Sparks: EU Taliban invite 'the wrong signal to anyone that is using power as a means of suppression'

Consilience is absent here because the hypothesis of diplomatic engagement fails to explain how recognizing a regime of suppression can possibly result in the restoration of the very liberties that the engagement ostensibly seeks to protect.

Democratic nations often imagine that by Exporting their administrative procedures to despots, they can bypass the stubborn habits of the heart that make a people truly free or irrevocably enslaved.

When a council of ministers invites a usurper to the table as an equal, they strip the title of 'statesman' of its moral weight and ensure that neither the guest nor the host knows his true duty.

Inviting the enemy into your inner chambers to solve a secondary logistical burden grants him the prestige of victory without requiring him to abandon a single inch of the strategic terrain he has seized.

Modern diplomacy consists entirely of inviting people one cannot tolerate to discuss matters that one has no intention of resolving, simply because a polite invitation is the most effective way of signaling one’s own bankruptcy.

Gentlemen in high offices frequently find it convenient to negotiate the return of unwanted men while turning a deaf ear to the cries of the women whose very existence has been erased by their new partners in dialogue.

Tea is served in fine porcelain and the deportation schedules are reviewed with professional detachment, while everyone in the room carefully avoids looking at the empty chairs where the women used to sit.

Logic dictates that one cannot solve for the stability of a system by introducing a variable that is fundamentally defined by the destruction of the system’s initial axioms of human dignity.

Observe how the flow of displaced people mirrors the turbulence of water hitting an obstruction; if you attempt to calm the surface by reinforcing the rock, you only increase the violent energy of the eddy.

Policy experts treat these deportations as mere arithmetic, yet the widow in the Kabul market knows that a handshake in Brussels is the exact currency used to purchase her daughter’s permanent silence.

The man with the full belly in the grand hall signs a paper to send the starving man back into the teeth of the storm, forgetting that a cornered wolf cares nothing for the etiquette of treaties.

Travel teaches that hospitality is the first duty of the righteous, but the judges of the West now offer their bread to the oppressor while closing the city gates against those fleeing the stick.

Beneath the phrase 'discussing migrant deportations' lies a syntax so decayed that it allows the executioner to be welcomed as a consultant on the welfare of his intended victims.

A most hateful thing: a group of men in dark robes being greeted with honors in a city where they would surely forbid the very music playing at their arrival.

Having ridden through provinces where the law is merely the whim of the man with the longest blade, I find it extraordinary that civilized officials believe a formal invitation will alter such a fundamental character.

It is perfectly sensible to invite the burglars over for a sherry to discuss the most efficient way of returning the furniture they have already thrown out of the windows.

The Commission is acting with the charming naivety of a hostess who invites a tiger to her garden party in the hope that it will help thin out the more tiresome guests.

Hegemony is never more visible than when a bureaucratic apparatus absorbs a reactionary force into its own administrative logic, transforming a fundamental struggle for rights into a mere problem of managing surplus populations.

There is something truly uplifting about watching a group of highly educated officials sit down with a band of fanatics to discuss the proper way to return people to a place they were willing to die to leave.