Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” is one of those concepts polite society cherishes because it flatters the audience. It reassures comfortable people that atrocity is merely a tragic software bug in modern bureaucracy: clipboards, procedures, rubber stamps, and men in sensible shoes who never quite understood what they were doing. The diagnosis has explanatory value. Here, it is spectacularly inadequate. There is nothing banal about watching sailors drown in front of you and deciding the water may keep them. No bureaucratic fog obscures the scene when the victims are visible, the terror immediate, and the choice not abstract compliance but cold, conscious indifference. This is not evil mediated by distance. It is evil at conversational range.

The episode off Sri Lanka is morally clarifying because it strips away so many of empire’s preferred alibis. A torpedo is one thing; the aftermath is another. The real indictment is not simply that a superpower can devise a rationale elegant enough to sanction destruction. It is that, after inflicting it, it can regard rescue as less urgent than messaging. That distinction matters only to people who believe civilisation lives in footnotes. The essential fact is simpler and uglier: men were left in the water, and another navy had to perform the elementary labour of human decency.

That, predictably, is the detail Washington’s professional necrophiliacs will work hardest to deodorize. The modern imperial state does not merely kill; it curates the atmosphere in which killing appears managerial, regrettable, and therefore mature. Violence must be given the right tone, the right........

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