The New Dark Age

Wednesday, 22 January 2025 — BettBeat Media

The genocide in Palestine isn’t just another ‘Middle Eastern’ conflict – it’s the culmination of an empire in terminal decline, desperately clinging to power through increasingly naked brutality. As empires rot from within, their true nature becomes most visible at the periphery.

The United States is experiencing the classic symptoms of imperial collapse: an out-of-control military-industrial complex consuming half of all discretionary spending while domestic infrastructure crumbles; endless military disasters from Vietnam to Afghanistan to Iraq; and now, full partnership in Gaza’s genocide while its own citizens struggle with chronic underemployment and collapsing social services.

This moment crystallizes what many in the Global South have long understood: The West’s proclaimed values of human rights, democracy, and international law were always selectively applied tools of power, not universal principles. When Palestinians sought protection under these same values, they discovered their worthlessness against Western geopolitical interests.

The collapse of an empire often appears sudden from the outside, but the internal rot develops over many decades. In America’s case, the warning signs have been unmistakable: a corporate coup d’état transforming democracy into oligarchy, the systematic destruction of labor unions, the conversion of elections into legalized bribery, a healthcare system that bankrupts its citizens, and the complete capture of institutions – from academia to media – by corporate interests.

Gaza represents the moment when these contradictions become impossible to hide. The empire that lectured the world about human rights now openly commits genocide. The self-proclaimed defender of democracy actively supports the mass killing of civilians trapped in an open-air prison. The champion of international law brazenly violates every convention it once claimed to uphold.

Gaza therefore provides humanity with a gift: it rips off the mask of Western democracy, revealing that the crimes against humanity we witness are not aberrations but core features of Western ‘civilization’.

The Gaza Method: A Preview of Life Under the Western Rules-Based Order

This all comes at a critical juncture, as climate breakdown and mass migration loom. The treatment of Gaza sends a chilling message about how Western powers plan to handle future humanitarian crises – not with aid and compassion, but with brutal force against those deemed expendable.

The response to Gaza has also exposed the complete erosion of traditional sanctuaries of dissent. Universities, once bastions of free speech, now coordinate to suppress peaceful protest. Independent media faces algorithmic suppression, while corporate media outlets, themselves transformed into siloed echo chambers serving oligarchic factions, parrot official narratives without question.

The transformation of Western societies into more overtly authoritarian structures isn’t happening in isolation. It’s part of a broader pattern where failing empires resort to increasingly harsh forms of control to maintain power. The militarization of police, mass surveillance systems, the world’s largest prison population, and the criminalization of dissent are all symptoms of this decay.

The legacy of Gaza extends far beyond the immediate conflict. It marks the moment when the West’s moral pretensions finally crumbled in full view of the world. While Western powers still maintain their military and economic might, their claims to moral leadership or civilization ring hollow against the backdrop of their participation in genocide.

Dragged Away for Asking: Gaza Shatters the Free Press Façade

Take the West’s lie of press freedom — their favorite moral cudgel against the Global South, now exposed as empty propaganda as they crush journalists who dare speak truth about Palestine.

This pretense crumbled in real time when, just a few days ago, Secretary of State Blinken’s security personnel violently dragged veteran journalist Sam Husseini out of a press conference for asking questions about U.S. complicity in Gaza’s genocide. The symbolism was perfect – while Blinken stood at the podium pontificating about Western press freedom, his staff physically removed journalists who dared question America’s role in mass killing.

The mask didn’t just slip – it shattered. Inside the very building where Western officials routinely lecture other nations about media freedom, a credentialed journalist was manhandled, handcuffed, and forcibly removed for attempting to ask about the Geneva Conventions and U.S. policy in Gaza. The subsequent media response was equally revealing: establishment outlets rushed to delegitimize the dissenting journalists, with CNN labeling them “demonstrators” and “hecklers,” while foreign policy experts bemoaned the “lack of civility” in questioning the powerful about their war crimes and crimes against humanity.

This is what Empire looks like in its terminal phase – unable to maintain even the most basic pretense of its proclaimed values, resorting to raw force against journalists in its own press rooms while still claiming to champion press freedom globally. The gap between rhetoric and reality has become too wide to conceal. What was once hidden behind closed doors now happens in full view, as the desperate actions of a declining power that can no longer maintain its civilizational facade.

How Western Media Flipped the Script on Rape in Gaza

The Western media’s fabrication of mass rape allegations, while simultaneously burying evidence of Israeli forces’ systematic sexual violence and rape of Palestinian prisoners, further exemplifies Empire’s moral collapse. As Palestinian women released from Israeli prisons testified about sexual abuse through forced strip searches and rape, and as evidence emerged of Palestinian male prisoners being raped to death – including a senior doctor – Western press outlets were busy amplifying unsubstantiated claims of sexual atrocities by the Palestinian resistance – claims that even Israeli newspapers eventually admitted lacked evidence.

This coordinated propaganda campaign revealed the total integration of Western media into the machinery of state power. The same outlets that rushed to broadcast Israeli allegations without verification remained conspicuously silent when Israeli soldiers who had raped Palestinian prisoners to death were celebrated as heroes in Israel. When Palestinian women (including children as young as 11) spoke of being dragged by their hair, subjected to degrading strip searches, and sexually abused in Israeli prisons, their testimonies were ignored or dismissed.

The contrast could not be starker. Unproven allegations against Palestinians received wall-to-wall coverage and immediate acceptance, while documented Israeli sexual violence and rape of Palestinian prisoners was buried or rationalized. This selective outrage exposed the Western media not as independent truth-seekers, but as willing — and demonically racist — partners in Empire’s information warfare and crimes against humanity – ready to amplify any claim that serves power while suppressing evidence of systematic state-sanctioned sexual violence against the powerless.

“The mechanisms of control being perfected against Palestinians today could easily be deployed against other populations deemed expendable tomorrow.”

Gaza’s Legacy: Stripping the West of Its Civilizational Mask

This phenomenon, which I call ‘The Great Unmasking of the West’, comes with profound implications. The global order is shifting, with nations of the Global South increasingly understanding that their future cannot lie with powers that so casually enable mass slaughter while blocking all attempts at intervention. The Western response to Gaza has made clear that the rules-based international order was always a fiction, selectively enforced to serve Western interests.

As climate crisis accelerates and resources become scarcer, the brutality displayed in Gaza offers a preview of how Western powers may respond to future crises. The mechanisms of control being perfected against Palestinians today could easily be deployed against other populations deemed expendable tomorrow.

What Gaza reveals isn’t just about Israel or Palestine – it’s about the true face of Western power when all pretensions are stripped away. As the Empire decays, it becomes more nakedly brutal, more openly contemptuous of the very principles it claimed to champion. From Washington to London, Paris to Berlin, Ottawa to Canberra, Western nations have not only failed to halt the genocide but actively enabled it through arms sales, diplomatic cover, and calculated silence. The masks have fallen. The pretense is over. The emperors stand naked before the world, revealed as architects of systematic brutality and defenders of genocide.

Palestinians, through their unbearable sacrifice, have given humanity a priceless gift: this revelation, this great unmasking of the West, at this critical historical juncture, will be Gaza’s enduring legacy to future generations.

– Karim