"The world is back to barbarism": General Sanders' prophetic speech.

“We are returning to barbarism.” The person who sounded the alarm in 2023 wasn't a social media agitator, nor an opportunistic ideologue, nor an apocalyptic columnist. It was Sir Patrick Sanders, then Chief of the General Staff of the British Army. A man from the hard center of Western military power. A war professional who doesn't speak impulsively. And what he said was simple, direct, and disturbing: the world is heading towards barbarism.

When a general of that level chooses that word - barbarism This is not a trivial figure of speech. It is a diagnosis. Barbarism, here, is not the absence of technology, but the absence of limits. It is the progressive replacement of law by force, of diplomacy by intimidation, of politics by destruction.

For decades, we were taught to believe that civilization advanced almost automatically. That the horrors of the 20th century had taught definitive lessons. That wars between states were remnants of a bygone era. This comfortable narrative crumbled. And it crumbled in a chain reaction.

War has once again become a legitimate instrument of international politics – see Ukraine, the Gaza Strip, and now the neo-imperialist delusions of Donald Trump in his frenzy to seize Venezuela, Greenland, Panama, Canada, and who knows what else. Civilians have once again become acceptable “collateral” targets. The language of dehumanization has reappeared shamelessly. The enemy has ceased to be an adversary and has become an obstacle to be eliminated. When this happens, barbarity has already begun – even if parliaments, elections, and empty speeches about universal values ​​still exist.

Sir Patrick Sanders served as Chief of the General Staff of the UK Army between 2022 and 2024. In speeches and public interviews – particularly from 2023 onwards – he warned that: the rules-based international order is deteriorating; the world is entering a phase of more frequent, prolonged and brutal conflicts; liberal democracies can no longer treat war as something remote; the UK and its allies need to prepare for scenarios of direct confrontation between states (for example, direct confrontations between member countries of the same international organization such as NATO – something unthinkable for recent generations).

The expression "we are heading towards barbarism" was used by him metaphorically and politically, not rhetorically: it signifies the normalization of violence, interstate war, and brute force as a central instrument of international politics.

His speech resonated widely and gained weight because it came from the highest command of the British Army, not from an external analyst; it broke with the traditional diplomatic tone of the Armed Forces; it echoed a growing sentiment in the West after the war in Ukraine, the conflict in Gaza, and the escalation of global tensions.

In short, Sanders was not announcing a specific war, but a gradual civilizational collapse, in which the logic of force once again replaces that of law.

What is most unsettling about Sanders' warning is not its alarmist tone, but the recognition that democracies, too, are being swallowed up by this logic.. By normalizing permanent states of exception – Trump just stated that the American presence in Venezuela and the Yankee appropriation of that country's oil "has no end in sight" – by accepting endless wars as the backdrop of daily life, by trading rights for promises of security, the democratic world is beginning to speak the language it always claimed to fight against.

Barbarity doesn't arrive all at once. It settles in gradually. First as an exception. Then as a necessity. Finally, as the norm. When we realize it, we are already justifying the unjustifiable, relativizing the unacceptable, explaining the inexplicable.

For Brazil and Latin America, the warning is not far off. Global barbarity has local effects: militarization of political discourse, criminalization of poverty, intolerance elevated to a method, violence transformed into spectacle, and foreign policy reduced to automatic alignments. And since order now belongs to the strongest, peripheral countries suffer first – and suffer most – when this order, in the international sphere, dissolves.

What is at stake right now is not just geopolitics, not just the likely need to draw a new world map of power, but the very idea of ​​civilization. Because civilization is not productivity, nor consumption, nor technology, nor economic growth. It is limits. It is pact. It is the conscious rejection of brute force as the rule of the world.

When a British general says we are heading towards barbarism, perhaps he is telling us something even more unsettling: it is not the future that threatens us – it is the past that returns. Why? Because it has never been fully overcome.

And the question that remains is not whether barbarism will come. It is already among us. The real question is: Who is still willing to resist it - and at what cost?