Russia’s Foreign Ministry Just Issued The Most Ironic Tweet Ever.

The Russian Foreign Ministry attempted to puff its country’s sordid history by tweeting on Wednesday that they were responsible for defeating the Nazis in World War II.

There’s just one problem: Wednesday happens to be the same day that the Soviet Union entered an alliance with the Nazis.

The tweet from the Russian Foreign Ministry stated: “Nazi Germany started #WWII and killed 27 millions Soviet people. USSR ended #WWII and saved the world from the Brown Plague.”

Then they proceeded to get obliterated by the Conservative Party’s Daniel Hannan:

Indeed, August 23, 1939 was the day that Hitler and Stalin entered into a pact in which they agreed not to attack each other. Prior to the pact, Stalin had lobbied for a Soviet Union-Britain-France alliance to prevent Hitler from taking Poland, to no avail since Neville Chamberlain was reluctant to enter an alliance with Stalin, among other reasons.

The Nazi-Soviet pact also stated that Hitler and Stalin would divide Poland once it was invaded.

“Stalin would have to go to war if he allied with Britain and France, but could have half of Poland without a war if he allied with Hitler — it was an easy choice to make,” noted the BBC.

The alliance was severed once Hitler attacked the Soviet Union.

The foreign ministry’s tweet also suggests that the Soviet Union was the chief entity responsible for the ending the war. They weren’t; history clearly shows that it was the American-led forces on D-Day that signaled the beginning of the end of the Third Reich. The Soviets certainly played a role in ending the war as they allied with the Allied countries, but it’s disingenuous to claim that they were chiefly responsible for it.

The tweet is a failed attempt to distinguish communism from fascism. As Thomas Sowell has explained, communism and fascism are both ideologies of the Left; they just had different methods of totalitarianism:

The Fascists were completely against individualism in general and especially against individualism in a free-market economy. Their agenda included minimum-wage laws, government restrictions on profit-making, progressive taxation of capital, and “rigidly secular” schools.

Unlike the Communists, the Fascists did not seek government ownership of the means of production. They just wanted the government to call the shots as to how businesses would be run.

Basically, the communists sought complete nationalization of industries for the government, while the fascists sought de-facto nationalization. Not quite the same, but similar.

In other words, the Russian Foreign Ministry issued a tweet claiming they were chiefly responsible for defeating Nazism on the anniversary of the Nazi-Soviet pact, a tweet in which the irony underlies the misleading nature of the tweet.

Epic fail.

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