China’s 80th anniversary V-Day commemoration in Beijing was an exercise in historical revisionism with Chinese characteristics with former Labor foreign minister and NSW premier Bob Carr and former Victorian premier Dan Andrews on hand to lend their dubious prestige to the grubby spectacle.

Who could begrudge ‘Dictator’ Dan Andrews his well-earned spot in the V-Day VIP happy snap just two rows behind Kim Jong-un, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping? Dan was surely Beijing’s most enthusiastic imitator when it came to locking down Melbourne and all but welding people into their high-rise hovels. Carr chickened out of the photo op, attending indoor events instead.

Andrews has said little since his resignation two years ago preferring to concentrate on his businesses, with a little help from a former adviser who is apparently a dab hand at facilitating Chinese loans to the ALP, has convenient connections to China’s United Front, China’s state broadcaster, China-linked banking in Hong Kong, and advised on Victoria signing up to China’s Belt and Road. Could it be that Xi’s apprentice hopes to be Beijing’s business concierge in Victoria? Dan’s disciple and successor Premier Jacinta Allan has announced an enormous business mission possibly in the hope of pumping some life into Victoria’s ailing economy before the next state election.

Carr, who likes to present himself as a history buff, transformed himself into a historian-for-hire justifying his attendance in a rambling op-ed that rewrote the second world war so that it concluded with China’s victory over Japan on 3 September, 1945. Whitewashed from the narrative was the inconvenient truth that Japan surrendered to the United States, not to Mao’s ragtag band of guerrillas. More importantly, Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist armies bore the brunt of the fighting, and it was American steel, oil, and ultimately atomic bombs that broke Tokyo’s will. Carr, it seems, prefers to burnish Beijing’s propaganda, where the CCP inherits a victory it did not win.

Even more bizarre is Carr’s assertion that the second world war ‘began’ with the Rape of Nanjing in December 1937. Let’s be clear: the second Sino-Japanese war began in July 1937, but the second world war began on 1 September 1939 with Germany’s invasion of Poland. On the road to that cataclysm stood Hitler’s rise in 1933, the remilitarisation of the Rhineland in 1936, the Anschluss with Austria in March 1938, Chamberlain’s appeasement at Munich in September, Kristallnacht that November, and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939.

For Carr, that history is an inconvenient truth since his presence was requested in Beijing not to honour the past but to glorify today’s pact between Xi – who sees himself as the reincarnation of Chairman Mao – and Putin, who is doing his damnedest to be the second coming of Stalin. Their ‘Axis of Autocrats’ extends to North Korea, and to Iran and its proxies, who have a soft spot for Hitler and a hatred of Israel and Jews.

With such a cast on stage, it was a case of ‘Don’t mention the (real) war’ and it’s hardly surprising that Bob was their uncle. He takes every opportunity to rail against the ‘Jewish’ lobby but has little to say about the atrocities committed by the governments of China and Iran, or funded by Qatar, whose lobbyists are shaping the Albanese government’s foreign policy.

Carr even managed to refer to Trump as America’s first post-democracy president, which seemed a bit rich given that he was paying homage to an alliance where the opposition is either in prison or pushing up daisies.

Carr also argued that critics of his attendance at the Victory charade with Putin were hypocritical, since Trump had rolled out the red carpet for Putin in Anchorage. Carr also crowed that US tariffs had pushed India closer to China, undermining the Quad.

What Carr ignores is that China’s material support (energy purchases, dual-use exports, banking channels) is helping Russia sustain its slaughter in Ukraine, and that US tariffs on India are not random protectionism but part of a broader sanctions regime against Moscow.

Moreover, Xi’s celebration rewrites history so that the CCP can pose as the rightful victor in 1945, and Russia can be recast as a co-liberator. This whitewashes Putin’s ongoing aggression and Xi’s palpable threat to Taiwan – the island where Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists retreated after the Communist victory in 1949 on the mainland.

Xi has taken to describing Taiwan’s democratically elected government as Nazis, just as Putin smears Ukraine’s Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as a Nazi, and Iran and Hamas denounce Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a Nazi. Like the boy in The Sixth Sense, who saw dead people, the Axis of Autocrats see Nazis everywhere, except in the mirror.

Into this pantomime strode Donald Trump, with his gift for comic puncture. On Truth Social he asked whether Xi would remember the ‘massive amount of support and blood’ America poured into China’s war effort, noting that many Americans died in ‘China’s quest for Victory and Glory’ and asking Beijing to pass on his ‘warmest regards to Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un, as you conspire against the United States of America’. Touché.

Beyond the war of words, the day was billed as what Beijing called a demonstration of ‘strategic transparency’, and was indeed the flexing of China’s massive military muscle – hypersonic missiles, tanks, stealth fighters, jets, and endless ranks of goose-stepping troops. If anything should persuade the Albanese government that Australia is woefully unprepared for war, it should be this.

Fittingly, the commemoration concluded in Tian’anmen Square with Beijing releasing 80,000 doves and 80,000 balloons as if such stagecraft, a mere sleight of hand, could dispel the ghost of Tank Man and the thousands of others who perished before the Gate of Heavenly Peace in 1989. Perhaps nobody is more conscious of those ghosts than the dignitaries who admire China’s triumph over that ill-fated democratic uprising but for those who treasure freedom the warning is clear; history is not just being rewritten, it is being weaponised, with the West in the line of fire.