Russian inventive achievements are actually pretty modest for such a large country with such a long history, and it’s not really surprising if people with a lot of national pride get touchy and a little crazy about the whole issue. It’s probably also the reason they go so wild for cosmonauts, because that is one legitimate unchallengeably significant technical achievement they do have
(Side note: while looking up a nice link for Cosmonaut’s Day, I accidentally discovered that the RF also currently has a public holiday called Military Intelligence Day. :eek::eek::eek:)
My God, that’s horrible! Those ingrate Russkies dedicate only one measly day to celebrating military intelligence!? Americans should be proud that their Congress has seen fit to allocate a full seven days for their own National Intelligence Community Week.
This reminds me of a hilarious recurring sketch from the UK comedy series Goodness Gracious Me, in which a character explains how (almost) everything comes from India.
I have a black coworker who claims everything was either originally from Africa or invented by African-Americans/Black People’s of the World (and the reason you don’t hear of it more was that the Powers That Be suppressed that knowledge). Among the things he claims were invented in Africa are hot sauce and chocolate. Now hot sauce is one of those things that seems to have been “discovered” by multiple people’s simultaneously but we have a pretty firm understanding of the origins of chocolate.
We have a pretty firm understanding that cocoa originated in the pre-Columbian Americas, but there are plenty of black nationalists who will tell you that Africans discovered America long before Columbus did. If you believe that, then you can believe that those Africans took the cocoa back with them and invented chocolate.
Well, if you take the long view, and remember that all of humanity originated on the African continent, then you can safely say that Africans invented whatever you want.
Incidentally, I have a Hungarian book that claims, in all seriousness, that Hungarians were the first Europeans to reach North America. The claim rests upon the discovery of an engraved stone in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, whose symbols the authors wishfully interpret as Hungarian runes.
All this reminds me of another Russian (well, Soviet) joke… This one has to do with the attitude of “OK, your country may also have <X>… But ours is better!”. Anyway, the joke:
An apparatchik is at his balcony in the Bolshoi Theater, where he has gone along with his wife to watch a ballet performance. In the middle of the performance, the wife looks at him in the eye and says: “OK, listen - I know everything. I know that you are having an affair with one of the ballerinas of the Bolshoi. Who is she? Point her out to me right now!”.
The guy hems and haws, but the wife is adamant: “No excuses! Who are you sleeping with?”. And then the guy finally admits it and says: “All right, yes, I am having an affair with one of the ballerinas. But, in my discharge, everybody is doing it! See that one? (points to one of the ballerinas) She is the lover of Gromyko. And, see that one? (points to another ballerina) She is the lover of Saratov. And that one…”
The wife stops him. “Yeah, very nice. But tell me right now, who is your lover?”
The guy reluctantly points to one of the ballerinas, and says: “That one”.
The wife looks hard at the ballerina, thinks for a moment, gives a satisfied smile and says: “Ours is better”.
I’ve been reading a book on the electrification of America. It ends with a 50th anniversary jubilee of Edison’s light bulb, at which the old man was practically deified. The book starts with the many other inventors who had invented light bulbs first, then goes on to make the accurate point that what Edison invented was the large-scale city lighting system. But in 1929 nobody cared about that. The light bulb was simple and understandable. Just as his phonograph and movie camera were, though they weren’t first either.
The impression I got confirmed my belief that at the turn of the 20th century America was a very young and very insecure country competing with the ancient cultures of Europe. They badly needed claims of their own to justify their becoming a world power.
Post WWII the USSR was in pretty much the same place, a new superpower that had to show it had a history and pedigree to justify its claim of being the equal of America.
I’m sure that European countries found American bumptiousness hilarious back in the day just as we considered the Russian boasting in the 1950s.
It’s going to be interesting to see how China handles its claims now that it is becoming a superpower. Except, if you read Needham, they’ll all be true. :eek:
We hosted a German exchange student, who once declared to me that Ford was a German car. When quizzed, she based it on there being a Ford car plant near where she came from. :smack:
At least she came to her senses when I pointed out that Henry Ford was an American, who had his original plant in Michigan, and that the BMW plant outside Columbia, SC didn’t make BMW an American car. :dubious:
The other factor you don’t mention but is shown in your post is the fashion in long established and perhaps declining powers for excessive self skepticism, sometimes beyond what facts support.
Claims that Edison ‘invented’ the light bulb, or the Wrights the airplane aren’t anywhere near ‘hilarious’. Edison made the first really practical and economical light bulb, and as you say the systems to accompany it. The Wrights made the first practical airplanes, especially by ca. 1905 when they were flying around for 1 hour+ at a time. Even European observers of the Wrights’ tour there in 1908 tended by then to realize the Wrights’ earlier claims, previously viewed skeptically outside the US, were probably valid based on how advanced they’d become (though of course nothing compared to rapid advances in aviation lots of places in the following years). It was more generally realized that various flying machines which hopped off the ground a bit in other places even prior to the Wrights were not really comparable to what the Wrights had achieved in their first couple of years of flight.
And the other thing both those claims underlined was a US culture (then) focused on practicality. It’s not as much anymore, besides tending to celebrate self-criticism excessively. It’s only a very partial overlap IMO with some far fetched chauvinist invention claims elsewhere like for example in the Soviet Union (although Russians did innovate in plenty of fields before and during the Communist era).
The other thing that has changed though is a more general recognition that most important technical advances are not wholly the inventions of single individuals. Which may also be more factually true nowadays, but it’s also a matter of a changed perspective I think which also explains some revisionism about who ‘invented’ what.
When a firend of mine visited Ukraine he was told that the story about the little girl getting wisked away by a cyclone who meets a scarecrow, tin woodsman, and cowardly cowardly lion on the way to the emerald city, was made up by a Russian.
" This announcement was followed twenty-four hours later by a story in Pravda proving conclusively that Sally’s Cloverdale Marathon III was a direct descendant of Nikita’s Mujik Droshky V, a prize Guernsey bull produced in the barns of the Sopolov People’s Collective twenty-six years ago. " (the story is pretty amusing for folks who want to understand the context of this quote.
I think you’ll find that it’s South Korean and Western publications that ascribe these incredible feats to Kim Jong-Il. Pretty much none of these sensational rumours can be traced back to a North Korean source. Some of the more ridiculous ones (Kim Jong-Il’s golf score, etc.) are documented and debunked in a Wikipedia article.
Whatever inventions and innovations other countries may have contributed to modern society, all modern languages and all modern philosophies still trace back to ancient Greece right? My good friend and neighbor assures me Greece is the basis of all western civilization.
