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An attack by a US submarine of Sri Lanka’s coast exposes the moral contradictions of empire. As sailors were left drowning after the attack on Iran’s IRIS Dena, a rescue effort forced an uncomfortable ethical reckoning.
By PROFESSOR JUNAID S. AHMAD
Hannah Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’ is one of those concepts polite society cherishes because it flatters the audience. It reassures comfortable people that atrocity is merely a tragic software bug in modern bureaucracy: clipboards, procedures, rubber stamps, and men in sensible shoes who never quite understood what they were doing.
The diagnosis has explanatory value. Here, it is spectacularly inadequate.
There is nothing banal about watching sailors drown in front of you and deciding the water may keep them. No bureaucratic fog obscures the scene when the victims are visible, the terror immediate, and the choice not abstract compliance but cold, conscious indifference. This is not evil mediated by distance. It is evil at conversational range.
The episode off Sri Lanka is morally clarifying because it strips away so many of empire’s preferred alibis. A torpedo is one thing; the aftermath is another. The real indictment is not simply that a superpower can devise a rationale elegant enough to sanction destruction. It is that, after inflicting it, it can regard rescue as less urgent than messaging.
The episode off Sri Lanka is morally clarifying because it strips away so many of empire’s preferred alibis. A torpedo is one thing; the aftermath is another. The real indictment is not simply that a superpower can devise a rationale elegant enough to sanction destruction. It is that, after inflicting it, it can regard rescue as less urgent than messaging. That distinction matters only to people who believe civilisation lives in footnotes. The essential fact is simpler and uglier: men were left in the water, and another navy had to perform the elementary labour of human decency.
That, predictably, is the detail Washington’s professional necrophiliacs will work hardest to deodorise. The modern imperial state does not merely kill; it curates the atmosphere in which killing appears managerial, regrettable, and therefore mature. Violence must be given the right tone, the right vocabulary, the right suit. Mass death is acceptable provided the sentence describing it is suitably crisp. Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio, along with the lacquered gangsters of the Trump administration, perform this function with the confidence of men who confuse theatrical hardness with geopolitical intelligence. Their real skill lies not in strategy but in aesthetic management: converting savagery into posture, posture into doctrine, and doctrine into cable-news masculinity for viewers who mistake bloodlust for seriousness.
That is why invoking Arendt still matters, but only by contrast. Banality describes distance; this describes intimacy. A drone operator thousands of miles away can at least hide inside screens, euphemisms, and the antiseptic lies of altitude. But when survivors are in the water, when bodies are not theoretical but floating, when another navy must recover the living and the dead, the ethical disguise collapses. One is no longer dealing with the grey tragedy of ordinary functionaries embedded in a machine. One is dealing with the bright obscenity of people who know exactly what the machine does because they are looking at it bobbing in the sea. Sri Lanka’s rescue effort therefore becomes more than a humanitarian footnote. It is an unbearable contrast. Amid the wreckage produced by empire, someone still remembered that drowning men are not abstractions.
The Caribbean ‘double tap’ allegations sharpen the point to a knife edge. First the empire kills; then it reportedly strikes the remainder; then its lawyers debate taxonomy; then its media ask whether the optics are challenging. The imperial imagination is forever trying to convert horror into process. Its deepest fantasy is that a second strike becomes less monstrous if accompanied by sufficiently technical vocabulary. Apparently barbarism now comes with briefing slides.
American media, with honourable exceptions, remains indispensable to this theatre of normalisation. Its role is not always crude propaganda; often it is something more efficient: tonal laundering. A girls’ school is bombed, Tehran is discussed in the register of a war game, maritime killing is narrated like a chess move, and the audience is invited to admire the ‘escalation ladder’ the way children admire fireworks. One can almost hear the cable-news baritone: grave, responsible, faintly aroused. Empire depends on this cadence. It needs a priesthood of smooth men and urgent graphics to assure the public that what would sound psychopathic in any honest language becomes ‘strategy’ once spoken in Washington English.
The truly poisonous class is not only the trigger-pullers but the ideological decorators: Zionists, neocons, imperial nostalgists, and all the war-criminal courtiers who speak as if the world were their private risk board and foreign bodies were merely pieces with weak endgames. Their genius, if one wishes to flatter depravity with that word, lies in converting moral inversion into professional expertise. To starve, bombard, torpedo, and abandon becomes prudence. To object becomes naivete. To rescue the drowning becomes, perhaps, a logistical inconvenience. One almost expects a think-tank panel titled ‘The humanitarian opportunities of maritime lethality’.
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What kind of civilisation trains men to commit such acts – starve, bombard, torpedo – and then calls them disciplined? What kind of republic produces leaders who destroy and then refuse the elementary dignity of rescue?
And the deepest indictment may be psychological. What kind of civilisation trains men to commit such acts and then calls them disciplined? What kind of republic produces leaders who destroy and then refuse the elementary dignity of rescue? The PTSD will not be confined to survivors. It will stain perpetrators, witnesses, and the political culture that taught them to mistake moral mutilation for strength. Empires always imagine trauma as something exported. In reality, it boomerangs.
So no, this is not the banality of evil. That phrase is too gentle, too sociological, too forgivingly upholstered for the spectacle before us. This is not moral sleepwalking. It is moral lucidity in the service of barbarism. The sailors were visible. The drowning was visible. The choice was visible. And so, finally, is the empire.
Prof. Junaid S. Ahmad teaches Law, Religion, and Global Politics and is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decolonization (CSID), Islamabad, Pakistan. He is a member of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST), Movement for Liberation from Nakba (MLN), and Saving Humanity and Planet Earth (SHAPE).
