12-30-2021, 05:37 AM
(12-29-2021, 03:07 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: I agree with brower on this. I think world war two and the Stalin-imposed famines and purges extended the Crisis period in Russia that may be attributed to world war I and the Revolutionary War. The effect of this extended horrific crisis on Russia was to slow down their national saeculum and put them on the global calendar of the world's dominant saeculum (ours), as happened elsewhere too at this time. Our times since the 1890s IS the birth of the global society, and the great wars that brought down the old world and separate ouselves from it so decisively were the birth pangs. "A little messy" ha ha. Catastrophic, actually; more so than experienced by any other nation in those times. But, to some extent, the old cycle that was on an earlier schedule, as suggested by galaxy, could still have some relevance. Nations today still have their own unfolding, but they can't escape the larger global cycle now either.
Is Russia in a 1T? Does Russia even have a saeculum, as I wondered before? It is not a very good 1T. The nation is declining, and the people are not happy. That the Putin tyranny appears stable and increasing could fit, but are we to define a 1T solely as a period when a tyrant increases his grip on power and is able to suppress dissent successfully and dream of military expansion?
My personal opinion is while I agree that most of the world has caught up with us in the saeculum (we're becoming a global society, after all), I think it may still be a bit confusing/murky with certain nations exactly what turning they're currently in (especially the ones that were on a significantly different schedule to ours prior to the Great Depression and World War II), and some nations are still doing their own unfolding whilst not being able to really escape our larger global cycle (and that's where it gets tricky). For example I believe it was even Neil himself that once said that the Islamic world was about a turning behind ours (I think according to him their 1T was 1961-1979 while their Awakening began in 1979 and ended sometime in the early 2000s), but as you pointed out they also experienced some VERY 4T like events back in 2011. I wonder if their possibly going through an 'anomaly' similar to ours in the Civil War saeculum (and if that's causing their saeculum to speed up and catch up with ours), and if their current generation coming of age is a Nomad/Civic hybrid much like the Gilded (though even for that work, it would still make sense for BOTH their 3T and 4T to be at LEAST 15-16 years long)? At any rate, how exactly Islam's cycle is unfolding is certainly an interesting topic worth debating and speculating.
I do agree with both you and Mr. Brower that Russia had a LONG 30 year 4T, and I also believe that's the consensus S&H themselves shared (I would maybe even argue that their 1T possibly started a few years AFTER ours did, I think either Neil or Strauss themselves said at one point that they didn't think their 4T ended until 1949), one possibility is that their 4T began around the time World War I ended and I'm sure they were hit hard by the 1918 Flu Pandemic (which would surely be a MAJOR Crisis event in ANY county approaching a 4T constellation). Russia is still such an oppressive dystopian dictatorship that my theory is that they were still stuck in the old world/post-medieval saeculum until World War II (if they're not still there now). If Russia IS currently in a 1T (which I doubt), it's certainly not one I would ever want to have (in fact, if it was still stuck in the old world saeculum, it would actually FAR more likely still be in a 3T than in a new 1T by now). From what I can remember though, S&H both thought that Russia's cycle (mostly) caught up with ours after World War II, with them even saying that their Baby Boomer generation equivalent had their own Awakening rebellion in the 60s and 70s (but that it was MUCH darker and bleak/dire than our own).