Lester Golden
1 min readSep 4, 2023

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The date I knew the Soviet Union was going to die was on my birthday February 24, 1988 when the anti-Armenian pogrom in Sumgait, Azerbaijan broke out. I told all my b-school classmates that day that the Soviet empire is finished because the nationalism genie is out of the lamp (bottle?) and they'll never be able to put it back in. Wait a couple or three to four years and it'll all break apart.

Then Putin started his genocidal war against Ukraine on my birthday. So I declared war on Putin with my only sphere of competence in combat: words.

Latvians of all political and ethnic stripes love to replace the hard work of analysis and thinking with the easy, lazy default of conspiracy. It's a form of political demobilization and modern serfdom, an expression of political impotence and lack of agency.

With its military's offensive capability devastated the best Russia can hope for is a frozen conflict that allows it to play for time until the next round. This is why Russian propagandists play up the nuke threat, as blackmail against the West's Axis of Prudence and the foreign policy blob in contrarian indicator Milley's Pentagon and the State Dept that is panicking at the thought that Ukraine might actually win a decisive victory.

I expect many Russians believe the movie Idiocracy as well as Wag the Dog were documentaries.

After Citizens United America has the best elections money can buy, just not in the way Russians imagine it.

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Lester Golden
Lester Golden

Written by Lester Golden

From Latvia & Porto I write to share learning from an academic&business life in 8 languages in 5 countries & seeing fascism die in Portugal&Spain in1974 & 1976.

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