the Truth About Russia

The truth is that Russia is a large, culturally rich country. It has the same amount of problems and they are different than ours. The truth is that they emphasize less personal freedom and we emphasize more.

The truth is: They do this for a reason. It is not some random evil plot to take all of Chik-Fil-A's money and keep them from sending it to the Baptist Consortium.

The reason Russia is like this is that they believe humans, for the most part, probably about ninety percent, can't handle freedom without getting fat and dumb. They look at America and they see about 90 percent of them fat and dumb. This is not a horrible inference, logically.

Russia has a similar amount of problems, like every nation-state does, but they are different. Their politics also require lies. This is similar to why Orwell chose to have an enigmatic ending to the book. It's not really black and white - the choice between freedom and constraint.

Here's the truth. We need to worry less about theories and academic consequences of authoritarianism and worry more about why they are critiquing us. If and when the critique is valid Americans need to think about what they've done wrong. Is freedom impossible or has it just temporarily sunk into an abyss of eating and Netflix binging?

The truth is: Russia and China have a point. And it solves nothing to ignore the critique and just "hate" them. We used to like Russia. Artists in this country owe great debts to Russian culture. When we theoretically modernize their politics we need to consider why they are repressing parts of their culture.

We can still believe in liberty and democracy and accept criticism (since that is the backbone of liberty and democracy in action), especially when that criticism reflects the sorts of things that are undeniably happening in our backyards.