The flames that consumed an Antwerp apartment block, claiming five lives, are not merely a tragedy of malfunctioning smoke alarms or delayed fire brigades. They are a mirror held up to a civilisation haemorrhaging competence. Belgian emergency services, we are told, are 'under strain'.
Under strain from what, one wonders? From the slow decay of institutional memory and the triumph of bureaucratic inertia over common sense? This is not a new phenomenon.
It is the same rot that saw Rome's vigiles struggle to contain fires after the empire had grown too fat and complacent. The parallels are almost too neat. Antwerp, once a jewel of the Low Countries, a centre of trade and bourgeois stability, now joins the litany of European cities where the infrastructure of safety is crumbling.
We have abandoned the Victorian virtues of duty and thrift, replacing them with a cult of managerial ineptitude. The fire might have been contained, the lives might have been saved, if the state had not grown so enamoured with its own complexity that it forgot its primary purpose: protection. Instead, we get press releases about 'resource constraints' and 'increased demand'.
This is the language of decline. Every preventable death in a first world city is an indictment of our collective failure to maintain the basic machinery of civilisation. The Belgian emergency services are not unique; they are merely a particularly arresting example of a European general malaise.
If we continue to romanticise decay as 'multiculturalism' or 'modernisation', we will find ourselves huddled in the ashes of our own incompetence.
