How the Great Truth Dawned

Post by benj111 » Mon, Aug 26, 2019, 8:43 AM UTC

solotronics wrote: post #32

claudiawerner wrote: post #3

I will preface this comment by saying that I am sympathetic to the author's criticism of the Soviet system which he has inherited from Solzhenitsyn, but being sympathetic to the communist hypothesis myself, I feel like there are omissions in the article worth picking up on. The article reads, >The contrary view, held by ideologues and justice warriors generally, is that our group is good, and theirs is evil. “Evil pe…

Interesting that you can mentally step over the literal industrial scale evil done on people in the name of communism and make an argument for it from an academic standpoint. Does it really matter at what fork in the road led to the atrocities of Mao, Pol Pot, and Stalin if they all came from the same starting point. People deserve to be free to make their own life outside of government interference which may or may…

Post by ivanhoe » Mon, Aug 26, 2019, 9:32 AM UTC

Fins wrote: post #25

ivanhoe wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there was certainly much more great writers at the same time, but composers like Rimsky-Korsakov or Borodin were first class by any measure... and those are two I could recall from the top of my head, with my very limited knowledge of 19th century Russian culture, I'm sure there's more...

They are good composers, no doubt, but probably not quite in the same league in, if anything, importance (not going to argue personal preferences in music) as, say, Beethoven earlier or Stravinsky later.

Post by rubberstock » Mon, Aug 26, 2019, 10:00 AM UTC

myth_drannon wrote: post #29

hydrox24 wrote: post #28

> It is worth noting that Russia’s most recent winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, Svetlana Alexievich, also produced literary works that were purely factual. Alexievich won with "Secondhand Time"[0], which I absolutely loved. It is essentially a transcribed oral history, but composed in such a way so as to become literature. It is particularly admirable for the way in which it allows narratives which contradic…

She is Belorussian not Russian by the way.

Post by cmrdporcupine » Mon, Aug 26, 2019, 1:20 PM UTC

benj111 wrote: post #41

solotronics wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting that you can mentally step over the literal industrial scale evil done on people in the name of communism and make an argument for it from an academic standpoint. Does it really matter at what fork in the road led to the atrocities of Mao, Pol Pot, and Stalin if they all came from the same starting point. People deserve to be free to make their own life outside of government interference which may or may…

Does every discussion of Christianity have to mention the Spanish inquisition and the Crusades? Does every discussion of Islam have to mention suicide bombers? Does every discussion of America have to mention Guantanamo bay? You can't reduce broad groupings down to the few evil things people may have done in the groups name. And then there's "that is the foundation of America and is the system most proven to provide…

Post by Fins » Mon, Aug 26, 2019, 4:02 PM UTC

ivanhoe wrote: post #43

Fins wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are good composers, no doubt, but probably not quite in the same league in, if anything, importance (not going to argue personal preferences in music) as, say, Beethoven earlier or Stravinsky later.

Very few countries had composers comparably famous as Beethoven or say Mozart or Bach are nowadays to the general public - and none had them throughout the different periods all the time. However, considering the social situation in Russia of the 19th century, proportion of urban vs. rural living people, proportionally smaller and less educated middle class than in West, IMHO there was actually quite a lot of top-not…