The figures are stark. Over 700 civilians dead at the hands of the Myanmar army in six months. But numbers, as the late great statistician Hans Rosling once said, only become real when they have a human face.
So let me tell you about Ma Khine, a 23-year-old teacher from Sagaing, who was shot while sheltering her students. Or the burnt-out shells of homes in Kayah state that once held three generations of a family. The UK government's condemnation, delivered from a polished podium in Whitehall, feels necessary but hollow.
Necessary because silence would be complicity. Hollow because we have watched this pattern: war, displacement, condemnation, more war. The cultural shift here is not just in Myanmar but in our own perception.
We are becoming desensitised to atrocity, scrolling past death tolls as we scroll past memes. The human cost is a slow erosion of empathy, a numbing of the collective conscience. On the streets of London, there are vigils.
Candles flicker in the cold wind, held by Burmese diaspora and British supporters. They sing songs of hope. But the wind is strong tonight.
And in Myanmar, the army continues its campaign. The question we must ask ourselves: is our outrage performative or will it lead to action? The dead are watching.
