This is an excellent rebuttal and I'm very pleased both you and Balancing Act are holding me to account. I believe that's what a comments section should be for - I'm dubious about people who won't debate or argue their points.
On this, you've hit the nail on the head - I have presumed that Putin's Nazi credentials are widely known and understood. The man is a dictatorial fascist in the cloak of a moderate politician. He doesn't have the military uniforms and shiny gold of Adolf Hitler - but he does have the snappy suit, the occasional topless horse-ride and the illusion of a modern politician. All this masks his tendency to order people pushed out of windows and poisoned with chemicals.
Which is why your Wrath of The Khans analogy is bang on. The assumption is my readers know this - and what is more interesting to me is not Vladimir Putin exists - but that he is where he is. The learning from WWII should've been, when an enemy collapses - you help build them up. Putin and his oligarchs emerged out of the shadows in a broken nation and Western powers took their eye off the ball and looked the other way. We did the same with Germany. Hitler and Putin (to some extent) cannot be viewed as stand alone historical figures - they are the direct result of failings in the democratic West foreign policy. That's the wider learning point and a binary argument lets us off the hook somewhat.
However, as another commenter said - the debate about responsibility for Hitler shouldn't happen when he was marching into the Sudentenland, it needs the fullness of time. My concern is that something, and someone, just as odious as Putin will emerge from the shadows once again... the West are once again partially shirking responsibility for their involvement. The UK in particular is filled with Russian money and Russian property owners. To that extent, I think when combined with my other article on 'is this total war plus'? what this article is really about is, 'don't take your eye off the ball again'.
But as you've said, possibly the wrong time and a presupposition that my audience already have a contextual understanding of Putin. Let me end this reply with one word I think sums Putin up.
Thundercunt.
