Occupying our minds at the moment is who is going to be our next president. Will we have Madam President, criminal extraordinaire? Trump, the abrasive business man? Cruz, Kasich, Ryan or even The Burn?
Will Obama’s transformation (termination) of America continue unabated with another democrat or can a republican get elected who might at least delay the process? What should have been a republican shoo-in despite the current electoral makeup of our nation for now appears up in the air. The republican must always face a culture becoming much more liberalized by the year. The continual flood of import democrat voters as well as the creation of dumbed down new ones as our young people who go through our liberal public education system come of age has now reached critical mass. That Barry O was elected twice and Hillary is viable is proof enough of that assertion.
If the republicans manage to hold firm and not consent to the nomination of Obama’s liberal appointee to the supreme court, the next president certainly will and likely more beyond that. If Americans, who are fast asleep, only could grasp the significance of that, then any republican should enjoy a 30 point lead over Hillary or the Burn in the various polls, instead, they show it is basically about even at this point.
A radically left Court will likely do irreparable damage to the nation, the termination may well be finally at hand. America the Great is fallen!! Let that run through your minds. As difficult as it is for us to realize, America’s fall is inevitable. Whether we are witnessing this currently in this age of Obama and democrat ascendency, or even if we have a temporary reprieve through a brief conservative resurgence, our doom is certain. America began with the brightest of hopes, but has relatively quickly, progressed through a perceivable cycle that great nations and empires of the past have gone through.
This multi-stage cycle for a nation that perhaps you have heard or read goes like this –
From bondage to spiritual faith;
From spiritual faith to great courage;
From courage to liberty;
From liberty to abundance;
From abundance to selfishness;
From selfishness to complacency;
From complacency to apathy;
From apathy to dependence;
From dependence back into bondage.
The author is believed to be Scottish historian Alexander Fraser Tytler (1747-1813).
We can see America in the above. Colonial America, pre-revolution, was not only under bondage to the English throne, it was also in bondage spiritually to the English Anglican church as well as somewhat corrupted other Christian sects. A few years ago I was interested in the First Great Awakening that swept through the colonies in the 1730’s and 40’s and its impact on motivating our Revolution against England. Naturally liberals deny any such claim in its attempt to stamp out our Christian roots, but the awakening was certainly a major factor. To my surprise, I learned that the colonists had some very warped views of what we consider to be biblical Christianity.
They did not preach or teach a personal salvation that bible believing Christians (the real kind) hold with. The colonists were enslaved to a radical form of Calvanism where they simply believed that God would save who he would save and consign who he willed to hell. Their “religion” was essentially a religion of “works”. There was no “believer’s” baptism, but merely infant baptism. While many of the great preachers of the Great Awakening were themselves Calvanists, they rejected the passive nature of “faith” in God and did preach that man must respond to the gospel and take the active step of repenting and asking God for salvation through faith in the work of Christ.
The Anglican Church was the dominant church in the colonies with its Roman Catholic style of church hierarchy. The “religion” was rigid and demanded loyalty to church and crown. The spiritual revival that swept at least the east and northeast led to a “revolt” against the organized churches, particularly the Puritans and the Anglicans, and with this new sense of freedom, the thinking of the colonists also turned to political freedom to match their religious freedom.
According to great-awakening.com,
“Revivalism in the colonies did not form around a complex theology of religious freedom, but nevertheless the ideas it produced opposed the notion of a single truth or a single church. As preachers visited town after town, sects began to break off larger churches and a multitude of Protestant denominations sprouted. The older groups that dominated the early colonies – the Puritans and the Anglicans – eventually began a drastic downward trend in popularity. Although they accounted for about 40% of American congregations as late as 1760, that number eventually dropped to under 2.5% by 1790.
The social effect of multitudes of new denominations was not, however, a fracturing of communities, but a unifying drive which helped to create a “national consciousness”.
The British and their loyalists in America often referred to the revolution as the “Presbyterian rebellion”. The Great Awakening – Revolution era carried America through the first three stages above, Bondage, Courage and Liberty.
For nearly two centuries following these primal founding events America enjoyed her age of prosperity and abundance. During the early to mid 19th century America saw great expansion, the construction of large cities as the nation spread westward. Railroads and canals were built, industrialization began and a vast agricultural empire was built in the south, and yes, southern agriculture was powered by slavery. Coal began making its impact felt in the country by mid-century and virtually displaced wood by the century’s end.
As the iron and manufacturing industries came into their own, America indeed had its place at the table in the world. It may be interesting to note that the 4 million black slaves of the south were worth about 750 dollars per head and had a significantly higher relative standard of living than free whites in the north, on the order of 15 percent higher. It’s impossible, by our modern sensibilities, to in any way approve of slavery, but if we looked at the issue as dispassionately and logically as possible, were American black slaves of the 1850’s worse or better off than their cousins in Africa?
There’s no question that evil “masters” abused their slaves, and slavery represents the exact opposite vision of America’s founding. However, if given a choice between freedom to live in barbaric lands, to be hunted by muslims (Obama’s ancestors) to be slaves under much worse circumstances, hunted by neighboring tribes to be slaughtered, existing in a state of grinding poverty and hunger or living a somewhat tranquil life with abundant food, clothing and shelter, exposed to civilization and Christianity AND ultimately given your freedom in this new land of opportunity and abundance, which would you choose?
I quote Robert H. Jackson in the first article of this site, “Do we need a Revolution”, where he said –
“whenever we reproach our own imperfections, as we ought often to do, we must not forget that our shortcomings are visible only when measured against our ideals, never when put beside the practical living conditions of the rest of the world. We have by Constitution, by legislation, and by judicial decision translated the Declaration out of the language of abstract philosophy into the idiom of everyday living. We have validated democratic principles by our success.”
When we consider America’s past, we don’t see perfection, but we see a pursuit of it. As we consider America’s age of abundance and reflect on the fact that America once imported and enslaved a race of people, we must temper our judgment with the acknowledgment that America disciplined itself, sacrificing 600 thousand American lives in the effort. It was largely the Christian ethos of America that led to its condemnation and elimination.
As we consider our “imperfections”, our conclusion must not be that what was America must be transformed, as Obama put it, terminated in practice, but rather our imperfections must be judged “when measured against our ideals, never when put beside the practical living conditions of the rest of the world”. That standard must be applied today, a century ago, in 1860 and 1776. An honest reflection of America and its past sees a nation that in spasms and spurts lurched ever upward to surpass all other nations on the ladder of rightness and goodness.
To believe that man and society is perfectible in this world by man’s own philosophies, schemes and designs as liberals are convinced of, experience shows they always lead to failure and disappointment. Malcolm Muggeridge, in his book, “The End of Christendom”, wrote,
“It’s in the nature of man and of all that he constructs to perish, and it must ever be so…the realization [of lasting perfection] is impossible for the simple reason that a fallen creature like man, though capable of conceiving perfection and aspiring after it, is in himself and in his works forever imperfect. Thus he is fated to exist in the no man’s land between the perfection he can conceive and the imperfection that characterizes his own nature and everything he does.”
Thus as America entered the 1960’s, cracks were already visible in the foundation of the nation and for the past half century our nation’s acceleration into oblivion has steadily increased and is now at “warp” speed.
“Abundance” gave way to “selfishness”.
The Wikipedia article on the subject of the “Me Generation” reads in part –
“The “Me” generation in the United States is a term referring to the baby boomer generation and the self-involved qualities that some people associated with it. The baby boomers (Americans born during the 1946 to 1964 baby boom) were dubbed the “Me” generation by writer Tom Wolfe during the 1970s; Christopher Lasch was another writer who commented on the rise of a culture of narcissism among the younger generation. The phrase caught on with the general public, at a time when “self-realization” and “self-fulfillment” were becoming cultural aspirations among young people, who considered them far more important than social responsibility.”
“The cultural change in the United States during the 1970s that was experienced by the baby boomers is complex. The 1960s are remembered as a time of political protests, radical experimentation with new cultural experiences (the Sexual Revolution, happenings, mainstream awareness of Eastern religions). The Civil Rights Movement gave rebellious young people serious goals to work towards. Cultural experimentation was justified as being directed toward spiritual or intellectual enlightenment. The 1970s, in contrast, were a time of disillusionment with idealistic politics among the young, particularly after the resignation of Richard Nixon, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the end of the Vietnam War. Unapologetic hedonism became acceptable among the young, expressed in the Disco music popular at the time…
“Health and exercise fads, New Age spirituality, discos and hot tub parties, self-help programs such as EST (Erhard Seminars Training), and the growth of the self-help book industry became identified with the baby boomers during the 1970s. The marketing of lifestyle products, eagerly consumed by baby boomers with disposable income during the 1970s, became an inescapable part of the culture. Revlon’s marketing staff did research into young women’s cultural values during the 1970s, and the research revealed that young women were striving to compete with men in the workplace and to express themselves as independent individuals. Revlon launched the “lifestyle” perfume Charlie, with marketing aimed at glamorizing the values of the new 1970s woman, and it became the world’s best-selling perfume.
“The introspection of baby boomers and their focus on self-fulfillment has been examined in a serious light in pop culture. Films such as An Unmarried Woman (1978), Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), Ordinary People (1980) and The Big Chill (1983) brought the inner struggles of baby boomers to a wide audience. The self-absorbed side of 1970s life was given a sharp and sometimes poignant satirization in Manhattan (1979). More acerbic lampooning came in Shampoo (1975) and Private Benjamin (1980). The Me generation has also been satirized in retrospect, as the generation called “Generation X” reached adulthood, for example, in Parenthood (1989). Forrest Gump (1994) summed up the decade with Gump’s cross-country jogging quest for meaning during the 1970s, complete with a tracksuit, which was worn as much as a fashion statement as an athletic necessity during the era.
“The satirization of the Me generation’s me-first attitude perhaps reached its peak with the television sitcom Seinfeld, which did not include conscious moral development for its baby boomer characters, rather the opposite. Nor did it have plots with lessons to teach its audience. It was a “show about nothing”, and its creators held this position deliberately….”
These “baby boomers” represented a new type of generation not seen up to that point. The hardship of the Great Depression of the 30’s followed by the massive undertaking to prosecute WWII led to a post war boom that saw new inventions that radically changed how American’s participate in and see reality and the world. Two things ran concurrently post war that changed America – an accelerated spiritual decline that allowed liberalism to conquer the press and the education system and a rapid development of technology with its attendant material accumulation. Television, probably the most important propaganda tool imaginable made its debut.
The parents, remembering privation eased up on their children and did all they could to ensure that their children would never face what they faced. While they made great efforts to provide for the material needs of their children they forgot the moral and spiritual training and left that to the education system. Traditional American parents created a void that liberals were eager to fill.
The boomers embraced the sex, drugs and rock and roll philosophies of the time. The girls bought into women’s liberation movement of the late sixties. As a result, traditional American values regarding sex which reflected Judeo-Christian ethics gave way to “free love”, which Wiki describes as “a social movement that rejects marriage, which is seen as a form of social and financial bondage. The Free Love movement’s initial goal was to separate the state from sexual matters such as marriage, birth control, and adultery. It claimed that such issues were the concern of the people involved, and no one else.”
(We see where this has led as one thing leads to another. The revolt against biblical morals created waves of children born out of wedlock, children with only one parent. This loss of morality led to the advance of the homosexual agenda of the 1990’s and the 2000’s. Now following their recent shocking success at turning society upside down, we’ve now hit the bottom with the rise of the gender confused. Did you ever think you would see the day when a demented male pervert could legally go into a girl’s bathroom? Now corporations, state and local governments and other entities are threatening to boycott the three states that passed laws to prevent that. Our nation has clearly descended into madness.)
Now, the Me generation created the next generation, known as Generation X, those born from the early 1960’s through the early 80’s. Some use these names interchangeably as they actually exhibit many or most of the same characteristics. Regardless, those born after the war and later have given us our current crop of young people, the “Millennials”, also dubbed the Me, Me, Me Generation by journalist Joel Stein in an article published in Time magazine on May 20, 2013. While Stein drew a terribly wrong conclusion as he is a 41 year old liberal wacko himself, he did accurately describe the youth of today, these millennials, writing –
“The incidence of narcissistic personality disorder is nearly three times as high for people in their 20s as for the generation that’s now 65 or older, according to the National Institutes of Health; 58% more college students scored higher on a narcissism scale in 2009 than in 1982. Millennials got so many participation trophies growing up that a recent study showed that 40% believe they should be promoted every two years, regardless of performance.
“They are fame-obsessed: three times as many middle school girls want to grow up to be a personal assistant to a famous person as want to be a Senator, according to a 2007 survey; four times as many would pick the assistant job over CEO of a major corporation. They’re so convinced of their own greatness that the National Study of Youth and Religion found the guiding morality of 60% of millennials in any situation is that they’ll just be able to feel what’s right.
“Their development is stunted: more people ages 18 to 29 live with their parents than with a spouse, according to the 2012 Clark University Poll of Emerging Adults. And they are lazy. In 1992, the nonprofit Families and Work Institute reported that 80% of people under 23 wanted to one day have a job with greater responsibility; 10 years later, only 60% did… these aren’t just rich-kid problems: poor millennials have even higher rates of narcissism, materialism and technology addiction in their ghetto-fabulous lives…
“Whereas in the 1950s families displayed a wedding photo, a school photo and maybe a military photo in their homes, the average middle-class American family today walks amid 85 pictures of themselves and their pets. Millennials have come of age in the era of the quantified self, recording their daily steps on FitBit, their whereabouts every hour of every day on PlaceMe and their genetic data on 23 and Me. They have less civic engagement and lower political participation than any previous group…
“They got this way partly because, in the 1970s, people wanted to improve kids’ chances of success by instilling self-esteem. It turns out that self-esteem is great for getting a job or hooking up at a bar but not so great for keeping a job or a relationship. “It was an honest mistake,” says Roy Baumeister, a psychology professor at Florida State University and the editor of Self-Esteem: The Puzzle of Low Self-Regard. “The early findings showed that, indeed, kids with high self-esteem did better in school and were less likely to be in various kinds of trouble. It’s just that we’ve learned later that self-esteem is a result, not a cause.”
“The problem is that when people try to boost self-esteem, they accidentally boost narcissism instead. “Just tell your kids you love them. It’s a better message,” says Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University, who wrote Generation Me and The Narcissism Epidemic. “When they’re little it seems cute to tell them they’re special or a princess or a rock star or whatever their T-shirt says. When they’re 14 it’s no longer cute.” All that self-esteem leads them to be disappointed when the world refuses to affirm how great they know they are.
“This generation has the highest likelihood of having unmet expectations with respect to their careers and the lowest levels of satisfaction with their careers at the stage that they’re at,” says Sean Lyons, co-editor of Managing the New Workforce: International Perspectives on the Millennial Generation. “It is sort of a crisis of unmet expectations.”
“What millennials are most famous for besides narcissism is its effect: entitlement. If you want to sell seminars to middle managers, make them about how to deal with young employees who e-mail the CEO directly and beg off projects they find boring. English teacher David McCullough Jr.’s address last year to Wellesley High School’s graduating class, a 12-minute reality check titled “You Are Not Special,” has nearly 2 million hits on YouTube. “Climb the mountain so you can see the world, not so the world can see you,” McCullough told the graduates. He says nearly all the response to the video has been positive, especially from millennials themselves; the video has 57 likes for every dislike…
“Millennials are interacting all day but almost entirely through a screen. You’ve seen them at bars, sitting next to one another and texting. They might look calm, but they’re deeply anxious about missing out on something better. Seventy percent of them check their phones every hour, and many experience phantom pocket-vibration syndrome. “They’re doing a behavior to reduce their anxiety,” says Larry Rosen, a psychology professor at California State University at Dominguez Hills and the author of iDisorder. That constant search for a hit of dopamine (“Someone liked my status update!”) reduces creativity.
“From 1966, when the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking were first administered, through the mid-1980s, creativity scores in children increased. Then they dropped, falling sharply in 1998. Scores on tests of empathy similarly fell sharply, starting in 2000, likely because of both a lack of face-to-face time and higher degrees of narcissism. Not only do millennials lack the kind of empathy that allows them to feel concerned for others, but they also have trouble even intellectually understanding others’ points of view…”
The selfishness had given way to complacency. The definition of complacent is – “marked by self-satisfaction especially when accompanied by unawareness of actual dangers or deficiencies.” (Merriam-Webster). The revolution of the 60’s marked this age. To do anything and everything that “felt right” to the individual, a casting aside of all the old cultural norms. There was a self-satisfaction, it still exists today of course and as the world and especially our nation is crumbling before our very eyes, there is no comprehension whatsoever in at least half our citizens of the “actual dangers” and “deficiencies” of the society they have created.
“Complacency” has now mutated or given way to “apathy”. The definition of Apathy is – “lack of interest, enthusiasm, or concern.”
Joel Stein continues –
“Because millennials don’t respect authority, they also don’t resent it. That’s why they’re the first teens who aren’t rebelling. They’re not even sullen. “I grew up watching Peanuts, where you didn’t even see the parents. They were that ‘Wah-wah’ voice. And MTV was always a parent-free zone,” says MTV president Stephen Friedman, 43, who now includes parents in nearly all the channel’s reality shows. “One of our research studies early on said that a lot of this audience outsources their superego to their parents. The most simple decision of should I do this or should I do that–our audience will check in with their parents.”
Stein finished his piece by writing –
“So, yes, we have all that data about narcissism and laziness and entitlement. But a generation’s greatness isn’t determined by data; it’s determined by how they react to the challenges that befall them. And, just as important, by how we react to them. Whether you think millennials are the new greatest generation of optimistic entrepreneurs or a group of 80 million people about to implode in a dwarf star of tears when their expectations are unmet depends largely on how you view change. Me, I choose to believe in the children. God knows they do.”
I would describe our millennial youth as completely brainwashed and dumbed down by the liberal education system, big entertainment and the media. These current youths were birthed by the generation who themselves were immersed in the modern revolution against American tradition and our Christian culture. While I shouldn’t have to, let me throw in the usual caveat, certainly there are fine, moral and conservative young people, products of fine parenting by those who hold those values. It’s just that they’re grossly out-numbered.
Clearly we see large swaths or our population at the apathy stage. It might not be fair to say that our 80 million youth totally lack interest, enthusiasm, or concern, it’s just that they don’t aim them at the right things. They have no understanding of the real world, as they’ve been brought up in a fantasy world created by liberalism.
Their interest and enthusiasm may be for who’s going to win on the Bachelor, or when will the next computer game come out, or where is the next rock concert, or what movie is playing at the theatre this week, or concerned that no one has texted them in the past 15 minutes. They have no knowledge of America’s past, no comprehension of its values. It takes someone rather unusual to peak their interest or enthusiasm for politics.
Why does Hillary not energize the youth? Besides being an old hag with a black heart, they clearly see she’s not “genuine” or “real”, nothing more than a power crazed opportunist. Obama appealed to them because he was not conventional, because he was not “establishment”, because he was cool and hip, because he pretended to be one of them. The Burn, while not exactly one of them, he at least to them offers a number of things that appeals to them.
It’s critical to understand that the democrat assault on America consists of demonizing conservatives/republicans. They must portray us as enemies of the state. If you don’t understand that, then you will never understand what is going on in the country today. Liberals aren’t just misguided souls who love our nation as we do. They hate everything about our country and they hate us. The young people have bought into this. In their isolated, ego-centric, selfish and complacent lives, they view any source of discord as something painful. Liberals have convinced them though, that conservatives are the only source of discord. Hence, conservatives war on minorities, women and the gender confused. Conservatives are racists, patriarchal and anti-science.
Obama now is thinning out our prisons because the black drug dealers are there simply because they’re black. The ruined lives, the murdered lives, left in the wake of the drug scourge, mean nothing to liberals. Since there’s an imbalance in the prisons in terms of racial make-up, then clearly this is a result of racism, not because blacks and hispanics have multiple higher rates of committing violent and drug related crimes.
Young people (and nearly all democrats for that matter) can’t tolerate confrontation unless it is directed against the “real enemy”, the conservative, then of course, it’s OK. Because democrats are apathetic about the real world they exist in, they resent anything that makes them feel threatened or uncomfortable and this deep sentiment has led to an extreme form of rationalization. These democrats are so programmed as to blame virtually every ill they consider to be the result of either conservative action or intransigence. Democrats and especially their young people believe they are on the cusp of ushering in their perfect world, their utopia. All that is preventing them is the evil American conservative.
The radical-leftist magazine “In These Times”, has an interesting article on line from December 15, 2014, entitled, “We Can’t All Just Get Along”, written by Susan J. Douglas. Before we consider her propaganda we must note that she is “a professor of communications at the University of Michigan”, she and her ilk are the ones constantly drumming subversive Anti-Americanism into the brains of our children. This was written just after the Republican electoral victory of 2014, below are some excerpts, as you read them just imagine the young people you know passing through our education mills being constantly exposed to the sentiments expressed –
“I hate Republicans. I can’t stand the thought of having to spend the next two years watching Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Ted Cruz, Darrell Issa or any of the legions of other blowhards denying climate change, thwarting immigration reform or championing fetal “personhood”…
“A brief review of Republican rhetoric and strategies since the 1980s shows an escalation of determined vilification (which has been amplified relentlessly on Fox News since 1996). From Spiro Agnew’s attack on intellectuals as an “effete corps of impudent snobs”; to Rush Limbaugh’s hate speech; to the GOP’s endless campaign
to smear the Clintons over Whitewater, then bludgeon Bill over Monica Lewinsky; to the ceaseless denigration of President Obama (“socialist,” “Muslim”), the Republicans have crafted a political identity that rests on a complete repudiation of the idea that the opposing party and its followers have any legitimacy at all…
“Why does this work? A series of studies has found that political conservatives tend toward certain psychological characteristics. What are they? Dogmatism, rigidity and intolerance of ambiguity; a need to avoid uncertainty; support for authoritarianism; a heightened sense of threat from others; and a personal need for structure. How do these qualities influence political thinking?
“According to researchers, the two core dimensions of conservative thought are resistance to change and support for inequality. These, in turn, are core elements of social intolerance. The need for certainty, the need to manage fear of social change, lead to black-and-white thinking and an embrace of stereotypes. Which could certainly lead to a desire to deride those not like you—whether people of color, LGBT people or Democrats. And, especially since the early 1990s, Republican politicians and pundits have been feeding these needs with a single-minded, uncomplicated, good-vs.-evil worldview that vilifies Democrats.
“So now we hate them back. And for good reason…”
To be fair, she did note in her diatribe that it was OK for us to “hate” her back but it was never OK for us to “use the word ‘hate’ when referring to people of color, or women, or gays and lesbians”. I suppose the fact that conservatives don’t use that word for them, or even feel that emotion, is beside the point. Needless to say, I suspect that no conservative would view themselves as described by the above, but sadly, our children swim in these nonsensical characterizations.
Our nation has now certainly reached the “dependence” stage. This is another message of the democrat party and liberalism. Dependence on government. I don’t have to tell you that nearly half our citizens get some sort of government check. This statement is in some ways misleading, since retirees who draw social security is counted in this number. The actual percentage of American “drones”, (a person who lives on the labor of others; parasitic loafer- dictionary.com) is more like 35 percent and growing year by year as liberal domestic policies continue to bear fruit.
When considering democrat economic policy one must conclude that either democrats are incredibly stupid OR that they know exactly what they’re doing. We’ve witnessed nothing but a steady march to oblivion by the western nations that have embraced big government economics for the past half century or more. Democrats today constantly berate capitalism, when in truth, we haven’t been much of a capitalistic nation for some time now. Liberalism has created the economic issues that our nation faces today, yet they blame it on the one thing that actually could return our nation to the right path, at least economically, if we would only embrace it.
Please feel free to read a previous post here on this site entitled, “America Becoming a Totalitarian State”. The article explains why democrat liberalism will inevitably lead to a totalitarian state. Liberal government will be forced (actually its quite eager to) to impose a “norm” on a fractured society. American’s final stage will be reached, “bondage”.
If we consider the nine steps or phases, bondage, faith, courage, liberty, abundance, selfishness, complacency, apathy, dependence and back to bondage, we could divide these into two groups, faith, courage, liberty and abundance that marked America for nearly two centuries after its inception, and selfishness, complacency, apathy, dependence and bondage which defines our nation of the past half century.
Currently there are no trends that are working in favor of America. Can you name one? The solution isn’t the application of more and more liberalism, but rather a return to the things that made our nation great, faith in God, courage of convictions, liberty for all, allow men and women to be all they can be as they play or interact on a level playing field and our nation will see abundance again. Rejection of these conservative truths will most certainly lead to the negative results. Liberals are terminating America and when it’s gone it will never come back. The demographic transformation will see to that.
When America turns into a third world hell hole, it will be just that. It will be just another nation that forgot God and was “turned into hell”, just another past great but now failed nation littering the junkyard of history.