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发帖数: 38600 | 1 No, you can't go back to the USSR!
http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2015/05/no-you-cant-go-back-to-us
To be sure, many aspects of the old USSR have been happily consigned to
oblivion. Among them:
•The communist ideology: the Communist Party no longer has a monopoly
on power.
•The bloc mentality: the Warsaw Pact evaporated, leaving NATO behind
as the one hand clapping. The new system is a multipolar one.
•Central planning: replaced with a market economy
•Economic isolationism: replaced with an export-driven economy based
on trade agreements with numerous nations around the world
•Authoritarian governance: replaced with authoritative governance, in
which leaders derive their authority from their popularity, which is based
on their performance in office, whereas previously the General Secretary of
the CPSU was a bit like the Pope—infallible by definition.
These are all positive changes, and very few people regret that they have
occurred, or wish for a return to status quo ante.
There are many other aspects of the old USSR which have been degraded,
sometimes severely, but nevertheless remain in place. Among them are public
health and public education.
The USSR had a system of socialized medicine that excelled at some things
and was mediocre in others. The shift to privatized medicine has been a
success in some ways, but is very hard on those who cannot afford the care
or the medications. The educational system is still very good at all levels,
but here too there has been significant degradation, bemoaned by many
observers.
The USSR invested heavily in science and culture, and much has been lost
during the difficult years of the 1990s—something that many people regret
very much. The USSR led the world in basic scientific research, probing into
matters that did not have any commercial applications, simply because they
were scientifically interesting and led to publishable results. The US led
the world in product design, something that Soviet engineers were happy to
simply copy much of the time, to save time and effort. Since they were not
attempting to export into the western consumer market, a slight lag in time
to market was of no consequence to them.
On the other hand, Americans have always had trouble wrapping their heads
around the idea of financing scientific research that had absolutely no
conceivable commercial applications. In addition, the anti-intellectualism
prevalent in American culture caused a proliferation of other sorts of “
scientists”: political scientists, social scientists, food scientists... a
certificate in “janitorial science” wouldn't be too much of a stretch.
Basic science is the premier transnational intellectual endeavor of the
human species in modern times, and the damage done to Soviet science has
caused significant damage to the pursuit of scientific knowledge throughout
the world, and a diminution in the stature of the scientific endeavor. Now
even in Russia scientists are forced to chase after grant money by pursuing
avenues of research that lead to patentable gizmos and gadgets.
One of the things that has been retained is the living arrangement. Over the
seven decades of the USSR's existence, there took place a thorough
transformation from an agrarian population dispersed across the countryside
to an industrialized population concentrated in major cities. The people
went from being log cabin-dwellers to apartment-dwellers. Following the
dissolution of the USSR, the housing stock was privatized, and now many
families own their residences free and clear. The ability to live rent-free
provides them with a very large competitive advantage compared to families
in high-rent, debt-ridden countries such as the US.
Along with apartment buildings built in dense, walkable clusters went a
system of public transportation. This, too, has remained largely intact, and
in many cities has been expanded and modernized. This, again, provides
numerous benefits to the population, and gives them an advantage vis à vis
people in car-dependent countries, where the people spend much of their life
stuck in traffic, and where the elderly, who are too old to drive safely,
are often forced to choose between being stuck in their homes and taking
their lives (and those of others) in their own hands behind the wheel.
* * *
When something is said to have collapsed, people often assume that it has
simply ceased to exist. But the effects of collapse depend on the nature of
the thing that collapses. When a hydroelectric dam collapses, it ceases to
produce electricity, plus it destroys lots of things downstream from it,
plus it may disrupt access to water. When a school collapses, it may kill
some schoolchildren, and some teachers, but it doesn't necessarily destroy
the knowledge that was being imparted. And when a mausoleum collapses, only
its description changes: it can then be described as “ruined.”
Some collapses are common, others not. Economies, especially bubble
economies, collapse all the time. Empires collapse with great regularity.
Civilizations are said to collapse, but do they really? A civilization can
be viewed as a functioning apparatus, but doing so seems to confuse a set of
principles with the entity that embodies them. Civilizational principles
can be quite durable: the Roman empire was gone for a thousand years when
Europe once again became capable of large-scale social organization, but,
sure enough, the Europeans dusted off the old Roman legal codes and
principles of organization, and started applying them. In the meantime, in
the colleges and universities, Latin had remained the language of learned
discourse, in absence of any surviving Latins being present to teach LSL
classes. It would appear that civilizations don't really collapse; they just
become quescent. New developments may spark them back to life, or they may
eventually be supplanted—by another civilization.
The USSR is gone as a political entity, but as a civilizational entity it
appears to be holding its own, though it lacks a name. The two-part name—
Soviet, plus “Soyuz” (Union)—fell apart. The word “Soviet,” used as an
adjective, applies only to the past. As a noun, it means “council,” having
originated from the revolutionary workers' councils, and this is still used
, although cautiously: “to help with council” is, to a Russian, to only
pretend to help. But the term “Soyuz” lives on; it is the name of the only
spaceship that can still ferry passengers to the International Space
Station; the new Customs Union is a Customs Soyuz. And Russian children
still grow up in the Soyuz, in a manner of speaking, thanks to Soyuzmultfilm
, the Soviet-era studio that produced excellent children's animated films,
which are still hugely popular and are now available on Youtube.
Let us think of the Soyuz—as a civilization, rather than of the USSR—which
was a political empire. A major effort was made to supplant it with western
civilization, through the introduction of market economics and a flood of
western imports, both material and cultural. Western civilizational
principles dominated for a time, among them such western innovations as
granting equal status to homosexual practices, disregarding the role of
ethnicity in political organization, and the abnegation of economic and
political sovereignty to the imperial center in Washington, DC. All of these
were, for a time, masticated thoroughly. Then they were rather forcefully
spat out, everywhere in the former USSR except for a few sorry basket cases,
the Ukraine foremost among them. But everywhere else, once the full fiasco
of western values became clear to all, previous civilizational principles
came roaring back to life.
Perhaps foremost among them is social conservatism. The Russian Federation
has two major religions: Orthodox Christianity and Islam, and a great deal
of effort goes into maintaining their mutual compatibility, so that religion
does not become a divisive factor. Introducing constructs that are alien to
both, such as gay marriage, is a nonstarter. But polygamy is not off the
table, and a senior Chechen official recently took a young bride to be his
second wife. This event caused quite a sensation, but was allowed to proceed
—in Moslem Chechnya.
Second is the principle that ethnicity is significant to social and
political organization. Russia is not a nation—it is a multinational
federation. There are over 190 different nations that make it up, with
ethnic Russians accounting for a little over 3/4 of the population. This
percentage is likely to decrease over time: Russia is second only to USA in
the number of immigrants it absorbs, and their country of origin, sorted by
the number of immigrants, is as follows: Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan,
Azerbaijan, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, Belarus, China,
Germany and USA.
During the existence of the USSR, the multi-ethnic composition of the
country was given much emphasis. Numerous small nations had their languages
written down for the first time, using the ever-expanding Cyrillic alphabet,
and endowed with a national literature. National languages were included in
school curricula, and various nations used them in their local self-
governance, to enlarge their autonomy and improve social cohesion. In
essence, the Russian Federation provides for ethnic sovereignty—each nation
can claim a measure of sovereignty for itself, rule itself and create its
own laws, provided they do not conflict with the larger whole. A prime
example of this is modern Chechnya: Moscow is content to let it persecute
its own anti-terrorist campaign, to put down the remaining foreign-financed
jihadis.
Imagine the principle of ethnic sovereignty being applied to the US, where
one's ethnicity is of no consequence provided one looks, sounds and behaves
sufficiently Anglo. In the US, ethnicity has been reduced to questions of
music and cuisine, with perhaps a festival here and there, but always with
the tacit understanding that “ethnic” means “other”: there is no such
thing as an “ethnic Anglo.” Since ethnicity is essentially taboo, the
completely artificial construct of race is used instead, with artificial,
discriminatory labels attached to categories of individuals. The label “
Latino” is particularly bogus, since there is very little in common between
, say, a Cuban and a Bolivian, except that both are likely to face
discrimination, neither being considered sufficiently “white”—Anglo, that
is. But imagine if the Mexicans or the African-Americans were to be granted
a similar level of autonomy within the US? It would blow the country to
pieces!
A country predicated on protecting “white privilege” cannot possibly
survive such a corruption of its founding principles. The US fought a
revolution to keep slavery legal (it was about to be abolished by the
British); then it fought a civil war to change slavery from one form to
another (there are more African-Americans in US jails now than there were
slaves in the Confederate South prior to the Civil War).
Nobody knows what wars lie in its future, or what will provoke them, but
this particular intercivilizational fault line is likely to be very
important. For what is a nation? Is it your tribe, or is it a bunch of
mercenaries pretending to be Anglo so that they are allowed into the country
club? Only time will tell which of the two civilizations will prove to be
more durable. | b********n
发帖数: 38600 | 2 The USSR invested heavily in science and culture, and much has been lost
during the difficult years of the 1990s—something that many people regret
very much. The USSR led the world in basic scientific research, probing into
matters that did not have any commercial applications, simply because they
were scientifically interesting and led to publishable results. The US led
the world in product design, something that Soviet engineers were happy to
simply copy much of the time, to save time and effort. Since they were not
attempting to export into the western consumer market, a slight lag in time
to market was of no consequence to them. |
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