The headlines from Colombia are grim again. Bloodshed, they say, is intensifying as the presidential race turns on the brutal civil war. But let us not pretend this is a sudden outbreak of savagery.
It is the predictable climax of a cycle that has plagued that nation for generations, a cycle that now threatens to drag the whole region into the mire. The candidates posture and promise peace, but the only certainty is that the violence will escalate, for the simple reason that both sides have more to gain from war than from peace. This is not the Fall of Rome, but it is a perfect microcosm of intellectual decadence, where ideology trumps reality and the lives of ordinary people are sacrificed on the altar of political ambition.
The election itself has become a referendum on the peace process, a process that was flawed from the start, treating drug cartels and guerrillas as legitimate political actors rather than criminal enterprises. The result is a nation trapped in a ghost story, forever replaying the same bloody tragedy. One candidate vows to honour the accords, the other to tear them up.
Neither offers a path to genuine stability. The former will appease the killers, the latter will embolden them. And the blood will continue to flow.
This is the tragedy of modern Colombia: a nation so enamoured with its own suffering that it can no longer imagine a future without it. The international community wrings its hands, but offers no solution. Why?
Because the West is itself in a state of decadence, morally exhausted, unwilling to admit that some conflicts cannot be negotiated, only defeated. The ghosts of La Violencia, the war of the 1950s that claimed 200,000 lives, are now joined by the shades of Pablo Escobar and the FARC. The election will not banish them.
Only a ruthless commitment to order and justice could do that, but that is a commitment the modern world no longer has the stomach for. So Colombia burns, and we watch, pretending it is a tragedy instead of a farce. The bloodshed will continue until the nation realises that the only peace worth having is the one imposed by a strong state.
Until then, the dance of death goes on.