“Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.”

William Shakespeare, The Tempest

On this Veteran’s Day, November 11, 2021, I want to honor the Veterans who served in uniform for the last two hundred and forty-five years and stood against evil. 

Thank you.

If you ask John Mearsheimer, an American political scientist and distinguished Professor at the University of Chicago, he will tell you that, “In the anarchic world of international politics, it is better to be Godzilla than Bambi.” The Godzilla nations are the empires and super powers with their mighty armies, unparalleled wealth, and resources. Bambi nations are… well… we hope the Godzillas are merciful and benevolent to them.

Here is a list of the greatest empires in history:

• The Persian Empire, under the rule of Cyrus the Great, stretched from Iran into Central Asia and Egypt.

• The Mongol Empire, led by Genghis Khan and one of the largest land mass empires in history, stretching from Central Asia to the Sea of Japan.

• The Ottoman Empire spanned portions of three continents: Southeastern Europe, Western Asia and North Africa.

• The Roman Empire, unmatched in military might at the height of its existence.

• The British Empire, the world’s largest Empire ever in terms of geography, covering a quarter of the earth’s surface—so large that “the sun never set on it.”

• Egypt, the Han dynasty, and the Spanish Empire, among others.

When we look back, history tells us that neither Godzilla nor Bambi live forever—just an average of two hundred-and-fifty years. All the great empires fell and are now in the dustbin of history. The United States will reach its two hundred and fifty-year birthday in 2026, less than five years from now. But why did the empires fall? What is it that defeats a wealthy and formidable empire? What can we learn from this?

Interestingly, the Chinese are asking this question, too. An article written by Zbigniew Brzezinski, and John Mearsheimer, in Foreign Policy Magazine states, “The Chinese Politburo invited two distinguished, Western-trained professors to a special meeting. Their task was to analyze nine major powers since the 15th century to see why they rose and fell.”  Brzezinski, Z, and Mearsheimer, J (2005, January 1) Clash of the Titans, Foreign Policy, Carnegie Europe

In the book The End of Christendom, Malcolm Muggeridge, an English writer, journalist, and satirist, speaks to the fate of the nations, and points to the fact that all of man’s work, including nation building, is flawed because it is an outgrowth of a flawed creature. In his twenties, Muggeridge was attracted to Communism and went to live in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, but the experience turned him into an anticommunist and eventually a Christian.

After this experience, Muggeridge wrote, “I conclude that civilizations, like every other human creation, wax and wane. By the nature of the case, there can never be a lasting civilization any more than there can be a lasting spring or lasting happiness in an individual life or a lasting stability in a society. It’s in the nature of man and of all that he constructs to perish, and it must ever be so. The world is full of the debris of past civilizations and others are known to have existed, which have not left any debris behind them but have just disappeared. Whatever their ideology may be, from the Garden of Eden onwards, such dreams of lasting felicity have cropped up and no doubt always will. But the realization 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.”

The greatest threat to America’s survival is not military might, nor standing armies who oppose her, but to be ruled by men of evil disposition who cling to perverse and iniquitous ideology.

I am concerned about the United States of America. I have noticed a change in her once sweet fruit. As a child, beneath the shelter of her strong limbs, I could pick and eat from any of the branches without worry. Not so much anymore. Her fruit has taken on a bitter, even poisonous taste. Its appearance has become wrinkled and pitted, and the worm holes concern me, causing me to wonder, is she being eaten from the inside out?

A few decades ago, our country began flirting with ideologies that she once spurned and shed lifeblood to stop: Socialism, Communism and Marxism. Now she is no longer flirting, but engaged in propagating the treacherous ideas and beliefs that for centuries have enslaved men through bondage and suffering— the result of an ideology that soldiers today and yesterday fought against at great cost. These were red-blooded men and women who suspended their own way of life, put aside their security and served in our military against evil.

One need not look beyond the fruit of the Communist, Socialist, and Marxist governments to know that they have always produced rotten fruit; they are ideologies hatched in the pit of hell. It is estimated that in the last one hundred years alone, Communism, which has its roots in Marxism, has killed nearly two hundred million people, most of whom died, not in combat but at the hands of the evil regimes that governed them through genocide, imprisonment, torture, and man-made famines. Evil fruit, evil ideology.

“The killings committed by Communist regimes can best be explained
as the result of the marriage between absolute power and the absolutist
ideology of Marxism.” Rudolph Rummel

Rummel, a political scientist and professor at Yale University and University of Hawaii, wrote Death by Government in 1994. In the book, Rummel analyzed 8,193 estimates of government killings and reported that throughout history, governments have killed over 300 million people—with more than half, or 170 million, killed during the twentieth century. These numbers don’t include war deaths.

And where is the church, I wonder, the vanguard against all that is evil? It is not awake but woke. Too many in the church have forsaken the Gospel of Christ and adopted a gospel based on the latest cultural fantasies and ideas that are entirely antithetical to what our Creator God states in His Word.

In an article featured in the American Spectator, Dennis Prager articulates the frustration many Americans have, watching the rising tide of authoritarianism as our politicians and their co-conspirators flood our daily lives with their Socialist narrative.

“From these Marxist Democrat soldiers in the White House, Congress, at the New York Times, Yale, Google, and Verizon, we hear essentially the message: “You little nothings shall go out and work by the sweat of your brow and give most of what you earn to me, the new gods of the state. You shall see the doctor I command you to see, speak and write the words I consider proper, send your kid to the school I demand, and indoctrinate them into the Marxism I cherish. You shall tear up the notion of citizen with my open borders, hand over the guns you protect yourselves with, use the type of energy I command, drive the cars I like, run your business as I say you must, and live in the types of homes and suburbs I consider proper.’”

A mere sixty years ago, our Communist enemies issued this chilling warning: “We cannot expect the Americans to jump from capitalism to communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving Americans small doses of socialism, until they suddenly awake to find they have communism.”

Today, we need to reject the daily spoonfuls of socialism fed to us and our children. The war is at our door; fight this evil because our lives depend on it.

But we cannot despair like those who have no hope. The power to preserve our nation is squarely in our hands and lies within the promise given by our Creator, God.

“If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sins and heal their land.”H