The United Kingdom has condemned the Ugandan army's shutdown of several media outlets. This is, we are told, a threat to Commonwealth values. I am most moved, I assure you.
The same UK that once drew lines on maps with a quill, dividing entire peoples into arbitrary states, now tut-tuts from the sidelines as the predictable consequences play out. The Commonwealth: a polite fiction designed to make us forget the hangman's noose. Uganda's strongman merely follows a script written by colonial administrators and perfected by post-colonial kleptocrats.
The real threat to Commonwealth values is the intellectual decadence that allows us to pretend that these regimes were ever intended to produce liberal democracies. We are watching the death throes of an empire's delusion, and rather than mourn, we should open our eyes. The ghosts of Kampala and London have much to discuss, and neither has clean hands.
