{"id":310995,"date":"2026-01-05T12:00:56","date_gmt":"2026-01-05T12:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=310995"},"modified":"2025-12-31T06:33:17","modified_gmt":"2025-12-31T06:33:17","slug":"decline-and-fall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2026\/01\/decline-and-fall\/","title":{"rendered":"Decline and Fall"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Sold Out – by Mr. Fish<\/p><\/div>\n

The British Empire, in steep decline on the eve of World War I, is a cautionary tale for a decayed U.S. Empire a century later.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

27 Dec 2025\u00a0<\/em>–\u00a0At the start of the 20th<\/sup> century, the British Empire was, like our own, in terminal decline. Sixty percent of Englishmen were physically unfit for military service, as are 77 percent<\/a> of American youth. The Liberal Party, like the Democratic Party, while it acknowledged the need for reform, did little to address the economic and social inequalities that saw the working class condemned to live in substandard housing, breathe polluted air, be denied basic sanitation and health care and forced to work in punishing and poorly paid jobs.<\/p>\n

The Tory government, in response, formed<\/a> an Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration to examine the \u201cdeterioration of certain classes of the population,\u201d meaning, of course, the urban poor. It became known as the report on \u201cthe degeneracy of our race.\u201d Analogies were swiftly drawn, with much accuracy, with the decadence and degeneracy of the late Roman Empire.<\/p>\n

Rudyard Kipling, who romanticized and mythologized the British Empire and its military, in his 1902 poem \u201cThe Islanders,\u201d warned<\/a> the British that they had grown complacent and flaccid from hubris, indolence and privilege. They were unprepared to sustain the Empire. He despaired of the loss of martial spirit by the \u201csons of the sheltered city \u2014 unmade, unhandled, unmeet,\u201d and called for mandatory conscription. He excoriated the British military for its increasing reliance on mercenaries and colonial troops, \u201cthe men who could shoot and ride,\u201d just as mercenaries and militias increasingly augment American forces overseas.<\/p>\n

Kipling damned the British public for its preoccupation with \u201ctrinkets\u201d and spectator sports, including \u201cthe flannel fools at the wicket or the muddied oafs at the goals,\u201d athletes whom he believed should have been fighting in the war in South Africa. He foresaw in the succession of British military disasters during the South African Boer War, which had recently ended, the impending loss of British global dominance, much as the two decades of military fiascos in the Middle East have eroded U.S. hegemony.<\/p>\n

The preoccupation with physical decline, also interpreted as moral decline, is what led Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to decry<\/a> \u201cfat generals,\u201d and order women in the military to meet the \u201chighest male standards\u201d for physical fitness. It is what is behind his \u201cWarrior Ethos Tasking,\u201d plans to enhance physical fitness, grooming standards and military readiness.<\/p>\n

We live in an eerily similar historical moment. Britain, within 12 years of Kipling\u2019s lament, was plunged into the collective suicide of World War I, a conflict that took the lives of over a million British and Commonwealth troops and doomed the British Empire.<\/p>\n

H.G. Wells, who anticipated trench warfare, tanks and machine guns, was one of the very few to see where Britain was headed. In 1908, he wrote \u201cThe War in the Air.\u201d He warned that future wars would not be limited to antagonistic nation-states but would become global. These wars, as was true in the 1935 Italian invasion of Ethiopia, the Spanish Civil War and World War II, would carry out the indiscriminate aerial bombardment of civilians. He also foresaw in \u201cThe World Set Free,\u201d the dropping of atomic bombs.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Nearly one third of the population in Edwardian England endured<\/a> abject poverty. The cause, as Seebohm Rowntree noted<\/a> in his study of the slums, was not, as conservatives claimed, alcoholism, laziness, a lack of initiative or responsibility by the poor, but because \u201cthe wages paid for unskilled labour in York are insufficient to provide food, shelter, and clothing adequate to maintain a family of moderate size in a state of bare physical efficiency.\u201d<\/p>\n

The U.S. has one of the highest rates of poverty among Western industrialized nations, estimated by many economists at far above the official figure of 10.6 percent. In real terms, some 41 percent<\/a> of Americans are poor or low-income, with 67 percent living<\/a> paycheck to paycheck.<\/p>\n

British eugenicists from the Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics \u2014 which was funded by Sir Francis Galton, who coined<\/a> the term \u201ceugenics\u201d \u2014 advocated \u201cpositive eugenics,\u201d the \u201cimprovement\u201d of the race by encouraging those deemed superior \u2014 always white members of the middle and upper classes \u2014 to have large families. \u201cNegative eugenics\u201d was advocated to limit the number of children born to those deemed \u201cunfit.\u201d This would be achieved through sterilization and the separation of genders.<\/p>\n

Winston Churchill, who was home secretary in the liberal government of H.H. Asquith in 1910-11, backed<\/a> the forced sterilization of the \u201cfeeble minded,\u201d calling<\/a> them a \u201cnational and race danger\u201d and \u201cthe source from which the stream of madness is fed.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Trump White House, led by Stephen Miller, is intent on carrying out a similar culling of American society. Those endowed with \u201cnegative\u201d hereditary traits \u2014 based usually on race \u2014 are condemned as human contaminants that an army of masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are terrorizing<\/a>, incarcerating and purging from society.<\/p>\n

Miller, in emails leaked<\/a> in 2019, lauds the 1973 novel \u201cThe Camp of the Saints,\u201d written by Jean Raspail. It chronicles a flotilla of South Asian people who invade France and destroy Western civilization. The immigrants, who the Trump administration are now hunting down, are described as \u201ckinky-haired, swarthy-skinned, long-despised phantoms\u201d and \u201cteeming ants toiling for the white man\u2019s comfort.\u201d The South Asian mobs are \u201cgrotesque little beggars from the streets of Calcutta,\u201d led by a feces-eating \u201cgigantic Hindu\u201d known as \u201cthe turd eater.\u201d<\/p>\n

This, in its most scurrilous form, is the thesis of the \u201cGreat Replacement\u201d theory, the belief that the white races in Europe and North America are being \u201creplaced\u201d by \u201clesser breeds of the earth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Donald Trump boasts<\/a> that he will be the \u201cfertilization president.\u201d American couples \u2014 meaning white couples \u2014 will be given<\/a> incentives by his administration to have more children to counter declining birth rates. In the vernacular of the right wing, those who promote this updated version of \u201cpositive eugenics\u201d are known as \u201cpronatalists.\u201d The Trump administration will also reduce<\/a> refugees admitted to the United States next year to the token level of 7,500, with most of these spots filled by white South Africans.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s allies in Big Tech are busy creating the fertility infrastructure to conceive children with \u201cpositive\u201d hereditary traits. Sam Altman, who has been awarded<\/a> a one-year military contract worth $200 million from the Trump administration, has invested<\/a> in technology to allow parents to gene edit their children before conception to produce \u201cdesigner babies.\u201d<\/p>\n

Peter Thiel, the co-founder<\/a> of Palantir<\/a>, which is facilitating<\/a> the Trump administration\u2019s mass deportation efforts, has backed an embryo screening company called Orchid Health. Orchid promises<\/a> to help parents design \u201chealthy\u201d children through embryo testing and selection technology. Elon Musk, a fervent pronatalist and believer<\/a> in the Great Replacement theory, is reportedly<\/a> a client of the startup. The goal is to empower parents to screen<\/a> embryos for IQ and select \u201ctheir children\u2019s intelligence before birth,\u201d as the Wall Street Journal notes.<\/p>\n

We are making the same self-defeating mistakes made by the British political class that oversaw the decline of the British Empire and orchestrated the suicidal folly of World War I. We blame the poor for their own impoverishment. We believe in the superiority of the white race over other races, crushing the plethora of voices, cultures and experiences that create a dynamic society. We seek to counter injustices, along with economic and social inequality, with hypermasculinity, militarism and force, which accelerates the internal decay and propels us toward a disastrous global war, perhaps, in our case, with China.<\/p>\n

Wells scoffed at the idiocy of an entitled ruling class that was unable to analyze or address the social problems it had created. He excoriated the British political elite for its ignorance and ineptitude. They had vulgarized democracy, he wrote, with their racism, hypernationalism and simplistic clich\u00e9-ridden public discourse, stoked by a sensationalist tabloid press.<\/p>\n

When a crisis came, Wells warned, these mandarins, like our own, would set the funeral pyre of empire alight.<\/p>\n

______________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for <\/em>The New York Times,\u00a0where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief. He previously worked overseas for\u00a0<\/em>The Dallas Morning News,\u00a0The Christian Science Monitor, and<\/em> NPR. He used to be the host of the Emmy Award-nominated <\/em>RT America show\u00a0<\/em>On Contact.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original – chrishedges.substack.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

27 Dec 2025\u00a0–\u00a0The British Empire, in steep decline on the eve of World War I, is a cautionary tale for a decayed U.S. Empire a century later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":310996,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[1876,2200],"class_list":["post-310995","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-british-empire","tag-us-empire"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310995","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=310995"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310995\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":310998,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310995\/revisions\/310998"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/310996"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=310995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=310995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=310995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}