/lit/ - Literature

War and Peace

>>20131106
>Insert joke about speed reading W&P here

>>20131059
The Brothers Karamazov

A History of Russia by Nicholas V. Riasanovsky
Peter the Great by Robert K Massie
Catherine the Great by Robert K Massie
Nicholas and Alexandra by Robert K Massie

>>20131106
>>20131162
pretty sure op is asking for non fiction. how will fiction help him?

>>20131059
unironically The Gulag Archipelago
tangentially but Why Nations Fail

>>20131178
Non-fiction becomes indistinguishable from fiction once it is allowed to go into a person's mind. The imagination takes care in both cases of filling in every single detail left undescribed.

>>20131174
good recs

Riasanovsky

Ivan Ilyin,
Wesen und Eigenart der russischen Kultur

Dugin

>>20132020
Putin is currently at war with people who decorate themselves with that nazi trash.
Seriously rethink your files, would ya?

>>20131059
To give a broad overview: the Russians saw themselves as the inheritors of Byzantium and the Orthodox Christian faith, particularly during the rise of the Ottomans. This has led to a similar national mindset to the Manifest Destiny idea that leads Americans to see themselves as exceptional.
>>20131178
Nonfiction is very good at laying bare the mindset of the author and his social circle during his time period. Even authors who write of times before their own will portray those days as a man of his days sees them (Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy both exemplify this through portrayal of the Russian Empire from a more ground-level view than an official history would).
The battle of Borodino probably didn't feature some of the more memorable scenes from War and Peace, but you or I could easily understand how the Russians of Tolstoy's time viewed the battle in all of its historical and national significance.

Normie history books:

>General history of Russia following the tsarist family.
The Romanovs: 1613-1918 by Simon Sebag Montefiore

>History of Russian culture 17th - 20th century.
Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia by Orlando Figes. (Check out his other books.)

And the Gulag Archipelago. (Cue tankies, yes I know it's fictitious.)

Articles by Konstantin Aksakov, if you can find them in English

The gulag archipelago

>>20131059
Here, OP

Also this might interest you

>>20131059
Contemporary Russia by Bressler is a wonderful book encompassing the political history of Russia.

>>20135807
>>20135784
>>20135828
>>20135726
>>20133763
>>20131174
best community ever

>>20131178
Sometimes stories can give you a better picture of the truth than facts.

Gulag Archipelago isn't the best book to start with unless your interest in Russia starts and ends with the soviet union
Not really sure why people are recommending it

>>20135882
This is true. The Gulag Archipelago is fantastic, but it only concerns a very small piece of Russia's history, so this is a great recommendation if you are hyperfixated on this topic.

read notes from underground

I liked Hedrick Smith's The Russians and The New Russians. First book was written in the early 70's and the second in the late 80's, so they talk a lot about the USSR and its social conditions.

>>20131356
ultra-based, sometimes true stories don't tell you the whole truth.

>>20135882
Kolyma Tales is also good if you happen to have an interest in the Soviet Union.

to really understand what Russia is about, read this book.
Russians have a special character, learning about them is learning about Russia.

>>20136794
literally me
i even had a friend who was literally Shtolz.
Mediocre author but genius epiphany.
>r. ruski

>>20136773
Shalamov was an actually prisoner in the actual GULAG system. Solzenitsyn was a snitch and gay in some soft tier prison.

>>20131059
Not a book, but Anatoly Karlin is worth reading if you're interested in Russian geopolitics.

https://akarlin.com/
https://akarlin.substack.com/

The Gulag Archipelago
Animal Farm (allegory to the Russian revolution)

>>20131059
Byzantium Endures.

>>20136860
>Animal Farm (allegory to the Russian revolution)

>>20131059
Lenin's Tomb

>>20131059
Pic related. Its from 2013 but still very actuall.

any books about how it was to live in russia after the udssr were kaputt and it was like the wild west because there werent any authorities?

>>20131059
Putin recommends “Sketches from a Hunter's Album” by Ivan Turgenev.

>"I could recommend to you one of the best Russian classic writers, Ivan Turgenev, with his books translated into dozens of foreign languages including, certainly, English. His well-known A Sportsman's Sketches has been a favorite book of Russian hunting fans for more than a century, which reflects in general the philosophy of hunting in Russia, where the mere process, the fact that you are close to nature and communicate with people, matters-not the outcome. It does not contain any passionate chases or vivid description of hunting trophies. The main character, in a simple but picturesque and very sympathetic way, tells stories about people he met while hunting, and their lives. They are a sort of sketches on Russia's heartland of the mid-19th century that provide food for thought and allow us to see our country, its traditions and national psychology in a new light.”

http://favobooks.com/politicians/86-vladimir-putin-reads.html

>>20131059
Russian literature is literally the most boring kind of books you can find
No wonder this lonely incel board likes them so much
I also had my phase when I was in college reading this boring bullshit and thinking I'm smart but I'm happy I grew out of it

>>20138205
Lonely incel here, I never liked the russian literature except nabokov.

>>20132020
Putin is not your neonazi saviour you embarrassing retard

>>20135882
Also hasn't it been proven to be quite embellished and even fraudulent at parts? I know a big reason it got pushed so hard was because it made for great anti-soviet material straight from the belly of the beast, regardless of quality or accuracy

>>20131059
Five Years at the Russian Court by Margaretta Eagar
Diary in Russia by Hanbury-Williams
Fate of the Romanovs

>>20131059
Day of the Oprichnik by Vladimir Sorokin

>>20138344
He de facto is, since all international Jews hate him and many Russian "oligarchs" are now fleeing to Israel or the west

>>20131059
A Concise History of Russia by Paul Bushkovitch

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0521543231

>>20138205
what do you read now

>>20138205
non-loner non-incel here, I always liked russian literature except nabokov

>>20131059
I try to find books written in the time period I want to learn about

>>20138512
The jews are either indifferent or actively supporting his denazification campaign, or do you think explicitly calling out the Azov battalion and vaporizing their HQ was his epic based 4D chess move to usher in the fourth reich?

>>20138512
but the jewligarchs are only fleeing to save their wealth from western sanctions, theyve been happy as a clam in putins russia until the west started crushing their balls

>>20138648
It's more complicated than that. But I don't want to derail the thread further

Slavery in Russia, 1450-1725
Godfather of the Kremlin

Ignore hagiographic biographical and apologetic garbage written by slavophiles and exiled nobility. Immediately destroy any romantic ideas you have about Russian past. Russia was a mafia state for hundreds of years that was a hell on earth for everyone except nobility, tiny urban classes, and provincial mercenary castes. For a long time this was barely recognized and full expositions of the abuses began to occur during the Soviet period.

The other book I recommend "Godfather of the Kremlin" shows that not much has changed in modern Russia. It demonstrates the magnitude of the humanitarian disaster of the 90s and the fradulent theft of public property that resulted in the extreme wealth concentration we see today. Russian Federation is really a combination of two criminal enterprises, public and private, each extracting as much as possible from the population through different channels. The federal structure is mostly a fake, provinces have no real power and nearly all cash is funneled to the central government. Local and provincial officials get by in the usual corrupt way but they don't become millionaires like politicians in Moscow. Read the book to get an understanding of the completely rotten foundations of modern Russia.

>>20138648
Azov battalion is bravely fighting so that Ukrainian boys can become proud queerpositive methpositive transqueens
As per usual there are jews on both sides

>>20138769
>a mafia state for hundreds of years that was a hell on earth for everyone except nobility, tiny urban classes, and provincial mercenary castes
This is the only moral form of society, sorry to break it to you
The vast majority of people aren't fit to direct their own lives

>>20131059
Geoffrey Hosking is great, tries to be analytical instead of narrative with his history, and maintains a neutral outlook on historical events. No crying about evil nazi bolsheviks murdering innocent ukrainian children for fun, and instead presenting the famine in its entirety with a plurality of the victims being ethnic russians.
Try Russia and the Russians for a one-volume take, or Russia: People and Empire + A History of the Soviet Union 1918-1990 for a more thorough two-volume narrative. He is great in that he spends quite a lot of time on social factors, relation of various ethnicities and non-russian people to the state and the policies that were formed to tackle these issues.

>>20139665
>t.serf in denial

>>20131059
>Not modern-day Russia but Russia in general.

LMAO, they're so far removed from on another that reading one on Russia in general will offer nothing relatable to modern day "Russia" the mafia state.

>>20132247
Putin is nazi trash

>>20131059
Dead souls by Gogol is a really fun depiction of 1830s Russia

>>20136846
LOL fucking retard.

>>20139907
When the overgrown overpopulated global liberal society collapses, 95% of us will be serfs for the warlords. This is not only acceptable, it's how a sane world would operate, in contrast to this decadent hedonistic egalitarian-elitist shithole we currently live in
You're under the delusion that your way of life is tolerable or moral, that you would be an exception in that case, and that your values derive from and symbolize strength. Really that idea of liberty has ever been anything but a Masonic weapon to butcher correct human society for profit

>>20140099
t.schizo

>>20138348
The entire thing is a fabrication. His wife basically said he invented the whole thing after the fact to bolster proTzarist rhetoric. There were no "gulags." It's a Peterson meme.

>>20140105
not an argument

>>20140107
so true!

>>20138512
Oligarchs are fleeing to Israel because they aren't going as heavy on rhetoric and sanctions against Russia as they're more allied than the west

>>20140133
No, it is. You’re a sniveling bootlicking pos. An enemy to humanity. Monarchism! You understand little of the old world.

>>20132020
Dugin is peak pseud and no one follows his playbook other than himself because no one can follow it.

>>20140983

>>20141026
Notice how these republics liberal capitalism keep setting up aren’t democratic at all? No, they’re oligarchic, anon. They’re practically monarchist as they are.
I propose actual democracy, and bootlickers like you can’t even fathom it

>>20141075
>UM THE PROBLEM IS WE DIDNT GO FAR ENOUGH
You propose a variant of the same shit-heap system, which could be le good!!! if it just followed slightly different principles and DID IT RIGHT. You're just a lib-dem factionalist, nothing new at all.
That entire project is compromised from top to bottom. People are not equal in any practical sense and the only liberty they care about is the liberty to get fat, do drugs, have sex and manufacture social validation on the cheap; all this to the maximum possible extent. The current state of affairs where public institutions all seek to maximize hedonism and degrade anybody who objects to this, from the left or the right, without any shred of consistency or self-respect, is the expected outcome after vulgarizing and democratizing every institution and sphere of life.
Breakdowns of hierarchy have led to breakdowns in the very concept of standards, and everybody becomes the same brand of copy-paste conformist bugman with shallow interests and aesthetic consumer-identities - just as we have seen for generations at this point. This was inevitable because humans are selfish stupid shortsighted animals. Traditional codes of behaviour are more holistic, more restrictive, more discriminate than what we see today, but they were written in blood and should not have been discarded just like that. By nature humans are insatiable beasts who need to be restrained and denied. Barring literal miracles, we only learn what works by what's left.

Is that shit about an island gulag where people resorted to cannibalism true or just propaganda?

>>20141266
they do this shit in north korea

>>20138769
>full expositions of the abuses began to occur during the Soviet period.
yeah like the soviets totally wouldnt embellish such things for the sake of their ideological goals, right?

MFers are cold and dark. when was the last time you saw a russian smile, i bet you can't even remember one.

>>20141360
because they come from a cold climate and theyre poor

>>20141247
>UM THE PROBLEM IS WE DIDNT GO FAR ENOUGH
Yeah, but there are times in history where we did go that far, and it worked. And we want it still.
> You propose a variant of the same shit-heap system, which could be
You fear groups of people running their own lives.
>slightly different principles
No, it is this world of oligarchy that’s only slightly different from monarchism. I propose a contrarywise system. Why we call it a revolution and distinguish it from a coup.
>lib-dem
These politicians that pin this label on themselves are representatives of the wealthiest nine times out of ten. I don’t care how much they wish for something more “liberal” or “democratic”, they’re for feeding the aristocracy of merchants and bankers. Who resemble the older aristocracy so much because some of them are. The feed I mention above is obviously what supports the whole thing. Debt tokens are required of the slave class. Money corrupts, compromises the whole world of human discourse.
I don’t care what else this schizo rant gets wrong. You aren’t in possession of a functional skull

>>20138691
>GREEN FROG IS A HATE SYMBOL AND EVERYONE POSTING IT ONLINE SHOULD BE PUBLICLY OSTRACIZED
>Azov's founding member Andriy Biletsky, leader of the far-right Social-National Assembly (SNA), had stated in 2010 that "the historic mission of our nation" was to lead the "white races of the world in a final crusade for their survival […] a crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen"
>W-well... I mean, it's ok, they're not directly a-attacking us or anything
Fucking pathetic. All their grandstanding and gestures and "values" abandoned at the drop of a hat if it allows them to accomplish their subversive goals

>>20141360
>>20141364
What are you talking about?
They’re just serious minded most of the time.
https://youtu.be/yzfy_uYwjoY

>>20131059
OP please disregard all other (admittedly quite good) suggestions in this thread and read Dead Souls by Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol. In the early 19-teens, as is somewhat well known, Tsar Nicholas II commissioned chemist Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky to travel around the Russian Empire with his newly developed color photo camera to make a visual record of what the peoples and cultures of the empire were like. The result (like picrel) is a stunningly-clear window into a bygone era. Well, Gogol’s book is a little like the literary equivalent of this except set a bit further back in history. In it, Gogol’s protagonist travels through Russia and the people he meets and interacts with, though fictional, capture an aspect of Russian culture and sociality as they then were that is lost on even today’s finest cameras. While listening to the author read a draft of the work out loud, Pushkin grew depressed and finally exclaimed "God! What a sad country this is!"

>>20141374
>Yeah, but there are times in history where we did go that far, and it worked. And we want it still.
LMAO alright then, what's your LARP of choice?
>You fear groups of people running their own lives.
No, I see what they've done with the opportunity and it's plainly maladaptive. Personally I'm also sick of it. But thankfully, thermodynamics will collapse this bent society and all of the addicts it's spawned
>No, [actually you're the same]
I am not a utopianist and I don't believe in rights. That's alien to either of you.
Comparing systems on the basis of hierarchy is a moronic argument. Hierarchy exists in all societies, it existed in every single society that claimed socialism or communism as well, it exists in some form on the level of the smallest social groups like among circles of friends. Hierarchy is a tool for humans to solve problems on an interpersonal and societal level. When formalized and upscaled, it defends against outside pressures and controls internal pressures in large societies. By all accounts small hunter-gatherer tribes got away without formal hierarchies, but that social model is outcompeted by even older social features, like agriculture.
Liberalism's devolution into a hierarchy is not a reason to dispose of it, it proves that hierarchy is inevitable and indispensable. The problem is that it is a perverted contradicted hierarchy. Liberalism is a shambling corpse purely on grounds of contradiction and hypocrisy, the fact that it causes subject peoples to poison themselves is just a second-order effect.
>[your] schizo rant
you seem to be either a libertarian or an ansoc and dogmatically invoke pleb seethe just like they do, while I'm primarily looking at this problem through a higher structuralist lens. Get real you lunatic

>>20141548
>No, I see
No, you do not. You’re looking at the wrong place. You’re not even acknowledging them
> [actually you're the same]
I just stated how you and your shadow are the same. I am neither.
> and I don't believe in rights. That's alien to either of you
Aren’t you the one advocating monarchal feudalism?
>hierarchies
You don’t know a thing about any of this. Stop talking

>>20139665
>This is the only moral form of society
what's funny is that you can't argue this on any level in the Russian context. You think might makes right? Well the nobility and priestly classes were anything but mighty, they were weak and pampered, didn't even have to go to war, conscripts did that (in incredibly shitty conditions btw, which is why Russians lost so many men in wars). The strong on the other hand were peasants who were ripped from years of hard labor. You believe in divine right or in monarchy? Russian monarchy was the most cynical of all European monarchies with the most assassinations of Tsars, internal plots, fathers murdering their sons, sons murdering their fathers, etc. Religious authority? Russian monarchy repressed Old Believers with pogroms and put down Cossacks (militant Christians) constantly until after Pugachev's rebellion they were turned into mercenaries for the state. Can you believe it? Morally corrupt weakling nobles imposing a slave morality religion on the naturally strong to hypnotize them into compliance, its disgusting and no wonder it led to disaster.

Technocratic competence? Russian bureaucracy was anything but competent; they didn't manage internal ethnic conflicts or expansion to the East, both were done by adventurers and mercenaries. The prolonging of slavery and serfdom by decades prevented industrialization on par with the West. Useless military adventures in Georgia and Central Asia drained the country of resources. Millions of Russians were conscripted and treated like cannon fodder for decadent, retarded nobility's stupid games. Are you a racist and you hate "racial mutts"? Romanovs were mutts of the highest order, mixing with Danes of Schleswig-Holstein, Rhineland Germans, Prussians, Poles, Swedes, Hessians, and maybe others that I'm forgetting. They even engaged in incest. Peter I "the great" was a dysgenic, microcephalic, epileptic lanklet who died because he couldn't piss. And all of this without talking about their crimes against the people, because you obviously hate the common people despite most likely being one yourself.

Doesn't matter if you're a racist, monarchist, classist, whatever, only a retard can defend Tsarist era.
>yeah like the soviets totally wouldnt embellish such things for the sake of their ideological goals, right?
The reality is the opposite. Soviet historiography tried to downplay the role of slavery in Russian Empire because historical materialism and Lenin said Russia had always been a feudal country, so slaves weren't supposed to be in the class structure. Nonetheless, once estates of the nobility and archives were seized and historians began publishing in journals like Historian-Marxist, this information started to emerge. If you don't believe that it's rigorous work I can link the articles that started coming out in the 20s about the condition of the serfs. For what it's worth similar research would have taken place if the Russian Republic had survived.

>>20141639
>No, you do not. You’re looking at the wrong place. You’re not even acknowledging them
you're citing revolutions as a role model, like these same people didn't fucking lead each of the big 3 revolutions in history. Remember when American landowners cynically threw out the Brits over business interests and then George Washington proceeded to forcefully crush a tax uprising less than 10 years later?
>Aren’t you the one advocating monarchal feudalism?
I want all utopianists to die in despair. I am advocating pessimism, which could have prevented all this. This has nothing to do with ideology, it has to do with hard demographic, economic, and ecological impacts of the Enlightenment industrialism (alongside the typical subjective social impacts) which are now finally coming home to roost. Feudalism was pretty dead by then, monarchism (absolutist) was still around, but I don't especially care for either mode of social organization. It is only important that humans are kept in the dirt where they belong, and hubris is kept in total check, since otherwise they'll just fly into the sun (as we have seen)
I suppose it seemed like I supported monarchism, but I really just oppose liberalism since it is intrinsically utopian. A putative postliberal despotism is certainly neither utopian nor is it a classical monarchy
>You don’t know a thing about any of this. Stop talking
Your boomer conspiracy canon doesn't have a monopoly on discussion about the elites and frankly it's an outdated embarrassing product of the initial culture shocks in the 90s. You people have no clout or credit because you endlessly bitch never do anything

>>20139665
>dude not fit yo direct even his own life tells the rest of the world how they should direct theirs
Almond activation.

>>20141666
>what's funny is that you can't argue this on any level in the Russian context.
No, that's exactly why you can argue this in the Russian context.
The worst premodern European society was still better than the utopianists that came after, capitalists or communists, both engaging in idiotic transhumanist rhetoric which stripped away unspoken aspects of human society that had been taken for granted. Imperial Russia was not subject to demographic collapse and rampant suicide rates to the same extent as what came afterwards. In the most apparently-obvious case where one might say "alright, surely anything is better than this, surely our engineered society can do better than these retards", it still crashed and burned.
Conversely, the Anglo-Germanic strain of civic society which so triumphantly and competently built this new world, starting from the nascent centers of self-righteous secular authority in Greenwich and Holland and Saxony, is also exhausted and ruined.
Hubris invariably is a recipe for disaster. It is a recipe for disaster in all cases.

>>20141736
>dude not fit [to] direct even his own life
Based on what?

>>20141431
uuoohh!

>>20141744
>Imperial Russia was not subject to demographic collapse and rampant suicide rates
Suicide is one of the most prevalent themes in classical Russian literature. The protagonist of the most influential Russian novel, constantly estimated to be the greatest work of all times, kills herself, while the secondary antagonist avoids her fate by completely rejecting the "beautiful pre-modernity" of the Imperial society and retreating into village to his family and peasants.

Through the plot Crime and Punishment, the protagonists personally encounters 4 cases of suicide or attempt at suicide in less than a week in Petersburg, without counting his own musings.

By mid XIX century the Church practice of burying suicide victims outside the graveyard fence fell into decline due to their frequency, so the Church just stopped considering obvious suicide as such.

The only reason why we can't talk statistics is that Russian Empire maintained next no no effective census of it's population, demographics and death causes - they counted their peasants less than a rancher counts his cattle, because they cared even less about it. The entire plot primes of Gogol's Dead Souls is built on the bureaucratic retardation of the Imperial government, specifically regarding peasant census.

>but muh population growth
Nobody beats China and India there. I assume that you consider them to be the true examples of ideal human society. Nothing affirms human life as much as it's devaluation, right?

>Hubris invariably is a recipe for disaster.
You say that in a discussion about a society that justified it's own timeless eternality by nothing more or less than a divine decree. And then it fucking crashed and died.

>>20141782
>the secondary protagonist

>>20141782
>Suicide is one of the most prevalent themes in classical Russian literature.
Your literary examples reflect the sensibilities of the authors, consider the contrast between AK and C&P specifically. The only point that adds to your argument here is the church policy. However, nobody can dispute what happened in the 90s, even beyond statistics and recency bias; it has been remarkable on a global level.
>Nothing affirms human life as much as it's devaluation, right?
What affirms human life is its maintenance. A sterile declining population is not more valuable based on some elaborated market principle, and the inverse is not true either; the sterilized aging population is a liability.
For that matter if the only humans around in 1000 years are Quechuan hill peoples and Bedouin nomads and Pashtun herdsmen, then those social models are better than ours. China is demographically compromised and I know too little about India to speak on it
>And then it fucking crashed and died.
Remind me how long the Soviets lasted.

>>20141822
>What affirms human life is its maintenance.
>For that matter if the only humans around in 1000 years are Quechuan hill peoples and Bedouin nomads and Pashtun herdsmen, then those social models are better than ours.
Literal bugman,

>>20131059
Unironically, one of the best books I've read [non-fiction] is 'Second-hand Time'. TLDR it is a series of interviews given by Russian citizens between 2000 and 2012. It's fascinating and depressing hearing the stories of people who talk about the collapse of their 'civilization', the trauma that the generations from Stalin's reign of terror etc inflicted upon their children [alcoholism, mainly], and everything in between. There's hundreds of interviews in there. My favourite ones are the millionaire businessman who calls everyone shmucks for not making money in the collapse of the USSR. The one(s) I find the most depressing are the college professor whose degree in Marxist Science literally no longer exists [they become homeless], and the mother whose son kills himself.

To your specific interest, there's loads in there about the culture of Russia described as it is by Russians. In many ways I think it's more useful than a history book written by some Amerifat or Britpopper talking about the 'tragedy' of Russia like it's some mentally disabled child who was never quite able to become white.

>>20142002
The kind of post I come to /lit/ for.

>>20131178
W&P is not entirely fiction, you idiot. Did you even read it?

>>20139665
sauce on that webm?

>>20142174
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coonskin_(film)
>Rabbit first goes up against Managan (Frank de Kova), a virulently racist and homophobic police officer and bagman for the Mafia, who demonstrates his contempt for African-Americans in various ways, including a refusal to bathe before an anticipated encounter with them (he believes that they are not worth it). When Managan finds out that Rabbit has been taking his payoffs, he and his cohorts, Ruby (Frank de Kova) and Bobby, are led to a nightclub called "The Cottontail". A black stripper distracts him while an LSD sugar cube is dropped into his drink. Managan, while under the influence of his spiked drink, is then maneuvered into a sexual liaison with a stereotypically effeminate gay man, and then shoved into women's clothing representative of the mammy archetype, adorned in blackface, and shoved out to the back of the club, where he discovers that Ruby and Bobby are dead. While recovering from being drugged, he fires his gun randomly in a fit of madness, and is brutally shot to death by the arriving police (who were either called in or alerted by the gunshots going off) after shooting one of the officers dead in his stupor.

>>20142174
>>20142235
Don’t bother watching it, I turned it off at the 20 minute mark.
It’s pure, unartistic filth.

>>20142002
Didn't that author admit to having no pretensions of being a reporter and occasionally embellishing stories and being selective with shit for rhetorical effect?

>>20141822
>Remind me how long the Soviets lasted.
The entirety of the current modernist, unjust, decadent, rotten, pseudo-egalitarian civilization has already outlasted the "better" premodernity.

So, this social model is better than yours.

>>20142294
Refer to my other example.
When climate and supply chain collapse destroy the massive overwrought urbanized industrial populations and the survivors wither away through conflict and infertility, and Quechua hill-farmers are left, who have been living in much the same way since before the Spanish arrival, whose model is better?

>>20142251
It triggered the tranny, probably worth checking out at least.

>>20142317
>When climate and supply chain collapse destroy the massive overwrought urbanized industrial populations and the survivors wither away through conflict and infertility, and Quechua hill-farmers are left, who have been living in much the same way since before the Spanish arrival, whose model is better?
The problem with the example is that the premodern society has ALREADY gone extinct, so into the trash it goes according to your own methodology. You try and resolve the contradiction by introducing two assumptions:
1. That the contemporary society will inevitably crash and burn.
That's not entirely without substance, but acts much more as wishful thinking here - you don't try to understand or describe the processes going on in the contemporary society and their possible consequences, you just preemptively write it off, because you just really want to. If you had a shred of intellectual sincerity, you would be worried that it might actually NOT crash and burn, and how that might actually happen. Which is still entirely an option. Instead you simply take it for granted.
2. That once the contemporary society crashes and burns, it is going to be replaced by muh based premodernity, not by something even more unjust or dehumanizing than the modernity.
That one really IS completely without substance. You literally pull it out of your ass, because you can't handle the alternative.

>>20131059
>greatest-of-all-time literature
Social realism was hip in the 19th century, and Russia was into it. It's not the greatest literature by any means. There's Greece, Rome, Britain, and France that are all above it. You can't have the best literature when you only have one century of it.
>impossible political revolutions
Jews happened to be Eastern Europe and they were funded by rich jews to take out the Tsar.

Russia is an interesting country, but your reasons are juvenile.

>>20142362
>Rome
>You can't have the best literature when you only have one century of it.
How can you have the best literature when you only have 0 centuries of it, tho?

>>20138647
Very beautiful brother.

>>20142366
? Great Roman literature started in 3rd century BC with Plautus and went well into the 2nd century AD with Juvenal, Aurelius, Lucan, and Apuleius.

>>20141710

based WLF reader.

>>20142340
>option 1
I've been glossing over things not because of a lack of concrete justification but just to keep my answers shorter to write and read. We are standing at the intersection of a number of worsening crises on a global level.
Demand for petrochemicals has not diminished while supply is being stretched. Green energy alternatives are built with petrochemicals and rare earth minerals which are themselves subject to shortage. Agriculture is becoming more vertically integrated and streamlined for efficiency in terms of inputs and outputs, worsening effects of local shortages, even as fertilizer supplies are running out and seed supply is restricted by cartels. Actually the same is broadly true across the larger economy, which is why the initial coronavirus lockdown caused knock-on shortages for two years in some industries on the basis of simple short-term demand fluctuation - see computer chips.
Global temperatures are rising faster than the most pessimistic models predicted, the number of cataclysmic fires/floods/storms/droughts increases each year, this is placing additional stress on many breadbaskets. Arctic ice melt is accelerating each year; once it melts completely it isn't clear if it will freeze again or if the North Sea will see a massive permanent climate shift. Rising ocean levels have caused more frequent catastrophic flooding in places like NYC which has simply gone ignored. CO2 directly makes most crop plants produce less nutritious yields. Also, climate impacts have a lag time with actual outputs of greenhouse gas, so the current trends and feedback loops are not even accounting for the past few decades of massive growth. We discover new pollutants and pollutant impacts each day, with which we've already saturated the earth.
Rates of mental illness are going up, fertility rates are going down. The industrial demographic transition has never reversed itself in any society. COVID has revealed the weakness of governments, and of people denied constant luxuries.
Each of these problems has been compounding faster than expected; meanwhile, our economic system undergoes massive crisis if growth even stops, let alone drops drastically. Without constant growth, it becomes impossible to pay for things like pensions and public services.
So we are living in a more hostile world with more people who are less adaptable, all while our socioeconomic systems tend towards fragile complexity. 7% of all people who have ever lived are alive today. All things considered it is almost impossible that we avoid disaster, and the disaster will strike on a global level.
Unlike most crises, our core social mechanisms are inexorably contributing to this one. The last time anything comparable happened was the Bronze Age Collapse when civilization itself disappeared for hundreds of years in some places, in a former heartland of civilization. Their crisis was that they were slowly salting the earth with their irrigation practices.

>>20142340
>>20142652
What happened after that collapse? The explosion of people living on the margins like the shepherding Aramaeans, who were a tiny ethnic group living in the Syrian hills amidst prosperous city-states. They make petty kingdoms in pale imitation of the Bronze Age powerhouses that came before, and their language becomes the most widely spoken in the region for the next thousand years. A resurgent Assyria responds to depleted bronze reserves by turning to iron, and carves a swathe through deserted and partially-recovered territories, adopting Aramaic and spreading its use further.
>option 2
Throughout the thread I have consistently been referring to a postliberal despotism alongside any premodern holdouts, which would arise from the shattered remains of modern states. This despotism would likely consist of open warlordism of the sort seen in China in the early 1900s or more recently in Africa, which would coalesce into some semblance of stability if food supply and fertility problems could be overcome. You would see charismatic military leaders or ethnic and religious chiefs at the head of private armies who can defend territory and people. This is what has happened with small-scale collapses in Africa and the Middle East in recent history. The larger-scale event would begin similarly, but these distinctions would widen irreparably over time.
In the new world it would not be possible to even manufacture plastics let alone electronics, because the very complicated and specialized technologies and mechanisms and machines, most of them proprietary, that prop up everything that happens in Western economies would literally be forgotten and lost like with the fall of Rome. People would have other problems for a long enough time that the hyperspecialized skills involved in maintaining these systems would go extinct. Also, the population will drop severely, and those most affected would be the specialists living in places which are least self-sufficient.
So we would revert to a preindustrial standard of technology at best, and while basic imperialism might be possible again, industrialism would never be. Easy cheap plentiful sources of the components for a Second Industrial Revolution were all long-depleted since the first one. And because the new societies would be agriculturalist by necessity, they would adopt agriculturalist traits over time. There can be no analogy to Assyria because there is no alternative to oil or coal as good as there was for bronze.
It makes no sense to talk about anything but premodernity, because even if things like slavery or cannibalism come back, that all happened in premodernity. The only functional distinction between premodernity and modernity, the only one that matters, is that modernity sterilizes people while demanding they contribute more, because of utopian expectations and industrial lifestyle. This is a recipe for disaster, and it's a result of the hubris I mentioned previously.

>>20141778
What does this reaction mean?

>>20143221

>>20143259

>>20136846
>reading a rabid retard

>>20141744
>idiotic transhumanist rhetoric which stripped away unspoken aspects of human society
read a medical textbook. every single condition that exists now existed then. anal fistulas, prolapses, hernias, all kinds of physical deformities. things that can be managed or fixed today were there to see and they were equally disgusting and repellant to the senses then as now. they just weren't talked about because they were embarassing and gross. that shit is degrading and humiliating and no amount of traditionalism, or pilgramages, or prayers or traditional rites can make up for this shit.

>>20138205
>wait Vanechka and Ivan are one person, the post

>>20143529
they wanted to find god in those things to justify the inversion of the societal structure

all they did was sink the poor and downthroaten

Venedict Erofeev Moskva- Petushki

>>20143529
No. A society of goat herders where child mortality is 50% and half of remaining mortality is because wolves eat people alive is better than a society of aestheticians which rapes nature and God and other societies to sustain itself then implodes when they run out of things to rape. That latter society lived an extractive parasitic existence then committed suicide, and is the most pathetic thing imaginable. You're a maladjusted person living in a walled garden completely out of touch with reality like every citizen of a so-called developed society.
>dude but what about bad smells and filth and disease and deformation and yuck and ick and cooties
if your opinions are so superficially aesthetic then I could shoot you in the head to irrefutably win the argument