-Caveat Lector-
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As always, Caveat Lector.
Om
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THE BABYLONIAN WOE Chapters XI-XII
by David Astle
CHAPTER
I. "In the Beginning was the Word."
II. The Temple and the Counting House
III. "Per Me Die Regnant!"
IV. The Left Hand of Dawn
V. Blood, Sorrow, and Silver
VI. Babylon, Banking, and Bullion
VII. Phrygia, Finance, and Front Man
VIII. Tyrant and Trapezitae
IX. Potsherds and other Fragments
X. Pergamum and Pitane
XI. Voices from the Dust.
XII. Sparta, the Pelanors, Wealth and Women
XIII. Money Creators and the Political Control
XIV. Man Proposes but God Disposes
CHAPTER XI: VOICES FROM THE DUST
Page 152
Before ever the lust seized the Greeks for the precious metal
pieces on which were recorded their laws in respect to the unit of
exchange; that is, before Greece became completely thrall to the
international bullion and slave interests, money had existed among
them in various forms for a long time previously. Little knowledge
remains of such systems of exchange prior to the assumption of bullion
and slave interests of total hegemony but exist such systems did, and
the significance of its monetary units issued against state expenses,
and as opposed to issue by private persons as against collateral
security, was understood, as the evidence of the Sparta or Lycurgus
indicates.
Pheidon was not inventor of money but the same as Servius
Tullius, a reformer. He introduced into the Peloponnese a definite
system of weights and measures, he adapted the weight of the new money
and he officially abolished the old and cumbersome iron money.
Numismatists airily dismiss the suggestions of the symbols of
money as being indicated in ancient times on leather, wood, or baked
clay which are found in both Cedrenus, Suidas and Seneca but study of
so-called primitive currencies of today, such as the shell moneys of
Oceania, leave little doubt that our forefathers, fully understanding
of the true philosophy of money, may very well have used such
intrinsically valueless materials to record the values of their
tangible money, prior to the commencement of precious metal coinage;
in the same way as the Melanesians and Micronesians have used shells
for such purpose from time immemorial.
Page 153
However, that such numismatists dismiss the significance of such
money and question it as having ever existed, is not surprising
considering that they merely record the money towards the creation of
which the controllers of bullion supplied the material; thus in a way
controlling its issue and such order of society as it gave rise to,
and therefore the numismatists themselves. Consequently the dismissal
by the numismatists of other materials for money and its symbols, not
internationally desirable or controllable by their masters might be
expected.
According to Professor Fritz Heichelheim in his Ancient Economic
History, Suidas ascribes the monetary use of leather and "ostrakina"
(pieces of shell and pottery) to the Romans previous to Numa
Pompilius. Such currency only had value as it carried with it the will
of the ruler.
Page 154
Troy fell to the Greeks under Agamemnon in 1250 B.C. The
destruction of Bog-Haz Koi, the Hittite capital in 1225 B.C, could
only have taken place as a result of investment by experienced,
disciplined and well organized forces with an excellent engineering
corps.
Page 155
According to Dawson, the production of leather in the Hittite
world was a state monopoly. Such monopoly of leather production would
suggest the possibility, if not the likelihood, of leather as the
material on which the symbols of their money were recorded.
For any state to be as strong for a long period of time and,
moreover, stable, it had to control not merely the issue of the unit
of exchange but also the material of which its visible symbols were
made; which had to be a total monopoly. The Hittite state appears
constructed to the same order as those early cities, that is, of God,
Priest-King and priesthood, makes this deduction the more likely.
The similarity of language suggests the forefathers of the
patricians of Rome derived from within the Hittite sphere of
influence. If so, would it not be natural for them to reinstitute the
same monetary system amongst themselves as they had known in their
homelands?
The numismatists and historians date the "Aes Grave," considered
by them to be the first true metallic currency of Rome, from 338 B.C.
accepting the opinion of Prof. Haeberlin. What then did Rome use for
money prior to that date considering the relatively exact property
valuations and taxes of Servius? That they used rough lumps of copper
(Aes Rude) as everyday money, cannot be accepted. There is no vestige
of doubt that a refined system existed by no means unrelated to the
exchange systems of Greece and in which a form of "Credit," too often
a privately created abstract money, was made use of. This system may
have been no more related to silver bullion than it may have been to
any other commodity, and international silver bullion interests would
exercise no definite control therein.
Page 156
There would be no reason to discredit Suidas's remarks in respect
to leather and clay money previous to Numa Pompilius. The clay
"scarabs" still being unearthed in Etruria may well represent evidence
of the clay units. Leather money of course would long since have
perished. Nor is there reason to think that the fiduciary money of
clay undoubtedly issued by bankers of Athens in the 5th Century H.C.
was in any way a new idea.
According to Livy relative to the financing of the cavalry of
Rome, "each century had a grant levied on rich widows of 2000 a
year." Are we to understand that the rich widows came to the treasury
with bags of pieces of rough copper?
Where taxes withdraw units of exchange from circulation, there
must be a force which injects such units of exchange into the
circulation. What therefore was the source of such units? Clearly
there is no reason to doubt this record of Livy.
In the Panadects of Justinian, Tenth Book, occurs this remarkable
passage from Julius Paulus, jurisconsul of the third century of our
era:
"The origin of buying and selling began with exchange. It common
happens that one is in need of what another has in excess but it
seldom coincided in time that what one possessed, the other wanted. A
device was chosen whose legal and permanent value remedied the
difficulties of barter by its homogeneity.
Page 157
This device being officially promulgated, circulated, and
maintained its purchasing power, not so much from its substance as
from its quantity. Whether those devices were clay or leather or wood
does not really matter. As such, they were true money being
intrinsically valueless and only of value because of that law which
ordered their acceptance in the exchanges. What above all would matter
would be the ease with which they could be counterfeited, no doubt the
source of their ultimate failure, and whether they were loaned into
circulation by private persons against so-called collateral, or paid
into circulation as against government expenses, as were the Aes Grave
at a later date.
Almost all philosopher-scholars of antiquity wrote of numerical
or fiduciary systems of money as being the only natural systems. None
of them entered into discussion as to whether issuance should be
against state indebtedness. It was so obviously a necessity for good
order and well-being in life, that such discussion never seems to
have occurred to them. The success of private monetary emission in
this day and its boldness now that its former criminal activities are
recognized and accepted as inevitable, such men could not even
imagine, not even Aristotle, who by reason of his family connections,
must have known something of the undercurrents of the financial world
as it existed at that time.
Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Zeno, all seemed to have been clear
on the subject. Plato was most clear and no doubt studied the
numerical system at Sparta. Living between 429 B.C. and 347 B.C., he
must have been at Athens when such system certainly must still have
existed at Sparta even if, as a result of the war, it had been
replaced by the Athenian system of private money issue based on the
fiction of precious metals or valuables in reserve.
(The Carthaginians make use of the following kind of money: in a
small piece of leather a substance is wrapped of the size of a piece
of 4 drachmae; but what this substance is no one knows except the
maker. After, this is sealed and issued for circulation; and he who
possesses the most of this is regarded as having the most money.)
Page 158
On the subject, Plato wrote:
"Further the Law of the ideal Republic enjoins that no private
individual shall possess or hoard gold and silver bullion but have
money only for domestic use, such as is necessary for dealing with
artisans and servants, sojourners and slaves. Wherefore our citizens
should have a money current amongst themselves but not acceptable to
the rest of mankind. When an individual needs to go abroad, on his
return, if he has any such money remaining let him deposit it in the
treasury and receive an equivalent sum in local money. If he is
discovered to have concealed it, let it be confiscated and let him who
knows and does not inform, be subject to anathema and dishonor equally
with him who brought the money and also to a fine not less in amount
than that of the universal money which had been brought back."
Page 159
Aristotle made the comment:
Numisma (Money) by itself is a mere device which has value only
by law (Nomos) and not by nature; so that a change of convention
between those who use it, is sufficient to deprive it of all value and
its power to satisfy our wants."
In the Ethics, Aristotle states further:
"By virtue of voluntary convention, Nomisma has become the media
of exchange. We call it Nomisma because its efficacy is due not to
nature but to Nomois (Law) and because it is always in our power to
control it."
Thus despite at least four hundred years of control of trade by
the masters of precious metal bullion, the scholars still clearly
understood the actuality of money and that it was an evincement of
the law. They still understood it was but so many numbers injected
into a circulation amongst the people relating value to value, and not
influenced by the material on which these numbers as laws were
recorded.
To say that money as such began with the striking of precious
metal coinage is therefore incorrect. The statement that an
international control over money came about as a result of a certain
group of private persons located in all major states of the world
creating a monopoly of those precious metals of which its symbols were
coming to be made, or better put, on which they were imprinted,would
be more to the point.
The evidence that in the earliest coinages in Greece had
essentially a local circulation in no way alters the picture
previously outlined of silver money as being part of an international
conspiracy. All Greek states apart from Athens and Samos, Siphnos and
Corcyra had to obtain silver bullion for their coinage from abroad,
which necessarily obliged them to deal with those traders who
specialized in dealing in bullion. Such trade in bullion had to be in
the hands of a small and highly secretive group and it would be only
such a group that could also control those supplies of slave labor and
their purchase from triumphant peoples whose warlike activities, as
likely as not, they had instigated themselves; slave labor so
necessary to the success of their mining operations.
Page 160
For example, the fact that the Carthaninian mines of Spain show
no signs of even the use of the ordinary propping and shoring
associated with mining cannot but indicate that the miners were most
likely captives of war from distant parts purchased for a song from a
victorious general and driven under threat of the lash.
At that period it would appear, such labor was so plentiful
that the cost of purchase of new slaves would have been less than the
cost of ordinary safety precautions. The silver mines of Spain as
worked by the Romans show interestingly enough an entirely different
story. All safety methods including the use of concrete, were used;
which also agrees with the fact that Rome, even when silver money was
in use so far as internal exchanges were concerned, had a relatively
ample supply of money for the details of day to day organization in
the overvalued bronze fiduciaries, the most grandiose "aes" and its
parts or multiples.
History has proven over and over again that a precious metal
coinage will move one way or another to where it might realize the
most profit either as coin or bullion. The so-called law of the
economists known as Gresham's Law states just that: "Bad money drives
out the good," which means that the silver in circulation would be
replaced by that less intrinsically valuable money, if such also
circulated, and which the economists described as "the bad," (the
questions of course being bad for whom?); such silver being hoarded
and exported to whatever market offered the best price or advantage.
Page 161
A few outstanding examples of this are:
a. The disappearance of silver from Athens and its replacement by
baked clay facsimiles during the 5th century B.C. and by yellowish
copper at the end of the same century.
b. The drain of silver from Rome during the early Empire to the Orient
where the ratio varied around 6:1 as compared to 12:1 established by
Caesar and its replacement by bronze or copper fiduciaries.
c. The drain of English silver coinage to India after 1666, such
silver being replaced by the "bad" money of the goldsmith's receipts
and the Bank of England notes and ledger credit page entries.
d. The disappearance of silver roubles in Russia during the 18th
century, their place being taken by the "bad" money of the copper
roubles and later, paper roubles (Assignats).
e. The almost complete disappearance from circulation between the
years 1967-1973 of silver coins of our country of Canada, such silver
coins being replaced by coins fabricated from base metal alloys.
Returning to ancient Greece, Prof. Heichelheim states:
"Such hoards as found previous to 560 B.C. are found in the areas
in which they were minted and never in other countries. Which fact
indicates that prior to 560 B.C. it is probable that laws governing
the export of coin were strictly enforced in Greece. Any silver that
left a state would do so covertly as bullion. The following Athenian
edict is evidence that such laws existed:
"Let no Athenian or sojourner lend money to be exported unless
(to pay) for corn or some such commodity allowed by law."
Page 162
By the time of Plato some two hundred years later, the real
weaknesses of precious metal systems of coinage were beginning to
show, hence the increasing discussion of the matter of money in
schools of philosophy. The establishment of the "Aes Grave" bronze
system at Rome certainly bears close resemblance to that internal
coinage as recommended by Plato for the ideal republic. By the date
generally accepted as the commencement of the Aes Grave system, 338
B.C., Roman scholars would have been fully aware of the teachings of
Plato. In the Aes Grave system, the national money was paid into
circulation by the state.
The weaknesses inherent in precious metal coinage systems as
becoming apparent in the time of Plato were:
a. The coins wore out or were hoarded out of circulation.
b. Hard rock mining was never profitable without slave labor.
c. Mine slaves died and sometimes, there being no wars, they could not
be replaced so easily.
d. The mines themselves became exhausted.
e. In a time of national calamity, when coinage was most of all
needed, it disappeared into hoards, largely held by foreigners,
members of that secret class of persons to whom wars were but
opportunity to drive harder bargains yet again, with mankind and his
states and peoples.
f. Even in time of peace, captains and merchants, if permitted, were
ever seeking a cargo for their return trip. If such cargo was not
available, they would take away their balances in precious metals or
slaves.
Page 163
A country like Greece with a large population would usually have
an unfavorable balance of trade which further drained away its
precious metal coinage or bullion. At the time of Plato, this
condition must have been really showing and its significance.
The Laureion mines were petering out despite the agitation by
Xenophon for the government of Athens to purchase ten thousand slaves
to lease to mine owners, (presumably obtained from his financial
sponsors) and where silver had become scarce.
The numerous clay facsimiles of Eastern Mediterranean coinages
still being found at Athens show that foreign bankers were quietly
filling the void with issues of a fiduciary character such as our
paper money, exemplified by the baked clay facsimiles mentioned by
Lenormant which the bankers clearly were injecting into circulation to
their own private account and that of their most useful Greek agents.
This would be effected by pointing out to a customer to whom the
banker was prepared to make a loan how much safer the actual silver
would be if left with the bankers in reserve in the Acropolis where
it would be guarded by the gods themselves and how these clay
facsimiles which all the customers were accepting could always be
redeemed in silver if really necessary(!).
(In London 2000 years later, when the goldsmiths operated exactly
the same "racket," the confidence of the public was gained through the
connivance, witting or unwitting, of the Royal House, and the storage
of the goldsmiths' reserves in the Tower of London. The fact of their
being in the Tower offered the same sanctity to the goldsmiths'
practice of issuing receipts as against non-existing reserves, i.e.,
fraudulent receipts. To encourage the circulation of his receipts, he
could plead the difficulties and the dangers of the formalities
attached to withdrawal of the metal itself for the purpose of
settlement of an account.
Page 164
Seltsman in "Greek Coins" says that following the complete
collapse of the Athenian Empire, Athens resumed its previous financial
activities through the growth of powerful "banks," such as that of
Pasion which operated in all major Greek cities providing a money
market for all of the Greek world. However, Seltsman makes no mention
of abstract expansions of the monetary unit, nor of the clay
facsimiles which were the tangible evincement of such expansion.
What Seltsman really points out to us in stressing that Athens
resumed its previous financial activities with powerful banks such as
that of Pasion operating in all major Greek cities, is the correctness
of our previous conjecture that the real underlying purposes of the
"Great" Peloponnesian war was to establish private common money market
across the Greek world totally controlled by the trapezitae or
bankers. Banks, too, couldn't thrive and realize full potential except
that government was become their instrument and that government, the
creator of the laws of the land, was in their debt. The foundation of
this god-power was government borrowing of the banker's fictitious
"Credit" money. The frantic efforts of the Athenian government to
stimulate increase of government spending while at the same time
devising methods to withdraw money by Sales Tax reveal that Athenian
government was now more firmly than ever in the hands of the
International Money Power, if Sparta was but now re-arrived there
after absence of three hundred years or so.
Page 165
Both Athens and Sparta were in no better a position than they
were before the war. Neither had won and neither had lost. Both lay
exhausted and over their prostrate bodies, the servants of the same
sardonic Money Power drew the chains of their slavery.
According to Rostovtsev, at Athens during the fourth century
B.C., both population and unemployment increased, prices rose, and
there was so-called "class struggle" and discontent.
Increase in prices is usually indicative of increase by the
number of monetary units in circulation. So while markets had shrunk,
money was still being created and put into circulation as against
"Free Bread and Circuses" consequently causing inflation and the rise
of prices of record. It is clear that what Athens exported was
privately created capital. Thus in what we know of as Antiquity, the
full meaning of the unit of exchange as a purely abstract conception,
regardless of what material it was recorded on, was clearly
understood, and without a doubt, this knowledge was inheritance from
ancient days, long before the advent of exchanges based on silver by
weight.
Page 166
The tremendous possibilities inherent in the use of precious
metal money 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,
was well understood by the bankers. Also known was how to create
periods of "lack of confidence" during which prices fell and
disheartened manufacturers 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.
Page 167
After Alexander, there do not seem many states left in which
precious metal money did not constitute the circulating medium and who
could not be influenced by that secret and international group of
people who made Gresham's Law very much of a reality to the undoing of
rulers and their peoples.
In the first place, bankers and their agents worked together to
cause this money created by slave scribe on clay tablet to be
seemingly plentiful. As a result, business flourished, wages increased
and prices rose until foreign merchandise sold competitively on the
home market. In consequence, some home manufacturers 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
paid off the banker if they could. When this collapse of industry
reached a certain point, it became no longer profitable for foreign
merchandise to sell on their home market, the bankers, satisfied that
the "Depression" had yielded sufficient rewards, and with a new crop
of industrialists now directly under their thumbs or under 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 previous loans, his ledger.
Page 168
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 specter
of total anarchy and destruction looming over more clearly before
them, for they no longer have the WILL TO BE.
With planned miscegenation through promotion of abortion, the
Indo-European peoples who writhe in torment as a result of these
incredible plans of the money masters and their agents soon may be
entirely obliterated. International Money Power, whatever it really
is, or whoever they really are, could not care less.
But one thing the 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 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.
Page169
Returning to Athens and its money, 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 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 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 customer require ready money over and above the among
required for settlement of balances owing, such 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 back
clay coins as fast as they could go. Admittedly, the banking of clay
coins was a little more expensive than the pen and ink required for
ledger entry money, or rather 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 Prof. Ure, the tyrants of the city states derived
their power from the new form of capital known as money. 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 the 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 in those days before the augmentation of bullion supplies
internationally.
Page 170
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 two thousand 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 1914: "Gold already acts in England
only as small change for notes." 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
among Indo-Europeans.
Although some authorities 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. Every since
the establishment of that ever changing mirage of the precious metal
money system, states and rules that became corrupted and undermined by
the extraordinary deceptions to which such system loaned itself,
wittingly or unwittingly, have fronted for those persons designated
bankers who under their very noses have operated the most unbelievable
swindles.
Page 171
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
naive, 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 labor 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, out of the deceit it practices
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 as being some special breed when they
are merely but unfaithful servants. 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 Leon 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 contributions 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 people. 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.
Page 172
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," 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 naive, 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.
James P. Warburg is one of the most ardent propagandists and
financiers of the World Government Movement in the US today. This same
James Warburg had the audacity and arrogance to proclaim before the US
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."
Page 173
Armed conquest 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 subjugation 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.
CHAPTERS XII: SPARTA, THE PELANORS, WEALTH AND WOMEN
Page 175
Sparta, of all Greek states, is one that resisted most of all the
encroachments of international money power and the circulation of
precious metals. However, from those laws promulgated by Lycurgus of
Sparta, reputedly during the ninth century B.C. but 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 gnawed at the heart of the
Doric overlord class of the Peloponnese. To him are ascribed the laws
directed towards this purpose such as are described by Plutarch:
Page 176
"Not contented with this redistribution of land, he commanded
that all gold and silver 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. With the diffusion of this money, at once a
number of vices were banished for who would rob another of such coin?
Who would unjustly detain or take by force or accept as a bribe a
thing which was not easy to hide or a credit to have, or indeed of any
use to cut in pieces? For when it was red-hot, they quenched it in
vinegar and by that means spoilt it and made it almost incapable of
being worked.
So now there was no means of purchasing foreign goods. No
itinerant fortune teller nor harlot monger, or gold or silver smith,
engraver or jeweler set foot in a country which had no money. For the
rich had no advantage here over the poor as their wealth and abundance
had no road to come abroad by, but were shut up at home doing
nothing."
Plutarch, of course, lived in a city in an age when all wealth
was assessed in terms of precious metals by weight. Needless to say,
in order to have the cooperation of the real ruler, local money
creative power, towards the publication of his works, he wisely
followed that trend of making a mockery of Spartan customs, a trend
which is still followed to this day by many so-called scholars.
Page 177
Sparta, early in the Millennium had come to understand the real
significance of precious metals money as being part of an
international confidence game. Sparta also realized the destructive
forces inherent in the activities of its controllers.
The so-called Spartan way of life derived from the necessity of
the Spartans to always be prepared for total war from abroad, as their
final rejection of international money power made certain would come,
and to be always prepared for war from within, i.e. insurrection; and
equal certainty deriving from the same causes.
The first Messenian War (736-716 B.C.) was entered into by King
Theopompus of Sparta for the usual reasons for any war in a state
indicated by archaeological findings as being under the thumb of
international money power; instigation of that money power in favor of
its arms industry and its other long range purposes. The long drawn
out character of the war indicated that the Messenians had equal
access to international arms industry with Sparta. Armies are not
raised and maintained in long drawn out wars without finances
acceptable in international trade and ready access to the best of
weapons and equipment; and it is clear the Messenians were not short
of such. This war served that purpose most desirable to money power of
reducing the power of kings followed by constitutional crises. The
first settlement was a victory of the Spartan peers over the kings and
curbing of royal prerogatives and powers. Such would have been typical
of the progress of international money power in its usual insidious
takeover of any state or civilization.
Page 178
The final edicts of Lycurgus as a result of the constitutional
crisis that followed the second Messenian war certainly indicate he
was aware of the loss of sovereignty that came to any state that based
its money system on the product of the international bullion brokers,
and which meant dependence on their good graces, the more especially
if such state had no mines of its own.
Of the reforms of Lycurgus, their cause, and those forces they
were directed against, there is no doubt whatsoever.
Page 179
There is no doubt that early in the sixth century B.C., the
Spartans totally excluded the international money market such as
controlled the rest of Greece through silver and gold money and the
bankers' practices relating to.
The notion created by Plutarch of that national currency of iron
as being something ridiculous and requiring also an ox-cart may be
dismissed as part of the steady stream of propaganda no doubt being
created in Athens against the customs of Sparta. If it is true that
the "pelanors" were of such weight as ruled out their being readily
passed from hand to hand, then it may reasonably be assumed that they
denoted wealth in much the same manner as the stone rings of Uap and
the ancient Indus Valley civilization; more in the nature of a
reserve, the circulating money being the leather notes referred to by
Suidas, just as the circulating money of Uap was shell strings,
similar to Tekaroro of the Gilbert Islands.
Sparta was indeed fortunate to possess considerably reserves of
iron ore. Thus both for her money and for her arms, she was therefore
independent and needed no assistance from abroad.
Page 180
The very fact that the power of the kings had been undermined
became a blessing in disguise. History has shown that the point to
which international money power immediately gravitates when
penetrating any people is the top, the king himself, either directly
or through the priesthood. Given his sanction and connivance with
respect to their schemes, then peoples are easily subdued and their
minds filled with arithmetical calculations and obsession with their
animal needs.
One of the first steps of such money power towards total
assumption of rule has been the eradication of kings for even though a
king might be lead into connivance with their schemes through lack of
understanding, he always could still awaken and discover his mistake
and realizing the sword was still in his hand, take measures to regain
his prerogative. Therefore he had to be disposed of or reduced to paid
and willing servant.
In Sparta there seems to have been another obstacle to
international money power, namely, the Ephorate, whose existence was
linked to that national money power of Sparta as instituted under the
protection of Lycurgus. Of the Ephors, it may be said their main
objectives were: "first the maintenance of home defence and limiting
of Spartan dominion to Messenia and Laconia (i.e. no imperial
entanglements) and an unrelenting hostility to the pretensions of
royal power in the state. The Ephorate was a profoundly democratic
institution that feared and fought against tyranny both within and
without the borders of Lacedaemon."
Accepting the tyrant as the front man of those alien agents of
international money power, the trapezitae, then the meaning of their
policies becomes clear: establishment of an area from which Spartans
could derive total economic freedom, sufficient to maintain themselves
and that which above all maintained their way of life and its source,
their national monetary system.
Page 181
The intervention at Athens was obvious policy in view of of the
unrelenting pressure of Athenian money power as a branch of
International Money Power against Sparta, city that had made a
mockery of the power of the counting houses of the world financial
centers and had set up example in the world which would become
inspiration to others. The Ephorate made sure that kings in no way had
the power to surrender themselves and the people they represented to
the blandishments of international money power whose opportunity alas,
has always been a weak and ill-instructed king. However the remark of
Archidamos, King of Sparta reveals even in 428 B.C. how the corruptive
forces outpouring from Babylonia, with its immediate agents, had
certainly re-entered Sparta to some degree:
"And war is not so much a matter of armaments as of the money
that makes armaments effective."
In his speech to his own people, Archidamos also warns them of
the 6000 talents war chest supposedly held by the Athenians in the
Acropolis. Both of these statements show no understanding of that in
which a king should above all be instructed, National Monetary
Emission, and prove how right were the Ephors in the controls with
which they surrounded his kingship. Archidamos privately was close
friend of Pericles, scion of the Alkmeonidae, whose destiny Greek
history shows to have always been closely linked to that international
money power.
During the period when the national currency of Sparta maintained
its integrity, it might be safe to say that the Spartan, in so far as
it is possible for true freedom to exist, was a free man. Indeed, the
helots were more than likely more free by a long way than are the
laboring classes of this day; and certainly more free than those
classes of semi-mass production lines of the other Greek cities whose
monetary systems were almost all at the mercy of the bankers, the
manipulators of the value of bullion and slaves.
Page 182
A monetary system, simple, inviting neither peddlers or luxury,
issued and regulated by a benevolent state and undoubtedly its units
paid into circulation with care and attention to the result on the
national well-being and strength, bred a sturdy independent people
completely contemptuous of the gold madness raging elsewhere. They
were an example by which other great peoples came to profit,
outstandingly, the Romans.
History gives much information about the means whereby money was
collected and raised and spent but nothing as to those shadowy figures
who institute its units in the first place and inject them into
circulation.
As to when international money power re-entered Sparta, there is
little enough evidence. But the outlook of King Archidamos suggested
it had made quite some progress by the date of the commencement of the
Peloponnesian war, and it may be safely said that to win that war, out
of which could come nothing but gain to international money power,
Sparta had to make almost total concession. The final victory over
Athens achieved the purposes of the international bullion and slave
traders as surely as final defeat would so have done.
As it will remembered, the relaxation and luxury that inundated
Rome after the second Punic War as a result of concessions that had
been made to international bullion and slave traders in order to be
able to re-arm after Cannae, and ultimately drive Hannibal out of
Italy and defeat him in his own territory, within 25 years dragged the
Romans down to a debauched money mad mob.
Page 183
Similarly, after the Peloponnesian War, like causes had done the
same for Sparta, and it was but 25 years later, in 371 B.C. the
Spartan Phalanx crumbled into bloody ruin at Leuctra and never again
recovered for the Spartans were now consumed by the corrupting
diseases of money madness and its attendant liberalism. That by 360
B.C. the ancient money system was little more than a memory is
revealed by the quotation from Alexander Del Mar:
"The crime of Gylipus, B.C. 360, and the decree offered upon its
exposure, viz. "That no coin of gold or silver be admitted into
Sparta, but that they should use the money that had formerly obtained"
shows that as this decay of the state and weakening of credit went on,
gold and silver coins, at or near their bullion value, gradually crept
into circulation as money. The failure of the decree to pass is
conclusive that the iron numerical system was no longer practicable."
In other words, the damage to that which had been Sparta done by
the ruler who first of all turned a blind eye to dealings in precious
metals, the regrowth of international trade, and no doubt the holding
of deposits in Athenian banks, was irreparable. It seemed this time
that the clock could not be turned back.
Page 184
Athens, as with Rome by the time of the Civil Wars, its original
people had disappeared into that mass of freed slaves and immigrants
from elsewhere.
Of Spartan money as reinstituted under the patronage of Lycurgus,
Ernest Babelon wrote:
"A long time after the use of money had been spread throughout
the Hellenic world, Sparta continued to make use of ingots of iron as
a means of exchange. These bars were known as "pastry cakes" weighing
an Aeginetic Mina, that is to say 756 Kg, required a wagon to carry.
All kinds of stories circulated on the subject of the famous
"Pelanors" of Sparta that seem to have remained in use until the
Persian Wars...
In the 7th century, King Pheidon of Argos, when he struck the
first silver money of Aegina, withdrew the former iron spits from
circulating that had served as money until then."
Page 186
Babelon, most learned scholar as he was, however reflects the
complacent attitude of the bankers that money was precious metal and
precious metal was money. Though over 2000 years have gone by,
precious metal money and its promoters still ruled, despite a dozen
great kingdoms and empires having risen at its behest and having
fallen at its behest. Did Babelon see the shadow which lurked behind
the throne, he closed his eyes and turned his head away.
Lycurgus was without doubt inspired to re-establish this national
monetary system by the clear understanding he must have come to have
of the evil effects of this gold and silver madness and its disastrous
effects as a result of the operations of the trapezitae or bankers
relative to the destruction of national morale and being. Precious
metal coinage was currency whose total circulation the state could in
no way control because of the desirability of its material
internationally. Its value was dictated by the arbitrary decision of
that international fraternity who controlled its mining and the slaves
that mined it, and out of manipulation of that pyramid of abstract
money they created thereon, controlled the political affairs of
states.
The money that had been established at Sparta was of value to
Spartans alone. Although no record exists of such matter, it may be
safely assumed that the Pelanors, the leather multiples or divisible of
Suidas, entered the circulation as against state indebtedness; thus
reducing taxation, that vicious destroyer of peoples, to relatively
negligible amounts. Their pitted and otherwise worthless appearance
deriving from their being immersed in vinegar when red hot made them
of no value for any other purpose than that for which they were
intended. The use of this national money was the force that gave
Sparta the leadership of Hellas until the end of the Peloponnesian War
and was that which necessarily dictated the policy of extirpation of
the tyrannies, the tyrant always being representative for the agent of
international money creative power through precious metal control.
Page 187
There might be the temptation to assume the Pelanors were a
system of "Iron Greenbacks" but while they resembled the Greenbacks in
this that they were the total will to be of the Spartans, assuming the
truth of their great weight, they may have been more in the character
of that monetary system of very ancient days of which the stone rings
of Uap are a last remaining evincement.
(According to Del Mar, the iron currency of the Pelanors was
strictly a numerical system confined to Sparta, it was a national
system having no relationship to International Standards or ratios
with other metals; thus being identical in character to the
"Greenback" paper money issued by President Abraham Lincoln during the
American Civil War and by which means the schemes of the international
bullion broking fraternity were temporarily frustrated.)
A healthy wholesome people who controlled totally their state and
existence would have little reason to accumulate money fortunes, and
wealth as distinct from the land which was their patrimony; and as
such money fortunes begin and end as little more than figures in the
banker's ledger, nor could they be guided into becoming mouthpieces
for the policies of the bankers. A genuine contempt for luxury
existed.
Page 188
Although it was said of the monetary reforms of Lycurgus that
precious metals seized in war were deposited with the Arcadians, of
later days, Augustus Boeckh wrote of gold and silver in Sparta:
"Sparta swallowed up large quantities of precious metals. The
principal cause of this stagnation was that the state kept the gold
and silver in store and only re-issued them for war and foreign
enterprise; although there were instances of individuals who amassed
treasures according to the law.
Xenophon stated that Lycurgus made the privilege of citizenship
equally available to all who observed the laws which would mean that
no Spartan suffered in respect to the mess to which he was entitled to
belong on account of economic condition. Xenophon had lived in Sparta
before the loss of Messenia. Aristotle after Messenia in 370 B.C. and
the certain penetration and assumption of control of Spartan fiscal
affairs by the bankers. The final military collapse at Leuctra rose
from that weakened condition that followed the apparent victory of the
Great Peloponnesian War and those concessions that would have already
been made to the international bankers as a result of the desperate
need of the Spartans for ships. The loan of 5000 talents towards the
building of ships which was granted to Sparta by Persia in 412 B.C.
would not have been granted without major concessions being exacted.
It would not take long for them to undermine the morale of Sparta by
the spreading of money madness. Of this situation, Polybius, as quoted
by Humphrey Michell, wrote the following:
Page 189
"Once they began to undertake naval expeditions and to make
military campaigns outside the Peloponnese, it was evident that
neither their iron currency nor the exchange of their crops for
commodities which they lacked, as permitted by the laws of
Lycurgus, would suffice for their needs. These enterprises demanded a
currency in universal circulation so they were compelled to beg from
the Persians and exact taxes from all the Greeks. For they recognized
that under the legislation of Lycurgus, it was impossible to aspire, I
will not say to supremacy in Greece, but to any position of
influence." "
The fact is however Sparta, while following the laws of Lycurgus,
had dominated in more or less degree. As soon as she lost sight of the
meaning and purpose of such laws, she became just another petty state;
an agency for the subterranean control by international banking
through manipulation of the silver and gold bullion basis of her
currency; each man, concerned with his own need and greed, aimlessly
following the pretty bubble which was the illusion of banker's
"wealth." The old order which had given them strength was soon
destroyed.
The later age of Aristotle was the age of the triumph of those
international interests whose arming and instigation of the Messenian
helots in an earlier age decided Spartans to accept the structure of
law as advocated by Lycurgus which meant surrender of so much ease of
living, rather than become the same as most Greek states, an alien
money manipulators' paradise.
Page 190
As the earliest finds of the clay facsimiles of precious metals
coinage at Athens seem to date around the middle of the fifth century
B.C., it may be assumed that one way or another, the lust for having,
one man more than his neighbor, slowly became injected into them.
Perhaps Spartan mercenaries who always required to be paid in those
international currencies of silver and gold had been inveigled into
depositing their pay with the bankers of the Piraeus with whom it
might "grow" with interest; taking home the baked clay coins as
evidence of their account and thus evading contravention of the
Spartan laws in respect of possession of gold and silver.
With the resumption of the rule of international money power in
later Spartan history, one of the most outstanding instances of that
sickness rotting the fibers of their racial morale was the tale of
those "Homoioi" who seemed to have fallen in the social scale and were
no longer able to take their places in those great messes. Scholars
gave various reasons for these "disenfranchised" Spartans apparently
known as the "hypomeiones." The reason for their coming to be is more
than clear. They are the direct result of the power to discriminate
which is the natural outcome in favor of the banker of that actual
god-power he exercises once installed as local money creator.
More than likely, the re-established bankers would have taken
care that certain families who might yet create opposition to them
were dispossessed by one means or another. With that banker created
money as being now necessary qualification for membership, it was a
small matter to make sure that those they wished to dispossess never
had enough.
Page 191
Clearly, the mess charges being assessed in silver money whose
issue the bankers controlled, those to whom such alien bankers
extended no favors and therefore ultimately dispossessed through
mortgage and foreclosure, not having any longer the wherewithal to
pay, no longer belonged.
The Spartan, whether poor or rich, in the days of national
currency had been the social equal of any other Spartan, however the
slow decay of the Spartan principle derived from a most outstanding
omission in the constitution which was total lack of provision for the
redistribution of wealth at certain intervals, and the cancellation of
debt as in the Hebrew custom of the 49th year.
Page 192
The control of wealth passed substantially into the hands of
women. Concern for the growth of money, no doubt, just as in this day,
replaced care for their men and the growth of their children.
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