So what? Does it even matter?Originally Posted by kaur
So what? Does it even matter?
Haeresis est maxima opera maleficarum non credere.
mirhond, I think it does. How country happened to be in this situation? Overstretched ambitions, bad economics etc ? Structural problems?
Source of the mith isn't necessarily rooted in reality, as Dayuhan have already said. Call it as you wish, it remains golden age of justice, equality and great achievements. Real problems of USSR you've mentioned above deserve another topic in "Historians" branch.
Last edited by mirhond; 05-21-2014 at 02:09 PM.
Haeresis est maxima opera maleficarum non credere.
mirhond, what can I answer if Russians dream about era that had serious systematic errors. Memory is tricky thing that picks out usuallly good things. Freud may think other way. Do you still like Жигули beer or prefer Carlsberg? What about those Sovet ice creams that were dreams of childhood? What about Magnum ice cream? Did you like riding Десна-2 bicycle, or Scott would be better? Oh, I forgot that those NATO/EU guys are producing those things in Russia now together with Russian oligarhs ...
Nice example about golden age, that should remind childhood
http://blog.t30p.ru/post/A-vi-znaete...-izdeliya.aspx
Some 61 percent of respondents polled by the Public Opinion Fund (FOM) in 2006, when Brezhnev’s 100th birth anniversary was marked, recalled the years of his rule as good times for the country and only 17 percent - bad times. Some 50 percent of Russians believe that Brezhnev played a positive role in the history of the country, 16 percent, think he played a negative role.
Meanwhile, only 36 percent of respondents wanted “to return the country to that historical period, when Brezhnev ruled it, with all typical features and peculiarities of the life in those years,” 42 percent opposed such comeback in the past.http://in.rbth.com/articles/2012/11/...era_19001.htmlAccording to the recent public opinion poll conducted by the Levada Centre, 45 percent of young people in the age brackets between 16-18 years stayed undecided about their evaluation of Brezhnev’s era. 44 percent of school students are unaware about the manhunt of dissidents in Brezhnev’s era, 54 percent of respondents do not have the slightest idea about the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Last edited by kaur; 05-21-2014 at 02:59 PM.
Exactly, not to mention that almost all they produce is BS, because almost no one follow technical requirements and standards. That is why customers usually prefer Belorussian dairy, meat and other staple, which is usually way better then Russian stuff. So when Belorussians lament about tirannical Lukashenko most Russians answer like: "You don't want him - excellent, we take him, we need such kind of a guy" So, if mass and public executions make business to follow the standarts, bureaucracy to obey the law and both to work for common good - we'd support it, because it's a part of a dream, along with free health care, free edication and ridiculously cheap housing we had in the days of yore. Class society is acceptable - unjust class society is unacceptable.
Last edited by mirhond; 05-21-2014 at 03:46 PM.
Haeresis est maxima opera maleficarum non credere.
Why Russians need this Lukashenko guy? If I remember correctly Russian state pays every year 20 billion to support this system. 10x more than to Crimea in the future.
My bad with numbers. Bad memory
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...9BO06S20131225Deputy Finance Minister Sergei Shatalov told Reuters in March that Belarus and Kazakhstan received about $6 billion annually from Russia in direct and indirect support and said that could increase by $30 billion if all trade restrictions were lifted in 2015 after the union is created.
In 2012 support was 6 billion. Belarus budget was 16 billion. First chapter here
http://www.osw.waw.pl/sites/default/...us_ang_net.pdf
Here are some numbers about Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Transnistria for comparsion.
http://www.theatlantic.com/internati...kraine/284197/
Armenia.
Russian cumulative investment in Armenia currently exceeding $3 billion, or approximately one half of total foreign investment in this country whose total annual total GDP was reported at $9.8 billion in 2012 (Interfax, Armenpress, September 3, 4).
http://www.jamestown.org/regions/rus...8#.U3zb7doaySM
Answer is obvious - quality of Belorussian goods, fair pentions and working factories are strongly assosiated with his ironfist rule.
Haeresis est maxima opera maleficarum non credere.
I suspect it has a lot to do with fear that any move to replace him could get out of control and put a pro-western government in... the old "he's a bastard, but he's our bastard" attitude.
Of course if Putin comes out of the Ukraine mess feeling very confident, he might try destabilizing Lukashenko to create a pretext for outright annexation, but that is of course very speculative.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary”
H.L. Mencken
I am not a Russian but I come from a country that has seen and lived socialism in its worst form.
Do I like Carlsberg or western goods?
Sure. There is quality control.
Do I like my country over Carlsberg.
You bet I do.
Can I still be what I am with this dichotomy?
Yes I can.
Do i reject my country for the Western way?
Never.
Therefore, your argument is false.
Further, may I ask why do you forsake your country's products for Chinese products?
What about the crave for Russian vodkas and Beluga and Iranian caviar and Cuban cigars?
In short, what is good and if one can pay, then one enjoys it beyond petty nationalist considerations.
Any answer?
Jingoism has limits.
This is what Patrick O'Brian said:
“But you know as well as I, patriotism is a word; and one that generally comes to mean either my country, right or wrong, which is infamous, or my country is always right, which is imbecile.”
Last edited by Ray; 06-17-2014 at 08:03 PM.
Kaur and others,
This maybe of interest about revolutions and movements
Time to smell the coffee and not get dreamy eyed and hallucinate on a dose of poppy induced govt and jingoistic public delusions .ISIS has not emerged from nowhere. They were not ‘fading away’ before the onset of the Syrian civil war; rather, they were regrouping, cleaning up their house (imagine the rooftop discussion between Ali La Pointe and Ben M’Hidi in The Battle of Algiers when he declares that before they take the fight to the French they’re first going to sweep up the pipes and dope dealers in the Casbah). Up to July 2013, at least in Salaheddin province, ISIS’s attacks were paid for by the Turkish government, not private donors from the Gulf as is commonly mistaken. ISIS’s presence in Syria did not ‘just happen’; rather, it was orchestrated by Turkey, which then decided to back up the wrong horse–Nusra, in the Spring of 2013. This last aspect of Victoria’s strategic diagnosis is, in my view, the most worrisome.
What we are seeing is not ‘just’ a civil war but an incipient schismatic war with thick tentacles linking it abroad in a patently ominous manner...... While speaking with Victoria the first thought of the near future of the Middle East which sprang to mind was one akin to the Balkan tragedy of the 1990s–only on a larger scale, with more money for weapons and willing suppliers, and with even less scope for external mitigation.
http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...556#post157556
Last edited by Ray; 06-17-2014 at 08:52 PM.
Ray, why you dragged my point from context? Mirhond was talking about Soviet golden age. What was golden there, when Eastern Europe was under Soviet military occupation? During that age was started also Afganistan war, that should be closer example about golden age for you. During that age Indian politics was manipulated by KGB as they liked, if I belive what Mitrokin wrote. Do you want this age back?
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