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Notes on the Usury Paradigm

Tom White

The world has had a long love affair with the idea of growth—growth of everything from population to wealth. And most of the world still believes that growth is a “good thing.” Unfortunately, it isn’t a good thing, at least not over the long haul.

Over short periods of time and for special purposes growth can be borne; in fact without some growth, we should have no food and no people. All of us start as an ovum and a spermatozoon and go on from there. We had better bear with that fact cheerfully, or we shall really be in trouble. The growth of that initial fertilized human ovum is the very model of sane and acceptable growth, since after nine months a baby results, and after 90 years, more or less, barring wars, disease, or famine that shorten life span, that baby dies and makes room for another human being. Sanity.

I believe the world needs to drop its fascination with perpetual growth, which is an insanity. The formula for it is the formula for “compound interest,” which Einstein is alleged to have said is the greatest invention of the human race. I should say rather the “greatest lunacy” of the human race. And I go so far as to say that “compound interest on money” is THE paradigm of modern global society, of finance-capitalist society.

The whole world is entranced by the possibility of living like the rich, which means, first, getting hold of a fortune. As some Wall Street operator has famously said, this is something you need to do just once. Then you can live on the interest from said fortune, “invested wisely in sound stocks and bounds.”

This simple program really worked for a time and some people, notably for the British in their heyday as rentiers to virtually the whole world. That world is now gone, as surely as Jane Austen’s world is gone of known fortunes and predictable returns on them. But not its central ideology. That still rules us as the dominant social paradigm of our entire age and over all the world. Our current U.S. president seems to be convinced that with the right jiggering the system can be made to work again. I do not think so. Only a huge disaster can result from what is now going forward in Washington, DC, and New York City (Wall Street)—and as far as I can see, in the rest of the world’s capitals.

Which Is It?

Depending on one’s angle of view, the current world situation and the current American situation can be seen as either ridiculously simple or murderously complex.

The complex view is the daily staple of the newspapers and the Internet. It has produced the present national (and world) mood: a semi-stunned, vast world of plebs (6-plus billion people) sits around wondering what’s going to happen next (and watching TV if they have it); a very small elite cooks up “happenings,” wars included, and delivers them to governments. The pleb watches and comments and, while money lasts, buys food (including dinners-out) and pursues daily interests, entertainments, and duties. Does disaster lie ahead? Will all go forward swimmingly? Who knows? And as long as my “thing” keeps going, who cares?

The simple view, however, is on display, more or less stridently, only on certain web sites on the Internet, in certain new books and many old ones. It has no large clientèle, because it is hated with an intense passion by the current Establishment (see below), which has done and will do everything it can to kill it off. At present the Establishment’s modus operandi is to stifle and ignore it, to treat it as the ravings of lunatics.

By the “simple view” I mean the call for a complete overhaul of our money-and-credit system, an overhaul that would return the issuance of all money from private bankers to the government, “the people.” The primary website for those who are interested in the current state of this immensely rational argument is that of the American Monetary Institute at http://www.monetary .org/. The AMI is run by Stephen Zarlenga, director. He has written a superb book, The Lost Science of Money: The Mythology of Money—The Story of Power, which can be bought for $60 through the AMI website but will cost at least $20 to $30 more through Amazon because Amazon has chosen to be most uncooperative with the author in selling this anti-Establishment work.

AMI has a developed program, including a draft of a monetary reform act that has been presented to Congress, but it gets no mainstream media publicity because the bankers presently “own” Congress and rule it, as they do the media.

A few more words on the overhaul AMI seeks: it involves, first, some combination of a repudiation or write-down of our national debt and a jubilee of debt forgiveness such as the world has not seen for several millennia (not since Biblical days). Professor Michael Hudson of the University of Kansas (website: http://www.michael- hudson.com/) is an economist and historian and an authority on the Mesopotamian invention of interest and the use of Jubilee years and the like debt-forgiveness practices of virtually all governments before imperial Rome to offset the social evils that always result from interest-taking.

The proposed overhaul or reform of the money system also means (or should mean) the end of interest-taking as a function of the issuance of money. Most of our present bankers’ money represents an interest-bearing loan to somebody. For there to be more money under the present system there has to be more debt. That is the deadly connection now in force nearly everywhere.

I would cheerfully agree to “abolish” interest-taking (usury properly so-called), except that you cannot abolish such things. It’s like trying to abolish sexual wanderings or greed. But one can withhold the use of the law to enforce interest-taking, and that should effectively end the worst of the usurers’ depredations. Even that, of course, is a far-away eventuality in our banker-ruled world.

Now for a few elucidations

There is an immense more to be said about money. I advance some thoughts in the remainder of this piece. These thoughts are set down in no particular order and are basically free-standing, except that they are all connected to my principal topic.

A Viable Government

By the words “nation,” “state,” or “country” we usually mean essentially the same thing. Let's start with what defines a State or an independent country. (This is quoted from the geography section of About.com):

Begin quote:

An independent State:

—Has space or territory, which has internationally recognized boundaries (boundary disputes are OK).

—Has people who live there on an ongoing basis.

—Has economic activity and an organized economy. A country regulates foreign and domestic trade and issues money.

[This is where Matt Rosenberg, the author of this definition, goes off track. If any “independent state issues money” I am not aware of which they are. I’d like to know. I suspect this is the reason for the strength of China, but I simply don’t know the facts. I remind you I am not a finance professional; else I should almost certainly be arguing for the divine right of bankers, which is the default mode of most financial writers. The U.S. for example presently has (no doubt temporarily) the most powerful money in the world; oil, the “black gold,” is marketed in dollars worldwide; and all our current wars, in one view, are designed to obtain oil sources or oil-pipeline routes The U.S. dollar is virtually a world standard, but it is issued by the private bankers who own the Federal Reserve, a condition I argue in this article needs to be ended.]

—Has the power of social engineering, such as education.

—Has a transportation system for moving goods and people.

—Has a government which provides public services and police power.

—Has sovereignty. No other State should have power over the country's territory.

[Again, an objection to author Rosenberg’s point. Sovereignty is defined as the “supreme power.” It rules the nation and issues its money. I remind you of Meyer Anselm Rothschild’s classic remark to the effect that so long as he controlled a nation’s money, he didn’t care who made its laws. He knew, of course, that he who issues a nation’s money is its true sovereign.]

—Has external recognition. A country has been "voted into the club" by other countries.

There are currently 195 independent countries or States around the world. Territories of countries or individual parts of a country are not countries in their own right.

End of quote.

Usury: A Definition

By usury I mean the taking of any interest on a loan of money—any interest, any kind of money. There are other definitions of usury, but this is the one that our Western world began with, the one that undergirds the Bible’s prohibition of usury. I am sticking with it.

The Model

The model or pattern for the rise of the “perpetual growth paradigm” or, as I also call it, the “usury paradigm,” is, as I have said, compound interest.

Please bear with me for a bit of a somewhat technical set-out: the formula for compound interest is D=P(1+r)n, where D is the debt at the end of a designated number of years; P is the principal loaned; r is the rate of interest; n is the number of years the principal was loaned for.

Doubling

From this formula one can quickly derive the famous “Law of 72,” the law of doubling. To determine (approximately) how long it will take for a quantity of anything to double at a certain rate of growth, divide 72 by that annual growth rate.

You probably are already aware of how quickly one reaches astronomical numbers by repeatedly doubling any quantity: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, 16,384. . . . Thus one can go from, for example, $1 million to $1,638.4 million (that figure equals $1.638 trillion or $1,638,000,000) in a mere 14 doublings.

As to “doubling”—it is clear that any growth persisted in long enough will lead to a doubling, and if the growth continues, to still further doublings, and so on, forever. Continued, everlasting growth of anything is simply impossible in our finite world. The formula for compound interest is the formula for perpetual growth. Perpetual growth is impossible; compound interest is the formula for the impossible—for utter ruin. Nature stops all growth. There are no 14-foot-tall human beings, no 500-lb. mosquitoes, no 900-foot-tall Sequoias.

Compound interest on money is possible for a while, but if persisted in, it must produce disaster. We are just now at the end of a 500-year growth binge produced by the astonishing “success” of capitalism. It has also produced a disaster, although not everyone is yet convinced of that, chiefly because we have not yet seen the final chapters of the story.

My wife and I recently got a money pitch in the mail from Shell Oil, with whom we have a gasoline account. If we accepted their generous offer to advance us $1,200, they would be delighted to do so. In the small print, however, they made it plain that if we failed to meet their terms in some way, they would be forced to charge us 28% annually on the outstanding balance. By almost anyone’s definition of usury that’s usury. At that rate an outstanding balance would double in less than three years. The only people who would take such an offer have arrived at a state of desperation awful to think about. You might well ask why an oil company is in the usury racket. I think the answer is, it is the best racket in town. In our city of fewer than 100,000 people the number of banks grows continually and “paycheck lenders” proliferate in our strip-mall storefronts like dandelions in an untended lawn.

Paradigm

The word “paradigm” in its present meaning came into common use in the years since 1962, when Thomas Kuhn employed it tellingly in his now famous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. To simplify, Kuhn held that science meanders along according to one “paradigm” until, after many contributions from many scientists, the “old paradigm” comes to seem inadequate to explain things; the scientists who held stubbornly to the “old paradigm” have the good grace to die off; and lo! a new paradigm comes into existence.

Kuhn thought the word “examplar” just as good as paradigm to indicate what he was talking about, but “paradigm” has carried the day and been much expanded in its meaning and applications over the last 40 years.

I contend that the Usury Paradigm, which fosters the adoption of governmental and financial policies to promote “growth,” as applied to the human cultivation of the earth, to the industrial production of nations, and especially to the “growth” of money by means of “interest” as the enabler of all plans for the future, has led to our present quite grievous dilemma. To summarize; it has resulted in an unsustainable, rising level of world population, and intensifying global crises in food, energy, pollution, and lately and above all, in the financial world.

(Wikipedia gives this on paradigm: “The Merriam-Webster Online dictionary defines ‘paradigm’ as ‘a philosophical and theoretical framework of a scientific school or discipline within which theories, laws, and generalizations and the experiments performed in support of them are formulated; broadly : a philosophical or theoretical framework of any kind.’”)

The Nub

Pius XI, coming at essentially the same social dissension that Marx called “class war,” pinned it down in a brilliant paragraph that has only one flaw, a flaw of omission; he did not name the people who had the power he described. Even back then, in 1931, it was not possible, evidently, for a Pope to get that close to the bone, to name the class of bankers or hint at their Jewish flavor or the usury “paradigm” they promulgated. This was in his famous social encyclical, Quadragessimo Anno of 1931, in Paragraphs 104-109.

Pius XI was writing in the same period in which Father Charles Coughlin was being disciplined by the Church for his outspoken critique—quite a bit too pointed—of the same money masters whom Pius described. (See Thomas J. Herron’s article, “When Is a Church Burning Not a Hate Crime? Jewish Lightning Hits Father Coughlin’s Shrine,” in Culture Wars Magazine, November 2002.)

Noting that the capitalist system had undergone many changes since Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum of 1891, Pius wrote:

“In the first place, it is obvious that not only is wealth concentrated in our times but an immense power and despotic economic dictatorship is consolidated in the hands of a few. . . . This dictatorship is being most forcibly exercised by those who, since they hold the money and completely control it, control credit also and rule the lending of money. Hence they regulate the flow, so to speak, of the life-blood whereby the entire economic system lives, and have so firmly in their grasp the soul, as it were, of economic life that no one can breathe against their will.”

Christ’s Either-Or Rule

In several verses of the New Testament that have no parallels in the Old, Christ says a human being has only two choices, he will worship God or Mammon. Strong’s Concordance gives the meaning of Mammon as a Chaldean word for money. That’s how Msgr. Ronald Knox translated it in his The New Testament in English published in the 1940s. The critical verses are Matthew 6:24 (in the Sermon on the Mount) and Luke 16:13; they are nearly identical and rendered this way by Msgr. Knox:

Mt: 6:24. A man cannot be the slave of two masters at once; either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will devote himself to the one and despise the other. You must serve God or money; you cannot serve both.

 

Lk: 16:13. No servant can be in the employment of two masters at once; either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will devote himself to the one and despise the other. You must serve God or money; you cannot serve both.

 

It seems obvious to me that we live in the Age of Mammon, or in Augustine’s terms, we live in the City of Man. The City of God is remote from us. We may try to connect with it, but the opposition is tremendous and the encouragement to self-delusion equally so. In Hindu terms, we live in the Kali Yuga, the end times of the end times.

 

The Classical Truth About Money

The stand-out classical point about usury or interest-taking is Aristotle’s: “Usury is unnatural.” Aristotle understood that money is sterile. And he said that "Money exists not by nature but by law," and, "The most hated sort (of wealth getting) and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself and not from the natural object of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange but not to increase at interest (my emphasis). And this term interest (tokos), which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of all modes of getting wealth, this is the most unnatural" (1258b Politics).

The Modern Understanding

As an illustration of the commonplace assumption nowadays that “growth is good,” let me now quote a 5-column headline in our local Sunday newspaper only a few months ago: “U.S. Economy is growing despite doomsayers.” The piece was written by a local man, who is widely revered hereabouts because he is apparently vastly well-to-do and is an economist, but no mere academician, rather an effective player in the markets of the state and nation. He owns a fine house rumored to have cost many millions.

This pundit assures the local “investing public” that they can count on achieving “compound annual growth rates (CAGR) that exceed those of the U.S.” And that means, he says, a growth rate higher than 3.77 percent, which is what he calculates for the nation “for the long term (until 2030).” (That rate of growth would produce a doubling of Gross National Product in a mere 18 years! And you thought that things were a bit dicey already!) How the rate of inflation figures in this our author does not say. There is not the tiniest note of skepticism about the need for and the general excellence of “growth.” Welcome to Nut-World thought as presently prevailing (or as still prevailing about a year ago).

I notice in all my recent surfings of the Internet that “growth” is being called for at virtually every hand: pundits look for signs of “green shoots,” eagerly prospect for this or that manifestation of renewed “expansion,” or signs of growth in anything at all. They speak with one voice as to the excellence of renewed “growth.” Meanwhile the only thing growing is our total of national and personal debt, and that is going off the charts for sure.

The Establishment

The most effective element in the American “Establishment” and in fact in the “Establishment” of all the world is the Jewish one. That is not really new in America or the world but it has become quite obvious since World War II. By “Establishment” I mean simply “the people who run things, whose word goes, who have the controlling (not necessarily the only) voice in the councils of politics, finance, war, and peace.”

In America until WW II, the WASPs, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, were unquestionably our Establishment, although the Jews were important from the beginning. It was Jewish influence that got us into WW I under Wilson and, actually a year before that war opened—four years before we entered it—the Jews in their role as international bankers (think Rothschild, Warburg), achieved the legal creation by our Congress of the privately owned Federal Reserve System, and Jews (or their surrogates) have dominated it ever since, thus controlling the issue of our money and the purposes to which it is put, with the result Pius XI described in the passage quoted above.

The years since 1946 have seen something now called the “rise of the Jews,” the tremendous increase in America in the wealth, power, and numbers of the Ashkenazim, the Central European Jews, who have, incidentally, very little but a literary connection with the Holy Land.

Just a few years ago Americans became aware that fully half of the “great rich” of our land, that is to say, its billionaires, are Jewish, although Jews make up less than 3% of the population. In recent years something called the “Jewish (or Israeli) Lobby,” —AIPAC and the hundreds of other Jewish organizations in the land—has proved immensely powerful, capable of seeing that billions of dollars of American support go to Israel every year, despite Israel’s record of waging relentless war on the Palestinians it shunted aside and has brutally oppressed since 1948.

Conspiracy

All comments of the foregoing kind are routinely dismissed by various Jewish spokespeople as predictable anti-Semitism on the part of non-Jews, but the one thing one never hears is a believable denial that there is, in fact, no plan or intention on the part of Jews (the BIG Jews who have the money for it and not the little Jews who do not) to “rule the world.” All their actions as bankers indicate they intend to. Israel Shamir, a Christian, former Jew, and great writer, clearly thinks the Jews intend to rule the goyim, and in certain ways do now. He calls them “the Masters of Discourse,” controllers of public speech. They appear to already rule America. We await at this moment word that Obama can defuse Natanyahu’s radical program for the Middle-East: “Jews Über Alles.” The issue is in doubt, at least. Shamir makes the curious observation that the Jews are like locusts; with no manifest individual leader, they still succeed in ravaging any country they choose to.

The Crime of the Ages

The three-millennium- old drive by the Jews to install usury everywhere has accelerated in modern, “capitalist” times. They came back into England after centuries of banishment with Cromwell (whose father was a banker in Holland), and in 1694 rigged up (with a non-Jewish front man) the monopoly privilege of issuing British money. Around the time of Napoleon, the Rothschilds arrived and prospered mightily. One observer has noted the Rothschilds ruled England by 1820 and have since. Their tactic was to intermarry with the British royalty and cut them in on the profits. Essentially the same story was repeated in America when the Rockefellers joined the Warburgs in establishing our Federal Reserve System (a private bankers monopoly of the right to issue U.S. money).

The use of usury to turn a nation of free people into debt slaves is the basic idea; it is no exaggeration to say that it is the crime of the ages and cries out for correction.

Australian scholar Peter Myers has lately provided an illustration of Jewish awareness of what they are about in supporting debt for gentiles. (Myers’s website, where one may sign on for his frequent emails is http://mailstar. net/index. html.)

Myers quotes a Lubavitcher source printed in an April 7, 2009 issue of Actualité Juive, a “respectable Jewish magazine” in France. It is a "Positive Mitsva N° 198: “It's the command we were instructed to demand interest from a non-Jew to whom we lend money, so that not only we don't help him and don't do him a service, but we *harm* him by lending money with interest, something we are forbidden to do to a Jew."

Myers comments: “I already knew this Mitsva, but it's the first time I read that its goal is to harm gentiles. I translated the French verb "nuire" ("nuisions") by "to harm." A scan of the page is at http://www.cijoint. fr/cjlink. php?file= cj200908/ cijmNY94nK. jpg.

Myers quotes two verses from the O.T. to the point:

 

"You will lend to many nations, but you will not borrow. The LORD will make you the head, and not the tail; you shall be only at the top, and not the bottom . . ." (Deuteronomy 28:12-13).

 

"You shall not charge interest on loans to another Israelite, interest on money, interest on provisions, interest on anything that is lent. On loans to a foreigner you may charge interest, but on loans to another Israelite you may not charge interest . . ." (Deuteronomy 24:19-20).

Population

This is the word for the biggest problem of all. If moral sanity were somehow ascendant in the world, all attention would be focused on feeding everybody adequately. And on redesigning world systems, not by fiat but by humane changes everywhere, so as to continue to provide food for all. This should be the main focus of every locality from this point forward: arranging for successful growing of food within easy travel range: virtual agricultural self-sufficiency. Of course this is a “Utopian” program. The tragedy is that a sane response to the most necessary challenges is considered Utopian. I’ll say no more, just perhaps direct you to the website www.dieoff.com for some scary estimates of what lies ahead if we just keep going as we are now.

Except to say that the overstretch of world population up to and beyond the Earth’s carrying capacity, especially in the teeth of the crash in cheap energy supplies, that is, oil, may never be much discussed by politicians, but at some point these folk will be swept away. Then, at last, we shall see the “population problem” writ large, with who knows what kind of dire consequences or inventive solutions.

Austrian Economics

One of the more significant of opinion-makers about money in America goes by the name of the “Austrian School of Economics.” It is currently headed by Lew Rockwell, a co-worker of Murray Rothbard in his last years, who now heads the von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, a focus of libertarian opinion. His school would liquidate or disestablish the Federal Reserve System in favor of a return to the “gold standard.” In other words, they hold entirely with the commodity money principle: money should have intrinsic worth and not be just a measure of other values. Ron Paul was their candidate in the last election.

The “Austrians” particularly deplore the idea of government as the issuer of money. They want banks to run on a basis of 100%- reserves, employing the gold standard; and they have adopted an unremitting anti-government stance. Their contention is that everything government does can be done better by private entities. Many of their published writings are extremely well done, those of Murray Rothbard especially, but there is a radical blindness endemic to their work: they cannot see that government—of one sort or another—has been with us since the dawn of history, and is apt to be with us to the end of it—and for good reasons that have been shown up in the current crisis.

I repeat: the only power great enough to stop the bankers in their drive for control of the world is government-of- the-people, of the dwellers in those 195 nations we spoke of above. And even it is challenged as never before by the fact that banker cooperation in financing the world is running way ahead of national cooperation in managing it, with the looming possibility the bankers will “win.” It would help if government were not so corrupt, so on the take with respect, precisely, to the bankers, who are (or ought to be) their traditional enemies.

Other Voices

I have already mentioned here and there some people whose work is vital to the needed money reform. Here, briefly stated are a few of the more significant opponents of the bankers’ unfair monopoly of the power to issue money:

—Ezra Pound, to whom I owe my own conviction that the money question is the most important question before all nations. I have written about him before in Culture Wars.

—Eustace Mullins, a man who met Pound while he was in St. Elizabeths Hospital in D.C. charged with treason. He has written and published a number of vital books on the Federal Reserve and other financial and cultural topics, many of them unobtainable. I own a few of them and propose soon try to get in touch with Mr. Mullen again, not having heard from him in five or more years. Google for Eustace Mullins and follow where that leads. An impressive education will result.

—Rupert Ederer, who writes for Culture Wars magazine. He agrees that bankers should not issue our money, the government should. I m not sure how he would propose that should be done differently than the American Monetary Institute’s Stephen Zarlenga’s proposals.

A curious feature of the present scene is that all the various writers who have a common disdain for the present system, do not seem to be united in a mass to drive for change. They give the impression of being isolated individuals rather than a strong movement. Apparently that is as it must be after the sweeping takeover in the last century of nothing less than the world by the bankers, who gave globalized successfully way ahead of everybody else.

—Ellen Brown, an attorney and brilliant writer, I am less familiar with her work than I should be, but she is right-on.

—Richard Cook, an astonishingly brave writer and critic who has retired from the U.S. Treasury and is now supporting the money reform the American Monetary Institute proposes: Government issue and control of money. Cook is especially keen to see Major Douglas’s Social-Credit ideas put into effect. Ezra Pound was a major promoter of Douglas right after World War I. I believe Cook’s scheme is the right one, but of course highly unlikely to be adopted unless there is a sharp turn in D.C. at some point.

—The “Truth in Money” people. Currently their website says they are “taking a leave of absence.” I own the book of that name and am entirely convinced by it. Used copies of the paperback that I own, and paid perhaps less than $10 to buy 20 years ago, are now selling on Amazon for close to $200. Truth in Money was written by two engineers who really figured out what was going on.

—David Astle’s The Babylonian Woe. I have mentioned this work before. I think it one of the most interesting of all studies of banking practices and money. Astle tells the story from earliest times in Mesopotamia to Greece and Rome. Amazon has a used copy at $96; Barnes and Noble, where I bought my copy years ago, no longer offers it. It, like Truth in Money, offers a wonderful chance, it seems to me, to make a good profit on a reprint, but it doesn’t happen.

I should be offering more detail on important books. The above citations are rather at random. A good list would go on for pages. And when it comes to the Internet—I stand down. Incredible riches there. But this piece is already too long. I leave it to the interested reader to do his own research. The whole campaign of getting the usurers off our backs will take many people and require their doing much work—which will not, unfortunately, likely get done or achieve the result of driving off the crooks who are siphoning money out of the U.S. in a kind of high glee. It’s too easy, and Americans are too stupid and distracted to get it. What we’ll get out of all this is what we’ll no doubt deserve.

Prognosis

My own sentiment (and it is hardly more than that since it is an entirely emotional reading) is that there will be no very successful solution found to the economic distress the economy has encountered in the last year or more. A chief reason for my great skepticism about the economy and its “recovery” is that the same bankers who created the present financial mess have been enlisted by government to provide the solution. One might perhaps be forgiven for calling this crazy, but that’s what we’ve done.

We are probably entering a period of decline and reorientation that will stretch out for many years. I accept the premise of Peak Oil: the total amount in the world has been half used up; we are on a declining slope and can no longer count on “cheap energy.” We may hope to avoid violence and starvation, but perhaps we cannot. The great global networks of trade and capital transfer, of international lending and investment, will shrink, as global goods shipments have shrunk in the recent collapse of economic credit-based activity.

At some point I expect the word to go out from the “capitals”: save yourselves if you can. At that point I think massive and expensive governments may go unfunded and smaller and more efficient, more local ones arise to take their place. If this can be accomplished without chaos and gunfire we’ll be lucky. My crystal ball goeth not much beyond this point. It’s ridiculous to try to plot the future in detail; it will always be something we can’t foresee.

Some of the understandings one might hope would go with this reorientation are: “small is better,” “local is beautiful,” “government is by people we know.” I find myself disbelieving in monster totalitarian systems where huge, dazed herds of people are ruled by distant experts. That seems to me a highly dystopian vision that I hope and pray never comes to be. What I am reasonably sure of is that where we have lately seemed to be heading is not where we are going to end up. I hope my “vision” or opinion strikes others as fairly positive.

The Jews

Now we come to the most complex and unlikely aspect of this whole discussion. E. Michael Jones and writers published by him have explored this topic extensively over recent years. As have a number of other writers on money as noted above. It is possible to talk and write about money and problems with money without mentioning the connection of Jews to the subject, but it is misleading to do so.

Karl Marx wrote in On the Jewish Question, "Money is the zealous one God of Israel, beside which no other God may stand. . . . The God of the Jews has become secularised and is now a worldly God. The bill of exchange is the Jew's real God. His God is the illusory bill of exchange" (from On The Jewish Question, tr. Dagobert Runes as A World Without Jews) and quoted from Peter Myers at http://mailstar. net/leftprot. html).

Leave aside the melodramatic rhetoric. Is this statement of Marx not plainly true, not just of Jews but Mammonites of all lineages? It is astonishing how weak and dithery we Christians have become in the face of contemporary Mammonism. In fact is it at all accurate to claim that not very many real Christians any longer exist, in or outside the churches?

On Violence and War

I have lately accepted the views of Fr. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy (see his website: http://centerforchr istiannonviolenc e.org/).

Fr. Charlie insists that to use or defend the use of violence is to deny the Lord Christ. This view condemns the behavior of the churches and its leaders pretty generally. They have connived to misrepresent the teachings of Our Lord from the Constantinian conversion of Rome to the present. The Lord said we are to love our enemies and forgive those who wrong us. As we forgive them so shall we be forgiven our trespasses in life.

Of course Fr. Charlie is widely thought of, if thought of at all, as a typical clerical dreamer, unrealist, or what have you. Most of what I have said in this piece probably falls under the same dismissing rubric. No matter. Without vision the people perish.

I suggested to Israel Shamir that the Christian romance with violence (the Crusades, feudal chivalry, and their illegitimate heir in modern warfare) had been just the mistake Fr. McCarthy said it was. I included in this the much discussed and honored—except in practice—“Christian Just War Theory.” Shamir responded that he was not a pacifist. Nations, particularly weaker ones, he said, must be free to defend themselves against aggression.

I stand corrected by him: I choose non-violence for myself because I am a citizen of the most violent and aggressive rogue state in the world; however, prompted by Shamir, I acknowledge the right of, for example, the Iranians and N. Koreans to seek nuclear ability to defend themselves against the aggression of their enemies. In a dog-eat-dog world, it seems to me right to refuse to be just another dog, but others also have the right to see things differently.

I am done with warfare myself; but others are not. The idea of “gunning up” to defend oneself against U.S. armaments is ridiculous. Our government has moved with lethal force against anyone who muscles up against it; the sight of your gun(s) gives them the license to gun you down. The Branch Davidians in Waco were the classic victims of such government action.

I should like to end with this thought: God is the Supreme Power. The rest of us are mere jackanapes unless we submit ourselves humbly to him. We learn how to do that, in the West at least, through the Christ spirit, and in the East largely via other divine manifestations, “other mansions.” The Christ spirit is universally available to human beings under many names; it is ours anytime we seek it making no demands, just holding to the faith.

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