Hannah Arendt warned that societies rarely descend into evil through monsters alone, but through obedience without thought. “Most evil,” she observed, “is done by people who never decide to be good or evil.” Power corrodes virtue not by force, but by habit. Gibbon, writing of Rome, reached the same verdict centuries earlier: greatness, when unrestrained, consumes itself. What cannot be faced cannot be changed, and what is endlessly justified soon ceases to trouble the conscience at all.

The United Nations now stands hollowed out, a monument to a moral order that no longer commands belief, its credibility in ruins and its authority in tatters. In its place rises a colder arithmetic: sovereignty traded for patronage, values subordinated to leverage. The new ethic is survival: take what lies within reach, defend what can be defended, and submit where resistance is futile. Acquiescing to strength is the new order. Morality no longer governs the world; it merely decorates it.

Genocide is reduced to outsourcing. Friedrich Merz describes the destruction of Gaza as “dirty work” done by others, absolving himself through distance. The deaths of women and children become tolerable when responsibility is displaced. Keir Starmer insists wars must continue until moral purity is secured by exhaustion—peace, he argues, must never........

© The Friday Times