The Babylonian Woe

by David Astle

  Judging by Sparta, perhaps some of the Greek states mentioned by Boeckh,[346] and later by Rome itself, it seems that in ancient times there was some considerable understanding of the power inherent in precious metal money to destroy, by lending itself to manipulation, the status quo of any race or state. The tremendous possibilities inherent in its use as the material on which the visible units of money were recorded towards the manipulation of prices and the consequent monopolization of wealth which always derived therefrom, through the process of loan against collateral security inflating the money supply, and giving rise to the seeming prosperity of great activity, followed by the “calling” of such loans, under one excuse or another, when the resultant prosperity was at its height, was well understood by the “Bankers.” Also was known how to create periods of “lack of confidence,” during which prices fell to less than the previous cost of manufacture, and when consequently manufacturers became disheartened, and were glad to sell out to anyone to whom the banker directed them for whatever they could get. That is, if they were lucky. If they were not quite so lucky, then their stock and factory would be seized as against the supposed debt, and sold at auction. No doubt such auctions were rigged in ancient times, just as much as they often are today.

  Those states previously mentioned, understanding therefore the evils of private emission of precious metal money, and that precious metal money must always be private money emission, except the state owns the mines, and takes absolutely total precaution to prevent the export of its metal except by its own decision as against its own needs, clearly, when all other states and princes were succumbing to the world drive of the international bankers, rejected banking as such, and the bullion brokers its founders. It was not until the 4th Century B.C. that they finally gave in, to what was undoubtedly an unremitting pressure, and this more likely as a result of the conquests of, firstly, the Achaemenid Princes of Persia, and secondly, the conquests of Alexander.

  After Alexander there do not seem many states left in which precious metal money did not constitute the circulating medium, and therefore could not be influenced by the activities of that secret and international group of people who made the so-called Gresham’s Law very much of a reality to the undoing of rulers and their peoples.

  The sequence of “Boom” and “Bust” just as in today, can be traced as follows:

  In the first place bankers and their agents no doubt worked together to cause this money, which it may safely be said, originally cost them no more than entry by slave scribe on the clay tablet, to be seemingly plentiful. As a result, business flourished, wages increased and prices rose. This rise in prices ultimately caused a situation in which foreign merchandise sold competitively on the home market. In consequence some home manufacturers, unable to compete, went into bankruptcy. The panic thus created amongst manufacturers beholden to the banks, prepared them for the inevitability of the likelihood of demand by their bank for repayment of loans outstanding. By now the bankers were telling everyone that Times were bad. “There was a freeze in Credit.” and “No Money about”. so when such loans were “Called,” the manufacturers dutifully hunted up all the silver they could find, and if they were able, paid off the banker. when this collapse of industry, and consequently prices, reached a certain point, it became no longer profitable for foreign merchandise to sell on their home market, creating the opportunity for resumption of their own industries. the bankers, satisfied that the “Depression” had yielded sufficient rewards, and with a new crop of industrialists now directly under their thumbs, or in control of their trusted agents, industry would be resumed. loans again were forthcoming from the banker’s overflowing strong rooms, or simply the same place as that from which originated the previous loans, his ledger; being therein merely a creation of stylus and clay tablet. Thus were the foundations laid for a new steady rise in prices.

  Herein, in this everlasting “Boom” and “Bust” of the so called “Empires” and “Civilizations” of the last few thousand years is the root cause of the desperate situation in which the indo-european peoples now find themselves, and, in which, seemingly having everything, in reality they have nothing except total exhaustion and the spectre of total anarchy and destruction looming ever more clearly before them, for they no longer have the will to be.

  With planned miscegenation and what could very well prove to be planned race self-extermination through the promotion of the use of conception aborting “medicines,” and of abortion itself by “operation” involving the tearing of the living fetus from the womb, the so-called indo-european peoples, who writhe in torment as a result of these incredible plans undoubtedly originating in the first place from the muddled minds of the money masters or their agents, fast dwindle to a fraction of the world’s population; soon, as may very well come to pass, to be entirely obliterated by those other races of the world who watch with glee this self-destruction of those who they had so recently believed to be one with the gods, such was their seeming superiority. International Money Power, whatever it really is, or whoever they really are, could not care less! Herein was its own design.

  But one thing such designers of all this forget. In the magnitude of the total disaster that looms so threateningly in these last days over the path of life, is also final disaster to the planners of this evil; whether this they had expected or otherwise; their own complete obliteration for sure along with the rest.

  For if God’s kingdom on earth is to arise, it is to arise in a world where little of the sicknesses that trouble us today, will be left, and the binding threads of incompetent thinking, and of evil itself, will be totally unwound. it will arise where the humble and the meek, such as remain, bow down in total acceptance of that natural order as was ordained: of god, which is the self-conscious everlasting itself: of priest-king in whom is the voice of god reigning in earthly glory understandable to men: of priesthood trained to total understanding of all the forces which mould men, and the devoted themselves, those who go about their affairs trusting in the sincerity and ability of their rulers, and who seek no more in life than the glory of their eternal master, and that they themselves always walk in the ways of righteousness.

  Thus, returning to Athens and its money in ancient days: the emission by the bankers of Athens of the baked clay facsimiles of the silver coinage they were reputed to have in storage in the vaults of the Acropolis, would have exactly the same effect on prices as the emission of silver coin; it would cause them to rise. Conversely, contraction of that clay coinage by calling of loans, would similarly cause prices to fall; and thus, as in today, “when the depression is over,” that is when prices are at rock bottom without totally wrecking the state, the “Banker” merely enters a few figures in his ledger to the credit of one of his agents, so it was in athens in that day. did the so-called customer require ready money over and above the money required for settlement of balances owing, such as could be met by debit, and transfer, and recredit, i.e., by cheque, then the so-called bankers at athens or the piraeus, merely set slaves to work to cast and bake clay coins as fast as they could go! Admittedly the baking of clay coins was a little more expensive than the pen and ink required for ledger entry money, or than the high speed printing press necessary for the paper facsimiles of today.

  Hence the enormous potential for the accumulation of wealth by a banker in a city state engaged in manufacture, and whose merchants and captains depended on him alone for their finances, especially when their business was largely with foreign parts. According to Professor Ure,[347] the tyrants of the city states derived their power from the new form of capital known as money.

  While in agreement with the general idea of Professor Ure, it must be asked: Why new form of capital? Metal money as capital, or what? It may be assumed that those references to baked clay, leather and wooden money in ancient Rome previous to Numa Pompilius, the first by Suidas, the second by Seneca, and the third by Cedrenus, also applied to ancient Greece; especially if the conjecture in respect to th
e leather monopoly of the Hittite state is correct. Suidas makes reference to leather money at Lacedaemon. There is no reason why other Greek city states should not have availed themselves of such readily obtainable material[348] (and cheap at that!) in those days before the augmentation of bullion supplies internationally by the new methods of mining, and the massive wars which gave rise to plentiful supplies of expendable labour.

  It seems to be reasonable that the money that enabled those industries that grew up in early Greece to get off the ground, as it were, was of such relatively intrinsically valueless material. Behind every industrialist was a banker, and the banker had to be the secret heart of the city. The early use of precious metal coinage in Greece had to have been similar to its use in Babylonia a thousand years before, or as gold in Britain 2000 years later, a standard on which to base prices and establish confidence in the “Great Banker” as being a wealthy man; a base on which a pyramid of ledger credit page money might be erected, represented in the circulation by leather notes, clay tokens, etc.

  As Stanley Jevons remarked in our era in 1914: “Gold already acts in England only as small change for notes.”[349] In a similar manner with money based on a silver standard, yet relatively little silver in circulation, such silver would have acted as small change in those ancient times. For evidence of greater wealth, leather notes, or clay tokens, or documents denoting cattle, which indeed may have been currency in large scale transactions, seem more likely to have served, at least amongst the Indo-Europeans.

  Thus right from the start it is safe to say that silver functioned as a balancing factor in oral and written agreements of merchandise exchange in Greece, actually functioning as a circulating medium itself only after King Pheidon of Argos. Although some authorities[350] say that the silver coinage was of state issuance, whether it was or was not, would make little difference. In so-called democracies, money power cannot but be the force behind the scenes. For that matter, anyone finding the paper notes of the British Empire three thousand years from now, because of the myth of the Queen’s Head and the Coat of Arms, would assume it too was state issue. They would of course be entirely wrong. Ever since the establishment of that ever changing mirage of the precious metal money system, states and rulers that became corrupted and undermined by the extraordinary deceptions to which such system loaned itself, wittingly or unwittingly, have fronted for those persons, often of criminal background, sometimes designated bankers, who under their very noses, have operated the most unbelievable swindles. It is hard to believe that states and rulers have been aware of the magnitude of the folly they commit in permitting private persons to exercise that power which is theirs as being representative of their peoples before God. Assuming ruler and temple lend their sanction, it is not long before the so-called banker, now able to finance an opposition to any power it is in his interest to destroy, or indeed, to withdraw financing from such power whose destruction he seeks, can literally laugh at those people, foolish, corrupt, or naïve, who, in lack of understanding of the meaning and source of that which was their strength and power, raised him up in the first place.

  Once the power of monetary emission is yielded by a ruler or state to private or external interests, it is rare that it can be recovered except as the result of all consuming cataclysm. Immense monopolies and vastly unequal money fortunes are neither gained nor saved by lawful labour or trade. Of necessity they are the natural outcome of the exercise of the power to discriminate, the power to reject or prefer that follows as inevitable consequence, when, in any state, private persons are permitted to create and issue the unit of exchange, whether tangible or abstract; and by whatever device of law such as may be needed to create appearance of legality.

  So far as the future of mankind is concerned, out of the deceit it practises on the simple, kind, and trusting, this instrument will be responsible for the complete enslavement and ultimate destruction of most, if not all, of this world. The hands that guide it are declared by themselves to be malevolent, and wittingly function and exert themselves in defiance of the natural order of life with their hearts full of pride and prejudice as for themselves as being some special breed, when merely they are but unfaithful stewards. Contempt for those who front for them in their secret conspiracy or are destroyed by it, shows equally in the arrogance of their manner.

  In the words of W. Cleon Skousen reviewing the great and compendious work of Dr. Carroll Quigley Tragedy and Hope, according to Dr. Skousen the most authentic and detailed account of the modern day conspiracy:

  “As I see it, the great contribution which Dr. Carroll Quigley unintentionally made by writing Tragedy and Hope was to help the ordinary American realize the utter contempt which the network leaders have for ordinary peoples. Human beings are treated en masse as helpless puppets on an international chessboard where giants of economic and political power subject them to wars, revolution, civil strife, confiscation, subversion, indoctrination, manipulation and outright deception as it suits their fancy and their concocted schemes for world domination.”[351]

  .For the original Rothschild (Amschel) who uttered that now famous line: “Let me issue and control a Nation’s money, and i care not who writes its laws,”[352] one cannot but have some grudging admiration, rogue though he was and should have been dealt with as such; but for those place-seeking persons, cynical or merely naïve, who nowadays prostrate themselves before the doors of the international bankers, as members of the societies dedicated to One World Government, such as The Council on Foreign Relations, The Canadian Institute of International Affairs, The Royal Institute of International Affairs, etc. one can have little respect.

  The first requisite for a man to be truly honoured amongst the people is that he bestow honour. Amongst these to whom the paths of meaningless ambition come first before any concern for their own, for they are largely drawn from that class of dead souls that is international in this, that every race and people on this earth is afflicted by them in more or less degree, the word honour too often will be meaningless. According to another recent writer: “James P. Warburg is one of the most ardent propagandists and financiers of the World Government Movement in the U.S.A. today. This same James Warburg had the audacity and arrogance to proclaim before the U.S. Senate (2-17-50): ‘We shall have world government whether or not we like it. The only question is, whether world government will be achieved by conquest or consent.’”[353]

  World Government is total government world-wide in which no independent race or people shall be except the rulers, who necessarily will have to be an exclusive caste. Total consent of all presumptuous, if not imaginative, bankers will never be; but out of the weakness and confusion created by them amongst us towards these their own vain purposes, the world Government they mutter about, may come through conquest, though it is not they who will be the conquerors, though indeed, they will be the principal instrument. There would be no way of bringing about that total monopoly of money, industry and empire, which is world government, save through the manipulation of the credulity of man-kind, and the pathetic trust he still maintains that his rulers are the voice of God on earth for him, as he blindly stumbles on, except it be by armed conquest. Armed conquest in its turn in these latter days, cannot be effected without the connivance of conspiratorial money power, although such conspiratorial money power in its virtually insane search for paths towards its own establishment towards World Rule forever and ever, has now become an institution, which in the horror of the weapons of total destruction and obliteration leading to final subjection that it has called into being, and, in its blindness, has also given to our enemies, can only be described as a juggernaut completely out of control, an all-engulfing Terror, as much for its creators, as he, who, in its original conception, such Terror was supposed to engulf.

  Sparta, the Pelanors, Wealth, and Women

  Sparta, of all the Greek States, is one that resisted most of all, in ancient times, the encroachments of international money power, and the circulation of
precious metals, and all those demoralizing factors deriving therefrom. However, from those laws promulgated by Lycurgus in Sparta, reputedly during the ninth Century B.C., but, as according to the archaeologists, the early sixth century B.C.,[354] it would seem that all those evils deriving from giving such international money power free rein, had already been experienced, and had brought about that reaction amongst the people generally that enabled Lycurgus to take those measures by which he expunged forever the main causes of the sickness of greed and self-interest which ate at the heart of the Doric overlord class of the Peloponnese. To him[355] are ascribed those laws directed towards this purpose such as are described by Plutarch:

  “Not contented with this (redistribution of land) he resolved to make a division of their movables too, that there might be no odious distinction or inequality left among them; but finding it would be very dangerous to go about it openly, he took another course and defeated their avarice by the following stratagem: he commanded that all gold and silver coin should be called in, and that only a sort of money of iron should be current, a great weight and quantity of which was very little worth. So that to lay up twenty or thirty pounds, there was required a pretty large closet, and to remove it, nothing less than a yoke of oxen.