The difference between the creeds of America and Russia (1928) / Bertrand Russell
"I think we come here to the kernel of the difference between the creeds of America and Russia. America, whose outlook is moulded by the Protestant tradition and a century of pioneering, believes in the individual fighting his way by his unaided efforts from poverty to affluence. In imagination he is supposed to be fighting the wilderness like the backwoodsman; if in fact it is against human competitors that he fights, that is not a matter upon which it is necessary to dwell. Nor is it good form to stress the fact that he will be probably all his life a slave as regards the expression of opinion, winning material comfort by the sacrifice of mental integrity. The opinions which he must not express are obviously undesirable opinions, and to compel him to hold his tongue about them is only to exercise a whole- some restraint upon anarchic impulses. By the time he is middle-aged he himself is in complete agreement with this point of view.
In Russia, on the contrary, the Byzantine Church, the Tartars, and the Tsardom have successively impressed upon the popular mind the nothingness of the individual; what he formerly sacrificed to God or the Tsar can be sacrificed with less difficulty to the community. Russian Communists differ from their sympathisers in the West chiefly in this matter of lack of respect for the individual. (See René Fülöp-Miller, Giest und Gesicht des Bolschewismus.) In this they can be more thorough than their Byzantine predecessors, who believed in the soul and the prospect of immortality. Having abolished the soul, the rulers of the USSR can accept the analogy of Leviathan more whole-heartedly than is possible for a Christian. To them the individualism of the West is as absurd as if the separate parts of the human body were to set up to live for themselves as in the fable of Menenius Agrippa. This is the root of their views on art, on religion, on ethics, on the family--indeed, on everything."
- Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays (1928), Ch: XVI, The Danger of Creed Wars, p. 193
Poor Russians!
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Me and my family live in Odessa. We are Russians and we are waiting for liberation from the beginning. How long will it take? Why is the Russian army doing nothing to help?
If you are a pro-Russian ethnic Russian who feels trapped in Odessa, wait out the war and do what you need to do to move to Russia. You’ll preferably want to have a job lined up with a reputable company before you make such a move to avoid you and your family falling victim to the active criminal elements within Russia or to homelessness as a result of a fruitless job search. A lot of military aged men were killed in crippled in the war with Ukraine after being forced to sign for the Russian Army under duress after being abducted from their civilian jobs, so there will be a lot of job openings available (truck loaders and unloaders for shops and markets were particularly hard hit by these coercive tactics). Avoid trying to make contact with Russia right now as doing so may place you under suspicion of being a Russian collaborator in the middle of a war with Russia, and thus subject to being imprisoned erroneously.
Russia will be unable to reach Odessa because they don’t have the capabilities necessary to hold Kherson, take Mykolaiv and then advance further west to take Odessa. They started the war with too little of their Naval assets in the Black Sea to carry out an amphibious assault on Odessa before the Montreux Convention locked out the rest of the Russian Navy from entering the Black Sea. Their airborne assault units were left to die trying to take and hold overly ambitious objectives during the Kyiv campaign, and their reconnaissance capabilities have been too severely degraded by Russian corruption in the military to be able to track down and engage the HIMARS platforms currently severing their supply lines deep behind the lines. They now struggle to isolate and engage Ukrainian Partisans and Commandos operating deep in Russian held territory, resulting in the crippling of Russia’s remaining aviation capabilities and Air Defense. The Russian Army is doing nothing to take Odessa because they can do nothing to take Odessa.
You are better off just going to Russia than trying to invite Russia to come to Odessa. And frankly, much of the tragedy in this war could have been avoided if Ukraine and Russia could have agreed on opening the border to ethnic Russians moving back to Russia than for Russia to try to use Ethnic Russians living in Ukraine as an excuse to try invading. And if the Russians deny you the opportunity to move to Russia… they probably never actually cared about you as anything more than an excuse in the first place.
Trump , Climate, and other Bat Sh**...
Resistance
Some of these are FaceBook groups, so you'd need to be onF/B to access them.
I think every human being eventually has a moment where they are standing outside in sweatpants that have lost the will to be pants, holding a trash bag, a divorce, a parking ticket, or some other receipt from the universe that says, “surprise, this too is part of it.” And then the sky bruises purple. And the air touches your face like it knows your whole story. And suddenly you realize: all the real is actually unreal. The dirt. The breath. The weird little bones in your hands. The fact that we are here, on a floating rock with pollen counts, paying bills, missing dead people, loving living people who say “leaving now” while still fully naked and looking for socks. And still, the moon clocks in. No applause. No benefits. No note from management saying, “Great work being ancient and luminous again.” Just the moon, working nights like a single mother with no applause, packing silver lunches for every dark thing that still has to rise. Tell me that isn’t holy. Tell me there is a better word than sacred for the way light keeps returning with no guarantee we will actually stop and take note. I know people who believe in therapy, probiotics, tarot, twelve-step meetings, manifestation journals, and waiting exactly eleven minutes before texting back so they do not appear emotionally available, even though their whole nervous system is standing in the driveway holding flowers. And underneath all of it, every ritual, every doctrine, every smoothie with chia seeds, the prayer is the same: Please let me be loved. Please let me be forgiven. Please let this strange little life mean something before my lower back submits its formal resignation. What is going on? For real tho—What is this place? This unbearable tenderness of being alive long enough to watch steam lift from coffee in winter like a soul practicing leaving. To see your friend laugh so hard they slap the table as if joy is a mosquito they are trying to kill. To hear a child say “pisghetti” and, for one shining second, realize language has finally been improved. I know I already noted this in the first piece, but the older I get, the less use I have for certainty. Certainty has never made me pull over because the sunset looked like God dropped a jar of peach jam across the whole midwestern sky and decided to be lazy and not clean up. Certainty has never made me gasp at rain on hot pavement. Certainty has never found me in the cereal aisle, holding Captain Crunch, suddenly remembering that everyone I have ever loved was made from stardust, hunger, and a series of decisions we probably should have slept on. No. It has always been awe. Awe was the first church. Before steeples. Before committees. Before men got involved and started making rules about skirts. Awe was there with its wild hair and muddy feet, saying: Look. Look again. Look until looking becomes love. Awe, and soup. Awe, and someone rubbing your back when you are sick. Awe, and old couples at Target arguing gently about avocados, as if marriage is not one vow but ten thousand errands performed beside the person who knows exactly how you like the cart pushed. Maybe gratitude was never meant to sound elegant. Maybe gratitude sounds like: “Damn. That woodpecker is trying to beat that tree from itself.” Maybe gratitude sounds like: “Thank you, body, for continuing to drag me through this world despite the many slim jims I have done to you at gas stations.” Maybe gratitude sounds like: “Thank you to the dogs who lose their entire minds when we come home as if we have returned from war and not Walgreens.” For me, that might be my gospel. That joy that does not wait for us to be impressive but only needs us to come through the door. Because the truth is, this life is devastating. And ridiculous. One minute you are 22 and invincible, driving too fast, eating gas station nachos with the confidence of a Greek god. The next minute you are googling, “Can sneezing cause a hamstring injury?” and the answer is, apparently, “Welcome to the second half of your life.” But even now— even tired, even grieving, even emotionally held together by iced coffee, playlists, and one very specific wolves hoodie— we keep finding reasons to stay soft. We plant tomatoes even though grief is real. We bake bread even though the news is on fire. We send photos of the sky to people we love with captions like, “LOOK,” as if beauty is an emergency and we are all volunteer firefighters. We keep saying, “You have to see this,” because wonder is the oldest form of resurrection. So here’s to the believers and the atheists and the agnostics and the people whose entire theology is just trying not to cry in the DMV line. Here’s to the people clinging to faith. Here’s to the people clinging to Xanax and oat milk and the one group chat where nobody pretends to be okay. Here’s to the tender-hearted weirdos. The accidental mystics. The ones who can contemplate mortality for six straight hours and then become emotionally attached to a perfect peach. The ones who know despair has a mouth, but so does laughter. May we never stop being drop-kicked by beauty in the middle of a Sunday afternoon. May we never become so polished that we forget how to stand in the Starbucks line of existence with our dumb, gorgeous hearts open, feeling the enormity of it all rattle around in our bones like thunder looking for somewhere to laugh. And may we remember: whatever else this is, whatever mess, whatever miracle, whatever cosmic group project no one was prepped for— all’ve it is astonishing. that we are here. that we have loved enough to be ruined. that the moon keeps showing up. that bread exists. So pass it on. Tear off a piece with your bare hands. Take it in as you take it down. And then go outside and look at that moon. MM
