CULTURE WAR BECOMES WORLD WAR?

What if the charmed lives we "baby boomers" have lived are owed to a happy historic accident, namely the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933? At that time the isolationist wing of the US Republican Party would have been happy to see Hitler take over Europe (as without US intervention he would surely have done). But as Robert Reich points out here, we can rely on no such luck this time around.

Putin's cynical abuse of the Soviet-era rhetorical goals "anti-fascism" and "de-nazification" to justify his invasion of Ukraine is a disgraceful insult to the millions of Russians who died fighting the real thing in WWII, and the naivety of those on the UK Left who accept such excuses is equally disgraceful. Putin may be keen to create historic parallels with anti-fascism and de-nazification, but actually far better parallels are with the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and the Prague Spring in 1968. In both cases pro-democracy insurgents were portrayed as "fascists" in order to excuse massacring them with tanks, as will soon be happening in Kyiv and Kharkiv. 

We should be slightly encouraged that our own government seems to have finally seen the folly of its shameless courting of Putin, but the records of their party's donations from Russian oligarchs must cast some doubt upon their commitment to effective sanctions: