A quote from Joseph Stalin at the beginning of the book Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization by Stephen Kotkin:
I propose a toast to simple, ordinary, modest people, to the "little cogs" who keep our great state machine in motion. . . . No one writes about them, they have no high titles and few offices, but they are the people who maintain us. . . . I drink to the health of these people.
From pathsofstoicism:
Best mental reset I’ve learned:
If your mind is loud — Write.
If your mind is empty — Read.
If your mind is racing — Walk.
If your mind is tired — Sleep.
If your mind is sharp — Build.
Most problems are just mismatched energy. Get the inputs right, the rest follows.
In a 1983 lecture (transcript), Yuri Bezmenov explains how Russian propaganda typically aims to weaken opposing societies. Here I want to go through his lecture and make some notes comparing it to the situation in the West today. By the West, I mean not a geographical place, but mean the group of countries that have largely joined into the same institutions. For example, the United States, Australia, the Netherlands, England, Japan, and South Korea all belong to the West.
This is the transcript of a lecture by Yuri Bezmenov (alias Tomas Schuman), a Soviet KGB defector. He "explains in detail his scheme for the KGB process of subversion and takeover of target societies at a lecture in Los Angeles, 1983." The transcript was generated by OpenAI whisper and manually verified and improved:
Subversion is the term, if you look in a dictionary or criminal code to that matter, usually is explained as a part of activity to destroy things like religion, government, system, political, economical system of a country. And usually it's linked to espionage and such romantic things as blowing up bridges, sidetracking trains, cloak and dagger activity in Hollywood style. What I'm going to talk about now has absolutely nothing to do with the cliche of espionage or KGB activity of collecting information. So the greatest mistake or misconception I think is that whenever we are talking about KGB for some strange reason, starting from Hollywood movie makers to professors of political science and "experts on Soviet affairs" or criminologists as they call themselves, they think that the most desirable thing for Andropov and the whole KGB is to steal blueprints of some supersonic jet, bring it back to Soviet Union and sell it to the Soviet military industrial complex. This is only partly true. If we take the whole time, money and manpower that the Soviet Union and KGB in particular spends outside of USSR border, we will discover-of course there are no official statistics unlike with CIA or FBI-that the espionage as such occupies only 10 to 15 percent of money, time and manpower. 15% of the activity of KGB. The rest 85 percent is always subversion. And unlike a dictionary of English, Oxford dictionary, subversion in Soviet terminology means always a destructive aggressive activity aimed to destroy the country, nation or geographical area of your enemy. So there's no romantics in there, absolutely. No blowing up bridges, no microfilms in Coca-Cola cans, nothing of that sort, no James Bond nonsense. Most of this activity is overt, legitimate and easily observable if you give yourself time and trouble to observe it. But according to the law and law enforcement systems of the Western civilization, it's not a crime because [it's only] misconception and manipulation of terms. We think that subverter is a person who is going to blow up our beautiful bridges. No, subverter is a student who comes for exchange, a diplomat, an actor, an artist, a journalist like myself was ten years ago.
Stephen Kotkin at 47:00:
And in the process of doing it, [Stalin] caused famine and was undermining, potentially, the party's own rule. He just kept going all the way through because he had the courage of his conviction. And then when they complained about him he made a mental note of that and he enacted his version of revenge on them a few years later for their criticisms of him when he did this. So he did this because he believed in the Marxist/Leninist fashion that this had to be done. He himself felt a man of destiny and therefore he could do this and he was looking to find the shock troops to galvanize the half-educated youth to take violence out on these gulags and to force the villagers into these collective arrangements. And so what he did and so this is what totalitarianism is: he galvanized people's agency and those people using their agency destroyed their own agency. They disempowered themselves by by taking up this call.
Jordan Peterson at 1:14:16: “The honest podcasters they’re trying to get smarter and they are bringing their audience along for the ride.”
Very interesting speech by Konstantin Kisin about the West: https://youtu.be/7mpaW6G9Bzk.
In honor of Jan Terlouw who passed away today. The first part of a famous story he told in the Netherlands (English below):
Toen ik een kind was, was het oorlog. De tweede wereldoorlog was van mijn 7e tot mijn 13e jaar. En toen het voorbij was, toen ik student was, toen ik mijn dienstplicht vervulde, toen ik mijn eerste onderzoeksbaan kreeg, toen was Nederland wat je noemde in wederopbouw. De huizen werden hersteld, de kerken, de andere gebouwen. Maar vooral waren we de welvaardstaat aan het bouwen. AOW kwam op stand. Ouderdomspensioen voor iedereen. En het ziekenfonds ofwel ziektewet. Medische zorg voor iedereen. Dat gebeurde. En in die tijd zat ik met mijn jonge gezin, we woonden in een single-huis in Utrecht. En overal hingen touwtjes uit de brievenbus. De kinderen konden gewoon de voordeuren opentrekken en bij mekaar binnenlopen. Volwassenen ook. We vertrouwden mekaar.
I used to always run my blog via a static site generator. For people unfamiliar with this, it essentially means that you modify files locally and then send these files to a static site hoster like GitHub Pages or Cloudflare. This worked fine but it wasn't very fast. Uploading a blogpost would take me a few minutes. I would need to modify the files locally, verify that it looked good, and then send them to the server.
The alternative was to setup Wordpress, but somehow that didn't feel good to me. Wordpress servers always felt too bloated. I just wanted exactly the things I needed and nothing more. No plugins. No styling options. No intricate menu's. Social media doesn't have those things either. On social media sites like X/Twitter, you can only made a profile banner and add posts. And it works. Isn't this what writing is about anyway? You write articles/blogs/letters/memos, or whatever you want to call it and publish it. Social media is widely used so it must work.
I've listened to many podcasts with historians over the years and I just realized one thing that my favorite historians all have in common: you can just watch/listen to a talk from years ago and it will still feel accurate.
You basically can't hear which year it currently is. Great historians talk about long lasting and persistent phenomena instead of ephemeral ones.