So it has come to this. Thirty-five bodies cooling on the tarmac of an airport in Niger. A scene straight out of the fall of Carthage, or perhaps one of those grim Victorian frontier massacres you read about in forgotten colonial dispatches.
And what is Whitehall’s response? Special forces on standby, ready to retrieve our diplomats from a country that is no longer a country but a howling void. How very Britain.
How very late imperial. We are witnessing the same pattern that undid Rome on the Rhine and the Danube: the periphery snapping at the centre because the centre has grown weak, timid, and utterly uncomprehending of the savagery beyond its walls. The Sahel is a powder keg, and we have been dousing it with hand-wringing and development grants.
Do not mistake this for a local tragedy. It is a symptom of a civilisation that has lost the will to defend its own interests, let alone impose order. The killers in Niger are not a random gang; they are the vanguard of a new Dark Age.
And we, with our special forces and evacuation plans, are merely the lighthouse keepers on a doomed shore. The question is not will we leave, but what we leave behind. And whether the barbarians will follow us home.
