IN WHAT amounts to a shocking indictment of the merchants of war — otherwise known as governments — in assorted western European capitals, operating as ever under the increasingly frayed umbrella of US hegemony and suzerainty over a world that is changing in front of our eyes, a contingent of German troops — yes, German — is to be deployed to Lithuania in a daily expanding Nato operation to “contain” Russia.

Everything, clearly, has been forgotten and no lessons have been learned by and on the part of men and women for whom strong leadership is coterminous with the willingness to march their countries lockstep into war on the flimsiest of reasons.

The last time German troops were deployed to Lithuania they were directed there by one Adolf Hitler, who currently — surprise, surprise — is being resurrected in the Western media in the image of Vladimir Putin. This is the same Putin who himself lost a two-year-old brother during the German siege of Leningrad between 1941 and 1944.