The Babylonian Woe

by David Astle

  History should not be misled by the Greek names of those significant figures and families concerned with money and money power at that time, whether in Lydia or in Greece. Oskar Seffert states quite clearly that the bankers or trapezitae were resident aliens.[201] Controlling the undercurrents of city life as undoubtedly they would have so done, in those days it would have been no more difficult than it is in these days to secure the services of a front man to promote their interests, and secure them citizenship if necessary. Just as aliens who seek trade and power amongst whatever people they maybe, so often change their names to suit the circumstances while retaining allegiance to that group into which they were born, so it was in that day, nearly three thousand years ago. In the early days of the Greek cities, citizenship was easy to obtain and persons with pretence at power, influence and money, in a society where worship of money had replaced worship of the gods, in truth, would have no great difficulty in that direction.

  Out of the weakening of what was left of the true power of kingly rule at Athens, such as descended from Mycenaean Greece, and consequent growth of “Aristocratic” democracy, doubtless deriving from concession to international money power for its assistance against the Dorian previous to 1100 B.C., and before whom it appears the city of Athens never fell, came the replacement of the title Wanax indicating god-king reigning in earthly splendour, for that of Archon-Basileus of lesser degree.[202] Out of the further weakening of such aristocracy of the Greeks as later existed, whether Achaean, Ionian, or Dorian, and the soul destruction sown amongst them as consequence of their betrayal into slavery and abuse of their followers who had so trusted them and looked to them for guidance, derived those conditions out of which the so-called tyrant rose to power. Out of the involvement of the natural leaders of the people[203] with things ignoble and inimical to their own kind, such as trade and “Money-making,” and with strange luxuries and vices, rose those men, often traitors to their own class, who fronted for the conspiratorial money power of the age. Such men steered the restless aspirations of the wage slaves of the cities; those dispossessed masses so easily stirred to active resentment against their former leaders deriving from the ancient nobility; and who, of course, had no more understanding than themselves of that force by which they were both being manipulated.

  Tyrant And Trapezitae

  Of the tyrants of Greece and Asia Minor in ancient times, the learned Professor Heichelheim wrote:[204]

  “These tyrants were for the most part members of the nobility themselves who had made the grade using the new political and economic possibilities of their time to overthrow their own equals and to subdue their whole home state temporarily. The tyrants were often compelled to introduce the coin economy pattern into the area over which they ruled, or at least to promote its development officially, in order to gain the upper hand over their enemies. To stabilize the position of the peasantry on the land, and to expand and rebuild state economy, a central distribution of money and goods in kind partly directed towards mercenaries, bodyguards and various political friends, and partly indirectly to the masses of poor people in the form of wages paid for extensive building operations and improvements, is characteristic of tyrant economy.”

  The above remarks of Professor Heichelheim indicate there were “new political and economic possibilities” in that period 650-500 B.C. when the tyrannies most of all flourished. The question then becomes, what were these “new political and economic possibilities?” The answer is arrived at readily; they derived from the activities of the agents of the international silver bullion brokers, who, from ports such as Argos, Athens, and Aegina where King Pheidon struck the first Greek silver coinage c.680 BC., promoted the luxury traders who sold their wares from wigs to harlots as against the new silver coinage or promise thereof. The opportunities clearly were for those who assisted in the monetization of the city, and all its activities and possessions, and its population, man, woman, and child, and their possessions too, and thereby assisted in the firm establishment of the rule of bankers, trade, and traders, as against the gods ruling over mankind living in his natural order.

  “The aristocracies refused political equality to the landless traders and manufacturers, the peasants were oppressed by the rich and encouraged to get into debt and then were reduced to slavery and exile; slaves began to compete with free labour. Ambitious individuals capitalized this discontent to overthrow the constituted government and establish themselves as tyrants in all the Greek cities with the notable exception of Sparta.”[205]

  The situation is very clear. The kings and aristocracies as descended from ancient days, as a derivative of their folly in permitting the unrestricted activities of the new bankers, who were now well established in all the major cities of Greece outside of Sparta, saw a class of manufacturers and entrepreneurs come into being, largely foreigners and men of lowly origin. These men, more often than not with the means of nobility but the outlook of slaves, were clearly a serious threat to kings and nobility and the order they represented.

  In the same manner during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries A.D., the worthy tradesmen of London, while still deferring to the natural nobility of the land, more and more realized, that they too were lords of the land through control of labour by the wage rates and needed little encouragement from that true source of their power, the bullion brokers, towards hatred of a government[206] which still gave them little say, for all the wealth that they were possessed of according to the new standards. This government still continued, at least until Charles I, to consider one of its main duties was to prevent the oppression of the poor and the trusting,[207] regardless of the so-called “needs of trade.”

  The similar class that rose in Greece some two thousand years previously, more and more realized that they were the new reality, and that they were now in actuality the lords of the land through labour, which they owned outright as slaves, or controlled as through daily wages. If the land itself they still did not own and control, it mattered not; for there were those voices that told them that land too was but a trade and a tool in the new order. As their textiles (as at Megara), or pottery (as at Corinth), that every ship leaving harbour carried to the ends of the earth, so the land of the great lord was but the capital investment that grew the food that he the manufacturer purchased for himself and his slaves or the raw materials needed for his particular trade; and he himself, in the money creator’s kingdom on earth, was as assessable in coin as was potter, weaver, or armourer. The land owning nobleman was a man controllable as themselves through the arts of taxation in terms of money, could they but institute a system of government in which the natural ruler had no more power to rule than themselves.

  No doubt these worthy tradesmen of Megara, or Corinth, or Athens, led on by the attitude of their true masters, the trapezitae, the money creators, agents of those great and ancient banking houses of Babylon city, said to themselves of the natural lords of Hellas “Who are these men?” “For all their fine manners and clothing, we could buy them up a hundred times did they but know it!”

  And so the stage was set for the arrival of the tyrant financed into existence by the bankers towards the total destruction of the old way of life, which still had within it the seeds of a strength sufficient to root out its enemies such as, in the case of Sparta, had been outstandingly proven by the renewal of the ancient life system through the financial and social reforms of Lycurgus. Classes of manufacturers and entrepreneurs, contemptuous of a nobility that seemed to have betrayed its trust, were easily stirred to envy and resentment, and the work of destruction by the tyrant received little or no opposition.

  “In order to level the class of large landowners and nobles economically, Theagenes of Megara simply allowed their herds of cattle to be slaughtered without remuneration. A frequent political device of tyrants from Asia Minor to Sicily was to murder or banish nobles, confiscate their possessions, and redistribute their wealth amongst the poor.”[208]

  The poor, needless t
o say, soon returned to being poor again. “The poor ye shall always have with you.” The poor merely being those who trust that their rulers are attending to serious matters as indicated by their position in the scale of life, such as governing. The word “poor” having existed, of course, long before the crafty banker, standing in the shade beside the ways of life, arranged it that measure of poverty and riches was in that number of (privately issued) units of exchange in which a man could be assessed according to success or failure in the conflict of life, as he the banker had established it.

  The tyrant, therefore, was that force by which international money power as it derived from the control of silver bullion and the slave markets, destroyed all resistance to its total ownership of life and labour and human hope. The status of all, slave or free, in some degree, depended on their relations with the trapezitae who presided at their table in the agora; and should they be kings or rulers of states, no doubt their destinies would be much influenced by those shadowy figures furtively watching from the counting houses of far away Mesopotamia. According to the special nature of the times, the tyrant, in his capacity as ruler, would above all be guided instrument; but that the tyrant no more understood the true significance of his existence than do these so-called revolutionary “leaders” of today, is a certainty.

  The so-called “revolutions” of today are clearly similar in their origins to those of the time of the tyrants; the main difference being more of a technicality. Until 1870 A.D. the arbitrary valuation of gold bullion as according to the decision of the bullion brokers, was common denominator of values internationally, with silver bullion in second place at the ratio as decided by the leading states; but still rarely varying a great deal from that ratio decided on nearly 2000 years ago by Julius Caesar and his financial advisors, of 12:1.[209] After the demonetization of silver in almost all the major states of the world, in the seventies of the last century,[210] the common denominator of values was gold alone, with silver just another commodity moving up and down on world markets according to supply and demand.

  More than ample evidence exists of those persons designated international bankers in “Modern Times” as also the instigative factor in the principle so-called revolutions of the last three hundred years. According to Commander Guy Carr,[211] the so-called English revolution was totally the work of the international bullion brokers who seem at that time to have been lodged in Amsterdam, although the loan of silver bullion to Queen Elizabeth I[212] for the recoinage that took place shortly after her accession to the throne as negotiated by the famous “Sicile,”[213] later Lord Burghley, came from Antwerp.

  Some of the Crypto-Jews of the Commonwealth,[214] of whom many would have been in England during the reign of Charles I, would also appear to have been a factor in such revolution as witting or unwitting agents of the Amsterdam bullion brokers.[215] The main designer of the events of those days seems to have been a Manasseh Ben Israel, “a remarkable character,” who apparently took the initiative in the financing of Cromwell;[216] which enabled Cromwell to obtain the best of arms, the first requisite of the would-be conqueror throughout history.

  The arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese Marranos[217] in Holland in 1593 A.D., with the consequent harnessing of the Dutch, a seafaring people, naturally aggressive, to their world wide trade activities, and the resultant so-called “prosperity,” immediately produced its impact in Britain. The regrowth of the commercial power of these “New Dutch,” more especially as deriving from the bullion trade which they seemed to continue to control internationally, principally due to the connections they continued to maintain in Spain, directed towards them a great part of the flood of the precious metals which was being wrung out of the wretched natives of South America particularly; not to speak of that which came from Japan, China, and India, of which not so much seems to be known.[218] No sooner did these precious metals arrive in Spain or Portugal than almost immediately they moved on to other parts in settlement of trade debit balances created largely by the Spanish wars in Europe, particularly in Italy.[219]

  This superfluity of the precious metals in Northern Europe certainly was one of the instigative factors, in the growth of “Banking,” which had spread from Venice and Genoa, to Amsterdam, and from thence to London,[220] where, evinced by the activities of the goldsmiths, it had set itself up against kings, as the whole story of the downfall of Charles I would indicate.

  The political picture of Northern Europe derived a great deal of its changing character from the rise in prices which came about both as a result of the relatively tremendous influx of new precious metals at that time, and as a result of the growth of “Banking,” that is private abstract money creation, which affected prices equally with that precious metal that could be seen as it circulated as money. Kings, often in the hands of the venal advisors to whom the age gave rise, were no longer able to make both ends meet, and not understanding the true nature of the activities of the bankers or goldsmiths, they neither knew how to put a stop to such activities nor, if they permitted them, how to tax them.

  The sullen resistance experienced by Charles I from the puritanical and self-righteous burghers of the City of London,[221] most of whom were by then deeply beholden to the goldsmiths for their finances, who, in their turn were no doubt beholden to the Amsterdam bullion brokers for the gold they sometimes needed in a hurry when rumour went round that their receipts which circulated as money, were largely false and had nothing behind them except lies, may be traced to these same bullion brokers of Amsterdam.

  Their policy above all required the weakening of kingship in England, for the “Banking” monopoly they saw they might come to institute in England, could not flourish with a king on the throne such as Charles who truly regarded himself as the Lord’s anointed. A king who was aware of the source of his power, even if not widely instructed therein, that is to say, who was aware of the true meaning of monetary creation and emission relative to his kingship, was not much to their liking. The reinstitution of the office of a Royal Exchanger, abolished by Henry VIII in 1539 on the advice of a Sir Thomas Gresham,[222] was also not much to their liking, nor the seizure by Charles of the £130,000 deposited in the Tower supposedly by the London merchants, reputed to have come from Spain en route to Dunkirk, Spanish possession at that time. The reinstitution of the office of Royal Exchanger meant that one of the major sources of revenue of the goldsmiths, and therefore their masters, the bullion brokers was cut off: that which obtained from the exchange of coins, foreign or domestic; which meant, therefore, they were denied the opportunity to clip, or sweat, or retain for export those full-weight coins that came their way.[223]

  “The unsafe condition of a Bank under a Monarchy.”[224]

  These words of Pepys indicate the trend of thought of certain circles at the time. Although Charles I could not be considered the most effective opposition to banking and its proponents, nevertheless, he was in the way; even if the cure to him —Cromwell— proved perhaps to be even more in the way! Cromwell’s “Bills of Public Faith,” of which very little record remains, a true currency being intrinsically valueless, state issued, and inconvertible, must have been cause for grave misgivings on the part of the goldsmiths, and all concerned, as to whether they had done right in supporting the enemies of the king! It was not long after the return to the throne of England of the Stuart Line in the person of the amenable Charles II, in 1660, that these “Bills of Public Faith,” the real key to sovereignty, were repudiated;[225] showing that the son had even less understanding of the realities of money than had the father.[226]

  To return to Cromwell and the principal factors that lead up to his success, and his assumption of the powers of tyranny: when it became clear that Cromwell was as “suitable” a man as could be found to fit the needs of the occasion, Manasseh Ben Israel supplied him with the gifted Fernandez Carvajal, for the reorganization of his army, which became known as the “Model Army”. Trained revolutionaries then poured into the country, presiding
over whom was the Portuguese Ambassador, a De Souza, who loaned them the diplomatic immunity of his house for their meetings. One such revolutionary was the man known today as Calvin, whose father had been fiscal agent to a prominent French Bishop.[227]

  These revolutionary leaders, besides developing the technique of spreading religious differences, also exploited the use of truculent mobs, a practice known to this class of people from most ancient times, for the gaining of political ends. According to Commander Guy Carr, who is a relatively recent writer on this subject:[228] “The evidence which absolutely convicts Oliver Cromwell of participating in the revolutionary plot was obtained by Lord Alfred Douglas, who edited a weekly review known as Plain English published by the North British Publishing Company. In an article which appeared in the issue of Sept. 3rd 1921, he explained that he and his friend, Mr. L.D. Van Valckert of Amsterdam, Holland, had come into possession of a missing volume of records of the Synagogue of Muljeim. This volume had been lost during the Napoleonic Wars. The volume contained records of letters written to and answered by the directors of the Synagogue.

  They are written in German. One entry dated June 16th, 1647 reads: From O.C. (i.e.) Oliver Cromwell to Ebenezer Pratt.

  ‘In return for financial support will advocate admission to England; this however impossible while Charles living. Charles cannot be executed without trial, adequate grounds for which do not at present exist. Therefore advise that Charles be assassinated, but will have nothing to do with the arrangements for procuring an assassin, though willing to help in his escape.’

  In reply to this dispatch the records show E. Pratt wrote a letter dated July 12th, 1647 addressed to Oliver Cromwell.

  ‘Will grant financial aid as soon as Charles removed and. admitted.[229] Assassination too dangerous. Charles should be given an opportunity to escape. His recapture will then make trial and execution possible. The support will be liberal but useless to discuss terms until trial commences.’