David Gleason advised me to never write a column in the blinding heat of thermobaric rage. But he never had to endure the dying kicks of a liberation movement turned misgoverning party stripping itself, and the rule-of-law-loving people of SA, of all moral dignity and running bare-cheeked through the UN General Assembly for the world to see our complete lack of testicular fortitude.

Videos of civilians being bombed, walking dazed and bloodied through the charred, dismembered embers that remain of Ukraine’s cities, dodging bodies, with sirens and gunfire all around them, provide incontrovertible evidence that the only thing special about this Russian operation is that Vladimir Putin somehow seems to have convinced the West that sanctions will work to stop it...