With Putin talking about the orthodox church being holy and using to justify some conservative bullshit, all I can remember was the bolsheviks going around the country proudly declaring that cities were now "officially godless" and redistributing the church's gold amongst the people and using it to pay for electrification projects.
Shit like this is why it's absolutely cursed when libs post Trump Putin are commies memes. On what fucking planet you historically illiterate dingus?
Russians are just naturally commies it has to do with their skull shape or something I think
Of course! That's why it's so tragic that the romanovs died, they went to the best finishing schools to learn how to subdue their innate commie urges 😭
ah if course, the Teutoloid Head has been warped through papist devilry over the generations leaving them fit to only march around in random shapes and eat potato. Tragically prone to "crusader moment" spasms. Only by a conversation to Protestantism and a thorough washing can they be saved.
The emperor and the pope had a full-blown culture war going around the end of the 19th / start of the 20th century. They were really worried about the loyalties of the Transmontanen ("those across the mountains", as they were believed to get their orders from across the Alps, were the Vatican is located if you take a look from Berlin). This culture war included a whole bunch of Catholic priests getting jailed. Wilhelminian Germany was actually more repressive towards the church than the DDR (i'm almost on-topic again, yaaaaaay).
BTW, all the other stuff is true. I eat the kartoffel a lot, with majo, and whenever i see a group of uniformed marchers from my window, they march in a very poorly ordered way because they're already shitface drunk at noon.
Just for clarity, this isn't a bit, this is all true. Yes, including the part with the alcoholic uniformed marchers.
Why are they marching?
I know German cuisine can be bland, but surely you don't just eat potatoes like apples?
Why are they marching?
Officially, it's a thing to preserve local tradition, in actuality it's a way to get plastered, make deals with local small business tyrants, and get a gun license if you're into that. I'm referring to the Schützen ("marksmen") that are huge in rural parts of the Rhineland and a token few other places, but other places have similar, thematically different clubs for wearing uniforms, marching around, getting drunk and doing a little tit for tat with your small town business network. As you can see here , they'll carry around toy guns while out in town, the real ordinance gets given out when they take turns shooting at a wooden bird mounted on a large pole to determine who of them gets to be this year's Marksman King. The king has to buy everybody free drinks and gets to ride in a carriage and shit like that, and builds a fake castle out of plywood or paper mache around his house's front door (this makes it sound as if he's some kind of rare bird, but it actually be like that), and then they all meet at the "King's Residence" to drink more beer. As the king has to pay all of that out of his own pocket, it's a prestigious thing to even take a serious shot at the bird. You compete to become King to demonstrate to the people that you're affluent and popular.
As you can imagine, all of that is incredibly chuddy in most places.
I know German cuisine can be bland, but surely you don’t just eat potatoes like apples?
They're mostly a popular side dish, the foundation for potato salad (a classic for christmas dinner) or a kind of hash browns (delicious Reibekuchen, or Rievekoche as we call them in the Rhineland), and of course everybody loves fries. Or potatos from the pan. Or baked potatos. Or crocettes. Or sourdough with potato, which i highly, highly recommend, it gives a juicy, chewy texture to the bread and makes it stay fresh longer.
Admittedly, the German love for the Kartoffel is a bit of a cliché, most of us eat a lot of international cuisine, and you can get excellent Turkish or Arabian fast food almost everywhere. But Turkish and Italian immigrants started caling Germans Kartoffeln as a comeback to constantly being called Spaghetti or Döner (note that the Germans calling them that likely eat a ton of spaghetti and döner themselves, i guess it really is always projection).
So because of that Kartoffel joke, chuds now think that blond, blue-eyed German schoolkids are constantly called Kartoffel by evil muslims gangster kids and insist that being called a Kartoffel is an n-word level form of racism. Basically, Kartoffel is the German equivalent to cracker or whitey. So i just love to throw that word around in the same way that American posters here will post about majonaise, or to trigger chuds when i'm on the German-speaking part of the internet.
Idk why this made me think of this but my cousin was saying Russians definitely had a secret eugenics program because they thought it would be funny if the entire country was hot women and dopey looking dudes.
My history teacher said that Russians still like Lenin because Russians are naturally disposed to like strong leaders or some racist gibberish like that, rather than, idk, the massive improvements in quality of life.
Thinking about muricans worshiping people who hadnd't improved the common peoples lives :thonk:
I live on terf island so she dislikes Americans as well but then pulls out the old “America bad but Britain fine for some reason” line
US Americans worship leaders like Jefferson and Washington to a degree that is beyond what most Europeans worshiped their kings and queens. Literally 2 minutes ago I was driving on Jefferson Street and turned onto Madison Street.
pulling out giant prop callipers with the words NOT FOR RACE SCIENCE I SWEAR engraved on it
It is disheartening to see how seven decades of Marxist-Leninist ideological influence vanished within a few years, leaving Russia as a nationalist chud-fest.
People were just hiding their religion back then. It was one of the most stupid descisions of the USSR, people who supported socialism were alienated because they couldn't pray and their preachers had to go into hiding or were deported.
because they couldn’t pray and their preachers had to go into hiding or were deported.
This reads like anti soviet rhetoric.
Because that was an extremly shortsighted thing to do, there is little here to defend or talk positively about. It didn't work and was counterproductive. Though to be fair, most Mullahs weren't deported, they just left or went into hiding. I have no idea about the christians.
This is definitly something we have to learn from and should not repeat.
China's doing a good job with it. Using their expropriate political power and allow it to exist instead of exterminate methods.
Exactly, most faith just went underground and it led to resentment with soviet institutions. You can't forbid culture or religion wholesale it doesn't work.
Completely forbidding anything that isn't a new cultural development will lead to erosion of trust. You have to wean people off old ways of thinking by being better than their old support systems.
If socialism is going to win, it's going to be by just being better, not by banning old ways of thought (exceptions for old ways of thought that require oppression of individuals or groups).
This at least give me some hope that maybe that the reverse could happen for the USA and the Western world if there's ever revolutions
This is the problem of the lumpenproletariat. I'm sure the Soviets tried to eliminate their ignorance, but I don't think they were all that successful. This is gonna be a real tricky issue for any socialist project in the future.
People need a positive light to guide them. "Decide for yourself" is, literally, too hard for many of them. They need some kind of higher purpose, and "get the tractor factory running on time" ain't it. One of the Soviet Union's major failings was neglecting the people's spirituality, or worse, attempting to crush it.
Liberalization was a catastrophe that caused mass death and suffering, and churches provided the same sort of community support and mutual aid that they do in the US, helping people survive. It makes perfect sense why in the sudden absence of the social support and secular community building that the USSR provided people would end up dependent on newly rebuilt religious institutions and become indoctrinated as a result (and the study on excess mortality resulting from liberalization specifically called out areas where religious institutions provided support networks as experiencing less excess death, demonstrating that such communities were an effective social defense mechanism that helped people survive hardship).
I've seen the same basic process happen firsthand in the US: my family was always secular and my grandparents were explicitly atheists and socialists, but decades ago my mother started attending a church with a friend of hers out of a vague need for community and mutual aid and became thoroughly indoctrinated for a few years before breaking with them for reasons I never learned (and more recently she completely cut ties with that friend after I came out and that person was apparently a transphobic piece of shit about it).
People have a desperate need for community and support, and religious institutions prey upon that need very successfully. I can 100% believe that 75% of the population was atheist-by-default until everything collapsed around them and their only lifeline was accepting religious indoctrination. This is also why leftist mutual-aid operations are so specifically targeted for violence and suppression by capitalist police: providing people with material support and community is an extremely effective means of winning people over to your side, and so only far-right institutions are allowed to provide them on any large scale by the capitalist state.
but being an atheist in the US basically gets you isolated and ostracized if you’re not already bourgeois.
Yeah, atheism was just the default for me, apart from some vague pagan animist stuff from my father, while Christians were always a hostile Other who were basically outside tormentors and attackers. I can absolutely understand why atheists become misanthropic and reactionary in the face of that sort of hostility, and went through a phase of that myself when I was a teen (in addition to the absolute incoherence of swinging wildly from edgy libertarian shitheel to earnest totalitarian quasi-trot/ultra when I was in high school, progressing to edgy chauvinist succdem libertine in college).
Ironically, going from a position of relative privilege (believing myself to be a cishet guy) to an active target of religious hatred and persecution (trans woman) has mellowed me out considerably, despite making the conflict all the more personal. Maybe it's just a broadening understanding of what the opposing side really is: the chauvinism, racism, and classism that all exist independent of religious institutions. That is to say that the religion is a tool for reinforcing and spreading these problems, rather than the actual root of them, and that what must be defeated are chauvinist and reactionary tendencies as well as the material conditions of precarity, alienation, and desperation that drive people into the arms of theocratic institutions; by educating away bigotry and chauvinism, you remove the most toxic effect of religious institutions; by providing a cure for alienation and precarity through secular social support and mutual aid institutions you remove the material factors that entrench religious institutions as systems of control.
If those goals are accomplished, then personal religiosity stops mattering for the most part, and people should ideally be allowed to follow whatever belief system they want so long as they don't propagate reactionary and chauvinist ideals.
Thankfully I think a lot of them, as I said previously, just pretend to believe to fit in with their communities, which will isolate and ostracize them otherwise.
I don't believe that there's a functional difference after long enough: while obedience is enforced through holding social support hostage, even a cynical and performative expression of belief becomes genuine over time as a function of how memories and belief work (so, simply expressing belief in something or stating it as a fact will eventually lead to it becoming ingrained if one doesn't actively denounce it in one's mind). As you go on to say, the emotional experiences people have in churches with group song and other rituals serve to reinforce and build belief.
it makes me sick that the bourgeois “new atheist” movement led by western chauvinists like sam harris and richard dawkins has tied secularism to the neoconservative crusader mindset that proliferated in the george W bush era
Yeah. That reminds me of a different, related topic that I've talked about on here before, about how back then the "western left" as it were included a bunch of chauvinist libertines who were only there because fundamentalism was an active threat to their own personal hedonism, and when clear lines were drawn with Gamergate and its related culture war shit all the chauvinist libertine types went full fash because it promised them freedom not only from the rules of theocrats but also from the restriction of women saying "no" to them or the McDonalds cashier asking them to please stop screaming slurs. It's quite scary to think that I probably would have gone down that same path if not for the fact that I realized I was trans right when all that shit was kicking off, suffered what can only be described as the complete razing of my ideology and worldview as I dismantled all the lies and values that built up my repression, then rebuilt my worldview from the ground up in a world that was suddenly actively hostile to my very existence. It's also kind of disheartening to think that deprograming all the chauvinist shit I'd absorbed from pop-culture or synthesized on my own from own alienation took something as drastic as a deep and personal need to dismantle it for my own benefit, and how hard it was to overcome all the toxic barriers it left sitting around just to learn to be a better person. Teaching people to be better is not a simple matter of providing accurate information and education, but requires something that makes them receptive somehow.
this is an interesting point, and kind of scary, if true. the idea that one’s most deeply held convictions are reinforced memetically like that. Makes me think of the old phrase “fake it til you make it” but with much more concerning implications
It is scary. It can be used positively, and it's a common facet of self-help snake oil (as well as outright occult theory stuff) where just vocally declaring what you want to be true can alter your perspective to an extent if it's repeated for long enough. It can also be used to make certain lies automatic like an alias or fake backstory (some old friends of mine used to do this shit, making up aliases and backstories for themselves and one another and just telling these lies to random strangers as small talk), or just used to make yourself believe a lie enough that you can tell it convincingly. I think method acting may work on a similar principle, where you just kind of trick your brain into giving you a different headspace and set of information to draw on.
But it also has much darker uses when it comes to indoctrination, where if someone is made to repeat something enough it does start to sink in, whether that's religious or secular (like the ritual of pledging allegiance to the american flag that many millions of children are made to do every single day, although the abject misery of school probably detracts from the power of that particular ritual by associating it with being uncomfortable and miserable). It's not mind control by any means, and I don't want to give the impression that that's what I'm claiming, but it can ingrain itself over time if it's not challenged and corrected. I don't believe it's enough in and of itself to make someone coerced into performative rituals and declarations of belief start to believe them, since the coercion aspect implies an active resistance, but when paired with the other emotional effects of ritual it leaves people with a lot of sort of default lines with strong positive emotional attachment that their memory will bring up and so they will consider these to be beliefs just as a basic function of what they feel like when remembered.
i stopped standing for the pledge in high school and so did a lot of other kids. the older we got, the harder it was to force us to do it. i noticed it was mostly the white suburbanite kids still doing it in high school whereas most POC, and some of the “weird whites” (i.e LGBT whites, nerds, goths) would just lay their heads on the desk or text because it was too early for that shit. i went to a kinda liberal school though. i’m sure it was different at private schools charter schools and religious schools. also i was lucky to have kinda lefty teachers in the morning. i heard more conservative teachers mandated it and made a big deal out of it.
Yeah, I remember it mostly not being taken seriously in high school, and I just ignored it apart from my last semester there, when there was the unfortunate combination of it happening during a class that I actually enjoyed and was interested in (and which I'd probably say was the single positive experience I had in high school) and the teacher making a big deal of it, so I stood to avoid antagonizing someone I otherwise liked and respected.
one thing i thought was funny is that a lot of the kids in ROTC wouldn’t stand for the pledge. a lot of them were only in ROTC as a form of punishment for some form of “juvenile delinquency”.
That's wild, the only thing I ever heard from ROTC kids in high school was that they wanted to be officers or get some enlistment privileges related to having taken ROTC.
For posts like yours and /u/KobaCumTribute I visit this website.
My general understanding is that religion was suppressed than oppressed, if that makes sense. It's a topic I'm interested in because growing up in American Evangelicalism in the 80s and 90s, all I heard was how the godless communists would shoot and kill anyone found with a Bible. While that was an absurd exaggeration the USSR did take tons of measures to try and decrease religiousity, at least that's my cursory understanding.
My general understanding is that religion was suppressed than oppressed
From all i know, that's a very good way to put it. I can't speak about the USSR, but the DDR still had churches, people still attended, but it was publicly frowned upon and the churches did not have the sway over the government they show in western Germany to this day. Germany actually isn't a particularly religious country, we have a lot less practicing Christians than the USA even in the western parts and the eastern states bring that number down further to a considerable extend, religion still isn't popular there to this day. In total and utter defiance of this, both the Catholic and Protestant church still are disproportionately powerful lobbying groups who, to give a recent example, get super pissy when the federal government tries to take their easter mass from them due to covid - around Easter, we had less than 10% vaxxed people, btw, and the churches still insisted on holding services in person and got through with that.
That kind of influencing wasn't the case in the DDR at all, and i think it's part of the reason why both homosexuality and abortion got legalized earlier in the DDR than in the west. I also have the hunch that the DDR going ahead on this put pressure on the west to give in to demands of gay and women's rights groups unless they wanted to look backwards compared to the rival DDR, although that's speculation on my part.
BTW, the churches in the east were also hotbeds of counterrevolution and revisionism and were subject to state surveilance. For some people, social activities organized by the church where also a way to partake in gatherings that weren't state sponsored. So there'd be people on the fringes of the congregation, especially teenagers, who didn't bother much with Jesus and just wanted to hang out with other folks from around town in church-adjacent social clubs and the like, but there was also some subversion going on. Being religious itself didn't necessarily get you in trouble, but it made you look sus because of these elements being present around the churches and that could lead to further problems depending on what was found out on a closer look. Absolutely not "in gommulism, religious people get shot", nominally you could practice freely, but de facto you'd be considered a bit reactionary and treated accordingly. Groups meeting at churches played a fairly prominent part in the fall of the DDR as well, so Honnecker may have been on to something there.
Thank you for sharing, I love learning about the DDR. Stasi State or Socialist Paradise is pretty high on my list of books to read next.
It's still a bit of a heated subject here. I'm old enough to remember the wall coming down, but i grew up in the west, so i always only knew the western side of the story, which was full of horseshoe theory, vuvuzela no iphone (our equivalent is "DDR no banana", as imported fruit where often hard to get there) and resentment about the partition. Then when i got older, i met a ton of people from the east (both from the DDR and a bunch of other formerly AES countries) and the common theme was usually "yes, it was bad ... it was a dictatorship and i didn't want that system any longer, BUT ..." The east had it really rough after the reunification. It wasn't as harsh as in Russia, but 80% of the people there lost their jobs, entire industries got bought up for nothing by companies from the west, and while the stores were suddenly full of consumer goods that people had always yearned for, they had no money to buy them with. There's a lot of very deep resentment of capitalism among easterners and while there's historic reasons why nazis are a really serious problem there, it's also the part of the country where leftist politicians are still most successful. People there often don't buy into the narratives of liberal democracy, one way or the other. There's a lot of small differences like that. A historic case of one society being split in two and then both halves developing independently under totally different material conditions and a totally different ruling ideology.
This is a good perspective to hear. Like, so much of what the west said about the DDR was bullshit. But at the same time, I also want to be fair and not pretend it was a workers paradise and everyone was just tricked into wanting capitalism.
There was no going back after the USA flooded East Germany with capital. In From Us To Me the co-op fisherman made a great point that if the GDR managed to create an exchange program wherein young people were forced/allowed to live under capitalism for a while (working min wage in Mexico or something) they would never have wanted the wall to come down.
People fell for the Propaganda and wanted to try it, but there was no going back once the Vanguard fell and capital was allowed to reign freely.
Germany actually isn’t a particularly religious country, we have a lot less practicing Christians than the USA
Yes, but also don't ignore how fundamental the church and its influence are onto mainstream politics, business and such. Being outside of cities or within the Southwest / South makes a huge difference.
Absolutely, i'm just talking in general here. I've unfortunately still run into young earth creationist types more than once, but it's a lot less common than, say, in America.
Yeah, figures like that are usually off the charts for the US compared to other western nations.
Everyone in my family except my grandmother and siblings believe that shit
Going of the memories of my parents, in a Soviet affiliated country but not the USSR... the vast majority of practicing priests were agents for the internal police. In general practicing religion was discouraged, outright preaching wasnt a thing, and tabs were kept on people who openly went to church. Schoolchildren would get their behavior score deducted for going to church and school institutions could have a stern talk with parents over it. And of course kids were encouraged to snitch on parents over it.
Bibles were prohibited from being imported. If they searched your luggage and found one you were in troooooooouble. That's what they said back then anyway.
During Late Gorbi ? Doupt tbh, he was fucking up too much all over the place to care about anti-religious propaganda . That was mostly till Stalin died tbh
Others have already gave some good answers, but I'll say that the Soviets (for most of their history) desired for there to be ideally only one church in each town (plus a synagogue or mosque if there was a significant population of Jews or Muslims, though that didn't always happen.) If it was a bigger city there could be a few more but religion was definitely kept controlled. Obviously it'd be a pain in the ass to get to the one church and the KGB monitored most of them since dissidents often were there. If you went to church you wouldn't advertise it but it wouldn't be considered criminal.
This is a good explanation for the very sudden rise in the 90s, alongside people discovering religion as a guideline in the chaos, pauperization and uncertainty following the collapse. But it has gone up continuously and almost without interruption after that. If it was just "i actually was always devout, i just had to hide it under the Soviets", you'd see it plateau after a few years, but that plateau phase is only reached 23 years after the USSR's fall. Active proselytization seems more likely as an explanation for the rise past the mid 90s.
I mean, this is just guesswork based on what seems plausible at a glance, i'm not particularly knowledgeable on Russia.
I read texts about how faith became hidden and private and how people would go great lenghts to keep their rituals.
This is a very correct interpretation. Faith in general was kept hidden and private. These are mostly not new converts, but people more openly talking about it. If the USSR had survived a few more generations probably religion would have genuinely fallen off...
If we had this meme back when reddit was le epic atheist site we would already acchieved revolution
You do realise the soviet union was very homophobic though being gay was illegal and people would frequently attack them. The homophobia is a Russian cultural issue
yes that true never said otherwise. Certainly GSM rights don't seem to be moving in a better direction either though.
My understanding is that Orthodoxy is more of a cultural thing, and that most Russians are still pretty secular. That's what I've heard from Russians anyway.
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
—Kraz Mazov
Yeah most of the "support" I see for Putin is from the severely irony-poisoned or stupidpol types. Sure, I have very qualified support for their opposition to US imperialism, but I make sure to qualify it when I do.
No, not when opposing these imperial interests is form very reactionary point and a very similar ideological departure point. Cause then it is just elites infighting, rather than genuine opposition.
Is there? Genuine question because this is the only place I visit online and I've never seen support for him here.
There shouldn't be. If you see any genuine support for Putin call it out, he's nothing more than a fascist
His only merit is that Russia is a counterweight to American imperialism. But thats because they are two competing imperialist powers, not one imperialist against an anti-imperialist
Cause a lot of leftists are generally anti-West too, and only have the perspective of living in the West, and may think that situation there is the worst or something like that. I think its not that leftists in general support Putin, as they dont like his opponents. Instead of disliking both.
- Genuine anti-imperialism leads to critical support for anyone who stands up to imperialists
- Critical support leads to ironic uncritical support on the internet
- Ironic uncritical support gets laundered through the internet enough times to confuse some people into genuine support
well he's has issues definitely, basically just a conservative nationalist. But he also leashed all the post-soviet oligarchs, gained (or regained depending who you ask) a bunch of nice land from ukraine, isn't corrupt as shit, pisses off the EU and US, and maintains a basic free social safety net. He also gets to take credit for the recovery from the shock therapy 90s. He's popular in Russia too and people like popular people.
Why leftists like him? Probably mostly the anti-americanism lol Russians leftists would probably be anti-Putin since the communists are the biggest opposition party.
yah minority and political rights are pretty shit and a lot of stuff is done backdoor. Though honestly I think he could be worse economically, Russia at least makes their oligarchs pay dues to the state rather than the other way around in the west.
The US meddled in the Russian election of 1996 to put the drunken, corrupt Yeltsin back in office. The results were horrific. Deaths approached wartime levels. Putin deposed him and put an end to western neo-liberals in the Kremlin administering shock therapy. I ain't saying he's a good guy...but sheesh Donald Trump would look like an improvement after the utter catastrophe of 1991-1999.
Sharp rise in blue line is interesting
Saudi arabia funneled loads of money into mosques and extreme preachers in the Caucuses regions after the USSR fell Which lead to a lot of problems, culminating in the Chechen wars and invasion of Dagestan
I doubt huge chunks of the population just suddenly found God or some other sense of spirituality so shortly after the collapse. It raises the question as to why people didn't naturally let go of their beliefs in the USSR. As others have stated, there was an ostracization that took place when it came to religious beliefs. It's also the fact that the USSR hadn't achieved a high enough level of socialism where people would've felt they needed to completely abandon faith.
It should also show that there are possible inroads to be made with a religious population considering that many of these people also preferred that the USSR had not collapsed. Lots to think about.
I genuinely don't see the conflict between religious faith and socialism
It's not an alien notion for sure. I've read plenty from individuals that have taken a syncretic approach with socialist thought and their own respective religious ideologies. Sometimes I do wonder if religion would be completely vacated if we ever reach that high form of communism. I don't have any concrete answer to that but it is interesting to think about.
I doubt it because people said the same thing about the switch from feudalism to capitalism
Faith is jusg a tool. I think really there isn't much for most religions that would be against the revolution.
Churches though, they tend to take a dim view on pro-social behavior.
a church is literally a social gathering of people. Personally I think the right dominates religion just because we let them
Nah, if is an evolutionary process. The more weird and dickish a religion is the more devoted you can make dedicated follower. The more devoted followers you get the more there is social pressure to become a regular follower.
The cycle repeats itself till everyone is sexually traumatized and using that guilt and shame to power church efforts.
More relaxed and chill churches have trouble getting the same energy going so they are outcompeted
that's a whole lot of wild allegation to base on general dislike alone
nah, that is one of the basic forms of general organization. it's in all the basic sociology textbooks. Doesn't matter the kind of organization. There is a specific term for it that I missed back on a quiz back in college so I am not gonna remember it now. Churches just have the added psychodrama about being hyper focused on sex. The same dynamics work if it is a club, a gym, or a plumbing company.
I was actually arguing with the allegation that the fuel for religion is sexual trauma
You can be compatible if you forget what the religious texts actually say, like the Bible and all those parts about pro-slavery, selling your daughter etc...
or the parts about the earth being created for all men, living communally with all things held in common, etc...
you can't take the Bible and act like it wasn't written for and by an early iron age audience and their interaction with God so yeah there are going to be the cultural norms of the background culture mentioned
Posts like this are why removing the downvote button was a mistake.
The only good thing to come from eastern orthodoxy is sarvente from that one fnf mod
