You can't really "study" a culture. You can only verstehen it. And in order to verstehen, you need to live into it. The rapid escalation of Z-war hardly came as a surprise to anyone who lived in the context of Russian culture. Watch this fragment from a super popular movie Brat-2
Aleksei Balabanov may be the most talented and the culturally influential film director of the post-Soviet Russia. Some even argue that he created the post-Soviet Russian culture. That may be an overstatement but the absolutely iconic status of his movies is hard to deny
Most of Balabanov's fame and influence is based on just two movies: Brat and Brat-2 covering fictional mafia wars of the Russian mafia. The first movie is taking place in Russia (St Petersburg), in the second movie they make a work trip to America
One of the more iconic meme phrases from the movie is:
"You scumbags will yet answer me for Sevastopol"
A Russian bandit is telling this to a Ukrainian before killing him. Crimean Sevastopol becoming a part of Ukraine was perceived as a major injustice by Russian nationalists
And indeed, the annexation of Crimea brought this iconic image back to the Russian discourse and meme culture. Consider this marshrutka, a passenger minibus
Or a pro-government demonstration in Vladimir. Notice a single word "ответили" = "[they] answered" on a poster. Everyone immediately gets the message and the cultural allusion. It's universally known
Some meme authors would notice a similarity between a newly appointed prosecutor of Crimea and the actor from Brat movie. In a sense, the annexation itself was seen in the Brat context
Extreme brutality of Z-war impressed many observers. Here you see Russian troops launching rockets with thermobaric warheads with a TOS-1A Solntsepyok heavy flamethrower system
Here you can see a Russian TV host Skabeeva praising the use of thermobaric warheads in Ukraine (with English subs). It's two minutes long and I strongly recommend to watch it through to grasp some understanding of the state of public discourse in Russia
Current derangement of the Z war may seem as an unfortunate accident to a foreigner who hadn't lived in the context of the Russian culture. But it seems logical and pretty much inevitable to the ones who did and consumed its cultural content. The end of🧵
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Yes. Behind all the breaking news about the capture of small villages, we are missing the bigger pattern which is:
The Soviet American war was supposed to be fought to somewhere to the west of Rhine. What you got instead is a Soviet Civil War happening to the east of Dnieper
If you said that the battles of the great European war will not be fought in Dunkirk and La Rochelle, but somewhere in Kupyansk (that is here) and Rabotino, you would have been once put into a psych ward, or, at least, not taken as a serious person
The behemoth military machine had been built, once, for a thunderbolt strike towards the English Channel. Whatever remained from it, is now decimating itself in the useless battles over the useless coal towns of the Donetsk Oblast
Yes, and that is super duper quadruper important to understand
Koreans are poor (don't have an empire) and, therefore, must do productive work to earn their living. So, if the Americans want to learn how to do anything productive they must learn it from Koreans etc
There is this stupid idea that the ultra high level of life and consumption in the United States has something to do with their productivity. That is of course a complete sham. An average American doesn't do anything useful or important to justify (or earn!) his kingly lifestyle
The kingly lifestyle of an average American is not based on his "productivity" (what a BS, lol) but on the global empire Americans are holding currently. Part of the imperial dynamics being, all the actually useful work, all the material production is getting outsourced abroad
Reading Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Set in southwest England, somewhere in the late 1800s. And the first thing you need to know is that Tess is bilingual. He speaks a local dialect she learnt at home, and the standard English she picked at school from a London-trained teacher
So, basically, "normal" language doesn't come out of nowhere. Under the normal conditions, people on the ground speak all the incomprehensible patois, wildly different from each other
"Regular", "correct" English is the creation of state
So, basically, the state chooses a standard (usually, based on one of the dialects), cleanses it a bit, and then shoves down everyone's throats via the standardized education
Purely artificial construct, of a super mega state that really appeared only by the late 1800s
There's a subtle point here that 99,999% of Western commentariat is missing. Like, totally blind to. And that point is:
Building a huuuuuuuuuuge dam (or steel plant, or whatever) has been EVERYONE's plan of development. Like absolutely every developing country, no exceptions
Almost everyone who tried to develop did it in a USSR-ish way, via prestige projects. Build a dam. A steel plant. A huge plant. And then an even bigger one
And then you run out of money, and it all goes bust and all you have is postapocalyptic ruins for the kids to play in
If China did not go bust, in a way like almost every development project from the USSR to South Asia did, that probably means that you guys are wrong about China. Like totally wrong
What you describe is not China but the USSR, and its copies & emulations elsewhere
What I am saying is that "capitalist reforms" are a buzzword devoid of any actual meaning, and a buzzword that obfuscated rather than explains. Specifically, it is fusing radically different policies taken under the radically different circumstances (and timing!) into one - purely for ideological purposes
It can be argued, for example, that starting from the 1980s, China has undertaken massive socialist reforms, specifically in infrastructure, and in basic (mother) industries, such as steel, petrochemical and chemical and, of course, power
The primary weakness of this argument is that being true, historically speaking, it is just false in the context of American politics where the “communism” label has been so over-used (and misapplied) that it lost all of its former power:
“We want X”
“No, that is communism”
“We want communism”
Basically, when you use a label like “communism” as a deus ex machina winning you every argument, you simultaneously re-define its meaning. And when you use it to beat off every popular socio economic demand (e.g. universal healthcare), you re-define communism as a synthesis of all the popular socio economic demands
Historical communism = forced industrial development in a poor, predominantly agrarian country, funded through expropriation of the peasantry
(With the most disastrous economic and humanitarian consequences)