I voted “Other,” because what’s leading to the empire now isn’t “the shrinking globe and the spread of WMDs,” but rather the absence of a countervailing force to U.S. power, something which existed until the 90s in the form of the old Soviet sphere.

Another countervailing force will rise within the next 50 years or less, and that will be China. China, as are India and Europe as a whole, is made up of distinct (though for the most part ethnically and/or culturally related) nations which theoretically could each exist on its own as an independent nation-state. Unless China is divided, before it gets too strong, into its constituent nation-states it will become a humungous force which no power on earth will be able to oppose.

The United States (together with Europe) might have been an effective deterrent to the power that China will soon become, if its traditional ethno-culture had not been tampered-with by the multiple forces which did the tampering, chief among them Wall Street, which always wants profits maximized, in this case to be accomplished by the replacement of high-wage U.S. workers with imported ultra-low-wage Afro-Asian-Mexican-peasant ones. Of course, living in their Gated/Locked/Dead-Bolted/Armed-Guarded Communities in the Hamptons, Martha’s Vinyard, Malibu, Newport Rhode Island, and along the Coast of Maine, and vacationing in Gstaad and at highly-restricted hôtels along the Côte d’Azur, the Wall Streeters, Big-Business moguls, and their D.C. marionnettes like W and his side-kick Rove, never see (or care in the slightest, of course) how their dirty work is presenting unacceptable problems for ordinary Americans and destroying this country for future generations.

The Afro-Asian-Mexican nation that these moral criminals are gestating right now as we speak will not have the “stuff” to go up against the behemoth that China will soon become. They all will then become the vassals of China every bit as much as Princes and Kings did before Genghis Khan and they’ll feel lucky if their daughters are chosen to be the number-four wives, or whatever the oh-so-lucky Chinese harem members are called, of some future Mao Tse-Tung.

Which brings me to the next question which seems raised by this poll: What makes nations disappear? It can’t be their change into empires, because while Rome disappeared after it became an empire, England didn’t until the mid-80s when, already thoroughly disabused of its empire status, it started adopting the multi-culti delusions coming out of this country, and is now safely on its way to permanent oblivion.

In high school we had to read and discuss essays by historians on what made the Roman Empire fall. The answer to that question is still unknown. Why is no country speaking Latin today? There’s one speaking Hebrew (albeit after a long hiatus), and there are a few which speak an English almost unchanged from that of Chaucer’s and John Wycliffe’s day, the 1300s. Why no Latin or ancient Greek? Is this not an important question to know the answer to? How in the world did Constantinople, the world’s second-greatest city at the time, fall to an army of Mohammedans?

William F. Buckley Jr. said that when he heard Churchill’s speech on the radio as a 13-year-old, the one that said, “Let Britain conduct itself in such a way that men will say, if the British Empire should last a thousand years, that THIS [the Battle of Britain against the Luftwaffe, in the skies over Kent] was their finest hour!,” he was profoundly shocked. What shocked him was the implication, in Churchill’s words, that it was possible the British Empire might not last FOREVER!

Well, that’s the way I feel. Buckley’s shock concerned the “mortalness” of an empire, of course, but the same question legitimately applies even more to nations: why DO some nations not last? When is ours destined to die, and can anything be done to prevent that?

Unadorned’s prediction of how China will rise while the ethnically disintegrated West will fall is eloquent and chilling.

Regarding his question of why empires or civilizations fall, a short answer is that all human things must eventually come to an end, but that they sometimes come to an end before their time, totally unnecessarily. This is the horrible tragedy of what is happening to the West, or rather of what the West is doing to itself.

I voted no because there’s no reason whatsoever to think America as a sovereign nation will be around much longer.