...Britain, The US and the other dominant Western powers used to having things their own way just didn’t get the memo.
Since history was recorded the world has been a series of Empires rising, spreading like viruses, abusing, corrupting and collapsing. That time is over.
Formed from the rags and remnants of epochs marked by maltreatment, domination, destruction, avarice, the grasping despoiling hands of men and the weapons they formed to brutalise others, the new norm has no shape yet. So its easy to think things are as they’ve always been.
They’re not.
We can’t know if the new era will be better or worse than the old. It certainly does not have the time or resources to squander that the Age of Empires had.
Meanwhile, the (recent) old order is simply in denial. Stamping its feet, sucking its gums, stinking in its own soiled clothing, impotently fawning and raging in turn. It does not recognise the symptoms of decline that are always the same and ultimately lead to rotting from within from the combined effects of gargantuan corruption in all its manifestations and the takeover at the top of government by those least able, least talented, most lacking in moral fibre and any of the human decencies.
The new world order is establishing itself to the discordant hysterical screeching and senile babblings of the old. Most aptly personified by Donald Trump, the true poster boy for the old, addled, incontinent body politic.
Many (and we have it here in the UK) are revolting against change that has, in reality, already happened. As with America, the rabid (predominantly) white right, spit and rage against anyone brown, anyone who does not submit to their narrow and poisoned view of the world, not realising they are already yesterday’s people.
The greatest irony, evident this side of The Pond, is that many of those doing the ranting and raving, the hatred and bitterness, living in a dead past, are the very people who brought down the world they hanker for.
I’ve discussed Trump’s Epstein war in Iran at length. And its certainly a massively significant catalyst in the re-forming that is going on. But there are other evident failures of Western hegemony that stand out. One is outlined in a letter of mine regarding AI recently published in (among other papers) THE JAMAICA GLEANER
Also a recurring theme in posts on this blog is the precipitous and predictable post-WWII decline of the British Empire that was stemmed, in part, by joining the EU. Britain was shored up for decades by inclusion in that vibrant trading environment. Also the advantages of free travel and flow of ideas and access, via the EU to much of the rest of the world on a more equal footing, helped maintain the fiction that it was still Great Britain.
We threw that away with Brexit for the sake of the casual racism and the wet dream of deregulation so enjoyed by the failed right on this Island. And many of those most vulnerable to the effects of this suicidal action were the most ardent in voting for destruction in 2016. Just as the US threw away its stronger global dominance with two terms of MAGA Trump.
Though in all ways the Trump catastrophe is more dramatic, more wide-reaching, more impactful for the entire globe, it was very much part of a pattern and a certain poison that was in the air and which has never fully cleared, like mustard gas, leaving a stench of decay which is palpable in our grey, dirty, failing cities with their empty stores like black gaps in a rotten set of teeth… Many of these gaps filled with the rough sleepers who, in their increasing numbers show us how the basics of our social order are failing and failing.
Brexit pretty much trashed the UK but the US domestic and foreign policy stumblings, fumblings and outright deliberate catastrophic disasters have altered everything of any significance in the modern world.
America tied itself to a lump of orange offal and the rest of us have watched in horrified fascination as she sank and sank and sank some more..
History, if we make it to that, will marvel at the decline. The speed. The totality. The lack of awareness. The way the old order clung to the flotsam and jetsam of their self-made destruction.
Of course it would be crass ignorance to ignore the insane irony of it being an area of the globe recently decimated by Western murderousness having had the very first empire. The war criminal half responsible for that atrocity was our own Tony Blair with his bestie George W Bush and that country Iraq. The Akkadian Empire established around 2334 BCE was located in Mesopotamia – modern day Iraq. And of course the end of the Akkadian empire was in part due to 'all of the above' plus climate change...
Isn’t there always a certain symmetry when fate is laughing at human frailty and vaulting ambition?
But the world to come is burying its dead, mourning its children, biding its time and eventually will turn its back on the old. Sickened by its excess, blood lust and wanton destruction. And one thing we must remember while the battles rage and the poor persist, is that Empire brutality taught the current underdogs how to survive. How to endure suffering. Something we in the West can no longer do.
The new element in all this, again something I’ve banged on about, is the precipitously unstable and depleted state of the planet.
Yes past empires fell and new ones sprang up each bent on dominance and blinded by a sense of superiority. But each one needing to mine the planet and exploit its people and resources for new wealth to fund avaricious expanse.
This time maybe the planet has had enough.
That is the new element.
That is the new challenge.
What will the new world order have to fund its ambitions?
I’d like to hear someone in a position of power and influence asking that question. At the moment its just noises off. Not just off but off the point, off their heads, off their meds and very off in the way meat goes if left out in the warmth where the flies can get at it.
When will, for example, those in power and those in the media turn their focus away from the fly-blown carcass of the old, not even fit for the knackers yard and concentrate on what is coming?
You know the answer to that and so do I.
When its far too late...