Rewriting History

Vladimir Putin has taken time off from re-hanging the Iron Curtain to engage in a bit of historical revisionism about who won the Second World War. The annual Victory Day parade, commemorating such minor skirmishes as Leningrad, Stalingrad and Kursk, provided the Mussolini of Muscovy with an opportunity to portray the USSR as having made a greater contribution to victory than the United States, or even Winston Churchill. Putin mentioned "millions of victims and terrible hardships", although he was tactful enough to omit Stalin's Michael Gove-style military reforms of the thirties, which involved purging virtually anyone with any knowledge or experience in the name of political correctness, and which may have contributed in some small way to the Nazis getting as far as they did. Defending his Ukrainian adventure, Putin also mentioned the resurgence of fascism in Europe; which will doubtless annoy Britain's present Head Boy and Winston Churchill's rightful heir, one of whose first actions as Conservative leader was to abandon the European centre-right bloc in favour of an alliance with the Latvian Waffen-SS fan club and the Holocaust-denying chancer Michal Kaminski. Next year, of course, the seventieth anniversary of Churchill's triumph will fall upon the very day after the general election; it is to be hoped that between then and now Britain's Head Boy and his chums will be forthright in reminding everyone who really got the job done.