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by dhdjjd 1566 days ago
Casual bit of racism. The main reason for despotism/imperialism is just economics.
3 comments

Reducing a 22 minute long video to simply casual racism doesn't seem to me to be a very deep look into it.
It's just wrong on so many points it's just difficult to argue it.

Russians didn't build castles: they did and they also had castle-like monasteries (even the Moscow stone Kremlin has been built during the Mongol yoke). Using Polish flags of the 16th century as an illustration is also at best misleading https://youtu.be/f8ZqBLcIvw0

The black plague had almost no impact because the black plague was very limited in Russia.

All this stuff about aristocracy competing for the favor of the monarch just disregards that almost every Romanov monarch was a result of a coup by aristocracy

Russian church was independent till Aleksei Mikhailovich and we still have old-believers.

It completely disregards the fact that during Ivan the Terrible rule Siberia was conquered by an independent knyaz (it was basically a private entity).

Comparing Russia to China is based on economic developments of the last 30 years. 40 years ago Russia was a super-state while China was recovering from its Cultural revolution. We don't know what is going to happen in the next 30 years.

Nowadays Russia in some points is less centralised than even European union.

As it's a popular belief here that Russia is totalitarian because you can't unite shariah state of Chechnya, buddist Khakasia, diamond extorting Yakutia and sea trading Vladivostok in one state without military and other types of oppression. But democracy is unfavorable to Moscow (and most Russians of the Central part) as Moscow's power is based on extorting mineral resources from the lands of conquered/peacefully joint nations. Overall we do not produce much of the economic value. European and other markets are far away. So we can't compete with Poland (or Ukraine) for European low-tech goods. The European part is interested in local manufacturing and import tariffs while Russian Far East is interested in free trade and cheap imports. Just too many conflicting interests in one state.
That cannot be true, the US lost billions in Afghanistan.
Can you point out the racism for me?