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Comment by ViktorRay | Hacker News Reader

”This interpretation reeks of Western naivete.”

The essay you are responding to was written by a historian.

The ideas actually described in the essay were not developed by a Western person. They were first implemented successfully by a non-Western person.

Mahatma Gandhi.

And Gandhi developed these ideas from reading the writings of another non-Western person. Leo Tolstoy.

More information can be found here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Letter_to_a_Hindu

As you can see in this article the non-Western Tolstoy was influenced by many non-Western religious and philosophical figures. Tolstoy then influenced the non-Western Mahatma Gandhi to successfully implement these ideas.

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I'm sure European aristocrat Leo Tolstoy would be astonished to find himself lumped in with an Indian as being non-western.

Tolstoy was Russian. Russia is not a Western country. And Tolstoy was influenced by non-Western philosophical and religious figures.

While Russia is not quite a western country, the European upper classes around St. Petersburg and Moscow were no less "western" in philosophy and thought than people from nearby Latvia, Ukraine or Finland.

Tolstoy delighted in Schopenhauer, a western philosopher who he based much of his later ideas on. And yes, Tolstoy was later influenced by eastern thought, and was famously a Sinophile, but that is, again, a western tendency common among upper class europeans of the period (along with Japonisme).

Furthermore, "War and Peace" is often called one of the greatest works of "western literature". It's even included in Encyclopedia Brittanica's "Great Books of the Western World".

Just because the Russian Empire wasn't universally western doesn't mean large groups of people within were not. My own great grandparents came to America from St. Petersburg and considered themselves western.

That’s very interesting! Thank you for the thoughtful reply.

> Russia is not a Western country.

Russian culture, as it is practiced in the country's power centers, both historically and today is absolutely Western.

It may not be liberal western culture, but guess what, there's no shortage of Western countries that have been, or are, quite illiberal.

For a simple example, MAGA is western culture. United Russia isn't at all different from it, it just has a different coat of paint and supreme leader.

The only thing that can make Russia "western" is if you equate white and western.

MAGA is western, because it is American. Russia is not western, because it is neither europe nor america. And they themselves consider themselves east. And did for over a hundred years.

If you have traveled a bit around the world, and first hand experienced different cultures, you will recognize that Russia of Moscow/Petersburg and other big cities is much closer to 'west' than to 'east' of China/India/Japan/Mongolia/Indonesia.

Maybe not western enough for you, it does have a distinct flavour (but then Sicilia is also distinctly different from Sweden), but still much closer to Europe than to Asia proper.

> The only thing that can make Russia "western" is if you equate white and western.

The thing that makes it western is similarity of culture, philosophy, religion, social structure, historic exchange and cross-pollination. [0] All of which exist well within the range set by countries that you would have no qualms of calling western.

It is very similar to the rest of Europe on all those axes, in a way that Indian, East Asian, Middle Eastern, Native American, African[1], Polynesian culture, philosophy, and structures are not.

Yes, there are some peculiarities about it that the anglosphere finds alien. The same can be said for any distinct culture within the western sphere.

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[0] Keep in mind that when I am speaking of Russia, my claims cannot be generalized among all of the ~100 ethnic and cultural groups that compose it. Just of the ones that make up the country's political center.

[1] I am speaking from a position of incredible ignorance when I just roll up an entire continent into 'African'. It's quite likely that people who know their ass from their elbow would be able to tell me why I'm wrong to do so.

…against a western government.

> Mahatma Gandhi.

I daresay the Brits were not as willing to gun down peaceful protesters as today's regimes are.

You should look up the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.

(Full disclosure - I had to look up the name after remembering it portrayed in the movie Gandhi)

At least that was condemned by Churchill as "unutterably monstrous".

The Iranian lot don't seem to have similar sentiments.

Gandhi also suggested, “But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife.”

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