@useless_idiot I think they hate Poles because being Slavic people, Poles still managed to break this cycle of abuse and distanced themselves from the empire — same reason they hate Ukrainians now I think.
You might be surprised, but that's the way they bring you up here — I've been eyeing Poland as a country to move to and nearly everyone, especially the older generation have been telling me: "Why Poland? They hate us!". None of these people of course ever been to Poland.
@useless_idiot So when I hear this "But they hate us" now, I respond with "Well, if you start telling them they should be part of the empire, Eastern Bloc and all that, they might even punch you in your face — and they would be right" 😂
Yeah, the Boyars/Aristocracy is very good at making us hate each other.
Not always though: the idea to ban Russian cultural expressions got very little traction in the Netherlands, but almost everyone condemned the invasion.
That's their upbringing: Russians are brought up in totally collective culture, where everyone is part of one whole. What that whole is exactly at any given moment depends on who's currently in power, but all their tyrannies maintain this collective consciousness as it's useful from control perspective. First you notice it in the language — they always say "we won WW2", "we sent a man to the space", and every single lowlife in Russia had for a moment boasted about "we took Bakhmut". And yes, they do hate individualist societies and are afraid of them, also because being an individual implies responsibility for your individual actions and your whole life, whereas collectivism offers a safe anonymity among the herd.
@useless_idiot
Well, in part it's because most Russians have been living in poverty most of the time — when people don't own anything, they don't feel responsible for anything, they also feel free to steal things as it doesn't even come to their mind that it might be something that someone else has earned hard.
I've been observing it for years when my mom have been planting flowers in front of our apartment building, watering them, weeding out the lawn — some people pass by and sometimes come up with an idea to come back and dig out something for themselves 🤦 Nothing even clicks in their head that someone might have done it with their own hands — they think that if something grows here, it must be the state, municipal services who have planted it — and if nothing grows on their lawn, the state must have made a mistake and they are free to fix it.
Every time people were allowed to own something, to have something private and personal, the whole system started falling apart. That's why living in poverty and depending on the state for miserable pensions and wages has been perpetually normalized — even now when people pay taxes, they are often concealed. Even if you work for a private company, it's the company who is responsible for paying taxes — this way they are telling people: it's not you, who pays taxes — it's that filthy capitalist and he gets what he deserves.
The second part of this problem is lack of genuine national culture — it always gets replaced by some state-crafted surrogate. Even when attempts are made to build something grassroots, the state either tries to hijack it — as was the case even with Immortal Regiment BTW: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortal_Regiment#First_event_with_this_name
It wasn't originally born in the depths of President's office.
Or, if these ideas have seeds of personal liberties, freedom and democracy — so the state can't bend it to its will, it tries to outright destroy it.
So when I'm telling people that modern day Russia might fall apart again, no one believes me: "But there are no separatist, there are no people trying to set themselves apart",— and that is true, but also there is nothing holding these people together.
There is of course and undoubtly such a thing as Russian culture — but are Russians themselves really versed in it? Do these young men who go to the war now to "protect Russian culture" have any idea of what it is. Did they ever read Pushkin or Tolstoy outside of obligatory school program? I doubt that!
They are often whining like bitches when some Soviet-era monuments gets torn down and I often ask them: "Why that monument is even supposed to be there?" They don't even realize how fucked up it is for Czechs to have monuments of Soviet soldiers.
Will it be language only that will hold people together? It's just delusional to think so.
It sometimes got really funny in late 90s to early 2000s: "Oh, Milla Jovovich, she's one of ours!"— she was born in Kyiv and moved to US when she was still a girl, how the fuck is she one of ours? Same for Nabokov — he had to flee the country while still being a teenager, he did write his early novels in Russian — while living in Berlin, the latter ones — in English, while living in US, but he's still "one of ours". Same story with Stravinsky — well, he at least used some "ethnic"/folk motives so that at least makes some sense. But I think most people who say this "one of ours" have never listened to Stravinsky and never read anything by Nabokov other than Lolita (originally in English). And sure thing, they know nothing about their biographies, they often even consider those who do exactly the same now — flee the country, traitors.
I think that "divorce" with Ukraine would be particularly hard in this regard — as no one really knows which "Great Russian writer" was really Russian — for some figures it's obvious, for others — not so much.
@useless_idiot @m0xee
@kravietz @useless_idiot @m0xee I don't think "collective" is the right word. Post-soviet societies are EXTREMELY atomized, that's what totalitarian regimes do to people - they kill ANY horizontal connections, any grass roots, any organizations, any institutions that are not heartless state bureaucracy. Even nuclear family. That's why divorce rates in russia still sky high. That's why russians report on their close family to KGB.
@kravietz @useless_idiot @m0xee Soviet human" must always stay alone and naked in the dark before Sauron's eye of state. And they don't know any other reality and don't believe it exists. They don't believe collective action is a thing. If Ukrainians brought down their dictator on Maidan - that must be secretly CIA coup. For russians democracy is some kind of a ploy, it's not real, it can't be real. People can't be subject of politics, you can do nothing, that's a law of nature.
@kravietz @useless_idiot @m0xee And that's why they hate the collective "West" - for them it's just another dictatorship that exploits you, but foreign, and hiding behind the mask of democracy. They hate their own state too, but "at least it's honest". At least putin is saying what they feel, not that nonsense fairytales about human rights. It's a zero sum game world where everyone is a slave to those who have more power and an exploitative oppressor for those who have less.
@kravietz @useless_idiot @m0xee And that's where famous post-soviet corruption came from (both Ukrainian and russian) - it's not a sin to steal from state, because the state is the enemy, the state is a slave owner, and you are slave. You can't free yourself, because there's no such thing as freedom, but you can take whatever you can as long as you don't get caught.
That’s a very good point, and I have just read a book on the history of serf uprisings in Poland[^1] which is a bit of an eye opener. All social phenomena widespread in the USSR - pretending to do work, workplace theft, passive resistance etc - were exact copies of the behavioural patterns under serfdom, be it in Poland or in Russia. And these patterns seemed to be the only way of resistance or protest available to people who were practically put into position of slaves by an oppressive landlord or state, respectively.
[^1]: https://bookwyrm.social/book/1302546/s/bekarty-panszczyzny-historia-buntow-chopskich
@kravietz @bjeelka @useless_idiot @m0xee does it relate to the "laying low" phenomenon in China?
Some Chinese employees and youth don't seem to see a future and thus only do the minimum necessary.
I use “collective” out of any better word. There’s an excellent book by Michel Heller “Cogs in the Wheel: The Formation of Soviet Man” who describes the Soviet society - as perceived and as formed by the state - as a mass of nameless and disposable pieces of human resource, that have no individual rights on their own and whose only value is to be the part of the larger state machine. How would you describe it other than “collective”?
@kravietz @useless_idiot @m0xee Yeah, right, I guess it's a different sense of the word. "Collective" as "I'm a cog in a big system, so I must spin this way as they said or they will replace me" rather than "I'm a cog in a big system so the system's interests are MY interests, so I must improve the system". There's no actual team play in totalitarian society, each cog doesn't actually give a shit about the "collective good", each cog is individualist, a survivor.
Extremely atomized! That too is a product of lack of genuine national culture — everyone feels that what we have now is fake, there is no real sense of national unity. We are told that we, unlike those Western individualists, always have collective in mind — nothing can be further from truth than this and everyone who has ever lived in Russia knows that it's utter bullshit. When Russian gets slightly wealthier so he can afford living not in a barn or a concrete box, the first thing he does is erect a fence. Look at the "elites" we have now — they are a perfect example of this. Not even fences, but concrete walls that you can't even see through, up to four meters high (!). There is this popular investigation by Navalny about an "elite" apartment building that didn't have windows on one of it's side because that side faces the estate occupied by Igor Sechin, head of RosNeft 🤣
And everyone does that — the first thing after escaping involuntary "collectiveness". This is why even Moscow had been a city of fences at one point — in late 2000s early 2010s I had to take a 3 block long side-route to get to the other side of otherwise impassible fence, and it wasn't some industrial zone or territory special in any other way — just normal apartment buildings and the adjacent school, that is no joke! There are no real communities and not a speck of trust in their neighbours. Now these fences are mostly gone — torn down by Moscow's government because this makes the city not look "European", and yet it's not because people got different, but because they got forced into this "collectiveness" again.
This only just started a decade ago or so, when still scarce middle class became capable of collective action — people started trying to decide for themselves, not waiting for the state to make decisions for them. And simultaneously the most popular protests started — people started realizing that they just don't want the state who always knows better. And eventually all of it got crushed — middle class became few again, a lot of people just left, those who stayed are trying to keep low profile. And the society is as atomized as it ever was 😩
@kravietz @useless_idiot @m0xee
@m0xEE@breloma.m0xee.net @kravietz @bjeelka @useless_idiot@noagendasocial.com @m0xee@librem.one
From agent based modelling, relaxing control in a state is virtually impossible without a degree of disorder.
The 'velvet revolution' is the only one I can think of. Even Gandhi had problems of inter community violence as he led India out of colonial rule. Those tensions and violence continue to this day, despite trading land for peace.
The only answer is to stop authoritarianism creeping in as it is in GB/UK, USA, I, H, Etc.
@useless_idiot I knew a few Poles in person and even online Poles are among the most fun people so I have always found this hard to believe.
The real reason is probably serf's way of thinking — when your master gets attacked you have to protect him, same here. Polish officials often voice something unfriendly towards Russia — the state, not the people — but a lot of Russians take it personally.