when the leaders are insane

The legendary diplomat and Russia specialist Jack Matlock once said relations between the two countries are like a pendulum. They eventually swing back. But what will we look like by the time you are ready to embrace us again? For decades we have indisputably been the two greatest space-faring nations. Though that arena remains our last realm of cooperation, we are probably beginning to lag there too. While you were launching your latest rocket at the moon we were launching them at Kyiv.Though we are both enslaved by our military-industrial complexes, our tradition of enslavement goes much deeper. While your white people oppressed another race, our nobility enslaved fellow Caucasians. This continued into the U.S.S.R. with the Communist elite the new masters. Now we toil under the yoke of kleptocrats. The resulting generational PTSD, which manifests itself in a sense of total disempowerment, is one of the reasons we don’t resist. We are a divided house too. We just have no coping mechanisms like transparency, free speech or public self-deprecation. Ironically self-loathing, a corollary of the slave mentality, leads to the kind of arrogance spewing from the mouths of our state-funded pundits — the ultimate PR team for the pigs in the house. Such conceit is a luxury and makes it easy to shed values and hurt others — peaceful neighboring countries as well as our own people. Despite what Dostoyevsky wrote we are no longer hung up on introspection. We have become a nation of ostriches run by a few lunatics and their equally deranged minority of supporters. The author is a Russian citizen.  https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2023/06/07/a-love-letter-from-russia-to-america-a81410