The Babylonian Woe
Page 23
Of this period until the 3rd Century A.D. the most learned Professor Heichelheim wrote: “There were regular lending associations while usury constituted quite an important item in the legal provisions of the Corpus Iuris and the Talmud. Only State Usury was rare, for the Roman State was still in a supreme position.[424] At the most, autonomous areas were the only exceptions here. Large interest free loans advanced to the state by individual citizens or chance patrons for reward in the form of honours or other more indirect advantage, were quite frequent up to the 3rd Century A.D.”[425]
However, it may reasonably be assumed that even during the period of the Commonwealth and the true greatness of the Roman people, though Roman Government had endeavoured to monopolize all sources of the material of its tangible currency, and had prevented as much as possible the circulation of precious metal, which clearly would undermine the integrity of the state issued unit of exchange, the grandiose aes, it still could not prevent counterfeits from entering the circulation. It could not prevent the corrupt practices of oriental banking after the extensive reentry of silver into the circulation as a result, clearly, of concessions made to the international bullion traders during the 2nd Punic war, nor thereafter the functioning of Gresham’s so-called law which such entailed. “Bad money drives out the good”; which, of course, depends on what is bad and what is good! Nor, therefore, could it control the extent in absolute, right across the Roman Empire, of the activities of that underground that garnered the precious metal from the circulation for more profitable use elsewhere.
As a consequence of the rejection by growing and powerful states such as Rome of the early and middle commonwealth of the claim of silver bullion interests that all tangible money should be founded on their product as base and common denominator of values, and the creation and paying into circulation of their own tangible money, with value deriving from its scarcity or otherwise, using largely copper or bronze as the material on which its numbers were recorded, as previously pointed out, much copper or bronze that came the way of the international bullion brokers would, undoubtedly have been used in what must have been an extensive industry devoted to counterfeiting of these fiduciary currencies. The product of this industry which would have been carried on abroad no doubt, while yielding handsome profit, through disturbance of that mass of abstract money based on the tangible currencies into which such products would have been injected, would also create instability of price in the states concerned.
Thus would be created conditions in which foreign money lenders would be better able to flourish, and secure the establishment of their own peculiar systems of private money emission based usually on the fiction of valuables on deposit for safe-keeping. Under such systems, when fully under way, the next step would be political control through so called political parties that such money power would bring into being, each necessarily dedicated to some “cause” through a so-called “Leader,” also chosen through the agency of such money power and by those forces it controlled. Such leaders would be “suitable” men, and would be chosen because pliable and, too often, naturally corrupt. Raised as likely as not from the lower ranks of society, and therefore dazed by the dizzy heights to which fortune had lifted them, such men would be most likely to carry out without question the policies required for the fulfilment of their master’s purposes and dreams; principally that of World Government; which should raise such masters, strange thought though it might be, to the position of world rulers, and therefore heirs of the god-kings of ancient days, in their own eyes; although to the eye of any clear-seeing man they might better have been called the anti-god, or in the language of the naïve Christians of a somewhat later time to the god-kings, demons.
Man Proposes But God Disposes
So speaking of One World and of World Rule, a vision stirs of a distant past, and of efforts towards World Rule in a smaller world of another day; a past of which so little remains other than shattered columns, cracked vases, a few precious metal coins and baked clay facsimiles thereof, and the writings of relatively a handful of the best of a former day, amongst which, strangely enough, still exist the works of the propagandists for money power such as Xenophon, and, as some say, Thucydides.
Behind these scattered fragments and the unseen but still existing remains of millions of dead that lie beneath land and sea, consumed in the constant wars of those ancient days, is the enigmatic vision of those half-Greek men amongst their records in the counting houses of Athens and the Piraeus, and the clear picture of them and their “Boy,” Pericles, scion of that line of the shifty Alkmeonidae, preparing under their guidance, plans for that “Great War” which would extend their financial hegemony across the whole Grecian world. If events proceeded along those lines in which they would see to it that they were guided, then, who knows? perhaps as a consequence, their financial hegemony might in time be brought to spread across the whole world. One World might, as a result of the scheming of their fevered brains, be brought to reality.
This empire was now completely controlled by them. After Klearchos, and the edict of 432 B.C. in which the Athenian allies were forbidden to use any standard other than that of Attica, followed by the edict of 415 B.C. in which the minting of silver was altogether forbidden them, the Athenian Empire must have fallen totally under the control of the banks. The edict ordering the subject allies to contribute money instead of ships, meant that they were to be drained of silver. When the silver was gone, they would be obliged to come hat in hand to the Piraeus for that which the “Great” Bankers were now lending as money against real collateral; entries in the credit page of their ledger, or clay facsimiles of silver and gold money which once had been.
This war would give the bankers complete control of Greece and all that such could bring about through their financial guidance. None would flourish from Colchis[426] to Illyria except they so willed it. The instrument which was Athens and its allies would finally and forever destroy that Spartan hegemony in the Peloponnese that had so long denied them entry, and had refused to accept their terms, and permit the circulation of that which they through trade and money. All that proud Dorian aristocracy of the Peloponnese would be exterminated, as these bankers had arranged long since for the aristocracy of so many other states and cities of the world. Their own future as a people destined to be lord over all, would be secure, except those wretched political hacks of Athens could be called their peers. Gone forever would be the iron and leather money of the Lacedaemonians, over whose issues they had no control, no foreign pedlars being permitted, no “Businessmen,” nor trade in imported luxuries.
So with this vision before them, the war would commence, and from that blood and fire that they the bankers would see to it would sweep the land, could come nothing but good for them as they planned in the shadows in the inner chambers of the counting houses of the Piraeus. These men knew that whatever happened, and the result was certain so they estimated, finally their agents would be permitted that which they wanted above all: permanent residence in Sparta, and time consequently to spread the poison amongst the people of Sparta which only they knew the brewing of to such perfection, the poison of moral decay. Under the stress of war, Sparta, through the agency of its ageing king Archidamos, who was privately friend of the banker’s “Boy,” Pericles, would secretly accept their terms, and permit the circulation of that which they loaned as money, and permit private persons to possess and hoard silver and gold, which, through the “Principles of Banking” would soon be theirs in any case.
However it seemed as if even in that day it could be said: The best laid schemes of mice and men gang aft a’gley! A well planned stratagem that should have established forever the banker’s dream of world empire through the creation of common money market embracing the whole world, and that would have removed all remaining resistance towards the realization of such dream, could they but settle once and for all the problem of Sparta, was frustrated; and if something approaching such common money market finally came about, it
was not out of the original plan. Plague spread in from Egypt having originated in Ethiopia; Athens particularly was stricken and by 427 B.C., three hundred knights, and four thousand, four hundred of the armoured hoplites drawn from the best of the Athenian middle classes, had fallen, not to the enemy, but to the plague. Woe willed from on High! The deaths amongst women, artisans and slaves were much more. Not merely were the formerly magnificent armed forces of the Athenians reduced to virtual ineffectiveness, so far as the original plan was concerned, but so was the civil war machine, economic or otherwise. sickness and death struck all and the rotting bodies of trapezitae or his slave were thrown on the mass funeral pyres together with that of hoplite and his wife. With the flames consuming the dead, most of the immediate schemes of the bankers turned into a wisp of smoke and disappeared into the heavens with an accompanying odour of burnt flesh.
Those precious metal pieces, those copper fiduciaries, those clay facsimiles, all those ledger entries, credits against no funds, money created out of the thin air as by the hand of the gods, all these were the secret of that endless urge and turmoil of the city states of Greece, and of the tumult which finally culminated in the dark years of that miniature “World War,” out of which could come no winner but the International Money Power. The “Great Peloponnesian War,” as it came to be called, saw a whole system of life crumbling to pieces, just as did these last two so-called “Great” world wars of our time; and still in the final ending not being replaced by that system most longed for by those who have guided us so far along this road of hopelessness.
In these brief moments of time since the fall of so much of ancient ways; faintly discernible as beginning about the period of the collapse of the Middle Kingdom in Egypt under the impact of the horses and chariots of the Hyksos, and that period of turmoil and destruction amongst which was the fall of that Ur of Ibi-Sin, the last great ruler of Sumer before it was eclipsed in its day of glory by all those Semitic peoples spreading Southward, so that even its language almost disappeared.[427] God seems to have more and more withdrawn his face from mankind, now moving without guide along the uncertain ways of time.
One thing stands out clearly from the fitting transfer of Ledger Credit Page Entry Money, evinced by tattered fragments relating to man and his money in very ancient days, and that is, One World! Through the whole web of confusion, this faint design grows clearly more distinguishable, concept of those who by nature of their secret trade, money, standing apart from life, think they know and understand all the paths of men and life; and because of the international character of that which they now control, delude themselves into believing that they, as designers of it all, rising into the firmament as gods, shall be heirs to it all.
These secret classes who live shut in by the four walls of their exclusivity, had originally believed that one more step would place them forever on the now empty thrones of the god-kings who formerly reigned in lordship over all; towards which place of all-power they had so long guided themselves through the devious paths of knowledge of precious metal money creation and emission, and all the deceits against mankind, to which it had loaned itself. With the establishment of the so-called United Nations Banking complex via the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, otherwise designated “The World Bank,” knowing no master on this earth other than God or the Devil, as the case might be, and with advent of the settlement of international trade balances Paper Gold, as the final deceit,[428] these secret classes behind it all, well might believe that the total of human activity, whether as towards War or Peace, depended on their instigation alone. With such triumphs resulting from the long years of planning and waiting, well might they have been justified in concluding that the end of a long and weary way towards World Rule had been reached; perhaps the only question remaining being: “Who should be the Ruler?”
But for them already is the bitter assurance that this promised land, even if faintly glimpsed, will never be; and that they stand on the same threshold as the rest of the Indo-European peoples, if not mankind. Beyond this threshold, where in the fatuity of their vain imaginings, was to have been a money changer’s World Kingdom, and for them and theirs, life everlasting, are in reality the desolate ways of the gulf of time and infinity, no less for them as for all. Those absolute weapons dreamed into existence as instruments towards the final realization of such world kingdom, mainly through the genius of the Indo-European peoples, have also been placed by the unruly agents of these secret classes, in the hands of other races of the world; races who now thrust God-wards, and whose hearts may be an ocean of envy, if not hate itself, for the same Indo-European who now totters towards the grave to which he was being led, sick unto death.
And even should this One World come to be, what of International Money Power itself and its fatuous dream of a money changer’s world dominion? and what will happen to it when the Indo-European who was its unwitting host and protector for so long, is gone? for, except for some unforeseen change in the course of events, gone he surely will be, and one or the other will have taken his place as world leader.
The present day Chinese, for instance, who very well may be strong in the competition for the throne of the gods from whence One World would be ruled, in the event of their accession to such throne, either by election, or by force of arms, would not be likely to tolerate this finance core, privately and irresponsibly controlled, and from which has been drawn the threads of evil that have so long tormented the so called Indo-European world; which long since has been totally entrapped in the web that has been woven. No more did the Chinese of ancient imperial days extend toleration to such activities throughout their long history.
But it may not be doubted; little if anything will be left anyway. Even should this world we know be spared total obliteration, after the pestilence of decay, once again will be just shattered columns, crumbling concrete, paper that turns to dust with the touch and ruin over all. Life’s urgent clamour will be followed by the silence of its extinction. The brief and fading evidence of all this turmoil will be but faint shadows on the accumulating dust.
The End
“And there came one of the seven angels which had the seven vials, and talked with me, saying unto me, Come hither; I will show unto thee the judgement of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters:
With whom the kings have committed fornication.
So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet beast, full of names of blasphemy.
* * *
And upon her forehead was a name written, a mystery, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND OF ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH
* * *
And he saith onto me, The waters which thou sawest where the whore sitteth are peoples, and multitudes, and nations, and tongues.
* * *
And the woman which thou sawest is that great city, which reigneth over the kings of the earth
* * *
And the kings of the earth who have committed fornication and lived deliciously with her, shall bewail her, and lament for her, when they shall see the smoke of her burning.
* * *
For in one hour so great riches is come to nought. And every shipmaster and all the company in ships, and sailors, and as many as trade by the sea stood afar off,
* * *
And they cast dust on their heads and they cried weeping and wailing, saying, Alas, alas that great city wherein were made rich all that had ships in the sea by reason of her costliness! for in one hour is she made desolate.”
Revelation xvii. 1. to xviii. 21.
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