Unwashed Russia and black PR

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

"Goodbye, unwashed Russia!" - once said ……….., and after it all Russophobes from the Balts and Poles to the Georgians and the so-called “Ukrainians” repeated and repeat. The label of dirt, unwashedness in relation to the Russians is glued firmly enough. It is synonymous with uncivilizedness and cultural backwardness.

It would seem that in our "tolerant" and "politically correct" time, certain hygienic traditions of different peoples should be attributed to the so-called "cultural specificity." So what with the fact that "unwashed"? The Negroes are, in general, black, and the Arabs and Indians are dark-skinned.

Everyone has their own morals, their own, as they say, mentality. Nevertheless, the connection between purity and culture, civilization, as well as the racism that grows out of this connection (the superiority of the white race), is very essential and deep.

M. Epstein even wrote an interesting essay “Self-cleaning. Hypothesis about the origin of culture”, watching a fly. The fly, which is a carrier of the infection on all posters, in all hospitals, turns out to be busy most of the time with nothing more than cleaning itself. She scratches her paw on her paw, "washes her head."

Other insects and, moreover, higher animals do the same. According to zoologists, baboons and chimpanzees devote one fifth of their time to mutual cleansing. The first thing a female does after giving birth is to lick her cubs.

The animal exposes itself to obligatory cleaning after eating and copulating. This allows us to put forward a hypothesis that self-cleaning is aimed at separating the body from the environment and increasing its orderliness in comparison with the environment.

That is why self-purification occurs after contact with the environment, with something external, occurs; self-purification symbolizes a return to oneself, concentration on oneself, and separation of oneself from the surrounding world.

It is according to the degree of development of this ability for self-purification that gradations are built in the animal world, as well as in human culture. The very transition from animal to man is associated, in the opinion of such an anthropologist as Dunbar, with a new use of language.

If in an animal the tongue is used for licking, then in a person it is for conversation. With the help of language, group members gossip, discuss each other, who is bad, who is friends with whom, who likes whom. The tongue is a way to wash the bones of others, a cheap and highly effective form of mutual cleansing.

Then you can build whole hierarchies of more and more pure forms of culture. So, for example, hygiene is a person's way of separating himself from nature for the sake of nature itself, that is, for the sake of the health of his body.

A higher form - the sense of ownership that holds the economy - is one of the primitive forms of separating one's things from others.

Above economics - politics, which is based on the separation of their group, their society from others. Next comes aesthetics, which is based on the principle of beauty, but to be beautiful means to be completely yourself, to separate from yourself everything that is not yours.

You can recall the words of Rodin that he creates statues from marble simply discarding everything superfluous, or the words of Pasternak that purity is the essence of poetry.

Ethics and religion are the next step - they are based on a taboo, a prohibition on touching and on everything bodily and natural. The sacred is as pure and spiritual as possible. It is not for nothing that all religions contain rituals of ablution.

The principle of philosophy in general only consists in the fact that any ideal phenomenon should be comprehended from itself, that is, there should be nothing external here either.

Naturally, it is possible to build other genealogies of culture, and this concept does not polemicize with them, but proceeding from other grounds, for example, the same Freud speaks of the incompatibility of untidiness with culture.

Theogonic concepts of the origin of culture also assigned an essential role to purity and whiteness in the genesis of culture.

If there is an escalation of self-purification higher, that is, we rise from more and more dirty to more and more pure, then there, on the contrary, - some, initially cleaner, falling, degrading and becoming polluted, creates the entire visible world.

In any case, a certain tension is created between the poles: on one there is the most clean and orderly, on the other pole - the most mixed and dirty.

This digression is made on purpose to demonstrate that the problem of cleanliness and unwashedness is not some part of the issue of culture, civilization of this or that nation.

Does Russia really look so unwashed in comparison with its cleaner and brighter neighbors and, especially, Europeans?

The first mention of the Slavs, which is given by Western historians, notes how the MAIN feature of the Slavic tribes is that they "pour water", that is, wash in running water, while all other peoples of Europe washed in tubs, basins, baths.

Amazingly, Russian by origin, even now, after one and a half thousand years, can be recognized by this habit. Recently I had to watch the family of a Russian emigrant who married a Canadian.

Their son, who does not even speak Russian, washes his hands under the open tap, like mom, while dad plugs the sink with a cork and splashes in his own dirty foam.

Washing under a stream seems so natural to us that we do not seriously suspect that we are almost the only (at least one of the few) people in the world who do just that.

Soviet people were shocked when they saw how the beautiful French actress in the film got up from the bath and put on a dressing gown without washing off the foam. Ugh!

But the Russians massively experienced real animal horror when they began to travel abroad, go to visit and see how the owners plugged the sink with a cork after dinner, put dirty dishes into it, poured liquid soap, and then simply pulled out the plates from this sink, teeming with slops and sewage. without rinsing under running water, (!!!) put on the dryer!

Some had a gag reflex, because it immediately seemed that everything that had been eaten earlier was lying on the same dirty (!!!) plate.

When they told their acquaintances in Russia about this, people simply refused to believe, they believed that this was some kind of special case of untidiness of a separate European family.

I will repeat once again that the custom of “pouring water” was distinguished earlier in Europe by the Slavs, it was assigned to them as a distinctive feature, which clearly had some kind of religious ancient meaning.

By the way, the very self-identification of the Slavs also reminds of the connection with self-purification. It was said above that a language, a word, is a stage in self-purification.

The self-name "Slavs" comes from "glory" and "word", that is, it means the people who have the word, the language, the one that speaks. Whereas all excellent people are "Germans", dumb.

There is a reasonable assumption that the Slavs, as a single group, were awakened to history by the Goths by their invasions. Since then, the name "Germans" has been assigned mainly to the Germans, although earlier it probably had a broader meaning. The Slavs excluded, singled out themselves as those who possessed the word.

By the way, the Russian word "pure" comes from "tsedy", from the verb "to filter", pure - filtered, filtered. The indications of the similarity of the words slave (slave) and "Slav", which are often abused by haters of the Slavs, who see in this "a slave nature, reflected even in the self-name" has an explanation.

Naturally, the warlike Germans often took the Slavs prisoner and turned them into slavery, gradually the word from a proper name for the Germans simply turned into a common noun, just as we now call all copiers with copiers and all types of diapers with diapers.

Well, now let's look at the Europe of those centuries. With the fall of the Roman Empire, any concept of cleanliness and cleanliness disappeared. If in Rome there were still baths (baths) in abundance for people, then Europe did not inherit this custom.

ATTENTION! From V to XII century, that is, 700 yearsEurope hasn't washed at all! This fact is noted by many historians. And if not for the Crusades, I would not have washed even more.

The Kiev princess Anna, who became the French queen, was not only the only literate person at court, but the only one who had the habit of washing and keeping herself clean.

The Crusaders amazed both the Arabs and the Byzantines with what smelled of them, "like from homeless people," as they would say now. The West appeared to the East as a synonym for savagery, filth and barbarism, and he was this barbarism.

The pilgrims who returned to Europe tried to introduce the peeped custom of bathing, but that was not the case! Since the 13th century, the baths have officially come under Church prohibition, as a source of debauchery and infection (!!!), so that the gallant knights and troubadours of that era exuded a stench for several meters around them.

The ladies were no worse. You can still see back combers made of expensive wood and ivory in museums, as well as flea traps …

The fourteenth century was probably one of the most terrible in the history of Europe, no civil, interreligious or world war brought as many disasters as the plague did. Italy, England lost half (!!!) of the population, Germany, France, Spain - more than a third (!!!).

How much the East lost is not known for certain, but it is known that the plague came from India and China through Turkey, the Balkans … it bypassed only Russiaand stopped at its borders, just where … baths were common. Such was the biological warfare of those years …

The fact that the Russians and the Slavs in general are still one of the most numerous ethnic groups in the world, despite the fact that most of all in history they fought and were subjected to genocide, this is not because of any special Slavic fertility, but due to cleanliness. and health. All epidemics of plague, cholera, smallpox have always bypassed us or little affected …

Even Herodotus in the 5th century BC. talks about the inhabitants of the steppes of the northeast, that they pour water on stones and soar in huts. According to various legends, in the 1st century, the Slavs met Andrew the First-Called with a bath.

But these are legends, but what is known for sure is the order of Prince Vladimir to build baths as "institutions for the not powerful" (sick). After all, a bath is not only cleanliness, but also health, hypoxia therapy, massage, warming up, and so on.

What I would like to note especially: after the polonization of Galicia and Volynia, the baths disappeared there, just as the Russian language turned into "Mova", and folk tales began to tell not about the exploits of Ilya Muromets and not about the Capital Kiev City (as is still hear in the Arkhangelsk and Vologda villages, thousands of kilometers from Kiev), and about the xenza and cunning peasants (typically Polish tales).

After the great resettlement of Russia to the North-East in the 11-12 centuries, together with Russian culture, Russian language, fairy tales, songs, the capital, the ruling dynasty, the baths also left from Little Russia.

One of the charges brought against False Dmitry the First was that he did not wash in the bath, although it was prepared for him every day. I got polish, I got a lot of European culture …

In a book published in Europe in 1644, The Laws of French Courtesy, it was advised to wash your hands every day and wash your face “almost as often”. And also in cultural Europe at this time, saucers were specially put on the table so that those who wish could culturally crush the lice caught on themselves.

But in barbarian Russia they did not put a saucer, but not out of feeble mind, but simply because there was no need, there were no lice.

And Solonevich also reports that in the 17th century in the Palace of Versailles, gallant ladies and gentlemen sent their natural needs right in the corridors. It is hard to imagine that this would happen in the chambers of the Moscow Tsar.

However, there would be no happiness, but misfortune helped: thanks to the European untidiness and "smelly", there was a need for perfumery, which became a real industry.

Perhaps the monarchist and Slavophil Solonevich is simply making a mistake?

But then let us listen to the modern writer P. Süskind, famous for the fact that he always reproduces the details of the life of the era described to the smallest needs. Here is a description of the main city of Europe, Paris in the heyday of the 18th gallant century:

“The streets smelled of shit, backyards smelled of urine, stairwells smelled of rotting wood and rat dung, kitchens smelled of tainted coal and lamb fat; the unventilated rooms stank of musty dust, the bedrooms - of greasy sheets, damp box-spring mattresses and the acrid, sweet smell of chamber pots.

The fireplaces smelled of sulfur, the tanneries smelled of caustic alkali, and the slaughterhouses smelled of clotted blood. People smelled of sweat and unwashed clothes, their mouths smelled of rotten teeth, their stomachs smelled of onion soup, and their bodies, if they were not already young enough, of old cheese, and sour milk, and cancer.

Rivers stank, squares stank, churches stank, bridges and palaces stank. The peasant smelled like a priest, a tradesman's apprentice - like a master's wife, all the nobility smelled, and even the king smelled like a wild animal - a queen, like an old goat, both in summer and in winter …

And in Paris itself, again, there was one place in which the stench reigned with a special infernality, namely the Cemetery of the Innocents.

For 800 years, the dead were brought here … for 800 years, dozens of corpses were brought here and thrown into long pits … and later on the eve of the French Revolution, after some pits dangerously collapsed and the stench of an overcrowded cemetery forced residents not only to protests, but to uprisings, it was finally closed and abandoned … and a market for edible goods was built in its place”(!!!).

Foreigners coming to Russia, on the contrary, emphasized the cleanliness and neatness of Russian cities. Here the houses did not stick together, but stood wide, there were spacious, ventilated courtyards.

People lived in communities, in peace, which means that the pieces of the streets were "common" and therefore no one, like in Paris, could throw out a bucket of slops just on the street, demonstrating that only my house is private property, and the rest - do not care!

The only city in Russia that was disgusting and smelly, not in squares, but in gateways and residential quarters, was the most European city - St. Petersburg. It is not for nothing that Dostoevsky captured this specificity of him in Crime and Punishment, but this was already in the 19th century.

Maybe the 19th century changed something in Europe?

Yes, but thanks to the Russians who entered Europe and brought camp baths with them. But it took almost another hundred years for, for example, in Germany, for example, to begin the massive construction of public baths, and the Germans learned to wash themselves every week.

No kidding, in 1889For a year, the German Society of People's Baths invited Germans to the baths and wrote advertisements for “every German has a bath once a week”. And then for the whole of Germany, at the beginning of the 20th century, there were only 224baths.

Maybe it was just the common people in Europe who were unwashed?

No, here is Yust El - the Danish ambassador to Russia at the beginning of the 18th century is surprised at the Russian cleanliness, here is Wellesley - the English military attaché under Alexander II is surprised at the weekly washing of Russians …

In general, it is very useful to read the book to everyone. "Russia is life itself"published by the Sretensky Monastery in 2004. The book has more than two hundred authors, all of them are foreigners who visited Russia from the 14th to the 20th century and left their notes and impressions.

Such a selection should have been published a long time ago, because, indeed, many foreigners came to Russia! And of course they left memories.

But we have one Marquis de Custine for all occasions. Its phenomenon is precisely that he was the only one of the millions of foreigners who visited Russia (including in captivity) left negative tendentious impressions about it.

That is why it was reissued dozens of times in Europe, and then in Russia in 1990, as many as three times as much as 700 thousand copies !!! The fact that what Custine wrote is often banal slander and ignorance, and this was perfectly shown by V. Kozhinov and K. Myalo, but this is not enough.

Millions of copies should be published the memoirs of dozens of ambassadors to Russia, prisoners of war, politicians, travelers. Almost all of the written name can be summed up in one phrase: "All foreigners went to Russia as Russophobes, and they return as Russophiles".

The book is replete with a lot of details: for example, everyone knows that fascist propaganda taught the Germans to perceive Russians as nothing more than "Russishe Schwein", pigs, but not many people know that during World War II, a serious question arose for fascist propaganda, what to do: from hundreds Thousands of Germans who had Slavs driven into slavery in their service, there were letters and reviews on the topic that there was no trust in official propaganda, because “the Russians turned out to be more than people,” and not pigs at all.

If we go back to our times, then we can say that apartments with bathrooms appeared in Europeonly in the 60s of the twentieth century, and trips to baths, even public ones, even exotic ones, such as saunas, Russian baths, thermal baths and hamams, are a rarity.

In Russia, even in Soviet times, the cult of cleanliness and hygiene was maintained with particular persistence. Who does not remember the lines from Mayakovsky's poem about a boy who loves soap and tooth powder? Who doesn't know "Moidodyr" by K. Chukovsky? Who among the Soviet people has not seen the poster "Wash your hands before eating"?

By the way, the question of the Russians: "Where can you wash your hands here?" still surprises foreigners. They do not wash their hands before eating unless they are obviously dirty.

As for the baths, it is still a universal favorite folk tradition. Even urbanized city dwellers go to summer cottages or to old people in villages, where a bathhouse is mandatory, if not at home, then at friends or neighbors. They also love the public, like the heroes of The Irony of Fate.

Communicating with emigrants who left Russia in the last 30 years, however, one can really conclude that for the first time in a thousand-year history (!!!) the West has surpassed Russia in matters of cleanliness and hygiene.

Indeed, now in the West there are baths, showers, bidets, and jacuzzis in huge numbers, the royal assortment of all kinds of hygiene products, detergents and cleaning products, toilet paper in every public toilet and many other achievements of "culture".

But even here, business, the production of these hygiene products and cosmetics and advertising have done their dirty work, too much.

A modern Western man lives as if under a glass cover, even beneficial bacteria and microbes are inaccessible to him, he has no immunity against elementary diseases, his cabinets are full of medicines, antibiotics, without which he, as a drug addict, can no longer do even with the most harmless cold. In hygiene, as in everything, a measure is needed.

A unique study of the prevalence of congenital medical defects was carried out in 193 countries of the world by American scientists commissioned by the March of Dimes public organization, which deals with helping children with congenital ailments.

The studies took into account congenital defects of a genetic or partially genetic nature, including heart defects, defects of the medullary (cerebral) tube, thalassemia and sickle cell anemia (blood diseases associated with a violation of the structure of hemoglobin), Down syndrome.

The general conclusions of the March of Dimes experts were completely disappointing: in the whole world, every sixteenth newborn has a serious genetic disorder.

The main reason is poor ecology, harmful chemicals or some types of infection that enter the body of the expectant mother, as well as consanguineous marriages and late childbirth.

The results of the study showed that the genetic health of the nation in Russia is still one of the best in the world. The number of birth defects per thousand children born in our country turned out to be approximately 42, 9.

For this, undoubtedly, a gloomy indicator, we occupy the fifth place in the world. At the end of the list were Benin, Saudi Arabia and Sudan with indicators from 77, 9 to 82, 0. Among the post-Soviet countries, Tajikistan (75, 2) and Kyrgyzstan (73, 5) have the worst indicators.

Ninety percent of children with congenital disabilities are born in countries with an average and low level of development. It is significant that the United States, with its vaunted medicine and fashion for a healthy lifestyle, was only in twentieth place, behind its southern neighbor Cuba.

“The study confirms that Russians inherited a good, reliable genotype from their ancestors, and this is the basis of health,” says Professor Alexander Chebotarev, deputy director of the Medical Genetic Center of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences.

“In general, their data are quite comparable with those that we get in sample studies. It is important that people understand: it is in our power to increase the health of future generations, and not mindlessly squander what has inherited from grandfathers and great-grandfathers."

So, rumors that the Russian nation will die out no later than next Tuesday have not been confirmed yet again. As well as the "indisputable fact" that the genetic health of a nation directly depends on the "level of development of democracy" in a particular country.

However, the fact that the Americans are inferior to us as many as fifteen positions in the sad register, for some reason, is not at all surprising. It is enough to watch the film "Double portion" by Morgan Spurlock to understand what fate awaits in the future the nation that has invented fast food in cardboard bags.

We, who are not married to cousins, unlike President Roosevelt and the writer Edgar Poe, who prefer homemade kvass and beer without preservatives to dissolving coca-Cola, are not afraid of severe frosts or social upheavals, spent all our childhood on football fields, and not in stuffy apartments behind the playstation, we have every chance of staying normal and healthy.

Yes, life expectancy in Russia has recently dropped sharply, but this is a temporary phenomenon, which has arisen due to the mild genocide called "perestroika" and "democratic reforms."

But with a thousand-year-old healthy genetic reserve, everything will be easily restored as soon as Russia is finally cured of demshiza.

This could have ended, but one demschizoid, to whom I have already presented the above arguments, in a similar dispute demonstrated a kind of loophole that I would like to close.

Say, when they talk about “Russian unwashedness,” they do not mean personal hygiene, but garbage on the streets, pissed-off elevators and a three-letter word on fences.

The form of our cities and settlements in the past has already been mentioned above, as for the present, there are indeed places on the globe where there are very few such phenomena. Some new England, Santa Barbara, small towns in Germany, Italy or England.

But England has its own Liverpool, Italy has a rather foul-smelling Venice. Even in Germany there are monster cities like Belefeld, for example. You can't live in it. Speaking about America, you need to remember about Harlem, the Bronx and the New York subway, about the favelas of all cities in South America, about the eastern ghettos.

In China and Egypt there are places where beggars live in thousands in cemeteries and in catacombs …

I am an avid traveler and have visited many countries. Unlike many of my acquaintances, I have never traveled "on a voucher", through a "travel agency" or through political tourism. In all these cases, a showcase is shown.

I always drove completely on my own and saw what I wanted and how much I wanted. I saw graffiti and dirty porches in absolutely all big cities.

In Paris, I stepped on dog shit several times during the day, in the very center. I saw clochards lying on the sidewalks in their own urine.

But the biggest argument is my two-hour videotape from the center of Europe - from Brussels. There, only the center is more or less acceptable to the human eye, everything else is a gloomy stone jungle, broken glass, painted walls, mountains of debris, dirt and not a single white face around.

From this "capital of civilized Europe" they dictate to us how to live, these people teach us not to pick our noses.

When my daughter and I flew directly from Brussels to Moscow, she said, "Dad, how clean it is here!" This is about Moscow, which for all Russians is by no means an example of a clean city!

I apologize if I gave someone a few unpleasant minutes, but this is the subject of the conversation, it was not we who started it, but the haters of Russia.

If you want to get rid of the unpleasant feeling as soon as possible and find "true freshness", then I do not recommend you a new gel or antiperspirant.

According to the Russian tradition, wash your hands, or even better - go to the bathhouse, with a broom, with a birch … An excellent remedy for dirty Western PR …