War!

[emo_snal]

   So Russia's at war. I don't think most of America noticed, though I have heard a few random people talking about it. Anyway, I wrote several papers about Georgia and its breakaway provinces and Russia's interests in the area, so this development is interesting to me

Comments

[silvershamrock]

Hm ... this is actually a little scary. I can't find the damn link (at least, not in English), but a few months back I saw a BBC documentary on the rise of National Socialism in Russia.
The presenter claimed that Russia currently has the highest concentration of Neo-Nazis in the world, and that they have a fairly significant influence on the government: apparently the Mayor of Moscow (or whatever the Russian equivalent is) is a Neo-Nazi himself.
One thing they've managed to push through is Russian women that marry non-Russian nationals have their citizenship revoked (apparently; again, I can't find the evidence to back this up).
Are these South Ossetians 'aryan' by any chance, or am I just clutching at straws?

[emo_snal]

Hmm well "aryan" isn't actually an ethnic group I don't think. Its jsut something the nazis made up. The aryanns were actually an INDIAN ethnic group way back in prehistory, but they were the origins of the "indo-europeans" I guess. Anyway for example Persia changed its name to Iran in the 30s to emphasize they too were Aryan and suck up to Mr Hitler

[silvershamrock]

I'd heard about the Nazi concept of 'Aryan' versus the reality, I just wasn't sure how it worked out in this case. So, it's probably not the Russian Nazis then (now there's a concept for you: Communist Nazis. Pretty sure Simpsons have done that one already).

Even so. Untrammeled Russian aggression is probably not a good thing, especially if there's a strong undercurrent of the 'Bruderbund', or whatever the Slavic equivalent is.

[emo_snal]

Oh yeah there are very definitely Russian skinheads (some left my brother unconscious in a snowbank in Estonia once), and Russian nationalism is definitely pretty strong right now. So yeah. I'm not sure there's a really convenient analogy to anything else but I dunno if you're in America but the Republicans have a kind of "America is awesome in whatEVER it does!!" kind of patriotism, and I think there a bunch of Russians that feel that way about Russia.

And yes, in the Simpsons McBane fights "Commu-nazis" in some short clips of one of his films.

[ext_90340]

This account of Aryans and of the Aryan myth is a bit muddled.

Just where and how the Indo-European languages arose is controversial, but I've never seen an academic propose that it originated in India. (Rather, the name Aryan was pulled from the language and culture of Indo-Europeans in India.)

The most popular theories associate the language group with some initial group of people. For a long time, spread was presumed to have been by forceable conquest (and it was within this context that the notion of a superior Aryan race arose; though, mind you, this myth was adopted rather than generated by the Nazis), Colin Renfrew has proposed a fine, rival theory that the Indo-European languages spread largely as a result of settled agriculture displacing hunting-and-gathering. (Renfrew's theory then locates the original Indo-Europeans in what is now Turkey.)