Conclusion
''To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude"
- Thomas Jefferson, principal author of the Declaration of Independence
"The United States is overextended, not just militarily but economically. We are trying to do too much, borrow too much, spend too much, and sooner or later we will have to suffer the consequences. We are a country in the beginning stages of what can best be described as hegemonic decay. Empires take decades if not centuries to wither, a process more clearly viewed through a rearview mirror; Edward Gibbon's masterful account of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire is perhaps the greatest example of this truth. But here and now, we're much less inclined to Gibbon's viewpoint than we are to Alfred E. Newman's. "What, we worry?" is pretty much the national motto when it comes to our finance-based economy and its future prospects" (William H. Gross, What, We Worry? Yes., washingtonpost.com, January 13, 2004).
"... for the first time since the end of the Cold War, one has the uneasy feeling that the future is not as settled and monolithic as it once appeared, that the American empire may one day go the way of the Roman...
"In the end, it is the vast global success of the American imperium - its all-pervasiveness - that, like its Roman predecessor, renders it so vulnerable. Can it really hope to be everywhere at once? Can it really prop up Israel, contain Iraq, appease Iran, intimidate Libya, bomb the Taliban back into the Stone Age (admittedly, by the look of them, not too great a distance), police the Balkans, deter the Chinese from invading Taiwan, build a space shield to ward off rogue missiles, meet its obligations to South Korea, keep India and Pakistan from brawling with atomic bombs, cut off the drug traffic from Latin America, create fortress-like borders to prevent a repeat of Tuesday's horrors - can it do all this, and at the same time ward off recession and remain the motor of the world economy?...
"At the very least, the collapse of the World Trade Centre surely marks the end of the Antonine Age of American hegemony and the start of darker and more uncertain times" (Robert Harris, Echos of Rome in an empire that must, eventually, pass away, from Daily Telegraph, London, in smh.com.au, September 13, 2001).
"Just as eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, so the price of progress is eternal change. This price often seems prohibitive enough to cloud the realization that the consequences of non-payment are worse than paying it" (Richard Grunberger, A Social History of the Third Reich, (Ringwood, Australia, Penguin Books, 1991), p.320).
What to expect in the 21st century?
George Bailey, in his book Germans: Biography of an Obsession, published in 1972, asked the question:
"...can we be sure that history has written finis to what was perhaps the grandest design ever conceived by man: the Holy Roman Empire?" (p.360).
No. Europe will reject the short-term-obsessed, society destroying Anglo-Saxon capitalism - which will be blamed for the coming economic collapse.
""What is happening in credit markets today is a huge blow to the credibility of the Anglo-Saxon model of transactions-oriented financial capitalism," veteran money-market observer Martin Wolf wrote last week in the U.K. Financial Times. "A mixture of crony capitalism and gross incompetence has been on display in the core financial markets of New York and London"" (David Olive, Anatomy of a credit crunch, thestar.com, December 16, 2007).
Europe will reinvent herself and provide the political, religious, economic and sociological leadership for the world in the 21st century.
Germany has an "ethnic concept of nationhood" [and] "still dreams of a Germanic Holy Roman Empire" and has yet to "recover from the aberration of Nazism"
- Jean-Pierre Chevenement, French Interior Minister, May 2000
Historical precedent
"The 1920s and 1930s provide a stark and disturbing reminder of just how quickly faith in markets and openness can be overwhelmed by political events"
- Rubens Ricupero, Secretary-General of UNCTAD, September 1997
"America was and is a millennarian society where overweening expectations can easily oscillate into catastrophic loss of faith.... The heroes of the 1920s had been businessmen, ... titans, led by Thomas Edison.... The 1929 crash and its aftermath weakened faith in this pantheon..." (Paul Johnson, Modern Times, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994, pp.259-261).
"The public turned on the former titans of Wall Street with a wrath that would last throughout the next decade... The Depression began a revival of community values against the selfishness of the twenties..." (Harold Evans, The American Century, New York: Alfred A. Knofe, 1999, pp.228,234).
[And] "the American intelligentsia turned to totalitarian Europe for spiritual sustenance..." (Johnson, p.261).
"The peace we think we have is only an interregnum before another cycle of conflict ... the end of the Cold War set the parameters for the next struggle for survival.
"... despite the myth of a reunited Europe, Europe has redivided along historical-civilizational patterns, with the recently expanded NATO a variation of the Western Holy Roman Empire...
"Kissinger believed that idealism had clearly failed throughout America's diplomatic history - that it led to an inefficient cycle of intense hope and activity abroad followed by morose withdrawal once it became apparent that hope and activity were unlikely to remake the world. The clearest example is President Woodrow Wilson's failed attempt to advance democracy and self-determination in the Muslim Middle East after the First World War, and the isolationism that followed" (Robert Kaplan, The Coming Anarchy, (New York: Random House, 2000), pp.182, 154, 138).
"America's primary purpose in assembling this alliance of peoples inside and outside Iraq is, plainly put, to stop a homicidal maniac and serial aggressor from gaining the power to threaten our cities with annihilation. A secondary purpose is to forcefully discourage any other nation from secretly supporting terror groups.
"The third purpose is driven not by any lust for global domination, but by out-and-out Wilsonian idealism: we want to make the Middle East safe for democracy..." (William Safire, Of Turks and Kurds, nytimes.com, August 26, 2002).
Please, therefore, request or view our free booklet Who and What is the Beast of Revelation? This booklet, using history and Bible prophecy, outlines the major geo-political and mega-political events of the first couple of decades of the 21st century as it relates to the soon coming continental-European world hegemony and the Anglo-Saxon-Celtic demise.
The booklet covers among other things Nebuchadnezzar and the neo-Babylonian Empire, the Medo-Persian Empire, Alexander the Great and the Diadochi Monarchies, the Roman and The Holy Roman Empires.
By looking at the Roman Emperor Hadrian, the Holy Roman Emperors Otto III and Frederick II Hohenstaufen, and others, we see through a glass darkly the soon coming Germanic leader of a yet future European superpower - "a variation of the Western Holy Roman Empire".
It is highly likely that The Coming Anarchy, as a result of the depression, will fulfil Christ's prophecy that:
"...ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places. All these are the beginning of sorrows" (Matthew 24:6-8).