Russia going pc? Bans Brit historians books

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There we are, poor Vladimir has gone of his rocker! The banning of books is surely what your average Ivan needs most these days! First Belgian pears, now British books, my oh my! Svetlana, where did you put that iron curtain and bring me some wodka!
 
Whatever next,

I suppose the women germany and other countries who took some 30 years to shake off their self assumed 'shame' before they told how they and their mothers were raped by advancing troops, were actually waiting in bed with candles lit and wine poured to welcome the victorious heroes from the East?

I hoped that in 1990 we were entering a new period of openness.
But, I suppose the nanouncement of the burning of 'smuggled' western food today by the russians that could have fed t
heir own homeless and poor shows the world of politics and dogma still is sadly a closed and dangerous one.

How very sad

Revisionism is a very poor substitute for living with the acceptance of documented truth.

Paul
 
While I agree that it is not helpful to ban books of historians I would like to ask why documents that might support the research of historians about WW II still remain classified in archives of the Western world.
Acceptance of documented truth is obviously not just a problem of Russia. Here goes my PI (political incorrectness) again...:rolleyes:

Cheers, Martin
 
What you guys may not be aware of, is the concurrent prosecutions of model shop owners in Moscow that had stocked and displayed German figures and busts. I am not quite sure what the outcome is (or whether it reached a conclusion yet) - but they are going heavy and absurd on Nazi propaganda laws.
Coupled with "propaganda of homosexuality" laws and who knows whats coming next, it will be an interesting place to live.
The scary thing is that majority seem to approve or not object to all this.
 
Martin64 said:
While I agree that it is not helpful to ban books of historians I would like to ask why documents that might support the research of historians about WW II still remain classified in archives of the Western world.
Acceptance of documented truth is obviously not just a problem of Russia. Here goes my PI (political incorrectness) again...:rolleyes: Cheers, Martin
Click to expand...


It's not politically or otherwise incorrect to question Martin.
It's actually narrow minded for anyone to just accept perception as truth.

The point I was making, and AB has just done the same on the world service, at 5am here;
was that the information they condemn as propagandising nazism, is from the russian ( then Soviet) archives.

We should all question,

Paul
 
Gaudin said:
What you guys may not be aware of, is the concurrent prosecutions of model shop owners in Moscow that had stocked and displayed German figures and busts. I am not quite sure what the outcome is (or whether it reached a conclusion yet) - but they are going heavy and absurd on Nazi propaganda laws.
Coupled with "propaganda of homosexuality" laws and who knows whats coming next, it will be an interesting place to live.
The scary thing is that majority seem to approve or not object to all this.
Click to expand...


The "funny" thing is, by banning all German figures, busts, models and whatever, they will have quite some difficulty to explain against whom their "Great Patriotic War" was so gloriously fought and won. Where are your heroes when you diminish or vilify your enemy? As for protesting or objecting to all this, from the earliest times the Russian people never have had any direct experience of democracy, be it under the tsars or the political commissars, functioning in a democracy has to be learned, unless you are born in one. As things seem to be going, it doesn't look as if they are going to have a chance at it!
 
Nothing really new or surprising here. Airbrushing history goes back a long way in Russia / the Soviet Union. Stalin turned it into an art form. Putin is merely carrying on the tradition.

- Steve
 
What does everyone expect? As if the day Gorbatschow stepped down, a Jeffersonian democracy sprang from the ground in its place? Russia has no tradition of democracy or the civil society (a society of based on law, before which all are equal) that is a precondition for a democratic society. It's been totalitarianism ever since Novogorod, at least, and by totalitarianism, I don't mean jackboots and torchlit parades--that's not what it means. It means a society in which there is practically no private sphere, no area of life that is not penetrated by the State. The closest they ever came was after overthrowing the Czar, and before the Germans shipped the Bolsheviks back to eliminate Russia from the first war. But even had Kerensky and his contemporaries succeed, I don't think they'd have had anything like the personal freedom we in the Anglosphere tend to consider a given. "A man's home is his castle" is an ancient ideal, even if it's honored more in the breach, something that we share and that sets us apart from folks on the continent.

Prost!
Brad
 
theBaron said:
What does everyone expect? As if the day Gorbatschow stepped down, a Jeffersonian democracy sprang from the ground in its place? Russia has no tradition of democracy or the civil society (a society of based on law, before which all are equal) that is a precondition for a democratic society. It's been totalitarianism ever since Novogorod, at least, and by totalitarianism, I don't mean jackboots and torchlit parades--that's not what it means. It means a society in which there is practically no private sphere, no area of life that is not penetrated by the State. The closest they ever came was after overthrowing the Czar, and before the Germans shipped the Bolsheviks back to eliminate Russia from the first war. But even had Kerensky and his contemporaries succeed, I don't think they'd have had anything like the personal freedom we in the Anglosphere tend to consider a given. "A man's home is his castle" is an ancient ideal, even if it's honored more in the breach, something that we share and that sets us apart from folks on the continent.

Prost!
Brad
Click to expand...

Globaly I agree, except when you seem to have a very american way of thinking that the continent ( Europe I guess ) is communist .
Allas this seems to be a common mistake among the good peoples of USA; I heard that systematicaly when travelling in the states : ".. you in France/Belgium etc are communists ...." I heard that from all levels of your society, even in an University as Cornwell . The vast majority is not communist but like in your Bill of Right we accept the freedom of speech and of thinking even for the peoples thinking communists ( we had no Mc Carthy )
Everybody on "the continent" get full and near free medical attention, has the right to get a "fill the gap" salary when loosing his job, the time he need to find a new one ( I had the chance to never need that ), have the right to a paid retirement calulate on basis of the number of years he worked for ( usualy minimum 40 years ). Is this communism ? I don't know . This was already discussed by the philosophers of the the beginning of the 18th century ( siècle des Lumières ), you know the ones you based your "Bill of Rights" on .

Best:)
 
Mirofsoft said:
Globaly I agree, except when you seem to have a very american way of thinking that the continent ( Europe I guess ) is communist .
Allas this seems to be a common mistake among the good peoples of USA; I heard that systematicaly when travelling in the states : ".. you in France/Belgium etc are communists ...." I heard that from all levels of your society, even in an University as Cornwell . The vast majority is not communist but like in your Bill of Right we accept the freedom of speech and of thinking even for the peoples thinking communists ( we had no Mc Carthy )
Everybody on "the continent" get full and near free medical attention, has the right to get a "fill the gap" salary when loosing his job, the time he need to find a new one ( I had the chance to never need that ), have the right to a paid retirement calulate on basis of the number of years he worked for ( usualy minimum 40 years ). Is this communism ? I don't know . This was already discussed by the philosophers of the the beginning of the 18th century ( siècle des Lumières ), you know the ones you based your "Bill of Rights" on .

Best:)
Click to expand...

Where did I say anyone was a Communist? You're making an inference that you shouldn't.

However, I will make this generalization: Europeans, in general, are Statist. That is, the common worldview places the State above the individual. That doesn't mean you don't believe in freedom of speech, the right of a jury trial, habeas corpus, and so on. But in any question, it means that you tend to accept far more action from the State into the life and affairs of the individual. That is the opposite of our political heritage, which we have as the descendants of Britons, and expressed by such thinkers in Britain during the Enlightenment such as John Locke and Adam Smith, though Montesquieu also had a strong influence on that worldview. We believe that government is a necessary evil ("If men were angels, no government would be necessary," as Madison put it), but we believe that the State should interfere as little as possible in the life of the individual. Or as Malcolm Reynolds put it, "That's why governments exist--to get in a man's way."

This is a generalization, true, but that means that it is generally true, understanding that there are exceptions. That's another fallacy of the past 50 years, that generalizations are to be avoided.
 

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