Apocalypse of Marx
THE FIRST FRENCH Revolution of 1789 marked the beginning of a long
series of uprisings in France. A new Duke of Orleans, Louis-Philippe,
became the figurehead of a July1830 revolt which placed him on the
throne of France as the ruler of a constitutional monarchy.
Assisting him was the Marquis de La Fayette. Another of
Louis-Philippe’s important backers was a man named Louis-Auguste
Blanqui, who was decorated by the new government for helping to make
the 1830 revolution a success.
Blanqui remained an active revolutionary after 1830 and provided
significant leadership for a long string of uprisings. According to
Julius Braunthal, writing in his book, History of the International,
“Blanqui was the inspiration of all uprisings in Paris from 1839 to
the Commune* in 1871.” 1
*The Commune was a revolutionary group which governed Paris from
March 18 to May 28, 1871
Blanqui belonged to a network of French secret societies which
organized and planned the revolutions. Nearly all of those secret
societies were outgrowths of Brotherhood activity and were
patterned after Brotherhood organizations. Each society had a
different function and ideological foundation for drawing people
into the revolutionary cause. Although the revolutionary societies
sometimes differed in matters of ideology and tactics, they had one
objective in common: to bring on the revolution. Many revolutionary
leaders participated in several of these organizations
simultaneously.
One of the most effective of the secret French revolutionary groups was the Society of the Seasons, over
which Blanqui shared leadership. This society was designed
explicitly for the purpose of hatching and carrying out political conspiracies. One of the Society’s allied organizations
was the “League of the Just.” The League of the Just was
founded in 1836 as a secret society and it aided Blanqui
and the Society of the Seasons in at least one revolt: the
uprising of May 1839. A few years after that uprising, the
League was joined by a man who would later become the
revolutionaries’ most famous spokesperson: Karl Marx.
Karl Marx was a German who lived from 1813 until 1883.
He is considered by many to be the founder of modern communism. His writings, especially the Communist Manifesto,
are an important cornerstone of communist ideology. As
some historians have pointed out, however, Karl Marx did
not originate all of his ideas. He was acting largely as a
spokesperson for the radical political organization to which
he belonged. It was during his membership in the League of
the Just that Marx penned the Communist Manifesto with his
friend, Friedrich Engels. Although the Manifesto contained
many of Marx’s own ideas, its true accomplishment was
to put into coherent form the communist ideology which
was already inspiring the secret societies of France into
revolt.
Because of his intellect, Marx gained considerable power within the
League of the Just, and his influence caused a few changes within
that organization. Marx did not like the romantic conspiratorial
character of the secret society network to which he belonged and he
was able to do away with
some of those traits within the League. In 1847, the name of the
League was changed to “Communist League.” Associated with the
Communist League were various “workers” organizations, such as the
German Worker’s Educational Society (GWES). Marx founded a branch of
the GWES in Brussels, Belgium.
At this point, we can see the extraordinary irony in these events.
The same network of Brotherhood organizations which had given us the
United States and other “capitalist”countries through revolution,
was now actively creating the ideology (communism) which would
oppose those countries! It is crucial that this point be understood:
both sides of the modern “communist vs. capitalist” struggle were
created by the same people in the same network of secret
Brotherhood organizations. This vital fact is almost always
overlooked in history books. Within a short one hundred year period,
the Brotherhood network had given the world two opposing
philosophies
which provided the entire foundation for the so-called “Cold War”: a
conflict that lasted nearly half a century.
Considering the affiliation of Karl Marx to the Brotherhood
network, it should come as no surprise that Marx’s philosophy
follows the basic pattern of Custodial religion. Marxism is strongly
apocalyptic. It teaches a “Final Battle” creed involving forces of
“good” and “evil” followed by a Utopia on Earth. The primary
difference is that Marx molded those beliefs into a nonreligious
framework and tried to make them sound like a social “science” rather
than a religion. In Marx’s scheme, the forces of “good” are
represented by the oppressed “working classes,” and “evil” is
represented by the ownership classes. Violent conflict between the
two classes is portrayed as natural, inevitable, and
ultimately healthy because such conflict will eventually result in
the emergence of a Utopia on Earth. Marx’s idea of inevitable class
tension reflects the Calvinist belief that conflict on Earth is
healthy because it means that the forces of “good”are actively
battling the minions of “bad.”
Marx tried to make his “inevitable conflict” idea sound scientific
by fitting it into a concept known as the “dialectic.” The
“dialectic” was a notion espoused by another
German philosopher, Hegel (1770-1831). Hegel’s idea of the
“dialectic” can be explained this way: from a thesis (an idea or
concept) and an antithesis (a contradictory opposite) one can derive
a synthesis (a new idea or concept which is different than the first
two, but is a product of them).
Marx took this seemingly scientific
idea and incorporated it into his theory of social history. In the
communist model of “dialectical materialism,” social, economic, and
political change arises out of the clash of contradictory, and often
violent, opposites. In this way, the endless wars of history and the
unceasing array of opposing factions on Earth are said to be a
natural part of existence out of which all social change must occur.
This makes endless social conflict seem desirable, and that is
precisely the illusion Marx tried to convey in his “class struggle”
theory.
The communist vision of Utopia is a curious, but significant one.
In it, everyone is a worker equal to every other worker. No one owns
anything but everyone together owns everything; everybody gets
everything they need but not necessarily everything they want; but
before this Utopia occurs, everyone must first live in a
dictatorship. Whew! This bizarre vision of Utopia seems clearly
designed to maintain mankind as a work race and to encourage humans
to accept conditions of social repression (i.e., dictatorship).
By Marx’s lifetime, spiritual knowledge had reached a severe state
of decay. The “quickie salvation” of the Protestants and the
embarrassing rituals practiced by nearly all religions were
understandably driving many rationally-minded people out of religion
altogether. It is not surprising that the validity of all spiritual
reality began to be questioned. This questioning led many people
to lean towards a strictly materialist outlook on life, and Marx
provided a philosophy for many of those people to step into. Although
Marx acknowledged the reality of spiritual existence, he erroneously
stated that spiritual existence was entirely the product of physical
and material phenomena.
In this way, Marx’s teachings helped
promote the Custodial aims expressed in the Book of Mormon and in
ancient Sumerian tablets of bringing about a permanent union between
spiritual beings and human bodies. Marx’s
writings gave this union “scientific” acceptability by suggesting
that spirit and matter could not be separated at all. Marxist
philosophy added that “supernatural” reality (i.e., reality existing
outside the bounds of the material universe) is not possible. Marx’s
Utopia therefore amounts to a Biblical Eden: a materialistic
paradise in which everyone is a worker with no route to spiritual
knowledge and freedom; in other words, a pampered spiritual prison.
During the same era in which communism was being shaped into an
organized movement, the practice of banking was undergoing important
developments. By the late 19thcentury, the new system of inflatable
paper money was the established norm throughout the world. This
money system was not adequately organized on an international scale,
however, and that was the next step: to create a permanent worldwide
central banking network which could be coordinated from a single
fixed location.
One scholar to write about this development was the late Dr. Carroll
Quigley, professor at Harvard, Princeton, and the Foreign Service
School of Georgetown University, Dr. Quigley’s book, Tragedy and
Hope, A History of the World in Our Time, achieved a degree of fame
because it was used by some members of the John Birch Society to
prove their “Communist Conspiracy” ideas.
Putting this notoriety
aside, we find that Dr. Quigley’s book is exhaustively researched
and well worth reading. Dr. Quigley was not a “conspiracy buff,” but
was a highly-respected professor with outstanding academic
credentials. Dr. Quigley’s book describes in great detail the
development and workings of the international banking community as
it established the inflatable paper money system throughout the
world.
Let us take a brief look at what Dr. Quigley had to say.
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Funny Money Goes International
IN HIS BOOK,
Tragedy And
Hope, Dr. Quigley divides the history of
“capitalism” into several stages. The third stage, which is
described as the period from 1850 until 1931, is defined by Dr.
Quigley as the stage of Financial Capitalism. Dr. Quigley states:
This third stage of capitalism is of such
overwhelming significance
in the history of the twentieth century, and its ramifications and
influences have been so subterranean and even occult, that we may
be excused if we devote considerable attention to its
organizations and methods. Essentially what it did was to take the
old disorganized and localized methods of handling money and credit
and organize them into an integrated system, on an international
basis, which worked with incredible and well-oiled facility for many
decades.1
Dr. Quigley described the overall
intent of the new integrated system:
... the powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim,
nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in
private hands able to dominate the political system of each country
and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be
controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the
world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent
private meetings and conferences.
The apex of this system was to be
the
Bank for International Setlements
in Basel, Switzerland, a
private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which
were themselves private corporations. Each central bank.. . sought to
manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic
activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by
subsequent economic rewards in the business world.2
In the English-speaking world, the newly-organized central banks
exerted significant political influence through an organization they
supported known as the Round Table. The Round Table was a “think
tank” designed to affect the foreign policy actions of governments.
The Round Table was founded by an Englishman named Cecil Rhodes
(1853-1902). Rhodes had created a vast diamond and gold-mining
operation in South Africa and in the two African nations named after
him: Northern and Southern Rhodesia (today Zambia and Zimbabwe,
respectively). Rhodes, who was educated at Oxford, did the most of
any Englishman to exploit the mineral resources of Africa and to
make the southern African continent a vital part of the British
Empire.
Rhodes was more than a man driven to make a personal fortune. He was
very concerned with the world and where it was headed, especially in
regard to warfare. Although he lived almost a century ago, he
envisioned a day when weapons of great destruction could destroy
human civilization. His farsightedness inspired him to channel his
considerable talents and personal fortune into building a world
political system under which it would be impossible for a war of
such magnitude to occur. Rhodes intended to create a one-world
government led by Britain. The world government would be strong
enough to stamp out any hostile actions by any group of people.
Rhodes also wanted to unify people by making English the universal
language. He sought to diminish nationalism and to increase awareness
among people that they were part of a larger human community. It was
with these goals in mind that Rhodes established
the Round Table. In
his last will, Rhodes also created the famous “Rhodes Scholarship”—a
program still in operation today. The Rhodes scholarship program is
designed to promote feelings of universal citizenship based upon
Anglo-Saxon traditions.
Rhodes’ heart was clearly on the right track. If successful, he would
have undone many of the harmful effects caused by purported Custodial
actions and by the corrupted Brotherhood network. A universal
language would have undone the damaging effects described in the
Tower of Babel story of dividing people into different language
groups. Promoting a sense of universal citizenship would help
overcome the types of nationalism which help generate wars.
Something went wrong, however.
Rhodes committed the same error made
by so many other humanitarians before him: he thought that he could
accomplish his goals through the channels of the corrupted
Brotherhood network.
Rhodes therefore ended up creating institutions
which promptly fell into the hands of those who would effectively
use those institutions to oppress the human race. The Round Table
not only failed to do what Rhodes had intended, but its members
later helped create two of the 20th century’s most heinous
institutions: the concentration camp and the very thing that Rhodes
had dedicated his life to preventing: the atomic bomb.
Rhodes’ idea for the Round Table had begun in his early twenties. At
the age of 24, while a student at Oxford, Rhodes wrote his second
will, which described his plans by bequeathing his estate for:
.. . the establishment, promotion and development of a
Secret Society, the true aim and object whereof shall be
the extension of British rule throughout the world...
and finally the foundation of so great a power as to
hereafter render wars impossible and promote the best
interests of humanity.3
Rhodes’ secret society, the Round Table, was finally born in 1891. It
was patterned after Freemasonry with its “inner”and “outer” circles.
Rhodes’s inner circle was called the Circle of Initiates and the
outer was the Association of Helpers. The organization’s name, the
Round Table, was an allusion to King Arthur and his legendary round
table. By implication, all members of Rhodes’ Round Table
were ”knights.”
It was inevitable that Rhodes’ success and political influence
would bring him into contact with other “movers and shakers” of
English society. Among them, of course, were the major financiers of
Britain. One of Rhodes’ chief supporters was the English banker,
Lord Rothschild, head of the powerful Rothschild branch in England.
Lord Rothschild was listed as one of the proposed members for the
RoundTable’s Circle of Initiates. Another Rhodes associate was the
influential English banker, Alfred Milner.
After Rhodes died in 1902, the Round Table gained increased support
from members of the international banking community. They saw in the
Round Table a way to exert their influence over governments in the
British Commonwealth and elsewhere. In the United States, for
example, according to Dr. Quigley:
The chief backbone of this [Round Table] organization grew up along
the already existing financial cooperation running from the Morgan
Bank in New York to a group of international financiers led by the
Lazard Brothers.4
From 1925 onward, major contributions to the Round Table came from
wealthy individuals, foundations, and companies associated with the
international banking fraternity. They included the Carnegie United
Kingdom Trust, organizations associated with J. P. Morgan, and the
Rockefeller and Whitney families.
After World War I, the Round Table underwent a period of expansion
during which many subgroups were created. The man responsible for
getting many of the subgroups started was Lionel Curtis. In England
and in each British dominion, Curtis established a local chapter (in
Quigley’s words, a “front group”) of the Round Table called the
Royal Institute of International Affairs. In the United States, the
Round Table “front group” was named the
Council on Foreing Relations - CFR.
Many Americans today are familiar with the New York-based Council on
Foreign Relations. The CFR is usually thought of as a “think tank”
from which come a great many political appointees at the Federal
level. Under the Presidential administration of Ronald Reagan, for
example, more than seventy administration members belonged to the
Council, including a number of top cabinet members. The CFR has
dominated earlier Presidential administrations as well, and it
dominates the present administration.
The chairman of the CFR for
many years has been banker
David Rockefeller, former chairman of the
Chase Manhattan Bank. Another Chase executive chaired the CFR before
that. The warning of Thomas Jefferson has come true. The banking
fraternity has exercised a strong influence on American politics,
notably in. foreign affairs, and the Council on Foreign Relations
is one channel through which it has done so. Regrettably, that
influence has helped to preserve inflation, debt and warfare as the
status quo.
When Cecil Rhodes was alive, he gained
considerable power in South
Africa and served for a number of years as colonial governor there.
He had a unique and effective way of delegating power. According to
one of Rhodes’ closest friends, Dr. Jameson, Rhodes gave a great deal
of autonomy to his trusted men. Dr. Jameson once wrote:
. .. Mr. Rhodes left the decision [on what to do in a situation] to
the man on the spot, myself, who might be supposed to be the best
judge of the conditions. This is Mr. Rhodes’ way. It is a pleasure
to work with a man of his immense ability, and it doubles the
pleasure when you find that, in the execution of his
plans, he leaves all to you; although no doubt in the last instance
of the Transvaal business he has suffered for this system, still in
the long run, the system pays. As long as you reach the end he has
in view he is not careful to lay down the means or methods you are
to employ. He leaves a man to himself, and that is why he gets the
best work they are capable of out of all his men.5
This can be an effective style of leadership, except when the means
used to achieve an end create their own problems. Some of the
methods used by Rhodes’ men did more long-term harm than immediate
good. In South Africa, for example, a struggle between Dutch settlers
(the “Boers”) and the English erupted into the Boer War. During
that conflict, one of the British officers under Rhodes, Lord
Kitchener, established concentration camps to hold captured Boers.
The camps were decreed by Kitchener on December 27, 1900 and over
117,000 Boers were eventually imprisoned within forty-six camps.
Conditions were so inhumane that an estimated 18,000 to 26,000
people died, primarily from disease. It was tantamount to mass
murder. Today we associate concentration camps with Nazi Germany and
communist Russia, but their 20th-century usage actually began with
the English under Lord Kitchener.
Perhaps the greatest irony in the story of the Round Table was the
role of that organization in creating the atomic bomb. After Rhodes’
death, the Round Table groups went on to establish other
organizations. One of them was the Institute for Advanced Study
(IAS) located in Princeton, New Jersey. The IAS greatly assisted the
scientists who were developing the first atomic bomb for the United
States. Institute members included Robert Oppenheimer, who has been
dubbed the “Father of the A-Bomb,” and Albert Einstein, to whom the
Institute was like a home.
As we have seen, the world was. undergoing many important
developments as it entered the 20th century. Central banking was
being organized into an international network. Bankers gained great
influence in British and American foreign affairs through such groups
as the Round Table and the Council on Foreign Relations. Meanwhile,
the communist movement was gaining increasing momentum in Europe.
This momentum bore fruit in 1917 when communist revolutionaries
established their first “dictatorship of the proletariat” in Russia.
Once again, the world was on the road to a Biblical Utopia.
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Back to Global Banking
The Workers’ Paradise
To MANY PEOPLE then living, the period from 1914 until the mid-1930’s
was a full-blown fulfillment of Apocalyptic prophecy. Those years
witnessed a devastating world war, a sudden worldwide influenza
epidemic which killed tens of millions of people within a short
period of time, and an international financial collapse marked in
Germany by a hyperinflation of its currency.
Sudden meteorological changes also occurred. Portions of the United
States became arid “Dust Bowls.” This brought about large-scale crop
destruction and the loss of many family farms to foreclosure. This
was a period in which reports of spectacular “fireballs” (brilliant
blazing meteors) were published by the New York Times with
increasing frequency. Some fireballs seemed to bring with them
violent storms, earthquakes and other natural disasters. New
messiahs were appearing throughout the world. Surely, believed many,
God was ushering in the Day of Judgment.
The beginning of the 20th century witnessed many changes in Germany.
The autonomous principalities were
being merged into a single German nation. Leading this unification
effort was the Prussian Hohenzollern dynasty, which was also in the
process of forging a large German war machine. This machine was
commanded by the Kaiser William, a Hohenzollern, who helped plunge
Europe into World War I.
Behind the German militarization lay the Brotherhood network. In the
early 1900’s, a number of mystical organizations in Germany were
espousing a curious mix of Aryan Master Race ideas and mystical
concepts about the future glories of Germany. This concoction
resulted in the notion of a German Master Race. One of the most
prominent writers in that genre was Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an
Englishman raised in Paris and tutored as a young man by a Prussian.
His most important work, Die Grundlagen des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts
(“The Foundation of the Nineteenth Century”), was published in 1899.
In that work, Chamberlain extolled the glories of “Germanism” and
announced that Germany was the nation best suited to bring about a
“new order” in Europe.
He indicated that Germans belonged to the
western Aryan group of peoples and were therefore racially superior
to all others. From Germany would arise a new race of “Supermen,”
he declared. Chamberlain believed in eugenics (improving the human
race by carefully choosing natural parents) and he proclaimed that
all Aryan Germans had a duty to breed the superrace from their Aryan
seed. Chamberlain also did not hesitate to express his
anti-Semitism. He stated that Jews introduced an alien influence to
Europe and that they debased all cultures into which they became
assimilated.
Emperor (Kaiser) Wilhelm of Germany and many members of the German
Officer Corps were deeply inspired by Chamberlain’s writings. The
Kaiser invited Chamberlain to the royal court and reportedly greeted
Chamberlain with the words, “It was God who sent your book to the
German people and you personally to me.”1 Chamberlain remained a
guest at the emperor’s palace at Potsdam where he became a
spiritual mentor to the Kaiser. The mystical ideas espoused by
Chamberlain did much to push the Kaiser and other German
leaders into the megalomania that brought about World War I.
World War I itself was triggered by a series of crises caused by the
assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir apparent to
the Austrian throne. He and his wife, Duchess Sofia, were shot on
June 28, 1914 in Sarajevo by Serbian assassins who belonged to a
secret occult society called the “Black Hand.” A political chain
reaction followed the killing, and World War I got underway when the
German Chief of Staff, General Helmuth von Moltke (himself a mystic,
although by some accounts not as fanatical about German destiny as
the Kaiser), ordered full military mobilization, followed by an
invasion of France on August 1, 1914.
Members of the mystical network had once again started a brutal and
senseless war.
There is another story from World War I worth sharing. It is the tale
of an unusual peace. It was told in Parade magazine by the writing
team of Irving Wallace, David Wallichinsky, and Amy Wallace in their
“Significa” column. Here is the story as they wrote it:
Amid the horrors of World War I, there occurred a unique truce when,
for a few hours, enemies behaved like brothers.
Christmas Eve in 1914 was all quiet on France’s Western Front, from
the English Channel to the Swiss Alps. Trenches came within 50 miles
of Paris. The war was only five months old, and approximately 800,000
men had been wounded or killed. Every soldier wondered whether
Christmas Day would bring another round of fighting and killing. But
something happened: British soldiers raised “Merry Christmas" signs,
and soon carols were heard from German and British trenches alike.
Christmas dawned with unarmed soldiers leaving their trenches, as
officers of both sides tried unsuccessfully to stop their troops
from meeting the enemy in the middle of no-man’s land for songs and
conversation. Exchanging small gifts—mostly sweets and cigars—they
passed Christmas Day peacefully along miles of the front. At one
spot, the British played soccer with the Germans, who won 3-2.
In some places, the spontaneous truce continued the next day,
neither side willing to fire the first shot. Finally the war resumed
when fresh troops arrived, and the high command of both armies
ordered that further “informal understandings” with the enemy would
be punishable as treason.2
The above is another one of those small, but noteworthy, episodes
revealing that human beings do not seem to be naturally prone to
war. Given the chance, they will lay down their arms and engage in
far more constructive and lighthearted pursuits. What caused those
soldiers to fight again were the pressures of an artificial social
structure arising out of many of the factors described in this book.
One major event of World War I was the Russian Bolshevik Revolution
of 1917. This was the revolution which turned Russia into the
communist nation we knew for most of the 20th century. The
Revolution occurred one year before the end of World War I. It was
led in large part by Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, who is better known
by his code name, “Lenin.”
At the time of the Revolution, Russia was an enemy of Germany. The
grimness of World War I had aroused in the Russian people a strong
anti-German sentiment. Opponents of Bolshevism were able to use this
sentiment against the Bolsheviks by accusing Lenin of being a German
agent. To some degree, this accusation was true. Sir Winston
Churchill, Prime Minister of Great Britain during World War II,
wrote, “They [the Germans] transported Lenin in a Sealed Train like a
plague bacillus from Switzerland to Russia.”3 Churchill was referring
to the train on which Lenin and his entourage traveled from their
revolutionary headquarters in Switzerland through Germany to
Russia in order to lead the Revolution which had already
gotten underway.
The German military guaranteed safe passage for
Lenin’s train through Germany, but would not permit Lenin or his
followers to step off the train while it was on German soil. At the
train’s first stop in Germany after crossing the border from
Switzerland, it was met and boarded by two German officers who
provided a silent escort for the
revolutionary party. The officers had been briefed earlier by
General Erich Ludendorff, Chief of Staff of the German 8th Army on
the Eastern Front. Ludendorff later became one of Germany’s most
powerful political figures and a prominent supporter of Adolph
Hitler.
Michael Pearson, author of an excellent book, The Sealed Train,
presents evidence that the Germans continued to support the
Bolsheviks even after the Russian Revolution was over. The German
military wanted to ensure that the Bolsheviks were able to retain
their power in Russia. According to German Foreign Office records
released after World War II, the Foreign Office had allocated
by February 5, 1918 a total of 40,580,997 German marks for Russian
“propaganda” and “special purposes.”
Most of that money is believed
to have been sent directly to the new communist regime...According
to the same documents, fifteen million marks had been released to
Russia by the German Treasury just one day after Lenin officially
assumed power in November of 1917. A telegram sent December 3, 1917
by Richard von Kuhlman, German Foreign Secretary, stated:
...it was not until the Bolsheviks had received from us a steady
flow of funds through various channels that they were in a position
to build up their main organ Pravda, to conduct energetic propaganda
and appreciably to extend the originally narrow base of their party.4
Three months later, another telegram sent by von Kuhlman revealed:
... the Bolshevik movement could never have attained
the scale or the influence which it has today without
our continual support.5
Lenin understandably denied accusations that he had received any
assistance from Germany. Germany was Russia’s enemy, and Lenin would
have been considered a traitor to Russia. After all, why would
capitalist Germany assist communists? The oppressive Russian Tsar had
already
abdicated before the Revolution and the Provisional Government set up in his place was a republican form of government
patterned after the United States.
Most people believe that Germany helped Lenin overthrow the
Provisional Government in order to end Russian involvement in World
War I. German military leaders wanted nothing more than to disengage
from the Eastern Front so that badly-needed soldiers and supplies
could be moved elsewhere. The Provisional Government had continued
the war against Germany, whereas the Bolsheviks did indeed pull
Russia out of World War I after they took power.
The question is then raised: why did Germany aid communist
revolutionaries? There were other political groups in Russia which
could have been supported.
For one thing, the Bolsheviks probably stood the best chance at
success. A more important factor is that some very prominent German
industrialists and financiers with influence into the German military
were supporters of the communist movement. Their support had begun
long before World War I. One of Karl Marx’s most visible backers had
been the wealthy German industrialist Friedrich Engels. Engels even
co-authored the Communist Manifesto with Marx. Significant support
for communism also came from the German banking community.
Max
Warburg, a top leader in German finance, lent his assistance to the
Bolsheviks, as did banker Jacob Schiff who, though an American, came
from the same German family which had shared a house in Frankfurt
generations earlier with the Rothschild family. According to Schiff’s
grandson, Schiff had loaned about twenty million dollars to the early
communist government in Russia. The combined infusion of Western
loans and German treasury money was the only thing that enabled the
early Bolshevik regime to survive.
There were many reasons why Western bankers financed the Bolsheviks.
The common origins of communism and the inflatable paper money system
in the same mystical network is one factor to be considered. Marxism
closely followed the basic philosophical pattern of Christianity and
other Custodial religions with their “final battle” and
Utopian messages. Perhaps the most important fact about modern
communism to explain Western banking support is the fact that
communism is actually capitalism taken to an extreme. To understand
this, we must take a look at what “capitalism” really is.
“Capitalism” and “free enterprise” are often equated. They should
not be. “Free enterprise” is unfettered economic activity; it
occurs where there is a free and open market for the production and
barter of goods and services. Entrepreneurs (people who start
businesses and take the risks) are the backbone of “free enterprise”
systems.
“Capitalism,” on the other hand, has two basic definitions. The
first definition elates to so-called “capital goods.” Those are goods
that are used to manufacture other products. A typical capital good
would be a machine used on an assembly line. A “capitalist” can
therefore mean a person who buys capital goods and uses them to
manufacture other products for a profit. This type of capitalist is
usually found in a “free enterprise” system, but he or she does not
require a free enterprise system to survive. He or she can exist
in almost any type of political or economic system so long as a profit
is made. In fact, this type of capitalist often survives best in a
closed enterprise system where there is little or no competition.
Governments are capitalists when they own and invest in capital
equipment.
The second type of capitalist is the “financial
capitalist.” Financial capitalism is the control of resources through
the investment and movement of money. It may or may not involve the
purchase of capital goods. A financial capitalist usually invests his
money in company stocks and influences the use of resources by
determining what enterprises he will invest in. A financial
capitalist may also be a banker who is entitled to create inflatable
paper money to lend, and who is able to influence the use of
resources by how he lends out his “created out of nothing” money.
The financial capitalist also does not require a free enterprise
system to survive and often benefits from monopolies.
As we can see, capitalism is not the same creature as
free enterprise, even if they often co-exist. Free enterprise and
capitalism frequently come into conflict with one another because
capitalism tends to move in the direction of monopoly and free
enterprise tends to favor free and open markets accessible to any
entrepreneur.
In 1989 and the early 1990’s, Russia and most Eastern European
nations voluntarily dismantled communism in their nations to replace
it with Western-style democracy. The Soviet Union was abolished and
most of the Soviet republics became independent countries united in a
loosely-knit confederation called the “Commonwealthof Independent
States.” Private ownership of land and business was restored to a
large extent. Nevertheless, it is still useful to discuss what the
Soviet Union was like under communism to understand how this
important Brotherhood faction did so much to perpetuate significant
problems within our own lifetime. Furthermore, communism still
dominates other nations and continues to inspire revolutionary
conflict in the Third World.
The economic system of communist Russia was an ultra-capitalist one
because its industry was even more monopolized, and the nation’s
economy was even more dominated, by the same institutions which
dominate capitalist nations. The most significant of those
institutions was the Soviet central bank, which operated just like
the central banks of Western nations. The major difference was
that the Russian central bank had, and still has at the time of this
writing, an even more intrusive role in the country’s economic life.
The Soviet Union’s central bank is called the Gosbank. It is both a
central bank and commercial bank rolled into one. As of 1980, the
Gosbank had approximately 3,500 branches and 150,000 employees.
Major Soviet enterprises, which were all government owned, depended
upon the Gosbank for loans to tide them through periods when their
outlays were greater than their incomes. In other words, communist
government enterprises in the Soviet Union also operated on a
profit-loss basis and they had to borrow money from the Gosbank when
they suffered a loss. As in non-communist nations, Soviet enterprises
paid interest on the money they borrowed. The only difference was
that the Gosbank charged
a fixed interest rate whereas many Western banks have a fluctuating
rate.
The Gosbank was, and still is, a “bank of issue”; i.e., it is
empowered to issue money. Gosbank creates money ”out of nothing” just
as Western banks do. Although the Gosbank was ostensibly under
government control in communist Russia, it was in fact a
semi-autonomous institution to which Soviet enterprises were, and
still are, deeply in debt.
The Gosbank was even more dominant in Soviet financial affairs than
are central banks in Western nations because all transactions
between Soviet enterprises had to go through the Gosbank. This
allowed the Gosbank to oversee all day-today financial transactions
involving Soviet enterprises. The Gosbank was also in charge of
dispersing wages to all of the workers. It was an enormous
bureaucracy which regulated Soviet economic activity to a remarkable
degree.
As we can see, communist Russia was a financial capitalist’s dream.
The Marxist idea that everything is owned “collectively” under
communism simply meant that a select elite in banking and government
had complete authority to direct the use of all exploitable resources
in the country. Soviet workers were paid wages with which they could
buy personal goods, but under Soviet law they could not own land,
buildings, businesses, or any large industrial equipment. Soviet
citizens could sell only “used” or personally-produced items, but
they could not hire others for personal profit or engage in middleman
activities. Although there existed limited exceptions to these
restrictions and a flourishing black market, Soviet laws
nevertheless created an effective monopoly in which Russian workers
were highly exploited in a rigid feudalistic system; we need only
compare communist Russia to medieval feudalism to appreciate that
fact:
As in old European feudalisms, the majority of the Soviet citizens
were forced to suffer chronic scarcities of goods and services, and
they were told that they had to endure it as a sacrifice for the
good of mother Russia.
As in old feudalisms, the Soviet people were effectively
“tied to the land” by a rigid bureaucracy which forbade people from
moving without government approval. That regulation existed to
control the economic and political life of the Soviet Union by
deciding where people lived and worked. That was the same motive used
to tie people to the land under old feudal lords. This caused the
Soviet people to become, to some degree, serfs. Emigration to nations
outside of the Iron Curtain was severely restricted which, again,
added up to a form of serfdom because the people were anchored to the
land on which they were born.
As in old feudalisms, the “elite” of communist Russia were accorded
special luxuries and privileges denied by law to the “masses.” In
the communist U.S.S.R., such privileges included fancy stores in
which only a relative handful were permitted to shop. The “elite”
also found it easier to travel outside of the Soviet Union and to
send their children abroad to be educated.
The old feudal lords maintained the system by offering a fortified
castle into which the serfs could retreat when attacked by marauders
or foreign armies. The Soviet system also stayed alive by
encouraging xenophobia and by regularly reminding the Russian people
about the invasions of Russia by Napoleon and Nazi Germany. The
Soviet state promised its people protection against a frightening
and
dangerous outside world.
As we can perhaps see, Marxist glorification of the laborer fit the
Soviet communist system very well. Because the system put such
severe limitations on ownership, the vast majority of people were
only valuable as workers and bureaucrats. Communism is also openly
atheist, i.e., it denies the existence of any spiritual reality. The
Soviet communist system thereby satisfied the Custodial
intentions expressed in ancient texts of preserving Homo sapiens as a
creature of toil whose existence from birth until death shall be one
long struggle for physical existence with no access to the spiritual
knowledge which might set him free.
A significant aspect of the Russian Revolution was the role of
espionage services in that upheaval. By the time of the Russian
revolution, the international intelligence community had grown into a
large and sophisticated affair with considerable influence.
Throughout all of history, Brotherhood
network members in positions of political power found intelligence
services an ideal conduit for promoting Brotherhood social and
political agendas because of the secrecy which typically surrounds
intelligence activities. As a result, many intelligence services
turned into sources of manipulation, upheaval, and betrayal. This
behavior was already evident in Russia, at the time of the Russian
Revolution.
Before the Provisional Government was established, Russia was ruled
by a Tsar (emperor). The last Tsar had at his disposal a vast
intelligence network known as the “Okhrana.” The Okhrana consisted
of several intelligence organizations which performed all of the
usual espionage functions with their secret agents, double-agents,
agents provocateurs, and secret dossiers. The Okhrana spied on
Tsarist friends and enemies alike and acted as Russia’s internal
security police. Inside Russia, the Okhrana engaged in extensive
anti-subversive activities. The unpopular domestic activities of the
Okhrana were a major issue used by the Bolsheviks to attack the Tsar.
The Tsar, of course, was eventually unseated. That must mean that the
Okhrana had failed.
Or had it?
Historians have noted that the Okhrana had heavily infiltrated and
assisted the Bolshevik movement. The Okhrana did this through spies
known as “agent provocateurs.” An agent provocateur is someone who
deliberately agitates others into committing illegal or disruptive
acts, usually in order to discredit or arrest the manipulated victim.
In America and other nations today, agent provocateurs are often used
by police agencies to entrap or compromise targeted people. These
activities are sometimes called “sting”operations.
There seems to be an obvious reason for engaging in agent provocateur
activities. If a targeted person does not commit an act for which he
can be defamed, compromised, or imprisoned, he must be made to commit
one. Because most provocateur actions are aimed against alleged
criminals or subversives, it would appear that provocateurism is a
useful tool for battling crime and subversion. In actual fact, it is
not.
Upon careful analysis, a researcher soon discovers that provocateur
actions are almost invariably carried out by people within
intelligence and police agencies who are criminal or subversive
themselves. Provocateurism proves to be a frequent cover for
officially-sanctioned subversion or criminality. Provocateur actions
are the best way for police and intelligence services to disguise
their secret support of criminal and subversive elements. A clear
example of this was the Russian Okhrana.
The Okhrana sent many agents to join the growing communist movement
in Russia. Okhrana agents insinuated themselves into the innermost
circles of the Bolshevik Partyand directed many Bolshevik
activities. This infiltration was so great that in the years
1908-1909, Okhrana agents constituted four out of five members of
the Bolshevik Party’s St. Petersburg Committee. Although arrests of
revolutionaries were frequent, the Okhrana did far more to assist
the Russian Bolsheviks under the guise of provocateurism than it did
to harm them. The Okhrana provided regular monies and badly needed
materials to the revolutionaries. It worked to stamp out two rival
parties to the Bolsheviks: the Social Democratic Party and the
Mensheviks. The Okhrana helped launch the Bolsheviks’ major
propaganda publication, Pravda. When Pravda was founded in 1912,
Okhrana agents served as editor (Roman Malinovskii, who was also a
member of the Bolshevik Central Committee and Lenin’s chief
lieutenant in Russia) and treasurer (Miron Chernomazov).
The Okhrana may have also supplied the Russian communists with the
infamous dictator Joseph Stalin. Biographer Edward Ellis Smith,
writing in his book, The Young Stalin, suggests that Stalin—a
revolutionary who later rose to the top position of the Soviet
government—may have entered the communist movement as an agent
provocateur. Historians have pointed out that Stalin was a main
contact between the Bolsheviks and the Tsarist police and he was
able to get many badly needed items from the Okhrana.
After the Tsar abdicated in early 1917, the Provisional Government
disbanded the entire Okhrana network. Bolshevik propaganda had
loudly denounced the Okhrana and one would therefore have expected
the victorious
communists to leave the Russian intelligence apparatus dismantled.
The Bolsheviks did just the opposite. Within six weeks of their
overthrow of the Provisional Government, the Bolsheviks
reestablished the intelligence network. This is perhaps not so
surprising when we consider the heavy Okhrana involvement in the
Bolshevik Party. Lenin merely did some organizational reshuffling,
gave the Okhrana a new name, and made the intelligence arm of
government even more dominant and oppressive than it had been
under the Tsar. By 1921, only four years after the Revolution, the
Bolshevik secret police employed ten times as many people as the
Okhrana had done under the Tsar. It was an open secret in Russia that
the Okhrana was back, more terrible than ever.
The name given to the reorganized Russian intelligence apparat was
the “Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counterrevolution and
Sabotage,” better known as the “Checka.” The Checka changed its name
and form several times during the ensuing decades. In 1922 it became
the GPU, then the OGPU, and in 1934 it was reorganized into the
“Peoples Commission of Internal Affairs” (the “NKVD”). It was finally
transformed into the modern KGB—history’s largest intelligence
organization. In 1992, the KGB employed approximately 90,000 staff
officers for internal security and the political prison system alone.
The KGB operated its own army of 175,000 border troops and carried out
most of the espionage and agent provocateur actions for which the
Soviet regime had been so well known. An organization the size of
the KGB was obviously, expensive to run.
The enormous resources
required to maintain this immense intelligence bureaucracy were
factors which helped keep the Soviet economy so dismal. Soviet
workers paid for the massive KGB every day with a lower standard of
living which they are still struggling to raise. As of this writing,
the KGB continues to exist within the Commonwealth of Independent
States, but there has been some restructuring to reflect the breakup
of the Soviet Union and some of the KGB’s functions have changed.
One person to write about the Russian Revolution was Arsene de
Goulevitch, a former general in the anti-Bolshevik “White” Russian
army. Although Goulevitch can hardly be considered impartial, he did
have some interesting things to say in his book, Tsarism and the
Revolution.
According to Goulevitch, English secret agents were numerous in
Russia before and during the Revolution. In fact, some financial
support for the Leninist cause was rumored to have come from English
banking sources. One of those rumored sources was Alfred Milner. As
we recall, Milner was one of the organizers of the Round Table. He
was also a major political figure in South Africa during the
Boer War. It was during the Boer War that the English created the
modern concentration camp. If Goulevitch’s allegation contains any
truth, then we might better understand where the Bolsheviks got the
idea to establish a massive concentration camp system as part of the
new communist economic system: namely, from the English.
The early Soviet concentration camp system was a large-scale affair
that reached its height under Lenin’s successor, Joseph Stalin.
Under the brutal Stalin, a crash program was launched to
industrialize Russia, beginning with Russia’s first so-called “Five
Year Plan.” The Plan required large quantities of inexpensive labor.
To acquire it, a widespread concentration camp network was set up
in Russia. The camps were administered by Russia’s secret police, the
NKVD. Concentration camp inmates were slave laborers who worked under
brutal conditions. Nearly all of the laborers were native Russians
who had been imprisoned under various pretexts.
The camps were an integral part of the Soviet economy for many
decades. In 1941, for example, 17% of the capital construction fund
for Russia was allocated to the NKVD to help it operate the camps.
Almost half of the chrome and two-thirds of Russia’s gold production
were carried out by camp inmates. Tens of millions of people passed
through the camps and about 10% of them died there. An estimated
three
to four million people perished in the camps from the time of the
camps’ inception to 1950 alone.
The Soviet concentration camps were decidedly “capitalist”
institutions in that they were designed to callously exploit human
labor to an ultimate degree. The “downtrodden working classes” had became even more downtrodden under their communist
“liberators.” With the ongoing reforms in Russia, it remains to be
seen what will happen with the concentration camps. As of this
writing, they are still in use as prison labor camps.
The imposition on the Russian people of communism and its far-flung
concentration camp system occurred during an already tumultuous era.
World War I was a brutal conflict. It had claimed about ten million
military casualties and millions more in civilian losses. When the
war ended in late 1918, another catastrophe struck: a worldwide
influenza epidemic. The epidemic lasted less than a year but
managed in that surprisingly short time to kill over twenty
million people; it was as sudden and nearly as devastating as the
14th-century Bubonic Plague. In Russia, these events were keenly
felt. A famine, coupled with the influenza, killed about twenty
million Russians between 1914 and 1924. The famine was caused
largely by the communist revolution and the consequent economic
upheavals.
For the beleaguered Russian people, these events were just the
beginning of a growing nightmare.
Under the Five Year Plan begun in 1928 by Stalin, all
privately-owned land was to be “collectivized,” i.e., it was to be
put under government ownership. Many peasants and landowners
understandably resisted. Stalin’s government responded by launching
a program of mass murder similar to the French Reign of Terror.
Peasants and landowners were targeted for physical extermination in
order to seize their land and remove them as obstacles to communist
Utopia. This extermination campaign lasted from 1929 until 1934.
Millions of people were murdered for no other crime than that they
happened to own land. In response, a rebellion broke out between
1932 and 1934 in which defiant peasants destroyed half of Russia’s
livestock. This rebellious act, coupled with the communist regime’s
attempt to bring in outside money by over exporting wheat (3.5 million
tons within two years) resulted in another famine that claimed an
additional five million Russian lives.
The total death count between 1917 and 1950 as a direct and indirect
result of the establishment of communism in Russia is estimated at
roughly 35 to 40 million people. This is one of the largest
mortality rates from any single episode in history. To this figure
we should add the deaths associated with the establishment of
communism in other countries, such as the two million land owners
murdered in China during Mao Tse-Tung’s crash industrial program of
the 1950’s, and the millions butchered in Cambodia in the early
1970’s under the Khmer Republic. In terms of the sheer number of
lives lost, communism was one of the single most catastrophic events
in human history.
My purpose in this discussion is not to beat a drum for rabid
anti-Communism. It is simply to indicate that the historical
patterns we studied have continued to recur in the 20th century.
Communism is little more than a rehash of a worn-out theme which has
been repeated over and over again with the same tragic consequences.
“Communism” is but another in a long line of destructive
artificialities arising out of the mystical Brotherhood network that
has helped keep people fighting, suffering, and dying for absolutely
no purpose whatsoever. “Communism” was not an alternative to the
enemies it claimed to fight, namely monopolistic “capitalism” and
End-of-the-World religions. Modern communism was their natural
outgrowth.
The dismantling of Soviet and European communism has been a cause
for genuine elation throughout the world. Brotherhood factions have
been coming and going throughout history, and the passing of each
often brings about a period of resurgence. Unfortunately, East
European reformers currently plan to preserve the inflatable paper
money system and erect a graduated income tax scheme to help pay for
it. Severe ethnic and nationalistic strife in several former
communist nations reveals that other warring factions have been
regenerated or created to mar the peace that should have come from
the end of the Cold War.
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