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A Soviet Prisoner's View on What's Important
- rpmisms 5y agoRussian thought and art is fascinating. I have never known such a collectively depressed culture to produce such beauty.
- stanrivers 5y agoIt's almost like the cold and wintry weather makes for a lot of time with oneself to think and build the skills needed to create beauty, no?
- saiya-jin 5y agoI would blame more the cold messed up soviet-era society for this. Artists produce their best works during suffering, not when having the best time of their life. And there was/is plenty of suffering for non-conformists in Soviet Union/Russia.
- distances 5y agoSome of the world's most celebrated literary works come from pre-Soviet Russia though. Life wasn't exactly easy in the Imperial times either.
- anticodon 5y agoDon't forget the huge bias in all of the materials describing Russia/USSR in the West, even coming from Russians themselves (like Brodsky, Solzhenitsyn, and other defectors/traitors/dissidents). One prominent goal of the Western world was always to destroy Russia (last prominent example: German invasion in 1941 which clearly stated that the final goal is to exterminate Slavs). There were and there are numerous plans in the current Europe and USA that continue the work of Hitler. Almost every day you can read in the news on the new plan of USA/NATO/GB to start a war with Russia. So, all the news, all the books, all the history you get on the West is dedicated to one thing: paint Russia and Russians as the most evil savages, the history of Russia as a bloody bloodbath, etc, etc. There's simply no English source on Russia/USSR/Russian-USSR history I've seen that was free from that bias. Even English prose contains absurd exaggerations when telling about Russia. Speech of famous USSR/Russian dissidents require different explanation, but most of them exaggerate the rusophobic bullshit with even more zealousness than anglosaxons themselves. I think the main reasons are that they need to find vindication for their treason and they need to demonstrate to the Western world that they're loyal. Also, it's possibly the only source of income for many Russian emigrants that have some humanitarian degree (writers, journalists) is to write rusophobic pamphlets.
- TheGigaChad 5y agoIdiotic dumbass.
- rpmisms 5y agoI am of direct Russian descent. Soviet Russia was a hellscape. It is not Rusophobic to say this.
- anticodon 5y ago«О чем вся великая русская классика? Об абсолютной невыносимости российской жизни в любом ее аспекте. И все. Ничего больше там нет. А мир хавает. И просит еще… Для них это короткая инъекция счастья. Они на пять минут верят, что ад не у них, а у нас. Но ад везде, где бьется человеческая мысль. Страдает не одна Россия. Страдает все бытие. У нас просто меньше лицемерия и пиара.» -- Пелевин
- thrwway34 5y agoSo, your proofs of world-wide Russophobia are... posts on Facebook, travel forums and a quote from Pelevin? Very fitting.
- anticodon 5y agoLOL, Russophobia doesn't even need proofs. You can open any western media (BBC, CNN, DW, whatever), type Russia in the search box, and get tons of results that regurgitate the same thoughts over and over: "Russia is guilty for everything bad that is happening now", "Russia is guilty for everything bad that happened in the past", "Russia is guilty for everything bad that will happen in the future", "Russians are dangerous villains", "Russians are savages". If you open social network, like reddit.com/r/worldnews, it would be even more obvious. If you open comments under any news about Russia there, you'll find even direct appeals to kill Russians (BTW, always ignored by Reddit, Facebook and Twitter moderators, but try to write the same about any other nationality and you'll be immediately banned). My comment was about a small part of russophobes - Russians that emigrated abroad. Most of the time they become the most zealous russophobes. I don't really know the explanation, nor do I really care. I've just made a rule to avoid Russians abroad as most of them hate themselves to the point of schizophrenia.
- shakow 5y ago> I would blame more the cold messed up soviet-era society for this Please read The Prince, The Karamazov Brothers, Eugene Onegin, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, or Dead Souls before writing this kind of grotesque sweeping statements.
- rpmisms 5y agoPre-Soviet literature is dark, but it really doesn't compare to Soviet-era works. Soviet Russia was a fucked-up place, I hope you don't get your information from propagandists.
- wayoutthere 5y agoAmerica is also a fucked up place where people walk around in fear of the police and the paramilitary forces (sorry, “patriots”) that occupy most of the US outside the major cities. You never know when one of them is going to pop into a synagogue or a grocery store with an AR-15. This country is dystopian af too; the American dream died with 9/11. We’re just another empire that’s rotting from the core.
- rpmisms 5y agoOut of curiosity—do you live here? America is beginning its decline, there's no question. I think you're worried about the wrong things, but that's simply a matter of opinion. Thankfully, we're nowhere near the insanity of 40s-50s Soviet Russia. Here, we have a right to freedom of speech, and at least ostensibly a right to bear arms. Hopefully we can maintain those rights and avoid the hellish police state phase of the collapse.
- wayoutthere 5y agoYup I live in America, and the black eye and tear gas I got from the cops last summer during the protests told me all I needed to know about the state violence that occurs in the US. Not to mention the “cops” showing up in unmarked vans and snatching people off the street, or secret prisons, or the cellular surveillance planes, or the vigilante “patrols” that continue to this day and are encouraged by the police captains. The police state is here, and if you own guns they’ll just storm your house with a swat team, shoot your dog, and charge you for assaulting an officer.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- stanrivers 5y ago>Of all the parts of your body, be most vigilant over your index finger, for it is blame-thirsty. A pointed finger is a victim’s logo — the opposite of the V-sign and a synonym for surrender. This was powerful to me.
- stevecalifornia 5y ago"...No matter how abominable your condition may be, try not to blame anything or anybody: history, the state, superiors, race, parents, the phase of the moon, childhood, toilet training, etc… The moment that you place blame somewhere, you undermine your resolve to change anything; it could be argued even that that blame-thirsty finger oscillates as wildly as it does because the resolve was never great enough in the first place. After all, a victim status is not without its sweetness. It commands compassion, confers distinction, and whole nations and continents bask in the murk of mental discounts advertised as the victim’s conscience — but try to resist it. However abundant and irrefutable is the evidence that you are on the losing side, negate it as long as you have your wits about you, as long as your lips can utter “No…” On the whole, try to respect life not only for its amenities but for its hardships, too. They are a part of the game, and what’s good about a hardship is that it is not a deception." This resonates with me-- it's something I have always held as a core belief. I made an appointment to be where I am today-- good or bad. The moment I blame my situation on someone or something I cede control of the situation.
- stanrivers 5y ago> The moment I blame my situation on someone or something I cede control of the situation But it is oh so easy to do that; to his point, there is a sweetness to it; I find I have to remind myself of the idea of ownership and personal responsibility all the time... it's so easy to end up blaming something or someone else.
- brundolf 5y agoIt's complicated, because a lot of people genuinely are victims whose suffering genuinely is someone else's fault, and they do deserve the help of others. At the same time: for the victims themselves, their best chance of overcoming their circumstance is often to not think about it that way. It's one of those tricky cases where a realistic mindset is not a useful mindset. You have to hold reality, and set it aside, and suspend your disbelief. It's hard to do that, so instead different people fully buy into one reality or the other and then get into conflict over the cognitive dissonance.
- Duncan62 5y agoThis death toll was neither an accident nor an automatic result of the war. It was a deliberate policy of the Nazi state. German treatment of Soviet POWs differed dramatically from German policy towards POWs from Britain and the United States, countries the Nazis regarded as racial equals to the Germans. https://www.mybpcreditcard.pro/ https://www.mybpcreditcard.pro/
- stanrivers 5y ago1. I agree with what you just said... it is amazing how some people can treat one group of people as, well, people, and another as animals. 2. Why is there a link to a credit card?
- AustinDizzy 5y agoLooks to be a bot account (which was created at the same time the comment was posted). The comment is an exact quote from this article at US Holocaust Memorial Museum: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nazi-persecution-of-soviet-prisoners-of-war#deliberate-policy-2 https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nazi-perse...
- stanrivers 5y agoWooow, I hate how that bot tricked me. That was like... too smart; eventually the entire internet is just going to be bots tricking each other into believing they are not bots...
- matbatt38 5y agoThat is what a bot would say imho
- brundolf 5y ago"Try not to set too much store by politicians. Not so much because they are dumb or dishonest, which is more often than not the case, but because of the size of their job, which is too big even for the best among them, by this or that political party, doctrine, system or a blueprint thereof. All they or those can do, at best, is to diminish a social evil, not eradicate it. No matter how substantial an improvement may be, ethically speaking it will always be negligible, because there will always be those — say, just one person — who won’t profit from this improvement… No matter how fairly the man you’ve elected will promise to cut the pie, it won’t grow in size; as a matter of fact, the portions are bound to get smaller. In light of that, or, rather, in dark of that — you ought to rely on your own home cooking, that is, on managing the world yourselves — at least that part of it that lies within your reach, within your radius." I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Society doesn't get better because we elect the right politicians, it gets better because the people in it decide to be better (in themselves, towards each other, etc). Politicians are just a (grotesque, exaggerated, warped) reflection of the rest of us; they will never be our salvation. We should stay informed, we should vote, but big-picture politics should be a small part of our lives (and heaven forbid it to be an integral part of our identities). Relationships with real people, solving small-scale problems that confront those we care about, are what really count. And the tragedy is that even as we've put more and more stock in the former, we've been actively sabotaging the latter.
- prox 5y agoThis also the view of Thomas Payne. Everyone should read “Common Sense”. Most topics are still relevant. Many problems you see in US politics are already foretold, and also how to get out of it. Personal responsibility doesn’t mean taking care of yourself, and stop there, it means taking care of your world, your community and as you say, fix small things together. Insulation is the real pandemic imo.
- asymptosis 5y agoI tried looking up things like "Thomas Payne" and "Common Sense" but nothing quite matched what you seem to be driving at. Is there something obvious I'm missing, or do you have a link for where to start looking further?
- TheGigaChad 5y agoWhy are all substack articles complete crap?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ramesh31 5y agoYour freedom and your health: the only two things in life that actually matter. Everything else is just a game that we all play with each other.
- 7402 5y agoI prefer what Solzhenitsyn said: "What about the main thing in life, all its riddles? If you want, I’ll spell it out for you right now. Do not pursue what is illusionary - property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life - don’t be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn for happiness; it is, after all, all the same: the bitter doesn’t last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing. It is enough if you don’t freeze in the cold and if thirst and hunger don’t claw at your insides. If your back isn’t broken, if your feet can walk, if both arms can bend, if both eyes can see, if both ears hear, then whom should you envy? And why? Our envy of others devours us most of all. Rub your eyes and purify your heart - and prize above all else in the world those who love you and who wish you well. Do not hurt them or scold them, and never part from any of them in anger; after all, you simply do not know: it may be your last act before your arrest, and that will be how you are imprinted on their memory."