Syria, a Petrie dish of rapine and warring baronies

Dystopia was once upon a time a filmic theme park, wherein a director could imagine all sorts of random tyrannies and arbitrary agents of terror. The classic embodiment of this dystopia was Mad Max, which was made in 1979 when communism effortlessly controlled much of the Eurasian landmass, while the Shah’s iron rule ensured that Iran remained a pro-western secular state.

Forty-five years on, the global map (and the certainties it conveyed) has been shattered. Economic communism survives solely in the coelacanth that is North Korea, which has sent much of its army to fight a war that would have been literally incredible to the minds of 1979. But far worse – and this would have been  a quite impossible feat for the human imagination of forty-five years ago – is the fate of the Middle East. In seemingly just a few days, Syria ceased to be a state in a state of civil war, and instead became dystopia’s latest recruit, a Petrie dish of rapine and warring baronies, just like its neighbour, Iraq. Semi-dystopia reigns in Libya and much of Algeria while in its unbridled, full-blooded form, it clearly hopes to extend its suzerainty to Jordan, Saudi and much of Iran and then reconnect with its kindred creed in Afghanistan. Why not then spread its malignant imperium to Pakistan?

What did the world do as civilisation was beginning to unravel and Christmas, 2024 approached? It had a conference on global warming in Baku, which is along the meridian coveted by dystopia’s ambition, while almost universally denouncing Israel for fighting one of dystopia’s most perfervid allies.

Meanwhile, the EU opened its doors to trade with South America ten thousand kilometres away, even as a virulent dystopia spread like malaria across Europe’s southern marches. For slumber, sloth and unreason are the rich soil in which dystopia can sink deep roots, and since virtually nobody and no institution have any memory of how to unknit the bloody chaos of dystopia, we in Europe take refuge in denial. But within the communal memory of the Chinese Communist Party, there is a residual memory of what dystopia is: a bloody and libidinous nightmare of rape and carnage that is ended only by ferocious tyranny that is barely better than the murderous chaos that it replaced. But it is still, nonetheless, better. If you wonder at some of the cruelties of today’s China, best remember its dystopia of just the day before yesterday.

Millions of refugees will soon be fleeing dystopia’s imperium, and the EU must decide what its policies should be towards them. But the EU is no more capable of devising a policy towards this existential calamity than it is of lassoing one of Saturn’s moons. The Council of the European Union is not king. The European Parliament is not king. Ursula von der Leyen is not a monarch of any kind, notwithstanding her sinisterly overweening ambition to rule over both detail and hectare. The European Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg is king, and recruitment to its ruling caste is confined to those infected with the deadly virus of human rights, and until that day that the Defenestration of Ague occurs, Europe will be increasingly ungovernable. Those who flee dystopia will themselves almost certainly be infected and carry the dystopian virus with them wherever they go. Indeed, dystopia has already arrived in its incubated form, evident in Malmo, Paris, London, Leicester, Munich and Madrid. What is Syria today could be the EU tomorrow. How seriously is Brussels taking that possibility? Is there even an organ anywhere in the European Union capable of pondering upon that possibility and then devising a policy to prevent it? 

The answer to both those questions is an anagram of “on”.

Proudly defenceless while supporting welfare states that themselves have attracted millions of people from undeveloped countries, the EU has been a vast vanity project for those who regard themselves as the product of the Enlightenment. But that triumph of “reason” was achieved by men whose cultures were steeped in Christianity and the warnings of the Old Testament: Man was a fallen creature, beset with sin, who would return to vice at the least temptation, and dystopia an-ever threatening possibly. What was their hell but dystopia? What was Breughel but a visual laureate of dystopia’s boundless horrors?  When he painted hell, he was addressing an audience that was literate in the ways of evil. When they forgot it, the Thirty-Year War returned to remind them.

But to the permanently infantilised children of the post-Second World War era, there is no such as real evil, just a temporary indisposition that can be wished away with the help of free doctors, free dentists and free hospitals. All is curable and all will be well, free of charge, so why not weave into existence a political union without an army, a navy or an air force? Are these not the tools of ancient barbarisms that the EU was conjured into existence to refute, deny and reject? Was not the EU the way forward, unlike the crude and unsophisticated examples set by the Russians, the Americans, the Chinese? Are love and the welfare state not better and more powerful than war?

As we gaze south over the narrow waters of the middle sea, we know the answer to that. Five years ago, the Chinese government in a global experiment in epidemiology very deliberately sent us Covid, and that should have been a warning to the West about the plague-potency of the airliner. Another plague now simmers in Aleppo and Basra, Cairo and Damascus, and it will approach us clothed in smiles and wide, beguiling eyes. Decency demands that we give sanctuary to these homeless, hungry hordes. But as many a lifeboat has discovered, decency can be the undoing of the decent and the doom of all. And is Europe remotely capable of discussing this issue as an existential one rather than an opportunity to indulge in displays of compassion that characterise the usually-feminised discourses of the west? Are we to endlessly revisit the Ethiopian Famine of 1985 as a model of how to respond to a humanitarian disaster, even though the Western aid prolonged the war, and far from ending Ethiopia’s appetite for famine and war, merely has systematically fed the country’s addiction to both? 

Certain days are retained in our memory long before that memory was born. Lord Grey’s words as he gazed over London that August day in 1914 – “The lamps are going out in Europe, and we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime” – live on. So too does Chamberlain’s gravelly, heart-broken wireless-broadcast of September 1939, as does Roosevelt’s scornful anger two years later. For those who in Europe who were alive that evil eve, we know where we were when we heard news of Kennedy’s assassination, just as we do when we heard about the Twin Towers and the moral start of the 21st century, and then last week about the Fall of Syria. 

It has been a century of unbroken horrors, but not least of those horrors has been the decline of the birthplace of world civilisation, its refusal to take its future seriously, with its feckless, reckless attitude to the defence of its culture, its species and its borders.   One of the great tomes of the anglophone component of western civilisation was Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, and those who read it in the second half of the 20th century would repeatedly ask how it was possible that the most sophisticated civilisation in the history of the world could so lose sight of its core values that within a single generation it could vanish from the face of the earth, leaving behind it merely standing stone and sundered dialects. Then we wondered. Now we know.

Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.