[burnafter182]

Hey old friend,

Do you think, that having been through Cold-war era conditioning and propaganda, that you're sort of sensitized to the "modern Russia tropes"? I ask because, well Russia seems like a shithole. A sort of noncompete on the global scale outside their natural resource stockpiles, but the US demagogues seem to like to point fingers there and I see it as more or less a propaganda tool. I suspect it's aimed at the generations that experienced the cold war, but I'm inducing hard.

[java-man]

I think a lot of people miss the Cold War. There was this far away, monolythic, scary enemy, that can be reliably used to justify any amount of military expenses. And to a certain point it was, of course, since up until 1953 they were expecting a "world revolution".

The situation changed ever so slightly after 1985, culminating in dissolution of USSR. Good riddance!

And now the same forces - or new incarnation of the same forces - are working again to create that image of an absolute enemy - on both sides. It's just so easy.