The United Nations has confirmed what many have long suspected: the Myanmar army has massacred 700 civilians over the past six months. Seven hundred. A number so clean, so round, it feels almost staged. But there is nothing theatrical about a bullet through a farmer’s skull or a child suffocating in a burning hut.
We live in an age of moral bankruptcy. The global order, that once grand edifice of post-war ideals, has crumbled into a theatre of gestures. Sanctions that are mere inconveniences, resolutions that are nothing but ink, and the eternal, cowardly refrain of ‘but we must not intervene.’ Compare this to the Congress of Vienna, where the great powers at least had the decency to carve up Europe with a semblance of order. Now we carve up nothing but our consciences.
The junta in Myanmar knows this. They know that the world will tut, wag a finger, and then move on to the next catastrophe. The UN report will be filed, the diplomats will issue statements, and the generals in Naypyidaw will sleep soundly, perhaps even chuckle at our impotence.
But let us not be too harsh on the diplomats. After all, they are merely reflecting the will of their peoples. And what is that will? A desire for comfort, for cheap goods, for the moral luxury of outrage without consequence. The average Briton, sipping his afternoon tea, will scroll past this headline and feel a flicker of sadness. Then he will return to his mortgage and his Netflix queue.
This is the hallmark of intellectual decadence: the inability to act on one’s principles. We are the heirs of Rome, but we lack even its brutal honesty. The Romans knew that empire was built on blood, and they did not pretend otherwise. We claim to stand for human rights, yet we fund the very regimes that trample them. We are the Pharisees of the international stage.
And what of national identity? Myanmar’s generals wrap themselves in the flag, invoke the nation, and murder in its name. They are not unique. Every massacre is justified by a twisted love of country. But a nation that murders its own people is not a nation; it is a crime syndicate with a flag.
The only remedy is a return to seriousness. A recognition that some evils cannot be negotiated with, that our comfort is not worth their lives. But that would require a spine, and spines are in short supply in this decadent age.
So we shall mourn the seven hundred. We shall write our columns and wring our hands. And the world will continue to rot, one headline at a time.
