Bravo! Mr. Kettle, Bravo!

I’m sure there will be any number of Guardianistas choking over their muesli this morning. If any of them eat anything so decadent, of course, and it’s not straight onto the knitted tofu first thing.

If the great history lesson of the 20th century is that socialism does not work then the watershed event in that tragic enlightenment was the one that took place in Moscow 50 years ago this month - the so-called "secret speech" delivered by Nikita Khrushchev to a closed session of the 20th congress of the Soviet Communist party on February 25 1956, in which he mounted a devastating attack on Joseph Stalin, then not quite three years dead.

One slight quibble, that the speech served very well to cover over Khrushchev’s own involvement in those horrors, most especially the Ukrainian Famine. But the final paragraph:

But the cold-war syllogism lives on today in a new guise. Too many haters of capitalism and the United States still cram everything into the frame of untruth and self-deception that says my enemy's enemy is still my friend because, even if he blows up my family on the tube, murders my colleagues on the bus or threatens to behead me for publishing a drawing, he is still at war with Bush, Blair and Berlusconi. It is 50 years this month since that simplistic view of the world lost whatever moral purchase it may once have had. It is time such thinking was, to choose a sadly appropriate word, purged. Too long, my brothers and my sisters, too long.

Applause, Applause, Applause.

Only one question left. How on earth did this get published in The Guardian?