Depended really on a whole variety of things.
How respected were you as an artist internationally. (So, was the state interested in "assimilating" you into the narrative)
How revolutionary were you. (CAN you be assimilated into the new Stalinist narrative)
How hotheaded were you. (Are you willing to compromise with the state)

The Soviets wanted to show how "forward thinking" they were, so they didn't just outright kill everyone they hated or deemed formalist/bourgeois/Trotskyite/Menshevik/Fascist/Reactionary.
If the artist was useful for the system and was willing to compromise, then they'd ask for a few propaganda pieces, and would let him write or compose whatever else they wanted on a smaller scale.

The doctrine of Marxism-Leninism boasted that the USSR's culture was the next step in cultural evolution. It was beyond the west. So obviously, assimilating contemporary art was important. Turning avant garde artists like Shostakovich and Mayakovsky into cogs in the system. Shostakovich gave up, Mayakovsky choose to have a bit more dignity/wasn't smart enough/willing to try undermining the system from the inside, so he bit the bulett. Admirable I'd say. That is, if we can believe the reports that it was a suicide.
There is this old joke about the event.

>Is it true that Mayakovsky the poet committed suicide?
>Yes. We even know his last words!
>So?
>"Comrades, don't shoot!"

Basically, if you weren't willing to cooperate, they'd at first stop giving you commissions, and would stop publishing you. Then they'd ban your already published works. (You could still try getting new stuff published and approved, it's just that you old works are now out of print until a new Vozhd comes around and softens the system.
Next is being publicly reprimanded by the Association of Proletarian Writers or the Association of Proletarian Musicians.
Then you get sentenced to 10 years and you're off to Siberia.

>For how long did you get sentenced?
>Ten.
>What for?
>Nothing!
>Come on, don't lie! For nothing you get at least 20!

And even if your sentence is over, they'd just randomly extend it, just to keep you away from the other intellectuals.
If you are proving to be a big nuisance for the Party and the State, then comes the NKVD and takes you in the middle of the night, and shoots you like a dog.

The soviets basically only killed you if you were not up to date with the current party line, and you were unwilling to compromise. (But if you compromised, then the state would compromise too. Shostakovich had to write extravagant, neoromantic/neoclassical symphonies for the Party, but they let him compose chamber works rather freely.)

The Nazis on the other hand wanted to steer the ship in a completely different direction, trying to rectify things of the past. For this reason, the Nazies focused more on assimilating the thinkers of yesterday, like Nietzsche and Wagner.
Why bother with the avant garde at all? It's Jewish rubbish anyway! Romanticism and classicism is the Aryan man's art direction! Sacrifice! The Will overcoming physical bounds! To bring by the end of history purely through will! Pick up that sword, oh, Siegfried and crush this decadent world order!
If you look at it, it's in line with how the regime of Napoleon worked for example. It also supported classicism.
The Nazis wanted to push the reset button on modernity, the Soviets wanted to show they are thinking ahead of capitalism.

These two books paint a good picture of the artistic life in the USSR. They usually intertwine with then-contemporary literature, so it's not only about music.

You can find similarities and analogies between every two objects in classifying them as widely as you can. You can divide them onto one broader category and be happy with it, arguing its validity with analogies popped up. It's all about intellectual jerking off, at some point.

The soviet saw the censorship coming right out of the top establishment (it wasn't a socialistic state in terms of power-sharing, to begin with) by way of denoting anything with a story different from depicting regular agricultural people talk about the revolution or key figures in the mythology and ideology of the new state.
Stalin in 1929, afaik, ordered to outlaw everything that was "formalism" which formally meant everything that highlighted a "form" more than content which meant everything apart from ideologically driven excitement about new life or events directly preceded and influenced it. Since about then, he had decided to be a great sole movie producer taking decisions on what films were to be shown. Of course, it narrowed down the soviet cinema output to 4-5 movies per year, and this span of time is widely regarded as a period of, at least, darkness. Even eager adherents are not prone to name a couple of films of oh-yes-superior soviet culture off that age. Similar courses of action were applied to different strands of art save for the differing executors.
So it started off as a way of repressing the culture which, in this regard, was aimed at gaining insight from the revolution and could bring some undesired questions into peoples' heads.
The establishment had seen them as a bunch of variables one might toggle with. And tools like that were applied mainly to ensure the power of the stalin's government. Films he chose, for instance, were largely patristical depicting him as THE father.
The artistic freedom of ussr in the 20s witnessed the greatest innovative use of montage in cinema, musical lift and, by inertia, a consequent tradition of russian literature. People felt they were not strapped anymore by the framework of proper art and were highly experimental yielding some fruits. The only thing is, theme was politized after the lenin's goverment "nationilized" everything to subsidize every field of the economics.

As for the nazis, they and the soviets in fact pursued the same ideals of having an equal layer of society with a higher order to control them. So, provided they were from the same epoch against almost the same background of ideas, they employ nearly the same means to make up programs to achieve the ideals. But when it boils down to the realisation, the main features were not excessively the same. Although in the nation problem, you can draw parallels as the newly formed USSR set out to erase the "great russian shoevinism" as they put it, nazis wished to force people think about the greatness of their heritage, the great germanic identity in simplistic, similar to the soviets forms of genre art rather than how they have overcome the tsar and lived a wonderful life. So, there's a subtle yet significant difference. The nazis wished to amplify feelings of being born german, the soviets wished to amplify feeling of being born to witness the falldown of the tsardom.
Roughly non-detailed speaking, it was like that.

Soviet and Nazi censorship were very similar in the sense that the state authorities were entitled to ban everything (music, literature,
paintings, cinema, massmedia etc.) that they considered opposing to the state and the state's official ideology.

Specifical differences were caused by the different ideologies, the different historical developments (Nazis 12 years/ commies 70 years) and the different structure of the administrative machineries in both states.

For instance in Nazi-Germany the censorship was executed by the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda while the USSR had a government agency engaged with the censorship of a certain field, for instance one agency that censored all publications that were printed.
The film industry was supervized by Stalin himself, if he thought a certain film's message would collide with the goals of the socialist
state or undermine its authority the film was banned, sometimes also the director purged from the party or arressted and sent to Gulag.

Also other than in Nazi Germany all publishing facilities (including theater, opera, music) in the USSR were state owned and strict control was
already executed at this level. A manuscript had to pass censorship of a state owned publishing house in order to be published and distributed.
Books which were known to meet the official taste, (for instance famous communist leader speeches) were printed in huge numbers while less favored by officials material might be only published in small numbers and not distributed widely.
Typical western literature such as best-sellers and romances barely existed in the USSR.

And that's that, with the cheesiest song I could find this stream has ended now. If anyone is still in shape to pick up: Feel free!

>>31082

>Thanks for hosting me.

Anytime, mate!

>You can be a master of eloquence in text, and sound like a retard while speaking :-DDDD. Then when it's over, you remember a dozen interesting things you could have said :-DDDD

This 100% - talking just draws much more attention than writing, so I tend to forget what I wanted to say while speaking. Just another reason why I like imageboards and generally writing texts so much: I can type what I want, and I can change it as often as I want before sending it. While talking I can't just stop for a minute and rethink because I noticed that what I'm saying isn't leading anywhere. I mean I can, but people will be confused :DDDD

>Unfortunately, the only topics I can waffle on about is amateur philosophy, art, and experiences with being a bipolar schizo with mild psychotic episodes.

>Now I'm kind of interested on what other Ernsts have to say, we have many experts on various topics on this board

I liked doing this a lot, and I will surely do that again, but I'll also be perfectly happy to listen in when other Ernsts give this a shot.

>>31083

>And I realized that I sounded like I had a stuffed nose the whole time, because I already have a noise reduction filter in my audio chain

I think you sounded just fine, though it's impossible for me to know how you sound normall. Oh by the way, I totally sound like Isaac Hayes normally :DDD

By the way: Here's yesterdays short story, if you want to read it (1/2):

When I woke up in the morning, I felt very unwise. So I asked my friend Hans-Dieter: "What can I do to become wise?" And he said to me: "That's easy: You need to travel! See the world, meet interesting people and broaden your horizon. This is good, Goethe, Tucholsky and Mark Twain also said so." - "That sounds good", I said, "Goethe, Tucholsky and Mark Twain couldn't all be wrong. Tomorrow I'll travel to the next village and wait at the gates of the local mall. Here I'll quickly meet lots of people I don't know yet, I'll be wise in no time." - "No, you got it all wrong" said Hans-Dieter, "You have to go farther. To other countries, even to another continent." - "Ah, I understand now. The farther away, the better." - "Yes, now you got it." So I calculated a target which made it possible for me to meet the biggest amount of people in the greatest possible distance from here. I decided to go to China, because that's far away, and there are lots of people living there.

So I took 2 weeks of vacation and flew to China. On arrival I started to greet every person I met with "Hello", and each time I counted the person in my notebook, because the exact amount of people I talked to could be important for the amount of total wisdom gained in my journey. Since the contact with the land itself could also be of importance, I rolled around on the floow every now and then, only to be sure. The GPS in my cellphone counted the distance I moved, and I wasn't sure if going by car also counted.

My vacation ended and I asked myself if I was losing some of the recently gained wisdom just by getting closer to my home again, but that seemed unlikely. Just after exiting the plane, I could feel my wisdom slowly decreasing, and even worse: I felt how I was wasting my time here, because right now I could be traveling again and further filling up my wisdom account. So I didn't go home this day, but took the next available plane to India instead, because there also are lots of people. In India I immediatly went to the beach, because I wa well prepared: that was the place, where wise people from all around the world gathered, and indeed, this place was overflowing with wise people. you could easily read the degree of their wisdom by their facial expressions. Only once before I looked into a face expressing that amout of wisdom: It was Hans-Dieter, when he had his 12th pint of beer at the local pub. Not surprising that he was able to give me all that good advice.

(2/2) - probably still some spelling errors in it, since it was initially only meant for me to read it out, but since it's there now, might as well post it.

This time, I didn't stay for 2 weeks, because for securing the biggest possible amount of wisdom, I wanted to see lots of different places, so obviously I couldn't stay in one place for long. I was very careful to not talk more than one word with every person I met, because when had had to speak more, I immediatly felt that I was straying from the most efficient wisdom gaining path. Later I limited myself to one day per location, and then contimue to the next location as fast as possible. I was going for large cities, with an airport close to the city. From there I could take a Taxi directly to the city center, jump out, say hello to everyone and go right back to the airport. My wisdom production was pretty much optimized by now, and I was beginning to wonder if all those other people would be able to keep up with me when I return, especially that stupid guy Schulze on the other side of the office hall.

When I was done visiting the large cities, I went for the usual places of interest, Macchu Picchu, the Pyramids, das Taj Mahal and so on. Suddenly I realized that I had never been 6 months in Australia after I finished college. I didn't even wander the Camino de Santiago. Not surprising that not long ago I felt this terrible deficit of wisdom. For a short while I became confused by realizing that earth is circling the sun at 30 kilometers the second, which again is circling the center of the milky way, which made us all travelers in some way. But I woulnd't be swayed by such distractions, not now, as I already were close to my goal.

Then, finally, I was done: I traveled to every country on the globe, had contact to millions of people, and with at least one person in every country (and with most ethnic subgroups- if they were recognized by Wikipedia). I visited every miracle of nature, and saw every building of relevance with my own eyes. Granted, maybe they built some new ones in the meantime, my wisdom woudn't be perfect, I knew, but at least there was no war or political change with would have led to the creation of new countries during my travels, which would have unnecessarily prolonged my journey. Finally, I was taking the plane back home. since I had sold my belongings long ago, I asked Hans-Dieter to fetch me from the airport. He brought his wife which he met in the mall in the next village, and his little daughter. His hands on his hips and with the widest smite he greeted me when I poked my head out of the plane.

He said to his daughter: "Look, a wise man approaches, one who has seen all of the world Listen close, for you can learn something here!" "Hey, " he shouted, and waved to me, "say something wise!" Without much thinking I replied: "Only when the last plane has landed, the last backpack shouldered and the last Street Food eaten you will realize that Goethe, Tucholsky and Mark Twain didn't have internet access."

The period preceding WW1 was very interesting for Western civilisation. It was an era of high idealism and joviality. Culturally Romanticism had run its course imparting a huge influence on the mindset of people while early modernism was starting to explore new concepts but for the most part it was all very exciting and optimistic.

Then WW1 began and the unimaginable horrors of modern warfare shattered the naivety of that era. Stuff like live and let live were throwbacks to the previous years where there was thoughts of a 'Brotherhood of man' but that stuff only really occurred in the opening periods of the war before the men became hardened to the realities of the war and either their hearts filled with hatred of the enemy or their minds fell to indifference and despair.

In the wake of the war the previous idealism was shattered. What followed was a more epicurean or even hedonistic culture and also much more cynical. People were not just celebrating the end of the war but also rejecting pre-war ideals. Before the war Western Civilisation was much vaunted and universally revered but afterwards people asked themselves how a civilisation that led to such a hellish bloodbath could be worth anything. Movement such as Dadaism began by ridiculing the pre-war mindset, other movements such as Fascism tried to reshape the idealism into a more narrow view that allowed for enemies and bloodbaths.

The world after WW1 had become cynical and understandably so. We still feel the effects today.

>>30896
>>30858
I found acid to be incredibly uninteresting tbh. Now I'll grant you, I probably didn't ever take that big a hit, was never in an awesome enough place, and never was otherwise sober enough to really enjoy it, but still I think that LSD is terribly overrated.

Maybe it was just that combination of me being drunk or mildly on benzos or somesuch that helped smooth over any weirdness from ever cropping up, but I really do think that partly what I just found from acid was pretty much what I expected out it at best and otherwise a lot of unexpected things weren't as great. I think that basically part of the problem is I already have too much of a compatible mindset to acid or something. I heard the apocryphal story about a Buddhist monk being given acid, with people (usually dumbass bydlo and druggie friend types) being all, can you even imagine how mindblowing it must be for a Buddhist monk, and the monk, completely unphased, saying just "yes it was interesting" or somesuch not terribly and unphased reaction.

Mine was not even that. I didnt even find it interesting. I saw at one point in my minds eye lots of things being devils or sins trying to tempt me and the concept of finding the Truth and reaching it and reaching God only to be so thoroughly convinced of your own paranoia to keep looking for the higher reality, and thus only achieving further delusion by grasping beyond that and still searching (which I guess there's a Christian equivalent in meeting Jesus and not recognizing Him being a similar concept) and how even the thought of that could be an instilled doubt set to undermine you from searching further and finding the deeper Truth etc but it was still all terribly uninteresting to me.

I would say however that perhaps the least expected part of LSD to me was just how not just banal it really was but also the extent to which I felt in control and handled my shit because I can't deal with weed which makes me paranoid (in case it not being obvious how deeply ill at ease I am in many ways). It was unexpectedly speedy, which I hated and was thankful for the alcohol, and with a metallic taste, and with such a complete sense of internal ease it didnt bother me, which is perhaps why it was so unexpectedly easy going because I think that no matter how ill at ease I am with the cosmos I am not uneasy with myself regardless of how much I probably should be. Concepts of self loathing and self disgust have typically been pretty elusive concepts to me so perhaps that is part of why some people have bad trips and I didn't, but at the same time the only interesting thing about it which also surprised me was how much I noticed details I hadn't before in my surroundings that were actually there as opposed to hallucinations which were few except for fractal like swirling in my wallpaper.

My best estimation is that had I took say six hits of acid and not been drinking things would've been different but at the same time I feel no compunction to do so. It matched aspects of my personality too well and I felt like a slightly disinterested monk whose primary problem with it is this reality can seldom get the lighting just right particularly when artificial ones are involved, although morning light also looks terrible. I can't stand the angles and points of illumination after sunrise.

But then again, I am also saying this as one who often joked that I was too jaded for heroin and the one time I tried that I also found it to be incredibly boring and uninteresting, thus proving my original stipulation correct: I am indeed far too jaded for heroin. Because it was boring and I was thoroughly unimpressed with it.