As Greece burns, so too does the West’s pretence of autarky. A wildfire, raging out of control in the parched Attic countryside, has compelled the British government to dispatch firefighting crews to the scene. News footage shows orange skies, weeping olive trees, and the charred skeletons of holiday villas. It is a tableau from Revelation, but I’ll wager it is merely a prologue.
Consider this. The Hellenic Republic, cradle of democracy and bankrupt sovereignty, now depends on the logistic might of its old creditors. London and Berlin send water bombers, not as charity, but as a strategic necessity. The same tourists whose selfies fill Instagram are now fleeing the inferno. The same groves that supplied Athenian oil for millennia are turning to ash.
This is not merely a climatic crisis. It is a structural verdict on the very project of European civilisation. The continent that once ruled the waves cannot even protect its own coastline from a summer blaze. We have become a museum preserved by foreign firemen. The irony is as thick as the smoke over Marathon.
And what of the deeper rot? Ours is an age of intellectual decadence, a Victorian fin de siècle without the empire. We argue about pronouns while the planet bakes. We hold inquiries while the pines crackle. National identity, once forged in the furnace of shared sacrifice, now dissolves in the heat of a single bad harvest.
Let us not pretend this is random. The gods of climate do not play dice. Every drought, every flood, every fire is a delayed bill from a century of industrial profligacy. Greece is the canary in the coal mine of the Mediterranean, and the canary is a blackened corpse. Britain, for all its bluster about global Britain, must now choose: become a fire brigade to the world or a fortress. History will not forgive a shabby compromise.
I say: send the crews. Salute the courage of the men and women who do the labour. But weep for the civilisation that cannot even keep its own hearth from turning to cinders. The age of irony is over. We face a choice between empire of responsibility or collapse into a sun-scorched impotence. The ashes will decide.
