So, another massacre. Another village in Myanmar reduced to ash and bone. Dozens dead, families erased, and the UK Government issues a sternly worded condemnation.
How very Victorian of us. We tut, we shake our heads, we issue a statement from a man in a suit standing behind a podium, and then we return to our tea. It is a ritual as empty as the prayers muttered over the graves of the fallen.
We are witnessing the collapse of the post-war liberal order, and our response is a press release. I am reminded of the Roman Senate, issuing decrees against barbarian incursions while the Visigoths massed at the gates. The rot is not in Myanmar alone; it is here, in our own intellectual and moral decadence.
We have convinced ourselves that words are deeds, that signing a petition is the same as raising a sword. The rebels in that village did not die for want of a strongly worded paragraph in the Foreign Office. They died because we have abandoned the very concept of a just war, of intervention, of moral clarity.
We are adrift in a sea of relativism, where every atrocity is met with a symposium and every tyrant with a diplomatic channel. The Empire is dead, but its ghost lingers in our delusions of influence. Meanwhile, the real world burns.
Do not tell me that this is the best we can do. It is the worst. And we should be ashamed.
