A time of great darkness . . .

This is my first post. I'm an American, culturally a Southerner, politically an agrarian of the Wallace Berry type, former military and military intelligence background, working in education for the last 25 years. While I enjoy teaching, drinking fine wine and craft beer, Clausewitzian strategic theory and related thought is probably more the "added value" that I can contribute. Have lived in Europe with my family for a long time.

We are in a very dark period at present. The forces of violent chaos, for lack of a better term, are triumphant, but their triumph is hollow and will be short-lived. The Republic that existed for me and my fellow citizens has been dead for 30 years. What has been going on over those last thirty years is essentially the "empire" picking over the bones of that former republic. Time to acknowledge that.

Our Republic was wilfully replaced by this "empire" which operates and exists in the shadows, is afraid to show its actual face, to proclaim its actual goals, to admit the sustained and monstrous level of the betrayal that perpetually takes place . . . It operates solely in the nether world of smug arrogance, illusion, mendacity, betrayal, violence, and worship of power and money (of the suck-up/kick-down variety) which now defines the society of which most of us are part. This supposed "empire", actually more of a malignant social disorder, is the greatest threat to humanity at present.

I think each of us need to decide where we stand in regards to this epochal swindle, that is either submit to or resist it, but the first step, at the least, must be that we admit to ourselves the obscene level of manipulation which essentially robs not only us, but our children and grandchildren of their very future . . . that is the very least one can do. By that simple action we free ourselves from the mental Thraldom which has been forced upon us.

Resist? How you may ask? Each of us in our own way . . . more on that later . . .