How come Russian always seems to be the bad guys in the world, causing trouble, in with their own citizens?

Better written: How come Russia always seems to be the bad guys in the world, causing trouble, even with their own citizens?

Because when they were kids, their heads were filled with all kinds of lies about how capitalism works. They were taught that capitalists are basically lawless thugs. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, they’re acting it out.

Some of the Western media follow the dystopian view issued by their Governments to deflect from their own shortcomings along the lines of Eastasia in Orwells 1984.
Though I accept the above comment that the Russian people have been been 'got at' by their Governments control of the education system and other propaganda.

You posters presume the Russian people have some significant influence over the Russian government. That is incorrect.

It follows that past indoctrination of the people is irrelevant. If you want to understand what Moscow does, identify the objectives of Putin and the oligarchs.

Because our morally bankrupt and corrupt government and political system here in the US needs a boogeyman.

The Russia of today is nothing like the Soviet Union - and to even to compare it to the USSR is laughable.

Every country needs a boogeyman so that it can deal with its internal problems. I live in a western country with rife socio-economic problems even if the country now are in the middle of a impressive business cycle. The socio-economic gap keeps growing and sow doubt in peoples mind. Social decay is everywhere to be seen. Our government and media tell us that other countries are a threat to us and that we have to be vigilant.

Bamboozled Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
>
> The Russia of today is nothing like the Soviet
> Union - and to even to compare it to the USSR is
> laughable.

I disagree. The Soviet Union was an autocratic kleptocracy, benefiting a privileged oligarchy (the Party), with a fig-leaf ideology (Marxism). The Russian Federation is an autocratic kleptocracy benefifing a privileged oligarchy (Putin's cronies) with the fig-leaf of nationalism ("Russia's greatness"). Both had sick GDPs* and an anemic military.**

"Same difference," as they say.

Speaking of oligarchs, Lot's Wife, I'm not worried about Russian oligarchs, but American oligarchs: Warren Buffet, Tim Cooke, Bill Gates & Satya Nadella, the Koch Brothers, Mark Zuckerberg, John Henry, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, George Soros,Rupert Murdoch...

* Old Soviet joke: "We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us."
** Ka-BANG! US Marine artillery just took out 200 Russian "mercenaries" in Syria. Bet you didn't read that anywhere!

Russian oligarchs and American proto-oligarchs can be problems at the same time. Different in type and degree but both problematic.

Bloomberg reported that figure over a week ago. The DoD claims that 100 were killed (and a couple of hundred wounded), only some of whom were Russian mercenaries.

The fog of war makes these things difficult to figure out. Best not to cherry pick the headlines you like best.

Last year, Russian destroyers were dispatched as a show of strength for Assad in the eastern Mediterranean; pictures were provided. A close look showed extensive rot and rust on the vessels, covered with paint. Their only aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, is a miserable joke. I'm impressed they could free up $100K for ads on Facebook and Twitter.

If we're to discuss dangerous adversaries, let's start a thread on China.

China is having a few problems of it's own. They had a wild time a few years ago buying up properties around the world and now are facing crushing debt. Just this morning it was announced that the Chinese government has taken over the Waldorf Astoria and jailed the head of Angbang. And they're not the only company that has had their CEO jailed for this.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/22/business/china-anbang-waldorf-astoria.html

I believe this is a direct result of their government structure. Since there is little in the way of oversight and counter weights for their executives they get to act out, for the most part, without consequence. If there was a good person in office, as opposed to Putin, I suspect that many good things would happen.

This is in opposition to most western governments which impede both the good and bad from happening. The slow crawl of western governments make it really hard to do anything.

I'm sure it has to do with valiancy in the pre-existence.

Many believe that if peoples knew each other well, and if their governments were all democracies, conflict would end. That believe is incorrect: it presumes that everyone's interests are compatible, which is demonstrably false.

There are a few reasons Russians always seem "bad." The first is that Westerners have a particular vantage point. Russians do not seem "bad" to Russians, nor to allied countries around the world like Syria. The value judgment is thus relative. What is bad to one person is good to another.

A second reason is that Russian culture is radically different. Sometimes when you put different peoples in close contact, the result is an increase in friction. That can happen within a country, when different ethnic or religious or political groups meet. There is abundant evidence of that potential for intra-community conflict in recent US history. The same thing often happens with countries: the more they interact, the more, at least in the short term, they argue and even fight.

There was a book written in 1913 entitled The Grand Illusion, whose author claimed that the nations of Europe were now interacting so frequently that war had become impossible. Oops. Yet today people repeat the arguments of that book as if World War One and Two had never intervened.

Yet another reason is that Russian political culture is incompatible with Western democracy. Russia went from a Czarist dictatorship to a communist dictatorship, then to a weak and fragile democracy that transformed into today's dictatorship. Democracy takes institutions and habits; it often requires decades or even centuries to put down roots. When an immature democracy experiences a concentration of wealth and power, it can easily transform into a vehicle through which the ruling oligarchy pursues its own interests. That is why the feelings of the Russian people are not terribly important in understanding Russian foreign policy. Russian and American citizens might get along well if they met each other, but that need not work much change in the pattern of governmental relations.

Finally, and most importantly, Russian geopolitical and economic interests differ dramatically from those of the West--and those interests are based on geography and history. That is why Russia and Britain were at each other's throats for centuries; it is why Russia and the US, which inherited the British strategic position, have so many conflicts. The two countries' interests in Syria, the Black Sea, the Straits, Southeastern Europe, Ukraine, Estonia and the Baltic, Afghanistan, North Korea, and many other places are diametrically opposed. American and Russian interests in the commodities markets, and particularly the oil market, are fundamentally incompatible.

So when Westerners describe Russia as always "bad," what they really mean is that the interests of the two regions are in many ways incompatible. Really strong leadership can overcome such natural conflicts and enable different countries to cooperate and even built good relationships. But it shouldn't be a surprise when such differently situated countries have difficult relations over decades or centuries.

I watched enough Rocky and Bullwinkle to know that Boris Badenov wasn't really from Pottsylvania.

A few years ago I read something about Russian culture I have never forgotten in a book about literary and cross-cultural analysis.

The chapter I am referring to discussed Russian culture as viewed through Russian fairy tales, legends, myths, children's tales, and folk sayings.

The author pointed out that, in the various accounts (and indicative of much of Russian culture in general), and in each case, the characters in the stories (etc.) all behaved in exactly the same manner...

Whatever the problem to be solved was, the characters in the various stories or whatever, when presented with the problem of the piece, all waited for some outside intervention of some kind to solve the problem: God, or a mythical deity figure, or magic or a magical figure ("witch"-like character), a suddenly lucky circumstance, or an "outside" change of some kind (the weather, the time of day or night, etc.).

At no point did the characters figuratively sit down, discuss the problem, and figure out some way of solving it themselves: building a bridge or a boat of some kind to cross an unexpectedly flooded creek...finding food when they lost what they brought with them...looking for allies in the surrounding countryside and asking for help from them...adapting a local cave for shelter, etc.

(The book pointed out that American tales of the same subjects, going back to our published book and magazine beginnings as a people, would have the kids figuring out one or more ways to solve the problem, assigning the individual tasks to those best suited to carry them out, and then---cooperatively---working for an end which would benefit all of them both individually and as a group, and get them out of whatever dilemma or fix they had gotten themselves into. If they were stuck in the great outdoors and a sudden storm arose, fictional American kids would quickly assess the materials, etc. available...gather leafy tree branches, stones, food and water (etc.)...and put together a protected place to stay and a way to survive the night (or whatever) until the storm blew over. Meanwhile, the Russian kids would be hunkered down, waiting stoically for "someone," of SOME kind, to wander by and physically direct them to a place of shelter.)

The lesson of the analysis was that culturally, as a people, Russians are taught to wait for direction from an outside "someone" who somehow knows more, or has "more"...

...while Americans (in our fictional stories, beginning at elementary school age), when put into a comparable situation, instinctively begin figuring out how to solve the problem...how to get whatever materials or other things are needed...how to parcel out the work necessary to those who can do particular tasks best...

...and that whether they get "out" of the problem or not is up to THEM, so if presented with such a problem, it is time to "get cracking," figure out HOW to do it, and then DO IT.

I have never forgotten this literary and cultural analysis, and it has served as a most valuable lesson in trying to understand many of the "whys" of Russian culture and history.

That's a heck of a thesis, Tevai. I think it works.

In a writers group I participate in, a member's protagonist is what I call a "Zhivago character:" interesting, poetic, but ultimately passive and subject to people and circumstances external to him. I keep telling him, people will abandon this character, and his book, but so far to no avail.

Consider: when the despicable Komarovsky (played by Rod Steiger) steals Lara (Julie Christie) away from Zhivago (Omar Sharif) at the end, what does Zhivago do? NOTHING! He runs to a window and watches her leave...forever. Even when Komarovsky says he (Zhivago) can join them on the train to flee to the East. Zhivago resigns himself to a life of loneliness and heartbreak, dying of a heart attack when he thinks he sees her on the street.

Just as chattel slavery has been a defining cancer on our history, serfdom has been a blight on the Russian nation. The difference is that we have confronted the evil (with varying degrees of success), but in 1917, Lenin's Bolsheviks replaced the aristocracy's system of oppression with their own.

As this is, after all, an LDS forum, I'll mention in passing that the instinct to oppress and exploit transcends cultures, nations, and eras, and we see a more civilized version of it in the COB.

Good analysis; in Chekov's plays, 'The Cherry Orchard', 'The Three Sisters', etc., characters sit around and talk and talk and talk about lost love, the "good old days", whatever, until one character finally does something they all dread will happen.

But that one character is almost always the one who had been telling them throughout the entire play that they need to stop talking, get off their butts, and DO SOMETHING--or something dreadful will happen.

I'm trying to tie this in with TSCC, but my wife is making coffee cake and I'm distracted....

and not too far back are reminders of Stalin, WWII, and evil (German) fascists.

Russia can be as corrupt as they like in their own backyard, but how dare they aspire to compete with the US: the long-crowned Badass Guys in the World. The US has an admirable Badass record backed by its poodle lapdog the UK. Please help me complete the list of countries the US has bombed since WWII, and then we need to add the many fascist coups the US has helped to promote in their War on Democracy.

Go U-S-A! U-S-A!


China 1945-46

Korea 1950-53

China 1950-53

Guatemala 1954

Indonesia 1958

Cuba 1959-60

Guatemala 1960

Belgian Congo 1964

Guatemala 1964

Dominican Republic 1965-66

Peru 1965

Laos 1964-73

Vietnam 1961-73

Cambodia 1969-70

Guatemala 1967-69

Lebanon 1982-84

Grenada 1983-84

Libya 1986

El Salvador 1981-92

Nicaragua 1981-90

Iran 1987-88

Libya 1989

Panama 1989-90

Iraq 1991

Kuwait 1991

Somalia 1992-94

Bosnia 1995

Iran 1998

Sudan 1998

Afghanistan 1998

Yugoslavia – Serbia 1999

Afghanistan 2001

Libya 2011

Assassination by Drone 2005 - date

I didn't see even one post on this thread that relates in any way to Mormonism or to recovery from mormonism. It's pure 100% political. So why doesn't the moderator delete them all, instead of only deleting my post? Although they run the board and can do what they want, shouldn't they try to maintain their respect from others by living the rules themselves? All I see is "...I agree with this political position. That one can stay. I disagree with that political position. That one I'll delete". So where is the integrity on this recovery board? Okay, I get it.... [DELETE]. The thinking has already been done for us here. Dissentiontion is prohibited.