*
MILITARY PREPAREDNESS
We marched around the schoolyard,
memorized rifle parts.
In June we were taken
to an indoor shooting range.
I pulled the trigger blindly,
shaken by the noise, the recoil.
Most of the time
I hit the side wall.
I pleaded poor eyesight,
was excused.
In truth I didn’t know
how to sight the target.
*
Grenade training: if you throw
a grenade to your right, you must run
to your left. I never got as far
as that. My fate was sealed in first grade
when I switched our primers
while a classmate was away
from our desk. My copy
had crisper, darker print. To be different
was to be wrong.
Someone else's meant superior.
I felt guilty about it for years.
I failed to confess it in church,
and felt guilty about that
also. At ten I confessed,
knees sunk into the hollowed,
creaky kneeling board,
the air musty with so many sins.
The priest solemnly insisted
I must give the primer back.
Also say five Hail Marys
and three Our Fathers. By then
I lived in another town,
on the verge of suspecting both
life and afterlife were absurd.
*
There’s a New Age theory of the beyond:
we get to see our lives
moment by moment all over again.
What an economical design for hell.
But I wouldn’t beg for another
chance to do it right.
Impossible. I’d like to fail again,
in a brilliant new way.
I'd like an angel to be
not a giant like my six-foot-six
Military Preparedness instructor, but a small
lap angel. He wouldn’t force me
to review my life
or scores on the shooting range.
He wouldn’t care about rifle parts,
wouldn’t listen to my “field report.”
He’d take me by the hand and say,
Relax, you unexpectedly
made it, here, eat this lily —
and I’d eat it the wrong way,
as the first time I was given a banana,
and ate it sideways,
leaving behind a delicately carved
banana-core — then we’d exit
laughing. You have to have
military preparedness for that.
~ Oriana
*
Brezhnev advocating peace to the world
Oriana:
When I came to the US at 17, I was startled to meet people who seemed to believe that the USSR had plans to attack the US. I knew that wasn’t the case; at best, the most devout Soviet communists believed that the US would destroy itself from within — it was just a matter of time.
Later I also realized that one could argue the two world powers were indeed conducting hostilities through various “proxy wars.” But I never thought the Russians were getting ready to invade the US, or perhaps be the first drop the bomb — simply because nothing indicated that Russia (by any other name) was suicidal.
Nor did I believe that the US had any intention of attacking the Soviet Union and its satellites (in fact, Poland had the status of the "most favored nation" since it was regarded as Russia's historical enemy). I remember we giggled uncontrollably during the high school nuclear raid drills. Those were part of the Military Preparedness class, which was hard to take seriously. (One of the posters that provoked particular merriment was "How to evacuate a state agricultural farm.")
Mary:
*
WHO OWNS BRUNO SCHULZ?
As Bruno Schulz, the Jewish writer and artist who is the subject of Benjamin Balint’s new biographical study, once wrote: “urge to sad whimpering to understand in a thousand kaleidoscopic possibilities with the feeling of homelessness”.
Well, not quite. These are Schulz’s words – sort of – but translated from the Polish in which he wrote them into English, and I’ve chosen them at random from the strange and extraordinary book Tree of Codes, produced in 2010 by the American novelist Jonathan Safran Foer. It consists of the entire text of Schulz’s short story collection The Street of Crocodiles, but with most of the words having been cut out, leaving yawning gaps, so that rather than reading the pages we read through them, creating strange, opportunistic collages of Schulz’s words, snippets and flashes of his thought.
Why would someone do this to a writer that they love? Kafka – to whom Schulz is often compared – described a book as “an ice-axe to break the frozen seas inside of us”, and Safran Foer says that “Schulz’s two books are the sharpest axes I have come across”. One difference between Kafka and Schulz is that while the former is a household name, the latter has attracted a smaller but more passionately devoted group of readers, especially among novelists who have followed in his wake: he is the quintessential writer’s writer, propping up and popping up within the fictions of Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Nicole Krauss, Danilo Kiš, David Grossman, Olga Tokarczuk, and many others.
Reading Schulz’s works, it’s easy to see why he might have had such an effect on this array of creative minds. His stories defy description, explication, paraphrase. They are set in a phantasmagoric version of the city of Drohobycz (now in western Ukraine), where Schulz was born and died, and largely in and around the cloth shop on the market square that his parents owned, but in a version of these places where time and space have become molten and malleable. They take place in “years which – like a sixth, smallest toe – grow a 13th freak month” in “an illegal time… liable to all kinds of excesses and crazes”. The narrator’s father – a looming, manic, tragicomic version of Schulz’s own – at one point wastes away to nothing, leaving only “the small shroud of his body” and “a handful of nonsensical oddities”; at another he morphs into “a monstrous, hairy, steel blue horsefly”, a development that the narrator takes in his stride as just one of many “summer aberrations”.
The stories read like the quintessence of the human imagination in its densest, strangest form, as if his language were a thick, sweet concentrate of the creativity that other writers dilute to a sippable weakness. The comparison with Kafka misses much of Schulz’s surreal humor and vivacity; the writer of whom he reminds me most is Maurice Sendak, with his bewitching childhood worlds filled with galumphing, unpredictable adults. Schulz’s stories provide what he called “that vibration of reality which, in metaphysical moments, we experience as the glimmer of revelation”.
In saying all of this, I am deliberately giving more space to the spaces of Schulz’s mind than to the terrible circumstances of his later life, and his death. As the Jewish community of Drohobycz was crushed into the city’s ghetto and progressively massacred, Schulz stayed alive for as long as he did by producing paintings for public buildings and for the brutal Gestapo officer Felix Landau, who wanted murals painted on his son’s bedroom walls. On 19 November 1942, the day before he was to escape with his friends’ assistance, Schulz was gunned down in the street by another Gestapo officer whose own protected Jew, a dentist, Landau had executed: “You killed my Jew,” the man supposedly explained, “I killed yours.”
Balint does a fine job of capturing Schulz’s life and his world before the war, his deeply peculiar mind and the fascinating figures in whose orbit he moved – like Debora Vogel, the multilingual poet and philosopher, author of Yiddish free verse and a PhD thesis on Hegel’s aesthetics, to whom Schulz proposed marriage before she married another man, and who deserves a biography of her own.
At times he veers into unhelpful psychologizing: while the analysis of Schulz’s masochistic tendencies, which are writ large in his writings, seems valid, the claim that in his encounter with Landau “the imagination of masochism… met the actuality of sadism” is to try to find meaningful symmetry in the most appalling and senseless of historical collisions.
Ultimately, however, Balint has more than just Schulz’s life and works in view, and his book begins and ends with the events from which Schulz’s contemporary reputation has become inseparable. In 2001, a German documentary film-maker rediscovered the murals that Schulz had painted for Landau, beneath the paint covering the walls of what had become a private residence. While debates about what to do with them were rumbling on, agents acting on behalf of Yad Vashem – the Holocaust Remembrance Centre in Jerusalem – ripped the murals from the walls and smuggled them illegally to Jerusalem, where they remain today, triggering a major diplomatic incident and a series of debates.
Who owns these works? What is their status, given that they were produced under duress – are they monuments to the cruelty of forced artistic labour or to the power of the imagination in even the worst conditions? Why should Schulz, who rejected all affiliation with organized Judaism, be claimed by a Jewish state? But given that he wrote in Polish, in a land that during his life was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and then of Poland, why should his works belong to or in Ukraine either?
Bruno Schulz self-portrait 1921
Balint explores these problems sensitively, though the book’s final sentence – which suggests that “a poetry also thrums in the longing to restore Bruno Schulz to his homeland, wherever that may be” – reads like a lyrical avoidance of the questions that he raises. I began with Safran Foer because his strange cutting out of Schulz’s words feels like a better testimony to the latter’s legacy – a reflection of its terrible gaps and absences – than the attempt to fix it in a country or in a museum.
It’s no accident, I think, that Safran Foer retained the words “kaleidoscopic possibilities with the feeling of homelessness”, for this is what Schulz provides, dazzlingly and excruciatingly. No modern writer testifies more powerfully, on the one hand, to the imaginative stimulus of a particular city, and, on the other, to the absurdity of the modern nation state as a unit within which to claim and organize human lives present and past. Balint quotes Yad Vashem’s insistence that Schulz was killed as a Jew even if he did not define himself as such – but to accept this straightforwardly is to allow antisemites far too much power over their victims.
I do not think that Schulz’s murals belong in Jerusalem, nor would they be at home in modern Ukraine. Render them homeless; make them mobile; move them across borders, from museum to museum, allowing as many people as possible to marvel and lament; allow them to exist as part of what Schulz called “a kind of experimenting in the unexplored regions of existence”. ~
Mary:
*
The presence of tranquility in a work of art speaks of a great internal civilization. Because you can’t have the tranquillity without reflection, you can’t have the tranquillity without having asked the great questions about your place in the universe, and having answered those questions to some degree of satisfaction. And that, for me, is what civilization means. ~ Ben Okra, Nigerian writer
*
RESISTANCE IN THE NAZI DEATH CAMPS
~ Operation Reinhard was a 2-year long effort to kill every Jew the Germans could find. In 4 extermination camps, almost 2 million people would be gassed and killed from late 1941 through late 1943. In 2 of these camps though, there were revolts, and thanks to these revolts, there were survivors.
I am going to focus on Sobibor because I think it is very interesting and even badass.
Sobibor was an extermination camp where 250,000 had been murdered. As 1943 was coming to a close the camp prisoners noticed that prisoners from Belzec (another extermination camp) had been sent to Sobibor and murdered after they dismantled and shut down their own camp.
The prisoners knew they would soon be killed when Sobibor was shut down so they came up with a brilliant plan.
Out of this, a resistance group was formed. They brainstormed ideas but soon got very lucky when a number of Soviet POWs arrived at the camp as more laborers, among them Alexander ‘Sasha’ Pechersky.
Sasha impressed everyone. During one of his first work details, he was placed outside the camp to cut down trees. When the SS guard started whipping Jewish laborers for cutting too slowly, Sasha protested.
The SS guard, amused by this, challenged Sasha to a challenge. If Sasha could cut down a tree in 5 minutes he would win a pack of smokes. If not, he would get 25 lashes. Sasha agreed and 4.5 minutes later the tree was cut down. When the SS guard offered smokes Sasha said “thanks but I don’t smoke. The SS guard then returned with bread and butter and Sasha said “no thank you, the rations I receive satisfy me fully”.
This act of defiance became a rallying cry in the camp. Pretty soon Sasha was one of the leaders of the resistance.
After a plan to tunnel out of the camp failed, they settled on an all-out revolt.
What took place is brilliant.
On October 14th 1943 the time was now. The camps commander, who was gifted at rooting out conspiracies, had left the camp with his aides. This was the time for the prisoners to strike.
They would designate combat teams in every barracks. These combat teams were the strongest men armed with crude weapons.
The prisoners then lured the SS guards to various locations. They would say “hey we have some new coats confiscated, come pick one out” and stuff like that. SS guards were lured to tailor shops, storerooms, shoe shining places, and other buildings where combat teams lie in wait.
First the camp commander SS Untersturmfuher Johann Niemann had his head split in by an axe. Then, every 6 minutes for the next hour an SS Officer was killed.
No alarm was sounded so far; things were going well. There was a problem though. Karl Frenzel, the most feared of the SS, had been late to his appointment and was thus still alive. Additionally, many killings had been far too public.
At this point, Sasha was sure the plot would soon be discovered as bodies were located.
Sasha then gave a speech to the assembled prisoners.
Our day has come. Most of the Germans are dead. Let's die with honor. Remember, if anyone survives, he must tell the world what has happened here!
The prisoners charged, using the pistols and rifles they had stolen. All-out chaos broke out as the prisoners got to the gate and nearby fences and clamored over.
Sonderkommando (SS headquarters) at Sobibor
The remaining SS Guards realize what is happening and open fire. Combat breaks out between the guards and prisoners. Hundreds of prisoners are slaughtered but many guards are gunned down from prisoners returning fire.
A few hundred get over the fence and head for the forest. Landmines kill many as others are gunned down.
In total, 150 are killed in the breakout, well over 100 were killed by mines in the forest, and a further 107 are hunted down and killed in the following days.
208 escaped with their lives though, and 58 would survive until the end of the war to testify what happened at Sobibor.
Sasha would steward a group of 50 Jews through the forest before abandoning them and making his way to the Red Army. He would survive the war and die in 1990 at the age of 80.
These 58 survivors would be the only people to survive Sobibor.
Treblinka had a similar revolt/escape where prisoners looted the armory, used grenades to destroy the camp, and made a dash for the gate. Here too almost everyone was killed but 70 managed to survive.
Treblinka had a similar revolt/escape where prisoners looted the armory, used grenades to destroy the camp, and made a dash for the gate. Here too almost everyone was killed but 70 managed to survive.
1.8 million Jews were sent to Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor. Of those 1.8 million, only 178 survived. 50 escaped Belzec during its operation, 58 escaped Sobibor during the uprising, and 70 escape Treblinka during their uprising.
This means these camps killed 99.992% of those sent there. Truly horrific. ~ Alex Mann, Quora
*
WHY RUSSIA’S DEFEAT IS NOT ASSURED
~ Even at this late stage a Russian defeat is not assured.
Russia: ammunition production
While it is true NATO can outproduce Russia by a factor of 50 if need be, this requires an investment the alliance may be unwilling to make. Right now the war is being fought with maximum possible peacetime production, with only limited forays into full scale wartime production by some manufacturers. It is a simple fact that added manufacturing capabilities probably won’t be needed for much longer, so it doesn’t make sense to waste money on something you won’t need a year from now, or ever again.
Russian leadership considers victory a matter of personal survival and will make Russians eat their children if it takes to win the war.
This is not a war Russia can win easily, but it can win. Their stratagem is brutal and simple: stay in the fight until NATO calls it quits and pressures Ukraine into making concessions. Agree to talks, then make additional demands from those concessions. Repeat until Ukraine is no more. See, once NATO agrees to force Ukraine into concessions, it is unlikely to double down on supporting the country.
Russian defeat is not yet assured. It can be seen on the horizon yes, it can also be smelled in the air. But it’s not here yet and it may not arrive at all. ~
~ Tomaž Vargazon, Quora
Peter Švančarek:
Your answer, while not wrong from a historical point of view, is wrong from a practical point of view. Old ammunition is not exactly safe and its functionality decreases. Shelf life is less than 30 years and that only if you store it well. Which in both cases isn’t applicable to Russia.
Patrick March:
First, the question is factually wrong, seeing how ruzzia’s gdp is a little larger than Italy’s and the disparity in GDP between NATO and ruzzia is more than twice what is stated.
Next, regarding the possible outcomes. Worst case would be a stalemate along the current lines of conflict.
Why? It again has to deal with GDP more then Putin’s ability to mobilize its population. Already the male population is being kept from leaving ruzzia; what next? ruzzia has lost its major markets for its resources and while it has found alternatives for some, it has had to discount the price dramatically. NG it just can't sell because pipelines only go to its old customers. Add to this that its oil resources were being maintained by the West and cant be easily replace will eat into its margins as well. You can duplicate this problem in many other industries as well, airlines, autos etc etc.
Long term its future ability to even defend itself from within becomes questionable. The idea that they will get stronger is based on an economic history that no long applies. Think the USSR in the late 80’s, isolated economically and politically with a frustrated population that sees their future getting grimmer regardless of what the media says.
Best case, Ukraine takes back what is theirs and Putin [the author uses “pukin”] is overthrown by a combination of minor power circles in ruzzia. They make peace in exchange for guarantees and Ukraines admittance to NATO.
Most likely case is a nasty stalemate that eats up the population of both countries for the next few years until ruzzia folds for the reasons described above.
Robert Lang:
Putin, and by extension Russia, won't stop until they are completely exhausted of capability in pushing the Putinist communo-facsist ideologically motivated Novorossyan aspired objective forward, and if they do ever manage to get to the Ukrainian West European borders then it will inevitably become a very much more expensive and difficult operation to halt the following stages of Russian progression of infiltrating into the B.9 as the next stage of slicing into Europe.
*
DID STALIN SEE THE U.S. AS THE WORST ENEMY OF COMMUNISM?
~ Yes, but only after WW2.
Before the war it was complicated. They were the bastion of Imperialism and exploitation all right, but there were nuances.
The Americans were isolationists. We hoped that they would sit and mind their Monroe business in the Western hemisphere while we were finishing off the bourgeois scum in Europa, Asia, and Africa. WW2 and FDR changed that. President Trump, you came to town way too late!
The US delivered the bulk of our military-industrial capacity built during Stalin’s industrialization in the 1930s. This was crucial for defeating Nazi Germany in the end.
During the war, their food supplies helped us to survive until we won back the food-producing areas of southern Russia and Ukraine. Lend-lease and all.
Outside of Europe, the US did what it could to undermine French, British, and Japanese colonialism. They did it for their selfish reasons, but the enemy of our enemy is my friend, or what?
Lenin and his comrades were outspoken fans of the industrial genius of Ford, Taylor, and other Elon Musks of the time. Their fascination rubbed off on Stalin and his circle of henchmen.
To get on better terms with the Americans, Stalin even reconstituted the Orthodox Patriarchy and “dismantled” the Comintern. Stalin obviously had a spot soft for the Americans, too.
If the US packed its stuff and retreated to its home turf after WW2, Stalin would be elated to get back to his Comintern business in Europe and Asia. But the bloody Yankees not only camped around our new Socialist Camp. They unfurled their nuclear umbrella over all Capitalists in our neighborhood.
From then on, getting the American Imperialists out of Europe and the Far East became the single biggest priority in Soviet foreign policy. Our defeat in the Cold War put the issue on pause. But President Putin dug up that hatchet again, once he felt Russia could afford it.
*
Soviet cartoons from the end of Stalin’s era clearly single out America as the prime culprit of all evil in the world.
Below, a Krokodil front page with general De Gaulle as a humble beggar. France still has its overseas colonies but is considered by Stalin a spent force. ~ Dima Vorobiev, Quora
De Gaulle as a beggar
Daz Dean:
Ah, the Cold War. Those were the days. You knew where you were during the Cold War.
The beastly commies, plotting behind their Iron Curtain, while leaflets came through the door telling us frightened children how to 'Protect and Survive’ in case of a nuclear war. Many wars were proxy affairs between the Autocratic East and the Democratic West, and when training with NATO, you absolutely knew who the bad guy was, and how terrible the fight would be.
Back then, there was a certain, naive, ideological purity to the whole affair. And an amount of mutual respect. There was certainly a great deal of sympathy for the ordinary Russian, or what glimpses we could see of them. Elton John sang 'Nikita', Nena got her 99 balloons out, and we all rejoiced when it appeared that the denizens of the Warsaw Pact countries had all been freed from tyranny without a shot being fired.
Yeah…good times. And here we are now — it's all gone, a little bit pear shaped.
Dima Vorobiev:
Oh the sweet time of Cold War innocence.
Matt Wilson:
Incidentally, the Monroe Doctrine exists because of Russia. After the Napoleonic Wars, the so-called “Holy Alliance,” representing the autocratic courts of Russia, Prussia, and Austria, declared an intention to recolonize the newly independent nations of the Western Hemisphere. Consequently, President James Monroe expanded the USA's defensive perimeter to include the rest of the Americas in order to dissuade Russia, Prussia, Austria, or whoever else from attempting to make good their pledge.
*
WHAT CAUSED THE SOVIET UNION TO FAIL?
~ Primarily consumerism. The promise of socialism was to take the wealth from the rich and to help the poor to become richer. But it was hard not to notice that the middle class in the West lived better than the Soviet middle class, and a lot of specific troubles felt humiliating. Like having to literally go to another city to buy sausage. And even the people on top felt screwed, because it was hard to go beyond owning a nice house and a nice car, even if you were a nationally-famous pop star, bestselling writer, or movie director. So, people thought that capitalism was the way to go, and that the Soviet system (whichever its strict definition was) failed to provide enough goods and services for the Soviet consumers.
The main reason why the Soviet system failed was the hypercentralization of the decision making. In a capitalist system, thousands upon thousands of business leaders are making independent decisions to guide their companies. Some fail, some succeed, and the system mostly works. In the Soviet system, a lot of decisions were made by the people on top of the pyramid of power, and there were not enough decision makers to keep the system alive and fluid to satisfy consumers. Like, the Politburo had to literally concern itself with the page count of a newspaper printed in Soviet Moldova, because it was about securing enough paper and not using that paper for something else kinda important. Startups were impossible in the Soviet Union, and every innovation had to go through some old, tired person with a million troubles and not a lot of drive. It’s a wonder that we had consumer goods beyond the easy-to-understand basics.
Of course, this is not specific to socialism. Too much power always leads to too many decisions that one person has to make. Or, even worse, a squabbling committee. Just look at the troubles of Walt Disney. They’ve botched Star Wars, they are botching Marvel, they are failing the subscribers of Disney+… But this an opportunity for the other companies to score, not the end of pop culture in the US. ~ Boris Ivanov, Quora
Maksym Shcherban:
The same reasons that are now causing fascist Russia to fail: corruption, totalitarian oppression, virtual nonexistence of civil rights and liberties, disregard of value of the human life.
William Lebotshy:
Pure economics. Even the USSR was not immune to economic laws. Russia always has been and remains essentially an exporter of minerals and agricultural products. No effort, even in a command economy, to develop a sophisticated industrial base. So it’s left behind like most third world countries that export minerals and grains.
Oriana:
A multitude of reasons are usually given for the collapse of the Soviet Union, but this one— consumerism (in this case denoting the lack of consumer goods) — strikes me as particularly relevant. Poland was affected by this too, though not in terms of food (agriculture stayed in private hands). But I did witness a lot of discontent and downright hatred of both Moscow and the Polish Moscow-controlled government for not providing better housing, the shortages of toilet tissue, soap, and more. (An old political joke: "Why is there no soap in Poland? Because the government is busy turning soap into Jews" — to understand this, you need to know that the government was also bec0ming increasingly anti-Semitic, explaining this as "trying to correct an ethnic imbalance within the party.")
Pavel Self:
Radio Yerevan was asked: “Why do we have all those shortages in meat supply?”
Answer: “We are approaching communism at such a fast pace that the cattle lag behind.”
(Note: Many political jokes used "Radio Yerevan." Yerevan is the capital of Armenia, but in the jokes it stood for deep provinces.
- Radio Yerevan was asked: "Is it true that there is freedom of speech in the USSR (in some versions, Russia), just like in the USA?"
- Radio Yerevan answered: "In principle, yes. In the USA, you can stand in front of the White House and yell, “Down with Reagan!”, and you will not be punished. Equally, you can also stand in the Red Square in Moscow and yell, “Down with Reagan!”, and you will not be punished."
- Radio Yerevan was asked: "Is it possible to build real socialism in Armenia?"
- Radio Yerevan answers: "Yes, but it would be better to do it in Georgia".
- Radio Yerevan was asked: "Could an atomic bomb destroy our beloved town, Yerevan, with its splendid buildings and beautiful gardens?"
Claude Speed:
Oh, yes. I remember my childhood in Vorkuta and how I, a mere four-year-old lad back then, exclaimed in amazement once I saw the “crocodile skull” (this was actually a cow’s skull) in the store — and it was the only merchandise on display…
Donald King:
I was working in Russia at times when the shelves were empty and everyone had money and at times when the shelves were full and no one had money. Strange times!
Andy William:
Trotsky wrote about this in the 1920s — that they had to find a way to get the basics into the shops, fresh and edible, and with pleasant not rude service.
Juhani:
He was of course hated for his progressive ideas.
Tim Kennedy:
In Voronezh in ‘82 shop after shop had nothing …except Dutch cheese and gherkins.
Bread shop was always stocked though and bread was delicious!
Russian "black bread" (rye bread)*
THE LIKELIHOOD OF 1917-STYLE OF REVOLUTION IN RUSSIA
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner mercenary force has said that 20,000 of its fighters have been killed in the battle for the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut. He warned that Russia could face another revolution if its leadership does not improve its handling of the war.
Prigozhin said 20% of the 50,000 convicts Wagner had recruited, and a similar number of its regular troops, had been killed over several months in the fight for Bakhmut.
He pointed to the social disparity underlined by the war. He said the sons of the poor are being sent back from the front in zinc coffins while the children of the elite “shook their arses” in the sun.
“This divide can end as in 1917 with a revolution,” he said in an interview. “First the soldiers will stand up, and after that – their loved ones will rise up. There are already tens of thousands of them – relatives of those killed. And there will probably be hundreds of thousands – we cannot avoid that.”
Ilya Ponomarev, spokesman for Freedom of Russia opposition group
Ilya Ponomarev, a Russian dissident based in Ukraine, claims to lead the political wing of the Freedom of Russia Legion. Ponomarev said the incursion had three aims: to declare a corner of the country as “free Russia”, to send a signal across Russia that the rebel movement was real and effective, and to divert Russian troops from the frontline to guard the border.
Ponomarev said that Prigozhin was a smart analyst of what was really happening in Russia and was “spot on” in his prediction about a brewing revolution. Asked about the absence of evidence so far of popular resistance in Russia, he said that in January 1917, Vladimir Lenin had said he doubted his generation would live to see the fall of the Tsarist regime, “and that was less than one month before the revolution started”. ~ Brent Cooper, Quora
Ron Clark:
So far the dead soldiers seem to have originated from those distant rural districts. Few Muscovites have lost sons and husbands. Revolution becomes more likely once Putin resorts to sending the sons of wealthier, more educated families from his Western regions.
Jonathan Murphy:
Ironically, the “Victim” mindset is prevalent (almost having become a national identity), and their leadership has for years sought to convince the people that ‘the West’ should be to blame, whereas their own leadership have prevented progress, prosperity and equality.
Of course, the ‘coup de grace’ is a shameless introduction of the terms ‘Russophobia’ and ‘unfriendly’ into the Kremlin lexicon.
Peoples rarely despise peoples….but quite rightly peoples do despise intolerable actions and injustices of nations’ LEADERSHIP.
Will we hear “not in my name” from the people of the Russian Federation?
Arthur Stepanyan:
Over the last 100 years, the mutinous spirit of the Russian Muzhik was weeded out through multiple purges, and more recently, through massive emigration of all action-capable Russian citizens. Also, any revolution needs a leader. Russia today does not have any.
Skeptical Human:
The leader of the Russian Volunteer Corps, known as Denis Kapustin or Denis Nikitin, is a Russian nationalist and linked to neo-Nazi groups, and the group openly advocates a monoethnic Russian state. No chance of winning over the Russian public and being the leader of a revolution.
Alexander Khuu:
A revolution or civil war in a nuclear armed nation would be quite different from the 1917 revolution and is the least desirable option. I am hoping for a coup instead.
Oriana:
Putin is of course well aware that many would love to see him tossed out a high window, or deposed in some manner, the way Khrushchev got deposed. Consequently the layers of security around him are very tight. He won't travel by plane, because a plane could be shot down. He has several identical-looking offices, so as to keep people confused about his actual location at any given time.
Besides, who else could take power? Patrushev? Prigozhin? Their imperial ambitions might be even worse. Navalny seems like a broken man at this point. After all the prison torments he's been subjected to, I wonder about his sanity. Even if sane, he is a Russian Supremacist and anti-Semite, not at all guaranteed to withdraw from Ukraine and try instead to improve the lives of Russian citizens.
Frustrating as is it, we'll simply have to wait and see. A defeat in Ukraine, or even a prolonged stalemate, would be bound to have some effect on the Kremlin. What kind of effect? I would be surprised it we weren't caught by surprise once again.
But waiting for a democracy in Russia is probably as realistic as collecting pennies in the hope of buying a Rolls Royce.
*
STEPHEN KOTKIN ON UKRAINE
How do you analyze Putin as a strategic figure in this horrendous drama?
He is not a strategic figure. People kept saying he was a tactical genius, that he was playing a weak hand well. I kept telling people, “Seriously?” He intervened in Syria, and he made President Obama look like a fool when President Obama said that there would be a red line about chemical weapons.
But what does that mean? It means that Putin became the part owner of a civil war. He became the owner of atrocities and a wrecked country, Syria. He didn’t increase the talent in his own country, his human capital. He didn’t build new infrastructure. He didn’t increase his wealth production. And so if you look at the ingredients of what makes strategy, how you build a country’s prosperity, how you build its human capital, its infrastructure, its governance—all the things that make a country successful—there was no evidence that any of the things that were attributed to his tactical genius, or tactical agility, were contributing in a positive way to Russia’s long-term power.
In Ukraine, what is it that he’s gained? If you look over the landscape, he’s hurt Russia’s reputation—it’s far worse than it ever was. He consolidated the Ukrainian nation, whose existence he denied. He is expanding NATO, when his stated aim was to push NATO back from the expansion undertaken since 1997. He’s even got Sweden applying for NATO membership. And, so, all across the board, it’s a disaster.
The problem is that he’s in power. And soft Russian nationalists, who were semi-critical of Putin, now have no place to go because you’re either all in, or you flee to Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Turkey. He’s wrecking his own country in a way, although in a very different way from the murdering that he’s carrying out in Ukraine.
What has been revealed about Russia’s military and its intelligence capabilities in the past year?
The war’s a tragedy. There’s no way to spin it as other than tragic, given what’s happened: the number of deaths in Ukraine; the amount of destruction; the consequences for other countries, including food insecurity. But there have been some pleasant surprises. One was the Ukrainians’ ability and will to fight. It’s been very inspiring from the get-go. We knew they would fight to a certain extent, because they twice overthrew a domestic dictator: in 2004 and in 2014. They went out into the streets, risked life and limb, and were willing to confront those domestic tyrants. Now you have a foreign tyrant. We knew that they would resist, but it’s been a pleasant surprise, the depth of their courage and resistance.
Olexandr Syrskyi, Ukrainian general who conducted the brilliant defense of Kyiv The other pleasant surprise has been Russia’s failures. We knew that there were issues with Russia: many of us thought that the Russian Army was really only about thirty thousand or fifty thousand strong, maximum, in terms of trained fighters who had up-to-date kit—as opposed to hundreds of thousands of dog-food-eating conscripts, untrained or poorly trained, badly equipped soldiers under corrupt officers. But, still, the depth of the Russian failure in Ukraine, from a military point of view of their objectives, was a pleasant surprise for many of us, myself included.
And there’s Europe’s adaptability and fortitude, right? Everybody said, “If Europe doesn’t have its cappuccinos in the morning and its espressos after lunch, there’s no way they could put up with this.” Look what’s happened: they switched from their dependence on Russian energy much faster than anybody thought. They’ve rallied in support of Ukraine pretty much across the board.
But the Russian economy didn’t shrink, let alone shrink massively. It turns out that the Russian people proved extremely adaptable to the sanctions regime and figured out how to survive—and, in some cases, how to prosper. Russian imports are back, and Russian exports are back. Russian employment is looking O.K.
Yes, the figures are a secret, but there are indirect ways that we can figure it out. How much is Turkey exporting? That helps us figure out how much Russia is importing, even though Russia’s keeping it a secret. So it turns out that the sanctions are not having the effect of inflicting severe pain in the short term. We’ll see what the long-term impact is. But so far the pressure to make Russia reconsider its policy of criminal aggression against Ukraine has not been there—even less than I thought it would be, and I was a skeptic on sanctions.
Steve, last year we talked about Sun Tzu, the great Chinese theorist of war, who said that you have to build your opponent “a golden bridge” so that he can find a way to retreat. A year later, do you have any thoughts on what that might look like, and is anybody even thinking about it at this point?
That would be a great thing, if we could do that. But there’s nothing like that in sight. You win the war on the battlefield. There are some shortcuts that could potentially enable you to get to a victory more quickly—for example, if the Russian Army disintegrated in the field. I said a year ago that that seemed unlikely, and there hasn’t been any evidence that the Russian Army is disintegrated in the field. In fact, there's been the call-up of the several hundred thousand new recruits—they’ve been deployed, they’re on the front lines, and they’re fighting.
The other shortcut we talked about was an overthrow of the Putin regime in Moscow and his replacement by a capitulatory, not an escalatory, Russian leader. But there was no evidence that the regime was in trouble. Authoritarian regimes can fail at everything—they can even launch self-defeating wars—so long as they succeed at one thing, which is the suppression of political alternatives. He’s very good at that. And then the third shortcut was the idea of the Chinese exerting pressure to force Russia to climb down. We didn’t think that China had this leverage, and we certainly didn’t think they would use their imaginary leverage.
So, without the shortcuts, we’re at the battlefield. And the problem with the battlefield is that victory is misdefined here. You have to win on the battlefield, but how do you then win the peace as well? What would winning the peace look like? We know you can win on the battlefield and lose the peace, right? Sadly, we’ve experienced that in our own country, with some of the wars that we’ve been involved in.
Vietnam, for example.
Yes. And then some of the more recent ones in the Middle East.
So here we are with Ukraine, and their definition of victory—as expressed by President Zelensky, who has certainly more than risen to the occasion—is to regain every inch of territory, reparations, and war-crimes tribunals. So how would Ukraine enact that definition of victory? They would have to take Moscow. How else can you get reparations and war-crime tribunals? They’re not that close to regaining every inch of their own territory, let alone the other aims.
If you look at the American definition of what the victory might look like, we’ve been very hesitant. The Biden Administration has been very careful to say, “Ukraine is fighting, Ukrainians are dying—they get to decide.” The Biden Administration has effectively defined victory from the American point of view as: Ukraine can’t lose this war. Russia can’t take all of Ukraine and occupy Ukraine, and disappear Ukraine as a state, as a nation.
But what would Biden—and U.S intelligence and the U.S. military—really like to see, in terms of a shift in attitude, if that’s the case?
We are slowly but surely increasing our support for Ukraine. First it was “Oh, no, we’re not sending that.” And then we send it. “Oh, no, we’re not sending Himars,” the medium-range rocket systems. We sent them. “Oh, no, we’re not sending tanks.” Well, yes, we’re sending tanks. So there’s been a kind of grudging, gradual escalation because of the fear of what Putin could do on his side in an escalatory fashion. And so we’ve given enough so that Ukraine doesn’t lose, so that they can maybe push a little more on the battlefield, regain a little bit more territory, and be in a better place to negotiate.
Because they wanted to join Europe. It’s the same goal that they have now. And that has to be the definition of victory: Ukraine gets into the European Union. If Ukraine regains all of its territory and doesn’t get into the E.U., is that a victory? As opposed to: If Ukraine regains as much of its territory as it physically can on the battlefield, not all of it, potentially, but does get E.U. accession—would that be a definition of victory? Yes, it would be.
Says you, but would the Ukrainian leadership and the Ukrainian people accept a situation in which they’re in the E.U., but Donbas and Crimea remain in Russian hands?
Well, you accept it or you don’t accept it—meaning you continue to fight. And, if you continue to fight, your country, your people, continue to die, your infrastructure continues to get ruined. Your schools, your hospitals, your cultural artifacts get bombed or stolen. Your children get taken away as orphans. That’s where we are right now.
I understand they want all of that territory back. But let’s imagine that they can’t take all the territory back on the battlefield. What then? We’re in a war of attrition right now, and in a war of attrition there’s only one way to win. You ramp up your production of weaponry, and you destroy the enemy’s production of weaponry—not the enemy’s weapons on the battlefield, but the enemy’s capability to resupply and produce more weapons. You have to out-produce in a war of attrition, and you have to crush the enemy’s production.
What’s an example of that historically?
Every war that’s ever been fought. There are two ways that major wars evolve. They all start as wars of maneuver because somebody attacks. There’s a lot of movement at first, and then they meet resistance and the offensive stalls out because it’s hard to maintain an offensive, and the other side’s resistance gets ramped up. Then what happens is you radically expand your industrial base for weapons. That’s what the U.S. did in World War Two, and that’s how we won the war.
Here’s the better definition of victory. Ukrainians rose up against their domestic tyrants. Why?
And so think about this: We haven’t ramped up industrial production at all. At peak, the Ukrainians were firing—expending—upward of ninety thousand artillery shells a month. U.S. monthly production of artillery shells is fifteen thousand. With all our allies thrown in, everybody in the mix who supports Ukraine, you get another fifteen thousand, at the highest estimates. So you can do thirty thousand in the production of artillery shells while expending ninety thousand a month. We haven’t ramped up. We’re just drawing down the stocks. And you know what? We’re running out.
Is Russia running out?
We’ll get to that in a second. But we’re on the hook for Taiwan, and we’re four years behind now in supplying Taiwan for contractual orders of American and allied military equipment. General [Mark] Milley, [chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff], God bless him, he’s there in the Pentagon, in that big E-ring where all the important people sit, and he turns his head because all his stuff is going out the door. Everything in our stocks is going right out the door, right past his desk. And it’s not going to Taiwan, which is a place that we want to send it. And so we would have to radically ramp up production, us and our allies, to fight a war of attrition.
And, at the same time, the sanctions were supposed to destroy Russia’s ability to produce weapons, and that’s not happening. Russia can produce about sixty missiles a month under sanctions. So that’s two horrible barrages against Ukrainian civilian homes and infrastructure, their energy infrastructure, their water supply—sixty missiles a month. That doesn’t include what they’re buying back from Africa that they previously sold. What they’re trying to get in deals with North Korea or Iran. The Soviet arsenal, the biggest arsenal ever assembled—a lot of it is rotting, but not all of it is rotting. Some of the production is still ongoing, not as much as Russia would like, but enough to carry out the strategy of “If I can’t have it, nobody can have it.”
If you’re in a war of attrition, you’ve got to be bombing the other side’s production facilities. You have to be denying the other side the ability to resupply on the battlefield. And you have to be ramping up your production like we did in the previous wars where we were directly engaged, but we haven’t done here.
So tell me: How do you fight a war of attrition with your left hand tied behind your back and your right hand tied behind your back? The Ukrainians are amazing. It’s just so inspiring to see what they’re doing. But if we get every inch of territory back—and we’re not close to that—we still need an E.U. accession process. Ukraine will need a demilitarized zone, no matter how much territory it gets back, including if it somehow gets Crimea back. It’s got the problem that, next year, the year after, the year after next, this could happen again.” ~ Quora
Charlie Brown:
Putin is not conquering these areas….more like leveling them.
Temujin Kuechle:
Good point. His prize is rubble, ruin, and a reasonable amount of hatred, distrust and opposition by the Ukrainians. What a victory?
Charlie Brown:
Oh… and I’m also hoping for uprisings like what’s happening in Georgia right now to succeed.
Russia: the courtyard of an apartment building. A
typical Russian apartment building is 17 stories high (which must be as
tall as the construction technique permits) and contains thousands of
tiny flats. The buildings aren’t as big as they look though, because
they are hollow, with a gloomy central courtyard in perpetual shadow.
Russian apartments are really small, even compared to the most basic US
apartment.
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CONSPICUOUS CRUELTY
Below, a painting by Víktor Vasnetsóv, “Outside the Moscow prison.” It depicts Ivan the Terrible’s prison guards handing out to a group of boyars (top aristocrats) the dead bodies of their relatives. Ivan IV’s Opríchnina (“extraordinary rule”) is a synonym for wild lawlessness and arbitrary executions in Russia. [It's also been called "conspicuous cruelty"]
However, compared to Stalin’s rule, the Oprichnina was a rather benign undertaking. When Ivan the Terrible, toward the end of his rule, decided to “pardon” those he executed, the roster of dead aristocrats didn’t exceed 6,000 names. That’s for the whole duration of his rule. For comparison, during the Great Purge of 1937–39 Stalin’s famous tróikas* outdid that in just two workdays.
*Stalin’s troikas” — groups of three men responsible for quick extra-judicial sentencing of individuals suspected of being anti-Soviet. According to NKVD statistics, from July 1937 to November 1938, 335,513 persons were sentenced by troikas in the course of the implementation of the National Operations. Among them, 247,157 (or 73.6%) were executed by shooting. ~ Wikipedia
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“Maybe forgiveness is just that: the ability to admit someone else's story.” ~ Lidia Yuknavitch
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WHY ENGLISH IS THE MOST WIDELY SPOKEN LANGUAGE IN THE U.S.
~ Regardless of where exactly they originated, it’s pretty clear that through the course of the history of the US, more people coming here came from non-English-speaking countries than English-speaking ones: Germany, France, the Low Countries, Scandinavia, Slavic-speaking places in Eastern Europe, China, a variety of African countries, and so on. English speakers formed a minority. And yet we speak English. Why?
Basically, because the US didn’t come out of nowhere. It originated as a series of colonies founded over a century earlier under the auspices of the English government. They were founded and ruled by the English, and at least initially they were inhabited largely by Englishmen. They were established as English-speaking regions. Immigrants started to come in from elsewhere, notably but not exclusively German-speaking states, but they trickled in slowly, so they individually had to assimilate into an English-speaking society.
English was the language of law and government and to a significant degree the language of commerce as well. At various points in the country’s history it’s been possible to build and maintain small enclaves where the primary language is that of “the old country.” There have been small towns across the American west where languages like German or Norwegian, and today there are still neighborhoods populated mostly by immigrants where you’ll mostly here Chinese, Spanish, Russian, Vietnamese, or some other non-English language. But no one group of immigrants has ever had sufficient “cultural mass” to assert their own language as a standard to displace English. Ultimately, it’s not that English became the dominant language, overcoming others. It’s that English started as the dominant language and no other language was able to overcome its early advantages.
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THE LAW OF REPULSION
If the general pursuit of happiness is problematic, specific strategies designed to bring about greater contentment can also backfire.
Consider the oft-cited technique of “visualizing your success”. A student might imagine themselves in mortar board and gown; an athlete with a gold medal around their neck; someone on a diet might picture the new clothes they’ll be wearing at the end of their regime.
The idea lies behind bestselling books such as The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale and often features in inspirational biographies. It seems to make sense that thoughts of success could boost our motivation and self-confidence. What’s wrong with imagining a better future for yourself?
Quite a lot, according to research by Prof Gabriele Oettingen and colleagues at New York University, which has shown that this intuition is counterproductive. One of her first studies found that dieters who spend some time imagining their newer, healthier figure tend to lose less weight than dieters who do not engage in such fantasies. Similarly, students who daydream about their future jobs are less likely to gain employment after university than students who don’t contemplate their successes in such vivid detail.
The researchers suspect that the positive fantasies – and the positive moods that they create – can lead to a sense of complacency. “You feel good about the future, with no urgency to act,” says Dr Sandra Wittleder, a postdoctoral fellow at NYU. This process could be seen at play in a recent study tracking students’ progress over the course of two months: the more they reported fantasizing about their success, the less time they spent studying for their exams – presumably because, at an unconscious level, they assumed they were already well on the way to getting a good grade. Inevitably, they performed worse overall.
Not only do these fantasies reduce the chances of success, the failures pack an even greater emotive punch once you compare your previous hopes with your current circumstances. Echoing Mauss’s research on the pursuit of happiness, Oettingen’s team found that the students who had engaged in this kind of positive thinking suffered a greater number of depressive symptoms months down the line.
If you really want to succeed, you’d do far better to engage in “mental contrasting”, which involves combining your fantasies of success with a deliberate analysis of the obstacles in your path and the frustrations you are likely to face. Someone going on a diet, for example, might think about the benefits for their health before considering the temptation of junk food, and the ways it could stop you from reaching that goal. By contemplating these potential failures, they may not feel so good in the short term, but many studies have shown that this simple practice can increase motivation and improve success in the long run. “It creates a kind of tension or excitement,” says Wittleder, who has shown that the method can help dieters to avoid temptation and eat more healthily.
BLACK AND WHITE THINKING
These unexpected effects should give pause for thought to anyone striving for even greater contentment – a topic that will be on many people’s minds as a new year begins. If we go about it in the wrong way, an overambitious set of resolutions will only set us up for stress, disappointment and loneliness.
Rather than making an elaborate list of life changes, we should aim for fewer, more realistic goals, and be aware that even some apparently benign habits are best used sparingly. You will have heard that keeping a “gratitude journal” – in which you regularly count your blessings – can increase your overall well-being, for example. Yet research shows that we can overdose on this. In one study, people who counted their blessings once a week showed the expected rise in life satisfaction, but those who counted their blessings three times a week actually became less satisfied with their life. “Doing the activity can itself feel like a chore, rather than something you actually enjoy,” says Dr Megan Fritz at the University of Pittsburgh, who recently reviewed the conflicting evidence for various kinds of happiness intervention.
You should also reset your expectations of the path ahead. While greater contentment is achievable, don’t expect miracles, and accept that no matter how hard you try, feelings of frustration and unhappiness will appear from time to time. In reality, certain negative feelings can serve a useful purpose. When we feel sad, it’s often because we have learned something painful but important, while stress can motivate you to make some changes to your life. Simply recognizing the purpose of these emotions, and accepting them as an inevitable part of life, may help you to cope better than constantly trying to make them disappear. Any effort that we make – whether it’s specifically aiming at greater happiness, or other measures of success – will come with some challenges and disappointments, and the last thing you should do is blame yourself for occasionally feeling bad when plans don’t work out.
Ultimately, you might adopt the old adage “Prepare for the worst, hope for the best, and be unsurprised by everything in between”. As my mother tried to teach me all those years ago, ease the pressure off yourself, and you may just find that contentment arrives when you’re least expecting it.
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-it-s-time-to-stop-pursuing-happiness?utm_source=pocket_collection_story
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“In the Bible, the apple is strange.
It is desirable because one has not tasted it yet.
From the very moment the girl desires,
she tastes distance, difference, strangeness.
One can say pleasure is not of this world.
It belongs to another world, another language.”
~ Hélène Cixous, Reading with Clarice Lispector
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MARTIN LUTHER, AUTHOR OF “THE JEWS AND THEIR LIES”
~ Jews refused to convert to Luther's new and updated version of Christianity.
See, he thought they were just holding out because of the corruption of the Catholic church and expected them to flock in droves to his new “Bible-true” version of the Christian doctrine. When he realized that Jews just wanted to keep doing our own thing and were not interested in the whole Jesus story, he was enraged and decided we all needed to die.
Because there were Jewish arguments that contradicted the claims of the New Testament about Jesus, Luther assumed Jews must all be perfidious liars who needed killing.
That’s the gist anyway. ~ Shayn M, Quora
Daniel Schwartz:
Jews also insisted, obstinately, on reading their own holy book in their own language, the language in which it was originally written… and not in Martin Luther’s German translation, with the resulting errors and mistranslations.
I mean, really. How dare they? It seems downright ungrateful for them to refuse his translation, from their language to a foreign one, introducing all sorts of errors on the way. Didn’t they realize how hard he worked on it?
Ruth Sanders:
All true; but as a footnote: the ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, by far the largest Lutheran synod in the U.S.), apologized clearly and definitively in 1994 for the anti-semitism of Martin Luther (for the statement, see Declaration to the Jewish Community), making a stronger statement than that of 1984 by the World Lutheran Federation, which many saw as more of an ‘explanation’ than an apology. Some European Lutheran churches have also issued apologies for Luther’s antisemitism.
Barbara McNeil:
Luther was a disgusting pos who called for angry peasants to be exterminated like rabid dogs, and stated that it was quite OK for women to die in childbirth because popping out babies was their sole function in life.
Mitchell Paul:
Hitler loved Luther.
Nazis quoted Luther often.
Asad Zuberi:
Why did Martin Luther keep the trinity?
It was not in the original Christianity.
Only after Constantine did the trinity became widespread.
Michael Mills:
Contrary to what is often believed, Luther did not advocate the killing of Jews living in the German lands. What he called for was their expulsion from the German lands if they continued to refuse to be converted to Christianity. His justification for their expulsion was that Germany was a Christian land and only Christians had a right to live in it, which meant that non-Christians had either to be converted or else leave.
Whatever one may think of the harshness of his proposals for expulsion, his analysis of the reason for the Jews’ resistance to conversion was entirely correct: namely that it was their racial pride, their belief that their descent from Abraham made them superior to other humans and gave them a special status as God’s Chosen People. Luther pointed out that the core doctrine of Christianity was that all humans were sinful and needed salvation through acceptance of Jesus the Nazarene as the Son of God and the Savior, which stood in contrast to the Jews’ belief that they did not need salvation since they already had the favor of God through their descent from Abraham.
The major part of Luther’s book is actually devoted to an attempted refutation of the Jewish belief in their special status through descent from Abraham, his main argument being that there were a number of peoples other than the Jews who according to the Jews’ own holy scriptures were descended from Abraham, eg the descendants of his son Ishmael and his grandson Esau, who nevertheless were denied by the Jews the special status they claimed for themselves. Luther’s argument was that if some descendants of Abraham did not have the status of Chosen People of God through that descent, then there was no reason to accept the Jews’ claim of that special status because of their descent, ie their race.
Ygal Kaplan:
’m always amazed at how “love thy neighbor”, “turn the other cheek” and “don’t judge others” was so easily turned into “KILL THEM ALL!”
Teddy Mullaney:
Sad…. I'm reading a book right now titled ‘the darkening age’ by Catherine Nixey, dealing with the Christian destruction of ‘pagan’ culture and art in late antiquity. Live and let live was definitely never a Christian credo….Jews were definitely not ‘pagan’, but if anyone deviated from the Christian line of thought in the slightest, they were automatically agents of Satan. Truly sad story…
Anyone who honestly thinks more good than evil has been done in the name of ‘God’ throughout human history is simply denying reality.
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WHY NORDIC COUNTRIES ARE MUCH MORE SECULAR THAN THE U.S.
A lot of it is related to a state monopoly on religion. For a long time you could essentially only be member of the Lutheran state church. And as we know, monopolies are not very good at selling anything in the market. The same goes for monopoly religion.
In the US there was an abundance of different Christian denominations all fighting hard for attention. You got some of the same innovation in the market places as you see for other products. Churches got more into offering more variation in song and music. More personalized message etc.
I noticed a very big difference when I visited American churches for the first time. Norwegian churches that I know best are quite dull in comparison.
Government Monopoly on Religion
Another important factor is that religion was essentially controlled by the state in Nordic countries. We got taught christianity in school when I was a kid, but not in preachy way. Because it was religion taught by a secular authority it was more like history.
I think this has very different outcomes for children. They are not taught they have to believe all this and be good believers. It is more of a matter of fact approach. This is very different from the kind of religious teachings I have seen in the US being done by the churches themselves.
The government has also been a strong force in liberalizing the church. They have basically dragged along a much more conservative church community. They pushed female bishops and gay priests on the church.
So basically a state monopoly on religion has been a major force for the secularization.
European Skepticism Towards Religion in General
But there is also a wider European context here. In Europe there is a longer tradition of the church abusing its power, in particular in Catholic countries. That is e.g. why France is fiercely secular. Thus society as a whole has been more skeptical of religion.
Norse Heritage
One of the reasons the Vikings had a terrible reputation, was that they were heretics. Pagan religion like Norse mythology lasted longer in Scandinavia than in most of the rest of Europe which got Christian quite early. My native Norway got Christened by force by one of our early Viking kings. But people all over the country resented him for it and kept the Norse Gods for a long time in secret.
If you ever watched game of Thrones, I would say the Scandinavian mindset is a lot like that of the Free Folk / The Wildlings. They don’t like to be told what to do. Norse kings were for a long time very different from European kings. In Norway kings were elected at parliament. Authority rested a lot on your ability to do a good job. If not people were prone to revolt against the king.
The instruction manual Germans got about Norwegians when they invaded said “never yell at Norwegians, they really hate that.”
I think a lot of Scandinavians probably strongly disliked the hierarchical nature of the church, and thus were quite active in sabotaging the whole thing. At least in Norway in medieval times you were required to attend church but few did, basically breaking the law.
Thus Christianity while dominant probably never had such a strong foothold in Nordic countries as in the rest of Europe. When modern times came, it had less power to withstand secularization. ~ Erik Engheim
A Lutheran church in Sweden
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RELIGION IN THE SOVIET UNION AND POST-SOVIET RUSSIA
~ The post-Soviet religious shift made itself visible when the Soviet rule was still going strong, as early as in the 1970s. People started to display Orthodox icons that survived the Soviet rule in their living rooms along with their best dinner sets and crystal vases. Conversations about Russian Orthodox history and religious themes in the works of our writers in the Romanov era began gaining ground among educated classes. More and more young people went to church for Easter services. Baptizing kids and getting married in church wasn’t any longer a career-endangering move, even though no one publicized it at work.
When Perestroika started, the spiritual collapse of Communism became all too evident. Healers and self-styled prophets filled the void. TV-shows where stern-faced men healed everyone through airwaves and loaded water at people’s homes with positive energy drew millions in audience.
During the first post-Soviet years, the Orthodox church didn’t catch the wind in its sails at once. It didn’t know how to compete with proselytizing crowds from other faiths. Its top executives were busy enriching themselves through government dispensations for custom-free trade in liquor and tobacco.
Toward the end of the Yeltsin’s rule and especially under Putin, the government decided to transform the Orthodox Church into a kind of a national ministry of spiritual matters. The clergy got returned its properties confiscated by Bolsheviks. It increased its presence dramatically in the mass media, schools, government offices and other public areas. The Pussy Riot affair demonstrated
to everyone that challenging the Church is now considered an extremist activity and can entail indictment and a prison term.
The Internet art below shows the ideological shift that happened in Russia in just one generation.
I think it plays a lot into the Nationalistic idea and this is the main purpose.
Unlike in the West Europe, in the East, because of the shifting borders due to conquest of different people with different religions, the religion became the placeholder of the national identity for most of the people. Thus, a proper Russian or Romanian can't be a proper Russian or Romanian unless they are Greek-Orthodox, and I would go as far as to say that this applies for most of the Eastern Europeans in terms of view of their national identity.
Alexander Kudryashev:
In a nutshell, Russian government daydreams about a National Idea which can can replace stale Communist idea. Orthodox Church idea is very convenient in this case.
It's been known for a long time to the general population.
It is well-known to the Government. Top Church officers are as well KGB officers.
It is easy to switch from a Communist Secretary to an Orthodox Prophet. Switching from telling one lie to another lie doesn’t need much time.
Jalar Lees
Religion is one of the differences between Russia and Estonia.
Interwar and post-Soviet Estonia took secular (irreligious) path — there was/is no state religion (or, there was/is separation between the state and religion factions — loosely cooperating and opposing one another in various matters).
Russia went from one extreme to another (but from Estonian perspective, not really, rather just “changed clothes" or tried to convert over).
Hani Pasha:
Bertrand Russell in his A History of Western Philosophy noted a dozen or so similarities between Christianity and communism; e.g. “church” -> party; “prophet” -> Marx, Mao, etc.; “gospel” -> communism; “heaven” -> “communist heaven”; “confession”->”self-criticism”. Marx was Jewish so he was very familiar with the Christian tradition. Communism is structurally similar to Christianity (with crucial differences as well), and that’s why some Christians see communists as the anti-Christ because communism seems like a bastardized version of Christianity.
Jonathan S:
I rather doubt that “Christians [who] see communists as the anti-Christ" have really even thought through their probably knee-jerk “commie! pinko!” reaction to the point of it being “because communism seems like a bastardized version of Christianity”.
Stefano d’Adamo:
From repression to regression.
Soviet-era joke: Brezhnev consults a noted psychic. ‘How will the USSR be in a 100 years?” The psychic concentrates, says “I see a red flag with yellow letters flying above the Kremlin.” “What do the letters say?” asks Brezhnev. “I don’t know” says the psychic. “I can’t read Chinese!”
Oriana:
Here is an image that doesn't bode well for the future of the Russian Orthodox Church:
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FRONTO-TEMPORAL DEMENTIA MAY INCREASE CREATIVITY
~ Neurological conditions can release a torrent of new creativity in a few people as if opening some mysterious floodgate. Auras of migraine and epilepsy may have influenced a long list of artists, including Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch, Giorgio de Chirico, Claude Monet and Georges Seurat. Traumatic brain injury (TBI) can result in original thinking and newfound artistic drive. Emergent creativity is also a rare feature of Parkinson’s disease. [I think it’s a response to dopamine-increasing (or mimicking) drugs.]
But this burst of creative ability is especially true of frontotemporal dementia (FTD). Although a few rare cases of FTD are linked to improvements in verbal creativity, such as greater poetic gifts and increased wordplay and punning, enhanced creativity in the visual arts is an especially notable feature of the condition. Fascinatingly, this burst of creativity indicates that the potential to create may rest dormant in some of us, only to be unleashed by a disease that also causes a loss of verbal abilities.
The emergence of a vibrant creative spark in the face of devastating neurological disease speaks to the human brain’s remarkable potential and resilience. A new study published in JAMA Neurology examines the roots of this phenomenon and provides insight into a possible cause. As specific brain areas diminish in FTD, the researchers find, they release their inhibition, or control, of other regions that support artistic expression.
Frontotemporal dementia is relatively rare—affecting about 60,000 people in the U. S.—and distinct from the far more common Alzheimer’s disease, a form of dementia in which memory deficits predominate. FTD is named for the two brain regions that can degenerate in this disease, specifically the frontal and temporal lobes. Not every person with FTD has the same pattern of loss in these regions; instead there are several variants. For example, degeneration in the temporal lobes, which are the seat of language in the brain, leads to difficulties in producing and understanding written and spoken communication. Some people with FTD have impaired speech production in what is called nonfluent FTD. Others may have difficulty in understanding word meanings in semantic FTD.
People with FTD also experience degeneration in the frontal lobes, which typically engage in a suite of skills related to social behavior, empathy, planning and decision-making. Impairment there can lead to poor judgment and difficulty understanding the perspectives of others. The frontal lobes are also involved in the complex interplay of brain areas that supports our social behavior, helping to balance baser desires and urges with the understanding of social norms and morals.
In a healthy brain, the frontal lobe’s activity can inhibit activity in other regions. This interchange is how the brain quells, for instance, the knee-jerk use of rude language with the understanding that such responses can cause offense. In FTD, however, researchers suspect that damage to the frontal lobes impairs their ability to suppress other brain activity. Behavior becomes disinhibited and socially inappropriate.
In a similar way, the recent study suggests that loss of temporal lobe activity somehow disinhibits artistic creativity in some individuals. In this new work, the researchers reviewed the medical records of 689 people with FTD or related disorders, looking for evidence of new or increased interest in artistic activities. In total, they found this change in 17 people—or 2.5 percent of their FTD participants. Most of these individuals painted, although some drew, sculpted, made pottery, crafted jewelry or quilted. FTD can sometimes be linked to certain genes, but none of these individuals had any known genetic cause of their dementia. Most in this artistic group had either the semantic or nonfluent variant of the disease, suggesting that FTD significantly affected their temporal lobe.
Researchers then selected people to compare with this artistic group. One set included FTD patients who were similar to the artists in many ways (including their diagnosis, age, sex and education) but did not exhibit artistic tendencies. An additional group matched the artists demographically (in age, sex, education and other factors) but did not have any form of dementia or serious health concern.
The research team used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to compare these three sets of people. Significantly, brain scans revealed that people with FTD had reduced volume in their left temporal lobe—an area that is important for speech production—when compared with healthy individuals. That atrophy was more pronounced in the artistic group than in those without artistic tendencies.
The scientists also found that some brain areas were relatively larger among artists with FTD. In particular, people with a smaller temporal lobe had greater volume in their dorsomedial occipital lobe, a region involved in visual association, when compared with FTD patients who were not artistically driven. This finding implies that while the temporal lobes were impaired by FTD, this visual area was enhanced. Further, among the visual artists with FTD, the portion of the motor cortex that controls movement in the right hand also showed a relative increase in volume. In fact, the greater the volume of the dorsomedial occipital lobe, the greater was this motor cortex volume.
Taking the evidence together, the researchers concluded that this disease’s effects on the temporal lobe may result in less control over the brain region that generates visual associations. In consequence, the creative drive is unleashed. Meanwhile the increased volume of the brain area that controls the right hand likely reflects the use of that hand in creating art.
The researchers confirmed these ideas by observing brain changes in one individual as her FTD progressed and creativity emerged. Positron-emission tomography scans measured how much energy was being used by different regions of her brain. Comparing brain scans revealed that, as the woman’s dementia progressed, her frontal and temporal lobes became significantly less active—and the areas involved in visual association became more active.
The new study suggests that, in a healthy brain, the temporal lobe is directly or indirectly inhibiting activity in the dorsomedial occipital lobe, which supports visual association. But why would a part of the brain involved in verbal processing suppress visual regions? These finding suggests a reciprocal or even competitive relationship between our verbal abilities and visual artistic creativity.
This insight is actually at the heart of a hypothesis regarding how our brain has changed over the course of human evolution: the “superior visual perception hypothesis.” Vision demands a lot of our brain’s computational capacity—so much so that we often close our eyes to concentrate on what we hear, whether it is music, speech, birdsong or crashing waves.
For example, visual processing helps us comprehend gesture, a nonverbal form of communication that likely preceded our use of verbal language. Computational tasks that supported the production and interpretation of gesture were also relevant to speech, and so, as we became more adept at language, gesture lost its primacy in communication. The brain regions responsible for gesture could have been taken over by those used in speech through an evolutionary process called exaptation, wherein parts of an organism take on different or completely novel roles.
This hypothesis may explain why areas involved in verbal processing might somehow tamp down activity linked to visual thinking. The new FTD research suggests this evolutionary process is, in a sense, undone in these artists with dementia.
Brain injury and neurodegenerative disease often have tragic consequences. It is therefore remarkable that these conditions can have a seemingly positive effect, such as enhanced creativity—and the finding can help us understand the origins of innovation. Creativity is part of humanity’s essence and distinguishes us in some ways from our hominid relatives. Is it possible that an artist is hidden in all of us, awaiting an accidental emergence?
Creativity is a complex behavior that requires several elements, including the capacity for divergent and symbolic thought, persistence despite uncertainty, skill in execution and the ability to evaluate one’s creations. When considering the burst in artistic activity sometimes seen in FTD, all of these factors should be weighed. In general, people with FTD perform poorly on tests of divergent thinking, suggesting either that this group of artists with the condition is quite distinct from other individuals who have it or that different aspects of creativity are somehow enhanced in the FTD artists. Other studies find that aesthetic judgment is retained in FTD, allowing affected people to evaluate the strength of their finished artwork, although many struggle to recognize emotional content in visual art.
Past research has also demonstrated that creativity emerges when we loosen our self-critical thinking. In FTD, a lack of self-censorship contributes to socially inappropriate behavior, for example, and may also mean that an artist’s “inner critic” is less vocal. Yet another facet of artistic success is practice. FTD is often accompanied by perseverative behavior in which people repeat the same actions or statements or become mentally stuck in an idea or behavior. Some scientists have proposed that the FTD artist benefits from the combination of behavioral disinhibition and repetitive practice. Indeed, that could also help explain the literary output of poetic people with FTD, who, unlike visually artistic people with the condition, have been spared significant losses to the temporal lobes’ language areas.
Still, none of these ideas fully explain the flourishing of artistic behavior in some people with FTD. The authors of the new study emphasize that the FTD artists were only a small percentage of the total number of people with this dementia that they sampled. Other factors, such as an artistic predisposition and an environment or circumstances conducive to creative pursuits, may be important.
The FTD artist may be at the center of a perfect creative storm. Studies of these individuals can therefore reveal the subtle interplay between brain regions that manifest in remarkable behaviors. The complexity of creativity makes it even more incredible that such ability can be a consequence of neurodegeneration. Ultimately, these findings are a humbling reflection of the human brain’s adaptability and seemingly endless capabilities. ~
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-rare-form-of-dementia-can-unleash-creativity/
Oriana:
This reminds me of the excitement caused by the finding that some Parkinson's patients also show increased creativity. Dopamine-mimicking drugs are probably the cause.
A certain percentage of people who survive being struck by lightning also show increased creativity, sometimes very sudden and dramatic. It is amazing to ponder the fact that sometimes brain damage results in artistic production. 
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SHOULD YOU WORRY ABOUT HOW MUCH TIME YOU SPEND SITTING?
~ First up: the idea that sitting might be bad isn’t just 21st-century scaremongering. One of the first studies to suggest a link between illness and sitting was conducted in the 1950s, when researchers found that doubledecker bus drivers were twice as likely to have heart attacks as their conductor colleagues. Since then, dozens of studies have found links between sitting and a variety of ailments, with a 2013 analysis of studies concluding: “Higher amounts of daily total sitting time are associated with greater risk of all-cause mortality.”
The problems caused by excessive sitting can be broken into two broad categories: postural problems and cardio-metabolic ones. You can mitigate the first to some extent by doing targeted stretches and mobility work (such as slow, controlled lunges or squats), or just sitting in more joint-friendly positions. The second? Not so much.
“You might be very active, but that doesn’t entirely protect you from being sedentary,” says Kelly Mackintosh, a professor of physical activity and health at Swansea University. “I could go for an hour-long run with the dog every morning and meet the government guidelines for physical activity, but then sit down or do sedentary activities for the rest of the day – which would mean that I’d be classed as sedentary, in terms of risk.”
In terms of postural problems and pain, sitting for prolonged periods can cause your muscles and tendons to stiffen, leading to patellofemoral pain syndrome – also known misleadingly as “runner’s knee” – and lower back pain. One recent study found an association between extended sitting and problems with hip extension, which might lead to other forms of musculoskeletal pain. Long-term workplace sitting is also associated with neck pain.
As for the other stuff? It’s not completely understood why sitting seems to be associated with a range of health conditions, but the most plausible explanation is that it puts your body into standby. When you do it for long enough, your metabolism slows, circulation is constricted and your ability to deal with glucose is compromised. You are effectively switching off some of your body’s largest muscles, with results that can range from increased waist size to diabetes risk.
So, what should you be doing? Sitting on a gym ball doesn’t really help; in fact, it might have negative consequences. One paper that compared balls with office chairs concluded that “prolonged sitting on a stability ball does not greatly alter the manner in which an individual sits, yet it appears to increase the level of discomfort”, while another found associations between sitting on a ball and “spinal shrinkage”.
Addressing your posture is more effective. At work, keeping your screen at eye level and your feet flat on the floor is a good start, allowing you to keep your spine and hips in less painful positions. The easiest way to make a significant difference, though, is to get up every 15, 30 or 60 minutes.
“There are a lot of studies investigating this,” says Mackintosh. “The optimal ‘breakup’ time remains to be identified, but, essentially, even if you have the same overall volume of ‘sitting time’, but break it up with bouts of standing, this is much better for various aspects of your health. Even standing once every 60 minutes helps.”
Best of all, of course, is standing for a while once you are up. “A key question is what employers can do to support positive behaviors and minimize sedentary behavior,” says Mackintosh. “But if that’s not happening, or you’re working from home, ask yourself: is there something you’re doing that doesn’t require you to sit down? Could you read your emails standing up? Could you do business calls standing, or go for a walk while you think?”
Were you standing comfortably while you read this? Maybe you should have been. ~
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/may/14/should-i-worry-about-how-long-i-spend-sitting-down
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LONGEVITY GENES: FOXO3, THE FORKHEAD OF YOUTH
One of the best-studied longevity genes is FOXO3, which codes for forkhead box protein O3. It is a member of the forkhead box (FOX) family of genes, which all encode transcription factors: proteins which regulate the expression of other genes. The FOXO subclass, of which FOXO3 is a member, regulates insulin signaling and protein metabolism in muscles.
FOXO3 is involved in tumor suppression, immune function, DNA repair, and resistance to oxidative stress.
Some variations in the FOXO3 gene are enormously beneficial, while others are risky. At rs2802292, which has the greatest effect of any single SNP yet studied in FOXO3, the TT genotype confers the same risk as smoking a pack a day for 25 years, having 20 mmHg higher systolic blood pressure, or having 20 mg dL-1 higher fasting blood sugar.
FOXO3 regulates insulin signaling and protein metabolism in muscles. Surprisingly, some variants in FOXO3 have as much of an effect on longevity as smoking a pack of cigarettes per day for 25 years.
In worm and fly models, increased FOXO3 expression increased lifespan. FOXO3 appears to promote tissue regeneration, autophagy (the cellular recycling system), and the growth of stem cells.
In rodents, FOXO3 also appears to increase the production of regulatory T cells (Tregs), which regulate the immune response, promote tolerance of harmless proteins, and prevent autoimmunity. Mice without a functional FOXO3 gene were also many times more likely to develop cancer and die young.
FOXO3 also plays a role in managing oxidative stress. Mice without FOXO3 are highly susceptible to reactive oxygen species in their bones, resulting in decreased bone mass and increased risk of fracture (osteoporosis). The antioxidant effect of FOXO3 has not yet been investigated in aged mice.
In animals, FOXO3 promotes tissue regeneration, autophagy, and the growth of stem cells. Mice and rats without a functional FOXO3 gene tend to develop osteoporosis and die young of cancer.
HOW TO INDUCE A GREATER EXPRESSION OF FOXO3
Exercise induces FOXO3 and its closely related cousin FOXO1, another transcription factor important for insulin signaling and reducing fat storage. This helps explain why people who are physically active tend to live longer! To increase FOXO3, commit to a fitness plan and focus on some forms of endurance training.
In mice, heat stress increased FOXO3 expression. This result suggests that using a sauna could help induce FOXO3 and extend lifespan. Indeed, some evidence has shown that people who regularly take sauna baths live longer lives.
Finally, intermittent fasting and calorie restriction activate FOXO3.
Diet:
Many polyphenols commonly found in plants we eat are capable of inducing FOXO3.
While we don't usually get a large concentration of any single polyphenol in the diet, we do get many of them in smaller concentrations, and they have synergistic effects.
A promising polyphenol to induce FOXO3 is EGCG, which is found primarily in green tea at reasonable concentrations.
Theaflavins, a class of polyphenols found in black tea, stimulated FOXO3 activity in multiple cell studies.
The longest living person ever, Jeanne Calment, lived to 122.5 years old! She used to enjoy cocoa daily, sometimes indulging in a kilogram (2.2 lb) per week. She was able to do this despite smoking, probably because the cocoa increased her FOXO3.
So, good news: eating a moderate amount of chocolate could increase your lifespan. [Moderate? I want to follow in the footsteps of Jeanne Calment, and go for 2 pounds a week!]
Other polyphenols that have induced FOXO3 in a lab include:
Resveratrol
Curcumin
Quercetin
Luteolin
Apigenin
A diet rich in polyphenols may help induce FOXO3 and extend your lifespan. Many fruits and vegetables contain helpful polyphenols like quercetin, luteolin, and apigenin; they are particularly abundant in apples, onions, broccoli, and many herbs.
Researchers don’t currently agree on whether resveratrol significantly affects human lifespan.
https://selfdecode.com/app/article/longevity-foxo3/#recommendations
Oriana:
What strikes me is how often tea appears in any discussion of health and longevity. Note that it’s definitely beneficial to drink black tea, a source of theaflavins.
As for resveratrol, I wonder if higher doses have been tried. Also, the liposomal form needs to be investigated.
It was also a joy to read that Jeanne Calment, who established a longevity record, indulged in chocolate, sometimes as much one kilogram a week. The chocolate probably helped her preserved her wit. She said, “I have only one wrinkle, and I’m sitting on it.”
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ending on beauty:
On this day each year you loved to relate
that the moment of your birth
your mother glanced out the window
and saw lilacs in bloom. Well, today
lilacs are blooming inside yards
all over Iowa, still welcoming you.
~ Ted Kooser, Father
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