The sun may have long set on the British Empire, but its ghost dances triumphantly across the bloodied soil of fractured nations. Colonialism, draped in missionary robes and "civilizing" banners, did not end; it mutated. From Baghdad to Benghazi, Kabul to Khartoum, the carcass of foreign governance rots under the golden plaques of "nation-building" and "democracy." Where colonial officers once charted railway maps, today, drones chart destruction. Where viceroys drew borders, now UN envoys draft broken peace deals.
"Democracy," they cry, yet it is the democracy of surveillance, debt, and puppet regimes. How can we forget the imposed order in Iraq, stitched together with American thread, soaked in sectarian blood? Or Libya, where the NATO symphony of missiles composed a requiem for sovereignty? Governance, under the masquerade of liberation, has merely become a new kind of imperial ledger, ruthlessly tallying oil fields and mineral veins.
Even humanitarian aid, with all its sweetened labels and glossy donor reports, often arrives as a Trojan horse, offering shelter with one hand and signing extraction contracts with the other. The International Monetary Fund, with surgical precision, slices public spending in the name of structural reform. Is it help, or hemorrhage?
And then there is the cruel irony: the very architects of global chaos now serve as the self-anointed saviors. They convene peace summits, write war resolutions, and preach tolerance, while the ashes of Yemen still smolder and Gaza mourns. The empires may have gone, but their manuals are still in use.
