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manhefnawi

Votes for All! | History Today - 0 views

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Suffrage Voting Workers

shared by manhefnawi on 31 May 18 - No Cached
  • But by 1916 the Liberal-Conservative coalition government felt it must reward the men fighting for Britain. Even Germany had enfranchised all adult males in 1871.
  • Enfranchising millions of working-class men was daunting for the politicians, especially as Labour grew in strength during the war; even more so in 1917 when the Russian Revolution brought the spectre of socialism still closer.
  • Britain was unusual in restricting female franchise. In the many other countries where women won the vote around this time – including Germany in 1918 – they gained it on equal terms with men.
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  • Suffrage campaigners objected to the inequalities, but accepted them as a first step and vowed to fight on.
  • Women then campaigned successfully for legal changes, including gender equality in divorce, property rights and child custody, and access to professions including the law.
  • women wanted equal voting rights. When the Conservatives won the 1924 election, the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, promised women the vote. He then did nothing until, by 1928, tired of his evasions, they threatened a return to militancy.
Javier E

The Order of Lenin: 'Find Some Truly Hard People' - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-bolshevism-soviet-russia.html

lenin history russia revolution stalin politics

shared by Javier E on 22 May 17 - No Cached
  • One of the murkiest issues has to do with the nature and causes of Stalin’s terror and the question of whether Stalin had broken with Lenin’s policies or continued them. Behind this lay the question of the institutionalization of violence in Bolshevik culture and the Soviet state.
  • the policies of Lenin and the Bolshevik Party did not at first rely on terror. However, the extreme conditions of the civil war from 1917 to 1922, in which some seven million people were killed, together with Lenin’s ruthless economic policies, led to the destitution and desperation of millions of people who found themselves without food, livelihood, shelter or security.
  • whoever attempts to destroy that unity of the socialist state, whoever seeks the separation of any of its parts or nationalities — that man is an enemy, a sworn enemy of the state and of the peoples of the U.S.S.R. And we will destroy each and every such enemy, even if he was an old Bolshevik; we will destroy all his kin, his family. We will mercilessly destroy anyone who, by his deeds or his thoughts — yes, his thoughts — threatens the unity of the socialist state. To the complete destruction of all enemies, themselves and their kin!”ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story
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  • “I would like to say some words, perhaps not festive ones,” he said. “The Russian czars did a great deal that was bad. They robbed and enslaved the people. But they did one thing that was good. They amassed an enormous state, all the way to Kamchatka. We have inherited that state.”
  • He concluded this grisly note with the directive: “Find some truly hard people.”The following month, he ordered: “It is necessary secretly — and urgently — to prepare the terror.”
  • The paradox, then, is that Stalin unleashed the Great Terror in 1936 at a time of relative peace and stability. The masses of enemies who suddenly appeared within Soviet society were largely invented. Millions of innocent people were arrested, tortured and shot, without evidence and according to quotas established in the Kremlin. Stalin did not bluff: Literally “anyone” could be guilty.
  • Nikolai Bukharin, the veteran Bolshevik and editor of Pravda, became one of those enemies: arrested in February 1937 and executed in March 1938. A letter he wrote to Stalin from his prison cell, on Dec. 10, 1937, is a rambling, pitiful epistle from a man who knows he is to die. Yet, astonishingly, he not only affirmed what Stalin had said to the Politburo the month before, but acknowledged his own role in creating the machine that now had him caught in its turbines.
  • “There is something great and bold about the political idea of a general purge,” he wrote. “This purge encompasses 1) the guilty; 2) persons under suspicion; and 3) persons potentially under suspicion. This business could not have been managed without me.”
  • Undermining the social order, abrogating the rule of law, putting fear at the core of individual consciousness and sowing distrust were essential to Stalin’s goal of eliminating any threat to his absolute power. Stalin not only eliminated possible party rivals in the Great Terror, but he also sent an unmistakable signal to the entire nation: If Bukharin, Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev could be guilty, everyone was under suspicion.
Javier E

How colonial violence came home: the ugly truth of the first world war | News | The Gua... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...y-truth-of-the-first-world-war

imperialism racism wwi white supremacy history Crisis

shared by Javier E on 17 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • In many books and films, the prewar years appear as an age of prosperity and contentment in Europe, with the summer of 1913 featuring as the last golden summer.
  • But today, as racism and xenophobia return to the centre of western politics, it is time to remember that the background to the first world war was decades of racist imperialism whose consequences still endure. It is something that is not remembered much, if at all, on Remembrance Day.
  • debasing hierarchy of races was established because the promise of equality and liberty at home required imperial expansion abroad in order to be even partially fulfilled. We tend to forget that imperialism, with its promise of land, food and raw materials, was widely seen in the late 19th century as crucial to national progress and prosperity. Racism was – and is – more than an ugly prejudice, something to be eradicated through legal and social proscription. It involved real attempts to solve, through exclusion and degradation, the problems of establishing political order, and pacifying the disaffected, in societies roiled by rapid social and economic change.
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  • In the years leading up to 1914, prohibitions on sexual relations between European women and black men (though not between European men and African women) were enforced across European colonies in Africa. The presence of the “dirty Negroes” in Europe after 1914 seemed to be violating a firm taboo.
  • “These savages are a terrible danger,” a joint declaration of the German national assembly warned in 1920, to “German women”. Writing Mein Kampf in the 1920s, Adolf Hitler would describe African soldiers on German soil as a Jewish conspiracy aimed to topple white people “from their cultural and political heights”. The Nazis, who were inspired by American innovations in racial hygiene, would in 1937 forcibly sterilise hundreds of children fathered by African soldiers. Fear and hatred of armed “niggers” (as Weber called them) on German soil was not confined to Germany, or the political right. The pope protested against their presence, and an editorial in the Daily Herald, a British socialist newspaper, in 1920 was titled “Black Scourge in Europe”.
  • The first world war, in fact, marked the moment when the violent legacies of imperialism in Asia and Africa returned home, exploding into self-destructive carnage in Europe. And it seems ominously significant on this particular Remembrance Day: the potential for large-scale mayhem in the west today is greater than at any
  • In one predominant but highly ideological version of European history – popularised since the cold war – the world wars, together with fascism and communism, are simply monstrous aberrations in the universal advance of liberal democracy and freedom.
  • In many ways, however, it is the decades after 1945 – when Europe, deprived of its colonies, emerged from the ruins of two cataclysmic wars – that increasingly seem exceptional. Amid a general exhaustion with militant and collectivist ideologies in western Europe, the virtues of democracy – above all, the respect for individual liberties – seemed clear. The practical advantages of a reworked social contract, and a welfare state, were also obvious.
  • But neither these decades of relative stability, nor the collapse of communist regimes in 1989, were a reason to assume that human rights and democracy were rooted in European soil.
  • In the early 20th century, the popularity of social Darwinism had created a consensus that nations should be seen similarly to biological organisms, which risked extinction or decay if they failed to expel alien bodies and achieve “living space” for their own citizens. Pseudo-scientific theories of biological difference between races posited a world in which all races were engaged in an international struggle for wealth and power
  • In this new history, Europe’s long peace is revealed as a time of unlimited wars in Asia, Africa and the Americas. These colonies emerge as the crucible where the sinister tactics of Europe’s brutal 20th-century wars – racial extermination, forced population transfers, contempt for civilian lives – were first forged
  • Whiteness became “the new religion”, as Du Bois witnessed, offering security amid disorienting economic and technological shifts, and a promise of power and authority over a majority of the human population.
  • The resurgence of these supremacist views today in the west – alongside the far more widespread stigmatisation of entire populations as culturally incompatible with white western peoples – should suggest that the first world war was not, in fact, a profound rupture with Europe’s own history.
  • Our complex task during the war’s centenary is to identify the ways in which that past has infiltrated our present, and how it threatens to shape the future: how the terminal weakening of white civilisation’s domination, and the assertiveness of previously sullen peoples, has released some very old tendencies and traits in the west.
  • Relatively little is known about how the war accelerated political struggles across Asia and Africa; how Arab and Turkish nationalists, Indian and Vietnamese anti-colonial activists found new opportunities in it; or how, while destroying old empires in Europe, the war turned Japan into a menacing imperialist power in Asia
  • A broad account of the war that is attentive to political conflicts outside Europe can clarify the hyper-nationalism today of many Asian and African ruling elites, most conspicuously the Chinese regime, which presents itself as avengers of China’s century-long humiliation by the west.
  • in order to grasp the current homecoming of white supremacism in the west, we need an even deeper history – one that shows how whiteness became in the late 19th century the assurance of individual identity and dignity, as well as the basis of military and diplomatic alliances.
  • Such a history would show that the global racial order in the century preceding 1914 was one in which it was entirely natural for “uncivilised” peoples to be exterminated, terrorised, imprisoned, ostracised or radically re-engineered.
  • this entrenched system was not something incidental to the first world war, with no connections to the vicious way it was fought or to the brutalisation that made possible the horrors of the Holocaust. Rather, the extreme, lawless and often gratuitous violence of modern imperialism eventually boomeranged on its originators.
  • At the time of the first world war, all western powers upheld a racial hierarchy built around a shared project of territorial expansion. In 1917, the US president, Woodrow Wilson, baldly stated his intention, “to keep the white race strong against the yellow” and to preserve “white civilisation and its domination of the planet”
  • it is too easy to conclude, especially from an Anglo-American perspective, that Germany broke from the norms of civilisation to set a new standard of barbarity, strong-arming the rest of the world into an age of extremes. For there were deep continuities in the imperialist practices and racial assumptions of European and American powers.
  • Rhodes’ scramble for Africa’s gold fields helped trigger the second Boer war, during which the British, interning Afrikaner women and children, brought the term “concentration camp” into ordinary parlance. By the end of the war in 1902, it had become a “commonplace of history”, JA Hobson wrote, that “governments use national animosities, foreign wars and the glamour of empire-making in order to bemuse the popular mind and divert rising resentment against domestic abuses”
  • With imperialism opening up a “panorama of vulgar pride and crude sensationalism”, ruling classes everywhere tried harder to “imperialise the nation”, as Arendt wrote. This project to “organise the nation for the looting of foreign territories and the permanent degradation of alien peoples” was quickly advanced through the newly established tabloid press.
  • In 1920, a year after condemning Germany for its crimes against Africans, the British devised aerial bombing as routine policy in their new Iraqi possession – the forerunner to today’s decade-long bombing and drone campaigns in west and south Asia. “The Arab and Kurd now know what real bombing means,” a 1924 report by a Royal Air Force officer put it. “They now know that within 45 minutes a full-sized village … can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured.” This officer was Arthur “Bomber” Harris, who in the second world war unleashed the firestorms of Hamburg and Dresden, and whose pioneering efforts in Iraq helped German theorising in the 1930s about der totale krieg (the total war).
  • the frenzy of jingoism with which Europe plunged into a bloodbath in 1914 speaks of a belligerent culture of imperial domination, a macho language of racial superiority, that had come to bolster national and individual self-esteem.
  • One of the volunteers for the disciplinary force was Lt Gen Lothar von Trotha, who had made his reputation in Africa by slaughtering natives and incinerating villages. He called his policy “terrorism”, adding that it “can only help” to subdue the natives.
  • his real work lay ahead, in German South-West Africa (contemporary Namibia) where an anti-colonial uprising broke out in January 1904. In October of that year, Von Trotha ordered that members of the Herero community, including women and children, who had already been defeated militarily, were to be shot on sight and those escaping death were to be driven into the Omaheke Desert, where they would be left to die from exposure. An estimated 60,000-70,000 Herero people, out of a total of approximately 80,000, were eventually killed, and many more died in the desert from starvation. A second revolt against German rule in south-west Africa by the Nama people led to the demise, by 1908, of roughly half of their population.
  • Such proto-genocides became routine during the last years of European peace. Running the Congo Free State as his personal fief from 1885 to 1908, King Leopold II of Belgium reduced the local population by half, sending as many as eight million Africans to an early death. The American conquest of the Philippines between 1898 and 1902, to which Kipling dedicated The White Man’s Burden, took the lives of more than 200,000 civilians.
  • In light of this shared history of racial violence, it seems odd that we continue to portray the first world war as a battle between democracy and authoritarianism, as a seminal and unexpected calamity. The Indian writer Aurobindo Ghose was one among many anticolonial thinkers who predicted, even before the outbreak of war, that “vaunting, aggressive, dominant Europe” was already under “a sentence of death”, awaiting “annihilation”
  • These shrewd assessments were not Oriental wisdom or African clairvoyance. Many subordinate peoples simply realised, well before Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, that peace in the metropolitan west depended too much on outsourcing war to the colonies.
  • The experience of mass death and destruction, suffered by most Europeans only after 1914, was first widely known in Asia and Africa, where land and resources were forcefully usurped, economic and cultural infrastructure systematically destroyed, and entire populations eliminated with the help of up-to-date bureaucracies and technologies. Europe’s equilibrium was parasitic for too long on disequilibrium elsewhere.
  • Populations in Europe eventually suffered the great violence that had long been inflicted on Asians and Africans. As Arendt warned, violence administered for the sake of power “turns into a destructive principle that will not stop until there is nothing left to violate”.
  • nothing better demonstrates this ruinous logic of lawless violence, which corrupts both public and private morality, than the heavily racialised war on terror. It presumes a sub-human enemy who must be “smoked out” at home and abroad – and it has licensed the use of torture and extrajudicial execution, even against western citizens.
  • It was always an illusion to suppose that “civilised” peoples could remain immune, at home, to the destruction of morality and law in their wars against barbarians abroad. But that illusion, long cherished by the self-styled defenders of western civilisation, has now been shattered, with racist movements ascendant in Europe and the US,
  • This is also why whiteness, first turned into a religion during the economic and social uncertainty that preceded the violence of 1914, is the world’s most dangerous cult today. Racial supremacy has been historically exercised through colonialism, slavery, segregation, ghettoisation, militarised border controls and mass incarceration. It has now entered its last and most desperate phase with Trump in power.
  • We can no longer discount the “terrible probability” James Baldwin once described: that the winners of history, “struggling to hold on to what they have stolen from their captives, and unable to look into their mirror, will precipitate a chaos throughout the world which, if it does not bring life on this planet to an end, will bring about a racial war such as the world has never seen”.
  • Certainly the risk of not confronting our true history has never been as clear as on this Remembrance Day. If we continue to evade it, historians a century from now may once again wonder why the west sleepwalked, after a long peace, into its biggest calamity yet.
knudsenlu

Reckoning With the Nuclear Reactor, 75 Years Later - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...547151

nuclear reactor legacy history war US

shared by knudsenlu on 04 Dec 17 - No Cached
  • At the time, news of the breakthrough on December 2, 1942, was conveyed  only in code: “The Italian navigator has landed in the New World.”Our “Italian navigator” was Enrico Fermi, the physicist who had escaped fascist Italy for America. The “New World” was not a place but a time: the atomic age. On that day 75 years ago, Fermi’s team set off the first controlled and sustained nuclear chain reaction.
  • The rest of the story is well-known: Bombs were made. Bombs were dropped. Hundreds of thousands of people died. A war was won.
  • “It’s always been a complicated story,” says Rachel Bronson, president of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the journal founded by former Manhattan Project scientists concerned about atomic weapons. Over the past 75 years, as the specter of nuclear annihilation has grown and waned and grown again, newspapers reporting on the anniversary have tried to grapple with that legacy.
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  • And details like the graphite dust that blanketed everyone. (Graphite was used as a “moderator,” to slow down neutrons so they could split uranium atoms.)
  • “We found out how coal miners feel. After eight hours of machining graphite, we looked as if we were made up for a minstrel. One shower would remove only the surface graphite dust. About a half-hour after the first shower the dust in the pores of your skin would start oozing. Walking around the room where we cut graphite was like walking on a dance floor. Graphite is a dry lubricant, you know, and the cement floor covered with graphite dust was slippery.”
  • The Chicago Pile was a genuine scientific breakthrough, but other, more famous milestones like the Trinity test and the Hiroshima bombing have also been pegged as the beginning of the atomic age.
  • When the 25th anniversary came around in 1967, World War II was receding from memory and the Cold War had come startlingly close to turning hot. It was atomic weapons that Americans were thinking about again. Volney Wilson, another physicist who worked on the Chicago Pile, speaking to the Schenectady Gazette, was far less optimistic: “It’s been a big disappointment to me ... I would have thought that the development of this horrible weapon would have been more of a force to bring the world together.”
  • The 50th anniversary came at a more optimistic time: 1992. The Soviet Union had dissolved. The United States was the world’s only superpower. The Soviet Union was not only dismantling its warheads, it was selling them to the United States for electricity.
  • Which brings us to the75th anniversary of the Chicago Pile. Nuclear power is on the decline in the United States today. Nuclear weapons are ever present in the news again. Yet nuclear science has also produced real breakthroughs in science and medicine. The legacy of the Chicago Pile is mixed, and it probably always will be—until, and such is the nature of nuclear weapons, the day it is clearly not.
cartergramiak

Opinion | If You Care About Social Justice, You Have to Care About Zoning - The New Yor... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...have-to-care-about-zoning.html

politics GOP trump Culture US

shared by cartergramiak on 19 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • Although zoning may seem like a technical, bureaucratic and decidedly local question, in reality the issue relates directly to three grand themes that Joe Biden ran on in the 2020 campaign: racial justice, respect for working-class people and national unity. Perhaps no single step would do more to advance those goals than tearing down the government-sponsored walls that keep Americans of different races and classes from living in the same communities, sharing the same public schools and getting a chance to know one another across racial, economic and political lines.
  • Single-family exclusive zoning, which was adopted by communities shortly after the Supreme Court struck down explicit racial zoning in 1917, is what activists call the “new redlining.” Racial discrimination has created an enormous wealth gap between white and Black people, and single-family-only zoning perpetuates that inequality.
  • By addressing a problem common to America’s multiracial working class, reducing exclusionary barriers could also help promote Mr. Biden’s third big goal: national unity. Today, no two groups are more politically divided from one another than working-class whites and working-class people of color. For centuries, going back to Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, right-wing politicians have successfully pitted these two groups against each other, but every once in a while, America breaks free of this grip, and lower-income and working-class people of all races come together and engage in what the Rev. William Barber II calls “fusion politics.”
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  • Blue cities and states — most notably Minneapolis and Oregon — have recently led the way on eliminating single-family exclusive zoning, as a matter of racial justice, housing affordability and environmental protection. But conservatives often support this type of reform as well, because they don’t want government micromanaging what people can do on their own land. At the national level, some conservatives have joined liberals in championing reforms like the Yes In My Backyard Act, which seeks to discourage exclusionary zoning.
Javier E

Madison's nightmare - Political theorists have been worrying about mob rule for 2,000 y... - 0 views

www.economist.com/...-about-mob-rule-for-2000-years

democracy mob Plato aristotle political theory history revolution

shared by Javier E on 02 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • It is naive to assume that mobs will be confined to the “nice” side of the political spectrum; the left-wing kind by their nature generate the right-wing sort. It is doubly naive to expect that mobs will set limits; it is in their nature to run out of control
  • Political philosophers have been making these points for more than 2,000 years.
  • Even liberal thinkers worried that democracy might give rise to “mobocracy”. They argued that the will of the people needed to be restrained by a combination of constitutional intricacy (individual rights, and checks and balances) and civic culture. The wiser among them added that the decay of such restraints could transform democracy into mob rule.
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  • The first great work of political philosophy, Plato’s “Republic”, was, in part, a meditation on the evils of mob rule. Plato regarded democracy as little more than mob rule by another name—perhaps without the violence, at least at first, but with the same lack of impulse control.
  • He noted that democracies are hard-wired to test boundaries.
  • Plato also argued that democracies inevitably degenerate into anarchy, as the poor plunder the rich and profligacy produces bankruptcy.
  • Anarchy leads to the rule of tyrants: a bully can appeal to the mob’s worst instincts precisely because he is ruled by his own worst instincts
  • this changed with the French and American revolutions, which were based on contrasting approaches to mob rule.
  • Aristotle, Plato’s great pupil, distinguished between three legitimate forms of government: kingship, aristocracy and democracy. He argued that they each have their dark shadows: tyranny, oligarchy and mob rule
  • He then outlined the ways in which these virtuous forms of government evolve into their opposites: democracy becomes mob rule when the rich hog the society’s wealth
  • A more practical thinker than Plato, Aristotle argued that there were two ways of preventing democracy from degenerating into mobocracy: mix in elements of kingship and aristocracy to restrain the will of the people; and create a large middle class with a stake in stability.
  • Machiavelli speculated that clever princes might be able to profit from chaos if they could forge the mob into a battering-ram against a decaying regime
  • Mostly elites were content with demonisation
  • He is, as it were, the mob in the form of a single person
  • The French Revolution also produced a robust conservative critique of mob rule—first in Edmund Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France
  • Samuel Huntington warned that “democratic overload”, with too many interest groups demanding too much from the state, would lead to democratic disillusionment as the state failed to live up to its ever-escalating promises.
  • Burke recognised that the mob has a collective psychology that makes it uniquely dangerous. It is a “monstrous medley of all conditions, tongues, and nations”. It relishes wild abandon—“horrid yells”, “shrilling screams” and the “unutterable abominations of the furies of hell”. It gets so carried away with its own righteous bloodlust that even normally decent people can be transformed into monsters.
  • He predicted that the revolution would end in the massacre of thousands (including the king, queen and priests) and the rise of a dictator who could restore law and order.
  • The cycle of mass protest followed by violence followed by dictatorship set a pattern for subsequent revolutions in Russia (1917), Cuba (1958) and elsewhere.
  • The American revolution succeeded where the French revolution and its progeny failed because it was based on a considered fear of “the confusion and intemperance of a multitude”.
  • “Federalist No. 55”, written by either James Madison or Alexander Hamilton, is particularly sharp on the way that ill-designed institutions can turn even sensible citizens into a baying crowd: “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob”.
  • The Founding Fathers argued that democracy could avoid becoming mobocracy only if it was hedged with a series of restraints to control the power of the people.
  • Alexis de Tocqueville added his own worries about mob rule in “Democracy in America”. For him the constitution alone is not strong enough to save democracy from the mob. A vigorous civic culture rooted in self-governing communities (he was particularly keen on New England’s townships) and a self-reliant and educated population are also necessary
  • So too is a responsible elite that recognises that its first duty is to “educate democracy”
  • The 19th century saw the world’s ruling elites reconciling themselves to the fact that democracy was the wave of the future. How you dealt with this wave depended largely on your attitude to the mob.
  • Pessimists held that delay was the best way to avert the mob.
  • This sort of pessimism has been out of fashion for a long time. The second world war and the defeat of Nazism led to an era of democratic self-confidence, and the fall of the Berlin Wall to one of democratic euphoria.
  • But a few pessimists continued to warn that democracies might well degenerate into mob rule if they neglected the health of their political institutions and civic culture. Seymour Martin Lipset, an American sociologist, echoed Aristotle’s view that a healthy democracy requires broad-based prosperity.
  • Harvey Mansfield, a political philosopher, reiterated Tocqueville’s worry that civic decay might corrupt democracy
  • many changed their minds when they discovered that, far from unleashing man’s natural goodness, the revolution had set free his inner demons. Those who stuck with the revolution despite the guillotine and the Terror did so on two grounds: that the old regime was responsible for the violence because it created so much pent-up hatred; and that you cannot improve the world without bloodshed.
  • In recent years the pessimists have grown in number
  • The election of Mr Trump, a reality-TV star, raised profound questions about the health of America’s political regime. Can democracy survive if television channels make billions of dollars by peddling misinformation and partisanship?
  • Or if wealthy people can invest vast sums of money in the political process?
  • Or if society is polarised into a superclass and a demoralised proletariat? Recent events suggest that the answer is “no”.
  • The age of democratic naivety died on January 6th. It is time for an age of democratic sophistication
  • Democracies may well be the best safeguard against mob rule, as liberal democrats have been preaching for centuries. But they can be successful only if countries put the necessary effort into nurturing democratic institutions: guarding against too much inequality, ensuring that voters have access to objective information, taming money in politics and reinforcing checks and balances.
  • Otherwise the rule of the people will indeed become the rule of the mob, and the stable democratic order that flourished from the second world war onwards will look like a brief historical curiosity.
brookegoodman

How Are Socialism and Communism Different? - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...ocialism-communism-differences

history

shared by brookegoodman on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Both socialism and communism are essentially economic philosophies advocating public rather than private ownership, especially of the means of production, distribution and exchange of goods (i.e. making money) in a society. Both aim to fix the problems they see as created by a free-market capitalist system, including the exploitation of workers and a widening gulf between rich and poor.
  • Socialism emerged in response to the extreme economic and social changes caused by the Industrial Revolution, and particularly the struggles of workers. Many workers grew increasingly poor even as factory owners and other industrialists accrued massive wealth.
  • Marx argued that all history was a history of class struggles, and that the working class (or proletariat) would inevitably triumph over the capital class (bourgeoisie) and win control over the means of production, forever erasing all classes.
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  • Unlike in communism, a socialist economic system rewards individual effort and innovation. Social democracy, the most common form of modern socialism, focuses on achieving social reforms and redistribution of wealth through democratic processes, and can co-exist alongside a free-market capitalist economy.
  • Led by Vladimir Lenin, the Bolsheviks put Marxist theory into practice with the Russian Revolution of 1917, which led to the creation of the world’s first communist government. Communism existed in the Soviet Union until its fall in 1991. Today it exists in China, Cuba, North Korea, Laos and Vietnam—although in reality, a purely communist state has never existed. Such countries can be classified as communist because in all of them, the central government controls all aspects of the economic and political system. But none of them have achieved the elimination of personal property, money or class systems that the communist ideology requires.
  • In the United States, socialism has not historically enjoyed as much success as a political movement. Its peak came in 1912, when Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs won 6 percent of the vote. But at the same time, U.S. programs once considered socialist, such as Medicare and social security, have been integrated into American life.
brookegoodman

Russian Revolution - Causes, Timeline & Definition - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...russian-revolution

politics crisis

shared by brookegoodman on 31 May 20 - No Cached
  • The Russian Revolution of 1917 was one of the most explosive political events of the twentieth century. The violent revolution marked the end of the Romanov dynasty and centuries of Russian Imperial rule. During the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks, led by leftist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, seized power and destroyed the tradition of csarist rule. The Bolsheviks would later become the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
  • In the early 1900s, Russia was one of the most impoverished countries in Europe with an enormous peasantry and a growing minority of poor industrial workers.
  • In 1861, the Russian Empire finally abolished serfdom. The emancipation of serfs would influence the events leading up to the Russian Revolution by giving peasants more freedom to organize.
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  • Between 1890 and 1910, for example, the population of major Russian cities such as St. Petersburg and Moscow nearly doubled, resulting in overcrowding and destitute living conditions for a new class of Russian industrial workers.
  • The massacre sparked the Russian revolution of 1905, during which angry workers responded with a series of crippling strikes throughout the country.
  • Russia entered into World War I in August 1914 in support of the Serbs and their French and British allies. Their involvement in the war would soon prove disastrous for the Russian Empire.
  • Czar Nicholas left the Russian capital of Petrograd (St. Petersburg) in 1915 to take command of the Russian Army front. (The Russians had renamed the imperial city in 1914, because the name “St. Petersburg” had sounded too German.)
  • Russian nobles eager to end Rasputin’s influence murdered him on December 30, 1916. By then, most Russians had lost faith in the failed leadership of the czar. Government corruption was rampant, the Russian economy remained backward and Nicholas repeatedly dissolved the Duma, the toothless Russian parliament established after the 1905 revolution, when it opposed his will.
  • The leaders of the provisional government, including young Russian lawyer Alexander Kerensky, established a liberal program of rights such as freedom of speech, equality before the law, and the right of unions to organize and strike. They opposed violent social revolution.
  • The Russian Revolution paved the way for the rise of communism as an influential political belief system around the world. It set the stage for the rise of the Soviet Union as a world power that would go head-to-head with the United States during the Cold War.
brookegoodman

Czar Nicholas II abdicates Russian throne - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...czar-nicholas-ii-abdicates

politics culture history

shared by brookegoodman on 31 May 20 - No Cached
  • During the February Revolution, Czar Nicholas II, ruler of Russia since 1894, is forced to abdicate the throne by the Petrograd insurgents, and a provincial government is installed in his place.
  • Nicholas soon retracted most of these concessions, and the Bolsheviks and other revolutionary groups won wide support.
  • In March 1917, the army garrison at Petrograd joined striking workers in demanding socialist reforms, and Czar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate.
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  • After a secret meeting, a death sentence was passed on the imperial family, and Nicholas, his wife, his children, and several of their servants were gunned down on the night of July 16.
rerobinson03

Islam - Five Pillars, Nation of Islam & Definition - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...islam

shared by rerobinson03 on 31 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Islam is the second largest religion in the world after Christianity, with about 1.8 billion Muslims worldwide.
  • 7th century
  • Islam started in Mecca, in modern-day Saudi Arabia, during the time of the prophet Muhammad’s life.
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  • , making it the youngest of the major world religions.
  • He continued to preach until his death in 632.
  • Muslims are monotheistic and worship one, all-knowing God, who in Arabic is known as Allah.
  • Followers of Islam aim to live a life of complete submission to Allah
  • Mosques are places where Muslims worship.
  • The prophet Muhammad
  • was born in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, in 570 A.D
  • Muslims believe he was the final prophet sent by God to reveal their faith to mankind.
  • Starting in about 613, Muhammad began preaching throughout Mecca the messages he received. He taught that there was no other God but Allah and that Muslims should devote their lives to this God.
  • n 622, Muhammad traveled from Mecca to Medina with his supporters. This journey became known as the Hijra
  • marks the beginning of the Islamic calendar.
  • The word “Islam” means “submission to the will of God.”
  • After Muhammad’s passing, Islam began to spread rapidly.  A series of leaders, known as caliphs, became successors to Muhammad. This system of leadership, which was run by a Muslim ruler, became known as a caliphate.
  • During the reign of the first four caliphs, Arab Muslims conquered large regions in the Middle East, including Syria, Palestine, Iran and Iraq. Islam also spread throughout areas in Europe, Africa, and Asia.
  • he caliphate system lasted for centuries and eventually evolved into the Ottoman Empire, which controlled large regions in the Middle East from about 1517 until 1917, when World War I ended the Ottoman reign.
  • When Muhammad died, there was debate over who should replace him as leader. This led to a schism in Islam, and two major sects emerged: the Sunnis and the Shiites.
  • The Quran (sometimes spelled Qur’an or Koran) is considered the most important holy book among Muslims.
  • t contains some basic information that is found in the Hebrew Bible as well as revelations that were given to Muhammad.
  • The book is written with Allah as the first person, speaking through Gabriel to Muhammad. It contains 114 chapters, which are called surahs.
  • The Islamic calendar, also called the Hijra calendar, is a lunar calendar used in Islamic religious worship. The calendar began in the year 622 A.D., celebrating the journey of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina.
  • Muslims follow five basic pillars that are essential to their faith. These include:Shahada: to declare one’s faith in God and belief in MuhammadSalat: to pray five times a day (at dawn, noon, afternoon, sunset, and evening)Zakat: to give to those in needSawm: to fast during RamadanHajj: to make a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once during a person’s lifetime if the person is able
  • Islam’s legal system is known as Sharia Law. This faith-based code of conduct directs Muslims on how they should live in nearly every aspect of their lives.
  • The prophet Muhammad is credited with building the first mosque in the courtyard of his house in Medina.
  • Muslim prayer is often conducted in a mosque's large open space or outdoor courtyard. A mihrab is a decorative feature or niche in the mosque that indicates the direction to Mecca, and therefore the direction to face during prayer.
  • Men and women pray separately, and Muslims may visit a mosque five times a day for each of the prayer sessions.
Javier E

Opinion | This Is How Theocracy Shrivels - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...sm-afghanistan-Islamicism.html

theocracy turning point history Culture revolution islamism terrorism survey effects

shared by Javier E on 28 Aug 21 - No Cached
  • Certain years leap out as turning points in world history: 1517, 1776 and 1917. These are years when powerful ideas strode onto the world stage: the Reformation, democratic capitalism and revolutionary Communism.
  • The period around 1979 was another such dawn. Political Islam burst onto global consciousness with the Iranian revolution, the rise of the mujahedeen after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Islamization program in Pakistan and the popularity of the Muslim Brotherhood across the Arab world.
  • By 2006, in an essay called “The Master Plan,” Lawrence Wright could report in The New Yorker how Al Qaeda had operationalized these dreams into a set of sweeping, violent strategies. The plans were epic in scope: expel the U.S. from Iraq, establish a caliphate, overthrow Arab regimes, initiate a clash with Israel, undermine Western economies, create “total confrontation” between believers and nonbelievers, and achieve “definitive victory” by 2020, transforming world history.
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  • The ideas that seized the imagination of millions had deep and diverse intellectual roots. For example, the mid-20th century thinker Sayyid Qutb mounted a comprehensive critique of the soulless materialism of America, tracing it in part to the separation of church and state — the fatal error, he believed, that divided the spirit from the flesh. In the Muslim world, he argued, body and soul should not be split asunder, but should live united in a resurrected caliphate, governed by Shariah law.
  • If extremists thought they could mobilize Muslim opinion through acts of clarifying violence, they have failed. Across 11 lands in which Pew surveyed Muslims in 2013, a median of only 13 percent had a favorable opinion of Al Qaeda.
  • In his 2011 book, “The Missing Martyrs,” Charles Kurzman showed that fewer than one in every 100,000 Muslims had become an Islamist terrorist in the years since 9/11. The vast majority rejected the enterprise.
  • When political Islamists tried to establish theocratically influenced rule in actual nations, their movement’s reputation was badly hurt. In one of extremism’s most violent, radical manifestations, the Islamic State’s caliphate in Iraq and Syria became a blood-drenched nightmare.
  • even in more moderate places, political Islam is losing favor. In 2019, The Economist surveyed the data and concluded, “Across the Arab world people are turning against religious political parties and the clerics who helped bring them to power.
  • Many appear to be giving up on Islam, too.” Ayatollah Mohammad-Taqi Mesbah Yazdi of Iran noticed the trend in his own country: “Iranians are evading religious teachings and turning to secularism.”
  • Globally, terrorism is down. Deaths from attacks fell by 59 percent between 2014 and 2019. Al Qaeda’s core members haven’t successfully attacked the U.S. homeland since 9/11. In 2017, the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, began a process of marginalizing radical Wahhabism.
  • “most Islamist terrorism today tends to be local — the Taliban in Afghanistan, Boko Haram in Nigeria, al-Shabab in the Horn of Africa. That’s a major reversal from the glory days of Al Qaeda, when its leaders insisted that the focus must be not on the ‘near enemy’ (the local regimes) but rather the ‘far enemy’ (the United States and the West more broadly).”
  • it’s obvious that even local conflicts can create incredible danger. But the idea of global glory — a fundamental shaking of the world order — that burst on the world stage roughly 40 years ago has been brought low.
Javier E

The 5 Biggest Bombshells In The Woodward-Costa Book | Talking Points Memo - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...lls-in-the-woodward-costa-book

coup revolution right-wing 2021 trump crisis history politics

shared by Javier E on 20 Sep 21 - No Cached
  • In November 2020, CIA Director Gina Haspel warned Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley: “We are on the way to a right-wing coup.” Haspel’s comments came amid general worry during the transition period that Trump would start a war as a way to distract from his loss in the presidential election, or to foment a crisis big enough so that he would somehow stay in power.
  • On Jan. 8, acting out of what the book reportedly describes as shock and fear due to the
  • insurrection, Gen. Milley purportedly gathered a group of senior military officers to “review the procedures for launching nuclear weapons.” The President had the authority to order a launch, but Milley also had to be involved, the book reports the JCT chair as saying. Milley reportedly looked each officer gathered in the eye and asked them to confirm that they understood. By law, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff does not have command authority.
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  • In conversations with senior staff, Milley reportedly likened Jan. 6 to the 1905 Russian Revolution, which was put down by the Tsar but presaged the successful 1917 revolutions that overthrew the country’s government. “What you might have seen was a precursor to something far worse down the road,” the book quotes him as saying.
Javier E

How Russians justify their support for the war - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...en-russians-existential-choice

support war russia putin paranoid suicide trauma survival

shared by Javier E on 24 Apr 22 - No Cached
  • whether it is “Biden’s war” or Putin’s, Russians have rallied around the flag, and most likely that’s because the Kremlin has led them to see the war as an existential choice: Either you win it, or your life is going to be destroyed.
  • The available evidence shows significant support for the war, as well as a surge in patriotism.
  • According to the Levada Center, a respected independent pollster, the number of Russians who thought the country was going in the right direction rose from 52 percent before the invasion to 69 percent after, and Putin’s personal approval rating soared to a whopping 83 percent
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  • As an experiment staged by researchers at the London School of Economics showed, support for the war goes down by 15 percentage points when people are encouraged to speak their mind.
  • In a joint project with the Ukrainian pollster KIIS, the Levada Center for years has asked Russians what kind of relations they envisioned between their country and Ukraine. In a poll conducted in December, only 18 percent of Russians said they wanted the two countries to become one, while 51 percent said they wanted Russia and Ukraine to be independent countries with an open border, and 24 percent said they wanted independent countries with a hard border.
  • In a Levada Center poll published on the day Putin launched the invasion, only 25 percent of Russians supported Russia’s expanding its borders to include the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk republics — Donbas, where much of the heaviest fighting is concentrated now — while 33 percent wanted the region to become independent and 26 percent wanted it to remain part of Ukraine.
  • It’s hard to deny that the war is fratricidal, however, and that would seem to make selling it to the public more difficult. How can you flatten Ukrainian cities where millions of Russians have relatives and friends?
  • The pattern of deeply intertwined relationships extends into broader Russian society. Having some kind of connection across the border is the norm, not the exception.
  • So how do Russians justify support of what so far has been a series of crimes against humanity committed against a people who are the transnational-relationship equivalent of next of kin?
  • The Kremlin employs two related narratives here. The first paints the enemy as the West, not Ukraine. This framing turns Russia into the smaller, weaker side in the conflict — a victim, not a perpetrator.
  • Medinsky the negotiator, who is better known in Russia as an architect of the historical narratives promoted by Putin’s regime, expresses the second framing best: “Russia’s very existence is at stake now,” he said last month. Russia, in this telling, is going through a period like the one that led to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, or the one when the Soviet system was falling apart in the early 1990s.
  • Messages aimed at triggering the survival instinct are extremely powerful in Russia, where various invasions from the West, including Adolf Hitler’s attempt at exterminating eastern Slavs as a race, define the historical experience
  • There is a mode of Russian collective behavior in the face of mortal danger: People forget their old grievances and rally behind the leader, even one hated by many. This is what happened in 1941, when the victims and perpetrators of communist genocide united under Joseph Stalin to repel the existential threat posed by the Nazis.
  • Russians are not facing an existential threat now, of course. Rather, it is their own country that’s posing an existential threat to a neighbor. But the human tendency is to grasp for comforting, rather than truthful, narratives.
  • It takes something along the lines of Germany’s defeat in World War II to accept reality. It also takes decades, rather than years or months.
  • Freed from its totalitarian prison in 1991, Russian society emerged badly traumatized by a century of outright genocide and bleak Soviet existence. It was re-traumatized by the turmoil of the 1990s
  • They remain oblivious to the fact that the more they deny reality, the worse will be the future trauma.
  • Unlike Ukrainians, Russians don’t even have the illusion of the West embracing and integrating them after this conflict. Pro-Putin Russians assume that all the West wants is to punish them, so they’ll try their best to postpone this punishment or prevent it altogether.
  • When Putin says Russians and Ukrainians are one people and then — in the next breath — begins slaughtering these people en masse, he is unleashing civil war, by his own logic. For now, that is confined to a neighboring country.
  • some pro-Kremlin commentators, including the editor of a key history journal and a well-known writer, have recently taken to branding members of the Russian opposition “internal Ukrainians.” The implication is that anti-Putin Russians should be treated with the same cruelty as Ukrainians, because they want to destroy Russia
  • Russians face few choices that don’t lead to self-destruction. The West might be thinking that by increasing economic and military pressure, it will achieve a behavioral change, and perhaps even a collapse of Putin’s regime, but it may just as well cause the opposite, uniting people in what they see as an apocalyptic battle for survival.
  • This war bought him a few more years in power. He paralyzed the resistance to his regime by turning his supporters into accomplices in war crimes and those who oppose him into enemies of the state. He doesn’t really need to occupy Ukraine; he needs the war per se.
  • without a clearly spelled-out vision of a post-Putin Russia fully integrated into the West — the kind of vision that inspires Ukrainians to fight against Putin — the vector of Russian society will remain fratricidal and, increasingly, suicidal. This is bad news for everyone on the planet, given that Russia’s nuclear arsenal is capable of destroying humanity. As Putin once put it: “Why do we need the world if there is no Russia in it?”
lilyrashkind

This Day in History - What Happened Today - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/this-day-in-history

today history

shared by lilyrashkind on 22 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • The 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, prohibiting the “manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors for beverage purposes,” is ratified by the requisite number of states on January 16, 1919.
  • . In December 1917, the 18th Amendment, also known as the Prohibition Amendment, was passed by Congress and sent to the states for ratification.
  • Nine months after Prohibition's ratification, Congress passed the Volstead Act, or National Prohibition Act, over President Woodrow Wilson's veto. The Volstead Act provided for the enforcement of prohibition, including the creation of a special unit of the Treasury Department. One year and a day after its ratification, prohibition went into effect—on January 17, 1920—and the nation became officially dry.
  • bluekoenig on 22 Oct 19
     
    Today in History JFK addressed the nation about what would become the Cuban Missile Crisis when Soviet missiles were found stored in Cuba where they could easily attack the USA
Javier E

Facing Economic Calamity, Putin Talks of Nationalizing Western Businesses. - The New Yo... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...russia-economy-ukraine.html

calamity putin russia response crisis economic

shared by Javier E on 11 Mar 22 - No Cached
  • Putin on Thursday opened the door to nationalizing the assets of Western companies pulling out of Russia and exhorted senior officials to “act decisively” to preserve jobs.
  • “I have no doubt that these sanctions would have been implemented no matter what,” Mr. Putin said in televised remarks on Thursday, arguing that his intervention in Ukraine served merely as a pretext for the West to try to wreck Russia’s economy.
  • “This will be a gigantic, transformational downturn,”
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  • Russia would see a 15-percent decline in its gross domestic product this year, which would wipe out much of the economic growth that Mr. Putin has presided over since taking office in 1999.
  • Further escalation of the war could lead more countries to refuse to buy Russian energy, the institute’s economists said, “which would drastically impair Russia’s ability to import goods and services, deepening the recession.”
  • The prospect of the Kremlin seizing private assets rattled Russia’s business community. Vladimir Potanin, a metals magnate who is one of Russia’s richest men, released a statement warning that such nationalization would “bring us back 100 years, to 1917” — the year of the Russian Revolution, when the Bolsheviks forcibly took over private enterprises.
  • Those employed by the sprawling public sector and state-owned companies — who make up much of Mr. Putin’s political base — are relatively insulated, with their jobs likely to be secure. By contrast, middle-class Russians whose jobs and lives are tied closely to the world economy, and who are already more likely than the average Russian to oppose Mr. Putin, are under greater threat.
  • “The medicine could turn out to be worse than the illness, even from the point of view of declared goals,” Mr. Enikolopov said, arguing that the sanctions could end up entrenching anti-Western views. “No one is looking at the collateral damage at all.”
  • Timofey Bordachev, a prominent political analyst, wrote that the new “Iron Curtain now descending between the West and Russia” offered the country “an absolutely fantastic chance to start a more meaningful and independent life.”
  • But not all Russians shared that optimism. Interviews with private sector workers across the country on Thursday revealed deep unease and showed that the economic crisis was already taking its toll on jobs and livelihoods.
Javier E

(2) What Was the 'Soviet Century'? - by André Forget - Bulwark+ - 0 views

plus.thebulwark.com/...what-was-the-soviet-century

soviet russia culture policy crisis history politics

shared by Javier E on 20 May 23 - No Cached
  • Schlögel makes the argument that the Soviet Union is best understood not primarily as the manifestation of rigid Communist ideology, but as an attempt to transform an agrarian peasant society into a fully modern state
  • “A ‘Marxist theory,’” he writes, “yields very little for an understanding of the processes of change in postrevolutionary Russia. We get somewhat nearer the mark if we explore the scene of a modernization without modernity and of a grandiose civilizing process powered by forces that were anything but civil.” In other words, the interminable debates about whether Lenin was the St. Paul of communism or its Judas Iscariot are beside the point: As a Marxist might put it, the history of the Soviet Union is best explained by material conditions.
  • the story one pieces together from his chapters goes something like this. In the years between 1917 and 1945, the Russian Empire ceased to be a semi-feudal aristocracy governed by an absolutist monarch whose rule rested on divine right, and became an industrialized state. It dammed rivers, electrified the countryside, built massive factories and refineries, collectivized agriculture, raised literacy rates, set up palaces of culture, created a modern military, and made the Soviet Union one of the most powerful countries in the world. In the course of doing so, it sent some of its best minds into exile, crippled its system of food production, set up a massive network of prison camps, watched millions of its citizens die of hunger, killed hundreds of thousands more through slave labor and forced relocation, and executed a generation of revolutionary leaders. It did all this while surviving one of the most brutal civil wars of the twentieth century and the largest land invasion in history.
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  • Over the next forty-five years, it tried to establish a solid basis for growth and prosperity. It launched an ambitious housing program to create living spaces for its massive and rapidly urbanizing population, and to nurture the growth of a Soviet middle class that had access to amenities and luxury goods. At the same time, it systematically blocked this new middle class from exercising its creative faculties outside a narrow range of approved topics and ideological formulas, and it could not reliably ensure that if someone wanted to buy a winter coat in December, they could find it in the shop. It created a state with the resources and technology to provide for the needs of its citizens, but that was unable to actually deliver the goods.
  • The USSR moved forward under the weight of these contradictions, first sprinting, then staggering, until it was dismantled by another revolution, one that was orchestrated by the very class of party elites the first one had produced. But the states that emerged from the Soviet Union in 1991, and the people who lived in them, had undergone a profound change in the process.
  • Schlögel argues that over its sixty-eight years of existence, the Soviet Union did succeed in its goal of creating a “new Soviet person” (novy sovetsky chelovek). But, as he puts it,The new human being was the product not of any faith in a utopia, but of a tumult in which existing lifeworlds were destroyed and new ones born. The “Homo Sovieticus” was no fiction to be casually mocked but a reality with whom we usually only start to engage in earnest when we realize that analyzing the decisions of the Central Committee is less crucial than commonly assumed
  • Placing the emphasis on modernization rather than ideology allows Schlögel to delineate oft-ignored parallels and connections between the USSR and the United States. In the 1930s, especially, there was a great deal of cultural and technical collaboration between U.S. citizens and their Soviet counterparts, which led to what Hans Rogger called “Soviet Americanism” (sovetsky amerikanizm). “In many respects,” Schlögel writes, Soviet citizens “felt closer to America; America had left behind the class barriers and snobbery of Old Europe. America was less hierarchical; you could rise socially, something otherwise possible only in postrevolutionary Russia, where class barriers had broken down and equality had been universally imposed by brute force.”
  • As each rose to a position of global economic, political, and military predominance, the British Empire and the United States divided the world into “white” people, who had certain inalienable rights, and “colored” people who did not. The USSR, rising later and faster, made no such distinctions. An Old Bolshevik who had served the revolution for decades was just as likely to end their life freezing on the taiga as a Russian aristocrat or a Kazakh peasant.
  • Pragmatism and passion were certainly present in the development of the USSR, but they were not the only inputs. Perhaps the crucial factor was the almost limitless cheap labor supplied by impoverished peasants driven off their land, petty criminals, and political undesirables who could be press-ganged into service as part of their “reeducation.”
  • Between 1932 and 1937, the output of the Dalstroy mine went from 511 kilograms of gold to 51.5 tons. The price of this astonishing growth was paid by the bodies of the prisoners, of whom there were 163,000 by the end of the decade. The writer Varlam Shalamov, Schlögel’s guide through this frozen Malebolge, explains it this way:To turn a healthy young man, who had begun his career in the clean winter air of the gold mines, into a goner, all that was needed, at a conservative estimate, was a term of twenty to thirty days of sixteen hours of work per day, with no rest days, with systematic starvation, torn clothes, and nights spent in temperatures of minus sixty degrees in a canvas tent with holes in it, and being beaten by the foremen, the criminal gang masters, and the guards.
  • There is no moral calculus that can justify this suffering. And yet Schlögel lays out the brutal, unassimilable fact about the violence of Soviet modernization in the 1930s: “Without the gold of Kolyma . . . there would have been no build-up of the arms industries before and during the Soviet-German war.” The lives of the workers in Kolyma were the cost of winning the Second World War as surely as those of the soldiers at the front.
  • Of the 250,000 people, most of them prisoners,1 involved in building the 227-kilometer White Sea Canal, around 12,800 are confirmed to have died in the process. Even if the actual number is higher, as it probably is, it is hardly extraordinary when set against the 28,000 people who died in the construction of the 80-kilometer Panama Canal (or the 20,000 who had died in an earlier, failed French attempt to build it), or the tens of thousands killed digging the Suez Canal
  • it is worth noting that slave labor in mines and building projects, forced starvation of millions through food requisitions, and the destruction of traditional lifeworlds were all central features of the colonial projects that underwrote the building of modernity in the U.S. and Western Europe. To see the mass death caused by Soviet policies in the first decades of Communist rule in a global light—alongside the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the genocide of Indigenous peoples in Africa and the Americas, and the great famines in South Asia—is to see it not as the inevitable consequence of socialist utopianism, but of rapid modernization undertaken without concern for human life.
  • But Soviet Americanism was about more than cultural affinities. The transformation of the Soviet Union would have been impossible without American expertise.
  • Curiously enough, Schlögel seems to credit burnout from the era of hypermobilization for the fall of the USSR:Whole societies do not collapse because of differences of opinion or true or false guidelines or even the decisions of party bosses. They perish when they are utterly exhausted and human beings can go on living only if they cast off or destroy the conditions that are killing them
  • it seems far more accurate to say that the USSR collapsed the way it did because of a generational shift. By the 1980s, the heroic generation was passing away, and the new Soviet people born in the post-war era were comparing life in the USSR not to what it had been like in the bad old Tsarist days, but to what it could be like
  • Schlögel may be right that “Pittsburgh is not Magnitogorsk,” and that the U.S. was able to transition out of the heroic period of modernization far more effectively than the USSR. But the problems America is currently facing are eerily similar to those of the Soviet Union in its final years—a sclerotic political system dominated by an aging leadership class, environmental degradation, falling life expectancy, a failed war in Afghanistan, rising tensions between a traditionally dominant ethnic group and freedom-seeking minorities, a population that has been promised a higher standard of living than can be delivered by its economic system.
  • given where things stand in the post-Soviet world of 2023, the gaps tell an important story. The most significant one is around ethnic policy, or what the Soviet Union referred to as “nation-building” (natsional‘noe stroitel‘stvo).
  • In the more remote parts of the USSR, where national consciousness was still in the process of developing, it raised the more profound question of which groups counted as nations. When did a dialect become a language? If a nation was tied to a clearly demarcated national territory, how should the state deal with nomadic peoples?
  • The Bolsheviks dealt with this last problem by ignoring it. Lenin believed that “nationality” was basically a matter of language, and language was simply a medium for communication.
  • Things should be “national in form, socialist in content,” as Stalin famously put it. Tatar schools would teach Tatar children about Marx and Engels in Tatar, and a Kyrgyz novelist like Chinghiz Aitmatov could write socialist realist novels in Kyrgyz.
  • Unity would be preserved by having each nationality pursue a common goal in their own tongue. This was the reason Lenin did not believe that establishing ethno-territorial republics would lead to fragmentation of the Soviet state
  • Despite these high and earnest ideals, the USSR’s nationalities policy was as filled with tragedy as the rest of Soviet history. Large numbers of intellectuals from minority nations were executed during the Great Purge for “bourgeois nationalism,” and entire populations were subject to forced relocation on a massive scale.
  • In practice, Soviet treatment of national minorities was driven not by a commitment to self-determination, but by the interests (often cynical, sometimes paranoid) of whoever happened to be in the Kremlin.
  • The ethnic diversity of the USSR was a fundamental aspect of the lifeworlds of millions of Soviet citizens, and yet Schlögel barely mentions it.
  • As is often the case with books about the Soviet Union, it takes life in Moscow and Leningrad to be representative of the whole. But as my friends in Mari El used to say, “Moscow is another country.”
  • None of this would matter much if it weren’t for the fact that the thirty years since the dismantling of the USSR have been defined in large part by conflicts between and within the successor states over the very questions of nationality and territory raised during the founding of the Soviet Union.
  • in the former lands of the USSR, barely a year has gone since 1991 without a civil war, insurgency, or invasion fought over control of territory or control of the government of that territory in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Eastern Europe.
  • Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 euthanized any remaining hopes that globalization and integration of trade would establish a lasting peace in Eastern Europe. The sense of possibility that animates Schlögel’s meditations on post-Soviet life—the feeling that the lifeworld of kommunalkas and queues had given way to a more vivacious, more dynamic, more forward-looking society that was bound to sort itself out eventually—now belongs definitively to the past. Something has been broken that cannot be fixed.
  • It is worth noting (Schlögel does not) that of the institutions that survived the dismantling of the Soviet state, the military and intelligence services and the criminal syndicates were the most powerful, in large part because they were so interconnected. In a kind of Hegelian shit-synthesis, the man who established a brutal kind of order after the mayhem of the nineteen-nineties, Vladimir Putin, has deep ties to both. The parts of Soviet communism that ensured a basic standard of living were, for the most part, destroyed in the hideously bungled transition to a market economy. Militarism, chauvinism, and gangster capitalism thrived, as they still do today.
  • Perhaps it is now possible to see the Soviet century as an anomaly in world history, an interregnum during which two power blocks, each a distorted reflection of the other, marshaled the energies of a modernizing planet in a great conflict over the future. The United States and the USSR both preached a universal doctrine, both claimed they were marching toward the promised land.
  • The unipolar moment lasted barely a decade, and we have now fallen through the rotten floor of American hegemony to find ourselves once again in the fraught nineteenth century. The wars of today are not between “smelly little orthodoxies,” but between empires and nations, the powerful states that can create their own morality and the small countries that have to find powerful friends
  • the key difference between 2023 and 1900 is that the process of modernization is, in large parts of the world, complete. What this means for great-power politics in the twenty-first century, we are only beginning to understand.
Javier E

Russians abandon wartime Russia in historic exodus - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...russia-diaspora-war-ukraine

russia exodus emigrants history

shared by Javier E on 14 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • Initial data shows that at least 500,000, and perhaps nearly 1 million, have left in the year since the invasion began — a tidal wave on scale with emigration following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991.
  • The huge outflow has swelled existing Russian expatriate communities across the world, and created new ones.
  • Some fled nearby to countries like Armenia and Kazakhstan, across borders open to Russians. Some with visas escaped to Finland, the Baltic states or elsewhere in Europe. Others ventured farther, to the United Arab Emirates, Israel, Thailand, Argentina. Two men from Russia’s Far East even sailed a small boat to Alaska.
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  • The financial cost, while vast, is impossible to calculate. In late December, Russia’s Communications Ministry reported that 10 percent of the country’s IT workers had left in 2022 and not returned.
  • those remaining in the depleted political opposition also faced a choice this year: prison or exile. Most chose exile. Activists and journalists are now clustered in cities such as Berlin and the capitals of Lithuania, Latvia and Georgia.
  • “This exodus is a terrible blow for Russia,” said Tamara Eidelman, a Russian historian who moved to Portugal after the invasion. “The layer that could have changed something in the country has now been washed away.”
  • the influx of Russians into countries such as Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, which have long sent immigrants to Russia, set off political tremors, straining ties between Moscow and the other former Soviet states. Real estate prices in those countries have shot up, causing tensions with local populations.
  • For many Russians choosing to flee, Armenia was a rare easy option. It is one of five ex-Soviet countries that allow Russians to enter with just a national ID — making it a popular destination for former soldiers, political activists and others needing a quick escape.
  • Given the shared religion and use of language, Russians typically do not face animosity or social stigma in Armenia. Obtaining residency permits is also straightforward, and living costs are lower than in the European Union.
  • Yerevan has attracted thousands of IT workers, young creatives and working-class people, including families with children, from across Russia. They have established new schools, bars, cafes and robust support networks.
  • n the courtyard of the “Free School” for Russian children, established in April, Maxim, a construction company manager, was waiting for his 8-year-old son, Timofey. The school started with 40 students in an apartment. Now, there are nearly 200 in a multistory building in the city center.
  • “I did not want to be a murderer in this criminal war,” said Andrei, who is being identified by his first name for safety reasons
  • Like the White Russian emigres of the Bolshevik era and the post-Soviet immigrants of the 1990s, many of those leaving Russia because of the war in Ukraine are probably gone for good.
  • The family has adapted seamlessly to Yerevan. Everyone around them speaks Russian. Maxim works remotely on projects in Russia. Timofey likes his school and is learning Armenian. Maxim said he is sure the family will not return to Russia.
  • Tanya Raspopova, 26, arrived in Yerevan last March, with her husband but without a plan, overwhelmed and frightened.Then she heard that another emigre was seeking partners to set up a bar, a space where Russian expats could come together, and she wanted to help. Tuf, named after the pink volcanic rock common throughout Yerevan, opened its doors within a month.
  • They started with a neon-lit bar and kitchen on the ground floor, which soon expanded into a small courtyard. Then they opened up a second floor, then a third. Upstairs there is now a recording studio, a clothing boutique and a tattoo parlor. On a Wednesday night in January, the place was packed with young Russians and Armenians singing karaoke, drinking cocktails and playing ping-pong. “We have since created such a big community, a big family,” Raspopova said. “Tuf is our new home.”
  • Thousands have chosen the UAE, which did not join Western sanctions and still has direct flights to Moscow, as their new home. Russians enjoy visa-free travel for 90 days, and it is relatively easy to get a national ID, through business or investment, for a longer stay.
  • The high cost of living means there are no activists or journalists. Dubai is a haven, and the go-to playground, for Russian tech founders, billionaires under sanctions, unpenalized millionaires, celebrities, and influencers.
  • Shortly after the invasion, conversations in Moscow’s affluent Patriarch Ponds neighborhood turned to the best Dubai real estate deals, said Natalia Arkhangelskaya, who writes for Antiglyanets, a snarky and influential Telegram blog focused on Russia’s elite. A year later, Russians have ousted Brits and Indians as Dubai’s top real estate buyers, Russian-owned yachts dock at the marina, and private jets zigzag between Dubai and Moscow.
  • Russians can still buy apartments, open bank accounts and snag designer leather goods they previously shopped for in France.
  • The UAE’s embrace of foreign business has lured a stream of Russian IT workers seeking to cut ties with Russia and stay linked to global markets. Start-ups seek financing from state-supported accelerators. Larger firms pursue clients to replace those lost to sanctions.
  • About a dozen people arrived to discuss opportunities in India, which has maintained ties with Russia despite the war. Most expressed bitterness about the Kremlin’s politics and a longing for Moscow when it was an aspiring global hub.
  • “The most important thing for me is to be able to develop international projects and to integrate my kids into a global community, so they grow up in a free environment,”
  • Andrei works as a delivery driver and shares a modest room with two other men in a shelter set up by Kovcheg, a support organization for Russian emigrants. “Before the war, I never followed politics, but after the invasion, I started reading about everything,” Andrei said. “I feel so ashamed about what Russia has done.”
  • “Every extra month leads people to get used to a different country,” she said. “They get a job there, their children go to school, they begin to speak a different language. The longer the war lasts — the longer the dictatorship in the country continues — the fewer people will return.”
  • the expats could become “a repository of relevant skills for a better, freer, modern Russia.” For now, though, Rojansky said, the outflow sends a clear message.
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