Pictures from the military parade in Beijing on Sept. 3 will haunt political analysts for a long time.
It was a truly extraordinary event: The leaders of the world’s most dangerous revisionist states — China’s Xi Jinping, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un — celebrating a victory that wasn’t theirs over an enemy that ceased to exist 80 years ago.
The military component of the parade was not particularly impressive; we’ve seen similar displays many times before. What stood out was the vivid illustration of George Orwell’s famous formula from the novel “1984”: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
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