>Vengeance, naked vengeance, is the greatest engine of man's progress. It is only when a man has been willfully slighted, totally debased and stripped of his illusions of 'goodwill between men', that he can begin to create the extraordinary. From the young writer called a poet-aster who rises to great heights in his maturity to the beaten servant boy that comes to be the master of a vast merchant empire, nothing stokes a man's fire hotter than to see others proven wrong and to acquire the power to lay them low. >Further, vengeance is the only universal urge. Every nation's myths share it, and there is nothing else that can turn a meek clerk into a magnate and a wan governess into a poisoner with equal swiftness. Only certain souls can kill for their nation or their god, more can kill for their family, more still if driven by circumstance, but every living person can kill, kill without remorse, kill again and again in the name of vengeance. It is the spirit that primes every duelist's pistol and draws the lines on every revanchist's map. It is the soul of nationalism, Marxism, and anarchism alike. >We stand on the precipice of a time in which every motivation that can be called 'good' will fall away. All those couched in love. Love of one's country, one's god, one's family, even oneself will die off. Avarice may replace them for a time but it will breed vengeance and vengeance, vengeance alone, will endure forever as new and ancient slights render every man and every people nothing more than agents of vengeance and death shall reign.
-V. Ivanonovich Sokolov, Tsarist Russian officer, philosopher of warfare, and occasional poet writing in 1917, mere days before he was killed defending his family home from Bolsheviks.
This is heavy. What’s the source on this? Never heard of this guy before.
Kevin Adams
He was never published in his lifetime except for some poems under a pseudonym. His entire family was slain (except for his daughter) by the Reds after he was killed having emptied "five revolvers, a Mosin, and Winchester rifle into the Bolsheviks and finally resorting to his saber." His youngest daughter, a consumptive, was spared because she was bedridden when the Reds arrived and I suppose they had some element of humanity. She managed to save his personal papers and through sheer strength of will managed to get out of Russia and onto a white emigre steamship to Japan. She died on the voyage but the works were passed to an Orthodox priest who had them privately published in Russian. He has only recently been rediscovered by Russians and the above (in the OP) was a translation made by a Russian scholar and might be the first translation of anything he ever wrote into English.
Bentley Fisher
Ah, I was wondering why google came up short. Thanks for the info. Unfortunately, I don’t speak Russian but I’ll keep an eye out for a translation.
>"five revolvers, a Mosin, and Winchester rifle into the Bolsheviks and finally resorting to his saber." Am I reading this correctly? He had this many loaded firearms lying around his house?
Ayden Sanchez
He was a soldier in a war, user, and knew the enemy was coming for him. of course he did.
Noah Butler
This is remarkable. I'll have to keep an eye out for when the full English version is published. It's fascinating to think how history would have gone if the Whites had won.
For a military man, I’m surprised he had so few. Also, why the fuck did the mods give me a warning for some random joe Rogan post on Yea Forums when I’ve only been on lit today?
Adrian Brown
I meant the writing, but the man himself too. He takes seriously the capacity for evil in people, which is so refreshing. Few people take that seriously today. But to really understand what Sokolov is saying I'd need to know more about Russian history than I do, because it's easy to fall into the reactionary trap that everything was great back in Christendom/Tsarism/etc. What he says in that passage is amazing to me, but I just wonder if he locates the alternative at some point in the past. In other words, I'm sceptical of any Golden Age claims, whether than Golden Age is said to be the present or some point in the past. Although I do think that there was a time in the past when the traditional morality that Sokolov describes was more widely understood, if not necessarily more widely followed.
Benjamin Ortiz
>Sokolov Wait a minute, Sokolov was REAL? Damn, those Metal Gear Solid games were more historically accurate than I thought...
There is very little Golden Agism or traditional morality in OP's quote. It's probably closer to Nietzsche than it is to Christianity though it isn't really Nietzchean.
Connor King
Is this some kind of extended joke being played on the board there is literally nothing about this guy online
Ian Nguyen
Google’s crawling of Russian language websites is notoriously poor and literally anything hosted in Russia is deranked on Google and Bing because of “misinformation”.
Landon Moore
>It's probably closer to Nietzsche than it is to Christianity I can definitely see that too, but I'd need to read more of the guy to be sure.
Evan Richardson
Different user, but wanted to chime in. I agree about waxing nostalgic over a past often full of misery and inequity in itself(hence the ability of a few to turn so many against it) but I remember a line from The Leopard: we were the lions, the leopards. What comes after us are jackals. Movements that inspire weak and timid mobs to overthrow their rule seem to always lend themselves to this paradigm. When an individual can only find strength as a faceless cell within this larger body of outrage, they have all the ruthlessness of their opposition but none of the charisma, intelligence or nobility. They also seem to only serve as footnotes in history until another strong minority replaces them.
This is the only guy I can find that sort of fits. Russian general who died in 1919
Ian Gomez
>Movements that inspire weak and timid mobs to overthrow their rule seem to always lend themselves to this paradigm. When an individual can only find strength as a faceless cell within this larger body of outrage, they have all the ruthlessness of their opposition but none of the charisma, intelligence or nobility. They also seem to only serve as footnotes in history until another strong minority replaces them.
As miserable as that all may be, does it legitimise the monarchical order that it opposes? I'm not being facetious, I'm genuinely asking. As terrible and honestly stupid revolts almost always are, monarchy is its own kind of stupidity as well, and the legitimacy of monarchs (whether by divine right or consent of the people) is a complicated problem that I think remains largely unresolved.
Asher Thompson
humans organically organize themselves into social groups
eventually they get tired of the way things are and burn it all down
Thats a question I struggle with mightily. I have always had a libertarian streak as a young man- so the idea of nobility or some super class of society gets me at an existential level. And yet... as I grow older I see what has inevitably replaced that structure time and time again and grow sick of everything. Just terrible nihilism that humans outside of strict hierarchal structures fall into insane ideologies of equality and suicidal egalitarianism; like a captain overflowing the life rafts till everyone drowns. I suppose until we use technology to free ourselves from forced cooperation models( if thats attainable) and can interact with each other in a truly voluntary basis, then I’d be for for the monarchs than what we have now. Mob rule with the loudest chorus being given the most attention, regardless of anything else.
Indeed, Paul Lombard writes: For on the deductive account the writing of actual histories would involve use of a theory constructed in such a way as to guarantee that histories in which it was applied would conform to the conditions necessary for a correct account of historical man. Such a theory would, for example, contain an account of a genetic sequence through which man's nature, society, and institutions develop, and in which each stage is taken to be both necessary and sufficient for its successor This “genetic account” influenced Marx’s teleological account of human society through the stages of primitive communism, feudalism, capitalism (itself divided into three stages), and industrialized communism. Furthermore, an antecedent to the Marxian conception of ideology can be found in Vico’s New Science: Human choice, by its nature most uncertain, is made certain and determined by the common sense of men with respect to human needs or utilities, which are the two sources of the natural law of the gentes. Common sense is judgment without reflection, shared by an entire class, an entire nation or the entire human race. Arguing against historical notions of fate and chance, Vico distinguished between truth in knowledge and certainty in consciousness, the latter of which is a mere cognitive affect. He emphasized the role of free will in the creation of history, although he understood the tension between free will and the constraints that institutions evince in and on humans. He sought to lay the grounds for a critique of “common sense” by combining the writing of history, which he associated with the activities of philology, and philosophical reasoning.
The Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost; Gods, Heroes, Men. One scheme implies a descent, and in Joachim’s vision we have a progressive perfection. Joachim imagines the permanence of the last stage, whereas Vico sees the cycle starting over as the popular commonwealths become corrupt, and fall from “perfect liberty” to the “tyranny of anarchy” brought on by unchecked liberty as these commonwealths become corrupt. The idea of decadence and decay plays an important role in Vico’s metahistory. In this sense, Vico was not like Marx, as Marx critiqued the arbitrary nature of authority as exercised through social formations at the scale of institution, and envisioned the state as an apparatus of social control withering away with the proper elaboration of communism in socio-economic forms. As such, Vico has found admirers in both conservative and radical (and radically conservative, for that matter) camps. Indeed, two scholars privilege this excerpt over others to show that Vico cleaved to Gemeinschaft social theory, whose logical extensions include fascism’s founding purpose – to forge a strong (rather than, say, flexible), pure society, using Volk philosophy as a propaganda tool.21
Bentley Adams
This is about Marx's reading of Vico and has nothing to do with Spengler. >Vico sees the cycle starting over as the popular commonwealths become corrupt, and fall from “perfect liberty” to the “tyranny of anarchy” brought on by unchecked liberty as these commonwealths become corrupt. And this sounds like Plato or something, and not at all like Spengler's mystic 'civilization as organism' model
Isaiah Mitchell
Spengler's organic model offers no hope of escape. It's the doomer version of cyclical history to Vico's bloomer.
John Allen
you're correct about that but a)that is far more realistic an outlook if you look at history, and b)the main difference isn't that Spengler is pessimistic but that his philosophy of history is genuinely mystical. I mean he says himself he took it basically from Goethe
Josiah Ramirez
so is this a meme or can anyone give a source on the russian mishima??
Ryan Robinson
The source has been posted my man. It’s early days yet for the scholarship on this author it all has to been translated excerpt for brief passages.
Owen Russell
For a military man, I’m surprised he had so few.
Easton Price
Everyone ITT needs to read The Village and Cursed Days by Ivan Bunin right now.
You do realize he is ultimately denouncing vengeance right? He illustrates its power then explains that it will destroy society.
Isaiah Carter
Alright so I'm pretty sure this is made up. I've spent about half an hour poking around on the slav internet and while there were a number of Vladimir Ivanovich Solokov's none of them have any writings to thier names. The closest to this man was a white army officer who fought heroically in the first world war and was executed in 1919. However he looked like the pic attached, not the soldier OP has.
There were also a few veterans who were executed in the purges by the same name, but again, no evidence of any writings. There was a notable painter by the same name. I assume Vladimir Ivanovich Solokov is something like John Smith is over here.
Error took place while posting. Apologies, but the point still stands.
Luis Bennett
It's a pretty convincing fake to be honest.
Jacob Bell
Then you should look up Solokov after all.
Jayden Jones
i am devastated and im not sure ill ever be able trust anonymous people on the internet again
Jonathan Perry
>being nogunz
Alexander Jackson
Anyone remember like 6 months ago when social media was full of stories about that girl with the pixie cut who was supposedly a German opposition leader in the rise of the nazis?
Same shit. Just invented
Eli Torres
>error took place while posting >twice >as well as file name no I'm sure you definitely got it right during your search though
Joshua Flores
>
Ian Lopez
I want it.
Juan Powell
Russia is a multi-national state with over 186 ethnic groups.
Levi Butler
>His youngest daughter, a consumptive, was spared because she was bedridden when the Reds arrived and I suppose they had some element of humanity. Kinda voids his whole rant
Colton Richardson
He is talking about vengenece but would ego be more encapsulating for what he means?
