The present only becomes comprehensible when viewed from its origins in the past.
-European mystic Rudolf Steiner

Dim lights  

I had the opportunity to put together two very interesting historian with
very different social perceptive. John Anthony West is an expert on ancient Egypt. 
His data investigating the water erosion on the Sphinx makes civilization over
10,000 years older than most anthropologists believe.

And Webster Tarpley, is more a social historian.  He sees the rises of the
olgarchy (a government where absolute power resides in the hands of a select
few wealthy people) as America demise and the decline of the West. 
His book 911 Synthetic Terror looks at the conspiracy and politics behind
the whole 911 event.
 
My questions to these experts were: What is the mechanism behind the
rise and fall of civilizations? What makes great cultures ashes in the
sands of history? Are we now recapitulating the same decline other
great civilizations have gone through before us; Egypt, Greece,
Rome, China, Byzantium?  Can we see patterns in their collapse
and prevent our own?

Can this dialogue with these two divergent historians provide answers to
avert what might be a place of no return.  Or are we faced with the truth
of the  satirical words of George Bernard Shaw, who said “What we
learn from history:  is that we learn not thing from history.”