Quote (ofthevoid @ Sep 3 2024 01:21pm)
Many populous countries have produced both strong works of art and contributed strongly to human development. Don't forget that Russia for a long time was the USSR and was an absolute behemoth when it comes to things like math, science, chemistry, etc. Prior to that they do have a relatively rich culture. IMO as some have already said, some of their writers & other arts are on par with western large nations. It's hard to truly rank though. I do think countries like UK, France, Germany, US, have an edge but that could be argued as subjective.
They've had a pretty significant amount of Nobel laureates (a number that's actually artificially deflated as many 'born in Soviet union' or pre-commie imperial Russia are attributed to Poland and other sovereign as they emigrated eventually or became their own countries) which to me is a really good indicator of impact and high contribution to the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_country#Russia_and_Soviet_UnionOverall though, it's really difficult to say that they are head and shoulders more brutal/evil/whatever than for example the US or what the Germans did to the Jews or Japan did to China/Korea. That's a lot of western centrism. It's not grounded in fair logic. How are you going to label Ukraine war so much more brutal while the US and allied countries have so destroyed and killed so many in places like Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen over the last 25 years. It's dishonest, western-centrism. A fair person questions why our soldiers killing backwater towel heads that were armed with only AKs as we're running strafing runs/drones are called heroes to be saluted and glorified, while Russian soldiers fighting in their war are to be viewed as sub-human orcs?
Well said. Russian chemists in particular are a wild and brilliant bunch, there tends to be alot of Eastern European Russian-speaking postdocs in our universities here. Mad respect.
Russian has historically been on-par with the other European powers in terms of development, each of these nations tended to excel at certain things. French excellence was unparalleled, British practicality and shrewdness conquered near the entire world, German precision & artistic spirit created the best works of classical music and essentially invented modern medicine & organic chemistry as a discipline. Germans and Russians were very closely knit, I mean it was literally called Prussia!
The United States is the prime superpower because they managed to synthesize the various strengths of all these different European nations, mainly British German and French.
It's absolutely bigoted Western-centric viewpoints that turn a blind eye to the moral failings of their own people. Germans of all people should recognize this
This post was edited by El1te on Sep 3 2024 02:56pm