The news arrives with the grim predictability of a Greek tragedy. An Indian sailor, his last words crackling through a phone line to his wife, become the human cost of American precision strikes. The United Kingdom, that venerable pugilist of history, now calls for restraint.
How terribly civilised. One can almost hear the ghost of Palmerston snorting into his brandy. We are back in the familiar tableau: the great powers rain fire, and the subalterns weep.
The sailor’s final transmission is a memento mori for a world that has learnt nothing from the Somme or the smoking ruins of Dresden. The UK’s call for restraint is a magnificent piece of theatre, a moral cloak draped over a corpse. It echoes the Victorian era’s ‘civilising missions’ where British cannons spoke of progress while native blood soaked the soil.
Today, the language is of ‘de-escalation’ and ‘proportionality’, but the melody remains the same. The sailor’s wife will not be comforted by diplomatic memoranda. This is the intellectual decadence of our age: we have perfected the rhetoric of humanity while outsourcing its practice to drones and cruise missiles.
The fall of Rome was not a single cataclysm but a thousand small betrayals of decency. Today’s call for restraint is but another brick in that long, crumbling wall. We deify the righteous bomb and mourn the accidental victim.
It is a farce, and we are all its weeping audience.
