Stirling Newberry delivers an insightful and cautionary lesson from history as to the state of our nation today, and a well-reasoned warning as to the potentially fatal trajectory of its current path.

We remember the Assyrian Empire, even if not by name, because of its impact on both Hebrew and Hellenic culture - it provided the prototype of the evil empire, with its fast rise, brutal peak and implosive collapse. Reading the Assyrian chronicles, with their accounts of flaying alive rebels and enemies and plastering their skins to the walls of cities, and then burning alive the maidens and young men, and looking at the friezes of them impaling populations that they warred upon, one realizes that, despite there being an Assyrian lobby today, the Assyrians by and large deserve their reputation for fearful slaughter and savagery beyond the norms even of a dark age.

Assyria is of interest today, however, not because of its legendary quality to many, and its claims to legitimacy - it amuses me that San Francisco, the city of peace, has a monument to a genocide-practicing empire - but because the patterns of behavior that the Assyrians engaged in, and the reasons for them, have parallels to our own.

As Newberry goes on to conclude….

While there is a sense that perhaps America will suffer a gentle decline as the British did, the alternative is that those who feel that they have been tormented by our actions will look to deliver the same fate to New York City or Washington, DC, that ancient rebellion delivered to Ninuwa - absolute devastation. In the world of asymmetrical threats, this is not mere idle speculation nor undue alarmism but a reasonable extrapolation that has been explored by such popular writers as Tom Clancy.

The Armies of Ashur could conquer the world, but they could not even hold the hearts and minds of their own people. In the end, these armies themselves spearheaded the revolt against the cult-king and his worship. In the end, it was the internal polarization driven by the religious system against the geo-political and economic realities that destroyed their state, and that is destroying ours.

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