Although there may be in what is by all accounts the highly expressive Russian language, there are no words in English to describe how offensive it is to compare to Hitler a man who was born and raised in Leningrad.
That city has changed its name, but the neighbouring, and highly populous, oblast of its hinterland is still called Leningrad, and it always will be. There is a reason for that. Likewise, whereas what were simply statues of Lenin for his own sake were taken down in the 1990s, those which are coming down in Ukraine today are war memorials, and thus offensive to the heirs of Stepan Bandera. If you need to Google him, then do so.
That city has changed its name, but the neighbouring, and highly populous, oblast of its hinterland is still called Leningrad, and it always will be. There is a reason for that. Likewise, whereas what were simply statues of Lenin for his own sake were taken down in the 1990s, those which are coming down in Ukraine today are war memorials, and thus offensive to the heirs of Stepan Bandera. If you need to Google him, then do so.
For two years, four months, two weeks and five days, while his father was on active service in the conventional sense, Vladimir Putin's mother and her co-citizens held out, eating the rats out of the sewers, and even worse besides. But they did hold out. And they won. Only for one of their sons, a son of their city, to be called Hitler by, of all people, Boris Johnson. If Putin is Hitler, then is Aleksandr Lukashenko some kind of Quisling as he presides over a country that lost one third of its entire population to the Great Patriotic War? Johnson is a national disgrace.
Not for the first time, of course. You never get a major international sporting tournament without the backing of your government, which only ever wants it for, if you will, propaganda purposes. That backing was how Johnson was able to besport himself, to the ridicule of the world, as the Mayor of the host city at the Olympics in 2012.
"An island mentality," Russia says that Britain has. If Johnson were one tenth the intellectual that he purports to be, then not only would this supposed biographer of Churchill have known far better than to have made yesterday's comparison (that book will henceforth remain unread by all sensible people, and it probably always was), but he would also have known that the Heartland Theory of Halford Mackinder retained vast influence in Russia and the former Soviet Union. He would have recognised the reference immediately. But he did not. He does not not. He is not.
Tonight, in her role as the ranting, drunken, middle-aged woman at all the worst dinner parties, Theresa May will tell assembled EU leaders that the "Russian" attack in Salisbury was, among other things, "indiscriminate". It was no such thing. It was very highly discriminate. It was also not very effective, having caused no death even after 18 days. Indiscriminate and fatal attacks are launched with the ideological, financial and other support of one of only two regimes in today's world that really do bear comparison with Nazi Germany.
One of those is North Korea. But the other, the one that inspires, funds and arms terrorism on the streets of Britain, is British-armed Saudi Arabia, before de facto ruler of which our Prime Minister walked backwards into 10 Downing Street earlier this month. A year to the day since his country's last attack, to date, on our soil, an attack only a few yards from that more recent humiliation, consider that the first reporters on the scene were from Going Underground, which is to say, from RT. Think on.
Not for the first time, of course. You never get a major international sporting tournament without the backing of your government, which only ever wants it for, if you will, propaganda purposes. That backing was how Johnson was able to besport himself, to the ridicule of the world, as the Mayor of the host city at the Olympics in 2012.
"An island mentality," Russia says that Britain has. If Johnson were one tenth the intellectual that he purports to be, then not only would this supposed biographer of Churchill have known far better than to have made yesterday's comparison (that book will henceforth remain unread by all sensible people, and it probably always was), but he would also have known that the Heartland Theory of Halford Mackinder retained vast influence in Russia and the former Soviet Union. He would have recognised the reference immediately. But he did not. He does not not. He is not.
Tonight, in her role as the ranting, drunken, middle-aged woman at all the worst dinner parties, Theresa May will tell assembled EU leaders that the "Russian" attack in Salisbury was, among other things, "indiscriminate". It was no such thing. It was very highly discriminate. It was also not very effective, having caused no death even after 18 days. Indiscriminate and fatal attacks are launched with the ideological, financial and other support of one of only two regimes in today's world that really do bear comparison with Nazi Germany.
One of those is North Korea. But the other, the one that inspires, funds and arms terrorism on the streets of Britain, is British-armed Saudi Arabia, before de facto ruler of which our Prime Minister walked backwards into 10 Downing Street earlier this month. A year to the day since his country's last attack, to date, on our soil, an attack only a few yards from that more recent humiliation, consider that the first reporters on the scene were from Going Underground, which is to say, from RT. Think on.
Oblast? Stepan Bandera? Aleksandr Lukashenko? The Heartland Theory of Halford Mackinder? This post was not written by Laura Pidcock.
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