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Russia doesn’t exist
(or that will be the case soon anyway.)
There are some jokes, and perhaps some conspiracy nuts, who think my country, Australia, doesn’t really exist. Us Australians take this with good humor. We aren’t a religion, we aren’t going to make you believe in us. It could even be beneficial to us if you left us alone.
Right now, we are seeing a remarkable transformation, a fall of an empire of sorts. While many are predicting and praying for the fall of Pax Americana, her biggest rival for seventy years is fading into obscurity.
The Soviet Union and Russia, the Empire and Empire lite respectively, were the grand bogeyman that had kids in classrooms hiding under desks in nuclear drills. We loved to hate them, where would James Bond and so many others be without such a foe? Would the Americans make such strides into space without the rivalry from the Soviets? (Btw I highly recommend the fabulous series “For all Mankind” on Apple+ which theorises what would have happened if the Soviets landed on the Moon first.)
Now a point of order about something that drives me crazy. The nonsensical argument that the Soviet Union and Russia are somehow different in much of their geopolitical outlook. Both were run out of the very same building in Moscow. They were Russian centric enterprises. Even Stalin, born in Georgia, did…
