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I hope you will never see this letter (1961)

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

#111

Post by dang »

wil421 wrote: post #81
southernplaces7 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, because asking your wife and the mother of the children the two of you created together knowing that they're a commitment of decades at least, to then take care of those children for as long as she can is just so old-fashioned and sexist? What's the "modern perspective" he missed out on here? That caring for one's own children is a circumstantial and fluid responsibility depending on convenience levels? Asking h…

Calm down, I’m sure a wife would say similar things given the circumstances. If I was on my death bed or my wife was we would both ask each other to look after our kids.

Please edit out swipes like "calm down" from your HN posts. (This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.)

Your comment would be fine without that bit.

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

#112

Post by dang »

FpUser wrote: post #79
noduerme wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You definitely have no clue about what happens in real life. You could easily find similar praises among the average Americans. I've encountered the same things in Canada as well.

> You definitely have no clue

Please edit out swipes like that from your HN posts. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Your comment would be fine without that sentence.

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

#113

Post by noduerme »

RedCondor wrote: post #103
noduerme wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Hit…

The "brainwashing" I refer to in nazi germany would be the initial racist belief in "aryans" and their supposed superiority. Sure, once someone had been indoctrinated with such state sponsored quasi-religious propaganda, one could say that the looting and pillaging followed logically. But it followed logically from an unprovable belief in a racist utopian future, which was only falsified by their defeat (at the hands of not just the USSR, but the western liberal democracies you seem bent on demonizing).

Likewise, the looting and starvation of Ukraine and the conquest of the Baltics under Stalin, and the subjugation of Central and Eastern Europe, the mass murder of Poles, the invasions to put down popular democratic movements in Czechoslovakia and Hungary were forms of expansionist pillaging, just as the looting of Ukraine is today, which follow "logically" from a total ideology once a population is properly indoctrinated. Of course not to "open markets" but to spread the communism which apparently everyone loves so much it must be enforced at gunpoint. If you object so strenuously to the term "brainwashing" then "propagandizing" and/or failing that instilling terror in the populace would work equally well. But let's not be ahistorical and pretend that the collectivization and industrialization of the USSR didn't come at the cost of tens of millions of lives and as a result of an expansionist, imperialist series of conquests.

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

#114

Post by tomohawk »

ShadowBanThis01 wrote: post #55

Anyone who hasn't seen "For All Mankind" should check it out. It depicts a future that might have transpired if the Russians had beaten the USA to the moon.

The Soviets never did land a person on the moon and get them back. It would appear they didn't have it in them to get it done.

Here's a brief history of the competition and why the Soviets failed:

https://www.inventionandtech.com/content/how-soviets-didn%E2...

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

#116

Post by RedCondor »

noduerme wrote: post #113
RedCondor wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Hit…

The "brainwashing" I refer to in nazi germany would be the initial racist belief in "aryans" and their supposed superiority. Sure, once someone had been indoctrinated with such state sponsored quasi-religious propaganda, one could say that the looting and pillaging followed logically. But it followed logically from an unprovable belief in a racist utopian future, which was only falsified by their defeat (at the hands…

[flagged]

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

#117

Post by noduerme »

foverzar wrote: post #107
noduerme wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

"I'm proud to pioneer the advancement of our free democratic world" would be a completely weird and abnormal thing for someone to say in a private correspondence. To explain where I'm coming from in seeing the hand of tyranny and fear in this letter: If I ever said anything remotely like that, anyone who knew me would think someone was holding a gun to my head.

Politicians may talk like that. But normal people in ostensibly private communications don't speak in political slogans unless they're either afraid or suffering from Stockholm syndrome.

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

#118

Post by ifdefdebug »

RedCondor wrote: post #89
rvense wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the America parallels to this statement would be God, democracy, "our way of life" and such, references to which would not at all be unexpected in a letter such as this from the 60's.

I get it now. Americans think "communism" is an icky political thing that Soviets were coerced to like, unlike "freedom and democracy (TM)", worthy abstract ideals that all Americans (nay, all Humans) should rightfully worship naturally and organically. It's pretty amusing!

It's pretty amusing watching you trying to lay a trap and then beating up a strawman with your sarcasm. This letter was meant for the masses to read, and not to be kept in private between him and his family. Not the regional flair of political messaging it contains is telling, but the fact that it contains political messaging at all.

If my wive went on a risky mission and died about it, and all I get from her was a letter about "freedom", "democracy" and maybe "our great nation" and stuff like this, it would break my heart even more.

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

#119

Post by deelly »

dang wrote: post #110
deelly wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Thank you for your time. Appreciate your honesty.

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

#120

Post by dark_star »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #100
RomanPushkin wrote: post #42

There were also the other words of Yuri Gagarin, on the way back from space: "Я горю, прощайте товарищи" ("I'm on fire. Farewell, comrades"). The capsule somehow managed to land successfully, and he ended up being alive.

Do you have a source for this? The Wikipedia article says nothing about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vostok_1

From the Wikipedia article:

At 07:55 UTC, when Vostok 1 was still 7 km (4.3 mi) from the ground, the hatch of the spacecraft was released, and two seconds later Gagarin was ejected. At 2.5 km (8,200 ft) altitude, the main parachute was deployed from the Vostok spacecraft.[43]

Gagarin's parachute opened almost immediately, and about ten minutes later, at 08:05 UTC, Gagarin landed. Both he and the spacecraft landed via parachute 26 km (16 mi) south west of Engels, in the Saratov region at 51.270682°N 45.99727°E.

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