Hyde, you are not wrong.

But almost all empires engage in shadow play.

Those who sell their souls to the supposedly 'necessary' deadly machinations to grease the bloody wheels of imperial needs are oblivious to the "two black-robed women wool-knitting their destiny in the "whited sepulchre city".

Marlowe observes that many in Brussels knew where the 'company' headquarters were: indeed, they are proud of what it has done for their city.

In short, they do not know, nor care, that they are at the very gates of hell.

Our current collective morality is so subsumed, distracted even entertained, by our Empires' avaricious nature, that even if a Dante suddenly appeared, or a Conrad, or a satirist like Jonathan Swift, their voices would be not echoes of despair, or pleas for sanity but plaintive whispers on the wind.

Our time? This time? Again?

However, the shadow play is no longer in the darkened alleyways of some ghetto, some Saigon hotel room or outskirts of a Bantu stand.

Nor is it taking place during the fog of war in Fallujah, or behind Abu Ghraib prison walls or Kandahar.

This shadow play is taking place in broad daylight.

It's naked.

It's why most should have difficulty watching a Sunday US football game, in a stunning new stadium, seating thousands, without thinking of the stark reality of an appalling and arrogant Imperial impunity unleashed upon children.

The irony in the motto "never again' is so monumental that to say it aloud would be a stain on those who once fought genocidal madness.