere under any circumstances? Did you watch too many post war Soviet propaganda movies? Perhaps you do not realize but for people under occupation nothing was worse than those fabulous Soviet and other kinds of partisans. You have no idea how many innocent lives were lost because of their activities. Nobody cheered these partisans. People prayed they would stay away form their villages. The activities of these partisans contributed practically nothing to the end result of the WWII but created untold suffering for the populations under German occupation. They did not speed up the end of the war by single day.
Czech’s approach was the most rational under the circumstances. They got a pretty good deal from Germans. They did not engage in an active resistance. Heydrich assassination was not their idea though despite of helping to apprehend the perpetrators who were sent from England they still paid a very high price in terms of awful retribution.
Very good question, and I have been pondering it myself in the past. I can only speak to Poland, since I know too little about the Czech Republic, but I think Poland is inoculated against multiculturalism in the short term for both structural and historical reasons. One structural reason is that it still lacks the critical mass of immigrants needed to make anti-immigration sentiments uncomfortable to express publicly. This is very important, especially for socially-savvy women. Another is that many Poles know first-hand what the situation looks like in the ghettos of Western Europe, for this is where they typically live when they work abroad. A historical reason would be that the Polish have no easily identifiable historical guilt that could be exploited by pro-immigration movements (i.e. a history of slave trade or colonies). This is reinforced by Poland still being quite a bit poorer than its western neighbors.
In the medium-to-long term, however, I would expect these blocks to immigration to become less effective. Ideological pressure from Western institutions will make it increasingly costly to express anti-immigration sentiments publicly (I would wager that this is already true of Poland’s “polite society”), greater prosperity will mean that fewer young people will have first-hand experience of the ghettos of Western Europe, and this new-found prosperity will also be used against Poland as a form of historical guilt. The only development I see putting an end to this is the widespread discreditation of multiculturalism in its heartlands, either through obvious economic retardation or scientific breakthroughs (e.g. HBD going mainstream).
The cuckservatives are indeed a much bigger threat (a much bigger threat everywhere) than the actual SJWs.
Actually, Lithuania (and the rest of the Baltics) ranks
surprisingly high on the International Innovation Index,
higher than Russia or Poland. For example, in the area
of femto lasers.
The GDP (PPP) per capita of Czechia and Israel is in the
$35-36,000 range, so Lithuania is very close. The whole
world will notice when Lithuania zooms past Israel in GDP
per capita. I would describe that as having a high propaganda
value.
The surprisingly low value of Israel’s GDP per capita (just like
Israel’s low IQ) is interesting. An Israeli colleague once said to
me that the whole world, starting with the US, is throwing so much
money at Israel that the Israelis have become lazy. Maybe there
is something to it.
The problem is that once you accept homosexual marriage you end up accepting the entire liberal agenda. Feminism, trannies, the whole package. And once you do that you will end up losing your country. The idea that homosexual marriage is no big deal is one of the wedge issues used to undermine societies.
So in fact homosexual marriage really is a bigger threat than immigration.
Almost, but not exactly; from Wikipedia (I have read the same from other sources, so in this case we can trust Wikipedia):
Bishop Gorazd was born Matěj Pavlík in 1879, in the Moravian village of Hrubá Vrbka. From Wiki: On 4 May 1961, the Serbian Orthodox Church recognized Bp. Gorazd as a new martyr, and on 24 August 1987, he was glorified in the Cathedral of St Gorazd in Olomouc in Moravia.
Interesting how, of all the Czechs in Prague, the refuge to the assailants was provided by a tiny religious minority, the Eastern Orthodox. A little more about Bishop Gorazd:
Yes, absolutely correct.
Gotta stop it before people be eatin’ da poo poo:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jjnrLt3VuSM
Milos Havel didn’t make propaganda movies for German Reich. As the owner of a major film studio he of course had contacts with the occupation authorities. But he also used these contacts to help a lot of people. After the war he was investigated for collaboration but the case against him was dismissed for lack of evidence.
I disagree with you about Vaclav Havel as well. He was a courageous man who was not afraid to criticize the treasonous commie scum ruling the country at the time and went to jail for it. Your insults are baseless.
I literally laughed out loud at this. BEST VIDEO EVER.
Casting your lot with Western Europe will get you Sharia.
Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians will find themselves stuck between an increasingly poor, violent, Arab/African/Turk Muslim-dominated Western/Central “Europe” (and a Muslim “Sweden”) and … Russia. Ironically, Russian help and even Russian annexation won’t look so bad then.
He worked for them. He was by definition collaborating with the German occupation – by the way, Germans killed at the same time around 100,000 Czechs.
That’s what they all say. Goering helped a ‘lot of people’, so did most high level Nazis. It is probably true, but it doesn’t change the fact that he collaborated with the occupation.
Yes, Havel went to jail under commies. The first specific ‘crime’ that he was sentenced for was ‘refusing to pay tax on an imported vehicle‘. He was awarded a brand new Volvo as prize from a West German foundation – when it crossed the border he was asked to pay an import tax. He refused. The clueless communist byrocrats charged him with tax evasion. Havel’s story is more complicated than the usual dissident hagiography.
Do you actually like Havel’s plays? He might be courageous, but his ‘art’ is pretty dismal.
Actually, it was exactly as I described it. The Wiki’s “flush the men out by flooding the crypt” politely omits that it was the local Czech firemen who flooded the crypt and in effect killed the 5 resistance members. Yes the firemen had Germans standing over them with guns, but it was still strange. There is a movie of the firemen pulling their oversized hoses to the Church and flooding the crypt. They looked like they were just doing a job like any other. That’s a part of Czech mentality too.
I agree with you about the irony that it was the tiny Orthodox Church that did more for resistance to Nazi occupation than most others.
I actually don’t know. It was an informal speech at a university, he might had counted only losses after the occupation started and before D-Day. In any case, a lot of French (and Belgian) volunteers died fighting on the German side and not that many died in the Resistance.
True, although there was always the option for a Czech to declare himself of ‘German’ nationality and go off to fight for the Reich. Some did it. Czech industry kept on humming, as much as 20% of German war material was produced by the Czechs.
I find these counter-intuitive facts were revealing. People who want it all black and white and keep on sticking to some story are missing most of the amusing things in life.
You are nutty (and passive aggressive as usual). A European country doesn’t need Russia to keep out migrants, what it needs is stricter border controls. It is totally possible to do within the bounds of the EU. When it comes to the potential migrants from Western Europe, all that needs to be done is rescinding the free movement of labour (that, too, could be done with a bit of work). None of this has anything to do with Russia. And besides, hardly anybody in the EU wants an open border / free movement of labour policy with Russia.
Most 3rd world migrants actually arrive into the Baltic states via the Russian border (Vietnamese, Congolese on trains from Moscow, Afghans, etc). The nationalists there actually proposed mining the Eastern border (but it would require exiting the Ottawa treaty).
So, then, some Czechs did indeed fight for the Germans.
“Given that PiS and Kukiz’15(the two main right-populist parties) won a majority of the youth vote in the last election”
But PiS kept Kaczyński well out of sight and there was an implicit promise that Macierewicz would be kept out of the government, many young people regretted that having voted for Szydło they ended up with the same old same old.
“Jaroslaw Kaczynski claims his brother was murdered at the Smolensk crash? I didn’t pay much attention to this and only noticed recently…does he really push that theory?)”
I don’t think so. He appointed a conspiracy theorist as Minister of Defense and a commission was set up and a huge amount of time and resources were poured into finding the ‘truth’ and…. nuthin’
For a time there would be supposed leaks about new evidence every couple of months or so but none of it ever showed up and most people in Poland don’t care.
Kaczyński himself has been walking back his commitment to the conspiracy theory and called for an end to the monthly rallies devoted to it (he wants the last one to be in April of this year). I think the really committed will continue them but he’s clearly done.
I myself think that the Russian government (any Russian government) would not to hesitate to engineer something like Smolensk (they’ve done far worse) but there’s really no evidence tying them to this that makes sense. The best guess is the pilot was being pressured to land and…. it didn’t work out.
And what Kaczyński really wanted was to tie his domestic political enemies (like Tusk) to it or at least try to make the public associate the two – he hates Tusk far more than he hates any Russians.
Right now his focus is trying to win back younger (and win for the first time) the better educated by replacing the popular PM with a dry-as-dust technocrat and getting rid of some of the ministers who resonate the least with the more educated public.
There’ve even been hints of softening on the migrant issue but I think that just means maybe finally accepting the minimal number promised by the last government. Everyone assumes they’ll just go back to Germany at the first opportunity anyway.
And indeed it does. The liberal crazies who rail about a lack of secularism in Russia are in this case correct.
Lithuania did accept a few migrants as required by
Brussels. Within weeks they were gone. Nobody
knows what happened to them. Most likely they
made their way to Germany. What partly protects
Poland and the Baltic countries from the migrants
is the slightly harsher climate as compared to
Germany (not to mention the generous welfare programs,
pre-existing ethnic communities, and the fact that
German is easier to learn than Polish). The climate in
western Germany is a bit milder than in Poland.
IINM there have been noises made about holding countries responsible if migrants leave, but on the other hand no one has explained how Poland (for example) is expected to keep a bunch of migrants from crossing an uncontrolled border with Germany…. ankle monitors? put them in a camp?
This is one reason there is no meaningful support at street level for the idea of accepting migrants.
Earlier Poland did accept a group of Christian Syrians giving them rent free apartments and free Polish lessons…. and within a week almost all of them went to Germany without so much as a thank you or goodbye.
slightly harsher climate – Climate is not an issue. If it was climate they would not be crowding Sweden or they would stay in Greece or Bulgaria Poland or Lithuania do not pay enough money. That’s all. Perhaps also having a bad reputation for not being immigrant friendly may help.
This is the wrong approach. It means that
the principle that Brussels can force countries to accept migrants will be accepted
once Germany finds a way to make itself less welcoming to migrants (or simply becomes poorer, or Poland richer) the migrants will start to flow to Poland and there will be no way to stop them.
“This is the wrong approach”
I agree, but the hints are out there in public. One problem is that PiS (I’m not a fan) wasted way too much political capital on idiotic squabbles with Brussels on the court system and cutting down the Białowieża forest.
Now they’re trying to make nice (since a majority of voters like the EU in principle) and that means caving on a lot of issues, Kaczyński isn’t going to give up on putting the court system under direct partisan party control (his pet project) so something else will have to give and that’s probably migrants.
Too bad, since that’s an issue where Poland is not isolated at all, maybe that’s part of the idea accept migrants after Hungary and Czech and Slovakia and Austria do…
Since you wrote, which I am glad you did, perhaps you will appreciate this story:
That’s how it seems. Hungary and Czechia seem to be more determined than Poland in this respect. It might be the case that Poland is actually the weakest link in V4. I do not mean Polish population but Polish political class. Which is nothing new. Poor Poles had not much luck with their politicians in last 300 years.
The only thing more valuable than territory are cities which are a combination of territory, infrastructure and concentrated population.
Losing Stettin, Danzig, Breslau, usw. was a huge loss for Germany, something the country did not recover from.
Terrific comment and strong analysis. I do have minor quibbles.
The counter-argument is your own country. It also doesn’t have any real basis for historical guilt but somehow Swedes have been made to be ashamed of their country anyway.
I partially agree. This is why I don’t buy the meme of “Eastern Europe will save the white race”. It’s nonsense. However, I don’t think I agree with your (unspoken assumption) that we’ll be quite as peripheral as you seem to think we will, either. It will have to be a combined effort.
“There’ve even been hints of softening on the migrant issue but I think that just means maybe finally accepting the minimal number promised by the last government. Everyone assumes they’ll just go back to Germany at the first opportunity anyway.”
You know that old American military saying: “ASSUMPTION IS THE MOTHER OF ALL FUCKUPS”.
The “fuckup logic” here: 1. They will ALL go back to Germany; and 2. No more will arrive AFTERWARDS.
True, but I didn’t intend to since Karlin has already summed up the matter from a pro-Russian point of view:
http://www.unz.com/akarlin/mh17/
Despite all this PiS gained in popularity since elections.
Because the Polish opposition is even worse/more incompetent.
We’ll see how that goes. I don’t know if the public will warm to dry-as-dust Morawiecki. I think he’s very competent but I suspect he’s more effective as a behind-the-scenes rather than fronting the show.
Szydło did connect with a lot of people as does Duda but both are on the outs with Kaczyński who continues as the most powerful person in the country.
And yes, the opposition continues to suck donkeys and is in total disarray. Polish politicians don’t really work well together without a dominant personality keeping them in line and PO lost that when Tusk went to Brussels.
What were those hints?
It’s just showing up as an issue in the party controlled media recently and Morawiecki’s trying to make nice with Brussels.
At this stage it might be nothing or it might turn into an about face.
“Poles had not much luck with their politicians”
Let’s not get hysterical. Poland’s GDP grew by about
4.2% in 2017 compared to Germany’s 2.2% growth
and Russia’s roughly 2% rate of growth (after two
years of negative growth). Since 1989 Poland’s economy
has grown at roughly the same rate as that of South Korea,
and has not experienced even a single year of recession,
not even in 2008. Moreover, Poland’s economy is roughly
the combined size of the economies of Czechia, Slovakia,
Hungary, and Austria. Also, unlike Czechia, Slovakia,
Hungary or Romania, Poland has virtually no Gypsies.
There is no reason to be as pessimistic as is the case
with some commenters here.
Sure. LOL. It is a well-known fact that Russians sleep and dream of how to occupy and add about 2.5 million freeloaders to Russia precisely because of their laser technology. You see, during 1960s and 1970s in USSR it was cute–you know, Baltics, the ersatz West, theatrical culture, distinctly “European” city centers, etc. This charm is long gone. Well-off Russians prefer (justifiably so) Nice, Barcelona or Italy (some get to London), some medium income Russians buy real-estate in Czechia, the rest travel to Thailand (some have property there), Malta, Turkey or elsewhere but not Baltic states. Per those indices–specifically Lithuania fares extremely poorly on any STEM metric, below average. So, what’s the catch? What’s in it for Russia, which already completed a transport bypass of Baltic states (ports, etc.)–a distinct sign of impending “invasion” /sarc. The only real product Baltic States have, apart from fish and some other minor things is a visceral Russophobia–the only currency which has real value among US and European “elites”. So, for them, to remain somewhat relevant and financially supported the only thing to export is a myth of impending, any minute now, invasion and occupation by Russians, logic and geopolitical and military sense be damned. Same applies to Poland, whose former MoD, as an example, accused Russia of… Holocaust. The guy now heads commission on Smolensk crash. As Alice would say–it is getting curioser and curioser.
I never claimed that Russia is planning to
invade the Baltics, so your answer was
completely unnecessary.
All I said was that Lithuania (and
the rest of the Baltics) are doing very well economically,
much better than when they were part of the Soviet Union.
You need to read more carefully.
don’t forget the term ‘humanitarian bombing’ which he only inspired…another dude coined the exact words (only further proof he was a mediocre writer)
otherwise, the adoration of this fool is one of the most depressing realities of political life here. (Granted, he’s much less popular in Slovakia)
also, in another example of elite hypocrisy, one of the main charges against Milos Zeman’s presidency(the main being him literally saying he does not wish a war with Russia and that’s why he is actively promoting trade with them – naturally, he is Putin’s slut, go figure..), is his, granted, excessive alcoholism and harsh bon mottism. With that old drunk Havel, who pissed himself on several occasions, it was considered ‘cute’.
“Climate is not an issue”
I mentioned climate as one issue in addition
to higher welfare payments in Germany, etc.
However, the fact that Poland is much farther north than
Austria or Hungary gives it a definite advantage.
For example, Poland was not in immediate danger
of being flooded by migrants in 2015 like Hungary and
Austria were. Hence, unlike Hungary, Poland didn’t have
to build a wall. Unlike the countries to the south, Poland
has access to the sea. The latter is a major advantage.
That’s not to say that geography is destiny but the country’s
location (incl. climate) does count.
Again, this is not exactly true. Especially when one looks at the contemporary dynamics in EU and NOT from mostly monetarists indices by Western economists.
I never claimed that you claimed that, governments of Baltic States, however, is a completely different story. It has as much of an economic driver behind Baltics’ paranoia as it has insanity.
In addition to losing 6 million of its citizens (3 million
Christians and 3 million Jews), Poland also lost territories
in the east as well two major cities Lvov and Vilnius. Lvov,
specifically, was a major university center where world-class
mathematics was being done (e.g., people like Banach or Stanislaw
Ulam who came to the U.S. and helped develop nuclear weapons.)
However, I’m not one to bemoan the loss of those territories.
Borders are never perfect but on the whole I think the European
borders today are more fair than those in the 1930s.
Re: the Polish-German issues – One way to think about it is
that since Charlemagne, i.e., in the last 1200 years, the history
of the Eastern Central Europe was dominated by the competition
between Slavia and Germania. By Germania I mean the territory
occupied by Germanics: 100 million German speakers plus 20
million Scandinavians. By Slavia I mean the (enormous) territory
occupied by the Slavs. There are roughly 240 million Slavs living
today compared to 120 million Germanics, 2:1 ratio. Based on the
population (and territory) ratio, the competition is one the Germanics
were destined to lose. In many ways WW II was the last desperate
attempt by Germany to win control over the Slavic territory, and the only
possible outcome was Germany’s loss. In 800 AD Charlemagne kept
the Germanics confined to the Elbe-Saale rivers (so called Limes Saxoniae).
But after his death, for 1200 years the Germanics kept pushing east
with the Western Slavs (Polabian Slavs, Bohemia, and Poland) bearing
the brunt of Germanic expansionism, the Drang nach Osten.
The Swedes, once they became fundamentalist Lutherans in the
1500s, also inflicted a lot of damage on Slavia, for about 250 years
in fact, so the Swedes also have a great deal to atone for. And they spent
WW II basically going to the beach and having fun while getting
obscenely rich on lucrative contracts with Nazi Germany.
Nevertheless, the 1200-year project for the Germanics to occupy
and impose their will on the Slavs finally came crashing down
in WW II. How could 100 million win over 240 million?
The Germans would have had to first kill 140 million Slavs
to achieve rough parity. Good luck with that! I realize I’m
obviously glossing over many details, e.g., the presence of the
Ottoman Turks who presented a mortal danger to both Slavia
and Hungary but I think the population and the territorial
ratio was to the Slavs’ advantage even 1000 years ago, so the
there was no doubt about the ultimate outcome even though
the Slavs’ main weakness (internal bickering) has taken its toll
over the centuries.
I think this may have something to do with
the small country vs large country dynamics.
There are traces of the same type of dynamics
in Lithuania’s attitude toward Poland. I think
the relationship has improved recently but several
years ago a couple of Polish journalists went to
Vilnius to investigate, and although generally
they found nothing wrong with Lithuanian
hospitality, they did encounter a waitress and
a couple of local men who acted suspicious.
They’d say, “Why are you coming here? What
do you want?” But most realize that Poland
left a lot of history in Vilnius (e.g., poet Mickiewicz),
and they have every right to visit. Similarly, the
Germans are welcome to visit Wrocław or Szczecin.
Someone with that job out to try to be at least a little respectful.
That is simply incorrect, immigration means miscegenation and replacing whites with non whites, homosexual marriage can come and go through the ages, however once the whites have race mixed then the white race is simply extinct forever.
Waste of time!
@bb
I hear you. Agree. In general, I always had and still have suspicion about “artsy” types.
You got an ethnically pure country for that.
According to people here, that is ideal, ergo Poland benefited from that.
Poland has more PT-91 and T-72s than it does Leopards:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Land_Forces#Equipment
Poland and Ukraine are jointly developing a MBT:
http://defence-blog.com/army/poland-and-ukraine-jointly-develop-new-main-battle-tank.html
Polish and Ukrainian defence companies have unveiled the new PT-17 main battle tank prototype during the MSPO-2017 defence exhibition. The new tank is an upgraded version of the Soviet T-72 MBT with NATO-standard ammunition.
Polish Zaklady Mechaniczne “Bumar – Labedy” S.A. and Ukrainian concern “UkrOboronProm” have agreed to a deal to jointly develop upgraded versions of the T-72 main battle tank (MBT) in April 2017. For the implementation of this project, UkrOboronProm has begun integration of the best Ukrainian technological developments: it has developed and supplied autoloader, a new engine, transmission, new 120mm main gun, fire control system, a system of dynamic protection, a demonstration tower.
Main purposes of modernization:
Increasing firepower and fire maneuver modernization;
Increasing survivability on battlefield;
Increasing mobility;
Increasing crew working comfort and extend mission duration.
The PT-17 is equipped with a 1,000 hp power pack, which includes an S-1000R engine. The manufacturer has stated that a 1,200 hp power pack is available as an optional upgrade.
The PT-17 tank is equipped with 120mm smooth-bore gun KBA-2 and autoloader for gun loading with fixed ammunition manufactured by the Ukrainian firm Kharkov Morozov Design Bureau. In order to be able to use 120mm NATO-standard fixed ammunition, the automatic loader of the gun is installed in an isolated self-contained compartment in the turret bustle. The level of armour protection of the automatic loader compartment is analogous to that of the Leopard and Abrams tanks.
The total allowance of ammunition of the tank includes 40 rounds, of which 22 are positioned in the automatic loader.
The PT-17 is equipped with the OBRA-3 system of laser warning receivers, which are linked to the vehicle’s smoke grenade launchers, and bar armour has been fitted over the turret bustle.
Yes and no. We don’t have much in the way of historical guilt, it’s true. We last saw war in 1814 (excluding the mostly peaceful annexation of Norway from 1814 to 1905), and our colonies were very small and short-lived (Saint Barthélemy being the best known). In the more recent past, we have also generally been a force for good on the world stage. Still, there are two common arguments in that spirit: (1) even if we weren’t involved in conquest and exploitation ourselves, we still piggybacked on other European countries that were and therefore should share the burden of colonial guilt, and (2) we avoided war and destruction by plain luck and therefore have an obligation to make room for the unfortunates of the world.
You are right, however, in the sense that other sources of guilt dominate over our perceived historical guilts. These are too numerous to go into, but I would point to our Lutheran tradition, our liberal and socialist traditions, the strong influence of cultural marxism since the 1960s, and maybe some others.
Of course. I don’t disagree with this at all.
GDP growth isn’t going to save you. It’s the cultural rot that destroys nations.
In fact a focus on GDP growth is one of the signs that cultural rot is well advanced.
You’re missing my point. If you lose the culture war you will end up losing the demographic war. It’s the loss of the culture war that creates the situation in which defeat in the demographic war is inevitable.
The acceptance of mass immigration is a symptom. It’s not the disease. If you concentrate on treating external symptoms without attacking the disease itself the patient will die.
A nation that surrenders on feminism, homosexuality and the trans madness will cease to reproduce and will willingly accept extinction.
On the other hand if you win the culture war you will win the demographic war.
It seems more and more obvious that Christianity is the crucial weakness of the West. Christianity in the West no longer exists as an actual religion but the civilisation-destroying elements within Christianity (like guilt, universalism and touchy-feely niceness) survived and they’re destroying us.
Agreed.
Not a solid argument.
This argument is already mitigated by the first point of being a force for good in the world stage.
The Swedes have no reason to feel guilty, same with Norwegians, etc. nobody cares about the Vikings other than to use them for sports mascots.
I’ve got in-laws in Sweden (Swedish ones) and I do feel bad that the traditional family unit is basically a thing of the past. My wife’s grandparents got married in one of those quaint little churches. All of my wife’s cousins have just a few kids between them all and I don’t think any are married. I don’t think people get married over there anymore right? They seem to kind of scoff at the idea; they just kind of live together and slip into some legally recognized union. I feel protective over Swedes (one of the most wonderful people in the world) and I don’t like people pushing nonsense on them or guilt-tripping them into self-destructive policies.
Peace.
If Poland recognizes fag marriage, then Ill be awful.
And it means the Catholic Church in Europe would be completely dead.
As I myself have almost gave up on religious Catholicism.
I dont see Catholicism or Christianity much, just Satan winning.
While I doubt some of the data up there,
its true younger generations are more open, especially towards US, westernization, faggotry,
abortions, etc.
All members of NATO will fall to the liberal disease.
Polish establishment has a messed up attitude toward being pro US in so many ways.
They refuse to even lift sanctions and grow a pair.
Let me tell you 50% of Poles think Western Democracy is a good thing. Thats 50% too much.
Poland alone can not win against Liberal and Neocon.
You have PO which is LiberalConservative.
PIS which is NationalConservative allied with Neocons.
Fertility rates are super low despite, being conservative.
Being conservative is NOT ENOUGH. Conservaitives destiny is to lose to pervertedLiberalism. Always! Thats what democracy is today.
There is a Jew called Friedman, he wants to rebuild a Miedzymorze type thing,
but with antiRussian hysteria, heavily pro American,
and a wedge to prevent Europe from being united.
Hes a typical Neocon, with Pale of Settlement thinking.
Majority of those Polish thinktank organizations in the US are CIA, pro US governments, etc.
with neocon input masquereding trying to get Catholic conservatives, and right wing to support them.
“In the more recent past, we have also generally been a force for good on the world stage.”
Dag Hammersjkold was a real force for good, alright.
Kinda true. But since the end of Soviet Bloc,
Poles are more open/okay to all neighbours,
Germans, others, and even Russians as people.
Is that good? bad? Ill say its okay.
On the other hand PIS may seem populist for liberals and internationalists,
but they were the major parties group, not really populist, just resisting the Soros, Merkel types, etc. Their Catholic views may piss of the Freemasons in the West. Kukiz was more populist.
You can NOT have Catholic or Slavic right wing parties allied with Neoconjackasses or Liberal perverts.
The country will fall if it continues.
Slowly rainbow flags, then foreign troops, then abortions, then womens rights, and it will keep coming in. Look how many American movies are running.
Already 30% of the Population is Liberal or leaning. Look at the voters of PO, Nowoczesna, etc.
Honestly half the population is like German or US wannabes in some ways.
Im not happy with whats happening, and im pessimistic with this garbage democracy
and little independance.
Its quite the opposite.
In faith:
Poles are the most faithful in Christianity (Catholicism). Larger amount of weekly Church goers,
larger amount are “more serious” types, compared to Russia.
In fact no large Western nation comes close in Europe.
Its the Russians who mark down 50 or 75% Orthodox (depending on poll), while having tiny amount of weekly Church goers, most of them do it for cultural reasons.
Now as for organized religion, the priests can be active in Poland, but this isnt 1500s anymore.
Lots of people want the Church away from government.
(PS. Im not saying Poland is better, in fact the cultural part which Russians have more (slightly) than Poland is important so society doesnt crumble. And even Poland is culturally kilometers ahead of West)… then there is weird thing where 1/3 of Russians like Lenin despite claiming to be Orthodox..
Isnt that strange as hell?! (no its not).
NATO moves in, liberals start winning,
and you get an Indian and homosexuals as leaders in Ireland,
you get a Lesbian leaderr in Serbia.
Divide and conquer is Anglo speciality and its very difficult to stop,
unless you are something like Russia or China.
“GDP growth isn’t going to save you”
I agree to the extent that excessive affluence generally
results in decadence. Case in point: Western Europe and
the United States have become corrupted by their
power (e.g., centuries of colonialism) and affluence.
But life is about optimization, not maximization.
Hence I would argue that Poland’s GDP per capita
(at about $30,000) is still suboptimal. Once it
reaches $35-40,000, I’ll be satisfied that Poland
has reached an optimal GDP level, and it’s time
to focus on more important indices like National Happiness
Quotient or something along these lines.
Putin: Communist ideology similar to Christianity, Lenin’s body like saintly relics
Conservatives are liberals. There are left-leaning liberals and there are right-leaning liberals who call themselves conservatives. But they’re all liberals.
The entire existing political establishment in the West needs to be rejected. It sounds like the situation in Poland is much the same.
All members of NATO will fall to the liberal disease.
That’s what NATO is for. It exists to enforce liberalism.
That’s a reasonable position to take.
Few people know about it, but in 1942 the Swedish and the Soviet fleet were in a real naval war in the Baltic (though without much results). This is not for “guilt” just an interesting fact.
Few people know about it, but in 1942 the Swedish and the Soviet fleet were in a real naval war in the Baltic (though without much results).
Source please. Not challenging you, just want to learn about it.
Maaan, two Polish right-wing atheists on Russian’s blog. What are the chances 😀 😀
Pretty much support everything you have written.
” At Smolensk the commander of the Air Force entered the cockpit (this was already against regulations), and pressured the captain to land regardless of the circumstances.”
He had not. You are repeating the leftist propaganda. There is a probability that he entered the cockpit, but it is not 100% sure.
As for the pressure, the captain said already before that he will try to approach for the landing. He even said so to the president’s guy “we will try to make one approach, but we probably fail. ” Then he continued to point that plane has no fuel to hang over the airport and that president has to make to decide, which backup airport to choose.
Then they went on with their original decision to make and approach. Then they decided to break the approach using automatic pilot – a fatal mistake, it seems.
It is real. If someone is liberal and thinks “well, it’s ok for Poland to being just a province of EU”, then he laughs at “Slavic identity”. However, when someone is nationalist, then he will at least accept we are Slavs and because of that we have peculiar Slavic traits.
We got even Eurovision entry song called in original “we the Slavs”
THis takes the discussion out of context. From my point of view, I have first seen newses about Germans claiming we are just taking money from EU and not contributing by taking the refugees in, then about how Poland should be ashamed by how racist and nationalist we are (statements made by Germans), and THEN reparations suddenly started to be a thing. Seems to me like a gigantic “f* you” shown to all those German journalists and politicians trying to lecture us.
I admit it was a bit misguided and emotional – and I might be wrong of course – but this is how it looked from my perspective.
In English I dont know of publications on this subject. In Russian:
Почтарев, А. Цена взаимных отступлений от принципов Морской сборник. – 1994
the summary of the article ( in Russian):
https://navy-chf.livejournal.com/2812767.html
Swedish Navy hunting for Soviet submarines, and probably sank one Soviet submarine. In addition, the Swedes sank one of their own submarine (another Swedish submarine was lost on mines delivered against Soviet submarines). Soviet submarines sank a number of Swedish merchant ships ( in most cases ships supply Germany)
I’d say the high support for the liberal attitudes basically is due to the state-sponsored propaganda. For the years all the medie were speaking with the same voice, constantly instilling a message that it’s not OK to dislike gays. They were also all in love with the west, with their nigger attitude of apeing everything coming from the west. If the shit eating was fashionable in the west, some of our so called “liberal elites” would be the most eager shit-eaters of them all.
However, the fact is that something started to change – first right-wing medias appeared and survived the attack by the government; and then right-wing party took over and cleansed the TV from the leftwing idiots.
That makes me somewhat more optimistic. Youngstas are less willing to admire the west, because basically as some point of development, they seem stop to matter that much. When you are dirt poor, earn 500$ per month and your neighbour earns 5000$, well, that’s huge. But when you earn 2500$ and you neighbour earns 6000$, that’s different – and when you earn 6000$ and your neighbour 10000$, you just start to see that maybe he is a bit richer, but he is also fat, disgusting and should take care of his own business instead of lecturing us.
SO that’s the two factors: media are no longer 100% liberal; and the younger population stopped to care about the west.
As for the German: this is pretty much common attitude to the Germans:
Thanks.
Absorbing ‘a gigantic “f* you”’ does not cost Germany a single pfennig but apparently gives Poles lost of satisfaction. You won’t get a single pfennig form Germany. Do Poles realize they are opening themselves to demands for Jewish reparations? This will be the only real outcome of the operation called “German reparations.” This was the only reason somebody came up with it. You are being played like a fiddle and your political class is a bunch of fools and probably traitors.
A brother once stated; conservatives are simply liberals on a time delay. The conclusion is inescapable once one observes things over an extended period of time.
Peace.
Utu, I am not saying it was wise. I would say rather someone thought it would be a great idea to say “stop demanding we conform to your ideas of how UE should be run because we owe you something. We owe you nothing”.
Also, there is no basis for Jewish reperations. Jewish citizens of Poland who died during the holocaust were POLISH citizens, and Israel or all other Jewish organizations demanding reparations can go a f* themselves, as there is no basis for demanding reparations from Polish government for things done to Polish citizens by foreign government. Also, if Jewish citizens died, the only successor to their property is Polish government. End of argument.
Oh, come on!! ABBA. dominating most high school dancing parties in 1970s in USSR (Bee Gees being second, but than again Australia has it coming for that). IKEA, moving part of its manufacturing to China. This is down right inhumane.
You mean in the context of this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_submarine_Baltic_Sea_campaign_in_1942
That’s interesting indeed, I had never heard of that, didn’t even know there was an active Soviet submarine force at that time.
It’s that one iirc:
I thought that was satire tbh.
The authors claimed it was a satire, however (a) they made bunch of other videos about slavic soul – just hear the “introduction” to his album (b) I’ve heard that Donatan himself has panslavic ideas (“we are the same people, of the same ethnic group: we are Slavs” he stated once), he feels half-Russian, considers Catholic Church a propagator of hostile culture…
I have an impression that there is a puny, but growing sympathy for the idea that we are the Slavs, separate from the westerners. I admit it might be skewed a bit, because I got it mainly from reading hundreds of comments under Percival and Percival Schuttenbach videos 😀 (you know, the band known for the Witcher soundtrack).
I was panslavist once, for a short time btw
E.g. this piece is not a satire for sure (note Donatan is a guy who is producing this, the fat guy with a horn appearing in the “we are slavic” video.
And finally Percival claims they were cheated by Donatan and they do not want cooperate with him anymore.
If Lithuania was such a shinning example of economic success how come hundreds of thousands of its young people live and work in the UK, France, Germany etc.
I’m also Polish (urodzony w Polsce – born and raised
in Marxist-ruled Poland) although I have now lived
in the United States for a number of decades. Witam!
For at least two reasons, 1. Lithuania’s economic success
is very recent (last 5-7 years); 2. Its WEALTH (rather than GDP)
per capita is still extremely low compared to W. Europe.
(Both factors apply to Poland as well). I’ll have another post
referring to wealth in a few minutes
Success has been shiny but it is still behind, and access to the West is very easy.
RIght-wing atheist? Because there were quite a few poles, but (a) not many (b) atheists are small minority in Poland (c) right-wing atheists are small minority of atheists and that’s why I was surprised 😀
How interesting! We had another clash with the USSR 10 years later, when a Swedish spy plane was shot down over the Baltic. (They also shot down the search-and-rescue plane for good measure.) The official Swedish line was always that it was out on a training mission, but some years ago, we learnt that it was actually spying on behalf of NATO.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalina_affair
The craziness of it is that I remember listening to ABBA in Pakistan in the early 80’s – they were a hit all the way out there.
Peace.
In the American context I’d describe myself as
middle-of-the-road (although I used to be a Democrat
in my younger years. In the U.S. there is a saying,
“If you’re not a liberal at 20, you haven’t got a heart;
if you are not a conservative at 40, you haven’t got a head”).
As to atheism, no I wouldn’t describe myself as an atheist.
Think Christianity mixed in with Advaita Vedanta and
Buddhism. This type of mixture is slowly becoming popular
in the U.S.
I can imagine, heh. I once heard an ABBA song in some old Soviet film, but I sadly can’t remember which.
Re: GDP growth is not going to save you.
I previously referred to GDP per capita, and how
Poland’s GDP per capita is still suboptimal (at
$30,000). I tend to divide countries into underdeveloped,
developed, and overdeveloped because I’m always
looking for Aristotelian optimality. Overdeveloped
countries (such as the U.S. and W. Europe) have done
a tremendous amount of damage to the world through
environmental degradation (e.g., Germany has one of
the lowest levels of biodiversity in Europe) and through
slavery and resource extraction. That’s one reason
I champion Central Europe (mostly V4)
as an optimal level of development. Belgium was a
colonialist power as recently as 1960, and it has the
nerve to tell Poland how to run its affairs. Germany
practiced slavery as recently as 1945. Also as someone
who thinks highly of Buddhism, I cannot stand countries
with huge national egos (mostly W. Europe and U.S.).
Having said that, I think wealth per capita is a better
measure of the country’s economic development than GDP
per capita. Here, compared to W. Europe, the V4 countries
still have next to nothing, and Eastern Europe(Russia, Ukraine,
Belarus) virtually nothing. When was the last time Britain or
France were completely destroyed? Not in centuries, if ever.
For the last 500 years the W. European families have been
accumulating wealth through industrialization, resource
extraction from colonialized countries, and slave trade. The
Slavic countries are still recovering from being almost
completely destroyed by the Germanic countries. That includes
Sweden. For 250 years (very roughly from its conversion to
Lutheranism to the 18th century) Sweden kept invading Slavic
countries, esp. Poland (read about Deluge) and Russia. Even today
on a per capita basis Sweden is the world’s foremost “merchant
of death” in terms of arms exports (so much for moral leadership!).
In conclusion, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe need
to emphasize economic development for a few more years because
they still have so little.
Agreed. Being top wealth is not so good.
So I think something like the GDP PPP / capita of Poland to Italy is okay.
Once you get to US/Germany/Sweden levels, society is becoming more focused on money, and little else.
Visegrad and East Europe, should get a bit richer (but not too the top)..
I think from Czechia/Poland to Russia we can afford to have more children, with so much land.
Atm the rates are only 1.3-1.7 fertility. Also make sure not to become to Westernized,
but keep eye on technology not to fall behind.
Also, Russia PPP GDP per capita is almost $29K (2018 estimate), so almost $30,000 as well, which is by the way almost identical to Latvia. So Russia even on average is not that far behind at all… So I’m not sure what’s your point exactly.
Lithuania is generally not that different from most ex-Eastern Bloc countries west of Ukraine… So Lithuania is not a huge positive outlier, nor is Russia a negative one.
I must say that I’m surprised that Lithuania’s GDP per capita is higher than Estonia’s (well, actually identical and not in nominal though).
You sure like to dramatize. You also appear to be know-it-all on all things Polish, especially what Poles should think or do about things that directly concern them.
The moment ABBA’s Arrival and self-titled albums were released in USSR in 1976 or 77 that was it. Of course, ABBA was known well before, but first those albums then their concert in Warsaw on TV–Soviet Union went insane. Jokes aside, and my progressive rock and fusion heavy fan background aside, ABBA are immortal. Still have most of their albums in both mine and wife’s cars. Nazia Hassan with her Disco Deewane was huge in Baku in 1980. Charming.
Three major West’s Soviet (Russian) virginity-losing pieces of music in 1970s:
Honorable mention: Smokie.
I distinctly remember me stoping having sex with pillows and having it with real girls in between three of those, I think. ABBA was absolutely huge and it is simply beautiful music. It is also a Europe which doesn’t exist anymore, that is why sometimes it hurts to listen to them–sweet pain.
Good stuff! Actually, I was surprised later in life when I discovered Bob Marley and my parents told me they were listening to that way back in the day in Karachi. Did Marley get play in Russia?
Peace.
In USSR, well he was but he was not, as was Reggae, that huge. UB40 concerts in Moscow, IIRC, in mid-80s were sold out. USSR was always more, if we talk about majority of people, oriented towards either top-notch art/progressive rock and hard’n’heavy staff. You had on several orders of magnitude larger probability to hear in 1976 or 1977 from any window songs by Rainbow or Genesis than by Marley.
Hmm, interesting, thanks. I have a hard time believing though that panslavism will become really viable as a political ideology given the asymmetries between Poland and Russia. And Balkan peoples seem quite different in mentality, culture etc. (iirc commenter AP doesn’t even consider them “real” Slavs).
Yes, the countries of Europe had their own thing going back then, and it came through in their pop music, even when artists did their best to sound American. ABBA, for instance, tried hard to sound like the Beach Boys, but their songs are still firmly planted in their time and place. One reason I feel so protective of Slavic culture is that it still has some of that European sensibility.
I can tell you one thing–ABBA sounded way better than Beach Boys and like Beach Boys were immediately recognizable from the first seconds of anything they sang. Their music was deeply Swedish folkish (after all Bjorn started playing in the Hootenannies which was Swedish folk band) and, in a larger musical sense European. They never even remotely approached blues. Just to demonstrate it–the only, to my knowledge, instrumental in ABBA’s arsenal–Intermezzo . It is as European as Bach, Mozart or Tchaikovsky.
https://youtu.be/b6kShipYwCk
Agreed, but a focus on wealth soon becomes an addiction. And consumerism is very seductive. You have to be very very cautious. Young people are incredibly prone to abandon traditional values in favour of money, consumer goods and fashion trends.
The bigger danger is the embrace of western pop culture that always accompanies increased wealth.
I’m surprised nobody mentioned the popularity of Boney M in the USSR.
………Lithuanians biggest trading partner is….wait for it……………Russia!
Just shows what a fu**ed in head dumb POS you are. Cretin
For a micro-state, Lithuania and the rest of the Baltics do appallingly for an european state you dipshit. Imagine how bad it would be if Lithuania didn;t have Russia trade or actually spent more than 1% of it GDP on defence…despite being a scumbag country constantly trying to incite war in the region.
Remittances
And what you described is already happening in Poland to some degree (the consumerism and materialism). with funds pumping in, plus a decent interior economy,
people forget their morals, and forget the debt part, and tons of foreign businesses showing up.
I checked: the latest estimate of Poland’s GDP (PPP) per capita
in 2018 is $31,000 vs $29,000 for Russia and $34,000 for Lithuania.
And unlike Russia Poland has virtually no oil or gas.
I lived in Warsaw for about a decade until last summer.
There is a visible rise in non-European migrants there, especially hanging around in the Zlote Tarasy shopping centre. There’s also a push in advertising to normalise non-whites – makeup and clothing companies being the main ones.
There is a massive urban/rural divide on things like politics, abortion and homosexuality. If, as in most countries, public opinion follows the cities then look for more ‘Western’ attitudes and liberalised laws on all these things. The PiS government will also encourage the pendulum to swing back the other way when people get tired of them. They aren’t so much nationalists as a mixed bag of contradictory and messy ideas.
The real reason that Poland will be brought in line is economic. The Polish economy is something along the lines of 45% foreign controlled, 45% state controlled and 10% Polish and private. Most of that foreign ownership is German. You can be as based and nationalist as you want, but it’s largely the Germans and the EU (through state funds) that will call the tune through economic control.
It’s sad to say about a country I love, but Poland is largely treated as a colony of Europe and not an integral part.
It’s exactly the other way around. The more Germans have invested in Poland the more careful they have to be to not lose their investments.
EU funds – very soon Poland will pay more than it receivs.
It’s getting so one is more surprised to discover that the female leader of any country has children than to find out she is a Lesbian.