So a plane falls from the sky over the People’s Republic. The fire is out. The bodies are cold.
And what do we hear? Silence. A silence so profound it could be the soundtrack to a new chapter in the decline of the West.
For twenty-first-century man, tragedy is no longer about the dead. It is about the story. And the story, my friends, is being written not in Beijing, but in Langley and Whitehall.
Western intelligence agencies, those self-appointed arbiters of global truth, are now probing a 'cover-up.' But what exactly do they expect to find? A confession that the Chinese government, like all governments before it, prefers to control the narrative?
The Fall of Rome was not announced by a press release. It was felt in the quiet emptying of granaries, the slow rot of roads. So too, perhaps, this crash is not a news story but a symptom.
A symptom of a world where the old imperial powers, haunted by their own intellectual decadence, can no longer tolerate a rival that does not perform grief according to their script. I am reminded of the Victorian era, when Britain’s moral outrage at the ‘opaque’ practices of the Orient was but a veil for its own commercial anxieties. Today, the cries of ‘transparency’ ring hollow.
They are the cries of a civilisation that has lost its nerve, its empire, and its capacity for strategic silence. The Chinese state will handle its dead. Let us hope the West can handle its own neuroses before it crashes on the runway of history.
