Russians Need to Learn How to Do Politics Better
In terms of “patriotic” or “nationalistic” media in Russia, it is all sourced and created by historians and military people. As a result, patriotic discourse in Russia is all based around discussions of military strategy, armaments and never-ending squabbling about the true history of the 20th century. This is because these topics are these people’s day jobs. It’s their bread and butter. They can’t NOT bring it up. These aren’t professional politicians - they’re hobbyists when it comes to politics and try to shoehorn their favorite pet topics into their political projects.
A lot of the critiques that I’ve had and the key points that I’ve tried to hammer home in my Russian-language content are the need to 1) start talking about issues that are NOT related to the economy, (like social alienation, depression, fatherlessness and the like) 2) the need to move past debating about political ideology (Communism v Fascism v Liberalism) and 3) the need to move past endlessly debating the finer points of 20th century history and sore topics like the civil war.
These are all interesting topics, don’t get me wrong. But it’s not politics, per se. Politics - or rather political platforms - are built in a different way.
All you do is you take a list of problems that are readily apparent to everyone in society like unaffordable and substandard housing, Western propaganda dominating social media, job-replacing migration and so on and you offer solutions to these problems.
It looks like this.
Problem A ====> Solution X
Problem B ====> Solution Y
That’s literally all you have to do. And solutions need to be original and realistic - they need to take into account the social/economic/political context of the day and modern technology. What you don’t need to do is constantly check and cross-reference the PolitBible of Karl Marx or cite Mein Kampf to realize that workers would be paid more if there were less cheap migrants competing with them in the labor pool. It’s self-evident.
Drop the ideology and all the bad baggage that is associated with it and simply focus on analyzing problems and providing solutions to them using non-partisan language. Politics is not the place to grind your ideological ax against your opponents at the Polit-History department of the university. It’s not about shoe-horning your own pet reading of history into a party’s political platform or using political activism to shill for your new, revisionist book on the history of Zhukov and his legacy on USSR politics. Russian grassroots patriot activists need to stop doing that - its counter-productive.
And this is Populism 101, people. See, everyone may not agree with your original opinion on Zhukov or Stalin, but you may find that there is a common consensus about the rent being too damn high. So just focus on that and leave the historical debates to the historians.
Since I’m writing in English, I could also extend the same advice to literally any dissident group in the West as well. But the peasantry in the West seems too hopelessly ideologized and pitted against one another for any viable Populist movement to succeed at this point. Also the elections are now blatantly rigged.
I’d instead focus on trying to de-ideologize close friends and loved ones and on preaching a message of peasant solidarity.
“Look man, we may not agree on everything about history or politics, but let’s at least agree that the politicians are corrupt and don’t have our best interests at heart and that we should stick together, help each other out, and not let the media turn us against one another. In the end, our family, our friends and our community is all we have.”
Fair warning: your mileage may vary.
My eyes really lit up at the words "peasant solidarity". My writings on the subject may be of some interest - The Peasants Shall Inherit the Earth (http://karlnorth.com/?p=1084) and The Quality of Peasant Life: a Scenario for Survival (http://karlnorth.com/?p=1270), in which is argued that the peasantry (still over half the population of the planet at last count) may have the best chance of surviving the demise of industrial civilization due to massive depletion of energy and other critical raw materials.
Also, did you know that Marx, in his later years, finally despairing that the miniscule Russian working class could ever be the basis of a successful socialist revolution, suggested that the Russian mir might be a better foundation for a revolution in such a vast nation as Russia. According to the Encyclopedia Britanica:
"mir, in Russian history, a self-governing community of peasant households that elected its own officials and controlled local forests, fisheries, hunting grounds, and vacant lands. To make taxes imposed on its members more equitable, the mir assumed communal control of the community's arable land and periodically redistributed it among the households, according to their sizes (from 1720)."
That last quote sums it up very well. We'd all do good if we saw ourselves as working-class Americans vs the false and useless political identities we're troughed into. Our problems require moving outside the bounds of democracy which has become an utter sham on the national level.