Re: Babel

On 3/28/24 5:54 AM, D wrote:

I listened to a youtube lecture of someone from the finnish military who studieds russia all his life, and he agreed with the deeply rooted paranoia of russia, and that it explains a lot about why they act the way they do.
 I think that in order to get long lasting peace in europe, the russian people need to go through some kind of public shaming like germany in WW2 in order to create a longing for peace and democracy.

They came close in the nineties, but Yeltsin's government messed up so badly that they went back to autocracy, which is all that Russia had ever known.

 It has to come from within, based on a collective, cultural realization that Tsars won't build a happy country. If it is pushed from above and outside, like after the soviet union fell, the system will fall again, since the people haven't internalized democracy.

Democracy — elected government — is just a part of something more basic. The best word for it is liberalism, but in the USA that's unfortunately been taken over by the advocates of heavy government in the economy. Here I'm using it in its proper sense.
Germany had a liberal tradition to help it find its way. It was weirdly mixed with strong monarchs, religious violence, and antisemitism, but it was there. Frederick the Great was an "enlightened absolutist" — a powerful oxymoron which I have an article on that should show up on libertyfund.org later today. It was based on a somewhat Hobbesian notion that a nation needs an absolute ruler, but the ruler is supposed to act for everyone's good. Frederick enacted some reforms, as did Joseph II of the Holy Roman Empire.
Russia also had an "enlightened absolutist," Catherine the Great, but her "enlightenment" consisted mostly of promoting culture and not of giving anyone more freedom. The Russian Revolution traded one set of czars for another, the main difference being that the new ones were even more expansionist.

 Another way for peace, as you say, is to break up russia and confiscate all major weapons. Moscow and the west will probably be a european oriented country, the rest will be factured between various small warlords and revert to their "*stan" names.
 The risk will still be though, that the moscow + west will again fall into tyranny after a decade or two.

Confiscating the major weapons is the real problem. Picking up nuclear weapons and carrying them off would cause all kinds of international and logistical issues, and someone might decide to launch them rather than give them up. They're probably already poorly maintained and unreliable, but that could just mean that instead of blowing up their intended target, they'll blow up somebody else.
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Gary McGath    http://www.mcgath.com