Russia Needs to Block Western Subversion Networks

Soon after my shadowbanning on Twitter, I made some comments on this issue to Artyom Alexandrov, a journalist for a Russian news website:

This practice [shadowbanning] blunts the growth of “unhandshakeworthy” viewpoints, while not being serious enough to provoke a mass outflow to other platforms. Naturally, if geopolitical relations between the US and Russia will continue to worsen, we may expect the cleansing of the Simonyans and Solovievs as propagandists and agents of influence of a hostile Power. As I understand, this is broadly already happening with respect to Iran.

As I also told the journalist, Russia doesn’t have any principled position on Internet freedom of speech – Roskomnadzor already blocks bookmakers (including predictions markets like PredictIt), some political websites (mostly nationalist), pirate websites including LibGen and Sci-Hub (something that even most Western countries don’t; a truly absurd state of affairs, considering that virtually no piracy there hurts Russian producers), and of course Telegram – it consequently makes no sense not to use the opportunity to block Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube, and other major Western websites as well, on the Chinese model. I go on to comment:

These social networks don’t guarantee free speech to anyone apart from liberals, they are also agents of influence and data repositories of a Power that is quite hostile to us. People who really need access to them can always use a VPN. Besides, we already have [Google and Facebook] analogues in the form of Yandex and Vkontakte. We have the technical capabilities to create analogues for the others.

I see absolutely no reason to let Western subversion networks that repress Russian POC such as myself to steal market share from Russian companies. 150 million people is more than enough to support a vigorous, self-sustained digital ecosystem. These networks are also a security risk, it’s not a secret that they feel all their data to the CIA, the NSA, and other intelligence agencies, which can and very likely is being used to carry out espionage and blackmail.

However, on a wider note, it is now increasingly clear that Western influence and English language knowledge is the main vector through which the forces of Chaos seep into this world. We need to implement Boko Haram, there is absolutely no need for 90-95% of the population (i.e. normies) to know English. The Realms of Man need to quarantine it off like a plague zone, contacts limited to strictly business or scientific (not cultural) exchanges.

Anatoly Karlin is a transhumanist interested in psychometrics, life extension, UBI, crypto/network states, X risks, and ushering in the Biosingularity.

 

Inventor of Idiot’s Limbo, the Katechon Hypothesis, and Elite Human Capital.

 

Apart from writing booksreviewstravel writing, and sundry blogging, I Tweet at @powerfultakes and run a Substack newsletter.

Comments

  1. Please keep off topic posts to the current Open Thread.

    If you are new to my work, start here.

  2. eugyppius says

    I have been making this point about the toxicity of the Anglophone sphere for years. You only see it when you get out. On the small scale it’s clearest of all: I think the broad geopolitical view is complicated by a lot of other forces. Here (Germany) the big cities with their Anglophone student populations had Floyd protests, even some half-hearted troublemaking as in Stuttgart (migrants posturing on social media). Biggest protests in foreigner-heavy Berlin obviously. Get out to the countryside where the English world is far more distant, and most don’t consume any English-language media, and they‘re even more dismissive of this crap than I am. It’s also true on a person-to-person basis, colleagues with the worst English are by far the most sensible about all these questions. There‘s no reason for most people to bother with English, the empire has a political cancer, we should wall it off.

  3. Jalaludin says

    The media coordinates its articles in english as well, so there’s no use if, for instance, everyone in Latin America unlearns english, the media will import and translate it to the masses.
    It’s even worse now, because the people will have nowhere to escape the propaganda.

    Also, defending not learning english is really complicated, as a non native speaker myself can attest: if you don’t know this language, you have basically no access to any information, be it good or bad, correctc or incorrect. Knowledge is extremely limited in any other language because it’s mainly produced in english, and almost never translated after that. This is a fact for both historic, modern and present information.

    But I agree with the analogous internet services and companies as a shield because that’s guaranteeing the sovereignty of information – and that’s what should be done in the first place regarding the media and academia.

  4. no need for 90-95% of the population (i.e. normies) to know English

    People who don’t learn more than 1-2 additional languages, are idiots though, even in their own language – as Goethe said.

    So assuming that we were dictators, and don’t want the population to be idiots (although to be honest as rulers we would probably want them to be idiots) – what language would be the best one to teach in school?

    Maybe Ancient Greek and Japanese.

  5. Vishnugupta says

    Agree with most of this post except the banning of English part.

    Singapore is an english speaking country but hardly a bastion of western liberalism.

    An order of magnitude more Russians speak English today than in 1992 but a much greater percentage support conservative right of centre policies than in 1992.

    Infact the more Russians and others speak English the more the top 2-5% people who can actually think for themselves will be able to appreciate the Russian POV.

    The rest are sheep anyway and their opinions hardly count for anything.

  6. Jalaludin says

    I can say with certainty that, if I hadn’t learned english I would be just another retard mobster following the media’s maze of lies and petty political theatres.

    I would probably be very far to the left, because that’s the only stuff you have available for consuming normally, even though I’ve always had a tendency for a right wing angle on the social matters, I’ve flerted with Libertarianism social position (allowed exactly because it’s bad), and had always thought that Smith and Ricardo, Mises and Freedman were right wing economists of right wing economic schools – which is also wrong.

    I thought Capitalism was the default state of the human beings, I had no knowledge about the evils of Communism, that politics mattered, that science was always right and academia a realm of knowledge.

    All of these misconceptions that were planted in me by the media and the educational system were dysmantled because I knew how to read in english, and the antidote to those viruses only existed in english.

    I must say that learning english was the most important thing to have ever happened in my life, and one of the most important things one can do right now in this day and age.

  7. We need to implement Boko Haram, there is absolutely no need for 90-95% of the population (i.e. normies) to know English.

    Yeah, sort of. English is a problem, but, on the other hand, English has become today’s Latin. I mean for academic papers, there’s no other language that does it.

    Also for cultural products, things made in English have a broader reach. Hell, AK writes in English and not in Russian for a reason!

    I don’t know what’s the solution. It’s true that countries where less people know English, appear less pozzed. Someone mentioned Germany, and, I don’t know if it’s because of communism or because less people speak English, but the East of Germany is slightly less pozzed than the rest of the country. But seeing from rap-loving, BLM-loving, LGBT-loving German young people today, not for very long.

  8. I think normies are normies because they are normies, i.e., it’s what they are, not because they know or don’t know English. They would still be normies if they spoke only Esperanto.

    “Normies don’t wake up by definition, they believe what’s normal and what’s normal is what the TV says.” (aeoli)

    I think learning new languages, even if rudimentary, is good, it actually liberates you and makes you find more information, not less.

    That said, the ideas circulating in the Anglosphere are the worst today, and they arrive first where the majority of people speak English. That’s why Anglo countries are the most screwed-up.

    I think more important than “banning English” would be banning Hollywood, etc, and focusing on creating your own national cultural content. Yes at first it will suck, but with time and practice it gets better.

  9. The Big Red Scary says

    Since almost everyone is an idiot anyways, and no one ever learned a language as a consequence of having been required to study it, you are proposing a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist.

  10. Singapore is not a bastion of fail and pozz because the political elite there are a bunch of illiberal Chinese boomers, and pozzing it up doesn’t benefit the PAP’s grip on power. Talk to a typical Singaporean student at one of the national universities and they have the same views as your typical liberal university student stateside or anywhere else in the Anglosphere.

  11. I like to drive home the point that there are no liberals in the US anymore.

    Modern US liberals have more in common with Marxist theoreticians from the Frankfurt School (e.g. Critical Theory as the framework for socio-cultural analysis) and assorted Jewish Bolshevik ideologues/activists than they have with classical British liberals of yore.

    The dominant American spirit is Bolshevik, not liberal.

  12. Passer by says

    The key to do this is to empower multipolarity – that is – the more other countries are important, the more their languages will be important too. And their information networks and industries. Which will in turn marginalise or significantly weaken the anglo ones.

    To bring down the anglo info dominance, everyone else must be empowered. China, India, Turkey, Iran, Latin America, Arab World, etc.

    That should be done in international organisations too.

    The end point is to have chinese, indian, hispanic, brazilian, arab, russian based and owned etc. youtubes, twitters, googles, facebooks and regional/national internets to displace the dominant anglo ones today.

    To do that within the EU Russia can support the french and possibly germans too, to back initiatives for elevating french and german within the EU.

    Multipolarity and regionalisation is the way to beat this. Along with measures to empower the quality of local education systems. Media cooperation between like minded countries (it already exists between Russia and China), etc.

  13. Maïkl Makfaïl says

    I think the reason why Facebook google and twitter are not blocked in Russia is because the Russian authorities fear that if Yandex and VK find themselves in a position of monopoly they will stop innovating. Compétition is a useful thing in IT. I think a better thing to do would be for the Russian government to subsidize its local it companies and help them to conquer market shares at home and abroad.

  14. eugyppius says

    Nobody is saying learning English isn’t useful or educational. There are just bigger, population-wide effects when a) everyone does it and b) the Anglophone media is saturated with cultural virions. That widespread English knowledge is an avenue for crazy political cancer is just inarguable: sure it brings some good as a lingua franca, but also lot of bad. If you cultivate a non-English culture, a great part of the apparent disadvantages will be ameliorated. (In some cases with the development of secondary, alternative regional linguae francae.) Yes, here as well the media runs articles that are basically straight translations from the NYT. The market for that stuff is people who are already up to their ears in the Anglophone world. There is also a segment of our media that is more domestic, not about the American democratic party, and the bigger that gets, the less we have to read about transphobia in the Süddeutsche Zeitung every day (trans being a particularly pronounced symptom of Anglo media influence).

  15. “Liberals” in English means “people who obey the TV (or internet equivalent, e.g. Twitter).”

    Scottish Enlightenment/Founding Father/etc. liberalism isn’t any part of our culture anymore. True.

    But nor are Adorno or Althusser or [insert any Jewish commie]—whom not even the top .1% of our literal Marxists read.

    We are way too stupid for any of that.

    The average Russian is stupid in a better way and should probably be protected from our influence.

  16. In the end, people will learn the language that’s the most useful for their prospects. So that turns it into a simple horserace between how quickly American culture can metastasise around the world and how quickly America falls and English becomes a less useful/universal language compared to, say, Mandarin. Things will probably descend into multipolar regional spheres of linguistic/cultural power — people in the CIS countries and maybe CEE will probably find Russian the most useful second language, whereas people in Africa might find use in learning the language of their new Chinese overlords.

    With their brand of mindless consumerism, America really did discover the first workable recipe for a single global culture. If their empire wasn’t on the decline, I think it could have actually worked, and they could have eventually attained cultural hegemony. But they screwed it up, thank God. I do get a kick out of Europeans being so desperate to mimic the depraved schizophrenic spasms of a dying society.

  17. Swedish Family says

    Relevant Mr. Scientism thread from November:

    Once you understand that the America-led ‘free’ internet represents an all-out attack on global sovereignty – the apotheosis of US imperialism – the hysteria around Chinese technology makes much more sense. China supplies the only real alternative.

    The importance of network hardware is that control over hardware would give the US control over local laws. That is, if there was no alternative, the US (and allies) could have used restrictions on hardware exports to coerce other countries into adopting the ’right’ regulations.

    The fact that you can get your hardware from China means that the US can no longer use tech to coerce countries to adopt its favored laws and regulations. Without the Chinese alternative, the US could’ve told anyone without a ‘free’ internet that they can’t have modern telecoms. With the Chinese alternative available, the US has little recourse against ‘cybersovereignty’, data localization laws, etc.

    Even if countries still use equipment from the US and its allies, they can threaten to use Chinese equipment if US demands become to onerous. If states can freely implement laws and regulations over the internet without the US interference that US control over hardware would allow, then they can privilege local services over US-based services (Google, Facebook, etc) or demand greater control over US-based services.

    The ‘free’ internet is a classic power asymmetry play. The US knows most states cannot provide real alternatives to US services, so it demands a ‘level playing field’ for its giant corporations to mercilessly crush tiny local enterprises. States seek to privilege local players.

    The internet threatens sovereignty in a way that print and broadcast media never did, because it‘s capable of completely undermining state-level gatekeeping unless it’s regulated. The vision of a ‘free’ internet the US pushes is just an internet without any NATIONAL gatekeepers.

    The ’free’ internet would be dominated primarily by US companies and content (and generally by its developed world allies), promoting liberal values. Other nations wouldn’t be allowed any legal recourse against this onslaught. Control over hardware would’ve ensured this.

    [Lightly edited for readability. //SF]

  18. Swedish Family says

    I must say that learning english was the most important thing to have ever happened in my life, and one of the most important things one can do right now in this day and age.

    This is always true of learning any reasonably distant language.

    Agree with most of your post, though. Knowing English well also means being better fit to seek out the truth behind whatever “global news” your local media tries to shove down your throat.

  19. Scottish Enlightenment/Founding Father/etc. liberalism isn’t any part of our culture anymore. True.

    But nor are Adorno or Althusser or [insert any Jewish commie]—whom not even the top .1% of our literal Marxists read.

    Adorno, Marcuse, and their countless co-ethnic imports from NS Germany and the Russian Empire were Jewish Bolsheviks and US sensibilities today reflect their coming to power, first in finance (they funded Woodrow Wilson who in turn signed the very Jewish Federal Reserve into law), the entertainment industry, the press, and higher education. You don’t really need to pin down to a single ideology. They completely displaced British-derived classical liberalism that made the US great.

    For comparison’s sake, there was a bloody civil war and the losing side (the south) was able to build monuments honoring its leaders and even keep Negroes from infecting the body politics of the south, or mixing with whites.

    Today’s environment is more repressive than the bloody aftermath of a civil war, let that sink in.

  20. Swedish Family says

    I think more important than “banning English” would be banning Hollywood, etc, and focusing on creating your own national cultural content. Yes at first it will suck, but with time and practice it gets better.

    Or better: put forward a modern Hays Code. No way Hollywood would dare flout that if China and Russia got in on the act. (Better still: chances are it would spur creativity.)

  21. Hyperborean says

    People who don’t learn more than 1-2 additional languages, are idiots though, even in their own language – as Goethe said.

    So assuming that we were dictators, and don’t want the population to be idiots (although to be honest as rulers we would probably want them to be idiots) – what language would be the best one to teach in school?

    Maybe Ancient Greek and Japanese.

    Powerful comment.

  22. Passer by says

    Btw, on the issue of multipolarity, the latest IMF GDP growth estimates are up.

    Biggest winner due to corona in relative terms is China. (NATO already warned about that).

    Biggest loser is the US and Western Europe.

    Non-western world gains in relative terms. Russia gains too vis a vis US and Western Europe.

    That is compared to the old before corona estimates from the end of 2019.

  23. Russian is stupid

    It’s nothing to boast about, but average Russian people have a higher educational level, than average Americans.

    And the more educated subsection of people in Russia, have more basic knowledge of Marxism, than in America, and also more knowledge of British enlightenment.

    Marxism by the way is partly derived from the British enlightenment, which Marx was studying every day in the British Museum reading room – there is not much opposition between the ideologies; Marxism is a part offshoot of the British enlightenment, and the best criticisms of him were also derived from this tradition.

    Marx’s ideas are a lot of the time based in Adam Smith, Locke, Ricardo, etc, and Marx’s writings cannot be understand by people who do not have a strong knowledge of those earlier authors.

    You won’t understand a sentence of Marx, if you have not read carefully Adam Smith, Locke – as well as, of course and most importantly, Hegel.

    Without a background of knowledge of those writers, then Marxism is just empty sloganizing.

    (Just as you won’t understand anything of Nietzsche, if you did not study first Schopenhauer. And you will not understand anything of Schopenhauer, without a bit of knowledge of Kant. And for Kant, it’s useful to know some of David Hume, etc).

    There is an amusing semi-literacy in Russia that we have the politicians who use the most neoliberal (i.e. Scottish Enlightenment originated) vocabulary of any politicians in the world, but usually in “creative” ways which show a lack of understanding of theories the terminology was invented to fit into.

    So heads of Russian (government funded) space industries, were whiny about SpaceX for “dumping”. (But heads of a government funded agencies, which is trying to compete with private companies in America, for American government contracts- are itself a kind of dumping).

    https://rusvesna.su/sites/default/files/skrin2_24.jpg

    If you look at today – Putin is saying voting on the constitutional amendments, will increase the country’s stability to (external) shocks.

    So Putin use pure vocabulary from classical economics, but such neoliberal vocabulary in used in “creative” new context of resetting his terms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_(economics)

    Ideas originating from neoclassical economic theory, are used for giving “objectivity” to his political preferences.

    https://i.imgur.com/ns83Iwf.jpg

  24. Hyperborean says

    When I read things in Scandinavian languages, it becomes very clear that the dominance of English is warping the languages.

    Aside from all the English loanwords, especially for “modern” topics, there are times when even the grammar becomes distorted when it clashes with English – as I have noticed occur even in some Danish state media articles.

  25. AnonFromTN says

    We need to implement Boko Haram, there is absolutely no need for 90-95% of the population (i.e. normies) to know English.

    Globohomo-style BS. Knowledge of English does not make any person a slave of the Empire and the rest of globohomo gang. Lots of perfectly normal people resisting globohomo speak English, some as the mother tongue, many more as the second language. What’s more, the English of Russian libtards, Ukrainian Nazis, and their ilk is in most cases pathetic.

    Yes, globohomo sites like FB, Twitter, or YouTube are based on English, but it is them that are crap, not the language they use.

  26. AnonFromTN says

    It’s nothing to boast about, but average Russian people have a higher educational level, than average Americans.

    Considering how ignorant an average American is, this, indeed, is nothing to boast about.

  27. The Realms of Man need to quarantine it off like a plague zone, contacts limited to strictly business or scientific (not cultural) exchanges

    Dugin said exactly the same thing some twenty years ago.

  28. Europe Europa says

    It often surprises me how clueless Americans are about Britain considering it is an English-speaking former colony, I think a lot would struggle to tell you what country the English language originates from.

  29. The Alarmist says

    For many of the foreigners in Germany, the English language is the common communication skill they bring to the table from day one: Why struggle to learn yet another language, despite it being the language of the host nation, when you can go straight to work with the English skills you already have in varying degrees?

    The problem isn’t English speakers per se, rather it is Ausländers in general who use English for convenience who are the problem; the Brits and Americans, particularly those in Germany, are for once in recent history not the foreigners of whom Germans should be most wary.

  30. Mary Marianne says

    This is a fact for both historic, modern and present information.

    The historic part is not true. The modern and present part is.

    Before WW1 & WW2 happened, a lot of information — whether news, scientific papers or otherwise — was still being produced in local languages such as German, French, Russian, etc. It was only after the USA became the most dominant economic power after WW2 (with about 50% of the world’s GDP in their hands) that English truly began to dominate everything on the international stage and this was only exacerbated by the rise of the internet in conjunction with the fall of the Soviet Union, which left the USA as the sole world hegemon from the 1990s onwards.

    The rest of us have simply become lazy. If we want to cut out the cancerous anglosphere, then we need to start producing our own information in our own languages again. It’s probably already too late for my country though; 99% of our population knows English and even the dumbest bricks here speak it adequately.

  31. Swedish Family says

    The key to do this is to empower multipolarity – that is – the more other countries are important, the more their languages will be important too. And their information networks and industries. Which will in turn marginalise or significantly weaken the anglo ones.

    To bring down the anglo info dominance, everyone else must be empowered. China, India, Turkey, Iran, Latin America, Arab World, etc.

    That should be done in international organisations too.

    The end point is to have chinese, indian, hispanic, brazilian, arab, russian based and owned etc. youtubes, twitters, googles, facebooks and regional/national internets to displace the dominant anglo ones today.

    To do that within the EU Russia can support the french and possibly germans too, to back initiatives for elevating french and german within the EU.

    Multipolarity and regionalisation is the way to beat this. Along with measures to empower the quality of local education systems. Media cooperation between like minded countries (it already exists between Russia and China), etc.

    I agree 100% that multipolarity is the way forward, but you (and our host) are wrong to focus on the English tongue. With billions of non-native English speakers, hundreds of millions of whom speak it better than natives (where it counts), the traditional English-speaking world will soon lose primacy. Indeed, there’s every sign this process is well under way already.

  32. Felix Keverich says

    On this issue I entirely agree with Karlin. I’ve been banned on Twitter and Reddit way too many times.

  33. Swedish Family says

    When I read things in Scandinavian languages, it becomes very clear that the dominance of English is warping the languages.

    Aside from all the English loanwords, especially for “modern” topics, there are times when even the grammar becomes distorted when it clashes with English – as I have noticed occur even in some Danish state media articles.

    May I ask how well you speak Danish (or Swedish — I seem to remember your being half-Swedish). It’s no dig; I’m asking mostly because working to keep Swedish vigorous and folksily Germanic is among the few things all Swedes agree on — far-leftists no less than far-rightists. To my ears, it’s in great shape outside academia.

  34. Europe Europa says

    I would argue that English being the global “lingua franca” does the native English no favours at all, in fact it weakens our position. A large percentage of identity is language and because our language is the world language the end result is we are seen as having less of a unique culture and identity than most other groups.

    I’ve noticed many websites, especially non-British websites, use a US flag or even a UN flag to represent the English language. What other major language has to suffer an indignity like that?

  35. AnonFromTN says

    It often surprises me how clueless Americans are about Britain considering it is an English-speaking former colony, I think a lot would struggle to tell you what country the English language originates from.

    Only a person knowing that there are things s/he does not know struggles. Most Americans don’t struggle. Only in the US you can hear something like “if English was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me”.

  36. The Alarmist says

    It often surprises me how clueless Americans are about Britain considering it is an English-speaking former colony….

    Your awkward use of the pronoun ‘it’ begs the question of whether you are referring to America as a former colony of Great Britain, or if you refer to Britain as a former colony of America. Given that the latter case still holds true, one might safely assume you indeed intended the former, in which case the answer to your query is simply that the American overlords don’t really need to know diddly-squat about their vassal-states, as long as the vassals continue their fealty.

  37. A danger of mono-lingual people, is to overestimate how objective their ideas are, and underestimate how easily their minds have been programmed by sometimes historically arbitrary associations of phrases and sentences.

    Much of our ideas just come from the typical associations of words in our language; and the more languages you learn, the more you start to perceive that – as a large part of language learning is just remembering which words connect to each other in each language. This is kind of thing Goethe was talking about.

    Although some languages have more space for expressing different associations of ideas, than others.

    English is a quite flexible language, as there is often both a Latin and a Germanic way to express your idea – and this is should allow for more choices in what ideas to associate together, compared to e.g. Spanish or Italian (there is mostly only a single way to say something in the purely Latin languages).


    Of course, for the rulers, it’s easier to control a mono-lingual race; while for creating the most original and interesting people, you would want to both shield and pollinate your culture with some alternative languages. A most difficult thing for the enlightened dictator would be in the choosing a language which does not leave his population too vulnerable to competing ideologies.

    I imagine schools which can nurture an intellectual elite to be bilingual in a language like Classical Tibetan. Then perhaps you could introduce books from foreign countries, by approved writers, into a Tibetan translation – and create a buffer zone from external influences, through using such an exotic language, that only the local elite would know.

  38. another anon says

    Soviet censorship of Western culture and Western influence was far more stronger and more efficient that Putin’s RF or future Karlin Empire is ever going to be.

    https://zeithistorische-forschungen.de/sites/default/files/medien/static/2013-2/Ivanova-Abb-14.jpg

    And in the end, it did not mattered at all.

    Defensive strategy is always doomed to be failure. Go for offense. Keep subverting and undermining the West until it falls to pieces and is no longer attractive role model to anyone.

    Remember, few Russian facebook ads made Trump president. What could full scale offensive do?

    https://nationalpostcom.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/satan.png

  39. The Alarmist says

    The answer is to be a polyglot.

  40. Maïkl Makfaïl says

    I totally agree btw and it goes in the direction of my first message .

  41. Mary Marianne says

    As a dictator, I would not want Japanese to replace English as the world’s lingua franca, though. Japan is, after all, still a living culture; and, just as I don’t want the Anglosphere to influence my country, I also don’t want the Japanese to be able to do that.

    Dead languages such as Latin and ancient Greece still have too powerful a connection to their living descendants. I would therefore not opt to choose those either, as it invites a way for Greece or the Vatican City to covertly assert their influence in my country.

    That leaves me with choices such as Sumerian, Egyptian hieroglyphs, etc. These languages/scripts are dead and their islamized descendants are not interested enough in reconnecting with that “Jahiliyyah” part of their history to boost their civilizational revival.

  42. another anon says

    The dominant American spirit is Bolshevik, not liberal.

    LOL. When was the last time you heard anyone in American politics call to expropriate the bourgeoisie?

    https://twitter.com/goldmansachs/status/879408187828555776

    The dominant American spirit is capitalist, and always had been.

  43. Although America sometimes benefits from swinging to the opposite extreme, and what can perhaps be described as an “overcompensation” by its elite, for their feelings of embarrassment about lack of European cultural heritage in the country.

    Otherwise – if not from some great compensation in funding for European high culture – how does Cleveland have a usually much better orchestra than exists in London, Madrid or Paris (and this was throughout the 20th century)? Similarly both Chicago and Los Angeles have had (often) better symphony orchestras than exists in London, Madrid and Paris for the last century. But it’s especially amazing that a minor provincial American city like Cleveland, has one of the best symphony orchestras in the world.

  44. Europe Europa says

    Specifically it’s American English that is the global lingua franca, there are many British English words and expressions that would be lost on most foreigners who know only American English/Globish.

    In many ways I feel that the peculiarities of British English and many of its dialects are at as much risk of being diluted by Globish/American English as many other languages are.

  45. AnonFromTN says

    I’ve seen Chicago and Metropolitan (NY) orchestras up close from the first row during operas. My estimate is that no more than a third of those musicians are children of American-born parents. In contrast, orchestras in Berlin (Staatsoper), Munich, and Wien are a lot more local. So, my answer is “money”.

  46. Pericles says

    Swedish for example has borrowed a lot from German, French and English, due to previous and current rulers.

  47. Banning something makes it cool. Especially for potentially subversive and subvertible young elites such as university students. So I think banning English is a bad idea.

    That said, Russia should certainly go on an offensive in this area, but it doesn’t do a good job at it. For example, I was looking for Russian baby clothes to take to US, shopping in Дочки и Сыночки, in SPB. I was able to find clothing made in Russia, but all the words and expressions were in English! In a large store, not a single Russian word. I ended up buying Russian made pajamas for 2 year old with sharks on them, and Polish made onesie for a newborn. (I may blame Poland for starting WW2, but they can draw adorable cats, which makes up for it for my kids). Sharks do not exactly scream ‘Russia’! Even though it is a good pajama, it makes no statement.

    Similar with shoes. I bought Ralf Ringer winter boots. Their old name was Squirrel Trading House. Squirrels are adorable and highly memeable and marketable. You can make awesome viral marketing campaign with squirrels. Ralf Ringer does not sound Russian, i guess it sounds more upscale, but people who go upscale with shoes usually buy Italian or something. For mass hipster appeal i would stick with Russian squirrels.

    Anyway, despite my best efforts to obtain subversive KGB coded messages so that my spawn could mind control the American public, i failed, on the account of Russia not speaking Russian. Which is a shame because all the media hysteria made normies naturally curious, and outside of the liberal elite circus, Russia could score some soft power points. Opinion of Russia may not be high, but opinion of media is not great either, so it can be done.

  48. We need to implement Boko Haram, there is absolutely no need for 90-95% of the population (i.e. normies) to know English.

    I’ll restate here the argument I made elsewhere:

    Rather than trying to insulate one’s country from the influence of the anglosphere by trying to hamper English language knowledge, a much better approach would be to develop a national English language education program, and staff it entirely with the most radical, absolutely nationalist people you can find. This has several benefits:

    1. This gives nationalists and patriots a steady source of income and government positions, thereby growing their power and political influence
    2. This stems the spread of the poz through English language knowledge by ensuring that the disseminators of that knowledge are slanted against it, and gives them an opportunity to filter out the corrosive aspects and educate their pupils to be hostile to the damaging parts of modern western culture

    3. this allows full integration with the English language business world; furthermore, in order to interact with the nation, the English language business world will now have to go through the nationalist-educated middlemen or otherwise learn the local language themselves.

    4. By ensuring that new anglophones are immersed in a nationalist atmosphere, it ensures that the interactions with the outside world will be coloured by their patriotic political orientation and ideals, thereby undercutting traitors and sellouts who seek to subvert the country in tandem with anglosphere based organizations by ensuring that the dominant image a country projects is one hostile to such subversion. This hampers interactions between anti-nationalist dissidents and their would-be supporters outside the country, by predisposing outsiders to be hostile towards the traitorous dissidents.

    This change would be relatively easy to effect since most countries already have the English language in their curriculum in some form, and, even better, it would be difficult to reverse, as government programs and institutions are legendarily difficult to cut back.

    For the record, China already has something like this and promotes English language learning quite a bit. This explains quite a bit of their success in outmaneuvering the USA recently.

  49. Hyperborean says

    I imagine schools which can nurture an intellectual elite to be bilingual in a language like Classical Tibetan. Then perhaps you could introduce books from foreign countries, by approved writers, into a Tibetan translation – and create a buffer zone from external influences, through using such an exotic language, that only the local elite would know.

    What would be the point of this? Why not just use a classical language that is closer in cultural-psychologically and that has an established corpus?

    Any potentially subversive material is already likely to have been translated a long time ago and since it is a dead language outside the realm of our theoretical dictatorship new ideas are unlikely to originate from outside.

  50. another anon says

    There are many good arguments for abolishing English. It is racist, sexist, colonialist, homophobic and transphobic language that absolutely sucks.
    What is the point of mixing pig Latin with savage Saxon screams? What is the point of two languages, one spoken and one written that have nothing in common?

    Unfortunately, this ship sailed long ago.

    75% to 90% of all scientific and technical papers are in English.

    https://slate.com/technology/2015/01/english-is-the-language-of-science-u-s-dominance-means-other-scientists-must-learn-foreign-language.html

    As recently as the 1960s, some 40 percent of scientific literature was published in French, German, or Russian.
    More than three-quarters of scientific papers today are published in English—and in some fields it is more than 90 percent, according to data compiled by Scott Montgomery in his book Does Science Need a Global Language?.

    20% of human race speak English.

    https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/how-many-people-speak-english-and-where-is-it-spoken

    Anyone who aspires for something more than working on rice or potato field for life is learning English.

    English is not going to go away unless civilization collapses to the stone age conditions.
    At this stage, fall of United States is not going to make any difference.

    Greek was the lingua franca of the ancient world, and fall of the Greek states did not changed it.
    In the Roman Empire, Greek was still the majority language, the language of trade, the language of education and culture – and all Greek political ideas (democracy, autonomy, free speech etc…) were completely obliterated.

  51. Hyperborean says

    May I ask how well you speak Danish (or Swedish — I seem to remember your being half-Swedish). It’s no dig; I’m asking mostly because working to keep Swedish vigorous and folksily Germanic is among the few things all Swedes agree on — far-leftists no less than far-rightists. To my ears, it’s in great shape outside academia.

    While I have some Finland-Swedish ancestors before they assimilated, I don’t have any direct modern Swedish ancestry. Rather the reason I speak Swedish has to due with my father being employed there foe a long time.

    As for my language abilities, since I only had one year of proper instruction in Danish my ability is a level lower than my Swedish.

    My Swedish is fine for technical and ordinary things, but for literary concerns I have been slipping. At least that is my evaluation based on the Swedish translation of Ernst Junger’s Storm of Steel. At least I avoided getting an accent from all the “bra Sverige”-speaking residents of my lovely neighbourhood.

  52. Hyperborean says

    Swedish for example has borrowed a lot from German, French and English, due to previous and current rulers.

    Quantity and quality.

  53. Hyperborean says

    English is not going to go away unless civilization collapses to the stone age conditions.
    At this stage, fall of United States is not going to make any difference.

    The writer Minae Mizumura made the same point, though from a pessimistic perspective. I will quote excerpts from something she said, perhaps appropriately, in French:

    “Il y a eu certainement d’autres langues internationales dans l’histoire de l’homme: le latin, le chinois, l’arabe – même le français. Mais aucune autre langue n’a jamais couvert le monde
    entier comme l’a fait l’anglais. Aucune autre langue n’est jamais devenue si complètement et absolument dominante. En effet, récemment, le nombre de ceux qui communiquent en anglais en tant que langue étrangère a excédé le nombre de ceux pour qui la langue anglaise est la langue maternelle. De plus, le langage a sa propre loi de propagation, indépendamment de la puissance économique ou politique. Quelque soit l’avenir économique ou politique des Etats-Unis, l’ hégémonie linguistique de l’anglais ne peut que s’accroître dans les années à venir.

    […]

    Or, vous savez qu’il existe un lien historique entre le roman et la langue maternelle. La naissance du roman comme genre littéraire avait pour condition la naissance de la langue vulgaire comme écriture, c’est-à-dire, la naissance de la langue maternelle comme écriture. Depuis, le roman a évolué avec cette écriture, à la fois exploitant et élargissant toutes les possibilités spécifiques à elle. Le lien entre le roman et la langue maternelle ne représente pas un lien nécessaire, mais il représente un lien
    très fort et très spécial – un lien même mystique chez certains écrivains, disons, mystifiés.

    […]

    Pensez seulement à tous ces lecteurs qui peuvent lire leurs oeuvres, soit dans l’original, soit dans la traduction. Il y a déjà un grand nombre de
    lecteurs anglophones. Mais il y a encore un plus grand nombre de lecteurs non-anglophones qui font vraiment circuler la langue anglaise dans le
    monde entier. Ceux-ci représentent une population cruciale en tant que lectorat car ils représentent la crème de la société, que ce soit en Asie, en Afrique, ou en Europe, étant inévitablement les plus cultivés de leurs pays.
    Il va de soi que le grand nombre de ces bilingues dans tous les coins de la terre a comme conséquence directe le grand nombre de traductions dans toutes sortes de langues d’oeuvres en anglais. La littérature écrite en anglais sera bientôt la Reine du monde.

    Ecrire n’est pas un acte d’onanisme. Ecrire, c’est envoyer notre langage au-delà de notre monde immédiat, au-delà de ce qui nous entoure, ici et maintenant. C’est envoyer notre langage dans le futur inconnu et dans l’espace inconnu pour que notre langage atteigne ceux que nous ne
    connaissons pas, mais qui sont nos véritables lecteurs, nos soeurs et frères spirituels. En effet, seule l’écriture surmonte si facilement et si
    parfaitement toutes les barrières terrestres: le temps, l’espace, le sexe, la race, l’âge, la culture, la classe, etc. Et déjà la littérature de langue anglaise surmonte le plus souvent et en plus grand nombre ces barrières terrestres.

    […]

    Pour comble de tout ceci, l’anglais n’appartient plus à personne. Il appartient maintenant à tout le monde. C’est une langue qui, à partir d’un
    certain moment, a cessé d’être liée aux Etats particuliers, aux sangs de leurs
    peuples, à leurs histoires.

    […]

    Néanmoins, plus il y avait de ces populations diverses qui écrivaient en anglais, plus l’anglais devenait une langue qui n’appartenait à personne, qui appartenait à tout le monde. La notion de langue nationale est ébranlée à la base, de même que
    la notion de littérature nationale.

    Aujourd’hui, les écrivains qui écrivent en anglais ne sont plus les écrivains anglais, américains ou canadiens. Ils sont simplement et
    tautologiquement des écrivains qui écrivent en anglais.”

    http://mizumuraminae.com/pdf/MizumuraLesdeuxtemps.pdf

  54. To deny English is to deny that there is an Anglo tradition of literature, philosophy, politics, that existed before all this woke garbage. Unfortunately with English, and especially English Media+politics, being so dominated by poz that is a bad first impression. But at the same time there exists plenty of information in the English language that people can learn that is completely contrary to the current opinions that are spread. For instance Lothrop Stoddard was an amazing and prescient writer, to deny yourself the ability to learn from him because the prevailing Anglo political culture is an absolute disgrace just means you lose out. There is a great deal to learn from English and in fact one can absolutely learn from Anglo mistakes, that is why, as you said, it is important to seek out and learn opposing ideas.

  55. From the 1990s on, the US Democratic Party has become economically capitalist but culturally Marxist. It’s a very odd mixture, I doubt it is stable, but this is the dogma since around Bill Clinton became president.

  56. another anon says

    From the 1990s on, the US Democratic Party has become economically capitalist but culturally Marxist. It’s a very odd mixture, I doubt it is stable, but this is the dogma since around Bill Clinton became president.

    It is very profitable mixture.
    Profitable, of course, for the people who matter. You and me are not one of them.

    https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/19635.jpeg

    BTW, There is no such thing as “cultural Marxism”. This meme is retarded.
    Just call the thing you want to call out its proper name:
    CAPITALISM.

    https://pics.me.me/lo-at-least-its-not-the-goberment-this-is-the-38661445.png

  57. EldnahYm says

    If I take what you say and twist it, it sounds like you’re arguing the rest of the world should impose divide and conquer tactics on themselves, in the hopes that it will displace Anglo societies. Is that plausible? In particular, wouldn’t competition between China, India, Turkey, Iran, Latin America, Arab World, etc. make it more likely for your proposal to if anything strengthen the Anglo influence? It seems simpler for countries to focus on themselves. Especially so for large countries like Russia or China.

  58. EldnahYm says

    In many ways I feel that the peculiarities of British English and many of its dialects are at as much risk of being diluted by Globish/American English as many other languages are.

    British English is probably more at risk.

  59. It’s not very surprising if you went through the public education system in the U.S. There is almost nothing about British history. The idea that the U.S. is in some sense descended from Britain is never emphasized. From my perspective, I wish British history were taught. Anything that could be a counter-narrative to the Ellis Island-centric we are all descendants of immigrants narrative would be welcome.

  60. Passer by says

    Its not divide and conquer, rather than multipolarity and regionalism. Spheres of influence. Each with different laws, regulations, cultures and IT ecosystems.

    The natural situation in the world before the US came into prominence.

    I doubt that anything else has the perspective to replace the current US empire. So this is how things will be. In such a world, the US will be just one power among many, suffering a significant decline in its influence. According to US futurologists, whose work is used by the NSC, this will be the case after 2050.

    So the world will move from Unipolarity – the US standard – to Multipolarity – regionalisation and different spheres of influence.

  61. anaccount says

    Anatoly is 100% correct and Im actually surprised Google, Facebook etc. aren’t already banned in Russia. Banning English is a good call as well, it’s the only language I speak but facts are facts. Globo-homo is obsessed with getting its perverted tentacles into Russia. Don’t give an inch!

  62. anonymous coward says

    That leaves me with choices such as Sumerian, Egyptian hieroglyphs, etc. These languages/scripts are dead and their islamized descendants are not interested enough in reconnecting with that “Jahiliyyah” part of their history to boost their civilizational revival.

    Classical Nahuatl would be my choice. Dead enough to not have much of a connection to modern Mexico, living enough to be easily picked up by any modern eurolanguage speaker.

  63. anonymous coward says

    Ecrire n’est pas un acte d’onanisme.

    A hot take I definitely disagree with.

  64. I noticed this “anglophone autism” too. The native Anglo countries are, well, irreversibly fucked. I doubt even 3 generations of direct rule from Moscow, Beijing and Tehran will fix it

    The exception seems to be India, probably because it’s of a wildly different culture and a slightly different race

    The other exception is France – infamous for it’s staunch rejection of English, yet it’s one of the most “angloized” countries

  65. Almost Missouri says

    You won’t understand a sentence of Marx, if you have not read carefully Adam Smith, Locke – as well as, of course and most importantly, Hegel.

    Without a background of knowledge of those writers, then Marxism is just empty sloganizing.

    True.

    And that’s why Marxism today is just empty sloganizing.

    The Derb-right likes to call this empty sloganizing Marxism, “Cultural Marxism” or “Cult-Marx”, but I’ve always thought that gives it too much credit. As if there were anything “cultural” about it. It’s really just the animalistic howling of video-slaves. Is there a better term? I just call it “Marxism”, in acceptance of the fact that Marx’s elaborate but defective ideology has collapsed in on itself and persists now only as mindless automaton of resentment.

  66. Felix Keverich says

    It just occurred to me: banning English schooling in Russia would further diminish Russia’s place in something called Nature index. I know Karlin greatly cares about Nature index, so what’s he gonna choose?

  67. Jatt Arya says

    Na, India fucked too. There’s above 75% reservation and even 100 for lower castes.

    It’s quota regime,

    Bureaucracy also hinders labor reform and land acquisition.

    You can only build capital intensive industries like auto and pharmacy not mass manufacturing.

    This then gets called casteism because reasons..
    Also interesting

    https://twitter.com/kryocken/status/1274993227616055296?s=20

  68. Swedish Family says

    While I have some Finland-Swedish ancestors before they assimilated, I don’t have any direct modern Swedish ancestry. Rather the reason I speak Swedish has to due with my father being employed there foe a long time.

    Aha, I see.

    I’m guessing, but I suspect many of the “English” loanwords you come across are really German and French loanwords that have also made it into English. We do have plenty of borrowings from English proper, but nearly all of them sit very well beside traditional Swedish words.

    The most obvious English influence on grammar is the appearance of plurals ending in -s where traditional usage calls for -r. This is mostly confined to acronyms, though, and no great blemish. Another is heavier punctuation, and this one I do think fouls the language. English itself could do with using fewer commas.

  69. I think more important than “banning English” would be banning Hollywood, etc, and focusing on creating your own national cultural content.

    Yes, that should be the number one priority.

  70. From the 1990s on, the US Democratic Party has become economically capitalist but culturally Marxist. It’s a very odd mixture, I doubt it is stable, but this is the dogma since around Bill Clinton became president.

    In Australia it happened in the 1980s when our leftist party, the Labor Party, became enthusiastically pro-capitalist. So it may be a thing across the Anglophone world. And the Labor Party here is very culturally Marxist. Mind you, the “conservative” LNP is every bit as culturally Marxist.

    BTW, there is nothing remotely Marxist about cultural Marxism so it’s better to use a different term.

  71. It’s mostly an anglophone world, correct, most of the leftist parties in the West so far aren’t in the pocket of capitalism as the democrats or Labor in the UK are in the pocket of high finance while professing cultural Marxism – perhaps Sweden’s Social Democrats are almost going in this road

  72. AnonFromTN says

    BTW, there is nothing remotely Marxist about cultural Marxism so it’s better to use a different term.

    Touché!

  73. another anon says

    BTW, there is nothing remotely Marxist about cultural Marxism so it’s better to use a different term.

    Touché!

    Just call it its real name: CAPITALISM.

    https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*wiUnX2RBH7qY7cwSF46_hQ.jpeg

  74. Yes, people saying “Cultural Marxism” – really a sign of willful idiocy, or the product of a failed education system.

    Some months ago, there was a user on this forum “Thorfinnsen”, who was trying to argue with me about his belief in the existence of “cultural Marxism” – this was not a good representative of American educational success.

    It’s like if people are saying “Platonic nominalism”, “Cartesian monism”, “Aristotelian realism”, “Humean rationalism”, “Satrean determinism”.

    If one half of the conjunction contradicts the main theory of the philosopher on the other half, then what is the purpose of conjoining them?

    The phrase can only be logically consistent, if you add a negation or disjunction.

    E.g. “not-Marxist; culturalism”, “not-Platonic; nominalism”, “not-Cartesian; monism”, “not-Satrean; determinism”.

    Or with a disjunction: “Marxism or culturalism”, “Platonism or nominalism”, “Satrean or determinist”, etc.

  75. Cleveland definitely have money to hire the best musicians, and a lot foreigners, including in its initial formation: they benefited primarily from George Szell arriving in USA asa refugee.

    But that Cleveland could afford and prioritize to hire the best musicians in the world, is the surprising (and surely a bit bizarre) thing.

    So, for almost a century now, Cleveland had prioritized classical music more than London, Paris, Madrid, etc – or at least it will sound better to listen to a symphony in provincial Cleveland, in America’s flyover land – than in many of the greatest and most prestigious European capital cities.

    In contrast, orchestras in Berlin (Staatsoper), Munich, and Wien are a lot more local.

    Vienna looks like still majority teutonic family names, with then minority of other Central European nationalities.

    Just there is a little multinationalism looking on their current orchestra. Pinchas (Uzbekistan), Doli (Albania), Bonelli (Italy), Kurylyak (Ukraine), Turriziani (Italy)
    https://www.wienerphilharmoniker.at/orchestra/members