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I had a strange feeling of déjà vu last Wednesday when on this programme Nick Robinson interviewed Maria Butina, a member of the Russian Duma and a Putin loyalist. She was adamant that only the information the Russian authorities published with regard to Ukraine was true. When Nick asked her why her country was bombing citizens in a peaceful city he had recently visited, she retorted, ‘Russian troops do not bomb a civilian population’. The same tone was heard in recordings made by Gabriel Gatehouse for his series 'The Coming Storm' on Â鶹Éç Sounds. This concerned the rise of the QAnon movement in the USA. There again, when faced with incontrovertible evidence which challenged what they believed, the QAnon loyalists more or less said that only the opinions their movement endorsed were valid. Now we have to admit that in any conflict there are different versions of the narrative according to which side you are on. If one or two people promote a very biased assessment, they can be discounted. But with Russia and QAnon hordes of people are affirming things which are demonstrably untrue. What lies behind this?... particularly given that many loyalists are intelligent people. The phenomenon is not, of course, limited to those engaged in warfare between nation states. You get the same thing with racists and sectarian devotees across the world whose version of the truth is often based on fears without foundation. Nor is this a contemporary issue. It's at least as old as the Bible, and perhaps best illustrated in a confrontation Jesus had with Pharisees, some of whom acted as the religious Thought Police of his day. Their profound conviction was that people with physical or learning disabilities were so because they or their parents had sinned. Other people, including Jesus' own disciples, subscribed to that belief. So, when he cured a man born blind, the Thought Police claimed that this was not a cure; the man was not blind in the first place. Oh, and not only was the man a sinner; Jesus was as well. End of story. Jesus publicly berated them, in words both scathing and insightful. To their great chagrin he suggested that they who claimed to see, were actually blind, suffering from self-induced myopia. It seems to me that those who shout loudest about fake news are often the same people who fear that their power or prestige would be eroded should they change their minds. And so they become the captives of their own delusion. If the people of Ukraine need liberation from oppression; many in Russia too need liberation from deceit.