> In Greek the gesture was known as the katapygon (κατάπυγον, from kata – κατά, "downwards" and pugē – πυγή, "rump, buttocks"). In ancient Greek comedy, the finger was a gesture of insult toward another person, with the term katapugon also referring to "a male who submits to anal penetration" or katapygaina to a female. In Aristophanes's comedy The Clouds (423 BC), when the character Socrates is quizzing his student on poetic meters, Strepsiades declares that he knows quite well what a dactyl is, and gives the finger. The gesture is a visual pun on the two meanings of the Greek word daktylos, both "finger" and the rhythmic measure composed of a long syllable and two short, like the joints of a finger (— ‿ ‿, which also appears as a visual pun on the penis and testicles in a medieval Latin text).
Solzhenitsin was also a right wing Russian nationalist who was absolutely part of the problem. That "realism that approaches Tolstoy's" you mentioned is actually mostly folklore and vastly exaggerated for propaganda purposes (see https://www.nytimes.com/1974/02/06/archives/solzhenitsyns-ex...).
> Solzhenitsyn's Greater Russian, Orthodox-driven nationalism, Elder notes, "once made him appear sorely out of touch, but today has become increasingly fashionable." Although he is best known for his exposure of the Soviet Gulag system and his staunch anti-communism, Solzhenitsyn welcomed Putin's rise to power in 1999 and praised him for restoring Russia's national pride. In 2007, Putin visited the ailing Solzhenitsyn at home to award him a state prize for his humanitarian work. In "Rebuilding Russia," published in the dying days of the U.S.S.R., Solzhenitsyn criticized the Soviet government's haphazard border policies that he said carved up traditional "Rus." He advocated a "Russian Union" encompassing Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, and the ethnic Russian parts of Kazakhstan.
> That "realism that approaches Tolstoy's" you mentioned is actually mostly folklore and vastly exaggerated for propaganda purposes
I can only vouch for the realism of his description of a hospital in his Cancer Ward (published in 1966), and for a scene of phonetic spectral speech analysis in In the First Circle (1968). Both unusually lifelike and showing first-hand experience.
"For it must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelise in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realised itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity. Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating the ‘end of ideologies’ and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, have so many men, women and children been subjugated, starved or exterminated on the earth."
Similar to how I, a committed communist, think The Economist is the best paper written in English. When a paper has a very explicit point of view that they don't hide, it's very easy to "read between the lines" and evaluate what they're saying on their own merits, taking their bias into consideration. The news is still the news, and you can make sense of what they're saying about it if you know their inherent biases. This is why I prefer sources like The Economist, who are happy to tell you they're classically liberal, rather than somewhere like CNN that's "unbiased news" that's really very biased without consciously revealing this bias.
Since it's impossible to cover everything that happens in the universe, choosing which news is important is a big part of being partial.
Anyway, I am less surprised that a revolutionary comrade like you is interested in knowing how the establishment thinks (to fight it I guess) than by OP's attitude, i.e., a reactionary taking interest (and judging positively) what the revolutionaries are writing. In my experience, people self-labelling as right-leaning tend to dismiss anything coming from the left as "utopian bullshit".
Labeling 'Le Monde," the most trusted newspaper in France and one of the largest papers on the planet as one written by "revolutionaries" is rich. There's far more difference between my politics and Le Monde than Le Monde and The Economist, both of which are still fundamentally liberal, reformist papers that accept the rule of capital and that capitalism is the Only System, just disagree on slight reforms around the edges. OP isn't that strange since Le Monde and him probably agree on most larger political decisions and just disagree about the reforms around the edges unless they're like a monarchist or something.
There's something to be said about limits. Interesting things happen when you set limitations. The Oulipo group, made up of writers like Perec and Calvino, would intentionally set limits in order to spur creativity. What's the harm in having a web protocol like Gemini attempting to do the same thing? The modern web is bloated, captured, no longer uncharted land waiting to be explored. Why not refuse and set off into the waters of Gemini? What do you have to lose?
From here: https://wikiless.org/wiki/The_finger?lang=en#Classical_era