Charles the Great

Today's selection -- from Civilization: A New History of the Western World by Roger Osborne. Charlemagne, one of the most powerful rulers in European history, used Christianity to consolidate his power and unify the population under his rule:


“Charlemagne, who reigned for 46 years from 768, set out to conquer the territory of his neighbours and to convert them to Catholic Christianity 'with a tongue of iron'. In 772 he invaded Saxony along the same roads as Augustus 800 years earlier, and met with the same resistance. His armies destroyed the sacred places of Saxon worship, but because the Saxons had many leaders, they were almost impossible to defeat. Visits to Rome reinforced Charlemagne's ambition to build an empire, and provided him with a sense of epic and brutal power. The campaign against the Saxons grew more bitter as villages were forcibly relocated and hill-forts besieged and destroyed. Elements of the Saxon nobility were persuaded, by the prospect of more power over their own peasants, to betray their people to the Franks, and at Verden in 782, 4,500 Saxon prisoners were beheaded on the orders of Charlemagne.


“In the peace that was finally agreed, as Charlemagne's secretary and biographer Einhard wrote: 'The Saxons were to put away their heathen worship and the religious ceremonies of their fathers; were to accept the articles of the Christian faith and practice; and, being united to the Franks, were to form with them one people.' The same conditions were applied to most of the peoples of the western European mainland as Charlemagne's armies took the Germanic heartlands and pushed east as far as the Avar Khanate of Hungary, while also forcing the Arab armies in Spain back as far as the Ebro. Local traditions of worship, either pagan or Christian, were abolished and any diversion from the Catholic faith was strictly punished, as Charlemagne's 'Capitulary Concerning Saxony' states: 'If anyone follows pagan rites [or] ... is shown to be unfaithful to our lord the king, let him suffer the penalty of death.'


“At its height, Charlemagne's kingdom extended from the Pyrenees to the River Oder and from the North Sea to south of Rome. Western Europe, excluding only Britain and Iberia, was under one ruler, its boundaries were strictly drawn, and its frontiers were closed. Charlemagne took a strongly Frankish view of how this society should be organized. In the time of his grandfather, monks had come to the Frankish kings from Ireland and England, eager to preach to the pagans of Frisia and Saxony--both Willibrord and Boniface followed a tradition of wandering or peregrino Christians. But Charlemagne's conquests and his strict enforcement of Christianity changed the nature of their travels. Instead of converting pagans, clerics were engaged in the education and 'correction' of the population, to ensure that they followed Catholic ways. This was not simply an authoritarian process; there was a widespread belief that God was waiting to punish humanity for its sins, which must therefore be eradicated.

“Charlemagne felt his own need of instruction and looked once more to the now-celebrated Christian school of north-east England. Alcuin of York, inheritor of the scholarly reputation of Bede, travelled to the new palace complex at Aachen (characteristically built in the countryside) to be Charlemagne's spiritual adviser. And while his subjects must be shown the correct ways to be good Christians, they should also be good Franks. Subjection to the Lord God was matched by subjection, loyalty and deference to one's secular lord. Charlemagne was a master at creating an atmosphere of utter loyalty at his court combined with a system of formal friendship which served as a model for his aristocrats. But in this rigidly hierarchical Frankish society, any attempt to form communal organizations--guilds or brotherhood leagues, for example--was ruthlessly suppressed. The increased use of written instruction also allowed the imposition, just as in ancient Greece and Rome, of codified laws. Roman law was reintroduced either alongside, or in place of, the customary laws of local populations.

The Bust of Charlemagne, an idealized portrayal and reliquary said to contain Charlemagne's skull cap, is located at Aachen Cathedral Treasury, and can be regarded as the most famous depiction of the ruler.

Charlemagne was declared Caesar, or emperor, on Christmas Day 800 by Pope Leo. This was less an anointment of a subject king than a desperate attempt by the pope to endear himself to the most powerful man in Europe, and to gain some influence over the direction of Christendom. Despite Stephen's efforts of 50 years earlier, western Christianity was firmly in the hands of northerners--principally Charlemagne and whichever scholars he chose to come to his court. The pope needed entry into this charmed circle. The learned monks at Aachen were charged with giving spiritual direction to Charlemagne's kingdom, but they also helped to create a mythic history of western Christianity, with Charlemagne as its apogee. This was entirely understandable; it was important for the Aachen court to create a 'civilization story' that explained their own place in history. Alcuin, in particular, was aware of Viking raids on the coast of his homeland and took these as a sign of God's displeasure with his flock. Einhard, Charlemagne's contemporary biographer, understood that the emperor had been granted great power precisely in order to bring the faithful to heel. 


“These writers followed Bede's lead in seeing pagan darkness both in the past and all around. They described the Merovingian centuries as an age of darkness, barbarism and ignorance, allowing later writers to speak of a 'Carolingian renaissance' in the eighth century. Both were a travesty of the truth, but fuelled the Franks' self-importance and gave justification to the severe brutality they had handed out. Even the Carolingian minuscules, the lower case Roman alphabet attributed to Charlemagne's court, emerged from the labours of generations of scribes who worked at the courts of 'barbarian' kings, while the development or reinstatement of 'correct' Latin by Alcuin and others (who came from regions where Latin had not been spoken for centuries) presented a new barrier between intellectual and ordinary life. People in Francia (and in Italy and Spain) in the early ninth century assumed they were speaking Latin which they had inherited from the Romans. But their Latin was an early form of French, and unintelligible to Latin scholars; Alcuin dismissed it as barbarous. Church Latin therefore became a language that was spoken by no ordinary people, but was the universal language of an educated elite and the required language of the Catholic liturgy--it was the language in which man spoke to God. 


“While Charlemagne wanted to create a Christian society in the form of a Holy Empire, Christian monks and bishops had begun to think about new political structures. In particular they read St Augustine's City of God, which told them they should not be content to live in a wicked world, but should aim to teach others the way that the world should be governed. The Christian church began to seek the establishment of a state governed by the doctrines of Christianity, just as Charlemagne wanted to recreate the majesty of the Roman empire by uniting the see of Rome with his own empire in the north. Charlemagne's power and ambition gave direction to the course of western history for the next 500 years by making the church in Rome part of western, rather than Mediterranean, Europe. Charlemagne created the state that many in Europe desired--a Christian empire centred on a court where piety and learning were valued, while converting or making war on the heathen tribes on its borders. The price was the quashing of diversity and granting the church an ever-growing influence in politics and education. Charlemagne had recreated Latin Christendom and put Christianity at the centre of the state's affairs, but he also put the state at the centre of the church's affairs.


“The reign of Charlemagne marks the end of the first phase of the Middle Ages, but his empire did not last. In 843 Charlemagne's son Louis the Pious divided his empire between his own three sons--the Franks were effectively divided into a western (French) kingdom, an eastern (German) kingdom, and a middle kingdom. The resulting conflicts were exacerbated by the increasing raids of Scandinavian northmen or Vikings and by incursions by Magyars and Slavs. But the power of the German element of the Franks was reasserted by the emperor Otto I, who was king of the Germans from 936, and emperor from 962 until his death in 973. Otto's armies defeated the invading Magyars, pushed the Slavs back to the Balkans and took over most of Italy. The Germanic people became, and remained, the dominant force in central Europe. By 1000, the Scandinavian raiders and people had become integrated into the Christian culture of western Europe.”

Civilization: A New History of the Western World
 
author: Roger Osborne  
title: Civilization: A New History of the Western World  
publisher: Pegasus Books  
date:  
page(s): 148-151

100 Years Ago: The End of German Hyperinflation

By 

Mises.org

November 18, 2023

On 15 November 1923 decisive steps were taken to end the nightmare of hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic: The Reichsbank, the German central bank, stopped monetizing government debt, and a new means of exchange, the Rentenmark, was issued next to the Papermark (in German: Papiermark). These measures succeeded in halting hyperinflation, but the purchasing power of the Papermark was completely ruined. To understand how and why this could happen, one has to take a look at the time shortly before the outbreak of World War I.

Since 1871, the mark had been the official money in the Deutsches Reich. With the outbreak of World War I, the gold redeemability of the Reichsmark was suspended on 4 August 1914. The gold-backed Reichsmark (or “Goldmark,” as it was referred to from 1914) became the unbacked Papermark. Initially, the Reich financed its war outlays in large part through issuing debt. Total public debt rose from 5.2bn Papermark in 1914 to 105.3bn in 1918.1 In 1914, the quantity of Papermark was 5.9 billion, in 1918 it stood at 32.9 billion. From August 1914 to November 1918, wholesale prices in the Reich had risen 115 percent, and the purchasing power of the Papermark had fallen by more than half. In the same period, the exchange rate of the Papermark depreciated 84 percent against the US dollar.

The new Weimar Republic faced tremendous economic and political challenges. In 1920, industrial production was 61 percent of the level seen in 1913, and in 1923 it had fallen further to 54 percent. The land losses following the Versailles Treaty had weakened the Reich’s productive capacity substantially: the Reich lost around 13 percent of its former land mass, and around 10 percent of the German population was now living outside its borders. In addition, Germany had to make reparation payments. Most important, however, the new and fledgling democratic governments wanted to cater as best as possible to the wishes of their voters. As tax revenues were insufficient to finance these outlays, the Reichsbank started running the printing press.

From April 1920 to March 1921, the ratio of tax revenues to spending amounted to just 37 percent. Thereafter, the situation improved somewhat and in June 1922, taxes relative to total spending even reached 75 percent. Then things turned ugly. Toward the end of 1922, Germany was accused of having failed to deliver its reparation payments on time. To back their claim, French and Belgian troops invaded and occupied the Ruhrgebiet, the Reich’s industrial heartland, at the beginning of January 1923. The German government under chancellor Wilhelm Kuno called upon Ruhrgebiet workers to resist any orders from the invaders, promising the Reich would keep paying their wages. The Reichsbank began printing up new money by monetizing debt to keep the government liquid for making up tax-shortfalls and paying wages, social transfers, and subsidies.

From May 1923 on, the quantity of Papermark started spinning out of control. It rose from 8.610 billion in May to 17.340 billion in April, and further to 669.703 billion in August, reaching 400 quintillion (that is 400 x 1018) in November 1923.2 Wholesale prices skyrocketed to astronomical levels, rising by 1.813 percent from the end of 1919 to November 1923. At the end of World War I in 1918 you could have bought 500 billion eggs for the same money you would have to spend five years later for just one egg. Through November 1923, the price of the US dollar in terms of Papermark had risen by 8.912 percent. The Papermark had actually sunken to scrap value.

With the collapse of the currency, unemployment was on the rise. Since the end of the war, unemployment had remained fairly low — given that the Weimar governments had kept the economy going by vigorous deficit spending and money printing. At the end of 1919, the unemployment rate stood at 2.9 percent, in 1920 at 4.1 percent, 1921 at 1.6 percent and 1922 at 2.8 percent. With the dying of the Papermark, though, the unemployment rate reached 19.1 percent in October, 23.4 percent in November, and 28.2 percent in December. Hyperinflation had impoverished the great majority of the German population, especially the middle class. People suffered from food shortages and cold. Political extremism was on the rise.

The central problem for sorting out the monetary mess was the Reichsbank itself. The term of its president, Rudolf E. A. Havenstein, was for life, and he was literally unstoppable: under Havenstein, the Reichsbank kept issuing ever greater amounts of Papiermark for keeping the Reich financially afloat. Then, on 15 November 1923, the Reichsbank was made to stop monetizing government debt and issuing new money. At the same time, it was decided to make one trillion Papermark (a number with twelve zeros: 1,000,000,000,000) equal to one Rentenmark. On 20 November 1923, Havenstein died, all of a sudden, through a heart attack. That same day, Hjalmar Schacht, who would become Reichsbank president in December, took action and stabilized the Papermark against the US dollar: the Reichsbank, and through foreign exchange market interventions, made 4.2 trillion Papermark equal to one US Dollar. And as one trillion Papermark was equal to one Rentenmark, the exchange rate was 4.2 Rentenmark for one US dollar. This was exactly the exchange rate that had prevailed between the Reichsmark and the US dollar before World War I. The “miracle of the Rentenmark” marked the end of hyperinflation.3

How could such a monetary disaster happen in a civilized and advanced society, leading to the total destruction of the currency? Many explanations have been put forward. It has been argued that, for instance, that reparation payments, chronic balance of payment deficits, and even the depreciation of the Papermark in the foreign exchange markets had actually caused the demise of the German currency. However, these explanations are not convincing, as the German economist Hans F. Sennholz explains: “[E]very mark was printed by Germans and issued by a central bank that was governed by Germans under a government that was purely German. It was German political parties, such as the Socialists, the Catholic Centre Party, and the Democrats, forming various coalition governments that were solely responsible for the policies they conducted. Of course, admission of responsibility for any calamity cannot be expected from any political party.”4 Indeed, the German hyperinflation was manmade, it was the result of a deliberate political decision to increase the quantity of money de facto without any limit.

What are the lessons to be learned from the German hyperinflation? The first lesson is that even a politically independent central bank does not provide a reliable protection against the destruction of (paper) money. The Reichsbank had been made politically independent as early as 1922; actually on behalf of the allied forces, as a service rendered in return for a temporary deferment of reparation payments. Still, the Reichsbank council decided for hyperinflating the currency. Seeing that the Reich had to increasingly rely on Reichsbank credit to stay afloat, the council of the Reichsbank decided to provide unlimited amounts of money in such an “existential political crisis.” Of course, the credit appetite of the Weimar politicians turned out to be unlimited.

The second lesson is that fiat paper money won’t work. Hjalmar Schacht, in his 1953 biography, noted: “The introduction of the banknote of state paper money was only possible as the state or the central bank promised to redeem the paper money note at any one time in gold. Ensuring the possibility for redeeming in gold at any one time must be the endeavor of all issuers of paper money.”5 Schacht’s words harbor a central economic insight: Unbacked paper money is political money and as such it is a disruptive element in a system of free markets. The representatives of the Austrian School of economics pointed this out a long time ago.

Paper money, produced “ex nihilo” and injected into the economy through bank credit, is not only chronically inflationary, it also causes malinvestment, “boom-and-bust” cycles, and brings about a situation of over-indebtedness. Once governments and banks in particular start faltering under their debt load and, as a result, the economy is in danger of contracting, the printing up of additional money appears all too easily to be a policy of choosing the lesser evil to escape the problems that have been caused by credit-produced paper money in the first place. Looking at the world today — in which many economies have been using credit-produced paper monies for decades and where debt loads are overwhelmingly high, the current challenges are in a sense quite similar to those prevailing in the Weimar Republic more than 90 years ago. Now as then, a reform of the monetary order is badly needed; and the sooner the challenge of monetary reform is taken on, the smaller will be the costs of adjustment.

—

1.See here and in the following H. James, “Die Reichbank 1876 bis 1945,” in: Fünfzig Jahre Deutsche Mark, Notenbank und Währung in Deutschland seit 1948, Deutsche Bundesbank, ed. (München: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1998), pp. 29 – 89, esp. pp. 46 – 54; C. Bresciani-Turroni, The Economics of Inflation, A Study of Currency Depreciation in Post-War Germany (Northampton: John Dickens & Co., 1968 [1931]); also F.D. Graham, Exchange, Prices, And Production in Hyper-Inflation: Germany, 1920 – 1923 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1967 [1930]).

2.To be sure: It is a “400” with 18 zeros: 400,000,000,000,000,000,000. In American and French nomenclature, it is “quintillion,” in English and German nomenclature one would speak of “trillion,” or a “thousand billion” times 1,000. In this article, the American nomenclature will be used throughout.

3.For further details see Bresciani-Turroni, Economics of Inflation, chap. IX, pp. 334–358.

4.H.S. Sennholz, Age of Inflation (Belmont, Mass.: Western Islands, 1979), p. 80.

5.H. Schacht, 76 Jahre meines Lebens (Kindler und Schiermeyer Verlag, Bad Wörishofen, 1953), pp. 207-208. My translation.

Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.

Party, Party!

By James Howard Kunstler

November 11, 2023

https://kunstler.com

We have created thousands and thousands of places in America that arent worth caring about and when we have enough of them were going to have a country thats not worth defending - James Howard Kunstler

Of course, you already sense that the 2024 election will be a freaky event, if it happens at all. If it’s not America’s last election altogether, it may be the last one that follows the traditional format that has signified stability in our country’s high tide as a great power: that is, a contest between Republicans and Democrats. Both parties are likely to crash and burn in the year ahead, along with a whole lot of other things on the tottering scaffold of normal life.

Have you lost count yet of the number of things in our country that are broken? The justice system. Public safety. Education. Medicine. Money. Transportation. Housing. The food supply. The border. The News business. The arts. Our relations with other countries. That’s just the big institutional stuff.  At the personal scale its an overwhelming plunge in living standards, loss of incomes, careers, chattels, liberties. . .  poor health (especially mental health). . . and failing confidence in any plausible future.

The reasons behind all that failure and loss are pretty straightforward. The business model for operating a high-tech industrial economy is broken. That includes especially the business model for affordable energy: oil, gas, nuclear, and the electric grid that runs on all that. We opted out of an economy that produced things of real value. We replaced that with a financial matrix of banking fakery. That racket made a very few people supernaturally wealthy while incrementally dissolving the middle-class. We destroyed local and regional business and scaled up what was left into super-giant predatory companies that can no longer maintain their supply chains. Fragility everywhere in everything.

Bad choices all along the way, you could say, but perhaps an inexorable process of nature. Things are born, they grow, they peak, they decline, they die. The difference this time is the scale of everything we do is so enormous that the wreckage is also epic. It’s happening in Western Civ at the moment, led by its biggest nation state, us, the USA, but it will eventually go global, spread to the BRICs and the many countries that will never actually “develop.”

I started writing about the fiasco of suburbia decades ago, and now the endgame of that living arrangement is in view. The dissolving middle class has gotten priced-out of motoring. Motoring is the basis of the suburban living arrangement. No motoring, no suburbia. It’s that simple. There was widespread belief among idealistic reformers that suburbia could just be “retrofitted” for “smarter” daily life, but that dream is over. The capital (money) is not there to fix it, and there’s no prospect that we’ll somehow come up with it as far ahead as we can see.

So far, the collapse of suburbia has happened in slow motion, but the pace is quickening now and it’ll get supercharged when the bond markets go down, as they must, considering the country’s catastrophic fiscal circumstances. That will produce exactly the zombie apocalypse telegraphed in all those movies and TV series over recent years: normality overrun by demonic hungry ghosts. Every day in suburbia will be Halloween, and not in a fun way.

All this is apprehended to some degree by the increasingly frightened public, though they have a hard time articulating it within any of the popular frameworks presented by politics, religion, or what appears lately to be extremely corrupt science. The people see what’s coming but they can’t make sense of it, and the stress makes a great many of them insane. Without a way to construct a coherent view of reality, or tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not, they behave accordingly: anything goes and nothing matters.

In the face of all this the two big political parties are helpless and clueless. The Democrats have made themselves into a giant feedback loop amplifying the poor mental health of their constituents. They are in CrazyLand, where there are no boundaries anymore, and to insist that there should be is an affront that gets you cancelled. They are in upside-down inside-out world. Hillary Clinton demonstrated this perfectly the other day on ABC’s The View when she accused her party’s opponents of trying to “do away with elections, trying to do away with the opposition, and do away with a free press….” It’s hard to imagine a more impressive lack of self-awareness.

And, of course, they are the party of “Joe Biden,” the moneygrubbing ghoul pretending to be president and pretending to run for another term — with hard evidence of his crimes publicly unspooling day by day now. The Democratic Party will not survive after an election that he runs in, and there is plenty of reason to believe that his regime might cancel or postpone the election on account of some contrived “emergency.”

The Republican Party is also badly splintered. Forces in the party are trying like hell to dissociate from Donald Trump, despite his clear domination in the polling. And another faction led informally by Rep. Matt Gaetz and new speaker Mike Johnson is in active rebellion against the GOP blob cabal around deposed speaker Kevin McCarthy, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and the evanescent uber-fool, Mitt Romney.

You may have seen candidate Vivek Ramaswamy go after Republican Party chair Ronna McDaniel (Mitt’s niece) in this week’s debate, a pretty savage attack, but well-earned. Ms. McDaniel has a unique libido for losing elections. She has especially helped deploy money from the GOP campaign war chest against candidates in her own party. The perfidy is quite out of this world. And it looks like the Matt Gaetz / Mike Johnson faction is good and goddam sick of it, too.

The net result of all this internal strife is a party that can’t function as an opposition to the Democratic Party of Chaos. So, chaos reigns for now. Chaos at the border. Chaos in foreign wars. Chaos in government finance. Chaos in the streets and the stores. Chaos in the school curricula. Chaos in the kids’ minds. Chaos in the household. Chaos in the supply chains. You can expect the chaos to really amp up when the financial markets blow and every household mired in debt faces its own margin call — along with every business in America.

Meanwhile, Mr. Trump slogs through an Okeefenokee Swamp of tribulations laid before him like the supernatural character he is. If he gets to the nomination despite it all, and happens to win the election, if there is one, every reptile and rodent will get bum-rushed out of the party and it will be transformed into something new. If not, the brand is finished and many in it will be looking to start a completely different brand.

Reprinted with permission from Kunstler.com.

The Best of James Howard Kunstler

James Howard Kunstler is the author of The Long Emergency, Too Much Magic, The Geography of Nowhere, the World Made By Hand novels, and more than a dozen other books. He lives in Washington County, New York.

Copyright © Kunstler.com

Previous article by James Howard Kunstler: The Four Wars

Lincoln As He Really Was

“The following is the foreword that I have written for the outstanding new piece of Lincoln scholarship, Lincoln as He Really Was, by Charles T. Pace.

Despite the fact that there are well over 10,000 books in print about Abraham Lincoln it is almost impossible for the average American – or anyone else – to know the truth about the real Lincoln.  Having given hundreds of public presentations, appeared on dozens of radio talk shows (including the Rush Limbaugh Radio Show), and participated in numerous debates on the subject of Lincoln, I have learned that the average American knows nothing at all about the man except for the few slogans and platitudes that we are all taught in elementary school (and then repeated endlessly in the popular culture).

As an elementary school student in the Pennsylvania public schools I was taught that Lincoln was so honest that he once walked six miles to return a penny to a merchant who had mistakenly undercharged him.  Decades later, when I debated Harry Jaffa who, like the man he called “Father Abraham,” was a student of rhetoric (but not of American history), Jaffa assured the Oakland, California audience of several hundred that Lincoln’s political speeches were in fact “the words of God.”  (This presumably did not include his dirty jokes, for which was famous).

Abraham Lincoln is the only American president that has literally been deified like a Roman emperor (Like Julius Caesar, his image is the first to be placed on his country’s coinage).  Lincoln’s deification eventually spread to the presidency, and then to the entire federal government.  The Lincoln myth is thus the ideological cornerstone of the global American empire, and has been for generations.  As Robert Penn Warren wrote in The Legacy of the Civil War, the deification of Lincoln (and of the government in general) has been used to argue that the “Civil War” left the U.S. government with “a treasury of virtue,” a “plenary indulgence, for all sins past, present, and future.”  Consequently,  American foreign policy intervention anywhere in the world is said to be always virtuous, by definition, because it is, well, American.

For more than 150 years this “treasury” of false virtue has been invoked to “justify” the slaughter of the Plains Indians from 1865-1898; the mass murder of some 200,000 Filipinos at the turn of the century; the imperialistic Spanish-American War; entry into Europe’s war in 1918; and myriad other interventions, from Korea to Vietnam to Somalia, Lebanon, Bosnia, Grenada, Panama, Nicaragua, Yugoslavia, Haiti, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and on and on.  It is all a part of “our diplomacy of righteousness, with the slogan of unconditional surrender and universal spiritual rehabilitation for others” (emphasis added), wrote Robert Penn Warren.  Professor Mel Bradford called the Lincolnian rhetoric that is the ideological basis for all this interventionism “the rhetoric of continuing revolution.”

This revolutionary rhetoric is alive and well today.  When Newt Gingrich authored a Wall Street Journal article in which he advocated the military invasion of Iran, Syria, and North Korea during the George W. Bush administration, he naturally titled the article “Lincoln and Bush,” implying that such belligerence would be “Lincolnesque” and therefore should not be questioned.  When the Marxist historian Eric Foner of Columbia University opposed the breakup of the Soviet Union in an October 1991 article in The Nation magazine he titled the article “Lincoln’s Lesson.”  Unlike Gorbachev, he said, Lincoln would never have let the Soviet satellite states secede in peace.

The Communist Party USA used to hold “Lincoln-Lenin Day” rallies and had a giant portrait of Lincoln in its New York City offices.  Even the former dictator of Pakistan, Pervez Musharref, invoked Lincoln’s unconstitutional suspension of the writ of Habeas Corpus to “justify” martial law in his country.  The deification of Lincoln has become a useful rhetorical tool for tyrants, militarists, and enemies of freedom everywhere.

Americans have been progressively dumbed down about Lincoln thanks to the avalanche of myths, superstitions, and propaganda produced by generations of “Lincoln scholars.” It wasn’t always that way, however.  During his lifetime Lincoln was actually the most hated and detested of all American presidents, as documented by historian Larry Tagg in The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln: The Story of America’s Most Reviled President.  For example, on page 435 of his book Larry Tagg cites an 1864 Harpers Weekly article that compiled a list of terms that the Northern press used to describe Lincoln including “Filthy Story-Teller, Ignoramus Abe, Despot, Old Scoundrel . . . Perjurer, Liar, Robber, Thief, Swindler, Braggart, Tyrant, Buffoon, Fiend, Usurper, Butcher, Monster . . .”

This all changed after the assassination as the Republican Party reveled in what Larry Tagg calls a “propaganda windfall.”  They would rewrite history with the help of the New England clergy in order to impose on Americans their version of what is essentially a New England theocracy composed of a government of nannies, pests, busybodies, tyrants, and money-grubbing plutocrats (known as “Yankees” by some).

New England pastors who had excoriated Lincoln for four years all of a sudden “rewrote their Easter sermons to include a new, exalted view of Lincoln as an American Moses, a leader out of slavery, a national savior who was not allowed to cross over into the Promised Land” himself.  Senator James Grimes of Iowa boasted that the Republican Party’s deification of Lincoln “has made it impossible to speak the truth about Abraham Lincoln hereafter.”

Senator Grimes was right.  In his 1943 book, The Deification of Lincoln, historian Ira D. Cardiff wrote that by then Americans were not even “interested . . . in the real Lincoln.  They desire a supernatural Lincoln, a Lincoln with none of the faults or frailties of the common man . . . a savior, leading us to democracy and liberty – though most said readers are not interested in democracy or liberty.”  Moreover, said Cardiff, “a biography of Lincoln which told the truth about him would probably have great difficulty in finding a publisher.”

Well, no longer. Lincoln as He Really Was by Charles T. Pace is a refreshingly truthful antidote to the standard Lincoln mythology.  It is refreshing because it is so fact-based and well documented and devoted to historical truth.   Lincoln as He Really Was is not your typical boring, voluminous biography filled with thousands of disconnected (and often irrelevant) facts dug up by a dozen graduate research assistants and published by a card-carrying member of the Ivy League Lincoln cult.  It is the first book since Edgar Lee Masters’ 1931 classic, Lincoln the Man, to attempt to reveal the truth about what kind of man Abraham Lincoln really was.

Based on voluminous research of Lincoln’s actions, first and foremost, and not just his rhetoric, Pace describes how Lincoln was an expert manipulator of people; extremely lazy when it came to physical labor (contrary to the “rail splitter” legend!); was not at all well read; and what he did read was almost exclusively books about speech-making and rhetoric, with titles such as Lessons in Elocution.   The book confirms in spades what economist Murray N. Rothbard once said about Lincoln in an (online) essay entitled “Just War”: Lincoln was a “master politician,” said Rothbard, defined as one who is a masterful “liar, conniver, and manipulator.” He makes any “master politician” or our time look amateurish by comparison.

Lincoln never joined a church, and both his law partner William Herndon and his wife Mary Todd said he was not a Christian.  His White House assistant, Colonel Ward Lamon, called him “an infidel.”  His close associate Judge David Davis, whom he appointed to the Supreme Court, wrote that Lincoln “had no faith, in the Christian sense of the term.”  But his mother read him Bible stories as a child, and later in life he studied the Bible for political purposes – to use religious rhetoric to sway the masses to favor his political positions.  These positions were almost exclusively the Whig economic program of protectionism, corporate welfare, and a government-run national bank to dispense subsidies to politically-connected corporations, especially his former employers, the railroad corporations.  He boasted of always being a “Henry Clay Man,” Clay being the leader of the party of the corrupt, corporate welfare-seeking plutocracy – the Northern Whigs and then the Republicans.

Pace shows what a political animal Lincoln really was, a “zealous party man” who honed his skills, such as they were, of personally attacking his political opponents with often over-the-top ad hominem assaults, similar to how the Marxists of his day, and our day, argue(d).

None of Lincoln’s family members voted for him, nor did 20 of the 23 ministers in his hometown of Springfield, Illinois.  He did not even carry his own county in the 1860 election.  These are the people who knew him best.

Lincoln was a master story teller, many of which were notoriously vulgar and crude.  He never passed up an opportunity to make a speech, writes Pace, as he spent years honing the skills of the master politician.  He could sound like an abolitionist in front of a Massachusetts audience, and the exact opposite in Southern Illinois.  His speeches were always vague and his positions hard to pin down, the hallmark of a successful politician.  He viewed politics as “life itself” and was intensely partisan, routinely denouncing his political opponent as “villains.”  He was a “born politician,” writes Pace.  He was, in other words, the very kind of man that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and James Madison warned their fellow citizens about with their admonitions about how government needed to be “bound by the chains of the Constitution” (Jefferson).  “[I]t is of great importance,” Madison wrote in Federalist 51, “to guard society against the oppression of its rulers.”

Lincoln invited no family members to his wedding; chose not to attend his own father’s funeral; and is said to have never had a real friend.  He had a “preacher’s voice” with a practiced “metaphysical tone” and was not afraid to tell outrageous lies for political purposes.  For example, he insisted that the South wanted to begin enslaving poor whites and immigrants and bring slavery back to New England, where it had ended for purely economic reasons.  He denied that he wanted war, or to destroy the union, or to destroy the South, and then proceeded to do every one of those things.

Lincoln as He Really Was ends with a masterful exposition of how Lincoln used all the skills of the master politician, accumulated over three decades, to incite South Carolinians into firing on Fort Sumter in order to use the incident (where no one was harmed or killed) to “justify” waging war on the South.  His war cost the lives of as many as 750,000 Americans according to the latest research in order to “save the union,” his professed war goal, and that of the U.S. Congress as well.  Of course, in reality his war destroyed the voluntary union of states created by the founders and replaced it with a more Soviet-style, compulsory “union” held together by violence, death, mass killing, and coercion.

You, dear reader, may believe that there is something fishy about The Official History of Abraham Lincoln.  Or perhaps you are incensed that you have been lied to all your life by the politically-controlled/politically-correct education establishment.  If so, Lincoln as He Really Was is a must-read as a first step in your rehabilitation as an educated American citizen – or as the citizen of any other country.  It will be especially helpful in allowing your children and grandchildren to have an opportunity to learn the truth about this important aspect of American history.”

God, Science, Data, and Quetelet -- 11/01/23

Today's selection -- from Science: A Four Thousand Year History by Patricia Fara. Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet, Belgian astronomer, mathematician, statistician, and sociologist, introduced a radically new way of thinking about human beings:


“In December 1871, the Prince of Wales was hovering near death, desperately ill with typhoid. The Archbishop of Canterbury and his allies moved into action, flashing out orders through the electric telegraph system for special prayers to be read in churches all over the kingdom. The Prince soon recovered, but the nation was divided--had God intervened, or was modern medicine responsible for this apparently miraculous cure? An eminent surgeon suggested that the issue be resolved statistically, making one particular hospital ward the target of prayers for a few years to see if its success rate improved. Although this holy trial was never carried out, the Prayer Gauge Debate continued for years--was disease a punishment under divine law, or could it be prevented by obeying scientific laws of health? 


“These arguments about praying might look like a direct conflict between science and religion, but they were not so much about who was right, but more about who could be trusted to decide what was right. Traditionally, authority lay in the hands of the Anglican Church, but during the nineteenth century British scientists started to claim power for their new rational priesthood. Ambitious scientists struggling to consolidate their reputation as elite experts squeezed out anyone they thought inappropriate. One move was to establish themselves as professionals by marginalizing those without full educational credentials. By adopting the pejorative label of amateurs, they set aside a large group of knowledgeable people--women, collectors, home-based astronomers. 


“Another tactic was to establish for the first time a sharp distinction between science and religion. Francis Galton deployed some strategic statistics, crunching through carefully selected samples to expose a supposed dearth of religious leaders on the councils of scientific societies. After a few logical leaps, he concluded that clergymen were no good at science--holding a theological vocation was, he declared, incompatible with being a competent scientist. The most eloquent spokesman attacking the Church was Thomas Huxley, champion of Darwinian evolution and inventor of the word 'agnostic'. Huxley landed his most celebrated coup during a public debate at Oxford, sneering that he would rather have an ape for an ancestor than the bigoted bishop opposing him. Although that may well be an apocryphal tale, Huxley definitely did ferociously condemn anyone who imagines that ‘he is, or can be, both a true son of the Church and a loyal soldier of science'.


“By parodying the religious opposition, Huxley made Darwin's ideas sound better. Even so, his aggressiveness does indicate how deeply theological issues were entrenched within scientific research during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Broadly speaking, there were two major themes. One strand of arguments related specifically to biblical theology. Evidence from fossils and rock formations suggested that the Earth was far, far older than suggested in the Bible; more controversially, theories of evolution contradicted traditional beliefs that life has remained unchanged since its creation by God. However, for many Victorians, the scriptural accounts represented powerful metaphors rather than literal reality, so that any contradiction of biblical details was not a prime concern. Instead, science's critics were more worried about the philosophical implications of recent ideas. Christians believed in a teleological cosmos, one created by an omniscient God, a Grand Designer, for a specific purpose. This comforting view was threatened by the new statistical methods in physics, and also by Darwin's theory of evolution, which assumes that chance may intervene between generations to introduce new characteristics. 

Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet


“God had been forcefully excluded from astronomy during the French Revolution, when Pierre-Simon Laplace rewrote Newton's ideas to create his deterministic cosmos, in which scientific laws govern every movement of every planet with no need for divine intervention. Inspired by this success, a Belgian astronomer called Alphonse Queteler decided that human societies are also controlled by laws. Each country has its own statistical patterns that remain constant from year to year--suicide and crime rates, for instance--and so Quetelet suggested that an 'average man' can consistently encapsulate a nation's characteristics. Politicians should, Quetelet prescribed, operate like social physicists and try to improve average behaviour rather than worry about extreme anomalies. For him, variations from the statistical mean were--like planetary wobbles--imperfections to be smoothed out so that overall progress could be ensured. 


“Quetelet had introduced a radically new way of thinking about human beings. As one of his admirers put it, 'Man is seen to be an enigma only as an individual, in mass, he is a mathematical problem.' Quetelet's successors took his ideas in many different directions. For one thing, his work was valuable politically because it could be interpreted in different ways. While conservatives insisted that little could be done to alter the current system, radicals accused governments of impeding the natural course of progress, and Utopians--such as Karl Marx--envisaged harmonious societies governed by nature's own laws guaranteeing improvement. Data collection projects proliferated, and statisticians searched for laws governing every aspect of life, ranging from the weather to the growth of civilization, from stock market fluctuations to the incidence of disease. Many scientists took their ideas from Quetelet rather than from abstract textbooks--but they added their own twist. Whereas Quetelet regarded individual deviations from the norm as errors to be eliminated, scientists set out to study how variations occur.”

Science A Four Thousand Year History
author: Patricia Fara
title: Science: A Four Thousand Year History
publisher: Oxford University Press

All Wars Are Bankers Wars


The video above features a 2013 documentary, “All Wars Are Bankers Wars,” written and narrated by Michael Rivero,[1] founder of whatreallyhappened.com. As explained by Rivero, all wars can be traced back to the private central bankers.

“The more you study this, the more you’ll realize that ALL wars are wars for the private central bankers,” he says. American soldiers have fought and died in wars initiated for no other purpose than to force private central banking on nations that didn’t want them.

Usury — The Birth of Money From Money

The philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BC) once said:

“The most hated sort [of moneymaking], and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself, and not from the natural use of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest.

And this term ‘usury,’ which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money, because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of all modes of making money this is the most unnatural.”

What Aristotle described is the business model of all central banks. They make money out of thin air by lending money at interest, and in the process, they drain a nation of its wealth. The first bankers war example illustrated in the film is that of the American Revolution, fought between 1775 and 1783.

Thirteen of Great Britain’s North American colonies revolted against British rule and established the sovereign United States of America, founded with the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

American Revolution Was Fought to Prevent Central Banking

However, as explained by Rivero, the American Revolution was instigated by the King George III Currency Act, which forced the North American colonists to conduct business using Bank of England banknotes borrowed at interest:

“If you go back to the writings of Ben Franklin … [here’s] a direct quote: ‘The refusal of King George III to allow the colonies to operate an honest money system, which freed the ordinary man from the clutches of the money manipulators, was probably the prime cause of the revolution.’

That’s Ben Franklin. Our public schools don’t teach that because you’re not supposed to know that the bankers were really behind the American Revolution.

After the revolution, the United States adopted a revolutionary radically different economic system in which the government issued its own value-based currency, so that private banks couldn’t skim the wealth of the people through interest bearing banknotes. So the American Revolution was fought primarily to free the American people from King George the third’s Currency Act …” [2]

When Corruption Fails, Threats Are Made

Unfortunately, it’s easy to corrupt people, and the central bankers know that better than most. Just one year after Mayer Amschel Rothschild uttered the now-infamous quote, “Let me issue and control the nation’s money and I care not who makes the laws,” private bankers succeeded in setting up a private central bank, called The First Bank of the United States.

This bank was founded in 1791, and within 20 years, it had gutted the U.S. economy while enriching the bank owners. As a result of its obvious failures, Congress refused to renew the bank’s charter. The intention was to return to a state-issued, value-based currency, for which Americans would not have to pay any interest. In response, Nathan Mayer Rothschild issued the following threat:

“Either the application for renewal of the charter is granted, or the United States will find itself involved in a most disastrous war.”

Despite that threat, Congress held firm and refused to renew the bank’s charter. Nathan Mayer Rothschild railed against the decision, stating:

“Teach those impudent Americans a lesson! Bring them back to colonial status!”

And that’s exactly what Great Britain did — or tried to do. The Rothschild-controlled Bank of England financed Britain’s War of 1812, the aim of which was to either a) recolonize the United States and force Americans to use Bank of England banknotes, or b) plunge the nation into so much debt, they’d have no choice but to accept a new private central bank.

“And the plan worked,” Rivero says. “Even though the United States won the war of 1812, Congress was forced to grant a new charter for yet another private bank, issuing the public currency as loans at interest.

Once again, private bankers were in control of the nation’s money supply and cared not who made the laws or how many British or American soldiers had to die for it. And once again, the nation was plunged into debt, unemployment and poverty by the predations of the private central bank.

In 1832, Andrew Jackson successfully campaigned for his second term as President under the slogan, ‘Jackson and No Bank.’ True to his word, Jackson succeeded in blocking the renewal of the charter for the Second Bank of the United States of America …

Shortly after the charter for the Second Bank of the United States expired, there was an assassination attempt on Andrew Jackson. It failed when both pistols used by the assassin, Richard Lawrence, failed to fire.

Later on, Lawrence explained the motive for the assassination by saying that, with President Jackson dead, money would be more plenty. So, it was an assassination motivated by the interests of the bankers.”

Debt Is an Enslavement System

The reason you never learned this in school is because the public school system is subservient to the bankers, who want certain history to remain hidden. When the Confederacy seceded from the United States, the bankers offered to fund Lincoln’s efforts to bring them back into the union — at 30% interest.

Lincoln replied that he would “not free the black man by enslaving the white man to the bankers,” and instead issued a new government currency, the greenback. The following quote from the London Times is a telling one: [3]

“If this mischievous financial policy, which has its origin in North America, shall become endurated down to a fixture, then that government will furnish its own money without cost.

It will pay off debts and be without debt. It will have all the money necessary to carry on its commerce. It will become prosperous without precedent in the history of the world. The brains and wealth of all countries will go to North America. That country must be destroyed, or it will destroy every monarchy on the globe.”

France and Britain considered invading the United States in support of the Confederacy, but were held at bay by Russia, which came to the aid of Lincoln’s Union. [4] The Union won the war, but Lincoln was assassinated in 1865. The interest-free greenbacks were pulled from circulation, and America was again forced into banknotes borrowed at interest from private central bankers.

In 1913, the private central bankers of Europe met with their American collaborators on Jekyll Island, Georgia, where they formed a new American banking cartel. Rivero explains:

“Owing to hostility over the previous banks of the United States, the name of this third bank was changed to the Federal Reserve, in order to grant the new bank a quasi governmental image. But in fact, it is a privately owned bank. It’s no more federal than Federal Express …

So 1913 proved to be a transformative year for the nation’s economy. First with Congress’ passage of the 16th income tax amendment, and the false claim it had been ratified. Here’s another direct quote [from U.S. District Court Judge James C. Fox, in Sullivan v. United States 2003]:

‘I think if you were to go back and try and find and review the ratification for the 16th amendment, which was the Internal Revenue, the income tax … you would find that a sufficient number of states never ratified that amendment.’”

Later that year (1913), President Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act, in exchange for campaign contributions — a decision he later regretted. In 1919, Wilson wrote:

“I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country, a great industrial nation is now controlled by a system of credit. We are no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.”

World War I and II Were Bankers Wars

According to Rivero, the real reason behind World War I — which began as a squabble between Austria, Hungary and Serbia and only later shifted to focus on Germany — was Germany’s industrial capacity, which posed an economic threat to Great Britain, the currency of which was in decline due to its lack of focus on industrial development.

After Germany’s defeat, the private bankers seized control of Germany’s economy, which resulted in hyperinflation. After the collapse of the Weimar Republic, the National Socialist party came into power and issued a new state currency not borrowed from central banks.

“It was based on a unit of value, not a unit of debt. Freed from having to pay interest on the money in circulation, Germany blossomed and quickly began to rebuild its industry. It was an amazing transformation to see. The media called it the German Miracle.

Time Magazine lionized Hitler for the amazing improvement of life for the German people and the explosion of German industry. They even named him Time Magazine’s Man of the Year in 1938.

And then, once again, Germany’s prosperity and freedom from a private Central Bank loaning the public currency at interest became a threat to other nations and other powers …

Germany’s state-issued value-based currency was also a direct threat to the wealth and power of the private central banks around the world, and as early as 1933, they started to organize a global boycott against Germany to strangle this upstart ruler who thought he could run his nation without a private central bank.”

World War II was basically a repeat of World War I, in that quashing Germany’s economic and industrial power was the chief goal. In a March 1946 note from Winston Churchill to Harry Truman, the reason for World War II was made clear:

“The war wasn’t only about abolishing fascism, but to conquer sales markets. We could have if we had intended so prevented this war from breaking out without doing one shot, but we didn’t want to.”

According to Rivero, Churchill also made the following statement in his book series “The Second World War”:

“Germany’s unforgivable crime before World War II was its attempt to loosen its economy out of the world trade system, and to build up an independent exchange system from which the world finance couldn’t profit anymore. We butchered the wrong pig.”

Our Military Are ‘Muscle’ for the Bankers

Rivero goes on to tell the story of how, in 1933, Wall Street bankers recruited Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler to lead a coup against the U.S. government, with the intent of installing a a fascist dictatorship. At the time, President Roosevelt’s “New Deal” threatened to redistribute wealth to the working middle class, which they were intent on preventing.

The idea was to get rid of the U.S. government in its entirety, and install a Secretary of General Affairs who would answer to Wall Street alone, and not the people. Butler pretended to go along with the plot, and then exposed it to Congress before it could be carried out.

Roosevelt tried to have the plotters arrested, but was told that if any of the central bankers were sent to prison, their remaining Wall Street buddies would deliberately collapse the economy and blame Roosevelt for it. Butler, in his 1935 book “War Is a Racket” also confessed the following:

“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service as a member of our country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major General, and during that period, I spent more of my time being a high class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and for the bankers.

In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I’m sure of it. Like all members of the military profession, I never had an original thought until after I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of the higher-ups.

This is typical with everyone in the military service. Thus, I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in.

I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909 through 1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China in 1927, I helped see to it that the Standard Oil wound its way unmolested.

During those years I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals and promotions. Looking back on it, I feel I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was operate his racket in three city districts. I operated on three continents.”

The Why Behind the Kennedy Assassination

In 1963, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who understood the predatory nature of private central banking, signed executive order 11110, which ordered the U.S. Treasury to issue a new public currency called the United States note. These banknotes would not be borrowed from the Federal Reserve but rather created by the U.S. government and backed by silver.

This represented a return to the system of economics the United States had been founded on. “All told, some $4.5 billion went into the public circulation, which eroded interest payments to the Federal Reserve and loosened their control over the nation,” Rivero says. Five months later, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, and the United States notes were pulled from circulation and destroyed. Rivero continues:

“Following Kennedy’s assassination, John J. McCloy, president of the Chase Manhattan Bank and president of the World Bank, was named to the Warren Commission. Now, I don’t care how good a banker he is, he’s not qualified to be investigating a murder, which is what we were told the Warren Commission was all about …

We all know that the Warren Commission was there to cover up what was going on. And, obviously, we can safely presume that John J. McCloy’s presence on the Warren Commission was to make sure the American public never got even a hint of the financial dimensions behind the assassination.”

The Rise and Fall of Bretton Woods

In July 1944, at the end of World War II, once it became obvious that the allied forces were winning and would be able to dictate the post-war political environment, the world economic powers met at Bretton Woods in New Hampshire to hammer out what became known as the Bretton Woods agreement for international finance, which was ratified the following year.

Under this new agreement, the U.S. dollar replaced the British pound as the global trade and reserve currency, and signatory nations were obligated to tie their national currencies to the dollar. As explained by Rivero:

“The nations that ratified Bretton Woods did so on two conditions. The first was that the Federal Reserve would refrain from over-printing the dollar as a means to loot real products … from other nations, in exchange for ink and paper.

It was basically an imperial tax imposed by the U.S. economic system on the rest of the world. That assurance of no over-printing was supposedly backed up by the second requirement, which was that the U.S. dollar would always be convertible back to gold by the U.S. government at $35 an ounce.

Now, of course, the Federal Reserve, being a private bank and not answerable to the U.S. government did in fact start over-printing paper dollars, which were sent to other nations around the world, and under Bretton Woods, they had to send back products and produce and raw materials at full value.

Much of the perceived American prosperity in the 1950s and ‘60s was the result of these foreign nations having to send real raw materials, goods, produce back to the United States in exchange for the these little pieces of paper … because they were forced to accept these paper notes as being worth $35 per ounce of gold.

Then, in 1970, France started looking at this huge pile of printed paper notes sitting in their bank vaults, for which real French product like wine and cheese had been traded, and it notified the United States government that they would exercise their option under Bretton Woods to return all those paper notes for gold at the agreed upon $35 per ounce exchange rate.

The problem was, the United States had nowhere near the gold to redeem all those paper notes. So, on August 15, 1971, Richard Nixon temporarily — nudge, nudge, wink, wink — suspended gold convertibility of the U.S. Federal Reserve notes. This … effectively ended Bretton Woods and many global currencies started to delink from the U.S. dollar.”

Land Grabs and the Birth of the Petro Dollar

Nixon’s suspension of Bretton Woods also created another problem. Rivero explains:

“The United States had been collateralizing their loans — money borrowed from other governments and foreign investors — with the American nation’s gold reserves, and with the awareness that there wasn’t enough gold to redeem all the Federal Reserve notes, lenders to the U.S. were starting to wonder: Did the U.S. government have enough gold to cover … their outstanding debts?

Foreign nations began to get very nervous about the loans to the United States and they were understandably reluctant to loan any additional money without some form of collateral.

So what Richard Nixon did is he founded the environmental movement, with the EPA and its various programs, like wilderness zones and roadless areas, inherited rivers, wetlands, and all these other programs, which all took vast areas of public lands and made them off limits to the American people who are technically the owners of all those lands.

But Nixon had no concern for the environment. The real purpose of this land grab under the guise of the environment was to pledge those pristine lands and their vast mineral resources as collateral on the outstanding national debt.

The multitude of all these different programs was simply to conceal the scale of the land grabbing, the collateralization of the American people’s heritage … Almost 25% of the entire nation is now locked up by these EPA programs and pledged as collateral on government borrowing.

Now, with available lands for collateralization already in short supply, the U.S. government embarked on a new program to shore up sagging international demand for the dollar. The United States approached the world’s oil producing nations, mostly in the Middle East, and offered them a deal in exchange for only selling their oil for dollars.

The United States would guarantee the military safety of those oil-rich nations, and the oil rich nations would agree to spend and invest their U.S. paper dollars inside the United States, particularly in U.S. Treasury bonds, which would be redeemable through future generations of US taxpayers.

The concept was labeled the petro dollar. In effect, the United States, no longer able to back the dollar with gold, was now backing it with other people’s oil, and that necessity to keep control over those oil nations to prop up the dollar has dominated America’s foreign policy in the region ever since.”

Wars and Murders to Prop Up the Petro Dollar

Over time, America’s focus on finance over manufacturing led to a situation in which oil-producing countries were flush with U.S. cash, but the U.S. wasn’t manufacturing or selling anything that these nations wanted to buy. Europe made better cars and aircraft, and didn’t allow genetically engineered foods.

In 2000, Iraq demanded the right to sell their oil for euros, and in 2002, the United Nations agreed they could do so under the oil for food program. A year later, the United States re-invaded Iraq, Saddam Hussein was publicly lynched and Iraq’s oil could once again only be sold for U.S. dollars.

A similar scenario took place in Libya. In 2000, Muammar Gadhafi proposed the adoption of a new gold-backed currency, the gold dinar. He then announced that Libya’s oil would only be sold for gold dinars. As noted by Rivero:

“This move had the potential to seriously undermine the global hegemony of the dollar. French President Nicolas Sarkozy reportedly went so far as to call Libya a threat to the financial security of the world. So, the United States invaded Libya under the the guise of supporting a popular rebellion.

They brutally murdered Gadhafi — apparently because the object lesson of Saddam’s lynching had not been enough of a message — imposed a private central bank and returned Libya’s oil output to dollars.

According to General Wesley Clark, the master plan for the dollarization of the world’s oil nations included seven targets: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Iran and Venezuela …

What is notable about those original seven nations targeted by the U.S. is that none of them are members of the Bank of International Settlements. This is the private central bankers private central bank located in Switzerland.

That meant that those seven targeted nations were deciding for themselves how to run their nation’s economies, rather than submitting to the international private central bankers.

Now … the bankers gunsights are on Iran, which dares to have a government central bank and sell their oil for whatever currency they choose. The war agenda for Iran is … to force Iran’s oil to be sold only for dollars, and to force them to accept a privately owned central bank.

You have been raised by a public school system and a media that constantly assures you that the reasons for all these wars and assassinations are many and varied. ‘We’re bringing democracy to the conquered lands.’ We hear that a lot, when actually the U.S. hasn’t. The usual result of a U.S. overthrow is the imposition of a pro-business, pro-Wall Street, pro-U.S.-dictatorship.”

The Real Agenda of the Bankers

In closing, the real agenda of the central bankers is a simple one. It’s to rob people of their wealth and enslave them to this predatory system by creating a false sense of obligation.

“That obligation is false because the private central banking system, by design, creates more debt than money with which to pay the debt,” Rivero explains. “There is no way out, the way it’s set up. It’s impossible to escape as long as you’re playing by their rules. And you need to understand, private central banking is not science. It is a religion.

It’s a set of arbitrary rules created to benefit the priesthood, meaning the bankers, and is supported only because people believe this is the way it’s supposed to be. The fraud persists with often lethal results only because the people are brainwashed into believing that this is the way life is supposed to be and no alternative exists or should even be dreamt of.”

The Path to Freedom — Abolish Central Banks

The reality is, we do not “need” central banks. Not in the slightest. A country, or even individual states, can create their own currency and run their own banks, either without usury, or with very low interest rates. That’s the path to freedom, and all that is required is the decision to do so, and the guts to carry it though.

Ideally, captured nations around the world would break free all at once, as this would best guarantee everyone’s safety. As noted by Rivero:

“Private central banks do not exist to serve the people, the community or the nation. Private central banks exist to serve their owners to make them rich beyond the dreams of Midas, and all for the cost of ink, paper, the right bribe to the right official and the occasional assassination.

Behind all these wars and all these assassinations … lies a single policy of financial dictatorship. The private central bankers only allow rulers to rule on the promise that the people of a nation be enslaved to the private central banks.

Rulers who do not go along with that will be killed and their nation invaded by those other nations still enslaved to the private central banks. The bankers themselves don’t fight these wars. Their children are not in these wars.

This so-called ‘clash of civilizations’ you are being told about by the corporate media is really a war between banking systems, with the private central bankers forcing themselves on to the rest of the world, no matter how many millions must die for it …

Now we’re going into the third [world war] in the nuclear, bioweapon age. That is very dangerous. We have to ask ourselves. Are the private central bankers willing to risk incinerating the whole planet to feed their greed? Apparently.

So, you, as parents, as siblings, as spouses, need to ask yourself, ‘Do you really want to see your loved ones in uniform killed and crippled, all for a bank balance sheet? …

As long as private central banks are allowed to exist … there will be poverty, hopelessness, millions of deaths in endless world wars … The path to true world peace lies in the abolishment of all private central banking everywhere, and to return to state-issued, value-based currencies that allow nations and people to become prosperous through their own labor and development and efforts.”

Sources and References