Meanwhile, in the West, we look on, appalled but not surprised, and then, bummed out by the constant torrent of misery coming from those parts of the world, change the channel. How about that Kanye West, right? What a legend/card/asshole/(insert your own assessment).
Here in the liberal-democratic world, with its ideals of universal human rights and general tolerance, we are aghast; not in our name, we say. Though this very world seems to be in the process of being swept away, replaced by something more brutish and atavistically Hobbesian. From 20 January, the massacre of Aleppo, and any similar actions which follow, will have been in our name. The United States will officially approve of Assad's ancient right as sovereign to crush rebellions, and to lay waste to their cities, making examples of entire populations that harbour rebels to deter future rebellions (mercifully preventing more bloodshed in the future!). And as satellites of the Trumpreich, so will the UK (which increasingly rejects the idea of human rights) and Australia (with its own gulag system for brown and/or Islamic refugees) and others. France will almost certainly join the new consensus after the election of their next President, who is tipped to be either an actual fascist or a Catholic reactionary aching to roll back the Enlightenment, but in either case a follower of Putin's ideology of strength. They will join Hungary, Turkey and Poland, already in the growing post-liberal consensus. And so, as the world starts to look more like Russia at any point in history, a place where life is cheap, power is all, and any words that contradict this are lies, the relative stability of what came before (roughly the world from the years after World War 2 to 2016) will recede into myth; part fantastically bright Star Trek utopia, part naïve Weimar-style idealism, and part decadent lie that deserved to die. Indeed, the last citadel of liberalism and human rights may well be Germany, having had totalitarianism and genocide sufficiently close in its past, and sufficient memorials to its terrible toll, to resist desperately.