web analytics

Guide to investing in gold & silver, 3

by Mike Maloney

 

Chapter Three:
 Old Glory

I hope by now you’re beginning to see a pattern develop. In all the examples I’ve shown you so far (and there are plenty more), the pattern is the same:

  1. A sovereign state starts out with good money (i.e., money that is gold or silver, or backed fully by gold and silver).
  1. As it develops economically and socially, it begins to take on more and more economic burdens, adding layer upon layer of public works and social programs.
  1. As its economic affluence grows so does its political influence, and it increases expenditures to fund a massive military.
  1. Eventually it puts its military to use, and expenditures explode.
  1. To fund the war, the costliest of mankind’s endeavors, it steals the wealth of its people by replacing their money with currency that can be created in unlimited quantities. It does this either at the outbreak of the war (as in the case of World War I), during the war or wars (as in the cases of Athens and Rome), or as a perceived solution to the economic ravages of previous wars (as in the case of John Law’s France).
  1. Finally, the wealth transfer caused by expansion of the currency supply is felt by the population as severe consumer price inflation, triggering a loss of faith in the currency.
  1. An en masse movement out of the currency into precious metals and other tangible assets takes place, the currency collapses, and massive wealth is transferred to those who had enough foresight to accumulate gold and silver early on.

But surely something like this can’t happen to the United States, you might say. We are, after all, the greatest country in the history of the world. Beyond that we aren’t an empire. We don’t conquer nations; we spread democracy.

We may not be an empire in the traditional sense of the word, but when it comes to economic issues, we operate like one in many ways. This is why I believe that not only will the United States decline and see its dollar crash; it’s already on its way. Let’s take a trip down memory lane and see how the United States got to this point in history.
 
Dread the Fed, the Golden Rule is dead

The beginning of the end for the United States economy started with the inception of the Federal Reserve. The Fed, as it’s called, is a private bank, separate from the U.S. government, with the power to dictate our country’s fiscal policy. Since the Fed’s formation, the U.S. dollar has become nothing but currency.

From roughly 1871 to 1914, when World War I began, most of the developed world operated under what is referred to as the classical gold standard, meaning most of the world’s currencies were pegged to gold. This meant that they were also pegged to each other. Businesspeople could make plans and projections far into the future, ship goods, start businesses, and invest in foreign lands, and they always knew exactly what the exchange rate would be.

On average over the period when the developed world was on the classical gold standard, there was no inflation… none, zero zip, nada. Sure, there were a few booms and busts, inflations and deflations. But from the beginning of the classical gold standard to the end, it averaged out as a zero sum game. The reason? Gold: the great equalizer.

Here’s why: When countries experienced economic booms, they imported more goods. The imported goods were paid for with gold, so gold flowed out. As gold flowed out of the countries, their currency supplies contracted (that is monetary deflation). This caused these economies to slow down and the demand for imports to fall. As the economy slowed, prices fell, making these countries’ goods more attractive to foreign buyers. And as exports rose to meet foreign demand, gold flowed back into that country. Then the process started all over again, the value of currency—based on gold—always moving up and down, in a narrow range, maintaining the equilibrium.

During the classical gold standard our currency was real, verifiable money, meaning that there was actual gold and silver in the Treasury backing it up. The currency was just a receipt for the money. Then, in stepped the Fed, one of the most notorious and misunderstood institutions in the history of the United States.

The difficulty with the Fed is that there’s a lot of information out there, which is one reason why it’s so controversial. There are two very polarized camps when it comes to the Fed. On one end you have the government, which trusts it to regulate the U.S. economy. On the other end, you have the conspiracy theorists, who believe, in no uncertain terms, that the Fed will eventually bring about the collapse of the U.S. economy.

Well, I’m here to tell you these “crackpots” are not as crazy as they may seem. For one thing, the Federal Reserve is not a government agency. It is a privately owned bank that has stockholders to whom it pays dividends. It has the power to actually create currency from nothing, and it is shielded from audits and congressional oversight. As former senator and presidential contender Barry Goldwater pointed out, “The accounts of the Federal Reserve System have never been audited. It operates outside the control of Congress and manipulates the credit of the United States.”
 
Not so humble beginnings

Famed Austrian School economist Murray N. Rothbard, the vice president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, distinguished professor of economics, and author of twenty-six books, opens his book The Case Against the Fed with the following:

By far the most secret and least accountable operation of the federal government is not, as one might expect, the CIA, DIA, or some other super-secret intelligence agency. The CIA and other intelligence operations are under control of Congress. They are accountable: a Congressional committee supervises these operations, controls their budgets, and is informed of their covert activities.

The Federal Reserve, however, is accountable to no one; it has no budget; it is subject to no audit; and no Congressional committee knows of, or can truly supervise, its operations. The Federal Reserve, virtually in total control of the nation’s monetary system, is accountable to nobody.

Here’s how it all got started. You might call this the not so humble beginning.

In 1907 there was a banking and stock market panic in the U.S., aptly called the Panic of 1907. It was widely believed that the big New York banks known as the Money Trust had been causing crashes, and then capitalizing on them by buying up stocks from rattled investors and selling them for tremendous profit just days or weeks later. The Panic of 1907 was a particularly devastating one for the U.S. economy, and there was an outcry by the general public for the government to do something.

In 1908 Congress created the National Monetary Commission to research the situation, and to recommend banking reforms that would prevent such panics, as well as to investigate the Money Trust. Senator Nelson Aldrich was appointed chairman, and immediately set out for Europe, spending two years and $300,000 (that’s $6 million adjusted for inflation) to consult with the private central bankers of England, France, and Germany.

Upon his return, Senator Aldrich decided to take some time off and organized a duck hunt with some friends. The friends he invited on vacation with him were the who’s who of U.S. economic power, the very New York bankers he was supposed to be investigating: Paul Warburg (Kuhn, Loeb & Company), Abraham Pete Andrew (assistant secretary of the treasury), Frank Vanderlip (president of the Rockefeller-lead National City Bank of New York), Henry P. Davison (senior partner at J. P. Morgan), Charles D. Norton (president of the Morgan-led First National Bank of New York), and Benjamin Strong (head of J. P. Morgan Bankers Trust, and to become the first Federal Reserve head).

It is estimated that these men represented one quarter of the world’s wealth. The retreat took place on a little island off the coast of Georgia called Jekyll Island. But there wasn’t much duck hunting; instead Aldrich and his distinguished guests spent nine days around a table hatching a plan that eventually created the Federal Reserve.

Here is what some of the attendees had to say about that meeting:

Picture a party of the nation’s greatest bankers stealing out of New York on a private railroad car under cover of darkness, stealthily hieing hundreds of miles South, embarking on a mysterious launch, sneaking on to an island deserted by all but a few servants, living there a full week under such rigid secrecy that the names of not one of them was once mentioned lest the servants learn the identity and disclose to the world this strangest, most secret expedition in the history of American finance.

I am not romancing. I am giving to the world, for the first time, the real story of how the famous Aldrich currency report, the foundation of our new currency system, was written.

B. C. Forbes, Forbes magazine, 1916

The results of the conference were entirely confidential. Even the fact there had been a meeting was not permitted to become public. Though eighteen years have since gone by, I do not feel free to give a description of this most interesting conference concerning which Senator Aldrich pledged all participants to secrecy.

Paul Warburg, The Federal Reserve System: Its Origin and Growth

There was an occasion, near the close of 1910, when I was as secretive, indeed, as furtive, as any conspirator. I do not feel it is any exaggeration to speak of our secret expedition to Jekyll Island as the occasion of the actual conception of what eventually became the Federal Reserve System. We were told to leave our last names behind us… We were instructed to come one at a time and as unobtrusively as possible to the railroad terminal on the New Jersey littoral of the Hudson, where Senator Aldrich’s private car would be in readiness… The servants and train crew may have known the identities of one or two of us, but they did not know all, and it was the names of all printed together that would have made our mysterious journey significant in Washington, in Wall Street, even in London. Discovery, we knew, simply must not happen, or else all our time and effort would be wasted. If it were to be exposed publicly that our particular group had got together and written a banking bill, that bill would have no chance whatever of passage by Congress.

Frank Vanderlip, in The Saturday Evening Post, February 9, 1935

Secrecy was so important to the attendees of this summit because Aldrich, as the chairman of the National Monetary Commission, was charged with investigating banking practices and recommending reforms after the Panic of 1907, not to conspire with the bankers on a remote island. So the bankers who were under investigation for needed reforms got together with the chairman of the congressional investigating committee (the guy that was supposed to investigate the suspects) at a secret meeting on an isolated island and concocted a bill, the Aldrich Plan, for a private central bank that they (the suspects) would own. When the bill was presented to Congress, the debates raged.

In one debate, Congressman Charles Lindbergh was quoted as saying, “Our financial system is a false one and a huge burden on the people. I have alleged that there is a Money Trust. The Aldrich Plan is a scheme plainly in the interest of the Trust. Why does the Money Trust press so hard for the Aldrich Plan now, before the people know what the Money Trust has been doing?”

But the Aldrich Plan never came to a vote in Congress, because it was a Republican-backed bill and the Republicans lost control of the House in 1910, and the Senate in 1912.

Not accepting defeat, the bankers essentially took the Aldrich Plan and changed a few details. In 1913 a nearly identical bill, called the Federal Reserve Act, was presented to Congress.

Again the debates raged. Many saw this bill for what it was: a prettied-up version of the Aldrich Plan. But on December 22, 1913, Congress gave up its right to coin money and regulate the value thereof, which was given it by the Constitution, and passed that right to a private corporation, the Federal Reserve.

 
The Fed and the death of the dollar—fractional reserve banking

Since the Fed opened for business in 1914, the currency of the United States (the U.S. dollar) has been borrowed into existence from a private bank (the Fed). The reason I say “borrowed” into existence is because every single dollar the Fed has ever created is owed back to that bank, with interest. The Fed creates all currency, not the U.S. government, and lends it out to the U.S. government and private institutions—with interest. Now you may be asking yourself, “If we pay back all the currency that was borrowed into existence, but we still owe the interest, where do we get the currency to pay the interest?” Answer: We have to borrow it into existence. This is one reason why the national debt keeps expanding. It can never be paid off. It is mathematically impossible.

But even more disconcerting is the way the Federal Reserve creates currency:

  1. It makes loans to the government or banking system by writing a bad check.
  1. It buys something with a bad check.

In the Fed’s own words, published in a 1977 paper called Putting It Simply, “When you or I write a check there must be sufficient funds in our account to cover the check, but when the Federal Reserve writes a check there is no bank deposit on which that check is drawn. When the Federal Reserve writes a check, it is creating money” Of course, as you know by now, I would beg to differ. They are creating currency, not money.

And once those newly created dollars are deposited in the banks, the banks get to employ the miracle of fractional reserve banking.

Here is fractional reserve banking in a nutshell. All banks have a reserve requirement, meaning they must keep a certain amount of currency on hand for withdrawals and such. If the reserve requirement set by the Fed is 10 percent the bank must keep 10 percent of the currency deposited on hand just in case someone wants to make a withdrawal; however, they are allowed to loan out the other 90 percent of those deposits.

Here’s the kicker. They don’t actually loan out the currency that’s in the accounts. Instead they create new fiat dollars out of nothing and then loan them out, which means they too are “borrowed” into existence. In other words, when you deposit $1,000, the bank can create 900 brand-new credit dollars with nothing but a book entry, and then loan them out with interest.

Then, if those brand-new loaned dollars are deposited in a checking account, the bank is allowed to create another 90 percent of the value of those deposits, and then another 90 percent of that. Then the process is repeated, and round and round it goes.

Coincidentally, the same year that the Federal Reserve Act was passed, there was also an amendment added to the Constitution: the Sixteenth, which created the dreaded income tax.

Before 1913 there was no income tax. The entire government was paid for by tariffs (duties on imports) and excise tax (taxes on things like alcohol, cigarettes, and gas). These taxes, and only these taxes, generated enough income for the government to operate. However, because it didn’t generate enough income to pay the interest due to the Federal Reserve, the income tax was created.

To review:

  • Since 1914, we’ve borrowed every dollar into existence.
  • We pay interest on every dollar in existence.
  • That interest is paid to a private bank, the Federal Reserve.
  • The world’s largest banks, not the government, own the Federal Reserve.
  • The United States can’t pay off its debt… it can only borrow more to pay the interest.
  • Our government created income tax so we can pay this interest.

Welcome to the rabbit hole. Welcome to your new context.

Categories
March of the Titans (book) Prehistory

Titans, 4

Food for thought from chapter 4 of March of the Titans: The Complete History of the White Race:
 

As the Neolithic revolution became more widespread and larger fixed settlements began to spring up, it became inevitable that these Old Europeans and Proto-Nordic types would start establishing formal societies. The Old European civilisations then came into being, laying much of the groundwork for the later development of Classical Greece and Rome.

Although these Old European civilisations were in fact quite distinct from classical Greece and Rome, they are often mistakenly thought of as one and the same thing.

The original, or Old European settlements, dominated huge areas of Europe and Russia, stretching from Italy right through to the Black sea, including all of modern Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria and part of the Ukraine.

The crucial difference is however that the Old European civilisations were created by the original continental Europeans (Proto-Nordic, Alpine and Mediterranean, with the latter two being in the majority) while the classical civilisations of Greece and Rome received their impetus from Indo-European or Nordic invasions which had started around 5000 BC.

The continental Old European civilisations in the Aegean were the Cretan civilisation, centered at Knossos on the island of Crete; the city state of Troy situated slightly south of the Bosporus straits in Asia Minor; certain smaller city states on the Greek mainland; and the Etruscans in Italy.

These city-states were the first to fall before the great Indo-European invasions, people who had mastered the art of copper working. Absorbed into the Indo-European peoples, the Old Europeans largely disappeared and this mix of White peoples laid the basis for the Mycenaean culture which replaced the Cretan civilisation as the dominant force in the Aegean.

Categories
James Mason

Siege, 6

The long road we’ve traveled

The distance we’ve traveled in the past decade can only be measured in terms of light years. How far, after all, is it from Commander Rockwell’s expressed ideal of the “American Constitutional Republic” to “Helter Skelter”? From “good citizenship” and conformity to total drop-out and total revolution? From the trial and execution of a few thousand traitors in high places to the drowning in blood of entire social and genetic segments of the population? From an old A.N.P. slogan, “White Man, Stand With Us or Stand Out of Our Way!”, to where there are no innocents, no non-combatants?

Consider how far we’ve come from the days when discussion revolved around what would take place after our legal and orderly assumption of power, as mandated by the people, to today where two schools of thought prevail: whether a war will destroy the System or whether it will collapse under its own rotten weight.

Regardless how, the result will be the same. Those who survive the initial period of absolute chaos that immediately follows will crawl out of their holes and take up the struggle on newly equalized terms: animal to animal.

Vol. XII, #8 – August, 1983

Categories
Abraham (patriarch) Art Bible Degenerate art Miscegenation

Why we are antisemites

by Adolf Hitler

Excerpted from a speech in a public meeting in the Great Hall
of the Hofbräuhaus organised by the National Socialist
German Workers Party in 15 August 1920:

 
My dear countrymen and women! We are quite used to being generally referred to as monsters. And we are considered particularly monstrous because, in a question that certain gentlemen in Germany are nervous about, we are marching at the head—namely in the question of the opposition to the Jews.

Note of 20 September 2017:

Carolyn Yeager, who translated the speech, has just threatened: “Take it down from your blog. You don’t have permission to post it. I will file a complaint with WordPress if you don’t.”

Note that I didn’t reproduce her whole translation, only excerpts. No male racist that I know, except her ol’ friend Tan, has reached this level of hysteria.

Categories
Joseph Goebbels

Antisemitism

by Joseph Goebbels

A passage from Der Nazi-Sozi, Elberfeld: Verlag der Nationalsozialistischen Briefe, 1927:

“You make a lot of noise about the fact that you oppose the Jews. Isn’t anti-Semitism outdated in the twentieth century? Isn’t the Jew a human being like everyone else? Aren’t there decent Jews? Isn’t it bad that we 60 million fear 2 million Jews?”

“You miss the point. Try to think logically:

If we were only anti-Semites, we would be out-of-place in the twentieth century. However, we are also socialists. For us, the two go together. Socialism, the freedom of the German proletariat and thereby of the German nation, can only be achieved against the Jews. Since we want Germany’s freedom, or socialism, we are anti-Semites.

Sure, the Jew is also a human being. None of us has every doubted that. But a flea is also an animal—albeit an unpleasant one. Since a flea is not a pleasant animal, we have no duty to defend and protect it, to be of service to it so that it can bite and torment and torture us. Rather, our duty is to make it harmless.

The same is true of the Jew.

Sure, there are decent (weiße) Jews. More of them every day. That however, is not evidence for the Jews, but rather it is evidence against them. The fact that one calls scoundrels among us decent “Jews” is proof that to be Jewish carries a stigma, else one would call deceitful Jews “decent (gelbe) Christians.” The fact that there are so many decent Jews proves that the destructive Jewish spirit has already infected wide circles of our people. It is encouragement for us to carry on the battle against the Jewish world plague wherever possible.

It is a bad sign for you, not for us, that 60 million fear 2 million Jews. We do not fear these 2 million Jews, but rather we fight against them. You, however, are too much of a coward to join this battle, and behave like a cat on a hot stove.

If these 60 million fought the Jews as we do, they would have nothing more to fear. It would be the Jews’ turn to fear.”

NS poster, 1

This poster announces a National Socialist meeting in Munich in May 1920. Hitler is to speak on the topic “What do we want?” The text below the title reads:

“Citizens! Do not believe that the Germany of misfortune and misery, the nation of corruption and usury, the land of Jewish corruption, can be saved by parties that claim to stand on a foundation of facts. Never!”

Categories
Judaism Kevin MacDonald Racial studies Science

Diaspora, 1

Food for thought from Kevin
MacDonald’s Diaspora Peoples:

 
Groups of Europeans are thus exactly the sort of groups modeled by Fehr and Gätcher: They are groups with high levels of cooperation with strangers. They are thus prone to market relations and individualism. On the other hand, Jewish culture and Chinese culture derive from the Middle Old World culture area, characterized by extended kinship networks and the extended family. They derive from cultures prone to ingroup-outgroup relationships in which cooperation is with the ingroup composed of extended family members…

Jews are at the extreme collectivist end of the individualism-collectivism continuum, so extreme that they are prone to martyrdom rather than abandoning the group. These people are obligated to remain in the group no matter what—even to the point of killing themselves and their own family members to prevent the possibility of becoming a member of the outgroup…

There has been essentially no conversion of Europeans to become mating members of the Ashkenazi gene pool. The very low levels of genetic admixture with Europeans may well have come from clandestine matings and rape…

Sephardic Jews were genetically distant from both Spaniards and North Africans despite having lived among them for centuries. Indeed, they remain very close to Kurdish Jews, a finding the authors attribute to genetic continuity with Jews exiled by the Assyrians in 723 B.C. and the Babylonians in 586 B.C. Kurdish Jews remained closer generically to Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews than to Kurdish Muslims, a truly remarkable finding, since it indicates no detectable genetic admixture between Kurdish Jews and their hosts over approximately 2700 years.

Categories
Civil war Ethnic cleansing Harold Covington Homosexuality Newspeak Pseudoscience Tacitus

A question for Johnson

In my article on “ethnosuicidal nationalists” I mentioned several aspects of white nationalism that seem to me indistinguishable from the anti-white zeitgeist of the present West. But I did not include homosexuality because only a faction of white nationalists preaches this lifestyle as a normal thing that we must accept.

Recently, some of The Right Stuff renegades posted podcasts denouncing what they consider a cancer to extirpate from the white nationalist movement: what they call a homosexual “mafia” within the movement (listen here).

Most of their discussion centres on Greg Johnson, the editor of the webzine and small house Counter Currents Publishing.

Last year, white nationalist Lana, host of Red Ice TV, interviewed Johnson in “Straight But Not Narrow Nationalism: Gays, Women & The Manosphere.” The way Lana introduces the subject of homosexuality seems to make us assume that we are facing a typical liberal woman. Lana swallows the pseudo-scientific propaganda that homosexuality is genetic, and that therefore the poor homosexuals have no choice but to act in accordance with their genetic programming.

Worse still, Lana uses the Newspeak term “gay” throughout her interview: a word that when I was a child it meant “cheerful.” (I will never forget how Christopher Plummer used the word gay when referring in The Sound of Music to the Vienna of the early 20th century: a film I saw in an elegant theatre.) The homo community appropriated that word so that, for purposes of euphony, their degenerate lifestyles would sound pretty to the public.

But what I wanted to focus on is the defence that Johnson made in that interview with Lana. This seems to be his main argument: “[Paraphrasing us] ‘Destroy the Jews and the non-whites and the homosexuals.’ Wait a second here. The homosexual category is not entirely a group of people that are enemies of white people… I sort of regard it as some form of bizarre and stupid fixation that a lot of people have… on the far right.” Then he added that non-Christians are more tolerant of homos.

The “tolerant” actually is the nihilistic liberal of the present West, not the pagan of the Ancient World who abhorred homosexual behaviour to the extent of punishing it with death. I mean the ancient Germans, as Tacitus portrays them (the pederasty of the Greco-Roman world is a separate issue that I have discussed extensively on this site: a practice that has nothing to do with any colour of their little LGBT flag).

Where lies the great dishonesty of Johnson is in the following. I, for example, consider myself fairly tolerant of homos if we take as a parameter the capital punishment applied by the ancient Germanics. My general attitude consists in, say, not focusing on the lifestyle of the writer—for example Oscar Wilde or Gore Vidal—but in their literary work. It is only if a Wilde insolently crosses the line by suing the father of his lover, when the system defends itself. Similarly, I found nauseating the photo of a macho lover that Vidal published in his autobiography.

But I don’t condemn the closet homos. The difference between my stance and The Right Stuff with dishonest Johnson, is that he does not want to see that the phobia that some nationalists are showing is due to the fact that already out of the closet, now the mafia wants to normalise homosexuality!

Johnson does not seem to recognize that tolerant people like me exist for heaps, even to his racial right. As a commenter of The Occidental Observer told James O’Meara, Johnson’s favourite homo author on his webzine, Do not shove your orifices into our noses and we leave you alone. But through their essays the “mafia” won’t stop pushing agendas to the confused teenagers who read or listen them.

Johnson’s normalising of homosexuality dates back many years before Lana’s interview. Only last year he published “Gay Panic on the Alt Right,” and three years earlier he dared to endorse the so-called homosexual marriage in “The Gay Marriage Controversy.” Even fifteen years ago, under a pseudonym, Johnson dared to publish “Homosexuality and White Nationalism: Two Arguments for Tolerance” in a forum of extremely tough racists. (Years later Johnson recognized that he was the author of that article—see here—: an article he even translated into French under the title “Homosexualité et Nationalisme Blanc.”)

These articles are not an isolated phenomenon. Johnson and the “mafia” are reluctant to see that if their group returned to the closet, we would leave them alone. But that’s not gonna happen, and nothing seems more aberrant to me that, in some Alt Right conferences, one of these open homos is allowed to address the young.
 
General order number four

A few years ago Johnson went to visit the racist and critic of homosexuality Harold Covington to the northwest of the US. Covington told me that Johnson had the audacity to give him a book authored by him which includes one of the essays mentioned above. Johnson has been a fan of the Covington novels about creating a white republic within what is now US territory. However, in his plans to found a new nation, Covington proposes to remove from the liberated territory the unhealthy elements of the new republic, what he calls General Order Number Four:

No Jew or other non-white person, no homosexual, and no white person engaged in interracial sexual activity shall reside within the boundaries of the Northwest American Republic, or within any area of NVA operations. NVA field commanders shall deal with violators of this General Order at their discretion…

To contextualize this order see: here. NVA stands for Northwest Volunteer Army, an army originally formed by a group of guerrillas that snatch a piece of territory from the degenerate US. In his novels, when civil warfare erupts in the American Northwest, to throw out those homosexuals who flaunt their lifestyles, Covington depicts fighters who furtively introduce bombs in so-called “gay bars.”

Several years ago Johnson did not let me comment on his webzine. I asked him something like this: When the holy racial wars start, your homo friend J.D., who lives in the Northwest—the epicentre of racial wars in Covington’s scenario—might find himself in the wrong bar. Will you stand by the freedom fighters or the forces of ZOG if the NVA boys blow your buddy up?

Categories
Hans F. K. Günther Lothrop Stoddard Madison Grant Nordicism Racial studies Science

Raciology, 6

In the late 19th century, the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) United States Supreme Court decision upheld the constitutional legality of racial segregation under the doctrine of “separate but equal.”

Eugenicists such as Harry H. Laughlin and Madison Grant sought to scientifically prove the physical and mental inadequacy of certain ethnic groups to justify compulsory sterilisation and restrict immigration, per the Immigration Act of 1924.

Lothrop Stoddard published many racialist books on what he saw as the peril of immigration, his most famous being The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy in 1920. In this book he presented a view of the world situation pertaining to race focusing concern on the coming population explosion among the coloured peoples of the world and the way in which white world-supremacy was being lessened in the wake of World War I and the collapse of colonialism.

Stoddard’s analysis divided world politics and situations into “white,” “yellow,” “black,” “Amerindian,” and “brown” peoples and their interactions. He argued that race and heredity were the guiding factors of history and civilisation, and that the elimination or absorption of the white race by coloured races would result in the destruction of Western civilisation.

Like Madison Grant, Stoddard divided the white race into three main divisions: Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean. He considered all three to be of good stock, and far above the quality of the coloured races, but argued that the Nordic was the greatest of the three and needed to be preserved by way of eugenics. Unlike Grant, Stoddard was less concerned with which varieties of European people were superior to others (nordicism), but was more concerned with what he called “bi-racialism,” seeing the world as being composed of simply coloured and white races.

In the years after the Great Migration and World War I, Grant’s racial theory would fall out of favour in the U.S. for a model closer to Stoddard’s. An influential publication was The Races of Europe (1939) by Carleton S. Coon, president of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists from 1930 to 1961. Coon was a proponent of multiregional origin of modern humans and divided Homo sapiens into five main races.
 
Racial policy of Nazi Germany

The Nazi Party and its sympathizers published many books on scientific racism, seizing on the eugenicist ideas with which they were widely associated, although these ideas had been in circulation since the 19th century. Books such as Rassenkunde des Deutschen Volkes (“Ethnology of the German People”) by Hans F. K. Günther and Rasse und Seele (“Race and Soul”) by Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss attempted to scientifically identify differences between the German, Nordic, or Aryan people and inferior groups. German schools used these books as texts during the Nazi era.

In the early 1930s, the Nazis used racialised scientific rhetoric based on social Darwinism to push their eugenic social policies. During the Second World War, raciology studies became anathema in the United States, and Boasians such as Ruth Benedict consolidated their institutional power.

After the war, the malicious propaganda by the Allied forces led most of the scientific community to repudiate the scientific support for racism.

Categories
Julian (novel) Literature

Julian, 6


 

II

The Memoir of Julian Augustus

From the example of my uncle the Emperor Constantine, called the Great, who died when I was six years old, I learned that it is dangerous to side with any party of the Galileans, for they mean to overthrow and veil those things that are truly holy. I can hardly remember Constantine, though I was once presented to him at the Sacred Palace. I dimly recall a giant, heavily scented, wearing a stiff jewelled robe. My older brother Gallus always said that I tried to pull his wig off. But Gallus had a cruel humour, and I doubt that this story was true. If I had tugged at the Emperor’s wig, I would surely not have endeared myself to him, for he was as vain as a woman about his appearance; even his Galilean admirers admit to that.

From my mother Basilina I inherited my love of learning. I never knew her. She died shortly after my birth, 7 April 331. She was the daughter of the praetorian prefect Julius Julianus. From portraits I resemble her more than I do my father; I share with her a straight nose and rather full lips, unlike the imperial Flavians, who tend to have thin hooked noses and tight pursed mouths. The Emperor Constantius, my cousin and predecessor, was a typical Flavian, resembling his father Constantine, except that he was much shorter. But I did inherit the Flavian thick chest and neck, legacy of our Illyrian ancestors, who were men of the mountains. My mother, though Galilean, was devoted to literature. She was taught by the eunuch Mardonius, who was also my tutor.

From Mardonius, I learned to walk modestly with my eyes to the ground, not strutting or measuring the effect I was creating on others. I was also taught self-discipline in all things; he particularly tried to keep me from talking too much. Fortunately, now that I am Emperor everyone delights in my conversation! Mardonius also convinced me that time spent at the games or in the theatre was time wasted. And, finally, it was from Mardonius, a Galilean who loved Hellenism too well, that I learned about Homer and Hesiod, Plato and Theophrastus. He was a good teacher, if severe. From my cousin and predecessor, the Emperor Constantius, I learned to dissemble and disguise my true thoughts. A dreadful lesson, but had I not learned it I would not have lived past my twentieth year. In the year 337 Constantius murdered my father. His crime? Consanguinity. I was spared because I was six years old; my half-brother Gallus—who was eleven years old—was spared because he was sickly and not expected to live.

Yes, I was trying to imitate the style of Marcus Aurelius to Himself, and I have failed. Not only because I lack his purity and goodness, but because while he was able to write of the good things he learned from a good family and good friends, I must write of those bitter things I learned from a family of murderers in an age diseased by the quarrels and intolerance of a sect whose purpose it is to overthrow that civilization whose first note was struck upon blind Homer’s lyre. I am not Marcus Aurelius, in excellence or in experience. I must speak now in my own voice.

I never saw my mother. But I do recall my father. Julius Constantius was a tall imposing man. At least he seemed tall to me then. Actually, from his statues, I reckon him to have been somewhat shorter than I am now, and broader. He was most gentle with Gallus and me on those occasions when we saw him, which was not often for he was always travelling, attending to the various small tasks the Emperor set him. I should mention here that at one time my father was thought to have had a better right to the throne than his half-brother Constantine. But it was never his nature to protest. He was gentle; he was weak; he was destroyed.

On 22 May 337, Constantine died at Nicomedia, to his apparent surprise, since he had just taken the water cure at Helenopolis and all the omens suggested a long life. On his deathbed he sent for our cousin, Bishop Eusehius, to baptize him. Just before the Bishop arrived, Constantine is supposed to have said, rather nervously, “Let there be no mistake.” I’m afraid that sounds exactly like him. He was not one to leave, as Aristophanes so wittily puts it, a single stone unturned. Constantine was never a true Galilean; he merely used Christianity to extend his dominion over the world. He was a shrewd professional soldier, badly educated and not in the least interested in philosophy, though some perverse taste in him was hugely satisfied by doctrinal disputes; the mad haggling of bishops fascinated him.

According to Constantine’s will, the empire was to be divided between his three surviving sons, each of whom had already been raised to the rank of Caesar. (Every schoolchild knows this but will they always?) To the twenty-one-year-old Constantine II went the prefecture of Gaul. To Constantius, twenty, the East. To Constans, sixteen, Italy and Illyricum. Each was to assume automatically the title Augustus. Surprisingly enough, this division of the world was carried out peaceably. After the funeral (which I was too young to attend), Constantine II withdrew immediately to his capital at Vienne. Constans set out for Milan. Constantius took over the Sacred Palace at Constantinople.

Then the murders began. Constantius maintained that there was a plot against his life, instigated by the children of Theodora, who had been legitimate wife to his grandfather Constantius Chlorus, whose concubine Helena, Constantine’s mother, had been discarded when his father was raised to the purple. Yes, it all sounds a muddle to those who read of such matters, but to us, caught in the web, these relationships are as murderously plain as that of spider to fly.

Some say there was indeed such a plot, but I doubt it. I am certain that my father was in no way disloyal. He had not protested when his half-brother Constantine became emperor. Why should he protest the elevation of his son? In any case, during the course of that terrible summer, a dozen descendants of Theodora were secretly arrested and executed, among them my father.

The day of my father’s arrest Mardonius and I had been out walking in the gardens of the Sacred Palace. I don’t recall where Gallus was; probably sick in bed with fever. For some reason, when Mardonius and I returned to the house, we entered the front door instead of the back, our usual entrance.

It was a pleasant evening and, again contrary to custom, I went to my father where he sat in the atrium with his estate manager. I remember the white and scarlet roses that had been trained to grow in trellises between the columns. And—what else do I remember? The lion-footed chair. A round marble table. The dark-faced Spanish estate manager sitting on a stool to my father’s left, a sheaf of papers in his lap. As I dictate these words, I can suddenly remember everything. Yet until this moment—how strange—I had forgotten the roses and my father’s face, which was—which is—all clear to me again. What a curious thing memory is! He was ruddy-faced, with small grey eyes, and on his left cheek there was a shallow pale scar, like a crescent.

“This,” he said, turning to the manager, “is the best part of my estate. Guard him well.” I had no idea what he was talking about. I am sure that I was embarrassed. It was rare at any time for my father to speak to me. Not for lack of affection but because he was even more shy and diffident than I, and not at all certain how to behave with children.

Birds—yes, I can hear them again—chattered in the branches of the trees. My father continued to speak of me, and I listened to the birds and looked at the fountain, aware that something strange impended. He said that Nicomedia was “safe”, and I wondered what he meant by that. The estate manager agreed. They spoke of our cousin, Bishop Eusebius; he was also “safe”. I stared at the fountain: Greek of the last century, a sea nymph on a dolphin whose mouth poured water into a basin. Remembering this, I realize now why I had a similar fountain installed in my garden when I was at Paris. Can one remember everything if one tries this hard? (Note: Have copy of fountain made for Constantinople if original can’t be found.)

Then my father dismissed me with an awkward pat; no last word, no mark of undue affection; such is shyness. While I was having supper, the soldiers came. Mardonius was terrified. I was so astonished by his fright that at first I could hardly understand what was happening. When I heard the soldiers in the atrium, I jumped to my feet. “What’s that? Who’s that!” I asked.

“Sit down,” said Mardonius. “Don’t move. Don’t make a sound.” His smooth beardless eunuch face with its thousand lines like a piece of crumpled silk had gone the colour of a corpse. I broke away from him, in wonder at his fear. Clumsily, he tried to bar me from leaving the room, but now, more alarmed by his fear than by the noise of strange men in the house, I bolted past him to the empty atrium. In the vestibule beyond, a woman slave stood weeping. The front door was open.

The porter clung to the frame as if he had been nailed to it. Through the woman’s soft weeping, I heard the sound armed men make in a street: creaking leather, dull clank of metal upon metal, and the hollow thud of thick-soled boots on stone. The porter tried to stop me but I dodged past him into the street. Half a block away, I saw my father walking at the centre of a formation of soldiers, led by a young tribune. Shouting, I ran after him. The soldiers did not halt but my father half-turned as he walked. His face was paler than the ashes of a wood fire. In a terrible voice, stern as Zeus, a voice I had never heard him use before, he said, “Go back! Now!”

I stopped dead in the centre of the street, several yards from him. The tribune stopped, too, and looked at me curiously. Then my father turned on him and said peremptorily, “Go on. This is no sight for a child.”

The tribune grinned. “We’ll be back for him soon enough.” Then the porter from our house seized me, and though I cried and fought, he carried me back into the house.

Several days later in one of the wine cellars of the Sacred Palace, my father was beheaded. No charges were made. There was no trial. I do not know where he was buried or if he was buried.