The ever-changing past

THERE may no longer be a Soviet Union, for which let us give thanks, but Sov history is still alive and unwell as ever. At that tower of Babel on the East River, aka the United Nations, the “Security” Council was holding one of its typically futile discussions the other day about how to achieve world peace.

This is the centennial year of the outbreak of the First World Catastrophe, and the UN observed it by holding a discussion formally titled “War, Its Lessons and the Search for a Permanent Peace.” Like the title of any other purely academic exercise, it should have had a colon at the end followed by a snazzy course description-like Tedium 101.

At one point in the course of this gabfest, the distinguished representative of the USSR, which is now just plain Russia again, put in his two rubles’ worth. His name escapes us, but it scarcely matters. Apologists for dictatorships old and new at the UN tend to be interchangeable. As for Russian regimes, they may come and go, but the party line never changes. The distinguished representative referred to the Second World War as “the victory of the Soviet Union-led anti-Hitlerite coalition,” conveniently ignoring the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 that made the Soviets a partner in that Hitlerite coalition. And made the Second World Catastrophe unavoidable. Britain would be left to stand alone in what would become her Finest Hour.

Whenever some defender of the old Soviet Union speaks of its having taken the lead against the Axis powers during that worldwide cataclysm, we are reminded of the high-ranking British officer who was asked, rather impatiently, by his Soviet counterpart when the Western allies would finally launch their long promised Second Front in Europe. Whereupon the Englishman explained: “I fought on the first Second Front, old chap, when you were on the other side.”

But the Kremlin still knows, to quote a line from 1984, that whoever controls the past controls the future. It’s an ever-malleable thing, history. Or what’s called history in Russia.

Editorial, Pages 17 on 02/21/2014

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