“Russia is not as resilient as it wants you to think”, read a headline that caught my eye today; and then tortured, truly wrecked my feeble foggy brain – could not That Economist spare us those two words (“it is”) that would turn the whole into something unambiguously coherent. 🤯 Leaving out “is” would have made it slightly acceptabler, or.. hmh, in hindsight it.. Hmhh — but then paywalling the article, too. A bridge too far..
Luckily, and of course by far not for the first time, there's archive.ph, always there to come and 🎶 save the da-ay. What is with that site, actually.. How can its noble work work. One too many another thing to casually remember to look up later.
Because meantime one u/Designer_Ear_1382 posted the below
in the dedicated comment section on r/europe.
I very vaguely seemed to recall having read something like it someplace before,
but not as ~elaborate, and not overdoing the Mongolian upshot like it does.
Rrreally cba rn to try and find out where it's from, which doesn't matter much,
because it sure is a poignant, if at times rather crudely worded bit of..
stuff for thought.
The Hellenic civilization passed them by. The Roman civilization passed them by. The Gothic civilization passed them by. The Renaissance passed them by. The Enlightenment passed them by. The concept of open society passed them by. The concept of democratic government passed them by. The concept of rule of law passed them by. The concepts
[sic]of human rights passed them by. The modern information society passed them by.What’s wrong with the Russians is that they have no education: neither a secular ethical education, nor a religious moral education. They glorify violence. They fetishize the criminal class. They applaud deception. They accept lying as a completely normal state of affairs. They appear to have no regard for human suffering: neither their own, nor that of anyone else. Their social vocabulary (outside the family) includes only two concepts: coercion and nihilism.
As far as anyone can tell, they remain a hastily industrialized post-Mongol empire, fundamentally accepting an autocratic czar, his boyars, and a population of passive serfs. It’s essentially the Mongol Empire with crappy tanks and a lot of nukes.
With the bold and italics mine, of course; not sure what to say about or make of it, so probably better to go with the Wittgenstein silence by default.