Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I hope you will never see this letter (1961)

news.lettersofnote.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 122 posts

Re: I hope you will never see this letter (1961)

#101

Post by filoleg »

gbuk2013 wrote: post #30
DrSAR wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That t is not entirely useless (non-native Russian speaker here). Even the pronunciation of 'check' has a starting t sound in it: tʃɛk. Without the starting t, you might end up with something that could be spelled sheck in English. So I'd argue, that the t in transliterations helps people who don't speak Russian to get the ч sound right. Since the transliteration as 'ch' is ambiguous and doesn't appear to work for ma…

(Native Russian speaker here) I don’t really agree. The “t” and “ch” require very different tongue and jaw positions and combining them is awkward and would require a vowel in between when used in a real word. English speakers are perfectly capable of pronouncing ch vs sh (e.g. chair vs share) whereas sh vs sh’ (ш/щ) might be more challenging.

Also a native speaker, and fully agreed with you.

Especially since there exist words in russian language that actually have "т" before "ч", and the sound it makes is different. Compare "отчёт" and "очки" (the closest similar word i could think of by the sound of the first half of it). If you try pronouncing the first word as if "т" wasn't there (or the second word, but as it "т" was there), it will sound both very different and wrong.

Re: I hope you will never see this letter (1961)

#102

Post by noduerme »

RedCondor wrote: post #96
noduerme wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your argument is he was a brainwashed peasant?

I think "brainwashing" is a nonsense, racist concept invented by the CIA in the 1950s, by agent Edward Hunter passing himself off as a "journalist," in order to superciliously rationalize away the powerful appeal of communism to working class people. So, depending on how you look at it, yes and no. https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/

Surely brainwashing as used now can describe any type of system. Weren't the nazis brainwashed? Aren't you implying that the American peasants are brainwashed? How could it be that the only people who were truly free and doing what they wanted were the ones living in a dictatorship featuring show trials and a gulag system?

Re: I hope you will never see this letter (1961)

#103

Post by RedCondor »

noduerme wrote: post #102
RedCondor wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think "brainwashing" is a nonsense, racist concept invented by the CIA in the 1950s, by agent Edward Hunter passing himself off as a "journalist," in order to superciliously rationalize away the powerful appeal of communism to working class people. So, depending on how you look at it, yes and no. https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/

Surely brainwashing as used now can describe any type of system. Weren't the nazis brainwashed? Aren't you implying that the American peasants are brainwashed? How could it be that the only people who were truly free and doing what they wanted were the ones living in a dictatorship featuring show trials and a gulag system?

Absolutely not. The Nazi project was extremely logical, and had massive conscious support from Germany, especially from its elites.

Germany explicitly argued they wanted to replicate the American expansion into the "Far West" but against the Eastern European "Far East" instead, and explicitly made positive reference to the genocide of indigenous people, the enslavement of Africans, and the "greatness" of America.

Hitler: "The struggle we are waging [in Crimea] against the Partisans resembles very much the struggle in North America against the Red Indians. Victory will go to the strong, and strength is on our side. At all costs we will establish law and order there. […] Saxony, for example, will enjoy an unprecedented trade boom, and we shall create for her a most profitable export market, which it will be the task of Saxon inventive genius to develop."

The Germans felt themselves as Americans. They weren't "brainwashed," they were just racist.

The Soviet Union built itself up through hard work and they had every right to be proud of what they accomplished, especially the defeat of Nazi (and more generally Western) efforts to enslave them, and especially since, unlike their Western counterparts, they accomplished it through hard work rather than through pillaging and looting the rest of the planet.

"Brainwashing" doesn't exist. It's a way for liberals—American liberals especially—to falsify history and to refuse to accept what people are saying, discarding it as nonsense in favour of more palatable and self-exculpatory narratives.

Re: I hope you will never see this letter (1961)

#104

Post by pcthrowaway »

asciii wrote: post #90
schoen wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> горю Wow, such wide-ranging cognates! https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur... ("warm", "thermal", "furnace", and even the "garam" in "garam masala") I'm glad he made it back to Earth safely.

TIL, my new fun fact for Garam Masla -- out of this world spice

Not sure how you got "out of this world" from "hot"

Re: I hope you will never see this letter (1961)

#105

Post by xyzelement »

jll29 wrote: post #61

From a modern perspective, it is a bit harsh to demand from one's wife ¨Hey babe, I am not coming back, please raise our two kids, oh and by the way please help our parents also!¨ - if she really was not at all informed.

If anything that reflects poorly on the modern perspective.

What different request would a man make today?

Re: I hope you will never see this letter (1961)

#106

Post by [deleted] »

noduerme wrote: post #32
dmblit wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Terror has ended by October 1938, when Gagarin was 4 years old. I wouldn’t call that “living through”. I’m not saying there weren’t political prisoners or executions later. There were, but the scale is incomparable. We can safely say Gagarin met a lot of people who had won the war growing up, but he had not seen someone familiar taken to prison for no reason every other day, and I would assume had not heard much…

You don't see plainly from the language of the letter that he had internalized the terror his parents and society experienced? It's obsequious.

[deleted]

Re: I hope you will never see this letter (1961)

#107

Post by foverzar »

noduerme wrote: post #34
chx wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was but a small child then, being born in 1934 and they were very good at hiding the worst atrocities which was not exactly hard those years given the rather limited mass communication. No one was posting a Tiktok about the deportation of the Crimean Tatars.

Even with modern communications, most Russians publicly deny knowing that their government is committing atrocities against its own citizens. Of course, they know just as well as people knew throughout the Soviet era. Hence the degree of phoniness in a letter ostensibly to one's spouse that is only intended to satisfy the politburo. Could Gagarin possibly have been unaware of recent history or of what happened to her…

Literally every single nation does that. It's a natural bias.

E.g. Americans don't lose sleep over Assange or the fact that Snowden is now a citizen of the evil Russia.

> Hence the degree of phoniness in a letter ostensibly to one's spouse that is only intended to satisfy the politburo

You really don't account for perspective. To Gagarin you'd sound no less phony if you'd said something like "I am proud to pioneer the advancement of our free democratic world". Also, consider that it was a modernist era back then - people hadn't yet really figured out being goofy.

Re: I hope you will never see this letter (1961)

#108

Post by foverzar »

noduerme wrote: post #33
FpUser wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. It does not

Real letters to wives don't include patriotic and political phrases about children being raised in a new paradise to come, except those written by cult members and those (in this case) written under duress.

Like in 2023, post-post-modernist or meta-modernist era, or universally whenever, including Gagarin's modernist age?

Re: I hope you will never see this letter (1961)

#109

Post by dang »

qikInNdOutReply wrote: post #92

https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/05/02/134597833/c...

Cosmonaut Crashed into Earth 'Crying in Rage' (2011) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24772891 - Oct 2020 (16 comments)

Cosmonaut Crashed into Earth 'Crying in Rage' (2011) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11072718 - Feb 2016 (63 comments)

Re: I hope you will never see this letter (1961)

#110

Post by dang »

deelly wrote: post #44
RecycledEle wrote: post #7

I wonder how the letter become publicly known?

Sceptic and cynic in me thinks that this is a part of the russian whitewashing company. I want to be wrong.

Please keep nationalistic flamewar off HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

(I appreciate that wasn't your intent, but we have to go by likely effects.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Post reply on HN