Salisa lohavittayavikant

I know it’s not my place and I’ve been completely unhinged in a bad way since the funeral, probably sometime before […], but you should consider stopping the war if you could. You wouldn’t be a weaker man for it but a stronger one. I do mean it. To be honest I don’t want to be a part of this anymore and as I said to Sasha a few weeks ago you all could nuke each other for all I care. But I feel I have to say this. If the Chinese (unofficially) and the Americans (officially) agree on something, perhaps it is a good time to take a pause and listen, sweetie. It is not about you or the ideas in your head, you know that. Your ideas are too entrenched and too unmalleable to be of any worth. They are calcified as hard facts. At first I did believe in you waging the war for the obvious “existential” reason but after everything that happened between you and me and the psychology I’ve been witnessing up-close I’m beginning to seriously doubt that. And even if it started as that, it has now mutated to actually threaten you existentially. Though I’m not sure if the information I’ve been exposed to is Western propaganda but I trust the officials at the highest level – the heads of state on the same level as you – making the moves to try to temper your downward path of senseless destruction. I’ve read that it was not in the best interests of the U.S. to have a weakened Russia being sold for parts and subsumed under China. Maybe they could move a needle on your behalf, who knows. And even if they push for a hard bargain, what’s wrong with accepting it? The Russian psychology of strength-weakness dichotomy makes no sense to me. No one in the wider world calls a man strong for being a distempered wreck, especially a senselessly or even purposefully violent one. Strength radiates outward through selfless actions and not destructive actions. Strength in a man of real worth is emotional strength. I fear your idea of strength is merely egoistical. It is crass and selfish and self-aggrandising. I fear also that you would rather go down with the ship in the same way Jim Jones took his people down with him when he didn’t need to. His ego was so intertwined with his community he could no longer separate his sense of self from the welfare of his flock. He felt the little society he built up was a part of him – a big part of him and his ultimate life purpose. He felt that he owned them but was also responsible for them. The idea of himself became so enmeshed with that of his people and when his mind started to deteriorate the living conditions of his people did also because he took it out on them and made things worse for them. And that’s what Jonestown was about. The man as the creator and the destroyer of human lives. He uplifted them like they were everything in his world and tore them down in one act of cruelty as if they were nothing in any world. But you are not like that. I don’t believe you are that. I know there’s a slim but serious chance that the West couldn’t be stopped at this point (though your biggest ally China doesn’t think so and so I trust their judgement on this) but you have to have faith in people and you have to believe in real actual changes. One thing I’ve learned interacting with you and your people is that you are so fixed in your way and you always see the worst in everything. Everything is a threat, a lie, a deception, a manipulation. True perhaps for your culture but not universally true elsewhere. And as I’ve said before, that just because they started the expansion doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t regret it. The rest of the world feels guilt, remorse, responsibility, and complicity. Whereas your culture is so brutal and unrelenting and unapologetic no one would admit fault in themselves however miserable that made them and everyone around them. You cannot project your culture and your experiences within it as something that represents the whole world. And though there are people who want to see you go down, not everyone does. And that ‘not everyone’ is your sliver of hope. And you have to try, sweetheart. You can still turn this around. There is no need to go down the path of further destruction. I fear you have gone into a catastrophic mode of thinking and feeling after being paralysed and traumatised by something you yourself brought about and you hated yourself for that. But that’s just something that exists within you. You don’t need to radiate that outward especially because it’s a self-feeding loop. The more you radiate it the more it becomes real and the more it is perpetuated and amplified and cyclical. One thing you can do to get rid of that anger and hatred is perhaps to change the situation that went awry because of you for the better. To alleviate the misery you brought about and atone for your actions. That’s how the festering self-loathing goes away. You fix the outer to alleviate the inner. Ultimately it is you who benefits.

I don’t know why I’m writing out all this. Maybe for the first time I realised you misunderstood my “overture” to be a musical prelude which an overture also is and so I should have been more generous in my interpretation of you. Though to be honest, I still want to see you go down and now is as good a time as any. I think the authoritarian model of governance brings out the worst in humanity that it’s no longer just a “political” issue but a uniquely “human” one. I think your culture and your people are incurable. To cure the temperament of your people and the mood of your culture is to cure the anomaly of authoritarianism and so it would never be permitted to happen. To shatter the ills of your society, you would have to shatter the state that governs it. For that, your state as we know it would have to be dissolved. Whether that should be through internal or external upending remains to be seen. And that’s probably why I wrote what I did earlier. I wanted you to be understood on a human level which is something you would never experience in your lifetime in a culture so antithetical to human compassion and human dignity and human psychology. And in a way what I wrote would fall on deaf ears because your temperament shaped by your culture would not permit you to understand it or act on it in the same way none of what I said to Anton seems to have been registered by him. It fuels my anger and disgust even more. If only he was raised in a better, more civilised, less authoritarian culture, I and no one else would have to suffer because of it. If only you… none of us would have to suffer from it. It’s all related, don’t you see?

— Salisa to Путуки, August 2nd, 2026