Almost a hundred years ago, Oswald Spengler predicted that a new high culture, entirely separate from the West, would be born somewhere in the Eurasian steppe. He claimed that the Bolshevik revolution was a communist movement on the surface, but fundamentally an anti-Western movement that sought to throw off Western influence. (If you're not sure what I mean by "high culture" or "West", read a summary of Decline of the West.)Could his prediction still prove to be accurate? I'm not sure that Russia, or Slavs in general have much a future given their rock-bottom birth rates, brain drain to the West, and general societal dysfunction. What do you think?
>>18731582But they fought nazism which was itself an anti-west, anti-european revolutionary force
>>18731584I don't think you know what I'm referring to by "West"...
>>18731582All the development world is in crisis due rock-bottom birth rates. It is just masked by immigration and immigration by itself masks it doesn't eliminate the problem. Multiple countries from Germany, to SKorea, Japan, Spain, Italy, and the whole former Warsaw Pact have extremely low birth-rates. Even the US is going to have problem in a couple of years as the boomers retire. Germany has been in that situation since the 70s. By 2030 they will have major problems with paying for pensions, social security, and other stuff. The next decades you will see major pushes for automatization, AI, robotics, immigration, and boosting birth-rates everywhere. You will see some ugly choices.
>>18731592I'm not trying to start a pissing contest between anons over whose country has bigger problems in the next few decades. I'm curious whether anyone thinks that the Slavs will become a high culture, in the Spenglerian sense, in the next few centuries. You probably don't know what this means, look it up
>>18731582Spengler was mostly correctPutin's Russia is already laying the groundwork for a "Slavic-Eurasianist" identity by mixing Bolshevism with Orthodox Christianity. The goal is to unite all Slavs and Central Asians under one great power that can challenge Germany for control over Europe
>>18731584No, the Nazis were a Western European Force, much more so than Britain and France. Their entire ideology was the culmination of radical Western Thought as a reaction to the increasing liberalism, America's rise to dominance and the rising giant in the Easts.The entire purpose of the Eastern Front was to elevate Germany into a super power so they can lead Europe against America. The reason Britain and France fought against Nazi Germany had nothing to do with ideology and culture, they just wanted to be the ones who ruled over Western Europe instead of Germany.
>>18731651Yes, this might be Putin's grand vision, but in my opinion this will have little impact on whether a Eurasian high culture comes to life in the future or not. For this to happen, there needs to be an organic explosion of creativity and vitality, like there was in western Europe around 1000 AD (give or take). Compare Europe in 800 to Europe in 1100: Dark ages, Muslim invasions, Viking raids, Charlemagne forming a crude and shallow empire in the ruins of WRE vs castles on every hilltop, increasingly sophisticated dynastic politics, Franks almost spontaneously launching a crusade into the Levant (and succeeding), massive cathedrals, skyrocketing population etc. At best I think Putin's rule may prove to be like a Eurasian version of Charlemagne, i.e. little immediate impact but laying the groundwork for something much bigger generations from now
>>18731582Eastern Europe already had a separate culture. Bolshevism severed Russia’s connections with the West, but it chiefly obliterated Eastern Orthodox Slavic culture to create a new Eurasian “Soviet Man”. This ultimately failed, and the misery in the East is a product of it. As a result Eastern Europe will either drift toward the West, or toward China. It lost its own standing, and is a rump of what it was and a minuscule of what it could have been.
don't be a tranny orientalist challenge, difficulty level: german philosopher
>>18731862Spengler was hardly an "Orientalist". He repeatedly stated that only Western civilization could develop advanced technology, and that technological civilization would disappear forever along with the West. Any future civilization would lack the relentless technological advancement of the West in his view. He also warned that the colored races of the world would learn to use Western technology for the sole purpose of bringing down the West, before abandoning it like a primitive casting aside a stick after using it to chase away a predator. The best example of this in his day was the Japanese building up their industry and military (which they would use to wage war against the West just a couple years after his death), and since then we've had a million more examples we can point to
>>18731927yeah my post was really more about schopenhauer and nietzsche. Spengler was the visionary of German nationalism and I agree with everything he had to say about Germany and Prussianism.It's just funny when these guys occasionally glanced longingly eastward
>>18731742>Putin's rule may prove to be like a Eurasian version of CharlemagneBait?Russia is more like the Franks before Clovis, or in modern terms the most base capitalist gangsterism. It is still capitalism, while the top is hopelessly corrupt the foundations are held firm by resourceful entrepreneurs and competent middle class professionals, rather like under the Soviet Union you'd have engineers sourcing materials and tools from the black market just to keep things running.As it has done before it is often from the bottom that new structures may emerge, first to undermine the Russian mafia, oil barons and oligarchs, then coalescing under a new leader who unifies these efforts that are starting to bubble up to the surface. Putin has done virtually nothing to challenge the corruption, all his supporters benefit from this or that corrupt scheme and he is just their figurehead, he is not le savior.To use another French anachronism, he is more like Robespierre than Napoleon, he even has the same fondness for killing, albeit with poison and downing aircraft than the guillotine.The Russian "Napoleon" however would face another problem, the fact that China now dwarfs the Russian economy, he won't be the main man. Russia's time in the sun was the 50s and 60s and now it's completely over.
>>18731582They may produce a sort of European influenced culture inflected with Byzantium, Asiatic and Slavic influences and conservative alternative to the liberal cosmopolitan western EU. The myth of liberal democracy is not as potent as it is in the West.
>>18731582> He claimed that the Bolshevik revolution was a communist movement on the surface, but fundamentally an anti-Western movement that sought to throw off Western influence. Technically he has a more complex take on it but I don't want to get into it. >Could his prediction still prove to be accurate?Yes. Presuming the world works the way he thought it did. Yes, yes it still can. Most objections one can bring up he already adresses more or less. Though not in one place and not talking about Russia specifically. > I'm not sure that Russia, or Slavs in general have much a future given their rock-bottom birth rates,While I get this argument, I think people who make them are being very present-brained. Yes, the birthrate (worldwide) is below replacement, population will shrink. But you have to see things with some scale. The continent of Europe (excluding Russia) only reached the population Russia has now in the 19th century. Sheer numbers aren't really important in Spengler's understanding of the world beyond the purview of Civilization and Zoological history.>brain drain to the West, It will pass. >general societal dysfunction.Irrelevant. "Societal functioning" in the Chudslop sense is more or less unique to this specific period and Culture in Spengler's morphology. You cannot judge the health of one of Spengler's cultures in purely material terms, especially not another culture's, that's a sign of senescence. In 800 an Arab observer could just as well dismiss Western Europe on these grounds.There are more salient criticisms you can make of Spengler's thoughts on Russia, anyway.
>>18732005TL;DR: The age and viability of Spenglerian cultures cannot be judged materially.
>>18731986To be clear I meant that AT BEST Putin would be the rough equivalent of Charlemagne, in the sense that his efforts would NOT have an immediate impact on a Slavic high culture, not that he is some great leader.
>>18731927>Whethera High culture doesn't just spontaneously materialize from thin air at a given time. The pre-cultural period is a slow coalescing of elements that takes multiple centuries. And if we are going to get into that, you could argue that Russian culture has already been born. I know a couple of guys who think this, the one thinks it started in the 19th century and the other thinks it started around the fall of the soviet union (both like to reference the book comparing post-soviet Russia to a feudal society in this). The first one is actually Russian, which is a big plus in my book.And regardless, even if it isn't the culture proper, you can still tell things about how a culture will be from a pre-culture. Charlemagne was still a proto-faustian. Despite being also Caliph and Chieftain. The remains of Charlemagne's empire are what created France, Germany, and Italy as we know them.
>>18732158Anyway, sorry for the digression. My point was that there is no 'whether', a Russian high culture is going to happen, eventually. At least according to Spengler.
>>18732162Plus, it's facetious to establish a difference between feudal europe and current Russia. By our standards, the kingdom of France in 1200 would be a failstate.
By the way all of you should read "Contemporary Russia as a Feudal Society" by Vladimir Shlapentokh. It's almost twenty years old but it holds up very well for what it is trying to propose.
>>18731695nazis hated European values like Christanity, Universalism, Age of Enlightenment, Human Rights, old institutions, aristocracy, democracy etc, it was a revolutionary, anti-european, anti-west movement, just like Bolshevism
>>18732980Hitler was actually an incarnated Orisha. Few know this. #EsotericNiggerism
