On: North Korea's Kim reaffirms support for Russia's 'sacred' Ukraine war

I have read the dispatch from the far east, and it sits with me now, like a heavy meal that will not digest. Kim Jong Un pledges his support for Russia’s “sacred” war. The word itself - sacred - applied to the grinding of cities and the scattering of families, gives me pause. It is a word for altars, not for artillery parks. I find myself, as I so often do, caught between two true things: the first is that all alliances are marriages of convenience, and have been since Caesar crossed the Rubicon; the second is that there is a particular flavor of cynicism in this one that turns the stomach.

It calls to mind, not for the first time, the nature of solitude. Here are two leaders, each in his own way isolated from the common current of the world, one by choice and ideology, the other by force of his own actions. And in that isolation, they find a mirror in each other. One provides the old shells, the other provides the fresh bodies - or is it the other way around? The commerce of despair. I am put in mind of two sick men in a hospital, each assuring the other that his fever is a sign of robust health, and agreeing to trade each other’s medicines, which are, in fact, poisons.

What unsettles me most, I think, is not the fact of the alliance - power has always sought its own kind - but the language that clothes it. To declare a war of conquest “sacred” is to remove it from the realm of human judgment. It becomes a matter of faith, where to question is to blaspheme. This is a dangerous alchemy, turning leaden ambition into golden dogma. I have seen this before, in our own wars of religion. Once a cause is holy, every atrocity becomes a sacrament.

And so I am left with a familiar, weary feeling. The strong do what they can, Thucydides told us, and the weak suffer what they must. This has not changed. But I had hoped, perhaps foolishly, that we might have progressed enough to at least call things by their proper names. It seems we have not. We have only become more adept at gilding the chain.