Seventy-five years ago, we lost the war. Or, more precisely, we gave up on winning it.
Among all the 75th anniversaries marked by our politicians — D-Day, V-E Day, V-J Day — this week’s is the one that should make us squirm. On Feb. 11, 1945, at the Crimean resort of Yalta, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin, and Winston Churchill agreed to a carve-up that condemned hundreds of millions of Europeans to tyranny and left the USSR as the only state to come through World War II wholly victorious.
That is not an easy thing to acknowledge. Even as I was writing the last paragraph, I felt as if I was somehow slighting the American, British, and other Allied soldiers (my late father among them) who, without making a fuss, dropped what they were doing and rushed to do their duty. Yet, 75 years on, we should be honest.
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