Victory Day

The Soviet Union started the War as all but a member of the Axis. But it entered the War against the Axis before the United States did, so what do you say about the Americans? Who, moreover, exacted an enormous price for their assistance?

As for the Communist Party of Great Britain, like the Labour Party always fond of taking credit for other people's efforts at things like Cable Street, it really did make such a contribution to the relief of Blitz victims in the East End that they elected Phil Piratin to Parliament in 1945.

His had been the brilliantly simple idea of using the London Underground as an air raid shelter. The Government would have none of it, so he just led people in, sometimes by force. Remember that when you see pictures of them down there.

The Conservative Whip extended to Archibald Maule Ramsay on every day of the War in Europe. Do look up how he passed most of that time.

There is an attempt to write the Soviet and satellite contributions to the War out of the historical memory, not out of anti-Communism (it never happened during the Cold War), but out of an attempt to rehabilitate the parties and the private armies with deep and often overt Fascist and Nazi roots in Eastern Europe, and most especially, at at the moment, in Ukraine.

This has been going on ever since the Yugoslav Wars. Now as then, those factions make no attempt to hide who and what they really are. But now as then, they are useful to neoconservative foreign policy. 

So we get ridiculous and offensive statements such as the one that has just been issued by Mike Pompeo and by several Eastern European Foreign Ministers, including even those of Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania.