A DISTANT THUNDER

by H. A. Covington

  Our role is to toil so that all may eat. Our place is to accept with gratitude such consumer goodies as our betters see fit to fill our bowls with, to shuffle and tap dance and tug the forelock, to vote the way we are told to vote by our natural superiors the liberals and the Jews, and to apply our lips in the prescribed manner to whatever derrières are presented to us. Finally, we must keep our minds squeaky clean of any impure doubt or racist thought.”

  “But what can we do, Mr. Morehouse?” asked someone else. “I mean, I love going out at night and dropping paper and spray-painting for the Party, but that’s petty stuff. It’s not going to bring down this rotten system.”

  “Oh, peasants have been known to revolt, Jason,” Red assured us. “Think guillotine, guys, with a pile of heads on the capitol steps higher than Tamerlane’s tower of skulls. Think of a big gallows like a wedding cake, with layers and rows of dangling bodies in thousand-dollar suits with pedicured toes turning slowly in the wind. The French did it in 1789. The Russians did it in 1917, even if it was for an evil cause. The Irish did it in 1921, the Italians did it in 1922, the Germans did it in 1933. Even the Iraqis and Iranians did it, and it looks like the Palestinians are going to pull it off as well. So will we.”

  Red made us understand economics in a way we’d never done before. I know economics is called the dismal science, but Red Morehouse knew that money was the source of all our enemies’ power, and in order to fight and win we had to have at least some kind of understanding of the way money worked, how it was created and used, and what the Jews had done to us with it. One night he asked us, “Okay, guys, how many of you know what usury is?”

  “Charging interest on loaned money,” replied Rooney promptly.

  “That’s right, but it’s not just the act of charging interest. Usury is an entire economic system,” he told us. “I’m reading a book on Renaissance Italy at the moment, and it’s inspired me with a concrete example from the past to show how our present economic order developed. Greatly oversimplified, of course, but it will help you understand one aspect of just how the hell our European people have arrived at our present mess. First off, you need to understand that although Karl Marx was full of sheep dip in most things, he did recognize and articulate certain correct and vitally important truths about the nature of capitalism. Capitalism is utterly dependent on the exploitation of human beings for their labor, and in order to function capitalism must reinvent Man as a commodity, an economic unit of production and consumption. This dehumanizing concept has proven one of the most destructive aspects of the Jewish incursion into Western civilization. Secondly, capitalism is dependent for the generation of its capital not only on profit, but on the highly cost effective form of profit known as usury.”

  I know all this sounds really dull, and you probably think I’m exaggerating about this guy getting a bunch of teenagers to sit still and listen to a long spiel on economics and the mechanics of the capitalist system. Under most circumstances, yeah, we would have been bored out of our minds. But bear in mind we weren’t sitting in a stuffy classroom surrounded by photos of Malcolm X and Mahatma Gandhi and other reminders that we were second-class citizens in our own land, while an official of the state tried to jam horse manure down our throat with a spoon. We were meeting secretly in a basement, to which we had come surreptitiously and in some cases lying to our parents about where we were going. We knew that if we were detected we’d be in trouble and be punished, and anything the establishment hated and feared enough to punish was of automatic worth in our eyes. We knew that whatever Mr. Morehouse told us was something that the people with power who made our lives miserable did not want us to know. That made all the difference in the world. Nothing like forbidden knowledge to perk up your interest in a subject.

  Red was off. “Usury is the collection of interest on loaned money, true, but it is much more. It is also the ultimate tool of Jewish power. Usury was forbidden for centuries to Christians, which used to be pretty much the same thing as saying Aryans. Only Jews were allowed to practice it, and any Aryan found charging interest was subject to a variety of penalties ranging from fines to the public removal of bits and pieces of the offender’s anatomy. Modern day banks and credit card companies would have you believe that the economy is entirely dependent on the charging of interest, but that’s bulldust”

  “Tell that to my dad who was just denied his Chapter Seven by that goddamned Judge Kaplowitz,” said one of the guys, George Douglas. “We’re gonna lose our house because of the twenty-nine percent interest on my mother’s operation last year,” he told us bitterly. “We had to put it on our last Visas and Mastercards because we didn’t have any cash at all.”

  “Good example of how usury is grinding white people into the dust today,” agreed Red. “By the way, George, see me after class tonight. I need to talk to you about that sitch. Yes, China?”

  “Mr. Morehouse, how did white people make profits without interest, before the Jews came?” said China, who had raised her hand. I figured she had a good idea already, since China was smart as a whip and to my surprise already the best read and most politically astute of the Wingfields. Rooney was all heart; China was just about all brain. She’d read Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century at age thirteen and I still have heavy going myself on that one. My guess was she was deliberately helping Morehouse out.

  “Good question. The generation of non-production related profit through interest is actually a fairly recent development in man’s economic history. So how did the economy work in the days before usury? Okay: let’s say we’re in Venice, a great trading city, about the year 1396. Usury is forbidden to everyone except the Jews, and their interest rates are as high as fifty percent, so no one but a drunk or a madman deals with them. They exist on interest mostly off the very poor, as pawnbrokers, and the Church has even established a series of interest-free co-op religious pawn shops to try and protect the poor from the bloodsuckers. But if you’re a merchant, you still have to finance your trading ventures. So how do you do it? Let’s say you want to send a ship to Constantinople full of Italian goodies, cloth and worked metal goods and glassware, wool, so forth and so on. You want to bring back the same ship full of Asia Minor goodies like spices, mahogany, Turkish rugs, etc. We will assign an arbitrary cost to this venture of 10,000 gold florins.” The basement had a blackboard—well, a greenboard—and Red wrote 10,000 florins cost on it in white chalk. “You believe that the profit from the sale of your goods in Constantinople and the resale of their goods in Venice will yield 20,000 florins, which for the sake of argument we’ll accept as accurate.” He wrote 20,000florins gross.

  “Where do you get the money?” Red asked rhetorically. “You can put up the entire ten grand yourself if you’re filthy rich, and many of the wealthiest merchant adventurers did so, as well as putting up their lives. These guys are not just businessmen, they’re sea captains and explorers and occasional pirates, and they command their own vessels. They can opt to take all the risk, including the risk of the ship sinking or getting captured by Arab corsairs, and take all the profit. Or they can look for investors to share the risk. Since our hypothetical merchant adventurer is a good Christian who doesn’t want to deal with hebes, and a good businessman who doesn’t want to pay half his profit literally to a Shylock, he goes to one or more of the great Lombard banking houses, most likely several of them because they will be more likely to back him if their individual exposure is less. The Bardi, the Pazzi, the Strozzi, the Albizzi, or the up-and-coming Medici.” He wrote the names on the board. “These banks are centered mostly in Florence or Siena, but they have branches all over Europe in a day when the first Rothschilds are still haggling with peasants over the pawn of their wooden shoes for a few pennies. Our friend explains his venture, shows them the ship so they know it’s a stout seaworthy vessel, lets them know he’ll be captaining the voyage himself, and points out that he’s got a good track record of a dozen prosperous expeditions prior to this.
He looks good to the Lombards, and so they lend him the dough.

  “The total outlay for this project is ten grand in gold florins. The merchant himself will put up 4,000 florins, or forty percent. The Bardi, the Strozzi, and the Medici banks will put up 2,000 each.” All this went up on the board. “They know they will have to wait one year for the ship’s return to find out how they did. This is the origin of the old expression ‘when my ship comes in.’ If everything goes according to plan, the venture will bring 20,000 gold florins, thus recouping everyone’s initial investment and leaving ten grand profit. The merchant will take his expenses of four grand plus four grand of the surplus and the three banks will take four grand each, which recoups their loan and gives them a one hundred percent return on their investment. Good business—and something comes of it. There is benefit to the community when consumers get a nice Persian rug or some pepper to put on Aunt Maria’s lasagna, which in the days before refrigeration disguises the taste of the half-putrefied sausage she uses in her recipe. And don’t even get me into medieval sanitation.” We all laughed. “Of course it was all a lot more complicated than that,” he went on. “For instance, in many cases the ship’s captain, if he was not the owner, would have a substantial share and the crew members would be paid not only a minimum wage but a small share each as well, plus there was taxes and overhead just like today—-but you get the idea. A rich merchant might send out ten ships a year under this system. Three would be lost, but seven of them would return, leaving an overall profit and Venetian society wealthier thereby. Do you note the difference between this system and Jewish usury?”

  “No interest,” I pointed out. “Profit comes from productivity.”

  “Bingo, Shane!” said Mr. Morehouse, beaming. “The Lombard banking system was based on production or acquisition of something tangible. Surplus value was to be created by buying actual things of value low and selling high, by making something or building something or undertaking risks to obtain something material and tangible. If the voyage didn’t succeed, the investors were out their money, and this risk element led to a high degree of caution, canniness, and ability to assess risk as well as encouraging daring and enterprise for higher profits. Another variation on this system was public works, for example the bridges over the river Arno in Florence, many of which were built by the bankers who were then allowed to collect tolls until they had recovered the expense of construction and a set profit, after which the bridges became free. There are endless variations. Money was lent for agriculture, to build a factory or a workshop, to build a road, whatever, but always something you could touch, feel, taste, use or consume. Money did not magically produce money out of nothing as it does with usury. The merchant princes of Renaissance Italy may have had a taste for luxurious living, intrigue, and poisoning one another, but they never threw money away like present-day governments and multinationals on loan interest. They had worked and sweated and bled and killed too long and hard to get it.

  “Whereas the Jewish usury system is a shell game where money multiplies by itself without relation to anything in the real world. So-called value is created by the manipulation of numbers on a piece of paper as in, say, today’s Stock Exchange or commodities market where there is only the most tenuous connection, if any, between the arbitrary value of the paper and any real or valuable object or commodity. Of course, from the point of view of the lender, usury has one advantage over the productivity or venture-based system: it eliminates risk, for the lender, anyway. But it increases risk many fold for the borrower who not only puts his business and his own capital on the line but sometimes everything he possesses. The borrower signs a bond or contract borrowing ten thousand florins and promising to pay back fifteen come what may, and as collateral he gives the lender the right to seize certain property if he is unable to pay by the stated date. The Lombard banking system was essentially a tool for the production of new wealth, while usury is a system for transferring existing wealth into a smaller number of hands, usually Jewish.”

  “So how did the kikes eventually move in on the system?” asked Rooney.

  “When did usury get its first foothold in the Western economy? Basically, when the Aryan ruling élite of that time, like their counterparts of the twentieth century, lost sight of their principles in the scramble for wealth, became deracinated, and started acting like Jews. Unfortunately, the first big capitalist usurers in modern history were these same Lombard bankers in their later stages. The Jews then slid in on the coattails of the regrettably accurate claim that ‘everybody is doing it,’ and within a short time were running the whole game. Always remember: if you offer the Jew a fingertip, he’ll take the whole hand. Essentially two things happened. First, a lot of the Lombard banks crashed down through the years when they made too many bad decisions, creating fewer and bigger banks handling more money led by more unscrupulous men as the Renaissance advanced. Late Renaissance bankers and financial tycoons were often converted Jews, many of whom continued to practice Judaism in secret and openly favored their own people at the expense of their host nations. Additionally, the Church became corrupt and quit enforcing the anti-usury statutes, and the secular princes and dukes and whatnot got into debt to the banks and overlooked the fact that they had begun to charge interest just like the Jews.”

  “Just like the damned credit card companies now all operate out of South Dakota or Delaware, so they can charge twenty-nine per cent,” said George Douglas angrily.

  “You got it,” said Red with a nod. “Usury crept into our economy in stages, and it was still frowned upon even as late as the nineteenth century. A character in a Sherlock Holmes story, for example, a ruined gambling nobleman who has mortgaged everything he owns and is about to lose it all, is referred to as being in the hands of the Jews by author Arthur Conan Doyle, an expression one could still get away with using as late as the 1890s. Now, of course, we’re all in the hands of the Jews. We’ve got credit cards operating out of states like South Dakota with no banking laws to speak of, that charge twenty-nine percent revolving interest. It’s actually cheaper to borrow money from the Mob. Organized crime’s traditional vigorish or interest rate being six for five or about eighteen percent.”

  Red had the true teacher’s gift of being able to make history come alive. He was full of really interesting little bits and pieces of historical trivia, and yet he always used them to illustrate larger points. One night we were talking about the Second World War and the mission of Rudolf Hess, who flew to Britain in 1940 in an attempt to reach a negotiated settlement and was imprisoned for the rest of his life for his trouble. “It shows just how desperate Adolf Hitler was not to fight Britain that he allowed Hess to make his peace flight,” said Morehouse. “You see, Hitler already pretty much knew that the British would never accept any peace that allowed National Socialist Germany to remain intact. How many of you have ever heard of the Venlo incident?” None of us had. I hadn’t, and I was fairly well read in things Third Reich-ish.

  “Venlo is a small town in Holland, right on the border with Germany,” Red explained. “The German Sicherheitsdienst or security service ended up kidnapping a couple of British spooks from there in the early months of the war. In the winter of 1939 Europe was in the grip of what they called the sitzkrieg, the phony war. The Führer knew that it was only a matter of time before the final showdown between National Socialism and Bolshevism, and he was desperately anxious to avoid a war on two fronts and make peace with the West while there was still time. Even before Hess, Hitler tried to make peace with Britain. This was just after Churchill had taken over from Neville Chamberlain as prime minister, and Hitler wanted to know if there was any possibility at all that Churchill might see reason and stop the war.

  “So he had his SD chief, Walther Schellenberg, set up a sting on British MI6 or whatever foreign intelligence was called at the time. Schellenberg had one of his officers, who came from an old Prussian Junker family, contact two British agents in Holland. This was before Holland fell
in the blitz, remember. This man told the Brits that he represented a cabal of disaffected German officers and industrialists and government officials who weren’t happy about taking orders from an Austrian housepainter, etcetera and were allegedly contemplating a coup against Hitler, but they wanted to know ahead of time what kind of peace terms Churchill would be willing to offer. I can’t recall all the various maneuvers; they went on for some months, but eventually the Brits were taken in and the proposal was laid before Churchill. Now, do you know what Britain’s terms for peace with Germany and an end to the Second World War before it had even begun were? Churchill laid down only two conditions. First, the death of Adolf Hitler and the dismantling of the National Socialist state. Second—and this is what gives the whole game away as to what that war was about—the second condition Churchill made was the return of Germany to the international gold standard.”