The heavy price of silence

Keeping quiet, denial and lack of courage in leaders enable genocide and corruption

- Armand Bam

n Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, three sons wrestle with the sins of their father, a man consumed by greed, selfishness and power.

Each brother embodies a path: Dmitri the impulsive, Ivan the rational sceptic, Alyosha the spiritual and compassionate. The tragedy of their family and of the wider society around them is not simply one man's corruption, but the way silence, denial and failure of courage let that corruption metastasise.

So too with nations. Leadership falters not only because of those who abuse power, but because of those who stay silent, rationalise wrongdoing or retreat from moral clarity.

At the UN, US President Donald Trump delivered a performance, half-speech, half-sales pitch. He spoke of sovereignty and greatness, but sovereignty for whom? Greatness at whose expense? It is not just what leaders say that matters, it is what they deliberately leave unsaid.

Power often hides behind omission as the powerless suffer. Climate change and immigration are painted as enemies, but the real threat is leaders who reduce justice to words while protecting their own ambitions.

In stark contrast, Barbados's Prime Minister Mia Mottley used her address to remind the world that “they make a desert and call it peace”. Her words cut through the fog of diplomacy, warning that cloaking injustice in silence or polite ambiguity does not preserve peace, it fertilises tyranny. She challenged leaders to resist the erosion of truth and to confront injustice directly, no matter how inconvenient.