This question has been debated for years by the Fourth TurningMrGuest wrote: Tue Apr 05, 2022 12:20 am > One question: can you clarify if you consider this a crisis period
> for Russia and Ukraine? In the online version of your original
> book you suggest that the 1989-91 collapse of the USSR was the
> last crisis period for Russia and Eastern Europe, but this strikes
> me as off. While WWII may not have started as a crisis war for
> Russia I don't see how the brutality by both sides, massive
> Russian losses and the legacy of the "Great Patriotic War" on
> Russian culture doesn't suggest that some kind of reset took place
> resulting in Russia/Eastern Europe ending WWII aligned with the
> generational cycle of Western Europe, the US, etc.
community. It's complicated by the fact that Russia is enormous,
and different regions have different timelines.
Russia's previous crisis war was the Bolshevik Revolution. WW II was
an Awakening era war. So the 1990s would have been a crisis era for
Russia if it hadn't been for the brutality of the Nazi invasion. In
2007, David Kaiser analyzed the situation in Russia and said that the
Nazi invasion had caused generational destruction similar to a crisis
war. This would be how a "first turning reset" occurs, which means
that after WW II, Russia returned to a first turning, or Recovery Era.
Thus, Russia and Ukraine are pretty much synchonized with the West in
being in a Crisis era.
Americans don't hold a grudge because they've won all their majorMrGuest wrote: Tue Apr 05, 2022 12:20 am > On a different topic, the national cultural differences are very
> interesting. On a somewhat related note I was recently thinking
> about how Americans don't seem to hold grudges against our former
> enemies the way many/most other countries seem to. Even in the
> case of our crisis wars we seem willing and able to put the past
> behind us. Perhaps this is a result of our culture of respecting
> the individual, our pluralistic values towards race/ethnicity
> ... or maybe it's simply that our civilians are largely shielded
> from the type of destruction, rape and murder that are normally a
> part of total war (I know that, for example, many US soldiers who
> actually experienced/witnessed the brutality of the Japanese held
> on to some amount of hatred for the people). It didn't take long
> for us to make up with England, Germany and Japan and non-crisis
> enemies like Mexico and Vietnam. Even the lingering tensions from
> our own brutal Civil War were relatively trivial compared to what
> is seen in other countries. I may be wrong, but my sense is that
> cultural attitudes is Europe are somewhat similar - in that I
> don't think many young French people hold deep grudges against
> Germans and vice-versa (except maybe when it comes to
> soccer).
wars. The exception would be the American Civil War, where the
Democrats lost and they definitely hold a huge grudge. They spent the
last century in the KKK massacring, lynching and raping blacks, and
they're spending this century massacring thousands of blacks in
Democrat-run cities, destroying black families so that young blacks
have no fathers, and impoverishing, exploiting and raping blacks in
the ghetto.
This doesn't sound like guilt and goveling to me. It sounds to meMrGuest wrote: Tue Apr 05, 2022 12:20 am > Around 20 years ago I stopped in Germany while bumming around
> Europe after college. My grandmother (a German Jew who fled to
> America in the 30s as a young woman) still passionately hated the
> German people and even warned me not to go there. In Munich my
> friend and I befriended some local German guys around our age and
> we all went out drinking. We were getting drunk, laughing,
> flirting with girls and having a great time. Then, at some point,
> one of the drunk Germans ask us if we were Jews. We we casually
> said were were the German kids started sobbing, apologizing to us
> and groveling for us to forgive them for the Holocaust. My friend
> and I tried and tried to explain to them that it didn't even occur
> to us to consider them responsible for what happened decades
> before any of us were born. But, this episode pretty much ended
> the night. The incident has always stuck with me. At the time I
> attributed it to the collective guilt Germany forcefully instilled
> in their children. In recent years I've brought it up as an
> example of the toxicity of "woke" shaming, in that as soon as we
> went from just a group of guys hanging out to representatives of
> ethnic groups weighed down by the baggage of the past it was
> impossible to maintain genuine human connection. I thought about
> this recently again while watching videos of young Chinese people
> ranting about their hatred of Americans/Westerners, citing
> historical events that many Westerners their age likely wouldn't
> even know about.
that they were mocking and making fun of you because you're Jewish,
and they don't like Jews.
