We are living in dangerous and decisive times — times of rupture, not routine. History is no longer moving quietly in the background, it is breaking open before our eyes. Empires that once declared themselves eternal are faltering, and the myths that sustained them are collapsing under the weight of their own contradictions.

I am a Jamaican baby boomer, born under the shadow of the British empire, when colonial rule still shaped our schools, our songs, and our sense of possibility. We were taught to sing “Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves” long after Britain’s moral authority had already begun to decay. We were trained to admire a Crown that extracted our labour, disciplined our bodies, and erased our past, calling the process civilisation.

Empire always spoke in the language of man, humanity, and freedom. Yet Jamaica experienced empire as plantations, chains, and terror. Sam Sharpe preached liberation and was executed. Paul Bogle marched for justice and was slaughtered. Emancipation came without land. Independence came without economic power. The contradiction was permanent: freedom proclaimed in theory, denied in practice.

Frantz Fanon, French West Indian psychiatrist and political philosopher, warned the colonised not to waste time in sterile litanies or nauseating mimicry. He urged us to leave Europe to its own fate, because Europe never stopped talking about “man” while murdering men wherever it found them — on its own streets and across the globe. For centuries it stifled almost the whole of humanity in the name of a so-called spiritual mission. Fanon foresaw the end point: a civilisation swaying between atomic destruction and spiritual disintegration.

Jamaica has lived this truth. Colonial education trained us to imitate Europe, not to transcend it. Development was defined as proximity to Western approval. Even after Independence, the colonial logic remained intact — external debt, structural adjustment, brain drain, cultural extraction, and an economy designed for consumption rather than production.

Empires, however, are not immortal. They obey a law older than any crown: rise, expansion, decadence, and collapse. Britain did not fall heroically, it declined quietly — through debt, irrelevance, and the slow erosion of legitimacy. The voice that once ruled the seas faded into a murmur.

But the sickness did not disappear. It migrated.

Two centuries ago a former European colony set out to catch up with Europe. It succeeded — too well. The United States absorbed Europe’s violence, racism, and appetite for domination, magnifying them to monstrous proportions. What we see today is not a new order, but an old one intensified: endless wars, financial predation, mass surveillance, and moral incoherence.

This is where the Jeffrey Epstein files matter. They are not gossip or sensational distraction. They are evidence of the decadence of a dying empire — an elite culture in which power circulates above the law, bodies are commodified, silence is bought, and institutions exist not to protect the vulnerable but to shield the powerful. This is what imperial collapse looks like at the top: corruption is normalised, impunity is entrenched, and moral bankruptcy is disguised as respectability.

Empires rarely collapse from outside pressure alone. They rot from within. Yet this is the civilisation Jamaica is still encouraged to admire and depend upon, even as its immigration policies harden, its borders close, and its welcome evaporates. Babylon’s message is unmistakable: Jamaicans are useful for labour, not belonging; for extraction, not dignity.

It is time to step out of Babylon, economically, mentally, and politically.

Western dominance is no longer uncontested. Its institutions are hollowing out. Its moral authority is exposed as selective and self-serving. As empire weakens, buried histories return — from the Inquisition to the Middle Passage, from colonial genocide to modern theatres of devastation. These are not anomalies, they are the system revealing itself.

At the same time, the long-suppressed African world is stirring. The so-called “dark continent” — demonised to justify its plunder — is asserting itself again, not as a charity case, but as a civilisational force with memory, resources, and destiny. As the psalmist declared: Ethiopia shall stretch forth her hands, not as symbolism, but as a movement.

For Jamaica, this moment demands clarity, not caution. We cannot cling to a collapsing order and expect dignity. We cannot continue to sing imperial songs in a post-imperial world and call it progress. We cannot measure our worth by proximity to powers that are themselves unravelling.

This is the hour of decision.

Decolonisation must move beyond flags and rhetoric to substance — land, production, technology, food security, energy sovereignty, and intellectual independence. It must mean breaking dependency, rebuilding productive capacity, investing in African and Caribbean solidarity, and reclaiming history as a weapon of liberation rather than a source of shame.

Empires are falling. New possibilities are rising. History has opened a door. This time, Jamaica must walk through it, not as an echo of Europe, not as a satellite of Babylon, but as a conscious actor in the making of a new world.

O Dave Allen is a Montego Bay-based writer and community development advocate. Send comments to the Jamaica Observer or odamaxef@yahoo.com.