Russia's Victory Day parade has been the trigger for plenty of fake news for FNN to reflect on.
Sky News reports:
Explosions, tanks and a life-sized Reichstag replica: No expense spared in Russia's efforts to justify Ukraine war.
... and ...
The memory of 1945 is now used as a unifying force [in Russia], and a means to justify the country's current path of aggression.
The authorities want people here to view the invasion of Ukraine in the same way as the Second World War - as an existential struggle against a foreign aggressor.
Well maybe.
But FNN does not believe that most ordinary Russians are thinking about the parade this way.
They are thinking about the sacrific made by some 27 million Soviet Union people, mostly civilians, who died in the Great Patriotic War.
People like the seven Gazdanov brothers from Ossetia who never got their seven brides. And never got a Steven Spielberg movie made about them either.
It's hard for anyone to get their head around this level of sacrifice, which dwarfs anything else that occurred in the Second World War.
And this is a sacrifice that it's not easy to acknowledge in the West.
The Chinese civilians and the Allied POWs awful suffering at the hands of the Japanese is part of the narrative highlighting of the sacrifice made to fight off bestial, busihido-driven oriental hordes.
But there's a problem with the heroic Soviet sacrifice.
The problem is that the killing was done by - wait for it - Europeans!
But we don't want to dwell on that in case it makes anyone feel uncomfortable that it was Europeans who killed more civilians in WW2 than those fiendish Japanese.
Hitler's 'willing executioners' to be precise - although let's not forget, not all were German.
The same Germans who produced Goethe, and Wagner were soon happily nailing dirt-poor peasants to barn doors, stealing all their food and incinerating their relatives with flame-throwers - because, after all, they were only 'untermenschen'.
Nazi ideology successfully managed to demonize Slavic peoples (and Jews and others), in order to prepare for the ruthless bestiality to come on the Ostfront and their eventual use as a vast slave-labour resource for the Reich.
Today's MSM borrows from the Nazi propaganda playbook by demonizing anything Russian and talking up 'democratic' Ukraine and its Churchillian leader whilst ignoring that the 'SMO' was clearly provoked by the West.
Dr Goebbels would have been proud of his present-day offspring.
That's why Soviet WW2 sacrifices have to be 'whitewashed'.
After all, 'we' won the war didn't we? So anything that undermines this core myth needs to be denied, deflected or distracted from.
Hence Putin's parade.
The media may want to taint Moscow's Victory Day parade to play in with their overarching Ukrainian narrative but is that really what it is about for the vast majority of people in the Russian Federation?
Or is it that these direct descendents of 27 million Soviet war-dead simply respect the sacrifice made by former generations to break the back of the Wehrmacht and force the downfall of Nazism and the suicide of Hitler in Berlin.
Something nobody else can claim.
But naturally, President Trump did when he claimed the USA won WW2 and:
'...nobody was close to us in terms of strength, bravery, or military brilliance'.
Who could imagine that when La La Land (2016) won an Oscar, it would soon become the real world.