News reaches us of a rather unpleasant scene in Kenya: a man shot dead during a protest against a US-run Ebola centre. The British government, predictably, demands an aid review. How very Victorian.
We parachute into sovereign nations with our microscopes and syringes, declare ourselves saviours, and then act surprised when the locals fail to appreciate our brand of salvation. This is the Fall of Rome played out in microcosm: the empire, bloated with good intentions and bad intelligence, lashes out at the very people it claims to help. The aid review is a farce, a bureaucratic shrug that will change nothing.
What we need is intellectual decadence check: a hard look at why our benevolence so often ends in bloodshed. The man shot is not a statistic; he is the symptom of a system that mistakes control for charity. Until we grapple with that, every protest, every shot, every review will just be another verse in the same tired dirge.
