Russia’s diplomats were once a key part of President Putin’s foreign policy strategy. But that has all changed.
In the years leading up to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, diplomats lost their authority, their role reduced to echoing the Kremlin’s aggressive rhetoric.
BBC Russian asks former diplomats, as well as ex-Kremlin and White House insiders, how Russian diplomacy broke down.
It’s actually hilarious how millennials are refusing to shit themselves in fear over hollow threats of nuclear apocalypse like the boomers did for decades.
Like, I’m going to die a slow death from microplastic poisoning. My kids will slowly cook to death as the earth warms. Instant death by fireball sounds pretty nice.
The young scions of our age find themselves in a curious juxtaposition to their forbearers, who once trembled at the thought of world-ending calamities unleashed by the fiery engines of the Autarch’s weaponry. These newer souls scoff at such fears, deeming them hollow echoes of a past era, perhaps because they have been raised in the shadow of subtler, yet equally inexorable, dooms. To them, the threat of slow ruin wrought by the invisible maladies that pollute our waters and air, or the gradual inferno that the Sun’s ever-increasing wrath promises to our world, hold more tangible dread. For these youths, the prospect of instantaneous annihilation in a blaze of cosmic fire seems almost a reprieve, a quick severance of life’s Gordian knot, sparing them the prolonged suffering promised by the ills that plague our slowly deteriorating Urth.
Pretty good
Your sentiment is not, in fact, new. It existed back then as well.
Started good…
…And then you wrote this. I see contradiction.
I’m really sorry to piss on your little eco-statement here, but climate change fears are relevant for decadent rich societies only. Most of the actual humanity is still more concerned with poverty, illiteracy, hunger, epidemics and genocide.
But I agree that those threats are hollow now, because people who’d never actually fulfill them are voicing them. Mostly thieves from the Russian “elite”.
In 1984 the threat would be voiced by bureaucratic leaders of a block occupying large part of the globe which was more or less designed from the ground up for playing “Global Thermonuclear War”, you can see than even in the way Soviet military in its every component was being developed starting from the 50s. Those leaders were not even that corrupt, usually (well, such famous Politburo members as Boris Yeltsin and Heydar Aliyev obviously were, but still), what they owned officially and unofficially is upper middle class level, in Western terms.
So maybe boomers were not so cowardly, yes?