Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary, has faced international condemnation after claiming Ukrainians can only fight the ongoing Russian invasion as long as the US continues to provide financial support and weapons.

Some people hoped Orban would defend the nation-state but he can’t because he has no idea what it is. As Ukrainians say, we will fight as long as at least one of us remains alive. And if nobody survives, the grass will rise out of the fields and strangle the Russian bastards. Orban clearly has no understanding of nationalism or patriotism. Not even a distant memory of it remains in his life. This is why he doesn’t get something so simple.

I feel sorry for him because such people miss a really powerful, important experience in life.

I’m working around the clock to meet a deadline on a project that is suffering because of my incapacity to keep my psychological issues at bay. As a result, I missed the 100-year anniversary of the creation of the USSR.

I can’t miss this opportunity to repeat that there was absolutely nothing good about the USSR. For a person with even the tiniest amount of dignity and even the smallest capacity for thinking, it was terrible. There was no physical coercion to speak of in the USSR I remember. No GULAG, no torture, no danger of losing your life for political reasons at all. What was terrible is that your whole life course was charted out for you and no significant departure from the plan somebody else made for you was possible. There was no chance for you to take responsibility for your own life. No chance to show initiative. No chance to make your own decisions. No chance and no need to think for yourself.

Many people loved it and still miss it. The lure of being cocooned by the power of a totalitarian state that protects you from life is always strong. The damage done by living so cocooned is so bad that it’s transmitted generationally to people born long after the USSR fell apart.