The media misled us and sold us the US Government/MI6 line, as ever

I am very ashamed that it took me this long to realise that the mainstream media are as untruthful and unreliable about Russia and the Ukraine as they are about every other political story. Journalists have let the world down more than any other institution, and that's saying an enormous amount when you think about the bishops and the academics. 

Please, if you read one thing about the war this week let it be this wonderful article by David Goldman.

David Goldman has a brilliant mind. He has made me distrust the gung-ho stuff written by the distinguished military experts like Prof Sir Lawrence Freedman and various retired generals, colonels and majors. 

Freedman strongly trusts the US line and seems terrified of Donald Trump and the 'populists', which makes me suspect he wants and perhaps is engaged in a crusade for liberal values.

I quote from David Goldman's article:

'Now Biden (who tweeted April 4 that he had “reduced the ruble to rubble” and shrunk the Russian economy by half) is blaming Zelensky. NATO Secretary Stoltenberg admits that Ukraine will have to give up territory for peace, echoing Henry Kissinger’s comments in Davos. The CIA is telling the New York Times that we had better consider the possibility that Russia might win to avoid another “intelligence failure” (have we had anything else in the past half-century?). That’s a crock, of course; the U.S. has satellites that can tell what Ukrainian soldiers have for lunch as well as large numbers of military advisers on the ground.

'We hear obligatory calls for more heavy weapons for Ukraine, but the Russians now can interdict, destroy, or capture most of what we try to send in. Switchblades and Stingers and Javelins are clever weapons but they don’t compensate for a Russian artillery advantage of between 15:1 and 40:1.

We have, in short, another Afghanistan, hatched by the same sort of group-think. Will the miscreants who cooked up this catastrophe face any consequences? Not a chance. There is safety in numbers. Except for a few cranks and oddballs like Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and your correspondent, every prominent conservative pundit and politician went full Jonestown. Russia’s initial muddle prompted a few weeks of intoxicated triumphalism.'

But best is David Goldman's comparison of the causes of the war with the causes of the First World War.

Apparently a book called The Sleepwalkers has absolved Germany from war guilt. Austria began the war but for much the same reasons as the USA invaded Afghanistan in 2001.