this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2024
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It is truly astonishing to consider how anyone could believe that Russians would rise up over frivolous matters like this. Moreover, I'd argue that there is a certain degree of racism in these narratives that rely on the notion that Russians or Chinese cannot independently produce products comparable to Western standards on their own.
In fact, the whole portrayal of liberal democracy as the sole legitimate form of governance amounts to little more than contemporary marketing for colonialism. This concept functions as a pretext for invasions disguised as benevolent civilizing missions and is directly connected with the notion that Western goods are superior. It's part of an overarching narrative that portrays the West as bringing enlightenment to "uncivilized" societies.
Can you imagine the blood in the streets if americans couldn't get their chicken nuggets? No more coors light? I think it's an american-centric line of thought to believe that other countries would revolt over losing their little treats like the US would.
always projection :)
Reminds me of Prohibition and how violent it got all because Americans couldn't get booze. To this day, I don't doubt there'd be an uprising if they ever tried that again here. We're dependent on bread and circuses, and we project like no other.
More snacks and projection than a drive-in movie theater.
Ya know, I don't think this is that far off from the truth, though naturally there are degrees to product worship and dependency on it among USians. I do think it makes a kind of sense if you consider how many in the US (in varying degrees) are void of a sense of identity or social responsibility and drift in nihilism. I mean, people are to some extent encouraged to form their identity around what products they're into. And on a national level, what else have USians got? Jingoism? Pride for being a colonizer and imperialism in a barbaric legacy? Some people in the US do have religion, but with varying levels of taking it seriously.
I myself have had times where I get very into a product (such as a video game) and the surrounding "community" (though the word "community" in this kind of usage is sort of silly with how loosely affiliated and discordant it tends to be). I'm lacking sources on it right now that I can recall, but I feel like I read once that this was intentional in some way, the conjoining of "product" and "community."
But either way (intentional or no) you can observe it with ease online, where it's virtually inevitable to run into zealots for a given product who will defend it so viciously, you'd think it was their firstborn on trial.
If you find it, I'd appreciate a share. Any searches including the two words are poisoned by articles trying to tell you how to turn your brand into a community. Each search is just page after page of that shit.
I'll try to remember to if I can find it. Web searching has indeed become a pain. I tried to do some just now, but didn't have much luck. Through a link in one article, I came upon one source that is vaguely related to what we're talking about, but not really on the point of specifically combining product and community. It's also sort of a shallow summary and may be stuff you've already heard of: https://www.businessinsider.com/birth-of-consumer-culture-2013-2
These quotes from it specifically stand out to me:
But, this isn't really the specificity of intent I thought I had found something on before. Maybe I confused someone extrapolating intent from outcomes in the past, or it's just out there in the mass of the internet somewhere and is hard to find.
Well, I'm for a democracy, just not Western liberal democracy.
It's bourgeois democracy at best and fascism at worst.
That's right, I want proletarian democracy which the dictatorship of the working class. Liberal democracy is a democracy for the capital owners.
Absolutely.
It is on a logical level, but it's also so much like typical feel-good story which Germans tell themselves about the end of the DDR and reunification. The story goes that life sucked in the DDR because people didn't have frivolous material goods, so the people rebelled and were rewarded by reunifying with the west.
That's a good point I haven't considered. There's already an underlying mythology this narrative taps into.
To be fair, western baubles and treats have been notable factor in the fall of socialism 35 years ago, but 35 years passed and now they aren't this attractive now and back then it was huge mistake from socialist governments to allow propganda penetration of their countries.
I very much agree, the whole perestroyka and glasnost business that Gorbachev started was ultimately what fucked USSR over.
Yeah, though it started much earlier, in '68 and the subsequent opening in Poland for example. In 1980 we were already prepared to demand Pewex (imported) goods.
That's true the trends go back further, but I think it was still possible to turn things around in the late 80s if more competent people were in charge. In my opinion, the most important aspect of USSR that needs to be analyzed going forward is how to improve the political system in order to keep opportunists and the incompetent out of positions of power. It's a general unsolved problem pretty much all human societies have that quality of leadership declines when the times are good.
I doubt if it could be just entirely averted, but if we got Deng instead of Gorba... on the other hand, USSR and Warsaw Pact wasn't China, imperialists were way too invested into toppling and looting it, they would never left us just be there and rule ourselves on the promise of capitalism.
For sure, USSR was put under far more stress than China. The other aspect was that, unlike China, USSR was seen as an ideological threat.
A lot of it was the aging of the population and leadership, combined with loss of political knowledge caused by the loss of an entire generation during ww2.
Right, but the question remains of how to make sure things stay on track even under such conditions. Catastrophes like WW2 will happen sooner or later, and the ability to recover from such disasters is a critical aspect of ensuring the continuation of the system.
💯
Agree on all points, except the word "racism" is incredibly overused to the point it loses semblance of original meaning.
Russians are mostly Caucasians, just like most Europeans or Americans. In fact, big parts of Caucasus itself are within Russia's borders.
But stereotypes of other nations are very strong - and intentionally fueled.
Racism is fluid, and in times like this, US and UK media likes to try and spin Russians as asiatic barbarians. They invoke tropes associated with the Mongol empire and call Russians "orcs". This goes back as early as the nineteenth century when the British and Russian empires were in an intense rivalry over control of central Asia.
Whiteness isn’t fundamentally about having white skin, which is what I assume you mean by referring to Caucasian ancestry.
The simple equation of whiteness and having light skin might be approximately true inside the US because of the whole slavery thing. The influx of African slaves prompted the Europeans to reconcile their ethnic differences on that superficial basis alone. But that didn’t erase racism between nominally white ethnicities. For example, Italians and Irish people have not always been accepted as white in the US.
The basis of racism is the categorization of certain peoples into pseudo-scientific races, and Europe has a long history of excluding Slavic peoples as a distinct race from the “civilized” western Europeans.