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BOUNDARY STONE
The place has a boundary stone,
a monumental warning for some
who might have transgressed without knowing
what territory they were entering,
leaving behind from where they had come.
There, the flowers are always in bloom,
animals and birds converse in a jargon
outside human interest or understanding.
Sometimes they approach the stone,
looking out for a world long gone.
I am one of them, my genes a bit of everything.
Pretty Boy Pretty Boy I find myself singing
though I don’t know what it means.
Maybe the remains of a ballad about the bombing.
~ Kerry Shawn Keys
The boundary stone Stone at the boundary of Snierikses, Lithuania.
Oriana:
The last three lines blow me away. "Pretty Boy Pretty Boy" is a marvelous surprise -- this is how parrots and other pet birds are often addressed. And then the "break-their-hearts" last line, with a special meaning now when Ukraine is being bombed, and we know that Putin, if victorious, plans to invade the Baltics next. 
Boundary stone, Mesopotamia
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“Reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life.” ~ Mario Vargas Llosa
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HOW SCHOPENHAUER AND IDEALIST PHILOSOPHY SAVED TOLSTOY
~ In the grip of the nihilistic ethos of late 19th-century materialism and Darwinism, Leo Tolstoy contemplated suicide. He would be saved only by finding confirmation, in Schopenhauer’s idealist philosophy, of his own earlier idealist intuitions. Idealism would go on to deeply transform Tolstoy’s life and work, reconnecting him to the simple but profound intuitions of meaning that pervade the lives of peasants. This essay recounts the existential difficulties of a world-famous individual who presaged both our cultural ethos today, and the transformative opportunities offered by modern idealism.
In 1877, only a year after completing his second masterpiece Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy fell into a severe depression—what he later called an arrest of life. It was so profound that, while undressing alone in the evening, he had to first remove a rope from his room in case he was tempted to hang himself. He refused to take a rifle with him on hunting trips so as to avoid sticking the muzzle into his own mouth.
Not quite fifty, Tolstoy had led what most would have considered a full, vigorous and creative life. He had spent a decade in the army, serving as a cadet in the crack Russian artillery at Sebastopol in the Crimean war and, as a writer, had become the star of the St Petersburg literati. The owner of a prosperous thousand-acre estate with many serfs and hundreds of horses, he had a beautiful wife and children, and enjoyed the respect of his class—some said he was more revered in Russia than the Tsar.
Suddenly, though, he could not look back on his life without being seized by horror. “I killed people in war,” he wrote. “I summoned others to duels in order to kill them, gambled at cards; I devoured the fruits of the peasants’ labor and punished them; I fornicated and practiced deceit. Lying, thieving, promiscuity… drunkenness, violence, murder… there was not a crime I did not commit…” His life as a writer had been even worse, he thought, with its vanity, self-interest and pride. His literary fame was worth nothing. “I would say to myself, ‘Well fine, so you will be more famous than Gogol, Pushkin, Shakespeare, Molière, more famous than all the writers in the world, and so what?’”
His life was meaningless. He had arrived at a moment of existential crisis, likening himself to a man lost in a dark wood, without any inkling of how to find a way out. Instead of merely sitting down under a tree and accepting it, he began to pace back and forth desperately seeking a path, frenziedly looking for a meaning that he felt must be there.
Tolstoy was aware that he was a casualty of the materialism that had largely supplanted religion as the dominant ideology among European elites since mid-century. As Charles Taylor has written, this period saw a sharp rise in what he calls unbelief, not only because many people lost their faith, but also because new parameters of knowledge undermined the certainty of the old religious values.
The most obvious changes were in the way people imagined the world they lived in. Science had demonstrated that the universe was much vaster than the cosy cosmos previously envisaged, and the theory of evolution had shown that forms were not fixed, and that the world existed in a perpetual state of change. “With my own self this belief assumed the form it usually takes among the educated men of our time,” Tolstoy confessed. “The belief was expressed in the word progress … I continued to live, professing faith only in progress. Everything is evolving and I am evolving; and the reason why I am evolving together with all the rest will one day be known to me.”
The precariousness of this outlook had first dawned on him a few years earlier at a public guillotining in Paris. As he watched the heads roll, he felt he had just witnessed a crime that no theory of progress could justify. “I knew it was unnecessary and wrong,” he wrote later, “and therefore that judgements on what is good and necessary must not be based on … progress, but on the instincts of my own soul.” The empiricist-materialist paradigm had, he saw, cut people loose from their moorings, without any moral compass or idea of where they were going. “In answering live in conformity with progress,” he wrote, “I was speaking exactly like a person who is in a boat being carried along by wind and waves and who, when asked the most important and vital question, Where should I steer? avoids answering by saying, We are being carried somewhere.”
Almost everyone of Tolstoy’s acquaintance—both inside and outside Russia—was drifting in this same boat: the materialist malaise affected the entire European privileged class. He saw clearly that this was “not life but only a semblance of life, and the conditions of luxury in which we live deprive us of the possibility of understanding life.” In fact, he thought, the upper classes had substituted the pursuit of pleasure for a sense of meaning: they were aware of the mouth of the dragon gaping beneath them but distracted themselves by self-indulgence and conspicuous consumption. Tolstoy referred to this as epicureanism—he felt he could no longer share it. A few people remained truly ignorant of the problem, though it was too late for him to join them and, in any case, such ignorance tended not to last. The only other ways of escape were equally unsatisfactory: either end the agony by killing oneself, or live a life of quiet desperation, knowing it was all pointless but carrying on anyway—a road to existential misery.
For two years, Tolstoy endured the agony, staving off the temptation of suicide, in the “vague awareness that my [negative] ideas were mistaken”. His life became a quest to discover the answer to a fundamental question: Is there any meaning in my life that will not be annihilated by my death? He quickly realized that he would not find a solution in science, since scientific knowledge was based on certain laws of nature that were simply inductions from observations of nature itself. All science could say, he thought, was that “in the infinity of space and the infinity of time infinitely small particles mutate with infinite complexity. When you understand the laws of these mutations you will understand why you live.”
Next he turned to philosophy, and among several philosophers mentioned in the book he wrote about his spiritual crisis—A Confession—is Arthur Schopenhauer. Tolstoy had first read Schopenhauer’s work The World as Will and Representation a decade earlier, while finishing his classic War and Peace, and was delighted with it. “Constant raptures on Schopenhauer,” he wrote to his friend Fet, in 1869, “and a whole series of spiritual delights which I’ve never experienced before … at present I am certain that Schopenhauer is the most brilliant of men.”
Tolstoy accepted Schopenhauer’s view that the physical world existed as appearance: what appeared to be objects were no more than representations of a transcendental subject. This subject was will—the essence of the world or the world-in-itself—of which humans were part. “We are not merely the knowing subject,” as Schopenhauer put it, “we ourselves are also among those entities we require to know … we ourselves are the thing-in-itself.” In other words, the universe was mental—a shared mind-at-large—and everything that existed, existed within this universal will.
Even before reading Schopenhauer, Tolstoy had referred to will as the essence of the soul, and in his notoriously revisionist epilogue to War and Peace, he cited will as consciousness or awareness [soznanie], a concept that would later become central to his world view. He observed that man knew himself by consciousness: the awareness of oneself as a being with free will. “To know himself as living, a person must know himself as willing,” he wrote, “he must be conscious of his will. His will, which expresses the essence of his life, a person is conscious of and can only be conscious of as free”. He added that what is discovered in the consciousness of self as a free being is a dimension of reality outside space, time and causality, and that this self is a participant in the divine. “If God is the whole, which contains the infinite universe and I am not just a part of that universe but a participant in the whole … then there is nothing else but this whole, and nothing other than me.”
Clearly, Schopenhauer’s metaphysics was a profound influence on Tolstoy’s writing. Anna Karenina, indeed, has been called, “an artistic embodiment of the world as will and representation.” Other scholars, though, have pointed out that, while the earlier part of War and Peace seems to express a Schopenhauerian perspective, this is problematic, because Tolstoy had not read the World as Will and Representation at the time he wrote it. How is this possible? It seems likely that many of the ideas Tolstoy expressed in this earlier work were his own, and that the reason he so delighted in Schopenhauer’s writing was because he found there the confirmation of intuitions he had had since his younger days. “He had been pondering the same questions,” wrote Sigrid McLaughlin, “and had arrived at similar … conclusions. These ideas were then in all probability reinforced as he gradually became more familiar with Schopenhauer’s philosophy.”
If Schopenhauer’s metaphysics helped Tolstoy find a path out of the dark woods during his spiritual crisis, though, it raises the question as to why this perspective, adopted many years earlier, had not helped him avoid it in the first place. The answer probably lies in the gap between the intellectual or rational grasp of the subject that Tolstoy could apply in his fiction, and the emotional—he termed it irrational—understanding that he could apply in his own person.
In fact, as Richard Gustafson has pointed out, in his personal life Tolstoy was in one sense a perpetual outsider. “He had no real friends … and was suspicious of the motives of those close to him. He did not trust or love others easily. He could not bear opposition to his opinions.”
Brought face to face with his imminent annihilation, Tolstoy was obliged to embrace what he agreed with in Schopenhauer’s view in a manner that lay beyond reason. In A Confession, he makes it abundantly clear that he rejects Schopenhauer’s pessimism—the idea, also expressed in various ways by other philosophers and sages, such as Socrates, Solomon and in Buddhism, that life is suffering, and that the will is an unknowable, evil power behind existence.
This was a cultural perspective, he realized: a view from within the culture of the dominant class in civilization. The void of meaning in the lives of Tolstoy’s circle was directly connected with their luxurious lifestyle: a lifestyle legitimized by the Cartesian underpinnings of the Enlightenment. They were parasites who amused themselves at the expense of other people’s labor, and it was almost impossible to feel connected to oneself, others and nature, while living in this manner. Tolstoy asked himself how he could have been so mistaken as to think that his life and the lives of sages such as Solomon, Schopenhauer and others were the true, normal life. After all, Solomon was a king, Buddha a prince, and Schopenhauer the scion of a wealthy banking family—all had been members of the ruling class in their time, and their pronouncements came in reaction to the suffering inherent in hierarchical civilization, where vanity was virtually de rigueur.
What struck Tolstoy most forcibly, indeed, was that the peasants, who formed the majority of the population, were not affected by this joyless ennui. While the upper classes spent their lives in idleness, amusement and dissatisfaction, he observed, and regarded suffering and death as a malicious joke, the peasants “suffer and approach death peacefully and, more often than not, joyfully. … these people who are deprived of all those things, which for the Solomons and me are the only blessings … knew the meaning of life and death, endured suffering and hardship, lived and died and saw this not as vanity but good.”
As he looked more closely at the lives of the illiterate folk, it dawned on him that while they knew nothing of rational learning—science, philosophy, or theology—they trusted in what he termed the irrational: intuition and feeling. In other words, they had faith. Tolstoy saw that it was faith alone that provided them with a sense of meaning.
This faith, Tolstoy observed, was not the same as that extolled by the Orthodox Church: what he referred to as blind faith, or a belief in the infallibility of Church doctrines. He had long since lost his respect for the Church because of its apparent approval of persecution, capital punishment and war. It had, he later wrote, perverted the original Christian message and become a means of controlling the masses.
The faith of the ordinary people, he said, was the consciousness of life—the same as Schopenhauer’s will, but without the pessimistic connotations: there was suffering, certainly, but there was also loving kindness. Faith was inseparable from human existence. If there was human life there was faith. If there was none, life was impossible. “Faith remained as irrational to me as before,” he wrote, “but I could not fail to recognize that it alone provides mankind with the answers to the question of life.”
Rational knowledge had led him to the conclusion that life was meaningless: his life had come to a halt and he had wanted to kill himself. The problem was, he now saw, that trying to explain the irrational in terms of reason was the same as attempting to explain the infinite in terms of the finite. His life, of course, had no meaning within time, space and causality, because those were simply aspects of representation, not will. Faith gave meaning to life beyond these limits.
“Whatever answers faith gives,” he wrote, “such answers always give an infinite meaning to the finite existence of man; a meaning that is not destroyed by suffering, deprivation or death.” In other words, expecting reason to disclose meaning was like expecting a knife to cut its own handle. Just as the handle directs the knife-blade, so faith—a sense of meaning derived from non-rational values, feelings, and intuitions—gives direction to reason. These feelings are not aspects of representation, but of the transcendent subject: Schopenhauer’s will.
Tolstoy had found his way out of the dark woods: he had the answer to his question. It had been staring him in the face in the work of Schopenhauer over many years, and indeed, had been part of his intuition from childhood, but had been obscured by the dominant ideology of his culture: the Cartesian rationalism that denied feeling. It now required an act of volition to embrace fully. “A great change took place within me,” he wrote, “the roots of which had always been in me. … the life of … the rich and learned, became not only distasteful to me, but lost all meaning.”
Thereafter, he turned his back on his class and refused to indulge any further in the vanities of social distinction. Leaving his wife and children in the mansion he had grown up in, he moved into a small farmhouse on the estate, officially dropped his title, dressed like a peasant, associated with peasants, and worked with his hands alongside them. He disowned his earlier writing, including War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and repudiated the copyrights so as to derive no further income from them. He attempted to make his estate public property, but ran into so much opposition from his wife and family that he dropped the idea.
He continued to write, however, turning out no more epic novels, but penning a large volume of material, starting with the autobiographical A Confession—the story of his spiritual awakening in 1882—followed by other spiritual works, such as What I Believe in 1884. In 1894 he wrote The Kingdom of God is Within You, a work expressing his belief in non-violent resistance that profoundly influenced Gandhi, with whom he corresponded. Among his fiction works was The Death of Ivan Illyich, a novella about an official who, dying as a result of an infection caused by a small accident, realizes that he has wasted his life in pursuit of power, possessions and status, and that he must renounce that life in order to be able to die in peace.
Although a censored edition of Ivan Illyich was published in Russia in 1886, most of Tolstoy’s later works were banned by the authorities and were described as Tolstoy’s abominations by the Orthodox Church, leading to his excommunication. They were published in England though—in Russian as well as in other languages—gaining him fame as a Christian Anarchist and social reformer, both within Russia and worldwide. ‘Tolstoy colonies’ were set up in many countries and his estate became a site of pilgrimage, to which his followers flocked from all over the world. In Russia, those found in possession of his banned works were persecuted, although his global reputation and the reverence in which he was held within his own country prevented the authorities from arresting him. Nevertheless, he remained under police surveillance until his death in 1910.
Although Tolstoy’s reputation as a spiritual leader and social reformer was somewhat eclipsed by the Russian revolution and two world wars, it is now enjoying a renaissance, as it becomes clear that the materialist blight affects not just “a few parasites,” as he put it, but the entire world. Indeed, industrial civilization currently threatens not only the well-being of the Earth, but also the future of the human species itself. Tolstoy was one of the first to grasp that the crisis of our society is not essentially political, economic, or even ecological, but spiritual. As he himself knew intuitively—and perhaps most of us know at some level—it can only be solved by an ontological change, by replacing the narrative of separation we have followed since the Enlightenment with a new non-dualist story: a story of re-connection with the cosmos, the transcendent self. ~
https://www.essentiafoundation.org/how-idealism-and-schopenhauer-saved-tolstoys-life/reading/?fbclid=IwAR1z357gLX8SwTZZgpl-VkUv7lZvGl6vo-006H3eYEsKvUgAXJvQpgPSpKA
Tolstoy's diary
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JKF ASSASSINATION WAS A PROBLEM FOR THE SOVIET UNION
~ YEKATERINA SINELSCHIKOVA writes that in the USSR, the assassination of Kennedy was a major problem, one that was tackled in all possible ways.
The news of the assassination sent shock waves across the entire world, including the Soviet Union. General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev was awakened by an aide with the words: “Kennedy’s been killed!” According to some accounts, the first thing he asked was: “Did we have anything to do with it?”
Soviet fears
The Soviet leader’s puzzling question had a certain logic to it. As it soon turned out, the accused Lee Harvey Oswald had connections with the USSR. He had lived there for two years, applied unsuccessfully for Soviet citizenship, married a Russian woman, become disillusioned with the socialist system, and then, in 1962, a year before the assassination, returned to his homeland. When the news broke, the KGB held a series of emergency meetings. Reports declassified in 2017 say that the head of the KGB residency in New York, Colonel Boris Ivanov, told his team that Kennedy’s assassination was a “problem.”
And more trouble was expected. Under Kennedy, relations between the superpowers had entered a partial thaw. Back in May 1963, five months before his assassination, Kennedy had stated: “For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”
He had even expressed a wish to work with the Soviet Union to put a man on the Moon. John Logsdon, a former member of Nasa’s Advisory Council, said that Kennedy suggested it to Khrushchev, but the Soviet leader refused.
Now that the U.S. president was dead, the Soviet leadership feared that radical anti-Soviet forces could take advantage of the situation. Archival documents indicate that the Kremlin was “in a state of shock and turmoil”: “The Soviet leadership was concerned that in the absence of a [U.S.] leader, some irresponsible general might launch a missile strike on the USSR.”
Let the church bells ring
The news spread like wildfire, and by morning everyone in the Soviet Union knew about the killing of Kennedy. The young, handsome, wealthy, pro-peace president and his glamorous wife were admired by the Soviet people. His assassination brought tears to many eyes.
“Church bells rang in memory of President Kennedy,” recalled a U.S. intelligence source who was in Russia at the time.
On Nov. 23, 1963, the newspaper Nedelya [Week] splashed Kennedy’s portrait over its entire front page. And although photos of such size were usually reserved only for members of the Presidium, the decision was approved by the Presidium itself — they too were in mourning.
In the book Nikita Khrushchev: Reformer, the memoirs of the Soviet leader’s son, Sergey Khrushchev states that his father fell to his knees and sobbed over the killing. In life, JFK had been a hope for the Soviet Union; in death, he was a major problem.
Disowning Oswald
According to declassified documents based on reports of U.S. agents in the USSR, the Kremlin believed that the assassination was the result of a conspiracy of ultra-right elements dissatisfied with the Kennedy administration and led by then-Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who assumed power after the assassination. This position coincided with the 1966 investigation of Erling Harrison, the district attorney for New Orleans. Nevertheless, the opinion that the assassination was in some way linked to the USSR (as well as Cuba) was very widespread in the U.S. and fanned by the media. The Kremlin decided that it had to defend itself.
“Only a maniac could think that ‘leftist forces’ represented by the U.S. Communist Party could have killed President Kennedy,” a U.S. Department of Justice report expounds the position of the then Soviet leadership.
As for Lee Harvey Oswald, the Soviet political class began to call him “a neurotic maniac disloyal to his country and everyone else.” The KGB washed its hands of him. It seized all photos of him from former friends in Minsk, as well as letters, recalls Professor Ernst Titovets, who, as a medical student in the 1960s, knew Oswald.
In a joint press statement, the USSR Foreign Ministry and the KGB declared that Oswald had never been in contact with the Soviet authorities, and that the killers should be sought in the U.S. A secret note for the Politburo highlighted the Kremlin’s willingness to provide information on Oswald, should the U.S. request it. But after talks with U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union Llewellyn Thompson, it was never published. “It is clear from everything that the U.S. government has no wish to involve us in this matter or to engage in a fight with the extreme right; it clearly prefers to bury the matter as quickly as possible... I believe that this point should be taken into account in further reports by our press,” wrote Anastas Mikoyan, Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, in a secret letter.
In the end, misinformation and fake news came into play. In the 1960s, Soviet intelligence spread rumors about CIA links to the Kennedy assassination, and paid U.S. lawyer Mark Lane, author of several controversial bestsellers about the Kennedy assassination (such as Rush to Judgment, 1966), to whip up talk of alleged CIA involvement and other conspiracy theories. This is described in detail in documents held at the Churchill Archives Center in Cambridge, UK.
All this lessened the attacks on the Soviets. And an escalation of the recent Cuban Missile Crisis, much feared in the USSR, did not materialize. Subsequent investigations found no evidence of Soviet involvement in the assassination. In 1999, in Cologne, Germany, Russian President Boris Yeltsin handed over to U.S. President Bill Clinton 80 pages from the Soviet secret archive relating to Oswald and the Soviet Union’s reaction to the assassination. “I want to thank you for this unexpected and important gift,” stated Clinton at the time. ~ Brent Cooper, Quora
Oriana:
It was Ruby's killing of Oswald that unnerved me as much as the assassination of the president. The man with crucial knowledge had been silenced. Back then in Poland everyone thought this was the work of the Soviet Union. When I came to the US, I found the debate still flourishing, with the CIA being the prime suspect, but also the FBI and the Secret Service. One thing I read somewhere is that a Secret Service agent in the car immediately behind the president's limousine accidentally pulled the trigger of his AR-15. Nothing seems too bizarre when it comes to trying to explain those events. We'll probably never know for sure.
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WHAT SOVIET CHILDREN WERE TAUGHT ABOUT THE U.S.
~ First: the official Soviet propaganda has never portrayed American people as evil. There was a lot of anti-American stuff, but that was entirely directed against the USA government, system and those who were in power, but it was not directed against the population.
Second: we knew (and we were told) that the USA was a society of class inequality, that the absolute majority were ordinary working people who were just the same like we were in the USSR, but we also knew the USA working people were severely exploited by their bosses and capitalists: they had to work hard just to earn money to survive! And what was even more terrible (as we were told here), a lot of people in the USA were unable to find a job — that seemed awful to us as unemployment did not exist in the USSR.
Official Soviet TV news often presented shots with homeless people in US towns who lived in carton boxes just in the streets next to skyscrapers, luxury hotels and banks (homelessness was totally unheard of in the USSR). The TV news explained to us those people were very poor because angry capitalists who ruled the country were too greedy for money and did not want to pay their workers.
Third: we knew the USA state system was truly evil, both because of mistreating their domestic population, and because of their aggressive military actions worldwide. We were told they were driven by money and greed, and all they wanted was to gain even more power and money, not caring about humans’ wealth, health and even lives. And there was also extreme race discrimination in the USA, as our propaganda said.
Fourth (you may find it funny, but we believed it): we were convinced American working class intensively fought for their rights against the angry capitalists and government. We had no doubt US workers dreamed of overthrowing the capitalist government and establishing a free socialist society similar to what we had in the USSR. ~ Konstantin Beloturkin, Quora
[Konstantin also remembers his earliest beliefs about the U.S.]
~ In my earlier years (maybe at age of 7 or alike) I did not know the world’s political geography well enough, and I tended to think USA was a socialist country.
There were two reasons for that:
USA (same way as USSR) was an acronym. That time (being a child) I had an impression all countries which have acronym names were socialist.
But the most interesting thing is that I already knew the USA astronauts had visited the Moon. And I was fully convinced only a socialist country could be so advanced that to launch their people to the Moon. It seemed obvious to me such an advanced technology was merely impossible for a capitalist country which exploited their citizens and where money ruled the life.
I remember it was a big surprise for me later when I first time was told the USA were capitalist. ~ Quora
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THE SOVIET UNION WAS BETTER AT PROPAGANDA (Dima Vorobiev, former propaganda CEO)
~ We were head and shoulders above the Americans, of course.
We played with an extremely weak hand in terms of resources, economic metrics, hard facts on the ground, quality of life and an overall attractiveness of the revolutionary concept to the regular Joe and Jane Doe. However, millions and millions of people in the entire world supported us and believed that we showed to them the way to a better future. Anti-Soviet propaganda tried to counter this with insider tales from defectors and experts in modern Soviet history, but until the end of the 1960 most people didn’t seem to trust them very much.
The watershed came first with Prague ‘68 and the start of Jewish exodus. And yet, even during my time the level of our international support far exceeded anything we can dream about with President Putin at the helm.
The Soviet poster below from an international festival of youth and students shows happy young faces, bright with distinct progressivist purpose—the thing than many in the West and other places felt sadly missing. The title is “Moscow is the capital of students of the entire world.”
The man and girl to the left are members of a studéncheskii stróyotriád (“students’ construction team”), groups of students who earned extra income during summer vacations as construction teams, mainly in the countryside, making up for an extreme dearth of available workforce during the last two decades of Soviet rule. “ИНТЕР” on the badge means the team was allowed to take on students from the Soviet block countries and the developing world. Such teams were entitled to more gainful projects with better accommodations, so that our foreign friends could spread around the news of our cool and wealthy lifestyle.
The banners list up major industrial colonization projects east of the Urals. The angry youth to the right are Western supporters of the Soviet cause. The banners in Russian say: “Solidarity”, “cooperation”, “socialism”, “peace”. The youth in the middle absorb the book wisdom, keeping their eyes and ears open for oncoming tidbits of Communist truth. Outlines of the Kremlin walls and the Moscow skyline in the background mark their rock solid home base.
Theng Hofses:
Dima, I really respect your opinion, but look at every movie that comes out of Hollywood and every TV series that the US makes as propaganda. Subtle but extremely powerful. Everyone wanted to come to the US, the wealth, law and order was just so pervasive.
A TV show like Friends or Baywatch is so subtly powerful. It completely undermined all Soviet propaganda. The US only lost the propaganda war after 9/11 with shows like 24, NCIS, etc where it shows American government bodies flagrantly breaking the law and being worshiped for it.
Dima Vorobiev:
A simple look at the sheer volumes of propaganda footage produced by the USA makes our bit just tiny speckles in comparison. Still, our speckles punched way above their weight.
Ilya Taytslin:
Dima specified that USSR was winning propaganda war only until 1960’s, which is about when American TV shows started being attractive to other cultures.
Tatiana Menacher:
Soviet Union had Department of Propaganda on the one of main Moscow squares which was the biggest building in Moscow. Propaganda budget was comparable to military budget. Only destroying of Western radio broadcasting was more expensive than all Soviet broadcasting. Can you imagine how powerful propaganda was when Soviet people lived in horrible condition and believed that their country is happiest in the world while no one was allowed to cross the border our to compare. The remainder of all powerful Soviet propaganda is today’s American universities which turned into socialist propaganda joints. Money Soviets invested into anti-American, anti-Capitalist propaganda working even today.
Hubert Kirchgaessner:
In my view, the Berlin Wall was the death knell to any chance of success that Soviet propaganda might ever have had in the West. A superior regime doesn’t need to imprison its own people.
In the West we knew that every episode of The Streets of San Francisco, of Dallas and of Dynasty spread the Gospel of Capitalism in the East much more successfully than Socialist Realism accomplished the opposite in the West. After the re-unification of Germany we learned how much the image of the West was shaped by TV entertainment — it was stunning.
Granted, there were diehards in the West who believed (or at least pretended to believe) Moscow’s message. But their faith was usually bought (typically via more than generous bribes to help them continue their totally ineffective agitative work). I distinctly remember the “Marxist Group” at universities I attended in Munich and Brussels. They openly admitted to being financed by Moscow, and had the flashy cars and other toys to show where that money went.
Their “teach-ins” were popular events for their unintended comedy. The poor speaker always had 3–4 planted supporters in the audience. However, those could not protect him (somehow it always was a man) from dozens of guests who just sat there, slapping their thighs and bursting out in laughter, or shaking their heads in disbelief at the storyline unfolding.
The question was, who was “better” at propaganda. Truth be told: the Soviet propaganda was naive and ineffective to the Western audience. If anything, highly counter-productive, On the other hand, we may not have intended TV soaps as instruments of propaganda (at least I don’t think they were intended as such), but they sure were effective.
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WHY WAS SOVIET PROPAGANDA SO UPBEAT?
~ Soviet propaganda was inspired by Marxist teachings. Communism as a progressivist ideology is filled with bright, optimistic expectations of the future. For the Communists, history is an often arduous and winding, yet unstoppable march from the dark past to the increasingly perfect future. Somewhere down the road people are going to learn to live in peace and harmony with each other, at long last.
Our propaganda posited that deep down inside, we’re all inherently good creatures. What held us back were many “deficiencies”, “imperfections” and “setbacks” inflicted on us by our miserable pre-Soviet past, not to mention the permanent mischief-making of the foreign Imperialists and their few but very wicked agents inside the USSR. As soon as we got rid of these parasites and vermin, and erased their detrimental influences on our minds, life in the USSR would radically and irreversibly improve.
Below, a Soviet poster from 1962, titled “We sing a song about the Motherland!” A boy with the red necktie of “young Pioneer” (Communist organization for schoolchildren in their early teenage) teaches a group of Little Octobrists to sing.
It’s remarkable how the artist managed to smuggle under the upbeat Communist motif her dark reactionary view on the nature of human interactions. What we see is an alpha male bossing around two submissive boys. The conductor baton is the visible attribute of his authority. He is assisted by two girls. One of them looks at his baton with fascination, while the other volunteers as a drill sergeant. One of the younger boys strives to oblige. The one to the right, with the small star of “little Octobrists” weirdly pinned to his shoulder, watches the top guy’s left hand with fear and doesn’t seem to enjoy the scene at all.
The caption says: “We are singing about the homeland.”
Oriana:
As schoolchildren we were exposed to massive propaganda, but on the whole we were resistant to it. One factor was the alertness of our parents if we started spouting something the parents knew was false (in terms of history, for instance). And besides, our parents and all adults in general were very open in complaining about the government, which was despised by the majority of the Polish population. The typical attitude was to discount any official pronouncements as lies.
In the evening our parents listened to Radio Free Europe, the BBC, and the Voice of America. All these were sources of counter-propaganda.
Exploring the short-wave radio, I discovered a Russian-language Soviet propaganda station, but very close to it was the Russian-language Freedom Station.
*
Mary: COMMUNISM IS LIKE A FUNDAMENTALIST RELIGION
It was remarked at one point in a former blog that what one missed about the USSR was the "idealism." I think that's a very crucial observation, that the whole impetus of the Revolution and the state it produced was that ideal of a better world, a world of community, equality, of plenty for all, of justice and the end of oppression. That is what you see in the propaganda posters of smiling children, what you hear in the music of The International. It is a very human dream of an earthly paradise of plenty and brotherhood, a utopia imagined like many others, and like many others, a failure, the reality betraying the dream in every way, on every level.
As Vorobiev notes, much human misery results from pursuit of such an ideal. All must be forced to march in the same direction toward the same goal— deviations, refusals, lack of enthusiasm are not permitted and will be punished, with everything from criticism to imprisonment, exile, torture and execution. The communist prophets and progressive warriors create massive human misery in the determination to uproot and eliminate all traces of the old, capitalist world, in act or in thought, all such tendencies are crimes against the state, crimes against the perfect future of the classless society.
This results in situations so much like those created by fundamentalist religions, that the results of one are hard to distinguish from the other. The state acts like the Taliban or the Inquisition, imposing its strictures with a heavy hand, carving away more and more at the possibility of individual freedom, aspiration, and thinking. And it must be noted as well how all of these come to use terrorism as an essential tool of management. We should not be surprised at Russian terrorist tactics in Ukraine, the bombing of civilians no different than Stalin's deliberate starvation of millions.
And yes, academia in the US still has a strong leftist-Marxist contingent...once pro-Soviet, then even Maoist for a time, always with some caveats about how these had got things all wrong. The importance of class and the idealism of the dream still has great appeal. The left in the US has its own history, heroes, art and literature, but not much now outside academia. Our greatest failure as a society is our history of slavery and the racism embedded in the structure of our institutions. Many working for social justice and equality do find inspiration in Marxism, but in a syncretic and uniquely American way.
Oriana:
Yes, I too see the similarity between the communist ideology (or any powerful ideology, for that matter) and fundamentalist religion. Perhaps the young in particular need some measure of idealism in their lives. Communism achieved something spectacular: it was a charismatic ideology, and it had its martyrs. Dedicated communists were ready to die for the party. As someone said, "Imagine being ready to die for the Department of Motor Vehicles."
Now and then I see an article on how to come up with a substitute for religion, but the answer is that it depends on the person. Thanks to the Soviet experiment and its clones, we know that a utopian ideology leads to disaster. Communism may work in small groups, e.g. some early Christian communes. As the group gets larger, quarrels erupt. The conflict between the ideal and the real becomes irreconcilable. The real is bound to win -- but sometimes only after the idealism goes astray and we see a massive slaughter of the "infidels."
*
RUSSIA’S TERRORIST TACTICS
~ The war in Ukraine now has a different nature than most of the wars we have seen this century. In the eastern part of the country, soldiers on both sides fight for territory on either side of a discernible front line. But elsewhere in Ukraine, something else is happening, something that looks less like war and more like multiple acts of terrorism. According to the U.S. criminal code, terrorist acts are “violent acts” with these goals:
(i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
(ii) to influence the policies of a government by intimidation or coercion; or
(iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping.
If terrorism is defined as an intimidation campaign using violence, then the bombing of Serhiivka (a small village in Ukraine) was terrorism. So was the June 27 bombing of Kremenchuk, in central Ukraine, when another Kh-22 anti-ship missile hit a shopping mall, killing at least 20 people. Terrorism could also describe the repeated use of cluster munitions in residential areas of Kharkiv, bombs that splinter into hundreds of fragments, causing death and injury, leaving traces across playgrounds and courtyards. Terrorism is also a good word for the July 10 attack on Chasiv Yar, where multiple rockets struck a five-story apartment building and emergency services spent many hours digging residents out of the rubble.
Russia is not pursuing traditional war aims in any of these places. No infantry assault on Serhiivka or Kremenchuk is under way. The Russian military’s planned occupation of Kharkiv failed several months ago. There is no scenario in which an apartment block in Chasiv Yar poses a threat to Russia or Russians, let alone the Russian army. Instead, the purpose of attacking these places is to create fear and anger in those towns and across the country. Perhaps the ultimate goal is to persuade Ukraine to stop fighting, although—as was the case in Britain during the Second World War—the bombardment of civilians seems to have had the opposite effect. Over time, many Ukrainians have become more accustomed to the raids, more determined to withstand them. In the Odesa City Garden, an elegant park that dates back to the beginning of the 19th century, people didn’t move, didn’t stop drinking coffee, didn’t even pause mid-sentence when air-raid sirens went off in the early evening last week.
But if the bombing campaign is not part of a “war,” as we normally understand it, that doesn’t mean it has no purpose. On the contrary, it seeks to achieve several goals. One of them may be to persuade people to leave, to become refugees, to become a burden and perhaps a political problem for Ukraine’s neighbors. Clearly the bombs are also meant to impoverish Ukrainians, to prevent them from rebuilding, to weaken their state, to persuade their compatriots who are abroad not to come home. Who wants to return to a country that features on the evening news every few nights, as another bomb falls on another apartment building or shopping mall? Who will invest in a place of smashed rooftops and broken glass? Sowing such doubts is a classic goal of terrorism too.
We Americans and Europeans are used to thinking of terrorism as something involving fertilizer bombs or improvised weapons, and of terrorists as fringe extremists who operate conspiratorially in irregular gangs. When we speak of state-sponsored terrorism, we are usually talking about clandestine groups that are supported, covertly, by a recognized state, in the way that Iran supports Hezbollah. But Russia’s war in Ukraine blurs the distinction among all of these things—terrorism, state-sponsored terrorism, war crimes—for nothing about the bombing of Serhiivka, or Kremenchuk, or Kharkiv, is surreptitious, conspiratorial, or fringe.
Instead Russia, a legitimate, recognized world power—a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council—is directing constant, repetitive, visible terrorist violence against civilians, many of whom are nowhere near the fighting. The attacks are not errors or accidents. The planes carrying bombs can be tracked on radar screens. Occasionally, Moscow issues denials—the shopping-mall bombing was, like many others, described by Russian state media as “faked”—but no apologies. The Russian army will not punish the murderers. On the contrary, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has already awarded medals to the brigade that committed so many atrocities in the town of Bucha.
In truth, Russian bombs are targeting not only random people, shops, medical buildings, pets. They are also targeting the whole apparatus of international law governing war crimes, human rights, and terrorism. With every bomb that Russian forces knowingly drop on an apartment building, and every missile they direct at a school or hospital, they are demonstrating their scorn and contempt for the global institutions Russia was once so desperate to join. The Ukrainian and international lawyers and prosecutors who are collecting the evidence will, in the end, be able to present not just one or two cases demonstrating war crimes, but thousands. Russia’s war is unprecedented, and the demand for justice in its aftermath will be unprecedented too.
Can we do more? The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has called Russia a “terrorist state” and other prominent officials, including some in the U.S. Senate, have called for the United States and Europe to formally designate Russia as such. This would bring serious legal consequences, including for Russian companies and other entities that are not already under sanctions. The main argument against this idea is not trivial: Russia is too big to cut out of the world economy, or to exclude from all international conversations. But also important is calling things by their real names, getting used to difficult new ideas, and learning how to deal with them. Russia is now carrying out acts of terrorism every day; this will have consequences for the rickety structure of international laws and practices that are designed to prevent such acts.
And not only for the laws and structures: In truth, Russian forces are also targeting the values that lie behind them, the principles and even the emotions that led people to create them in the first place. Compassion, a sense of shared humanity, an instinct that children do not deserve to be victims of war, an assumption that people who are not harming you or your nation deserve to live normal lives—all of these moral assumptions have been cast aside by an army determined to create pointless, cruel, individual tragedies, one after the next. The Serhiivka bombing alone created so many of them. The middle-aged woman, six months pregnant, whose legs were burned by the bomb. The elderly woman, disoriented, waiting for her Red Cross package because she could do nothing else. The refugee from the first Donbas war in 2014, who was knocked unconscious by the bombing, taken to a hospital and never recovered. The beloved soccer coach who was visiting Serhiivka to run a summer camp, and was hit by one of the bombs while he slept.
Each one of these stories has wider echoes, touching people who were far away at the time. Quite by accident, I was in Odesa a few days later talking with a local official about something different, the possible demining of Odesa’s port. Serhiivka somehow came up.
His face changed. He knew the coach, a former employee, a star athlete who had tried to enter the world of business, found it dull, and returned to soccer. He also knew that the coach had two children. “I was filled with horror when I thought they might have been there with him,” he told me. “And then I realized that it didn’t matter whose children were there—his children, or someone else’s children—the horror would be the same.” ~
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/07/russia-war-crimes-terrorism-definition/670500/?fbclid=IwAR16QhFVbM0KGjheI1ml1Wykf2zAwSsC7Tw17dArYqBvh12VJbbFkGSXM28
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THE WAR IN UKRAINE AND THE QUESTION OF EMPATHY
~ From the beginning of the so-called special military operation, what has shocked me the most is my compatriots’ inability to empathize with the suffering of the Ukrainian people (nor with Russian soldiers losing limbs and lives).
The most common emotion that I observed in people in Moscow and elsewhere in Russia in regards to Ukrainians has been a lack of any emotion — indifference.
The imperial belief in national superiority have been drilled into Russians for years with school and television anti-human, diabolic propaganda that would make Goebbels blush. Propaganda has desensitized Russians to become receptive to silent acceptance and resignation to home-grown fascism.
Russians choose to rather believe lies on TV than what their family members, co-workers and friends in Ukraine are telling them. They also don’t feel any personal responsibility for the war in Ukraine.
With that in mind, Masanya, crowd-funded Youtube cartoon series created by Oleg Kuvayev prefaced their latest episode, number 162, about war with the explanation what is empathy.
Empathy is the most important human feeling. The ability to empathize. The ability to put oneself in the place of another.
The title of the episode, Saint Mariuburg, a combination of Maryiupol and Saint Petersburg, a Russian city, is an attempt to cause viewers to empathize with themselves and then project that feeling unto Ukrainians.
Masyanya wakes to the news that cities of Russia are being bombarded. It’s 7 AM, and Masyanya is in denial. She does not believe what’s going on. But when she and her husband read newsfeed on cellphone they learn that the port was bombed and twelve people died.
They reconstruct a series of events as they have happened in Ukraine in February, only it’s the Russians who are on the receiving end.
The apartment block is shaken from a jet fighter boom, followed by a distant explosion. Masyanya learns that China started this war.
Masyanya tells her two kids that they won’t go to school, not due to lockdown but because “we’re being shot at.”
The news anchor reports, “President of China requested to clear Russia of Nazis and fascists and ordered to attack Russian towns and cities.”
Masyanya has a panic attack and packs her family into a car that gets stuck in a gridlock of residents fleeing St. Mariuburg.
A building close by is shelled and smoke fills the air. The family abandons car and runs to hide. They find shelter in a building basement with other random people.
After another explosion, an old sad-looking professor speaks up, “You know, I’ve always loved China and Chinese culture.”
At night, the couple watches graphic images of the aftermath of bombardments in Astrakhan on their smartphones and can’t help cursing out aloud. They leave the basement next morning to look for food.
The building where supermarket used to be located has been bombed out. They pass by a dead neighbor woman lying on the road.
They return home and find things in order and feel relieved. Right at the moment of shared safety the adjacent building gets hit, and the windows and part of the wall get blown off.
Next, they find shelter in a metro station packed with people.
St. Isaac Cathedral, St Petersburg landmark, got directly hit with a missile killing multiple people hiding inside. Masyanya gives vent to her frustration, “this is the result of a man with inferiority complex and a bunch of rusty weapons taking control over a huge country.”
The supreme leader of China reports, “Russia is full of fascists and it’s China’s mission to liberate Russia from fascists and to return historical lands to China. What’s that f***king Russians? There are no Russians. All their culture has been stolen from other nations. Russian language is bastardized Ukrainian. We will liberate Russia. Learn Chinese!”
*
A missile hits Hermitage Museum and another one demolishes Alexander Column.
“Those who have hell in their soul brings only hell to other people,” says Masyanya and decides to join territorial defense.
Sitting by a camp fire in a courtyard, a man tells Masyanya that his family evacuated to Mariyupol and Bucha.
Father gets killed from a blast wave that flattens him against the wall as he goes up stairs to invite them to dinner.
His surviving son records in his diary, “A man that tried to reach us was killed by a sniper. My sister died yesterday. There’s only me and my mom. April 2022.”
*
Two Chinese soldiers approach the building where the two surviving members of the family are hiding. Afraid to go in, they chuck in a hand grenade.
Masyanya wakes up from a nightmare and rants.
“Empathy separates a man from an animal. It is what makes us human and not beasts. War desensitizes empathy…This war is a great shame of Russia. It is a curse that will hang over Russia for a long time. Occupiers and killers will burn in hell. Sorry, the cartoon wasn’t merry. But I can’t be merry when so many people are dying in Ukraine?” ~
Misha Firer, Quora
[Masyanya is a popular cartoon on youtube. Due to its anti-war message, it was recently banned, according to the BBC.]
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Putin is not raining missiles on the heads of Ukraine's civilian population, killing children, women and the elderly, in order to defeat Ukraine. He knows he's already lost his insane war there. He is doing it now in order to hold on to power in Russia. ~ Misha Iossel
Michele Berdy:
Yes,
there is a hysterical quality to what they are doing both in Russia and
(horrifically) in Ukraine. It’s not working out the way he thought it
would, and like a sick, spoiled child he is just destroying whatever
he can reach.
*
RUSSIA AND RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT
~ I believe Russia could spend more on RnD, but it is not the main problem. The main problem of Russian science is Russian state.
Long answer. I am going start from long time ago, from Soviet times. I know Russian people are proud of Russian science. They are proud of Russian sputniks, they are proud of Yuri Gagarin. They often say that USSR was great because of its space program. It makes me sad and angry when credits for Soviet science go to Soviet state.
Sergey Korolev was one who created Soviet space program. What did USSR do to assist him? He was arrested in 1938 together with other researchers and engineers of Reactive Scientific Research Institute. He was beaten and tortured during investigations and then sentenced to 10 years in prison, but was released earlier in 1944. Soviet government took 6 years of his life. In prison he started working on rocket engines.
Lev Landau was a genius, a theoretical physicist, Russian Feynman, whose expertise was worth that of a whole research institution.
He was arrested on 1938 and spent a year in prison. He was lucky because two other famous physicist Niels Bohr and Pyotr Kapitsa asked Stalin to release him. Landau once said that he wouldn’t survive two more months in prison.
These people worked for the fame of the Soviet State. My guess was that they worked because they were too passionate about what they were doing, and basically they did not have other options.
But Soviet times are gone, and it’s a tragedy according to our leader. Now we live in a completely different Russia, which is according to its constitution is democracy with democratically elected Parliament and President.
I am still too far from the topic.
I was working in an institution located just across the street from Kremlin, five minutes from Okhotny Ryad, Manezhnaya Square and Red Square. The institution had a security service which reported to FSB rather than to Russian Academy of Science. During 2008–2011 a head of security service was a former prison security officer. We had quite strange rules there. I remember I could bring a backpack with my notes, pens and books to the institution without a written permission. I had to leave the backpack at the entrance, take everything I need for the work in hands and then enter to the institution. Surprisingly another option was to put backpack in a shopping bag (yes, this how rules often work in Russia).
As long as I was working there, one of key responsibilities of the director of the institution was to fight against reorganizations to move us from center of Moscow to Fryazino. A red brick building in the very center was too desirable for many officials. And reorganizations were a thing.
Mikhail Kovalchuk was famous for reorganizations. He was a director of Kurchatov institute one of the most funded institutes with the most underpaid researchers in Moscow of that time. He initiated a series of reorganizations which resulted in a few other research institutions joining Kurchatov Institute. Each reorganization meant more money for Kovalchuk and less money for actual researchers.
But reorganizations was not the only thing Kovalchuk was famous for. He had a dream, he wanted to become a President. Of Russian Academy of Science of course. But for some reason the Russian Academy of Science, this monster from the Soviet times turned out to be more democratic than the whole country, and Kovalchuk lost every election he took part in. He was furious. And he decided that the Russian Academy of Science must die like Roman Empire died.
And they killed it. They replaced it with a governmental agency run by people who had nothing to do with science, and who had no idea what problems they should solve.
But killing Academy of Science is still better than killing people. And now we are back at Soviet times.
Dmitri Kolker, physicist from Novosibirsk, expert in quantum optics and laser systems is now suspected for high treason. He was brought to detainment center from hospital (he has the 4th stage of cancer), but don’t worry too much, an FSB officer told his wife that they have great conditions for a cancer patient, they have a fridge in the detainment center (according to his son, in hospital Dmitri was fed intravenously). It’s not the first case of charging scientists with treason. Neither it is the second nor third case. Unfortunately, it becomes a usual practice. ~
~ Pavel Aseyev, Quora
It should not have been a surprise, and yet I was shaken when I read about a brilliant Russian economist, Nikolai Kondratiev, who theorized about the long cycles in capitalism (the so-called Kondratiev wave). His analysis showed that capitalism, contrary to Marx, is not headed for extinction. He was accused of treason and shot.
Nikolai Kondratiev, 1892-1938
*
DIMA VOROBIEV: DO YOU PREFER TO LIVE IN A COMMUNIST OR A CAPITALIST COUNTRY?
~ I have tried both, so I perfectly know what I’m talking about.
I was quite comfortable in the USSR.
I was lucky. I had great parents, who survived in the pavement cracks when Stalin had a blast killing people left and right.
My father was 25 when the war began. He wore the uniform from day one, and ended up in the 2% from the pre-war Red Army that weren't killed or starved to death by the Nazis.
I was born in Moscow, where all of Russia dreams to move to one day. I got free education and free health care (rather crappy, but I didn’t know better). I was smart (lucky?) enough to get to the top floor, before the whole thing came crushing down.
No reason for me to call the Soviet Motherland a cruel mother, as far as I’m concerned. Quite the opposite.
Yet, I’m fully aware that all of this is just a matter of pure benevolent luck. My father had ample chance of being buried in an unmarked Gulag hole in Siberian permafrost, like many others. My mother was just luckier than all those cossacks that died with their families in the Stalin-engineered famine in the 1930s.
When the Soviet Motherland showered me with gifts, it was just a small fraction of what it took from innumerable other Russians farther upstream. I feel humbled when I realize this. I feel like this Jew who is the last survivor of a vast Jewish family annihilated in the Holocaust and asks himself: “How did I deserve this?”
Now, I’ve been living in a Capitalist society for the last 30 years.
What I see is the regular proportion of fun and absurdity, inherent to the world from the day God hit the Big Bang button. I like it that people here are not allowed to whip up human misery just because it may serve some higher purpose. I understand better now why freedom makes a lot of people feel confused and abandoned. But I’m amazed how much nicer people are to each other when profit-seeking and sales budgets kick in.
I want my kids to live around nice ordinary people, rather than justice-seeking warriors and equality-obsessed prophets.
Capitalism, you have my vote. ~
Joseph Thomason:
Excellent post. Solzhenitsyn and Robert Conquest [a historian of Stalinist Terror] should be required reading in the West. I don’t think people here are capable of understanding the cruelty people are willing to commit for some higher purpose. It doesn’t help that Western academia has downplayed the dark side of the Soviet Union considerably.
David Janov:
In the 1950s, Raymond Aron (French) stated it thus: “There are some people who are willing to countenance the worst crimes, provided only that they are committed in the name of the proper doctrine.” It seems that some things never change.
*
CAN UKRAINE EVER FORGIVE RUSSIA?
~ Forgive Putin and his cronies? The answer is no. Especially because, even if Russia is beaten back to its starting point in Feb 2022, it will have won. Even if it loses the Crimea and Donbass, it may still have won. That is because it will not have lost as many people as it abducted (over a million I believe). In other words, a territorial restoration would be offset by Russia’s imperialistic demographic victory, which will have interrupted Russia’s long term demographic decline. ~ Bruce 5359, Quora
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RUSSIA’S FERTILITY RATE
~ Western Pharma is exiting swathes of Russian markets due to sanctions, which exacerbates diabolical Putin’s law that prescribes hospitals and clinics to always give preference to Russian designed and manufactured meds over Western ones in state procurement auctions, even though they’re of considerably lower quality.
The self-extermination with low quality drugs, in turn, overlaps with another issue: low fertility rates.
The official national 1.6 babies per woman fertility rate is fake.
Regional public officials doctor and spin creatively stats to a larger piece of pie. Apart from North Caucasia region where populace barely speak Russian and hang portraits of Erdogan on living room walls, fertility rate is similar or equal to that of Ukraine, a territorially, culturally, linguistically and historically close people, and stands at 1.1 babies per woman.
With the raging on and deepest economic crises since 1991, fertility rates in Russia have most likely fallen to the lowest, rock bottom, place in the world.
Therefore, sowing death with old Soviet weapons is an extension of the national extinction. Traveling in Tversk Oblast, I spotted more tombs in numerous cemeteries than people alive. ~
Misha Firer, Quora
(In another article, Misha wrote that a typical Russian family consists of a divorced mother, one child, and a grandmother.)
Stephen Grimmer:
Russia has TWO major demographic problems.
The 1990s cohort from the Soviet collapse is the smallest yet, only the +65s pushing average life expectancy, are smaller, but it is these 20-30 year olds who are needed fight the wars, keep the country running, and have children.
People suffering deprivation, uncertainty and sanctions tend to have fewer children.
Add to this as-yet unseen war losses, killed, wounded, traumatized, emigration of the young and bright, plus years of coming hardship from sanctions and the situation will soon get MUCH worse.
Russia’s population is about to collapse disastrously.
Oriana:
Of course the demographic crisis (and was it just yesterday when we talked instead about the “population bomb”?) involves most of the world.
“South Korea has the lowest fertility rate globally at 0.9 children per woman, closely followed by Puerto Rico at 1.0 and a trio of Malta, Singapore, and the Chinese Special Administrative Region Hong Kong all at 1.1 children per woman.”
If Misha is correct, then Russia’s fertility rate could go down under 1. The replacement level fertility rate is roughly 2.1 children per woman. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/total-fertility-rate
Statistics bear out the statement “People suffering deprivation, uncertainty and sanctions tend to have fewer children.” But the numbers tell a more confusing story. Malta, South Korea, Singapore? These are relatively affluent places where parents need not worry how they’ll manage to feed their children. Abundance doesn’t guarantee that a couple will desire to have more than one child, if even that one child.
Obviously something else has become a powerful factor. It’s possible that educated women, who also tend to be working women, see motherhood as an impossibly draining second job. And it needn’t be that way c if we truly believe that “it takes a village” to raise a child. It takes good collective childcare.
You can be relatively affluent, but poor in terms of being able to hire competent child-care help. Children are increasingly seen as an expensive nuisance, and a life-long drain on the parents' resources. I've seen many couples who've decided to have dogs instead of children -- it's so much easier, you save a ton of money, and a dog's affection is more reliable than a child's. Now, human population needs to shrink, so not extolling the joys of motherhood is fine for the moment. Long-term, however, unless that attitude toward children ("an expensive nuisance") changes, our survival as a species becomes less and less certain.
China has certainly learned not to repeat the mistake of the one-child policy. But when the policy was abolished, Chinese couples did not resume having five or six children -- or even the three recommended by the government. They have gotten used to the notion that one was enough, the new normal -- just as we are getting used to seeing a small dog in a stroller instead of a baby.
Putin's plan is to halve the Russian abortion rate by placing restrictions and by requiring women to undergo a consultation that will actively try to discourage them from having an abortion. There are also cash awards for first-time parents, and a payment for the second child.
Putin also wants to see alcohol consumption cut in half.
*
WORLD POPULATION WILL PEAK SOONER THAN PREVIOUSLY EXPECTED
~ The latest update of the UN’s World Population Prospects confirms we are now in sight of a time when the human population will cease to grow and be in ongoing decline.
In its 2017 update, the UN projected the world’s population would reach 11.2 billion in 2100 and still be growing. The 2019 revision indicated the world’s population may peak at 10.9 billion by 2100. The latest revision indicates the world’s population may peak at 10.4 billion by 2080.
In other words, the UN has reduced its projected peak world population by about 800 million and brought forward the date for this peak by 20 years.
The UN’s projections are now much closer to those by researchers at the University of Washington, who suggested two years ago that the human population would peak at significantly less than 10 billion by 2065, decline to less than 9 billion by 2100 and keep declining – the current world population is about 8 billion.
The UN projections are higher largely due to an assumption that fertility rates in low fertility nations such as China and Japan will gradually rebound.
Low fertility is predominantly the function of two major changes that started in the 1960s – increasing availability of affordable contraception and the rising education of girls.
The world’s fertility rate has fallen from five births per woman in 1950 to 2.3 births per woman today. This is projected by the UN to fall to the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman by 2050 if not substantially earlier.
The human population will keep growing after that because of the current youthful age structure in 46 less-developed nations. These nations, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, will have rapidly growing working age populations for many decades. Sub-Saharan Africa is projected to become the most populous region of the world by the late 2060s surpassing both China and India.
By contrast, the combination of an older age structure and below replacement fertility will result in the populations of more than 60 mainly developed nations declining by at least 1 per cent by 2050 – many are projected to shrink by more than 20 per cent by 2050.
Major economies such as the enlarged European Union, China, Russia and Japan will go into population decline this decade if they haven’t already.
Their older age structure, very low fertility rates and limited immigration makes this inevitable.
The share of the global population aged 65 or more is projected to increase from 10 per cent or 770 million in 2022 to 16 per cent or 1.6 billion in 2050.
The portion of the elderly populations of most developed nations are already larger than this and will grow more quickly. Aging will slow briefly in developed nations during the 2030s as deaths rapidly outnumber births but it will resume after that.
The world’s most populous country, China, is projected to see its population almost halve by the end of this century with almost 50 per cent of its population aged 65 or over.
There will be periods over the next two decades when the Chinese population will be shrinking by over 15 million per annum.
Despite now having a below replacement fertility rate, India’s population is projected to keep growing well past 2050 due to its youthful age structure.
The big contrast are traditional migrant settler nations such as the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand whose populations are projected to keep growing well into the second half of this century.
This is predominantly a function of ongoing immigration that has slowed the rate of aging in these nations and pushed out the point in time that deaths will exceed births.
This provides these nations more time to make the transition to an older and slower-growing population.
Australia also has one of the world’s highest life expectancies at birth and at age 65. By contrast, life expectancy in the US has been in decline for a number of years. This decline accelerated during the pandemic.
All other things equal, a declining world population is good news for the environment, although it may only be of marginal benefit to limiting greenhouse gas emissions.
But significant population aging and eventual population decline have major implications for both economic and social policy.
The slow speed at which demographic change affects nations unfortunately results in governments giving these issues little attention until very late.
The current crisis in our health and aged care systems is one consequence of this neglect of an aging population.
Stagnating and eventually shrinking economies with massive government debts in developed nations, plus China and Russia, will be a long-term feature of population aging and decline.
We need to start better preparing for this. ~
https://www.smh.com.au/national/world-population-to-peak-and-decline-sooner-than-previously-thought-20220710-p5b0ik.html
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GRAY WHALES CAN TEACH HOW TO MOTHER AND ENDURE
~ I recently found an old notebook with two lines scribbled on the first page: "We’re looking out of the window of the Women’s Refuge at the rain. We can’t go out because I cannot afford to buy shoes."
I don’t remember writing this, 10 years ago now but, flicking through the blank pages that followed, a memory came. My son, six months old, crawling around a park in waterproofs and sopping wet socks, splatting his hands joyfully into puddles, me alongside in flip-flops. In the space between the writing and the memory, I’d concluded that shoes or no shoes, downpour or not, we needed to be outside. Inside the Women’s Refuge, there was no escaping my situation, that of an insolvent single mother. I felt trapped not just by the walls but also by society’s definition of me. Outside, the rain on my skin, we were contained only by the horizon.
I fell short of typical parenting standards, having neither partner nor home. Although I’d worked as a BBC journalist for a decade, my salary was insufficient to cover even the basics. I became a charity case, and moved through a succession of temporary accommodations, to a refuge, then a hostel for single mothers. I did editing jobs while my baby slept, scoured hospice shops for clothes, and used food banks.
I will forever be grateful for the support of those charities when I was at my lowest, exhausted by poverty and isolation, traumatized by an ugly breakup and court proceedings. At the hostel, I even had access to a psychotherapist. During one appointment, worried I was going crazy, I whispered that I had eaten my son’s fingernail clipping, after cutting his nails for the first time. Having no-one to share his milestones with, I wanted to ensure I did not forget the moment, him babbling excitedly on my knee, fascinated by the scissors. So I took that first tiny crescent moon and swallowed it whole.
‘Great,’ she said. ‘That’s original, just do whatever works for you.’ Another time, I confessed I’d lied about traveling away for work, saying I was staying with friends locally, in order not to jeopardize my hostel place. Under her unwavering gaze, I became uncomfortable but she said nothing critical, only smiled. Inside, something shifted. Guilt evaporated. She gave me permission to trust myself, to put my family first, to lie for us even.
That night, I ignored my editing work and read online about whales. I watched my favorite David Attenborough clip, where a colossal blue whale emerges next to his tiny boat, then strayed on to an article about the marathon migration of grey whales. The mothers fought off predators, parented and breastfed the calves, all while swimming halfway across the planet from the warm Mexican birthing lagoons to the Arctic feeding grounds. They were endurance incarnate. Mothers and newborns, the article said, could be seen in Baja California from December to April. As I read about them, I felt new strength. It was January. The mothers and babies must already be there, in Baja.
On the phone, on the beach, cupping my hand against the wind, I told an even bigger lie. Max raced barefoot on the sand, squealing as he watched his footprints trailing off behind him.
‘Are you still working, still staff?’ the man in the call center asked. I was inquiring, ever so casually, about the possibility of a bank loan.
‘Yes,’ I said. He paused. I stopped breathing. He had my account in front of him. It must have been clear I absolutely was not staff any more, was barely working. If I could hold my breath until he spoke it would be a yes, I told myself.
‘That’s all done for you,’ he said.
My horizon was now that of the migrating whales. We would follow them from Mexico to the top of the world, I told Max. They would swim and we would bus, train and boat alongside them. I would relearn from the whales how to mother, how to endure, how to live.
The tour groups call them ‘friendlies’, whales that approach the boats. We were driven through salt flats from the town of Guerrero Negro to the lagoon. Out on the water, the sun burns down on us, on Max’s little hooded head. He’s restless so I softly sing to distract him. ‘Twinkle, twinkle little star.’ ‘Stop,’ he orders, belting out a solo. There’s a sudden, sharp ‘puh’, an explosion of spray. Stinking bottom-of-the-ocean shrimp breath engulfs us. Tiny droplets catch a rainbow. Five feet of whale head erupts from the water and reaches towards the sky. There’s a downward curved mouth as big as a slide, close enough to touch.
‘Aaaah, go away, whale!’ shouts Max.
‘Incroyable!’ a French voice from my right.
‘No teeth, right?’ A hesitant American on the left.
Grey whales are thought to see forward and down, which is useful when skimming prey off the ocean floor. She’s angling her eyes to look at us. Returning her gaze, I feel no fear, only trust. I hold Max up. The dappled grey expanse sinks down.
‘Mummy, Mummy!’
‘I’ve got you.’ He lands a pat and I reach out myself. Her skin is soft to the touch. She rises. I steal a rubbery, salty kiss.
Now the mother’s checked us out, the calf comes close, noses the boat. It back-flops on top of the adult, rides momentarily on her flukes, tail-slaps the water. The splash reaches our grinning, cooing faces.
Come here, baby whale, come here, gimme pat,’ calls Max. And yes, you come to him, you answer his call.
Whalers discovered this lagoon in 1857. They called the greys ‘devil fish’ and hunted them to near-extinction. When calves got in the way of the harpooners’ sights and were struck, the mothers showed desperate ferocity. In 1874, Captain Charles Melville Scammon wrote that: ‘the parent animal, in her frenzy, will chase the boats … overturn them with her head, or dash them in pieces with a stroke of her ponderous flukes.’
The ocean was a lonely place for greys while numbers recovered. For decades, fishermen in the lagoons avoided them as they were said to attack boats and overturn kayaks. Then, in 1972, something extraordinary happened. Francisco Mayoral, a local fisherman known as Pachico, was out in his panga looking for grouper. An adult female surfaced alongside. Frightened, Pachico tried to maneuver away. But the whale came up repeatedly beside the little boat. Stories differ about what happened next. One says Pachico placed a hand in the water and the whale rubbed up against him. Another says she raised her head and stayed there so long that he reached out and touched her.
Pachico took numerous marine biologists to witness the behavior. The whales came to him, and to Pachico they were more than friends. ‘The whales, they are my family,’ he explained.
The behavioral biologist Toni Frohoff has described the encounters as ‘collaborative’, showing intelligence and a possibility of intentional communication. This shift from ferociousness to friendliness in the lagoons shows ‘behavioral plasticity’– an ability to adapt, assess threats, take up new opportunities, and learn from others, perhaps even other species. I’ve been learning from the whales, how to relax and play again, to leave my trauma in the past. If they can recover and trust after all they’ve been through, so can I.
We traverse an undersea canyon where predatory orcas lie in wait for the calves. The greys hug the shoreline – shallow waters where orcas can’t follow – and keep their young close. When ambushed, they’ve been observed to roll onto their backs and to hold the babies above water, in between their flippers. Sickened at the thought of Max witnessing an attack on a calf, I sleep with him in the boat’s cabin, placing him similarly on my chest, wrapped in my arms.
Each day on our journey north, I wake knowing whales are on the move too. Following them, eyes on the horizon, nothing can get us, my failures can’t catch up with me. It helps that Max loves buses and trains. ‘Does that say “bus”, Mummy?’ he asks, pointing to the tarmac as we approach a bus stop in Newport, Oregon. It does. Perhaps it’s just a good guess but if he’s learning to read that’s something else I can use against critics of our journey. I remember friends’ concerns about my taking a two-year-old traveling, the lack of routine, a different bed every night. But Max is so content when we’re on the road, just like me.
Grey whales are gurus of managing the unknown. They survived the ice ages by being flexible on diet, and seem to manage stress well, perhaps due to genetic advantages, including in DNA maintenance and repair, and immune responses. The hope is that all this could help them survive in the warming, changing ocean. A mass grey whale die-off began in 2019. Hundreds have washed up dead, a large proportion of them poorly nourished. And, over the past two years, increasing numbers of underfed whales have joined the Sounders.
I wonder how Earhart first found the ghost shrimp. Did she fortuitously lose her way one day? If I want to pioneer my own path, perhaps, like her, I have to take risks.
I watch the footage from my underwater camera in the Mexican lagoons. It’s all grey-green and swirling motes as I hold it underwater. A few minutes in, the swirls form shadows, the shadows strengthen until they are long shapes looming, bubbles rising from their sides as they twist. They eye me as they pass the lens. I hear Max singing from above, his voice traversing the species barrier. At the surface, my face appears, shrieking with delight. I fumble with the camera. Hands reach towards the whales. They blow kaleidoscopic spray into the air.
We journeyed to see them. They came to meet us. They heard us. When I was desperate, they helped me rewrite my story, reminded me that feeling lost is part of managing change, of forging new paths through crisis. Whales do not deal in hope or hopelessness: they deal in living, taking each breath as it comes. They travel to the end of the earth for their young. ~
https://psyche.co/ideas/grey-whales-taught-me-how-to-mother-how-to-endure-how-to-live
Mary:
Thinking of the grey whales and the lessons in love and endurance they model, it is tempting to imagine they have decided...yes, deliberately, to approach us despite our bloody and predatory history. To think that perhaps they have forgiven us, and have much more to teach. We already know their brains and behaviors are complex and intentional, they may well be as intelligent and individual as we are.
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THE WISDOM OF AGE
After loving my parents, my siblings, my spouse, my children and my friends, I have now started loving myself.
I have realized that I am not “Atlas”. The world does not rest on my shoulders.
I have stopped bargaining with vegetable & fruit vendors. A few pennies more is not going to break me, but it might help the poor fellow save for his daughter’s school fees.
I leave my waitress a big tip. The extra money might bring a smile to her face. She is toiling much harder for a living than I am.
I stopped telling the elderly that they've already told that story many times. The story makes them walk down memory lane & relive their past.
I have learned not to correct people even when I know they are wrong. The onus of making everyone perfect is not on me. Peace is more precious than perfection.
I give compliments freely & generously. Compliments are a mood enhancer not only for the recipient, but also for me. And a small tip for the recipient of a compliment, never, NEVER turn it down, just say "Thank You.”
I have learned not to bother about a crease or a spot on my shirt. Personality speaks louder than appearances.
I walk away from people who don't value me. They might not know my worth, but I do.
I remain cool when someone plays dirty to outrun me in the rat race. I am not a rat & neither am I in any race.
I am learning not to be embarrassed by my emotions. It’s my emotions that make me human.
I have learned that it's better to drop the ego than to break a relationship. My ego will keep me aloof, whereas with relationships, I will never be alone.
I have learned to live each day as if it's the last. After all, it might be the last.
I am doing what makes me happy. I am responsible for my happiness, and I owe it to myself. Happiness is a choice. You can be happy at any time, just choose to be!
[Alas, I’ve lost the link. Apologies.]
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THE ORTHODOX CHURCH IS HARMFUL TO RUSSIA
~ Personally, I think that one of the institutions that has been hurting Russian society for centuries is the Russian Orthodox Church. Not only in the fact that it is de facto subordinate to the state, but that, unlike most churches, it has not reformed itself in any particular way, and when you listen to the opinions of some of its clergy, you get the feeling that you have been transported back to the Middle Ages. Also, its activities and work with the believers is pretty crazy. Compare, for example, a number of Catholic and Protestant churches, which despite a number of very controversial historical episodes have more or less been centers not only of universal education but also of enterprise for hundreds of years.
If the Roman Catholic Church is accused of being too conservative (a criticism that is entirely correct and that causes problems for the Church itself), compared to the Russian Orthodox Church it is an institution that is universally progressive and modern. ~ Misha Firer, Quora
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HOW THE ORTHODOX CHURCH IS HELPING PUTIN’S WAR
~ To Vladimir Putin, Orthodox Christianity is a tool for asserting Moscow’s rights over sovereign Ukraine. In his February televised address announcing the recent invasion of Ukraine, he argued the inhabitants of that “ancient Russian land” were Orthodox from time immemorial, and now faced persecution from an illegitimate regime in Kyiv.
Led by Patriarch Kirill, the Russian Orthodox Church is one of the most tangible cultural bonds between Russia and Ukraine. The gilded domes of Kyiv’s Monastery of the Caves and St. Sophia Cathedral have beckoned pilgrims from across both lands for nigh on a thousand years.
With religious rhetoric, Putin taps into a long tradition that imagines a Greater Russia extending across present-day Ukraine and Belarus, in a combined territory known as Holy Rus’. Nostalgic for empire, this sees the spiritual unity of the three nations as key to Russia’s earthly power as an exceptional civilization. Encouraged by Putin’s “special operation,” Russian Orthodox nationalists are excitedly recalling the prophecy of a twentieth-century saint from Chernihiv, now one of Ukraine’s beleaguered cities. “Just as the One Lord God is the indivisible Holy Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” this monk foretold, “so Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus together are Holy Rus’ and cannot be separated.”
Putin is not the first modern Moscow ruler to co-opt this idea in seeking to consolidate secular power. During the darkest hours of World War Two, Stalin reinstated the Russian Orthodox Church—having almost bled it dry—and replaced the communist Internationale with a new national anthem. Its lyrics asserted that the Soviet Union was “unbreakable, welded together forever by Great Rus’.”
Around 2007 the Kremlin further advanced the allied concept of Russky Mir, or the Russian World, initially a soft power project aimed at promoting Russian culture worldwide and likened by Patriarch Kirill to the British Commonwealth. Putin, however—unsettled by mass protests against his authoritarian regime in 2011-12 as well as those that toppled his vassal in Ukraine in 2013-14—has since twisted both Holy Rus’ and the Russian World to serve a more violent agenda.
Outsized emphasis now goes to Russia’s tradition of warrior saints. It was by remarkable coincidence, Putin told thousands of flag-waving supporters at a recent Moscow stadium rally, that the military operation in Ukraine commenced on the birthday of Saint Theodore Ushakov, an eighteenth-century Russian naval commander famed for never losing a single battle. “He once said, ‘This threat will serve to glorify Russia,’” Putin enthused. “That was the case then, is now, and ever shall be!”
Cast aside is an alternative Christian holy tradition of defiant passive resistance, exemplified by the first saints to be canonized in medieval Rus’, the Kyiv princes Boris and Gleb, who accepted martyrdom at the hands of their brother. “They gave up without a fight,” Putin once remarked in disgust. “This cannot be an example for us.” With the attack on Kyiv’s current ruler, even small acts of Christian pacifism by Russians are quashed. A remote village priest was fined hundreds of dollars for publicly refusing to support the war and thus “call black—white, evil—good.” A young woman was detained outside Moscow’s main Orthodox cathedral for holding up a simple sign bearing the biblical commandment, “Thou shalt not kill.”
In this Putin can count on the backing of a body of jingoistic opinion now dominating the Church hierarchy. Flanked by medal-laden Defense Minister Shoigu at the 2020 consecration of a cavernous black and green military cathedral, Patriarch Kirill prayed that Russia’s armed forces would never suffer defeat. This March, on the very same spot where Pussy Riot made their infamous protest against cozy Church-Kremlin ties a decade ago, the Patriarch presented an icon to the head of Russia’s National Guard—the same unit now reportedly suffering heavy losses in Ukraine—in the hope that this would “inspire new recruits taking their oath.”
This priest concluded his sermon with the hope that Kazakhstan, Moldova, and Georgia would be reunited with Russia, in addition to Ukraine. But if Putin is looking to burnish his legacy as gatherer of historical Russian lands, there is a problem. The inhabitants of Ukraine are not interested in being “liberated” by his operation to “de-Nazify” their country. “The Russian World has arrived!” one woman shouted sarcastically as she filmed invading troops facing off against a crowd of angry locals just 20 miles from Ukraine’s eastern border with Russia. “We are not waiting for you, so get out of here!” Within hours of the first missile strikes on February 24, even the the Orthodox Church in Ukraine that is under the Patriarch of Moscow turned indignantly to Putin. “We ask that you stop this fratricidal war immediately,” Metropolitan Onuphry implored. “Such a war has justification before neither God nor man.”
Putin’s is thus a spiritual, as well as military, misadventure. Similar to Stalin’s pivot at the lowest point in World War Two, his reliance upon the Orthodox Church over the last decade smacks of desperation. It hardly stems from personal commitment to the faith: while projected as a believer from the beginning of his presidency, for more than a decade Putin largely rebuffed the Church’s policy goals—such as mandatory classes on Orthodoxy in public schools—until his need for autocratic symbolism prevailed after his return to the presidency in 2011-12. Throughout his rule he has consistently spoken and behaved at odds with normative Orthodox Christian behavior, such as by claiming that choice of faith is unimportant since all religious categories are human invention, or when awkwardly greeting Patriarch Kirill with the gestures reserved for venerating a sacred relic or icon.
Bellicose rhetoric from Orthodox clerics does resonate with some devout Russians, but this is a narrow swath of the population. While a 2019 national poll found that over 60 percent of Russians older than 25 identify as Orthodox, those attentive to institutional Church life—such as by attending Easter worship services—amount to only a few percent. The same poll found a precipitous drop in those identifying as Orthodox among the 18-24 age group—just 23 percent.
This contrasts starkly with Ukraine, where a quarter of the population attends Easter services and a majority of 18-24 year-olds define as believers. Swift and total alienation of millions of Ukrainian Orthodox is a colossal price for Patriarch Kirill to pay for loyalty to Putin, Ukraine being where a third of his parishes and monasteries are located. The Patriarch’s international standing is also shot, as Orthodox abroad not gagged by the Kremlin’s new ban on criticism of the Russian armed forces have condemned the war—including Kirill’s own bishops in Estonia and Lithuania—along with Pope Francis and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Instead of a Russian World, the Moscow Patriarch may soon find his authority stopping at the borders of the Russian Federation.
The Church’s dwindling reach thus means that Putin cannot use it to restore the age-old dream of an expanded Holy Rus’. At 70, however, Russia’s president has no long-term ambition to consolidate Orthodox spirituality—only his personal grip on power for however many more years God grants him.
https://time.com/6167332/putin-russian-orthodox-church-war-ukraine/
White roses, signifyng purity, for Patriarch Kirill*
HOW TO THRIVE AFTER LEAVING YOUR FAITH
~ To some, the idea of leaving a religion can seem as innocuous as cancelling a gym membership. However, for many who have left a faith tradition, the reality is much more complicated. As a psychologist who works with these individuals – and as a formerly religious person – I have found that the transition can be challenging and even intensely painful. While the reasons why people leave a religion and the experiences they have in doing so are quite varied, many endure deep feelings of loss and confusion along the way.
One Muslim woman described to me how her values no longer aligned with the traditional Islamic teachings of her family. She agonized over whether to introduce her family to her non-Muslim boyfriend of several years. She feared that they would disown her.
A Catholic gay woman told me about how she had struggled to reconcile two seemingly incongruous parts of her identity. Eventually, she decided to pursue spirituality without the involvement of the Church. She felt she was being forced to remove herself from a community of which she still wanted to be a part, but that had made it clear she was not really welcome.
A Mormon man recently left the Church after learning about what he considered serious discrepancies between its actual history and what he had been taught. He now struggled over how to break the news to his family and friends, as he knew they would be shocked, especially since he had been a leader in the Church for much of his life. He was especially afraid that his adult children would see him as a sinner, and would distance themselves and their families from him.
My own experience with leaving religion, like many people’s, unfolded gradually over the course of years and was due to many reasons. One of these was that I began to notice how many of my therapy clients were suffering from their experience with the religion that I had always deeply believed in and identified with. Some of these clients struggled with feelings of shame and self-hatred to the point that they battled suicidal thoughts after attending church. I grappled with the dissonance between my values and what I began to recognize as thinly veiled sexism, racism and homophobia in my Church’s doctrines. I experienced a confusing identity crisis that required me to re-evaluate my own beliefs and admit that many of them were wrong.
If you, too, have decided to leave a religion – or have been working through such a change for some time – you might find yourself questioning your identity, your purpose, or decisions that you have made. You might even lose, or have already lost, relationships and community. I have seen these difficulties up close. But I have also come to see that, as is often true of difficult challenges in life, this kind of transition can ultimately bring enormous growth and contentment too.
YOUR FAITH TRANSITION WILL BE UNIQUE, BUT YOU ARE NOT ALONE
There is no single correct way to navigate a change in your faith. While many people leave their religion behind completely, many others hold on to certain traditions and maintain some participation in the faith community, even as their beliefs change. How you define and what you choose to call your experience (a transition of faith, a loss of faith, leaving your faith, deconversion, etc) is for you to decide. In this article I use these terms interchangeably with the full knowledge that no one term is right for everyone.
Various aspects of your identity – such as race, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability status, marital status, parental status, or socioeconomic status – can influence what specific challenges you face during a faith transition. What helps one person to get through this time might not be as helpful for you; this does not mean you are ‘doing it wrong’ or haven’t tried hard enough, just that your experience is distinct from theirs. You’ll need to be patient with yourself as you find what works for you.
Still, it can be helpful to recognize that you are going through something that many others have experienced in some way. Throughout much of the world, we are seeing declines in religious membership. While many people who leave one religion convert to another, in recent years an even greater number of people have become unaffiliated with any religion. As of 2015, the religiously unaffiliated accounted for an estimated 16 per cent of the global population, and in almost half of the world’s countries they made up the second largest ‘religious’ group.
One similarity I’ve noticed among people who transition away from faith is that they often report feeling they have grown in numerous ways and become more empowered through the experience. For this reason, the phrase ‘loss of faith’ doesn’t always resonate; they often report that they have gained something invaluable.
One client told me that their religious life was full of feelings of deep shame and a sense that they could never measure up to God’s expectations. After leaving their faith, they reported feeling self-acceptance and self-love for the first time. The change had a ripple effect in this person’s life: it affected the way they showed up in their marriage, increased their willingness to be open and vulnerable, and brought renewed confidence and excitement about their career.
The process of leaving a religion is comparable with other developmental transitions, such as moving out of a childhood home or starting a new career. Whenever we move from one stage of life to another, we go through a transitory phase, the space between an old way of functioning (which we knew very well) and a new way (which we haven’t quite figured out yet). During this transitory phase, you might experience feelings of loss, anxiety and other difficult emotions. It will take time to figure out and adjust to the new stage of life you are entering. But, like many of the individuals with whom I’ve worked during faith transitions, you can come out stronger – and better able to live a life that feels genuine to you.
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You could be surprised by what you miss and what feelings you have as a result of leaving your faith. You may grieve the loss of certain meaningful beliefs, elements of your identity, or relationships and community that were tied to your religion. Grief is not a linear path: you can experience anger, sadness and other feelings at many times and in many combinations. Know that, while these feelings can be intense, they tend to decrease in intensity and make more sense over time, particularly when you give yourself room to feel and accept them.
It’s possible that you will also experience feelings such as shame about leaving or fear or anxiety about the consequences of your decision. You might even feel ashamed about having been a part of the religion at all, or angry at yourself for not leaving earlier. The emotional experience can be confusing for some, especially those who have had a difficult relationship to their faith. If religion was a fundamental part of your identity, but you came to find it antithetical to other significant aspects of it (eg, your sexuality, gender or political beliefs), moving away from religion might involve simultaneous feelings of loss and validation.
The experience of leaving a religion can bring up so many questions and challenges that it is easy to become overwhelmed. Relationship complications, familial disagreements and personal dilemmas can abound during this time, and it’s not always clear how to resolve them. Additionally, religious systems often provide straightforward answers to life’s most difficult questions (‘What should I devote my time and energy to?’ ‘What is the meaning of life?’) – without religion offering this sense of clarity, life can start to feel more overwhelming and confusing.
‘I don’t know’ – or even better, ‘I don’t know yet’ – are valid answers to the difficult questions and conundrums that you might encounter during a faith transition. Allow yourself the time necessary to find your footing again. Trying to hurry this process often leads us to choose what most quickly alleviates our anxiety, rather than what is most in line with our values. It’s important to remember that there are rarely perfect solutions or answers in life. Recognize the unhelpful pressure to ‘get it right’, and instead confront the challenges of a faith transition with flexibility and a plan to readjust your approach as many times as necessary.
A client of mine described missing the habit of a nightly prayer, but reported that, as they no longer believed in a god, it felt like a strange thing to want to do. We explored why they missed this spiritual practice and what it had offered them. They discussed how those quiet, prayerful moments had given them a space to reflect on the day’s successes and failures, remember the things they were grateful for, and commit to living their values more fully. What a beautiful practice! This client later came up with the idea to meditate on these areas, and found this practice to be deeply meaningful to them and in line with their values.
As another example, after leaving my religion, I chose to hold on to the belief that challenges in life are an opportunity for growth and development. This idea is in line with my personal and professional values, and I find it helpful in navigating life. But I chose to leave behind the belief that painful emotions or experiences are punishments from God for sinful behavior. I find this belief shaming, unhelpful in my own life, and ultimately out of line with my values.
Many of my clients have told me that they could more genuinely live in accordance with their values after leaving a faith, as they were independently choosing to do what felt right, rather than doing what they were told was necessary. ~
https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-thrive-after-leaving-your-religion-and-emerge-stronger?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=c0650bc8c3-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2022_07_13_05_25&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-c0650bc8c3-71890240
Oriana:
Things were relatively easy for me. Aside from one confrontation with my parish priest, from which I emerged victorious and further empowered to close the door completely, my one difficulty, and it turns out to be a common one, was a once-in-a-great-while worry that I might be wrong and thus, having lost Pascal's Wager, would end up in hell for eternity. In time I had formed a response to that, and it was the idea that worshiping a monstrously cruel god who throws people into hell is immoral and cowardly. Such a god is not worthy of worship. It would be like worshiping Hitler — except that in my opinion the biblical god out-Hitlered Hitler.
Eventually the worry disappeared, and I could see how the notion of hell was created to manipulate people through fear. The knowledge that religions are a human invention, mostly going back to the archaic era when humans had no scientific knowledge about natural causes of various phenomena, so they assumed the existence of invisible kind or malignant supernatural entities who demanded sacrifice, grew more and more certain with time.
I’ve had some dreams about being in hell, but those were not really nightmares; I felt no fear. My dreams about various kinds of hell were very interesting, and helped me clarify what I valued most about life.
Remembering the moment of insight when I realized that all religions were man-made mythologies, I remember feeling relief — so much nonsense fell off me. In addition, I was finally free from the “Eye in the Sky” — a god constantly watching me, even reading my thoughts. Now I was responsible for my own moral integrity, a self-owning adult.
Since I was only 14 at the time, one could argue against my feeling suddenly adult. I wasn’t yet an adult in every sense of the word, but dropping the tyranny of religion was a huge step toward adulthood.
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~ When Adam was 130 years old, he had a son in his own likeness, after his own image; and he named him Seth.
So Adam lived a total of 930 years, and then he died. ~ Genesis 5:3-5
Oriana:
I think the Catholic church was right when it prohibited -- or at least strongly discouraged -- the faithful from reading the bible. Reading the bible is one of the things people frequently mention when asked why they became atheists.
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MUSCLES AND AGING
~ There is perhaps no better way to see the absolute pinnacle of human athletic abilities than by watching the Olympics. But at the Winter Games this year – and at almost all professional sporting events – you rarely see a competitor over 40 years old and almost never see a single athlete over 50. This is because with every additional year spent on Earth, bodies age and muscles don’t respond to exercise the same as they used to.
I lead a team of scientists who study the health benefits of exercise, strength training and diet in older people. We investigate how older people respond to exercise and try to understand the underlying biological mechanisms that cause muscles to increase in size and strength after resistance or strength training.
Old and young people build muscle in the same way. But as you age, many of the biological processes that turn exercise into muscle become less effective. This makes it harder for older people to build strength but also makes it that much more important for everyone to continue exercising as they age.
The exercise I study is the type that makes you stronger. Strength training includes exercises like pushups and situps, but also weightlifting and resistance training using bands or workout machines.
When you do strength training, over time, exercises that at first felt difficult become easier as your muscles increase in strength and size – a process called hypertrophy. Bigger muscles simply have larger muscle fibers and cells, and this allows you to lift heavier weights. As you keep working out, you can continue to increase the difficulty or weight of the exercises as your muscles get bigger and stronger.
It is easy to see that working out makes muscles bigger, but what is actually happening to the cells as muscles increase in strength and size in response to resistance training?
Any time you move your body, you are doing so by shortening and pulling with your muscles – a process called contraction. This is how muscles spend energy to generate force and produce movement. Every time you contract a muscle – especially when you have to work hard to do the contraction, like when lifting weights – the action causes changes to the levels of various chemicals in your muscles. In addition to the chemical changes, there are also specialized receptors on the surface of muscle cells that detect when you move a muscle, generate force or otherwise alter the biochemical machinery within a muscle.
In a healthy young person, when these chemical and mechanical sensory systems detect muscle movement, they turn on a number of specialized chemical pathways within the muscle. These pathways in turn trigger the production of more proteins that get incorporated into the muscle fibers and cause the muscle to increase in size.
These cellular pathways also turn on genes that code for specific proteins in cells that make up the muscles contracting machinery. This activation of gene expression is a longer-term process, with genes being turned on or off for several hours after a single session of resistance exercise.
The overall effect of these many exercise-induced changes is to cause your muscles to get bigger.
HOW OLDER MUSCLES CHANGE
While the basic biology of all people, young or old, is more or less the same, something is behind the lack of senior citizens in professional sports. So what changes in a person’s muscles as they age?
What my colleagues and I have found in our research is that in young muscle, a little bit of exercise produces a strong signal for the many processes that trigger muscle growth. In older people’s muscles, by comparison, the signal telling muscles to grow is much weaker for a given amount of exercise. These changes begin to occur when a person reaches around 50 years old and become more pronounced as time goes on.
In a recent study, we wanted to see if the changes in signaling were accompanied by any changes in which genes – and how many of them – respond to exercise. Using a technique that allowed us to measure changes in thousands of genes in response to resistance exercise, we found that when younger men exercise, there are changes in the expression of more than 150 genes. When we looked at older men, we found changes in the expression of only 42 genes. This difference in gene expression seems to explain, at least partly, the more visible variation between how young and old people respond to strength training.
When you put together all of the various molecular differences in how older adults respond to strength training, the result is that older people do not gain muscle mass as well as young people.
But this reality should not discourage older people from exercising. If anything, it should encourage you to exercise more as you age.
Exercise still remains one of the most important activities older adults can do for their health. The work my colleagues and I have done clearly shows that although the responses to training lessen with age, they are by no means reduced to zero.
We showed that older adults with mobility problems who participate in a regular program of aerobic and resistance exercise can reduce their risk of becoming disabled by about 20%. We also found a similar 20% reduction in risk of becoming disabled among people who are already physically frail if they did the same workout program.
While younger people may get stronger and build bigger muscles much faster than their older counterparts, older people still get incredibly valuable health benefits from exercise, including improved strength, physical function and reduced disability. So the next time you are sweating during a workout session, remember that you are building muscle strength that is vital to maintaining mobility and good health throughout a long life. ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/50-year-old-muscles-just-can-t-grow-big-like-they-used-to-the-biology-of-how-muscles-change-with-age?utm_source=pocket-newtab
Oriana:
I remember a presentation of a study at a gerontology convention that showed that just talking a 20 minute walk every day had profound implications for health, including life expectancy.
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REGULAR SALT INTAKE LINKED TO INCREASE IN PREMATURE MORTALITY
~ More frequent addition of salt to food outside of cooking or other preparation may significantly increase risk of premature mortality from any cause and lower life expectancy, according to findings from a new study of more than a half million people in the UK Biobank.
Investigators found that those who regularly added salt to their food had a 28% increased risk of premature death vs those who never or rarely added the flavor enhancer. Moreover, at the age of 50, life expectancy for women who regularly used salt was reduced by 1.5 years; for men of the same age, 2.28 years of life were lost.
The study, published July 11 in the European Heart Journal, found the association was independent of diet, lifestyle, socioeconomic level, and pre-existing diseases. The authors also found, however, that high intake of potassium-rich foods, including fruits and vegetables, may attenuate the association.
“To my knowledge, our study is the first to assess the relation between adding salt to foods and premature death,” said lead study author Lu Qi, MD, PhD, of Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in a statement. “It provides novel evidence to support recommendations to modify eating behaviors for improving health.
“Even a modest reduction in sodium intake, by adding less or no salt to food at the table, is likely to result in substantial health benefits, especially when it is achieved in the general population.”
As context for their study the authors note the historic difficulty in assessing overall intake of sodium, stating that results of past research looking at the association with risk of mortality is inconsistent, “showing positively linear, J-shaped, or inversely linear associations." Thus, their decision to focus on sodium added at the table independent of salt added during food preparation.
Qi and colleagues analyzed data from 501 379 participants in the UK Biobank study who completed a questionnaire at baseline (2006-2010) about frequency of adding salt to their food. Options were never/rarely, sometimes, usually, always, or prefer not to answer. This last group was not included in the final analysis.
Average age of the cohort was 56.7 years, 45.6% were men, the majority (94.3%) was White. Premature death was defined as death before the age of 75 years and was ascertained through review of death certificates.
During their analyses, investigators adjusted for potential confounding variables including age, sex, race, deprivation, body mass index, smoking, alcohol intake, physical activity, diet, and medical conditions such as diabetes, cancer and heart and blood vessel diseases.
The team’s analysis of specific causes of premature mortality found that more frequently adding salt was significantly associated with greater risk of cardiovascular disease and specifically with a higher hazard of stroke but not coronary artery disease mortality.
When they analyzed the association between increasing levels of additional salt and life expectancy, they found that compared with never/rarely adding salt, always adding salt to foods was related to 1.50 (95% CI, 0.72–2.30) years lower life expectancy for women at age 50 years and 2.28 (95% CI, 1.66–2.90) years lower life expectancy for men at the same age.
"Hypertension is a major determinant of cardiovascular disease, with a population-attributable fraction of >20%, and a third of all strokes are attributable to this factor.” ~
https://www.patientcareonline.com/view/salt-added-frequently-to-food-may-increase-risk-for-premature-mortality-study
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ending on beauty:
. . . paradise was when
Dante
regathered from height and depth
came out onto the soft, green level earth
into the natural light
~ A. R. Ammons
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