Vladimir Putin has learnt his lesson well. His tutors, the Nazis Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler, perfected the idea that “If you are going to tell a lie, tell a big one, and if you repeat it often enough, people will come to believe it.” People are assumed to reason that the big lie is so implausible nobody would dare invent it, so it must be true. The big lie horrifying the civilised world is Putin calling the Russian invasion a “special military operation”, described as a “peacekeeping exercise”, and denying the casualties mounting by the day. And as Goebbels is also said to have observed, such a lie has to be maintained by every instrument of the state.