Not the Same Sort of Thing At All

Some remarks by an empty suit on the subject of the Eastern Question appear to have given a Russian parliamentarian occasion to blaspheme. "The annexation of Crimea was illegal and illegitimate in March 2014, and remains illegal and illegitimate in March 2015," proclaimed Britain's Head Boy's minister for Wogs, Frogs and Huns; whereupon the head of the Russian parliament's foreign affairs committee started drawing comparisons with the Falkland Islands, over which the sainted Thatcher fought a war for peace, freedom and democracy thirty-three years ago. The war cost more than nine hundred lives, many of them British, and was fought against a fascist dictatorship with which the sainted Thatcher's government had been, until then, only moderately friendly. Twenty years after first annexing the islands, Britain fought a war for peace, freedom and civilisation in the Crimea itself, to protect the democratic and humane Ottoman Empire against the illegal and illegitimate onslaught of the baby-eating Russian Bear. Russia's own experience of such purely defensive and democratic wars and land-grabs has, of course, been laughably limited, particularly since the year of the London Blitz.