Russia (2 Viewers)

I meant that the alt-right scene in general draws in part from the wider neo-folk scene and its offshoots. I vaguely recall some online outrage among Eurasianists when Death in June performed in Kiev a while back and expressed support for the regime there. A rather baffling myopia given DIJs solidarity with Israel as well.
DIJ have made a career out of ambiguous right wing flirtations, part of me thinks it's one big joke (Douglas Pierce being an openly gay man who performs crappy music around occult and esoteric themes would probably be first against the wall if a far right regime like the Nazis came to power) but most of me thinks it's a cynical ploy to cash in on the right wing industrial music/folk fan who seem to drop money on all sorts of shite once there's a rune on the cover and a vague whiff of totalitarianism in the air. There seems to be a much bigger movement of anti-fascist types who follow the likes of DIJ around to try and cancel shows. I was reading about some metal band who were dropped from the festival for once having covered DIJ, the whole thing seems mental to me.

I find it hard to believe that the neofolk scene is big enough to significantly feed into the mainstream right wing political movement in any meaningful way. They're a highly visible niche (once you start looking for them) but do you really think all the Golden Dawn or English Defense League lads are sitting down in the evening and putting on a Sol Invictus or Burzum LP? I think the general far right hysteria sweeping Europe owes a lot more to people just being racist pricks.
 
I said it has *partly* contributed to the 'alt-right' scene, not wholly responsible for it, and didn't really intend or imply any connection with the 'mainstream right wing' at all. I'm there are plenty of Duginists/Eurasianist who have no interest in this music. DIJ are coming from a more Strasserite position - they are SA more than SS for what it's worth, a significant part of whose leadership was also gay, by the way. But i think you are also right whn you say that they cynically play with ambiguities to create some interest for their otherwise pretty dreary music.
 
I love to go on about Russia, keep asking questions as long as you see fit.
Stalin built the Soviet Union (well, not quite, but he was instrumental in its growth and consolidation), Gorbachev rocked up and within six years it had all fallen apart.
I guess for Stalin there wasn't time to slowly industrialise, the Soviet Union was a unique experiment and was under threat from without almost immediately. To steer it through its birth pangs would take huge sacrifice and as ever it fell upon the ordinary people to make that sacrifice. Stalin comes out of it well because the Russians like a strong leader, and because Russia needs a strong leader, keeping together a state of that size is no easy task.
This also pre-supposes that communism was a good thing Stalin did. It was a failed experiment. Gorbachev didn't destroy anything, it was doomed to fail. It was a house of cards, a Potemkin village, the world's longest game of Jenga.
Russians wishing it could still be great again, is like Mrs. Madoff longing for that time she was rich.

Wishing they were China rings false to me. China has things people want. Russia has nothing anyone wants except what's in the ground.

And saying Russia needs a strong leader sounds to me like its people are too stupid or too dangerous to lead themselves, so that's why we have to shoot politicians and journalists in the head and poison defectors and beat broadcasters to death.
The things that it takes to make Russia run seem like an awful sacrifice for what is a shitshow of a country.

It sounds like I'm having a go, and I probably am. But I don't get this allegiance to Russia beyond it being a reaction to hating corporatism and the West.
 
I might buy this

Putin Country | IndieBound


9780374247720.jpg

Putin Country
A Journey Into the Real Russia

By Anne Garrels

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Hardcover, 9780374247720, 240pp.

Publication Date: March 15, 2016

Description
More than twenty years ago, the NPR correspondent Anne Garrels first visited Chelyabinsk, a gritty military-industrial center a thousand miles east of Moscow. The longtime home of the Soviet nuclear program, the Chelyabinsk region contained beautiful lakes, shuttered factories, mysterious closed cities, and some of the most polluted places on earth. Garrels's goal was to chart the aftershocks of the U.S.S.R.'s collapse by traveling to Russia's heartland.
Returning again and again, Garrels found that the area's new freedoms and opportunities were exciting but also traumatic. As the economic collapse of the early 1990s abated, the city of Chelyabinsk became richer and more cosmopolitan, even as official corruption and intolerance for minorities grew more entrenched. Sushi restaurants proliferated; so did shakedowns. In the neighboring countryside, villages crumbled into the ground. Far from the glitz of Moscow, the people of Chelyabinsk were working out their country's destiny, person by person.
In "Putin Country," Garrels crafts an intimate portrait of Middle Russia. We meet upwardly mobile professionals, impassioned activists who champion the rights of orphans and disabled children, and ostentatious mafiosi. We discover surprising subcultures, such as a vibrant underground gay community and a circle of determined Protestant evangelicals. And we watch doctors and teachers trying to cope with inescapable payoffs and institutionalized negligence. As Vladimir Putin tightens his grip on power and war in Ukraine leads to Western sanctions and a lower standard of living, the local population mingles belligerent nationalism with a deep ambivalence about their country's direction. Through it all, Garrels sympathetically charts an ongoing identity crisis. In the aftermath of the Soviet Union, what is Russia? What kind of pride and cohesion can it offer? Drawing on close friendships sustained over many years, Garrels explains why Putin commands the loyalty of so many Russians, even those who decry the abuses of power they regularly encounter.
Correcting the misconceptions of Putin's supporters and critics alike, Garrels's portrait of Russia's silent majority is both essential and engaging reading at a time when cold war tensions are resurgent.
 
This also pre-supposes that communism was a good thing Stalin did. It was a failed experiment. Gorbachev didn't destroy anything, it was doomed to fail. It was a house of cards, a Potemkin village, the world's longest game of Jenga.
Russians wishing it could still be great again, is like Mrs. Madoff longing for that time she was rich.

Wishing they were China rings false to me. China has things people want. Russia has nothing anyone wants except what's in the ground.

And saying Russia needs a strong leader sounds to me like its people are too stupid or too dangerous to lead themselves, so that's why we have to shoot politicians and journalists in the head and poison defectors and beat broadcasters to death.
The things that it takes to make Russia run seem like an awful sacrifice for what is a shitshow of a country.

It sounds like I'm having a go, and I probably am. But I don't get this allegiance to Russia beyond it being a reaction to hating corporatism and the West.

A lot of people miss Communism though, sure it wasn't perfect but if offered a security that capitalism doesn't. I'll always ask people from the former Warsaw pact states that are over a certain age how they felt about communism and, without exception they have had fond memories of it. These are people from say Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and so forth so that if these states, that had communism imposed on them, can harbour some residual fondness for it it's not at all surprising that Russians would look back with fondness at this era.
In the long run it probably was doomed to failure but it was the speed with which it ended and what came after that upset people.
I don't think they wish they were China so much as they wish that they had done what China did - slowly transitioned from one system to another rather than leaping wholesale into a brave new world that was (initially anyway) even more brutal than what went before.
I meant that Russia as a state, not the people themselves, needs a strong leader but I guess its equally true that Russians are fond of a strong leader for historical reasons.
There's a lot of sacrifice for sure but I would return to my earlier point about the individual being subordinate to the collective, people come and go but Russia remains, that's the most important thing.
I can't speak for others but for myself it's not so much an allegiance to as a fondness for Russia, what its borne from I have no idea but its certainly not a hatred of the West, it's done a lot of good for humanity, as has Russia.

Of course all that is just the opinion of an Irish guy who has visited Russia once (briefly) and read some books, I may well be incorrect in some of what I say.
 
I said it has *partly* contributed to the 'alt-right' scene, not wholly responsible for it, and didn't really intend or imply any connection with the 'mainstream right wing' at all. I'm there are plenty of Duginists/Eurasianist who have no interest in this music. DIJ are coming from a more Strasserite position - they are SA more than SS for what it's worth, a significant part of whose leadership was also gay, by the way. But i think you are also right whn you say that they cynically play with ambiguities to create some interest for their otherwise pretty dreary music.
I have no idea what a Duginist, Eurasianist, Strasserite or SA is so I'm going to back out of this thread due to ignorance.
 
The SA (Sturmabteilung, the original brownshirts) were the so-called Strasserite 'left-wing' of the Nazi party, led by Ernst Röhm (who was homosexual). Its leadership was wiped out in the famous 'Night of the Long Knives'. You probably knew that. The rest is admittedly obscure.
 
The SA (Sturmabteilung, the original brownshirts) were the so-called Strasserite 'left-wing' of the Nazi party, led by Ernst Röhm (who was homosexual). Its leadership was wiped out in the famous 'Night of the Long Knives'. You probably knew that. The rest is admittedly obscure.
Nope, only did history as far as the junior cert and as far as recreational readings go, a history of nazism has not been on my radar*. I know the term night of the long knives but not what it referred to. Thanks for the explanation.

*I've been reading Norman Davies history of Europe for the past three years and it's a struggle. I'm currently at Napoleon but still feel as ignorant as when I started. Maybe the more modern parts will stick as I've more of a context for them.
 
Just to reiterate for 7 - no tomorrow as i do see now that my response was perhaps vaguer than intended. The rapid industrialisation of the USSR was not a matter of mere living standards or economical development, but one of existential threat. There was a plan to wipe the Russians out as a people to the west of the Urals and replace them with Germans. An unindustrialised state was guaranteed to succumb to this plan and its genocidal consequences. Talk of a Stalinist 'self-genocide', real or imagined, is something i've only ever heard of coming from the shriller end of Ukrainian nationalism and some of its western exponents. Let the Russians deal with their own ghosts how they see fit, and weigh the tragedies and their consequences according to their own experience. We've enough undealt with issues in our own backyards than to lecture them on historical probity.
 
Just to reiterate for 7 - no tomorrow as i do see now that my response was perhaps vaguer than intended. The rapid industrialisation of the USSR was not a matter of mere living standards or economical development, but one of existential threat. There was a plan to wipe the Russians out as a people to the west of the Urals and replace them with Germans. An unindustrialised state was guaranteed to succumb to this plan and its genocidal consequences. Talk of a Stalinist 'self-genocide', real or imagined, is something i've only ever heard of coming from the shriller end of Ukrainian nationalism and some of its western exponents. Let the Russians deal with their own ghosts how they see fit, and weigh the tragedies and their consequences according to their own experience. We've enough undealt with issues in our own backyards than to lecture them on historical probity.
Real or imagined?
He's directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of tens of millions. That is real.
I'm trying to understand the Russians and I find their way of dealing with genocide bizarre to say the least.
Like a victim defending their abuser. It's at least worthy of comment.
 
'Real or imagined' - I have denied that millions died, i've questioned the label 'genocide'. You won't find any disagreement with me when it comes to acknowledging Stalin's ruthlessness. Genocide is something else entirely. The last genocide attempted in Russia was against the Circassians in Tsarist times.
 
I meant that the alt-right scene in general draws in part from the wider neo-folk scene and its offshoots. I vaguely recall some online outrage among Eūurasianists when Death in June performed in Kiev a while back and expressed support for the regime there. A rather baffling myopia given DIJs solidarity with Israel as well.

I see depends on the group or project I suppose allot of differnt things could be put under the same label. I think such stuff would be extremly controversial in Russia and maybe also they just dont have the history for it unlike various european countries. I am not sure what is behind the right in the Ukraine politics there is maybe Beghazi type situation ?
 
I see depends on the group or project I suppose allot of differnt things could be put under the same label. I think such stuff would be extremly controversial in Russia and maybe also they just dont have the history for it unlike various european countries. I am not sure what is behind the right in the Ukraine politics there is maybe Beghazi type situation ?
I'm not sure i've understood the Benghazi reference. My understanding of Ukrainian far-right politics is that it is a largely West-Ukrainian phenomenon, or at least the bulk of it originates there. The reason for this is that much of the areas in question, Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, Chernivytsi etc, were historically a part of Halych or Galicia, which was a province of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and never a part of the Russian one. During WW2 the USSR annexed these areas from what was then Poland. Prior to this there was a particularly virulent strain of nationalism and fascism amongst groups such as OUN and UNA which thrived in Galicia and expressed itself in both anti.Polish and anti-Russian sentiment - the 'Banderovtsi'. Their brutality was such that it even made the SS wince. The present Ukrainian right are descendents of the OUN. Sorry, i've not got much time to flesh this out at the moment. Just a quick overview.
 

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