The Collapse of Empire

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 25 Nov 2024

Mazin Qumsiyeh | Popular Resistance – TRANSCEND Media Service

23 Nov 2024 – I spent over a quarter century, or some 40% of my life, living in the “Western world”. I have the privilege of US Citizenship and the luck of having a great deal of travel around US (traveled in 48 states), Canada, Europe (most countries), Australia, and New Zealand. As I embarked on a tour of dozens of invited talks, it is good to be brutally honest with people of these Western lands.

What we most loved about these countries despite their bloody colonial history is a character that is now being destroyed: freedom of thought and action that allowed for expansion of human knowledge, logic, and development unencumbered by dogma and narrow interests.  The checks and balances of “democracy” have been damaged for decades. Trump takeover of the United States just simply crowned the end.  This was so easy to foresee as the rigged system ensures money and extortions determine elections. Fr example in the US, the Democratic party received more than half its funding from Zionists whose allegiance was to a foreign entity.

The same for the labour party in the UK. So it was that principled leaders like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn are demonized successfully (I recommend Ilan Pappe’s book “Lobbying for Zionism on both sides of the Atlantic”). Over the past 150 years, billionaires became Zionists starting with the 19th century Rothschild family. The die was cast for the western partnership by its full partnership in the Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine but also the die was cast for the end of a 500 + years of western enlightenment. Trump was the orange straw that could be the final breaking point. This was so foreseen long ago by students of history who understand how empires implode.

Thomas Cole, the Collapse of the Roman Empire 1836

What most attracted many of us to “western ideals” has been eroding for a long time. That is liberal ideas and laws with checks and balances that ensures the common person not only has a say in the system but can actually influence the system. This is how common people were able to get their way in areas like women right to vote, civil rights, social security, unionization, medical care access, ending western support for oppression (e.g. in Vietnam and South Africa), among many others. This liberalism also allowed unfettered pursuit of knowledge even when it challenged dogma (e.g. Darwin’s “Theory of Natural Selection” and Franz Fannon’s work)

In the US much of the knowledge was also generated by immigrants (most PhD students from other parts of the world). I was a beneficiary of this culling of minds from other countries though I chose not to stay in the West. I reached pinnacles of knowledge becoming an (associate) professor at universities like Duke and Yale, publishing books and over 200 peer reviewed research articles that advanced knowledge (from medicine to biology to human rights), and befriending tens of thousands of people would not have been possible without that freedom of thought afforded in a liberal west.

But I also witnessed a relentless war on knowledge and truth in this western world in my 44-year academic career. Ironically, the same people who declared this war are those who benefited from Western openness and ability to lobby to get their way. The erosion of freedoms is accelerating. It reached a point were the Congress of the most powerful country on earth passes laws that a) equate anti-racism/anti-Zionism with antisemitism, b) gives the Secretary o Treasury (whose allegiance is to Zionism not to the US) the authority to strip NGOs of non-profit status if they call for basic human rights like Palestinian refugee right of return and ending apartheid.

Advocating for an end to genocide becomes a crime. This is of course not only in the US (and not even worst in the US) but in other western “democracies.” Flying a Palestinian flag became a crime.  Questioning Zionist (mis)use of the Jewish holocaust also becomes a crime. This even before the incoming fascist government of Donald Trump takes office and declares war on climate change and health sciences. But also we noted collective amnesia in eh west so while there was a proliferation of Jewish holocaust museums funded by western governments, there was to bew few if any museums to the hundreds of holocausts and genocides perpetrated by those same Western governments (Slavery, natives/indigenous people in what became USA and Australia and Latin America, African genocides from Congo to Namibia, Syria, Yemen, Iraq etc.).

The decline of this openness and knowledge-based systems concomitant with mass media managed by billionaires drumming up non-sense led to situations where voters think their only choices are “lesser of two evils”. One evil advocates genocide and the other genocide and mass hysteria about immigrants.  Both led by a deep state mechanism resentful, fearful, and suppressive of any mass people movement.  Thus, the US (and other western countries) become more and more insular and anti-immigrant and anti-knowledge and superficial and continue the slide towards self-implosion. Any casual observer or student of growth and decline of empires will tell you that the western/European powers are now in decline and this is due to their own “implosion”.

The vacuum is being filled by rising powers now organized under the BRICS+ umbrella (Brazil, Russia, China, India, South Africa, now being joined by many other countries. It saddens us to see how the proud European powers became subservient to special interests. US foreign policy is no longer driven by US national interests but are driven by supra-national entities like the world Zionist organization. This indeed turned out to be the final nail in the coffin of western scientific and rational “progress”.

Perhaps Mahatma Gandhi was right to answer a question about what he thought of Western Civilization by saying “I think it would be a good idea”.  Is it still possible to save the western world? Perhaps it will take the massive global uprising against the tyranny and genocide we are already seeing. Perhaps it is inevitable to have new world powers  like China or the rise o the Islamic world (already Western Zionist-led Islamophobia is leading to strengthening Islam) or perhaps an awakening of the 2.3 billion Christians to the destruction happening in the Holy Land including to us Christians. Perhaps a combination of those. Time will tell.

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Mazin Qumsiyeh, associate professor of genetics and director of cytogenetic services at Yale University School of Medicine, is founder and president of the Holy Land Conservation Foundation and ex-president of the Middle East Genetics Association. He won the Raymond Jallow Activism Award from the national Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee in 1998. He is co-founder and national treasurer of Al-Awda, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition, and has written extensively about the Middle East. Qumsiyeh is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, author of Sharing the Land of Canaan and Popular Resistance in Palestine, a professor at Bethlehem University and director of the Palestine Museum of Natural History in Bethlehem. http://palestinenature.org

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