Collapse of the American Empire: Swift, Silent, Certain!

• All empires come to an end. The collapse of the Anglo-American empire will be no different. However, its coming collapse is by design via deliberate incompetence. Don’t be deceived, there is a long-term plan under execution for the collapse of this empire to usher in World Government, World Currency and One World Central Bank. America must be crippled, must be ‘castrated’ so that it will be of no threat to this coming fascist police state – world government. Paul B Farrell writes:
   
  Historians warning of a sudden ‘thief at night,’ an ‘accelerating car crash’
  Now, Harvard’s Niall Ferguson, one of the world’s leading financial historians, echoes Diamond’s warning: “Imperial collapse may come much more suddenly than many historians imagine. A combination of fiscal deficits and military overstretch suggests that the United States may be the next empire on the precipice.” Yes, America is on the edge.
    
  Dismiss his warning at your peril. Everything you learned, everything you believe and everything driving our political leaders is based on a misleading, outdated theory of history. The American Empire is at the edge of a dangerous precipice, at risk of a sudden, rapid collapse.
   
  Ferguson is brilliant, prolific and contrarian. His works include the recent “Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World;” “The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World;” “Colossus: The Rise and Fall of The American Empire;” and “The War of the World,” a survey of the “savagery of the 20th century” where he highlights a profound “paradox that, though the 20th century was ‘so bloody,’ it was also ‘a time of unparalleled progress.’”
   
  Why? Throughout history imperial leaders inevitably emerge and drive their nations into wars for greater glory and “economic progress,” while inevitably leading their nation into collapse. And that happens suddenly and swiftly, within “a decade or two.”
   
  You’ll find Ferguson’s latest work, “Collapse and Complexity: Empires on the Edge of Chaos,” in Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council of Foreign Relations, a nonpartisan think tank. His message negates all the happy talk you’re hearing in today’s news — about economic recovery and new bull markets, about “hope,” about a return to “American greatness” — from Washington politicians and Wall Street bankers.
    
  ‘Collapse of All Empires:’ 5 stages repeating through the ages
  Ferguson opens with a fascinating metaphor: “There is no better illustration of the life cycle of a great power than ‘The Course of Empire,’ a series of five paintings by Thomas Cole that hangs in the New York Historical Society. …. in ‘The Course of Empire,’ he beautifully captured a theory of imperial rise and fall to which most people remain in thrall to this day. Each of the five imagined scenes depicts the mouth of a great river beneath a rocky outcrop.”
    
  ….. Ferguson’s warnings that the “American Empire on the precipice,” near collapse.
     
  First. ‘The Savage State,’ before the Empire rises
  “In the first, ‘The Savage State,’ a lush wilderness is populated by a handful of hunter-gatherers eking out a primitive existence at the break of a stormy dawn.” Imagine our history from Columbus’ discovery of America in 1492 on through four more centuries as we savagely expanded across the continent.
   
  Second. ‘The Arcadian or Pastoral State,’ as the American Empire flourishes
  “The second picture, ‘The Arcadian or Pastoral State,’ is of an agrarian idyll: the inhabitants have cleared the trees, planted fields, and built an elegant Greek temple.” The temple may seem out of place. However, Cole’s paintings were done in 1833-1836, not long after Thomas Jefferson built the University of Virginia using classical Greek and Roman revival architecture.
   
  As Ferguson continues ….. You are also reminded of one of history’s great tragic ironies — that all nations fail to learn the lessons of history, that all nations and their leaders fall prey to their own narcissistic hubris and that all eventually collapse from within.
   
  Third. Consummation of the American Empire
  “The third and largest of the paintings is ‘The Consummation of Empire.’ Now, the landscape is covered by a magnificent marble entrepôt, and the contented farmer-philosophers of the previous tableau have been replaced by a throng of opulently clad merchants, proconsuls and citizen-consumers. It is midday in the life cycle.
    …….
  “”Most great nations, at the peak of their economic power, become arrogant and wage great world wars at great cost, wasting vast resources, taking on huge debt, and ultimately burning themselves out.” We sense the “consummation” of the American Empire occurred with the leadership handoff from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush.
    …..
  Four. Destruction of the Empire
  Then comes ‘The Destruction of Empire,’ the fourth stage in Ferguson’s grand drama about the life-cycle of all empires. In “Destruction” “the city is ablaze, its citizens fleeing an invading horde that rapes and pillages beneath a brooding evening sky.” Elsewhere in “The War of the World,” Ferguson described the 20th century as “the bloodiest in history, one hundred years of butchery.” Today’s high-tech relentless news cycle, suggests that our 21st century world is a far bloodier return to savagery.
    …..
  ….. in “Wealth, War and Wisdom” by hedge fund manager Barton Biggs, Morgan Stanley’s former chief global strategist who warns us of the “possibility of a breakdown of the civilized infrastructure,” advising us to buy a farm in the mountains.
   
  “Your safe haven must be self-sufficient and capable of growing some kind of food … well-stocked with seed, fertilizer, canned food, wine, medicine, clothes, etc. Think Swiss Family Robinson.” And when they come looting, fire “a few rounds over the approaching brigands’ heads.”
   
  Five. Desolation … after the Empire disappears
  “Finally, the moon rises over the fifth painting, ‘Desolation,’” says Ferguson. There is not a living soul to be seen, only a few decaying columns and colonnades overgrown by briars and ivy.” No attacking “brigands?” No loveable waste-collecting robots from Wall-E?
   
  Epilogue: ‘All Empires … are condemned to decline and fall’
  In a Los Angeles Times column, Ferguson asks: “America, a Fragile Empire: Here today, gone tomorrow, could the United States fall that fast?” And his answer is clear and emphatic: “For centuries, historians, political theorists, anthropologists and the public have tended to think about the political process in seasonal, cyclical terms … we discern a rhythm to history. Great powers, like great men, are born, rise, reign and then gradually wane. No matter whether civilizations decline culturally, economically or ecologically, their downfalls are protracted.”
   
  We are deceiving ourselves, convinced “the challenges that face the United States are often represented as slow-burning … threats seem very remote.” “But what if history is not cyclical and slow-moving but arrhythmic?” asks Ferguson. What if history is “at times almost stationary but also capable of accelerating suddenly, like a sports car? What if collapse does not arrive over a number of centuries but comes suddenly, like a thief in the night?” What if the collapse of the American Empire is dead ahead, in the next decade? What if, as with the 2000 dot-com crash, we’re in denial, refusing to prepare?
    …..
  You are forewarned: If the peak of America’s glory was the leadership handoff from Clinton to Bush, then we have already triggered the countdown to collapse, the decade from 2010 until 2020 … tick … tick … tick …   

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