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Tag: United States

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Miscegenation Nordicism Philosophy of history Sparta (Lacedaemon) Who We Are (book) William Pierce

Three-eyed raven, 3

Indented paragraphs are taken from Who We Are by William Pierce:

The Dorians of Laconia organized the Peloponnesian population in a three-layered hierarchy. At the top were the citizens of Sparta, the Spartiates, all of pure Dorian blood, ruled by their kings. At the bottom of the social structure were the Helots, or serfs, consisting of the aboriginal Mediterranean elements as well as many of the conquered Achaeans of mixed blood. No Spartiate could engage in trade or practice a craft. The Perioeci handled all their commerce, and the Helots provided all their other needs…

It is easy to imagine the Spartiates, upon their arrival in Laconia, surveying the moral decadence and the racemixing which had made the Achaeans such an easy conquest for the Dorians, and then instituting a carefully designed program to safeguard themselves from a similar fate. For a time this program succeeded; the moral character and the racial quality of the Spartiates remained famously high. But ultimately it failed in both regards…

They should have done what the Hebrews did with non-Hebrews in Canaan: exterminate them all. And this is still the problem with white nationalism today. American WNsts are not even willing to recognize that in an ethnostate the citizen of the Aryan Republic should not be allowed to marry, say, a Sicilian American. In a true Aryan ethnostate that conquers North America, mudbloods should not even have the right to reproduce. WNsts are committing ethno-suicide as they are reluctant to scientifically define the subject of who is really white. (See the article in The Fair Race, “The new racial classification”.) Pierce continues:

The Spartiates never succumbed to racemixing, but they did succumb to their own lifestyle. They would have been well advised to eliminate the Helots of the Peloponnesus and the Mediterranean population of Crete altogether and to establish a purely Dorian peasant class in those areas. Then they may well have been able to practice a successful eugenics program, maintain their moral health, and have a stable population too. But, of course, they did not have the advantage which hindsight gives us.

The other Hellenic tribes did succumb to racemixing. Their populations did not suffer the decline in numbers which the Spartiates did, but they suffered a decline in racial quality which resulted in their extermination, perhaps more slowly but just as surely—and less cleanly.

Note: The above quotations of Pierce’s book are contextualized in The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour (available: here). If life permits, next Tuesday I will comment on another passage from the same visionary chapter on Greece coming from the pen of the American ‘Raven’.

Spencer attacked by military police

Just see what has happened today: the US government breaks its own laws before a peaceful gathering at ‘Unite the Right’ Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. They’ve just attacked peaceful Richard Spencer while ignoring violent antifa!

Hunter Wallace tweets in situ:

1/ This bullshit was unbelievable. WE were attacked, maced and pepper sprayed by Antifa

2/ Antifa threw piss bombs, bricks, and smoke bombs into Lee Park

3/ THEN the police declare #UniteTheRight an unlawful assembly, force us to march miles to McIntire Park

4/ Meanwhile, the Democrat Governor of Virginia declared a State of Emergency

5/ So now we can’t peacefully assemble anywhere or exercise our free speech in spite of a federal court order

I found this pic in an antifa site celebrating the illegal arrest.

____________________________

 

Dear Kim Jong-um:

If James Mason is right that—:

“The enemy today is the US Government itself and it is by every standard of measure, the most evil thing that has ever existed on earth”

—please, please nuke not only its capital but its financial and movie industry cities that keep the evil thing alive…!

Categories
Holocaust New Testament

On schizo white nationalism

In 2012 I started to type directly from Randel Helms’ book Gospel Fictions for this blog. Recently, at Greg Johnson’s Counter Currents Aedon Cassiel started a series on exactly the same subject and from the same point of view, that we may call ‘mythicism’ (see e.g., here). Even Cassiel himself, after being asked in the comments section if Helms’ approach in analysing the Gospels had influenced him, responded that he was certain that he has read Helms. Since I won’t be adding weekly translations of Karlheinz Deschner’s history of Christianity as I started to do on Saturdays, perhaps this Saturday the anti-Christian reader might find it interesting how the most recent exegesis continues the debunking of the gospel narrative…

But white nationalism is a schizophrenic movement. Most of them want to have it both ways: universalist Christianity and a white-only ethnostate; feminism (cf. Covington’s novels to create the ethnostate) and women having lots of kids within the white republic; they want a takeover of the State but fail to even form a political party. In the specific case of Counter Currents, Andrew Hamilton once said that the webzine that published his articles was ‘schizophrenic’, presumably referring to the fact that he and others reject open homosexuality while the webzine’s editor at the same time publishes homosexualist articles. The list could go on an on. In another of his Counter Currents articles, Cassiel wrote:

So to make it abundantly clear that this argument is posed with no hostility, I’ve decided to collaborate with Christopher Robertson to make this a sort of Bible Week at Counter-Currents. While I publish a discussion of the possibility that Jesus never existed as a historical figure, Robertson will be publishing a sort of Bible study (which he agreed to do by my insistence—I genuinely found it interesting). This way, the overall tone of Counter-Currents won’t be skewed towards either its Christian or non-Christian readers. And I hope that this token of good faith will help defuse any sense of hostility potentially created by this essay.

This is another example of the ‘split personality’ in the movement. I had already noted Johnson’s forked tongue on the subject of Christianity. This is reflected in the fact that his set of values is schizoid too, as can be seen in the first paragraphs of ‘Dies Irae’, the first article of my book Day of Wrath.

But all nationalists are schizophrenic, not only Johnson. Read ‘Dies Irae’ and ask yourself if you’re stuck with Christian ethics, even if you have superficially abandoned the religion of your parents.

The problem is not a peculiar man named Johnson: it’s the country where he was born. In the 1980s I lived at the other side of the Golden Gate where Johnson is currently living (I hated to visit the big city; beautiful Marin County on the other hand had few spics then). I was shocked to see how deeply biblical the country was. Yesterday I watched this video by Steven Anderson.

The first monologues of the video are the best exposé of the Holocaust narrative that I’ve ever watched. Then pastor Anderson—for the first twenty minutes I didn’t know he was a pastor—started to talk about how Jews and Muslims will burn in hell, the fate for all those who reject the Lord Christ, etc.

We can imagine how Americans, if they apostatized from Christianity, could tap the hidden forces of the Aryan psyche. But in a schizophrenic movement that tries to mix water and oil, such as white nationalism, that won’t happen.

Categories
Art Degenerate art Democracy French Revolution Industrial Revolution Oliver Cromwell Poetry

W. B. Yeats

“Puritanical anti-Europe has become exactly what it set out to become: New Zion,” wrote Sebastian Ronin a couple of years ago referring to the US. Regular visitors of this site know that from my point of view the etiology of white decline is, in order of importance: (1) materialism, (2) Christian ethics and (3) Jewish influence. These excerpts from Kerry Bolton’s essay on Yeats in his book Artists of the Right give the idea of the most harmful factor of all:

 

The rise of industrialism and capitalism during the 19th century brought with it social dislocation, the triumph of the commercial classes and interests, and the creation of an urban proletariat on the ruins of rural life. Smashed asunder were the traditional organic bonds of family and village, rootedness to the earth through generations of one’s offspring, and attunement to the cycles of nature.

With the ascendancy of materialism came the economic doctrines of Free Trade capitalism and Marxism and the new belief in rationalism and science over faith, the mysteries of the cosmos, and the traditional religions. The forces of money had defeated everything of the Spirit. As Spengler explained in his Decline of the West, Western Civilization had entered its end cycle. Such forces had been let loose as long ago as the English Revolution of Cromwell and again by the French Revolution.

There was, however, a reaction to this predicament. The old conservatives had not been up to the task. The spiritual and cultural reaction came from the artists, poets and writers who reach beyond the material and draw their inspiration from the well-springs of what C. G. Jung identified as the collective unconscious. This reaction included not only the political and the cultural but also a spiritual revival expressed in an interest in the metaphysical.

Among the artists in “revolt against the modern world” was the Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), leader of the Irish literary renaissance and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. Despite his English and Protestant background, Yeats was involved in the Young Ireland movement, much of his poetry celebrating the Irish rebellion and its heroes.

Yeats had been as a youngster introduced by his father John, himself a Pre-Raphaelite artist, to the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites, the romantic imagery of which stood then as a rebellion against the encroachments of modernism and industrialism. Having lived in England as a child twenty years before, Yeats was now struck by how much had radically changed under the impress of “progress.” The modern era had even impacted upon the aesthetic of Yeats’ own family, writing of how his father now made his living, and also alluding to the changes being wrought by modernism in art:

It was a perpetual bewilderment that my father, who had begun life as a Pre-Raphaelite painter, now painted portraits of the first comer, children selling newspapers, or a consumptive girl with a basket of fish upon her head, and that when, moved perhaps by memory of his youth, he chose some theme from poetic tradition, he would soon weary and leave it unfinished. I had seen the change coming bit by bit and its defence elaborated by young men fresh from the Paris art-schools. ‘We must paint what is in front of us,’ or ‘A man must be of his own time,’ they would say, and if I spoke of Blake or Rossetti they would point out his bad drawing and tell me to admire Carolus Duran and Bastien-Lepage. Then, too, they were very ignorant men; they read nothing, for nothing mattered but “Knowing how to paint,” being in reaction against a generation that seemed to have wasted its time upon so many things.

For Yeats the mystical was the basis of both his poetry and his political ideas. He was particularly interested in the Irish mystical tradition and folklore. He saw the peasantry and rural values as being necessary to revive against the onslaught of materialism.

Additionally, the “occult” provided a literally hidden culture that was above and beyond the crassness of democracy, of the herd, and of material existence, hence its being termed the “Royal Art,” where again, as in traditional societies over the course of millennia, a priestly caste, at the apex of a hierarchical society, served as the nexus between the terrestrial and the divine, serving as that axis around which High Culture revolves.

Yeats’ poetry was intended as an expression of these symbols of the unconscious and the archetypal. This resurgence of these age-long memories required a “revolt of soul against intellect now beginning in the world.” What is here called “intellect” was the advance of rationalism, scientism, and Enlightenment doctrines that had destroyed man’s nexus with the divine embodied in traditions and hierarchical social orders, and which has repressed man’s spiritual nature in favor of the crassly material.

Yeats, like D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, et al., was particularly concerned that commercialism would mean the pushing down of cultural values in the pursuit of profit rather than artistic excellence. Hence, he called for a revival of aristocratic values. He lamented that, “the mere multitude is everywhere with its empty photographic eyes. A declaration of war on the masses by higher men is called for. Everywhere the mediocre are coming in order to make themselves master.”

His appeal was to the artist and to the individual of taste and culture for, as Nietzsche had pointed out, culture is the faculty that distinguishes the human from other organisms. In this spirit, Yeats applauded Nietzsche’s philosophy as “a counteractive to the spread of democratic vulgarity.”

Yeats’ keen sense of historical context is reflected in “The Curse of Cromwell.” Here he identifies the English Revolution as what we can see as the inauguration of the cycle of “Money over Blood,” in Spenglerian terms: the victory of the merchant class over the traditional order, which was to be re-reenacted in the French Revolution. The Bolshevik Revolution was of the same spirit of money against blood, of the materialistic against the spirit and culture.

All three revolutions were carried out in the name of “the people” against the traditional rulers, only to create a greater tyranny in the service of money. Spengler had written in The Decline of the West: “Practical communism with its ‘class war’… is nothing but the trusty henchman of big Capital, which knows perfectly well how to make use of it… in that their object is not to overcome money-values, but to possess them.”

Cromwell’s English revolution has had lasting consequences for the entire West. The cycle of Money over culture and tradition that Cromwell inaugurated has never been overcome. America was founded on the same Puritan money ethics and continues to spread that spirit over the farthest reaches of the world.

The specter of Puritanism has haunted the entire world ever since, “far and wide.” Nobility of character, regardless of “class”—itself a vulgarization of the traditional castes—was destroyed by the inauguration in the West of the reign of money by Cromwell, and one that was not overcome, but rather adopted by its supposed “enemy,” socialism, as Spengler was to point out. Yeats, as “The Curse of Cromwell” shows, has been one of the few to realize the full depth and lasting significance of Puritanism under whatever name it might appear.

No longer are there left those of noble tradition, those who served as part of a long heritage, “the tall men”; and the old gaiety of the peasant village, the squire’s hall and aristocrat’s manor have been beaten down.

All neighborly, content and easy talk are gone,
But here’s no good complaining, for money’s rant is on.

The artists, once patronized by the aristocracy, must now prostitute their art for the sake of money on the mass market, as script writers, and “public entertainers” to sell a product. All individuals are now producers and consumers, including the artist producing for a consumer market.

And we and all the Muses are things of no account.

Yeats considered himself heir to a tradition that has been repressed by democratic vulgarity, and he lived in service to that tradition, now virtually driven to the catacombs under the dead weight of “mass culture,” which is nothing more than consumerism posturing as “art,” “literature,” and “music” manufactured according to market demands. He and a few others of the same temperament lived in the service of High Culture as contemporary troubadours “against the modern world” to uplift the spirits of the remnant who have managed to maintain their nobility in the face of the crass.

One product of democracy and capitalism that Yeats feared was the proliferation of those he regarded as inferior people. Yeats advocated planned human up-breeding and joined the Eugenics Society at a time when eugenics was a widely held belief among the intelligentsia. Yeats had “On the Boiler” published the same year, where he endorsed the psychometric studies that were showing intelligence to be inherited, and expressed concern at the proliferation of the unintelligent.

The aristocracy of old, the noble lineage of blood, of familial descent, has been replaced by the new rich, the merchants, our new rulers are those who measure all things by profit. Like Spengler, Yeats saw hope in Fascist Italy: “The Ireland that reacts from the present disorder is turning its eyes towards individualist Italy.” In particular, he admired the educational reforms and cyclic historical doctrine of Italian Fascist philosopher and Minister of Education, Giovanni Gentile, stating in 1925 before the Irish Senate, of which he was a member, that Irish teachers should study the methods that Gentile had enacted in Italian schools, “so to correlate all subjects of study.”

The following year Senator Yeats stated that the Italian educational system was “adapted to an agricultural nation” which was applicable also to Ireland, “a system of education that will not turn out clerks only, but will turn out efficient men and women, who can manage to do all the work of the nation.”

With the assumption to Government of De Valera in 1932, the following year Yeats was seeking to formulate a doctrine for Ireland that would be a form of “Fascism modified by religion.” History consisted broadly of “the rule of the many followed by the rule of the few,” again reminiscent of Spengler’s idea of a “new Caesarism” that follows on the rule of plutocracy at the end cycle of a civilization.

For Yeats, the rule of the few meant a return to some form of aristocracy.

Categories
Currency crash Franklin D. Roosevelt

Guide to investing in gold & silver, 4

by Mike Maloney

 

Chapter Four:
 Greed, War, and the Dollar’s Demise

With the outbreak of World War I, as with all the historical examples we’ve already covered in this book, the combatants halted redemption in gold, increased taxes, borrowed heavily, and created additional currency. However, because the United States did not enter the war for almost three years, it became the major supplier to the world during that time.

Gold flowed into the U.S. at an astounding rate, increasing its gold stocks by more than 60 percent. When the European Allies could no longer pay in gold, the U.S. extended them credit. Once the U.S. entered the war, however, it too spent at a rate far in excess of its income. The U.S. national debt went from $1 billion in 1916 to $25 billion by war’s end.

The world currency supply was exploding.

After the war, the world longed for the robust trade and economic stability of the international gold standard that had worked so well before the war. Thus, throughout the 1920s most of the world governments returned to a form of the gold standard. But the standard employed wasn’t the classical gold standard of the prewar period. Instead, it was a pseudo-gold standard called the gold exchange standard.

Governments never seem to learn that you can’t cheat gold. During the war, many countries inflated their currency supplies drastically. Yet when they tried to return to gold, they didn’t want to devalue their currency against that gold by making the number of units of currency (gold certificates, or claim checks on gold) match the number of units of gold that backed that currency. So here’s their “solution”:
 
Building pyramids

After the war, the United States had most of the world’s gold. Conversely, many European countries had large supplies of U.S. dollars (and depleted gold reserves) because of the many war loans the U.S. had made to the Allies. Thus was decided that under the gold exchange standard, the dollar and the British pound, along with gold, would be used as currency reserves by the world’s central banks and that the U.S. dollar and the pound would be redeemable in gold.

In the meantime, the U.S. had created a central bank (the Federal Reserve) and given it the power to create currency out of thin air. How can you create currency out of thin air and still back it with gold, you ask? You impose a reserve requirement on the central bank (the Federal Reserve), limiting the amount of currency it creates to a certain multiple of the units of gold it has in the vaults. In the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, it specified that the Fed was to keep a 40 percent reserve of “lawful money” (gold, or currency that could be redeemed for gold) at the U.S. Treasury.

Fractional reserve banking is like an inverted pyramid. Under a 10 percent reserve, one dollar at the bottom can be expanded, by layer upon layer of book entries, until it becomes $10 at the top. Adding a fractional reserve central bank, underneath fractional reserve commercial banks, was akin to placing an inverted pyramid on top of an inverted pyramid.

Before the Federal Reserve, commercial banks, under a 10 percent reserve ratio, could hold a $20 gold piece in reserve and create another $180 of loans, for a total of $200. But with the Federal Reserve as the foundation under the banking pyramid and having a reserve requirement of 40 percent, the Fed could put $50 in circulation for each $20 gold coin it had in the vaults. Then the banks, as the second layer in the pyramid, could create loans of $450 for a total of $500.

With the new gold exchange standard, foreign central banks could use dollars instead of gold. This meant that if the Federal Reserve had a $20 gold piece in the vault, and issued $50, then a foreign central bank could hold that $50 in reserve and, at a reserve ratio of 40 percent, issue the equivalent of $125 of their currency. Then when that $125 hit the banks, the banks could expand that to $1,250 worth of claim checks, all backed by a single, solitary $20 gold piece. That means that the real reserve ratio (the ratio of real money that could be paid out against their currency) was now only 1.6 percent.

Now there was an inverted pyramid, on top of an inverted pyramid, on top of an inverted pyramid. This was highly unstable. Ultimately, the gold exchange standard was a faulty system that governments imposed on their citizens, which allowed the governments to act as if their currencies were as valuable as before the war. This was a system that was destined for failure.
 
The rise of credit culture

But every pyramid scheme flourishes in its early days, and so did the gold exchange standard. With all the new currency available from the central banks, the commercial banks generated many new loans. This abundance of currency led to the greatest consumer credit expansion thus far in American history, which, in turn, led to the biggest economic boom America had ever experienced. In a very real sense, credit put the roar in the Roaring Twenties.

Before 1913 the vast majority of loans had been commercial. Loans on nonfarmland real estate and consumer installment credit, like auto loans, were almost nonexistent, and interest rates were very high. But with the advent of the Fed, credit for cars, homes, and stocks was now cheap and easy. The effect of low interest rates combined with these new types of loans was immediate; bubbles sprang up everywhere. There was the Florida real estate bubble of 1925, and then of course the infamous stock market bubble of the late 1920s.

During the 1920s, many Americans stopped saving and started investing, treating their brokerage account as a savings account, much like many Americans treated their homes in our most recent housing bubble. But a brokerage account is not a savings account, nor is a house. The value of a savings account depends on how many dollars you put in. But the value of a brokerage account or a house depends solely on the perception of others. If someone thinks your assets have value, then they do, but if they don’t think they have value, then they don’t.

In a credit-based economy, whether the economy does well or does poorly is largely based on people’s perception. If people believe things are great, then people borrow and spend currency, and the economy flourishes. But if people have the least bit of anxiety, if they have doubts about tomorrow, then watch out!

In 1929, the stock market crashed, the credit bubble burst, and the U.S. economy slid into depression.
 
The mechanics of a depression

The popping of a credit bubble is a deflationary event, and in the case of the Great Depression it was massively deflationary. To understand how a deflation occurs, you need to know how our currency is born, and how it can join the ranks of the dearly departed.

When we take out a loan from a bank, the bank does not actually loan us any of the currency that was on deposit at the bank. Instead, the second the pen hits the paper on that mortgage, loan document, or credit card receipt that we are signing, the bank is allowed to create those dollars as a book entry. In other words, we create the currency. The bank is not allowed to do it without our signature. We create the currency, and then the bank gets to charge us interest for the currency we created. This brand-new currency we just created then becomes part of the currency supply. Much of our currency supply is created in this way.

But when a home goes into foreclosure, a loan gets defaulted on, or someone files bankruptcy, that currency simply disappears back into currency heaven where it came from. So as credit goes bad, the currency supply contracts, and deflation sets in.

This is what happened in 1930-1933, and it was disastrous. As a wave of foreclosures and bankruptcies swept the nation, one-third of the currency supply of the United States evaporated into thin air. Over the next three years, wages and prices fell by one third.
 
Run, baby, run

Bank runs are also enormously deflationary events because when you deposit one dollar into the bank, the bank carries that dollar as a liability on its books. It someday owes that dollar back to you. However, under a fractional reserve system, the bank is then allowed to create currency in the form of credit (loans), in an amount many times that of the original deposit, which it carries on its books as assets. As we’ve discussed, under a 10 percent reserve, a one dollar liability can create another $9 of assets for the bank.

This is normally not a problem, as long as the bank isn’t loaned-up to the maximum amount permitted. With just a small amount of “excess” reserves, the bank can cover the day-to-day fluctuations because most of the time deposits and withdrawals come close to balancing out.

But a serious problem can develop when too many people show up to make withdrawals at the same time without the counterbalancing effect of the relatively same amount of people making deposits. If withdrawals exceed deposits, the bank will draw from those “excess” reserves. Once those “excess” reserves have been used up, however, fractional reserve banking is then thrown into vicious reverse. From that point on, to be able to pay out one dollar against deposits, the bank must liquidate $9 of loans. This was what was happening in 1931, and it was one of the major contributing factors to the collapse of the U.S. currency supply.

Also, prior to the advent of the Federal Reserve, the public had about one dollar in the bank for each dollar in its pockets, and the banks kept one dollar of reserves on hand to pay out against each $3 of deposits. But thanks to the Federal Reserve, by 1929 the public had $11 in bank deposits for each dollar in its pocket, and the banks only had one dollar on hand to pay out against every $13 in deposits. This was a very dangerous situation. The public had lots of deposits and very little cash, and the banks also had very little cash to back up those deposits.

By November of 1930, bank failures were more than double the highest monthly level ever recorded. Over 250 banks with more than $180 million in deposits would fail that month. But this was only the beginning.

The largest single bank failure in U.S. history happened on December 11, 1930. The sixty-two-branch Bank of the United States collapsed. This failure would have a cascading effect, causing over 352 banks with more than $370 million in deposits to fail in that month alone. Worst of all, this was before deposit insurance. People’s entire life savings were lost in the blink of an eye.

Then, to top it all off, on September 21, 1931, Great Britain defaulted from the gold exchange standard, throwing the world into monetary chaos. Foreign governments, along with businesses and private investors from the United States and around the world, began to fear that the U.S. might follow suit. Suddenly, there was a dash for cash.

Within the U.S., banks were running out of gold coin, and at the same time tremendous outflows of gold began to leave the vaults of the Federal Reserve, destined for far-off lands. The pyramid scheme that was the gold exchange standard began to crumble. To stop the bleeding, the Fed more than doubled the cost of currency in the U.S., raising the rates from 1.5 to 3.5 percent in one week.

As a result, between August 1931 and January 1932, 1,860 banks with $1.4 billion in deposits suspended their operations.

However, 1932 was an election year. Three long years into the Depression people were desperate for a change, and in November, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president. Even though his inauguration wouldn’t be until March, rumors started flying that he would devalue the dollar. Again gold flowed out of the vaults as foreign governments, foreign investors, and the American public lost even more faith in the dollar, and the most devastating bank run in American history began. But this time the American public wouldn’t be fooled.

As Barron’s put it in its March 27, 1933, issue: “It has been aptly observed that the stages of deflation since 1929 have been the flight from property (chiefly securities) into bank deposits, next a flight from bank deposits into currency, and finally, a flight from currency into gold.”

Incredibly, the currency supply of the United States was falling so fast that if it continued at that pace for a year only 22 percent of it would remain. The U.S. economic outlook was dire, and it seemed as if the dollar would fall into oblivion.
 
Executive order

On March 4, 1933, Roosevelt was inaugurated, and within days he signed executive proclamations closing all banks for a “bank holiday,” freezing foreign exchange, and preventing banks from paying out gold coin when they reopened. A month later he signed an executive order requiring U.S. citizens to turn over their private property (gold) to the Federal Reserve, in exchange for Federal Reserve notes.

On April 20, he signed another executive order, ending the right of U.S. citizens to buy, or trade in, foreign currencies, and/or transfer currency to accounts outside the United States. On the same day, the Thomas Amendment was sent to Congress, authorizing the president, at his discretion, to reduce the gold content of the dollar to as low as 50 percent of its former weight in gold. It was enacted into law on May 12, and then amended to give Federal Reserve notes the full “lawful money” status.

But there was still one major hurdle to overcome before Roosevelt could devalue the dollar: the infamous gold clause.

During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln had to come up with a way to pay the troops and introduced a second purely fiat currency to the country the greenback dollar. When it first appeared, the greenback was worth the same amount as gold notes. But by the end of the Civil War they had fallen to just one third of the value of the gold-backed dollar. Many people who had made contracts or taken out loans before the war in gold notes paid them back in depreciated greenback dollars. Of course this was cheating the creditors and many lawsuits were filed.

After the end of the Civil War most contracts contained a “gold clause” to protect lenders and others from currency devaluation. The gold clause required payment in either gold or an amount of currency equal to the “weight of gold” value when the contract was entered into. The big problem for Roosevelt was that most government contracts and obligations also had this clause written into them. So devaluing the dollar would also increase the cost of government obligations by the same amount.

So at the behest of President Roosevelt, Congress passed a joint resolution on June 5 defaulting on the gold clause in all contracts, public and private, past, present, and future. In essence, the government simply said to American citizens and businesses, “We don’t have to pay you.”

Outraged by what he viewed as the government’s blatant disregard for Americans’ rights, Senator Carter Glass, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, lamented, “It’s dishonor, sir. This great government, strong in gold, is breaking its promises to pay gold to widows and orphans to whom it has sold government bonds with a pledge to pay gold coin of the present standard of value. It’s dishonor, sir.” But Senator Thomas Gore of Oklahoma put it even more succinctly when he said, “Why, that’s just plain stealing, isn’t it, Mr. President?”

But these protests fell on deaf ears. On August 28, 1933, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 6260, outlawing the constitutional right of U.S. citizens to own gold. To keep from having to default on its commitments (declare bankruptcy), and to keep concealed the fraud of fractional reserve banking, the banking system’s only choice was to get the government to make gold (the legal money of our constitution, an inert, inanimate element) illegal for U.S. citizens to own. Roosevelt gladly obliged.

First under threat of publishing the “gold hoarders”—names in the newspaper, and then under threat of fines and imprisonment, the United States of America, land of the free and home of the brave, ordered its citizens to turn over their own private property (the money in their pockets) to any Federal Reserve Bank. As far as I can tell, no one seems to know exactly who penned these proclamations and executive orders. But one thing was now clear. The government was no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Instead it was a government of the bankers, by the bankers, and for the bankers.

But there was still one more dastardly deed to be done.
 
Weight watchers

On January 31, 1934, Roosevelt signed an executive proclamation effectively devaluing the dollar. Before this proclamation it took $20.67 to buy one troy ounce of gold. But now, since the dollar instantly had 40.09 percent less purchasing power, it took $35 to buy the same amount of gold. This also meant that, with regards to international trade, the government had just stolen 40.09 percent of the purchasing power of the entire currency supply of the people of the United States—all with the stroke of a pen. That is the power of fiat currency.

The worst part of this whole situation is that people who followed the rules and turned in their gold as decreed were the ones who suffered the most because those who illegally hung on to their gold realized a 69.33 percent profit due to the pressures Roosevelt’s policies applied on the dollar. Less than 22 percent of the gold in circulation was turned in, however, and it seems not a single person was arrested or prosecuted for hoarding.

But despite the efforts of the U.S. government, gold won in the end. Gold and the will of the public forced the government’s hand. By forbidding the U.S. population from laying claim to any of its own gold, and by devaluing the U.S. dollars, the United States was able to avert international runs on the dollar and was able to continue international trade under the gold standard. By declaring the claim checks on gold held by U.S. citizens null and void, and by requiring more claim checks from foreign central banks to purchase each unit of gold, there was now a far lower multiple of claim checks to gold, and the fractional reserve system was once again manageable.

[Note of the Ed.: In his books and audiovisual materials, Maloney loves charts. Here we are not reproducing Chart 2. U.S. Monetary Base and Gold Reserves, 1918-1935, but the curious reader can see it: here.]

By devaluing the dollar from one twentieth of an ounce of gold to one thirty-fifth of an ounce, the value of the gold held by the U.S. Treasury now exactly matched the value of the monetary base. This meant the dollar was once again fully backed by gold. It also meant that there was no reason for gold to continue being illegal since there was now enough gold to pay out against every paper dollar in existence, and the dollar could have been fully convertible into gold once again.

Gold had once again revalued itself, not with the knockout blow and the death of the currency as in previous chapters, but this time by a technical knockout. To halt the implosion of the U.S. banking system and to regain the trust of our international trading partners, gold had forced the government to devalue the currency by stealing from its citizens, and it had once again accounted for all the excess currency the banking system had created. Gold was still the undefeated heavyweight champion of the world.

But all the pain and suffering could have been avoided. Gold and silver require discipline and constraint from banks and governments, and both banks and governments resent gold for it. Numerous factors contributed to the Great Depression, but there was only one root cause. Governments around the world, along with the Federal Reserve, foreign central banks, and commercial banks, all tried to cheat gold.

Categories
James Mason

Siege, 10

Playing the ball as it lies

“We are a parliamentary party by compulsion”, said Adolf Hitler during the Kampfzeit period in Germany from 1925 to 1933. Because Germany was still essentially sound under the surface in 1923, the open revolt did not work, nor catch on with the populace (apart from being betrayed from the inside by conservative swine). And because German society and institutions were still basically sound at that time. Hitler and his fellow Putschists were looked upon quite sympathetically and favorably by those presiding at their trial in 1924 which resulted in less than a year’s incarceration. (That German court gave Hitler less than a year for “high treason”; the System here today gives patriots fifty years for charges they were framed on, for doing nothing!)

What had prompted the Munich Putsch was the apparent bottoming-out of German law-and-order and economy. But that drastic move was premature because the Weimar regime—filthy and rotten as it was—still had more than one gasp left in it. The economy actually rallied from that point up until the World Depression of 1929 which sent a stampede of desperate Germans, no longer complacent, into the ranks of Hitler’s Party.

The point is that German institutions were yet healthy enough to work within, and indeed too healthy to try to overthrow (as the Communists had already found out the hard way). The problem was a thin coating, or scum, if you will, of traitors at the top. Because of Hitler’s correct assessment of the situation and the firm course he set his Party on accordingly in 1925, the history of the NSDAP from then until the Machtergreifung—the taking of state power—is an unbroken, uninterrupted uphill climb.

We of the NSLF are a revolutionary party by compulsion. We are the first to realize that no popular revolt can be contemplated at this time as the only thing “popular” at the moment is further pleasure and more diversion among the quivering masses. The society is a shambles and the economy slips more every day but most would—and will—be surprised to learn just how much further it can deteriorate before the situation can be termed critical.

We also realize that nothing, absolutely nothing by way of Anglo-Saxon institutions remain intact and this effectively means that America as it had been known for about 150 years has been wiped out more cleanly than if it had been defeated in a sudden war. (This actually had been Germany’s case and was what had allowed for her resurrection within only fourteen years.) The United States went the worst way a country can—terminal cancer—but yet, historically, even that process was quick—quick enough to leave enough White Men with some ability to still think and act as White Men. The rest is up to us.

The polarization of the people and the government is so total that few even among the Movement can grasp its fullness. Perhaps the best way to be sure that we are the prime representatives of the people is to be aware that NO ONE is further alienated from the ruling, governing establishment than we. We call ourselves a LIBERATION FRONT and not a party because we hold no illusions about ever being able to realize anything concrete through parliamentary measures.

How could such a movement succeed when the people themselves don’t care and the ruling body—Left, Right, and Center—unanimously stonewalls against us? The voices and opinions of the System might put forth varying opinions on any topic or issue save one: US. We are now and forever strictly O-U-T! But we know why we are out and they know why we are out so there should be no conflict on that. They are the Establishment; we are the Revolution.

These are the rules, of their choosing, not ours. But they are the reality of a situation as harsh as it is immutable. It is war. Only a fool and a weakling would ask for it to be otherwise. The one fundamental reason the Hard Right movement in this country has perennially gone nowhere is because it has NEVER fully comprehended this one fundamental reality and has never been set upon the proper course as was Hitler’s movement in Germany.

To describe the past twenty-odd years of Rightist and even Nazi effort in the United States as inappropriate is to put it as accurately and charitably as possible. Set upon an inappropriate course, with inappropriate ideals and priorities, inappropriate methodology, etc. —little wonder then why we have been plagued with such miserably inappropriate and wholly inadequate human resources. It is the reason quality human material doesn’t stay around long. The Movement has been off-base at the very foundation which means that no matter how carefully or skillfully the framework might go on, it is all fore-doomed to collapse (as it always has done).

There has always been the talk of a New Order and a New World. Those are easy slogans, too easy in fact because their meaning is mostly lost. Their meaning directly implies a TOTAL CHANGE. Given the graduality of the decline of American society and culture over the past thirty or forty years, it’s hard for any comparatively young person to appreciate how far we’ve sunk and to know from that just what we’ve lost, and what must be recaptured and through National Socialist discipline and idealism enhanced and reinforced, super-charged to become something greater than has ever been seen on earth. Even Hitler did not face a task such as we face.

Being aware of this then, the notion of even attempting or remotely desiring to become a part of the unspeakably vile and sick Establishment and System is utterly revolting to any true National Socialist. To sit amongst the sold-out and degenerate Senate and Congress in the Capitol?! Even Hitler refused to seat his new government in the same halls as the Weimar regime or the Imperial government (liberally laced as it was with Jews). He wanted a new beginning. Our enemies are VILE and only appear “legitimate” because of the power that comes with money. We state here and now that we shall SMASH THEM and, furthermore, that they are HELPLESS TO PREVENT IT! The road may be long and rocky but the moment will arrive and both our will and our striking blows shall be irresistible.

No recognition and no cooperation today means no compromise and no quarter shown tomorrow. No favors rendered today means no obligations to fulfill tomorrow. Not asking today means not being told tomorrow. If we do not accept and function by the circumstances as they exist, we not only condemn ourselves to eternal failure but we miss the opportunity now given for a revolution more total and complete than anything ever before in all history.

Vol.X, #1 – January, 1981

Order a copy of Siege (here)

Categories
American civil war Deranged altruism Evil Kevin MacDonald

Diaspora, 2

Food for thought from Kevin
MacDonald’s Diaspora Peoples:

 
Puritans forbade the worship of Christmas, both in England and Massachusetts, and whipped, burned, and exiled those they found to be heretics, all the while believing themselves to be the beleaguered defenders of liberty…

At that time certain religious non-conformists, especially Anabaptists and Quakers, were still prevented from settling in New England and imprisoned, tortured, and even executed if they returned there…

As in the Old Testament, God’s wrath would be leveled at entire communities, not only individuals. Each member was therefore responsible for the purity of the whole, since transgressions of others would result in God’s wrath being leveled at the entire community. Puritans were therefore highly motivated to control the behavior of others that they thought might offend God. This included, of course, the sexual behavior of other community members.

Both East Anglia and New England had the lowest relative rates of private crime (murder, theft, mayhem), but the highest rates of public violence—“the burning of rebellious servants, the maiming of political dissenters, the hanging of Quakers, the execution of witches”. This record is entirely in keeping with Calvinist tendencies in Geneva…

Puritans waged holy war on behalf of moral righteousness even against their own cousins, perhaps a form of altruistic punishment described by Fehr and Gachter and found more often among cooperative hunter-gatherer groups than among groups, such as Judaism, based on extended kinship.

Whatever the political and economic complexities that led to the Civil War, it was the Yankee moral condemnation of slavery that inspired the rhetoric and rendered the massive carnage of closely related Anglo-Americans on behalf of slaves from Africa justifiable in the minds of Puritans.

Militarily, the war with the Confederacy rendered the heaviest sacrifice in lives and property ever made by Americans. Puritan moral fervor and its tendency to justify draconian punishment of evil doers can also be seen in the comments of “the Congregationalist minister at Henry Ward Beecher’s Old Plymouth Church in New York who went so far as to call for exterminating the German people, the sterilization of 10,000,000 German soldiers and the segregation of the woman.

In England, Puritanism never really developed into a group evolutionary strategy but remained a loosely bordered faction among other Protestant sects. In New England, however, it developed as a hegemonic religious and political movement in control of a particular territory. Membership in the church required a vote of the congregation. “The principal criterion, besides an upright behavior, was evidence that God had chosen the candidate for eternal salvation…”

Categories
Antiochus IV Epiphanes Tom Sunic

On Judaised Americans

My last posts on the Greco-Roman wars against the Jews (here and here) made me wonder… Just compare how pre-Christian Europeans handled the Jewish problem with how, in modern America, the red carpet was rolled out for the Jews since the 19th century in line with the dominant Judeo-Christian, liberal ideology.

As Tom Sunic explained in the very first chapter of Homo Americanus, in the US not a single politician will ever admit that America is a theocratic system with a peculiar political theology. Think of how Donald Trump recently became the first sitting American president to visit Jerusalem’s Western Wall!

If Aryans ever wish to re-establish their own racial sovereignty, they must identify their foe: Judeo-Christian ethics, which pervades even the white nationalist movement. One example will suffice. Greg Johnson has been working on a White Nationalist Manifesto for some time. When he finally publishes and advertises it through the forums, will it contain his “Old Right” bashing favouring an effete Neo-Christian “New Right”?

Whatever the impact of the forthcoming White Nationalist Manifesto among American racists, many of whom are Christians, the US owes its very existence to the Jews. The 17th century reverence for the Old Testament by those naïve, starry-eyed colonisers who imagined a “City on the Hill” comes to mind. “Very early on America’s founding fathers, pioneers, and politicians identified themselves as Jews who had come to the new American Canaan from the pestilence of Europe,” writes Sunic.

After another post on the Jewish-Roman wars, the following Saturdays I’ll be adding passages from Deschner’s Criminal History of Christianity describing how the Early Church dealt with the Jews. Despite their rabid anti-Semitism, early theologians did not push for those pagan attempts to solve the Jewish problem once and for all.

Certainly, unlike the US, in anti-Semitic Christendom the Jews were not revered, but they were tolerated. Those early theologians that I’ll be quoting on Saturdays are similar to the white nationalists of today: much barking but no bites. This is why, unlike National Socialism, white nationalism won’t ever work. Whites must transvalue “New Right” values back to “Old Right” values!

Antiochus’ war (167-164 BCE)

“He ordered his soldiers to cut down without mercy those whom they met and to slay those who took refuge in their houses. There was a massacre of young and old, a killing of women and children, a slaughter of virgins and infants. In the space of three days, eighty thousand were lost, forty thousand meeting a violent death, and the same number being sold into slavery.” —2 Maccabees, 5:11–14.

The siege of Jerusalem (63 BCE)

Jews were massacred by invading Romans. The event marked the end of Jewish independence.

The Samaritan Revolt (36 CE)

The Samaritans rebelled against the Romans. The rebels were ruthlessly massacred by order of the Roman Procurator.

The First Jewish-Roman War (66-73 CE)

Jews were massacred by Romans throughout the war; 97,000 enslaved. It was the first of three major Jewish revolts against the Romans. It resulted in the destruction of the Holy Temple and a devastating depopulation of the Jewish population as the massacre wiped out a large percentage of their population. (Again, compare Titus’ deeds with what Donald Trump did a couple of months ago in what remains of that temple.)

Bar Kokhba revolt (132-136 CE)

Decisive Roman victory. The Romans enslaved many Jews of Judaea, massacred many Jews, suppressed Jewish religious and political authority, banned Jews from Jerusalem, and renamed and merged Judaea into the Syrian Palestine province. The war meant another devastating depopulation of the Jewish population.

If white nationalists, so overwhelmed by Judeo-Christian ethics, are not committing ethnic suicide how do you explain that they are not celebrating such victories?

Guide to investing in gold & silver, 2

by Mike Maloney


 

Chapter Two:
The wealth of nations

In studying monetary history to identify cycles, it is necessary to examine both sides of the coin so to speak. The temptation is for people to blame all their woes on their government. Certainly governments are often at fault when it comes to inflation through fiat monetary policy, but one must never forget that in the end we are ultimately the ones who consent to our government’s rule. History is full of examples of greed leading a populace to do incredibly stupid things. Indeed, we don’t need government to ruin our economy. We can get by just fine by ourselves, thank you.

The best example I can think of is the tulip mania of 1637.
 

A tulip is still a tulip…

In order to understand the absurdity of this moment in history I’m about to share with you, you simply have to ask yourself: Would I pay $1.8 million for a tulip bulb? If the answer to that question is yes, then please put this book down and get some professional help. Otherwise, read on and see just how crazy the public can become.

Everyone thinks of tulips when they think of Holland. Then they think of beer. What many people don’t know is that tulips are not indigenous to Holland. They were imported. In 1593 the first tulip bulbs were brought from Turkey to Holland. They quickly became a status symbol for royalty and the wealthy. This developed into a mania, and soon a tulip exchange was established in Amsterdam.

Very quickly this mania turned into an economic bubble. You may find this comical; in 1636 a single tulip bulb of the Viceroy variety was traded for the following: 2 lasts (a last is 4,000 pounds) of wheat, 4 lasts of rye, 4 fat oxen, 8 fat swine, 12 fat sheep, 2 hogsheads (140 gallon wooden barrel) of wine, 4 tons of beer, 2 tons of butter, 1,000 pounds of cheese, 1 bed, 1 suit of clothes, and 1 silver goblet.

At its very peak in 1637 a single bulb of the Semper Augustus variety was sold for 6,000 florins. The average yearly wage in Holland at the time was 150 florins. That means that tulip bulbs were selling for 40 times the average Hollander’s annual income. To put that into perspective, let’s assume the average U.S. salary is $45,000. That means that a tulip bulb in today’s terms would cost you $1.8 million.

Soon people began to realize how absolutely crazy the situation had become, and the smart money (if you can call anyone involved in this mania smart) began to sell. Within weeks tulip bulb prices fell to their real value, which was several tulip bulbs for just one florin.

The financial devastation that swept across northern Europe as a result of this market crash lasted for decades.

 
John Law and central banking

Another great example of a society replacing its money with an ever inflating currency supply is the story of John Law. John Law’s life was a true roller-coaster ride of epic proportions.

Born the son of a Scottish goldsmith and banker, John Law was a bright boy with high mathematical aptitude. He grew up to be quite a gambler and ladies’ man, and lost most of his family fortune in the course of his exploits. At one point, he got into a fight over a woman and his opponent challenged him to a duel. He shot his opponent dead, was arrested, tried, and sentenced to hang. Being the knave that he was, Law escaped from prison and fled to France.

Meanwhile, Louis XIV was running France deeply into debt due to war mongering and his lavish lifestyle. John Law, who was now living in Paris, became a gambling buddy with the Duke d’Orleans, and it was at about this time that Law published an economic paper promoting the benefits of paper currency.

When Louis XIV died, his successor, Louis XV was only eleven years old. The Duke d’Orleans was placed as regent (temporary king), and to his horror he found out that France was so deep in debt that taxes didn’t even cover the interest payments on that debt. Law, sensing opportunity, showed up at the royal court with two papers for his friend blaming the problems of France on insufficient currency and expounding the virtues of paper currency. On May 15, 1716, John Law was given a bank (Banque Générale) and the right to issue paper currency, and there began Europe’s foray into paper currency.

The slightly increased currency supply brought a new vitality to the economy, and John Law was hailed as a financial genius. As a reward the Duke d’Orleans granted Law the rights to all trade from France’s Louisiana Territory in America. The Louisiana Territory was a huge area comprising about 30 percent of what is now the United States, stretching from Canada to the mouth of the Mississippi River.

At that time, it was believed that Louisiana was rich in gold, and John Law’s new Mississippi Company, with the exclusive rights to trade from this territory, quickly became the richest company in France. John Law wasted no time capitalizing on the public’s confidence in his company’s prospects and issued 200,000 company shares. Shortly after that the share price exploded, rising by more than 30 times in a period of months. Just imagine, in a few short years, Law went from a gambling addict and penniless murderer to one of the most powerful financial figures in Europe.

Again, Law was rewarded. This time the Duke bestowed upon him and his companies a monopoly on the sale of tobacco, the sole right to refine and coin silver and gold, and he made Law’s bank the Banque Royale. Law was now at the helm of France’s central bank.

Now that his bank was the royal bank of France it meant that the government backed his new paper notes, just as our government backs the Federal Reserve’s paper notes. And since everything was going so well, the Duke asked John Law to issue even more notes, and Law, agreeing that there is no such thing as too much of a good thing, obliged. The government spent foolishly and recklessly while Law was pacified with gifts, honors, and titles.

Yes, things were going quite well. So well, in fact, that the Duke thought that if this much currency brought so much prosperity, then twice as much would be even better. Just a couple of years earlier the government couldn’t even pay the interest on its debt, and now, not only had it paid off its debt, but it could also spend as much currency as it wanted. All it had to do was print it.

As a reward for Law’s service to France, the Duke passed an edict granting the Mississippi Company the exclusive right to trade in the East Indies, China, and the South Seas. Upon hearing this news, Law decided to issue 50,000 new shares of the Mississippi Company. When he made the new stock offer, more than 300,000 applications were made for the new shares. Among them were dukes, marquises, counts, and duchesses, all waiting to get their shares. Law’s solution to the problem was to issue 300,000 shares instead of the 50,000 he was originally planning, a 500 percent increase in the total number of shares.

Paris was booming due to the rampant stock speculation and the increased currency supply. All the shops were full, there was an abundance of new luxury goods, and the streets were bustling. As Charles Mackay puts it in his book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, “New houses were built in every direction, and an illusory prosperity shone over the land, and so dazzled the eyes of the whole nation, that none could see the dark cloud on the horizon announcing the storm that was too rapidly approaching.”

Soon, however, problems started to crop up. Due to the inflation of the currency supply, prices started to skyrocket. Real estate values and rents, for instance, increased 20-fold.

Law also began to feel the effects of the rampant inflation he had helped create. With the next stock issue of the Mississippi Company, Law offended the Prince de Conti when he refused to issue him shares at the price the royal wanted. Furious, the Prince sent three wagons to the bank to cash in all of his paper currency and Mississippi stock. He was paid with three wagonloads-ful of gold and silver coin. The Duke d’Orleans, however, was incensed and demanded the Prince return the coin to the bank. Fearing that he’d never be able to set foot in Paris again, the Prince returned two of the three wagonloads.

This was a wake-up call to the public, and the “smart money” began to exit fast. People started converting their notes to coin, and bought anything of transportable value. Jewelry, silverware, gemstones, and coin were bought and sent abroad or hoarded.

In order to stop the bleeding, in February of 1720 the banks discontinued note redemption for gold and silver, and it was declared illegal to use gold or silver coin in payment. Buying jewelry, precious stones, or silverware was also outlawed. Rewards were offered of 50 percent of any gold or silver confiscated from those found in possession of such goods (payable in banknotes of course). The borders were closed and carriages searched. The prisons filled and heads rolled, literally.

Finally, the financial crisis came to a head. On May 27, the banks were closed and Law was dismissed from the ministry. Banknotes were devalued by 50 percent, and on June 10 the banks reopened and resumed redemption of the notes for gold at the new value. When the gold ran out, people were paid in silver. When the silver ran out, people were paid in copper. As you can imagine, the frenzy to convert paper back to coin was so intense that near riot conditions ensued. Gold and silver had delivered a knockout blow.

By then John Law was now the most reviled man in France. In a matter of months he went from arguably the most powerful and influential force in society back to the nobody he was before. Law fled to Venice where he resumed his life as a gambler, lamenting, “Last year I was the richest individual who ever lived. Today I have nothing, not even enough to keep alive.” He died broke, in Venice, in 1729.

The collapse of the Mississippi Company and Law’s fiat currency system plunged France and most of Europe into a horrible depression, which lasted for decades. But what astounds me most is that this all transpired in just four short years.

 
The Weimar Republic—a painful lesson learned

By now you’ve learned the kind of damage fiat currency can cause. Now let’s look at another example and identify the silver lining (no pun intended), and how such extreme situations can actually present opportunities to acquire vast wealth.

At the beginning of World War I, Germany went off the gold standard and suspended the right of its citizens to redeem their currency (the mark) for gold and silver. Like all wars, World War I was a war of and by the printing press. The number of marks in circulation in Germany quadrupled during the war. Prices, however, had not kept up with the inflation of the currency supply. So the effects of this inflation were not felt.

The reason for this peculiar phenomenon was because in times of uncertainty people tend to save every penny. World War I was definitely a time of uncertainty. So even though the German government was pumping tons of currency into the system, no one was spending it—yet. But by war’s end, confidence flooded back along with the currency that had been on the sidelines, and the ravaging effects worked their way through the country as prices rose to catch up with the previous monetary inflation.

Just before the end of the war, the exchange rate between gold and the mark was about 100 marks per ounce. But by 1920 it was fluctuating between 1,000 and 2,000 marks per ounce. Retail prices shortly followed suit, rising by 10 to 20 times. Anyone who still had the savings they had accumulated during the war was bewildered when they found it could only buy 10 percent or less of what it could just a year or two earlier.

Then, all through the rest of 1920 and the first half of 1921, inflation slowed, and on the surface the future was beginning to look a little brighter. The economy was recovering, business and industrial production was up. But now there were war reparations to pay, so the government never stopped printing currency. In the summer of 1921 prices started rising again and by July of 1922 prices had risen another 700 percent.

This was the breaking point. And what broke was people’s confidence in their economy and their currency. Having watched the purchasing power of their savings fall by 90 percent in 1919, they knew better this time around. They were smarter; they had been here before.

All at once, the entire country’s attitude toward currency changed. People knew that if they held on to their currency for any period of time they’d get burned… the rising prices would wipe out their purchasing power. Suddenly everybody started to spend their currency as soon as they got it. The currency became a hot potato, and no one wanted to hang on to it for a second.

After the war, Germany made the first reparations payment to France with most of its gold and made up the balance with iron, coal, wood, and other materials, but it simply didn’t have the resources to meet its second payment. France thought Germany was just trying to weasel its way out of paying. So, in January of 1923, France and Belgium invaded and occupied the Ruhr (the industrial heartland of Germany). The invading troops took over the iron and steel factories, coal mines and railways.

In response, the German Weimar government adopted a policy of passive resistance and noncooperation, paying the factories’ workers, all 2 million of them, not to work. This was the last nail in the German mark’s coffin.

Meanwhile, the government put its printing presses into overdrive. According to the front page of the New York Times, February 9, 1923, Germany had thirty-three printing plants that were belching out 45 billion marks every day! By November it was 500 quadrillion a day (yes, that’s a real number).

The German public’s confidence, however, was falling faster than the government could print the new currency. The government was caught in a downward economic spiral. A point of no return had been passed. No matter how many marks the government printed, the value fell quicker than the new currency could enter into circulation. So the government had no choice but to keep printing more and more and more.

By late October and early November 1923, the German financial system was breaking down. A pair of shoes that cost 12 marks before the war now cost 30 trillion marks. A loaf of bread went from half a mark to 200 billion marks. A single egg went from 0.08 mark to 80 billion marks.

The German stock market went from 88 points at the end of the war to 26,890,000,000, but its purchasing value had fallen by more than 97 percent.

Only gold and silver outpaced inflation. The price of gold had gone from around 100 marks to 87 trillion marks per ounce, an 87 trillion percent increase in price. But it is not price, but value, that matters, and the purchasing power of gold and silver had gone up exponentially.

When Germany’s hyperinflation finally came to an end on November 15, 1923, the currency supply had grown from 29.2 billion marks at the beginning of 1919 to 497 quintillion marks, an increase of the currency supply of more than 17 billion times. The total value of the currency supply, however, had dropped 97.7 percent against gold.

[Note of the Ed.: In his books and audiovisual materials, Maloney loves charts. In “Chart 1. Price of 1 Ounce of Gold in German Marks from 1914-1923” he depicts the Weimar Republic hyperinflation from one to a trillion paper marks per gold mark. We won’t be reproducing his charts in this site, but the curious reader can see them: here.]

The poor were already poor before the crisis, so they were affected the least. The rich, at least the smart ones, got a whole lot richer. But it was the middle class that was hurt the most. In fact, it was all but obliterated.

But there were a few exceptions. There were a few who had the right qualities and cunning to take advantage of the economic environment. They were shrewd, adept, and nimble, but most of all, adaptable. Those who could quickly adapt to a world they had never seen before, a world turned upside down, prospered. It didn’t matter what class they came from, poor or middle class, if they could adapt, and adapt well, they could become wealthy in a matter of months.

At this time, an entire city block of commercial real estate in downtown Berlin could be purchased for just 25 ounces of gold ($500). The reason for this is that those who held their wealth in the form of currency became poorer and poorer as they watched their purchasing power destroyed by the government. On the flip side, those who held their wealth in the form of gold watched their purchasing power increase exponentially as they became wealthy by comparison.

Here is the important lesson: During financial upheaval, a bubble popping, a market crash, a depression, or a currency crisis such as this one, wealth is not destroyed. It is merely transferred. During the Weimar hyperinflation, gold and silver didn’t just win, but smashed their opponent into the ground, by delivering yet another devastating knockout blow to fiat currency. Thus, those who held on to real money, instead of currency, reaped the rewards many times over.

Categories
Autobiography Egalitarianism George Lincoln Rockwell Pseudoscience

This Time, 8

rockwell

A passage from This Time the World
by George Lincoln Rockwell

But then, in 1939, I sat in “Sociology I” class and tried my best to make some sense out of it all. I had been happy at the chance to study sociology, as it appeared to me logical that there must be some fundamental principles of the development of the social relationships of life, as I had discovered simple basic principles of other affairs I had looked into. I was most eager to learn these basic principles of the operation of human society so that I could understand the events around me and perhaps even predict sociological occurrences in accordance with the principles I would be taught.

But it would be many, many years before I would fight my way into the intellectual sunshine of such simple, fundamental and logical presentations of the facts of social life. In Professor Bucklin’s classroom on society, all was the most depressing darkness and confusion. It all sounded most enlightening, of course. There were lots of brave new words, ethnic groups, etc., but try as I might, I could not get to the bottom of it all to find any idea or principle I could get hold of. Everything was “by and large” and “in most cases” and “on the other hand” and “So-and-so says, but Dr. So-and-so says absolutely not.” Muddiness of mind was not deplored, but glorified. I buried myself in my sociology books, absolutely determined to find out why I was missing the kernel of the thing.

The best I could come up with was that human beings are all helpless tools of the environment; that we are all born as rigidly equal lumps and that the disparity of our achievements and stations was entirely the result of the forces of environment—that everybody, therefore, could theoretically be masters, geniuses and kings if only we could sufficiently improve everybody’s environment. I was bold enough to ask Professor Bucklin if this were the idea and he turned red with anger. I was told it was “impossible” to make any generalizations, although all I was asking was for the fundamental idea, if any, of sociology.

I began to see that sociology was different from any other course I had ever taken. Certain ideas produced apoplexy in the teacher, particularly the suggestion that perhaps some people were no good biological slobs from the day they were born. Certain other ideas, although they were never formulated nor stated frankly, were fostered and encouraged—these were always ideas revolving around the total power of the environment.

Slowly, I got the idea. At first, I just used it to get better grades. When I wrote my essay answers in examinations, I poured it on heavily that all hands in the civilization in question were potential Leonardo da Vincis, no matter how black they were, nor how they ate their best friends for thousands of years; and that with a quick change in environment, these cannibals too would be writing arias, building Parthenons and painting masterpieces.

But then I began to wonder “how come”? Certainly, environment was important. Anybody could see that. But it was obviously negative. You can make a helpless boob out of a born genius by bringing him up in a dark closet, but you can’t make a genius out of a drooling idiot, even by sending him to Brown [University]. Was it just old man Bucklin who was insane with environment? Or was it the whole subject? I went to the library and read more sociology books. They were universally pushing the same idea.

I began to make fun of sociology in the college paper in my column and got into more trouble. Some of the columns were “killed” before seeing the light. I was still too ignorant to know that I was fighting Lysenko and Marx and the whole Soviet theory of environmentalism—which has captured and hypnotized or terrorized all our intellectuals—and I imagined I was battling just one foolish college course!

During my second year at Brown, my picture of the world darkened as I discovered more and more intellectual dishonesty in this university which had first seemed almost heaven itself to me. I still knew little or nothing about Communism or its pimping little sister, “liberalism”, but I could not avoid the steady pressure, everywhere in the university, to accept the idea of massive human equality and the supremacy of environment. In every course, I was repelled by the intellectual cowardice of the faculty in failing to stand up for any doctrine whatsoever.

I majored in philosophy and, while I admired the intellectual brilliance of my professors, particularly Professor Ducasse, I was hugely disappointed in the headlong retreat of all the faculty whenever they were asked their own opinions as to the objective truth in any matter. I was told that “eternal seeking” is the way to knowledge and there is no denying that, but lively discussion is also vital to any advance of knowledge and you cannot have any lively discussion where the opposition either doesn’t exist or melts away like a wraith when you seek to take hold of it.

I was running into the disease of our modern life: cowardice and pathological fear of a strong personality or strong ideas. Dale Carnegie has codified and commercialized this creeping disease as “how to win friends and influence people”, which boils down to the essential principle of having no personality or strong feelings or ideas and becoming passive and empty so that “the other fellow” can display his ideas and personality. But he, too, is trying to become popular by being passive and dispassionate, so that the result is like connecting two dead batteries: no current. Such human robots are suited to enslavement by a 1984-type society, but not to life in a bold, free society of men. This is the way women should be, perhaps, but not our men and especially not our leaders.

I found the same feeble feminine approach in every subject except in the sciences, and for these last, I was very grateful. In geology and psychology I could find a few principles and laws which stayed there when I reached out to grasp them, and so I reveled in these subjects and rebelled to the limit of my capacity in the others. In sociology I went so far as to write an insolent examination paper which almost got me thrown out of Brown.