Face it, you can totally imagine Tsar Putin talking about his Ukraine conflict exactly like this:
P.J. O'Rourke can be amazingly sharp with his wit trained on a serious subject. He looks at Russian history as a source for hope that the Russians will punish themselves for invading Ukraine if we won't.
After reciting their grim history of death, misery, poverty, and autocracy, things got even worse for Russia:
And that’s pretty much it for Russia’s Golden Age. After the 18th century, Russia devoted itself mostly to being big fat loserland, losing pace with the modern world, wars, Alaska, a communist utopia, a million victims of Stalin’s purges, 6 million victims of the famine of 1921, 8 million victims of the famine of 1932-33, a “Kitchen Debate” between Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon, ICBMs in Cuba, the space race, the arms race, the Cold War, and finally, 14 independent countries that were once in the USSR.
The really funny thing is, the Russian people will insist on getting the government that will give them more death, misery, poverty, and autocracy:
Now, because of what he’s doing in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has a higher smerd popularity rating than Ivan the Terrible or even Stalin. We certainly should have screwed him over. But Russian history is on our side. He’ll certainly screw himself.
I wouldn't rule out another Mongol invasion, at this point. I'm starting to suspect that the Russians just massively pissed the original Mongols off over something or another. Anger management issues, you know.
