CountCash (whom I do not and have not insulted in any way) criticises what I write because it contradicts his accepted viewpoints. However, contradicting preferred beliefs is not the same as contradicting actual facts, and I try to keep my posts factual. For my part, where demonstrated and verifiable facts require me to change my views, I will change them. CountCash writes, “Everyone knows Canada and the rest of the British Commonwealth entered the war not as British puppies, but as sovereign national states.” Of course. I know it too, and I have never suggested otherwise. Britain and the old Commonwealth nations had a very special relationship based on loyalty, shared kinship, shared values and shared history, and within that relationship no one was anyone’s “puppy”. Britain declared war on Germany on September 3 1939, and within days Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa did likewise not because they were Britain’s slaves or puppets, but because their sense of loyalty and honour made it unthinkable for Britain to be involved in a struggle for its life, and them not helping. This is a relationship Tsarist Russia may have had in some degree with some of its dominions, but which Soviet Russia never did. Its relationship with its captive peoples was based on fear and terror. Perhaps this is why some, who only know that kind of dynamic for international relations, also impute the same to relations within the British Commonwealth. CountCash continues, “Yes there were only two sides in WW2, the Axis and the Nazis (he means the Allies and the Axis). It doesn’t fit the Russophobes logic, but the facts seldom do. Truth is simplicity itself.” There were certainly only two warring camps. But there were not just two orientations in the War. The Baltics, for example, were on neither side. They tried to keep out of the war altogether, were serially invaded by both sides and kicked as a football between both sides. The same is true of much of Eastern Europe. Russia began the war as an ally of Hitler, then became an ally of the West, and when the German danger had passed fell out of alliance again and imposed its own utterly oppressive totalitarian regime of occupation in the lands out of which it had driven the Nazis – Stalin was anything but a freedom fighter. France fought in the name of freedom, but there were nominally two Frances. And it did not occur to the France that won to grant similar freedom to its North African and Indo-Chinese colonies, just as it never occurred to Britain to grant freedom to India and to its many colonies in Africa, and further wars had to be fought against those “liberators” in some of those areas. Italy was an on-again, off-again friend and enemy through the war. Finland had its sympathies entirely with the Allies, but Russia’s aggression against it forced it to fight on the Axis side. I can go on and on with such examples. I’m afraid that truth is not simplicity itself – one-line propaganda slogans are. They propose definitive answers in black-and-white certainties (or in red-and-white banners) so as to imply further thinking is not necessary. But truth is not like that, as I have illustrated. CountCash asserts that “the Soviet Union did nothing wrong with regard to Japan.” Yet the war against Japan which Russia entered for about 3 days ended more than 50 years ago. Russia has still not signed a peace treaty with Japan, and still has not left the Japanese territory it occupied. This stands in quite some contrast to the example of the other Allies.