> Maintenance is something very, very specifically Western

Not really. The need for maintenance occurs when a specific "Thing" has been around for long enough, and when the institutions, schools of thought that sustain that Thing persist for long enough. When there are radical, rapid political/economic/political changes, "maintenance" and the need for maintenance goes away. This article focusses on maintenance of industrial artifacts, and nowhere in recent times have industrial artifacts (boats, lifts, software), the companies that produce them, and the living standards they create, and the governments that encourage them been continuously existent longer than the "Western countries" (since the early 1800s at least). If you were to look outside the sphere of industrial artifacts, for example at old religious buildings - churches, mosques, temples - you'll see solid examples of good maintenance all over the world. The Koran, a literary artifact, for example, has been well-maintained for over a thousand years across the world by a mostly pre-industrial society.

TLDR: Keeping something running isn't just a "Western" thing - but keeping industrial products running is certainly Western, because only the West has seen a continuous and sustained industrial movement for over 200+ years.

There used to be major US companies that were really into maintenance, and pverbuilding for low maintenance. The Bell System. The Pennsylvania Railroad (the Standard Railroad of the World). The King Ranch (the King Ranch line was "we don't fix fence, we build fence.") Teletype Corporation. IBM. Xerox.

There's something to be said for that.

Reading the quote, it seems the east/west divide is along first/third world rather than the traditional hellenestic divisions.

Nonetheless, it does diminish the quotation.

Hoffer is wrong. He's confusing different military philosophies with this mixed up idea about national identity regarding "maintenance".

I don't think anyone would suggest Germany didn't perform a minor miracle by rebuilding as quickly as they did (with massive support), but the Russians went from having half their country burned to the ground, to a world superpower (also with a large amount of support), in a shorter time span than it took West Germany to return to pre-war industrial levels.

More than half. The vast majority of Soviet population and industrial base was in the burned-down part.

Who supported Russia after the war?

The conquered countries that were stripped of a good part of what they had, largely.

would appreciate a reference.

p.s. many parts of eastern europe has been destroyed during the war as well; and was getting rebuild themselves.

Most of what was left of factories in the Soviet occupation zone (the later GDR) was dismantled and moved to the Soviet Union as reparation in the years after WW2. Here's some info in English about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_German_Democrat...

When I was young I heard a lot of crazy stories about the Russians in Germans (I grew up in the Erzgebirge mountains where the Russians mined the Uranium for their atomic bombs, think of an Eastern 20th century gold rush), some of those stories are how entire production lines were moved onto trains and to the Soviet Union nearly over night (they had a lot of experience with this since a few years earlier the Soviet Union basically moved their entire military production a few thousand kilometers eastward, out of the war zone).

Interesting, thanks.

Here's a reference for you https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag People all across occupied lands were enslaved (on paper sentenced for some nonsense and send to workjails)

I was referring to the massive lend-lease support, and the continued industrial support provided to the Soviet Union during the war, not after war. I should have been more clear about that.

But this measure, Japan proved to be utterly Western. They also recovered brilliantly, as predicted.

Er, can you explain that last sentence?

A nail as in its own rack to hang on. Because they value that broom and its mission enough to go through the trouble of creating a rack for it, you could imagine that they put some higher value in that mission (maintenance) and its role in accomplishing it.

At least, that's what I got out of it.

It's quite real. TechShop once had racks for their brooms and dustpans. After two moves, the mid-peninsula TechShop lost their broom racks. Maintenance went downhill about that time.

That's about when the LSD started kicking in.

>Maintenance is something very, very specifically Western.

Yep, no other cultures maintain anything.

This is pretty laughable. To me, almost every Western country is half-broken. When I lived in the US, I was surprised how frequent power faults were there. Streets are full of bumps and corroded pipes were everywhere. And in Europe. Do they have any concept of a decent public bathroom over there? Oh, and don't get me started on how badly their trains are operating. I bet that many train accidents are due to the poor maintenance. It's probably true that maintenance is less paid an attention in poor countries, and there are more non-Western countries that are poor. But it's funny that people can get away with a claim like this. It almost sounds like a white supremacist to me.

TL;DR: Japan is nice.

The GP quote contrasts "the West" to Russia, which is itself overwhelmingly White. It's hard to see a white supremacist angle on a comparison between two majority-white blocs.

In the taxonomy of white supremacists, Russians are "slavic". This was literally part of Hitler's justification for invading eastwards.

("Whiteness" is not simply about skin colour. There's a fascinating/ugly history of how various immigrant groups to America became "white")

Yeah, Japan was my first thought when I read that. You can't tell me with a straight face that they don't maintain everything to within an inch of its life.

Ironically except for the single most maintained item in the west, which is a house.

In Japan they are treated as basically disposable.

Gotta have a gold sink in your economy somewhere to fight inflation.

> TL;DR: Japan is nice.

True, but was also devastated by a war that allowed rebuilding almost from scratch.

Maintaining things coincidentally, and thinking in terms of there being such an activity as "maintenance" that you might want to start doing on any given thing if you aren't doing it already, are different things. I can believe that some cultures have no concept of "Total Cost of Ownership" distinct from purchase price, for example.