Apocalypse of Marx

THE FIRST FRENCH Revolution of 1789 marked the beginning of a long series of uprisings in France. A new Duke of Orleans, Louis-Philippe, became the figurehead of a July1830 revolt which placed him on the throne of France as the ruler of a constitutional monarchy. Assisting him was the Marquis de La Fayette. Another of Louis-Philippe’s important backers was a man named Louis-Auguste Blanqui, who was decorated by the new government for helping to make the 1830 revolution a success.

Blanqui remained an active revolutionary after 1830 and provided significant leadership for a long string of uprisings. According to Julius Braunthal, writing in his book, History of the International,

“Blanqui was the inspiration of all uprisings in Paris from 1839 to the Commune* in 1871.” 1

*The Commune was a revolutionary group which governed Paris from March 18 to May 28, 1871

Blanqui belonged to a network of French secret societies which organized and planned the revolutions. Nearly all of those secret societies were outgrowths of Brotherhood activity and were patterned after Brotherhood organizations. Each society had a different function and ideological foundation for drawing people into the revolutionary cause. Although the revolutionary societies sometimes differed in matters of ideology and tactics, they had one objective in common: to bring on the revolution. Many revolutionary leaders participated in several of these organizations simultaneously.

One of the most effective of the secret French revolutionary groups was the Society of the Seasons, over which Blanqui shared leadership. This society was designed explicitly for the purpose of hatching and carrying out political conspiracies. One of the Society’s allied organizations was the “League of the Just.” The League of the Just was founded in 1836 as a secret society and it aided Blanqui and the Society of the Seasons in at least one revolt: the uprising of May 1839. A few years after that uprising, the League was joined by a man who would later become the revolutionaries’ most famous spokesperson: Karl Marx.

Karl Marx was a German who lived from 1813 until 1883.

He is considered by many to be the founder of modern communism. His writings, especially the Communist Manifesto, are an important cornerstone of communist ideology. As some historians have pointed out, however, Karl Marx did not originate all of his ideas. He was acting largely as a spokesperson for the radical political organization to which he belonged. It was during his membership in the League of the Just that Marx penned the Communist Manifesto with his friend, Friedrich Engels. Although the Manifesto contained many of Marx’s own ideas, its true accomplishment was to put into coherent form the communist ideology which was already inspiring the secret societies of France into revolt.

Because of his intellect, Marx gained considerable power within the League of the Just, and his influence caused a few changes within that organization. Marx did not like the romantic conspiratorial character of the secret society network to which he belonged and he was able to do away with some of those traits within the League. In 1847, the name of the League was changed to “Communist League.” Associated with the Communist League were various “workers” organizations, such as the German Worker’s Educational Society (GWES). Marx founded a branch of the GWES in Brussels, Belgium.

At this point, we can see the extraordinary irony in these events. The same network of Brotherhood organizations which had given us the United States and other “capitalist”countries through revolution, was now actively creating the ideology (communism) which would oppose those countries! It is crucial that this point be understood: both sides of the modern “communist vs. capitalist” struggle were created by the same people in the same network of secret Brotherhood organizations. This vital fact is almost always overlooked in history books. Within a short one hundred year period, the Brotherhood network had given the world two opposing philosophies which provided the entire foundation for the so-called “Cold War”: a conflict that lasted nearly half a century.

Considering the affiliation of Karl Marx to the Brotherhood network, it should come as no surprise that Marx’s philosophy follows the basic pattern of Custodial religion. Marxism is strongly apocalyptic. It teaches a “Final Battle” creed involving forces of “good” and “evil” followed by a Utopia on Earth. The primary difference is that Marx molded those beliefs into a nonreligious framework and tried to make them sound like a social “science” rather than a religion. In Marx’s scheme, the forces of “good” are represented by the oppressed “working classes,” and “evil” is represented by the ownership classes. Violent conflict between the two classes is portrayed as natural, inevitable, and ultimately healthy because such conflict will eventually result in the emergence of a Utopia on Earth. Marx’s idea of inevitable class tension reflects the Calvinist belief that conflict on Earth is healthy because it means that the forces of “good”are actively battling the minions of “bad.”

Marx tried to make his “inevitable conflict” idea sound scientific by fitting it into a concept known as the “dialectic.” The “dialectic” was a notion espoused by another German philosopher, Hegel (1770-1831). Hegel’s idea of the “dialectic” can be explained this way: from a thesis (an idea or concept) and an antithesis (a contradictory opposite) one can derive a synthesis (a new idea or concept which is different than the first two, but is a product of them).

Marx took this seemingly scientific idea and incorporated it into his theory of social history. In the communist model of “dialectical materialism,” social, economic, and political change arises out of the clash of contradictory, and often violent, opposites. In this way, the endless wars of history and the unceasing array of opposing factions on Earth are said to be a natural part of existence out of which all social change must occur. This makes endless social conflict seem desirable, and that is precisely the illusion Marx tried to convey in his “class struggle” theory.

The communist vision of Utopia is a curious, but significant one. In it, everyone is a worker equal to every other worker. No one owns anything but everyone together owns everything; everybody gets everything they need but not necessarily everything they want; but before this Utopia occurs, everyone must first live in a dictatorship. Whew! This bizarre vision of Utopia seems clearly designed to maintain mankind as a work race and to encourage humans to accept conditions of social repression (i.e., dictatorship). 

By Marx’s lifetime, spiritual knowledge had reached a severe state of decay. The “quickie salvation” of the Protestants and the embarrassing rituals practiced by nearly all religions were understandably driving many rationally-minded people out of religion altogether. It is not surprising that the validity of all spiritual reality began to be questioned. This questioning led many people to lean towards a strictly materialist outlook on life, and Marx provided a philosophy for many of those people to step into. Although Marx acknowledged the reality of spiritual existence, he erroneously stated that spiritual existence was entirely the product of physical and material phenomena.

In this way, Marx’s teachings helped promote the Custodial aims expressed in the Book of Mormon and in ancient Sumerian tablets of bringing about a permanent union between spiritual beings and human bodies. Marx’s writings gave this union “scientific” acceptability by suggesting that spirit and matter could not be separated at all. Marxist philosophy added that “supernatural” reality (i.e., reality existing outside the bounds of the material universe) is not possible. Marx’s Utopia therefore amounts to a Biblical Eden: a materialistic paradise in which everyone is a worker with no route to spiritual knowledge and freedom; in other words, a pampered spiritual prison.

During the same era in which communism was being shaped into an organized movement, the practice of banking was undergoing important developments. By the late 19thcentury, the new system of inflatable paper money was the established norm throughout the world. This money system was not adequately organized on an international scale, however, and that was the next step: to create a permanent worldwide central banking network which could be coordinated from a single fixed location.

One scholar to write about this development was the late Dr. Carroll Quigley, professor at Harvard, Princeton, and the Foreign Service School of Georgetown University, Dr. Quigley’s book, Tragedy and Hope, A History of the World in Our Time, achieved a degree of fame because it was used by some members of the John Birch Society to prove their “Communist Conspiracy” ideas.

Putting this notoriety aside, we find that Dr. Quigley’s book is exhaustively researched and well worth reading. Dr. Quigley was not a “conspiracy buff,” but was a highly-respected professor with outstanding academic credentials. Dr. Quigley’s book describes in great detail the development and workings of the international banking community as it established the inflatable paper money system throughout the world.

Let us take a brief look at what Dr. Quigley had to say.

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Funny Money Goes International

IN HIS BOOK, Tragedy and Hope, Dr. Quigley divides the history of “capitalism” into several stages. The third stage, which is described as the period from 1850 until 1931, is defined by Dr. Quigley as the stage of Financial Capitalism. Dr. Quigley states:

This third stage of capitalism is of such overwhelming significance in the history of the twentieth century, and its ramifications and influences have been so subterranean and even occult, that we may be excused if we devote considerable attention to its organizations and methods. Essentially what it did was to take the old disorganized and localized methods of handling money and credit and organize them into an integrated system, on an international basis, which worked with incredible and well-oiled facility for many decades.1

Dr. Quigley described the overall intent of the new integrated system:

... the powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences.

 

The apex of this system was to be the Bank for International Setlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank.. . sought to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world.2

In the English-speaking world, the newly-organized central banks exerted significant political influence through an organization they supported known as the Round Table. The Round Table was a “think tank” designed to affect the foreign policy actions of governments.

The Round Table was founded by an Englishman named Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902). Rhodes had created a vast diamond and gold-mining operation in South Africa and in the two African nations named after him: Northern and Southern Rhodesia (today Zambia and Zimbabwe, respectively). Rhodes, who was educated at Oxford, did the most of any Englishman to exploit the mineral resources of Africa and to make the southern African continent a vital part of the British Empire.

Rhodes was more than a man driven to make a personal fortune. He was very concerned with the world and where it was headed, especially in regard to warfare. Although he lived almost a century ago, he envisioned a day when weapons of great destruction could destroy human civilization. His farsightedness inspired him to channel his considerable talents and personal fortune into building a world political system under which it would be impossible for a war of such magnitude to occur. Rhodes intended to create a one-world government led by Britain. The world government would be strong enough to stamp out any hostile actions by any group of people.

Rhodes also wanted to unify people by making English the universal language. He sought to diminish nationalism and to increase awareness among people that they were part of a larger human community. It was with these goals in mind that Rhodes established the Round Table. In his last will, Rhodes also created the famous “Rhodes Scholarship”—a program still in operation today. The Rhodes scholarship program is designed to promote feelings of universal citizenship based upon Anglo-Saxon traditions.

Rhodes’ heart was clearly on the right track. If successful, he would have undone many of the harmful effects caused by purported Custodial actions and by the corrupted Brotherhood network. A universal language would have undone the damaging effects described in the Tower of Babel story of dividing people into different language groups. Promoting a sense of universal citizenship would help overcome the types of nationalism which help generate wars. Something went wrong, however.

Rhodes committed the same error made by so many other humanitarians before him: he thought that he could accomplish his goals through the channels of the corrupted Brotherhood network.

Rhodes therefore ended up creating institutions which promptly fell into the hands of those who would effectively use those institutions to oppress the human race. The Round Table not only failed to do what Rhodes had intended, but its members later helped create two of the 20th century’s most heinous institutions: the concentration camp and the very thing that Rhodes had dedicated his life to preventing: the atomic bomb.

Rhodes’ idea for the Round Table had begun in his early twenties. At the age of 24, while a student at Oxford, Rhodes wrote his second will, which described his plans by bequeathing his estate for:

.. . the establishment, promotion and development of a Secret Society, the true aim and object whereof shall be the extension of British rule throughout the world... and finally the foundation of so great a power as to hereafter render wars impossible and promote the best interests of humanity.3

Rhodes’ secret society, the Round Table, was finally born in 1891. It was patterned after Freemasonry with its “inner”and “outer” circles. Rhodes’s inner circle was called the Circle of Initiates and the outer was the Association of Helpers. The organization’s name, the Round Table, was an allusion to King Arthur and his legendary round table. By implication, all members of Rhodes’ Round Table were ”knights.”

It was inevitable that Rhodes’ success and political influence would bring him into contact with other “movers and shakers” of English society. Among them, of course, were the major financiers of Britain. One of Rhodes’ chief supporters was the English banker, Lord Rothschild, head of the powerful Rothschild branch in England. Lord Rothschild was listed as one of the proposed members for the RoundTable’s Circle of Initiates. Another Rhodes associate was the influential English banker, Alfred Milner.

After Rhodes died in 1902, the Round Table gained increased support from members of the international banking community. They saw in the Round Table a way to exert their influence over governments in the British Commonwealth and elsewhere. In the United States, for example, according to Dr. Quigley:

The chief backbone of this [Round Table] organization grew up along the already existing financial cooperation running from the Morgan Bank in New York to a group of international financiers led by the Lazard Brothers.4

From 1925 onward, major contributions to the Round Table came from wealthy individuals, foundations, and companies associated with the international banking fraternity. They included the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, organizations associated with J. P. Morgan, and the Rockefeller and Whitney families.

After World War I, the Round Table underwent a period of expansion during which many subgroups were created. The man responsible for getting many of the subgroups started was Lionel Curtis. In England and in each British dominion, Curtis established a local chapter (in Quigley’s words, a “front group”) of the Round Table called the Royal Institute of International Affairs. In the United States, the Round Table “front group” was named the Council on Foreing Relations - CFR.

Many Americans today are familiar with the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations. The CFR is usually thought of as a “think tank” from which come a great many political appointees at the Federal level. Under the Presidential administration of Ronald Reagan, for example, more than seventy administration members belonged to the Council, including a number of top cabinet members. The CFR has dominated earlier Presidential administrations as well, and it dominates the present administration.

The chairman of the CFR for many years has been banker David Rockefeller, former chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank. Another Chase executive chaired the CFR before that. The warning of Thomas Jefferson has come true. The banking fraternity has exercised a strong influence on American politics, notably in. foreign affairs, and the Council on Foreign Relations is one channel through which it has done so. Regrettably, that influence has helped to preserve inflation, debt and warfare as the status quo.

When Cecil Rhodes was alive, he gained considerable power in South Africa and served for a number of years as colonial governor there. He had a unique and effective way of delegating power. According to one of Rhodes’ closest friends, Dr. Jameson, Rhodes gave a great deal of autonomy to his trusted men. Dr. Jameson once wrote:

. .. Mr. Rhodes left the decision [on what to do in a situation] to the man on the spot, myself, who might be supposed to be the best judge of the conditions. This is Mr. Rhodes’ way. It is a pleasure to work with a man of his immense ability, and it doubles the pleasure when you find that, in the execution of his plans, he leaves all to you; although no doubt in the last instance of the Transvaal business he has suffered for this system, still in the long run, the system pays. As long as you reach the end he has in view he is not careful to lay down the means or methods you are to employ. He leaves a man to himself, and that is why he gets the best work they are capable of out of all his men.5

This can be an effective style of leadership, except when the means used to achieve an end create their own problems. Some of the methods used by Rhodes’ men did more long-term harm than immediate good. In South Africa, for example, a struggle between Dutch settlers (the “Boers”) and the English erupted into the Boer War. During that conflict, one of the British officers under Rhodes, Lord Kitchener, established concentration camps to hold captured Boers. The camps were decreed by Kitchener on December 27, 1900 and over 117,000 Boers were eventually imprisoned within forty-six camps. Conditions were so inhumane that an estimated 18,000 to 26,000 people died, primarily from disease. It was tantamount to mass murder. Today we associate concentration camps with Nazi Germany and communist Russia, but their 20th-century usage actually began with the English under Lord Kitchener.

Perhaps the greatest irony in the story of the Round Table was the role of that organization in creating the atomic bomb. After Rhodes’ death, the Round Table groups went on to establish other organizations. One of them was the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) located in Princeton, New Jersey. The IAS greatly assisted the scientists who were developing the first atomic bomb for the United States. Institute members included Robert Oppenheimer, who has been dubbed the “Father of the A-Bomb,” and Albert Einstein, to whom the Institute was like a home.

As we have seen, the world was. undergoing many important developments as it entered the 20th century. Central banking was being organized into an international network. Bankers gained great influence in British and American foreign affairs through such groups as the Round Table and the Council on Foreign Relations. Meanwhile, the communist movement was gaining increasing momentum in Europe. This momentum bore fruit in 1917 when communist revolutionaries established their first “dictatorship of the proletariat” in Russia.

Once again, the world was on the road to a Biblical Utopia.
 

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The Workers’ Paradise

To MANY PEOPLE then living, the period from 1914 until the mid-1930’s was a full-blown fulfillment of Apocalyptic prophecy. Those years witnessed a devastating world war, a sudden worldwide influenza epidemic which killed tens of millions of people within a short period of time, and an international financial collapse marked in Germany by a hyperinflation of its currency.

Sudden meteorological changes also occurred. Portions of the United States became arid “Dust Bowls.” This brought about large-scale crop destruction and the loss of many family farms to foreclosure. This was a period in which reports of spectacular “fireballs” (brilliant blazing meteors) were published by the New York Times with increasing frequency. Some fireballs seemed to bring with them violent storms, earthquakes and other natural disasters. New messiahs were appearing throughout the world. Surely, believed many, God was ushering in the Day of Judgment.

The beginning of the 20th century witnessed many changes in Germany. The autonomous principalities were being merged into a single German nation. Leading this unification effort was the Prussian Hohenzollern dynasty, which was also in the process of forging a large German war machine. This machine was commanded by the Kaiser William, a Hohenzollern, who helped plunge Europe into World War I.

Behind the German militarization lay the Brotherhood network. In the early 1900’s, a number of mystical organizations in Germany were espousing a curious mix of Aryan Master Race ideas and mystical concepts about the future glories of Germany. This concoction resulted in the notion of a German Master Race. One of the most prominent writers in that genre was Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an Englishman raised in Paris and tutored as a young man by a Prussian. His most important work, Die Grundlagen des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (“The Foundation of the Nineteenth Century”), was published in 1899. In that work, Chamberlain extolled the glories of “Germanism” and announced that Germany was the nation best suited to bring about a “new order” in Europe.

He indicated that Germans belonged to the western Aryan group of peoples and were therefore racially superior to all others. From Germany would arise a new race of “Supermen,” he declared. Chamberlain believed in eugenics (improving the human race by carefully choosing natural parents) and he proclaimed that all Aryan Germans had a duty to breed the superrace from their Aryan seed. Chamberlain also did not hesitate to express his anti-Semitism. He stated that Jews introduced an alien influence to Europe and that they debased all cultures into which they became assimilated.

Emperor (Kaiser) Wilhelm of Germany and many members of the German Officer Corps were deeply inspired by Chamberlain’s writings. The Kaiser invited Chamberlain to the royal court and reportedly greeted Chamberlain with the words, “It was God who sent your book to the German people and you personally to me.”1 Chamberlain remained a guest at the emperor’s palace at Potsdam where he became a spiritual mentor to the Kaiser. The mystical ideas espoused by Chamberlain did much to push the Kaiser and other German leaders into the megalomania that brought about World War I.

World War I itself was triggered by a series of crises caused by the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir apparent to the Austrian throne. He and his wife, Duchess Sofia, were shot on June 28, 1914 in Sarajevo by Serbian assassins who belonged to a secret occult society called the “Black Hand.” A political chain reaction followed the killing, and World War I got underway when the German Chief of Staff, General Helmuth von Moltke (himself a mystic, although by some accounts not as fanatical about German destiny as the Kaiser), ordered full military mobilization, followed by an invasion of France on August 1, 1914.

Members of the mystical network had once again started a brutal and senseless war.

There is another story from World War I worth sharing. It is the tale of an unusual peace. It was told in Parade magazine by the writing team of Irving Wallace, David Wallichinsky, and Amy Wallace in their “Significa” column. Here is the story as they wrote it:

Amid the horrors of World War I, there occurred a unique truce when, for a few hours, enemies behaved like brothers.

Christmas Eve in 1914 was all quiet on France’s Western Front, from the English Channel to the Swiss Alps. Trenches came within 50 miles of Paris. The war was only five months old, and approximately 800,000 men had been wounded or killed. Every soldier wondered whether Christmas Day would bring another round of fighting and killing. But something happened: British soldiers raised “Merry Christmas" signs, and soon carols were heard from German and British trenches alike.

Christmas dawned with unarmed soldiers leaving their trenches, as officers of both sides tried unsuccessfully to stop their troops from meeting the enemy in the middle of no-man’s land for songs and conversation. Exchanging small gifts—mostly sweets and cigars—they passed Christmas Day peacefully along miles of the front. At one spot, the British played soccer with the Germans, who won 3-2.

In some places, the spontaneous truce continued the next day, neither side willing to fire the first shot. Finally the war resumed when fresh troops arrived, and the high command of both armies ordered that further “informal understandings” with the enemy would be punishable as treason.2

The above is another one of those small, but noteworthy, episodes revealing that human beings do not seem to be naturally prone to war. Given the chance, they will lay down their arms and engage in far more constructive and lighthearted pursuits. What caused those soldiers to fight again were the pressures of an artificial social structure arising out of many of the factors described in this book.

One major event of World War I was the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. This was the revolution which turned Russia into the communist nation we knew for most of the 20th century. The Revolution occurred one year before the end of World War I. It was led in large part by Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, who is better known by his code name, “Lenin.”

At the time of the Revolution, Russia was an enemy of Germany. The grimness of World War I had aroused in the Russian people a strong anti-German sentiment. Opponents of Bolshevism were able to use this sentiment against the Bolsheviks by accusing Lenin of being a German agent. To some degree, this accusation was true. Sir Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of Great Britain during World War II, wrote, “They [the Germans] transported Lenin in a Sealed Train like a plague bacillus from Switzerland to Russia.”3 Churchill was referring to the train on which Lenin and his entourage traveled from their revolutionary headquarters in Switzerland through Germany to Russia in order to lead the Revolution which had already gotten underway.

The German military guaranteed safe passage for Lenin’s train through Germany, but would not permit Lenin or his followers to step off the train while it was on German soil. At the train’s first stop in Germany after crossing the border from Switzerland, it was met and boarded by two German officers who provided a silent escort for the revolutionary party. The officers had been briefed earlier by General Erich Ludendorff, Chief of Staff of the German 8th Army on the Eastern Front. Ludendorff later became one of Germany’s most powerful political figures and a prominent supporter of Adolph Hitler.

Michael Pearson, author of an excellent book, The Sealed Train, presents evidence that the Germans continued to support the Bolsheviks even after the Russian Revolution was over. The German military wanted to ensure that the Bolsheviks were able to retain their power in Russia. According to German Foreign Office records released after World War II, the Foreign Office had allocated by February 5, 1918 a total of 40,580,997 German marks for Russian “propaganda” and “special purposes.”

Most of that money is believed to have been sent directly to the new communist regime...According to the same documents, fifteen million marks had been released to Russia by the German Treasury just one day after Lenin officially assumed power in November of 1917. A telegram sent December 3, 1917 by Richard von Kuhlman, German Foreign Secretary, stated:

...it was not until the Bolsheviks had received from us a steady flow of funds through various channels that they were in a position to build up their main organ Pravda, to conduct energetic propaganda and appreciably to extend the originally narrow base of their party.4

Three months later, another telegram sent by von Kuhlman revealed:

... the Bolshevik movement could never have attained the scale or the influence which it has today without our continual support.5

Lenin understandably denied accusations that he had received any assistance from Germany. Germany was Russia’s enemy, and Lenin would have been considered a traitor to Russia. After all, why would capitalist Germany assist communists? The oppressive Russian Tsar had already abdicated before the Revolution and the Provisional Government set up in his place was a republican form of government patterned after the United States.

Most people believe that Germany helped Lenin overthrow the Provisional Government in order to end Russian involvement in World War I. German military leaders wanted nothing more than to disengage from the Eastern Front so that badly-needed soldiers and supplies could be moved elsewhere. The Provisional Government had continued the war against Germany, whereas the Bolsheviks did indeed pull Russia out of World War I after they took power.

The question is then raised: why did Germany aid communist revolutionaries? There were other political groups in Russia which could have been supported.

For one thing, the Bolsheviks probably stood the best chance at success. A more important factor is that some very prominent German industrialists and financiers with influence into the German military were supporters of the communist movement. Their support had begun long before World War I. One of Karl Marx’s most visible backers had been the wealthy German industrialist Friedrich Engels. Engels even co-authored the Communist Manifesto with Marx. Significant support for communism also came from the German banking community.

Max Warburg, a top leader in German finance, lent his assistance to the Bolsheviks, as did banker Jacob Schiff who, though an American, came from the same German family which had shared a house in Frankfurt generations earlier with the Rothschild family. According to Schiff’s grandson, Schiff had loaned about twenty million dollars to the early communist government in Russia. The combined infusion of Western loans and German treasury money was the only thing that enabled the early Bolshevik regime to survive.

There were many reasons why Western bankers financed the Bolsheviks. The common origins of communism and the inflatable paper money system in the same mystical network is one factor to be considered. Marxism closely followed the basic philosophical pattern of Christianity and other Custodial religions with their “final battle” and Utopian messages. Perhaps the most important fact about modern communism to explain Western banking support is the fact that communism is actually capitalism taken to an extreme. To understand this, we must take a look at what “capitalism” really is.

“Capitalism” and “free enterprise” are often equated. They should not be. “Free enterprise” is unfettered economic activity; it occurs where there is a free and open market for the production and barter of goods and services. Entrepreneurs (people who start businesses and take the risks) are the backbone of “free enterprise” systems.

“Capitalism,” on the other hand, has two basic definitions. The first definition elates to so-called “capital goods.” Those are goods that are used to manufacture other products. A typical capital good would be a machine used on an assembly line. A “capitalist” can therefore mean a person who buys capital goods and uses them to manufacture other products for a profit. This type of capitalist is usually found in a “free enterprise” system, but he or she does not require a free enterprise system to survive. He or she can exist in almost any type of political or economic system so long as a profit is made. In fact, this type of capitalist often survives best in a closed enterprise system where there is little or no competition.

Governments are capitalists when they own and invest in capital equipment.

The second type of capitalist is the “financial capitalist.” Financial capitalism is the control of resources through the investment and movement of money. It may or may not involve the purchase of capital goods. A financial capitalist usually invests his money in company stocks and influences the use of resources by determining what enterprises he will invest in. A financial capitalist may also be a banker who is entitled to create inflatable paper money to lend, and who is able to influence the use of resources by how he lends out his “created out of nothing” money. The financial capitalist also does not require a free enterprise system to survive and often benefits from monopolies.

As we can see, capitalism is not the same creature as free enterprise, even if they often co-exist. Free enterprise and capitalism frequently come into conflict with one another because capitalism tends to move in the direction of monopoly and free enterprise tends to favor free and open markets accessible to any entrepreneur.

In 1989 and the early 1990’s, Russia and most Eastern European nations voluntarily dismantled communism in their nations to replace it with Western-style democracy. The Soviet Union was abolished and most of the Soviet republics became independent countries united in a loosely-knit confederation called the “Commonwealthof Independent States.” Private ownership of land and business was restored to a large extent. Nevertheless, it is still useful to discuss what the Soviet Union was like under communism to understand how this important Brotherhood faction did so much to perpetuate significant problems within our own lifetime. Furthermore, communism still dominates other nations and continues to inspire revolutionary conflict in the Third World.

The economic system of communist Russia was an ultra-capitalist one because its industry was even more monopolized, and the nation’s economy was even more dominated, by the same institutions which dominate capitalist nations. The most significant of those institutions was the Soviet central bank, which operated just like the central banks of Western nations. The major difference was that the Russian central bank had, and still has at the time of this writing, an even more intrusive role in the country’s economic life.

The Soviet Union’s central bank is called the Gosbank. It is both a central bank and commercial bank rolled into one. As of 1980, the Gosbank had approximately 3,500 branches and 150,000 employees. Major Soviet enterprises, which were all government owned, depended upon the Gosbank for loans to tide them through periods when their outlays were greater than their incomes. In other words, communist government enterprises in the Soviet Union also operated on a profit-loss basis and they had to borrow money from the Gosbank when they suffered a loss. As in non-communist nations, Soviet enterprises paid interest on the money they borrowed. The only difference was that the Gosbank charged a fixed interest rate whereas many Western banks have a fluctuating rate.

The Gosbank was, and still is, a “bank of issue”; i.e., it is empowered to issue money. Gosbank creates money ”out of nothing” just as Western banks do. Although the Gosbank was ostensibly under government control in communist Russia, it was in fact a semi-autonomous institution to which Soviet enterprises were, and still are, deeply in debt.

The Gosbank was even more dominant in Soviet financial affairs than are central banks in Western nations because all transactions between Soviet enterprises had to go through the Gosbank. This allowed the Gosbank to oversee all day-today financial transactions involving Soviet enterprises. The Gosbank was also in charge of dispersing wages to all of the workers. It was an enormous bureaucracy which regulated Soviet economic activity to a remarkable degree.

As we can see, communist Russia was a financial capitalist’s dream. The Marxist idea that everything is owned “collectively” under communism simply meant that a select elite in banking and government had complete authority to direct the use of all exploitable resources in the country. Soviet workers were paid wages with which they could buy personal goods, but under Soviet law they could not own land, buildings, businesses, or any large industrial equipment. Soviet citizens could sell only “used” or personally-produced items, but they could not hire others for personal profit or engage in middleman activities. Although there existed limited exceptions to these restrictions and a flourishing black market, Soviet laws nevertheless created an effective monopoly in which Russian workers were highly exploited in a rigid feudalistic system; we need only compare communist Russia to medieval feudalism to appreciate that fact:

As in old European feudalisms, the majority of the Soviet citizens were forced to suffer chronic scarcities of goods and services, and they were told that they had to endure it as a sacrifice for the good of mother Russia.

As in old feudalisms, the Soviet people were effectively “tied to the land” by a rigid bureaucracy which forbade people from moving without government approval. That regulation existed to control the economic and political life of the Soviet Union by deciding where people lived and worked. That was the same motive used to tie people to the land under old feudal lords. This caused the Soviet people to become, to some degree, serfs. Emigration to nations outside of the Iron Curtain was severely restricted which, again, added up to a form of serfdom because the people were anchored to the land on which they were born.

As in old feudalisms, the “elite” of communist Russia were accorded special luxuries and privileges denied by law to the “masses.” In the communist U.S.S.R., such privileges included fancy stores in which only a relative handful were permitted to shop. The “elite” also found it easier to travel outside of the Soviet Union and to send their children abroad to be educated.
The old feudal lords maintained the system by offering a fortified castle into which the serfs could retreat when attacked by marauders or foreign armies. The Soviet system also stayed alive by encouraging xenophobia and by regularly reminding the Russian people about the invasions of Russia by Napoleon and Nazi Germany. The Soviet state promised its people protection against a frightening and dangerous outside world.

As we can perhaps see, Marxist glorification of the laborer fit the Soviet communist system very well. Because the system put such severe limitations on ownership, the vast majority of people were only valuable as workers and bureaucrats. Communism is also openly atheist, i.e., it denies the existence of any spiritual reality. The Soviet communist system thereby satisfied the Custodial intentions expressed in ancient texts of preserving Homo sapiens as a creature of toil whose existence from birth until death shall be one long struggle for physical existence with no access to the spiritual knowledge which might set him free.

A significant aspect of the Russian Revolution was the role of espionage services in that upheaval. By the time of the Russian revolution, the international intelligence community had grown into a large and sophisticated affair with considerable influence. Throughout all of history, Brotherhood network members in positions of political power found intelligence services an ideal conduit for promoting Brotherhood social and political agendas because of the secrecy which typically surrounds intelligence activities. As a result, many intelligence services turned into sources of manipulation, upheaval, and betrayal. This behavior was already evident in Russia, at the time of the Russian Revolution.

Before the Provisional Government was established, Russia was ruled by a Tsar (emperor). The last Tsar had at his disposal a vast intelligence network known as the “Okhrana.” The Okhrana consisted of several intelligence organizations which performed all of the usual espionage functions with their secret agents, double-agents, agents provocateurs, and secret dossiers. The Okhrana spied on Tsarist friends and enemies alike and acted as Russia’s internal security police. Inside Russia, the Okhrana engaged in extensive anti-subversive activities. The unpopular domestic activities of the Okhrana were a major issue used by the Bolsheviks to attack the Tsar.

The Tsar, of course, was eventually unseated. That must mean that the Okhrana had failed.

Or had it?

Historians have noted that the Okhrana had heavily infiltrated and assisted the Bolshevik movement. The Okhrana did this through spies known as “agent provocateurs.” An agent provocateur is someone who deliberately agitates others into committing illegal or disruptive acts, usually in order to discredit or arrest the manipulated victim. In America and other nations today, agent provocateurs are often used by police agencies to entrap or compromise targeted people. These activities are sometimes called “sting”operations.

There seems to be an obvious reason for engaging in agent provocateur activities. If a targeted person does not commit an act for which he can be defamed, compromised, or imprisoned, he must be made to commit one. Because most provocateur actions are aimed against alleged criminals or subversives, it would appear that provocateurism is a useful tool for battling crime and subversion. In actual fact, it is not.

Upon careful analysis, a researcher soon discovers that provocateur actions are almost invariably carried out by people within intelligence and police agencies who are criminal or subversive themselves. Provocateurism proves to be a frequent cover for officially-sanctioned subversion or criminality. Provocateur actions are the best way for police and intelligence services to disguise their secret support of criminal and subversive elements. A clear example of this was the Russian Okhrana.

The Okhrana sent many agents to join the growing communist movement in Russia. Okhrana agents insinuated themselves into the innermost circles of the Bolshevik Partyand directed many Bolshevik activities. This infiltration was so great that in the years 1908-1909, Okhrana agents constituted four out of five members of the Bolshevik Party’s St. Petersburg Committee. Although arrests of revolutionaries were frequent, the Okhrana did far more to assist the Russian Bolsheviks under the guise of provocateurism than it did to harm them. The Okhrana provided regular monies and badly needed materials to the revolutionaries. It worked to stamp out two rival parties to the Bolsheviks: the Social Democratic Party and the Mensheviks. The Okhrana helped launch the Bolsheviks’ major propaganda publication, Pravda. When Pravda was founded in 1912, Okhrana agents served as editor (Roman Malinovskii, who was also a member of the Bolshevik Central Committee and Lenin’s chief lieutenant in Russia) and treasurer (Miron Chernomazov).

The Okhrana may have also supplied the Russian communists with the infamous dictator Joseph Stalin. Biographer Edward Ellis Smith, writing in his book, The Young Stalin, suggests that Stalin—a revolutionary who later rose to the top position of the Soviet government—may have entered the communist movement as an agent provocateur. Historians have pointed out that Stalin was a main contact between the Bolsheviks and the Tsarist police and he was able to get many badly needed items from the Okhrana.

After the Tsar abdicated in early 1917, the Provisional Government disbanded the entire Okhrana network. Bolshevik propaganda had loudly denounced the Okhrana and one would therefore have expected the victorious communists to leave the Russian intelligence apparatus dismantled. The Bolsheviks did just the opposite. Within six weeks of their overthrow of the Provisional Government, the Bolsheviks reestablished the intelligence network. This is perhaps not so surprising when we consider the heavy Okhrana involvement in the Bolshevik Party. Lenin merely did some organizational reshuffling, gave the Okhrana a new name, and made the intelligence arm of government even more dominant and oppressive than it had been under the Tsar. By 1921, only four years after the Revolution, the Bolshevik secret police employed ten times as many people as the Okhrana had done under the Tsar. It was an open secret in Russia that the Okhrana was back, more terrible than ever.

The name given to the reorganized Russian intelligence apparat was the “Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counterrevolution and Sabotage,” better known as the “Checka.” The Checka changed its name and form several times during the ensuing decades. In 1922 it became the GPU, then the OGPU, and in 1934 it was reorganized into the “Peoples Commission of Internal Affairs” (the “NKVD”). It was finally transformed into the modern KGB—history’s largest intelligence organization. In 1992, the KGB employed approximately 90,000 staff officers for internal security and the political prison system alone. The KGB operated its own army of 175,000 border troops and carried out most of the espionage and agent provocateur actions for which the Soviet regime had been so well known. An organization the size of the KGB was obviously, expensive to run.

The enormous resources required to maintain this immense intelligence bureaucracy were factors which helped keep the Soviet economy so dismal. Soviet workers paid for the massive KGB every day with a lower standard of living which they are still struggling to raise. As of this writing, the KGB continues to exist within the Commonwealth of Independent States, but there has been some restructuring to reflect the breakup of the Soviet Union and some of the KGB’s functions have changed.

One person to write about the Russian Revolution was Arsene de Goulevitch, a former general in the anti-Bolshevik “White” Russian army. Although Goulevitch can hardly be considered impartial, he did have some interesting things to say in his book, Tsarism and the Revolution.

According to Goulevitch, English secret agents were numerous in Russia before and during the Revolution. In fact, some financial support for the Leninist cause was rumored to have come from English banking sources. One of those rumored sources was Alfred Milner. As we recall, Milner was one of the organizers of the Round Table. He was also a major political figure in South Africa during the Boer War. It was during the Boer War that the English created the modern concentration camp. If Goulevitch’s allegation contains any truth, then we might better understand where the Bolsheviks got the idea to establish a massive concentration camp system as part of the new communist economic system: namely, from the English.
 

The early Soviet concentration camp system was a large-scale affair that reached its height under Lenin’s successor, Joseph Stalin. Under the brutal Stalin, a crash program was launched to industrialize Russia, beginning with Russia’s first so-called “Five Year Plan.” The Plan required large quantities of inexpensive labor. To acquire it, a widespread concentration camp network was set up in Russia. The camps were administered by Russia’s secret police, the NKVD. Concentration camp inmates were slave laborers who worked under brutal conditions. Nearly all of the laborers were native Russians who had been imprisoned under various pretexts.

The camps were an integral part of the Soviet economy for many decades. In 1941, for example, 17% of the capital construction fund for Russia was allocated to the NKVD to help it operate the camps. Almost half of the chrome and two-thirds of Russia’s gold production were carried out by camp inmates. Tens of millions of people passed through the camps and about 10% of them died there. An estimated three to four million people perished in the camps from the time of the camps’ inception to 1950 alone.

The Soviet concentration camps were decidedly “capitalist” institutions in that they were designed to callously exploit human labor to an ultimate degree. The “downtrodden working classes” had became even more downtrodden under their communist “liberators.” With the ongoing reforms in Russia, it remains to be seen what will happen with the concentration camps. As of this writing, they are still in use as prison labor camps.

The imposition on the Russian people of communism and its far-flung concentration camp system occurred during an already tumultuous era. World War I was a brutal conflict. It had claimed about ten million military casualties and millions more in civilian losses. When the war ended in late 1918, another catastrophe struck: a worldwide influenza epidemic. The epidemic lasted less than a year but managed in that surprisingly short time to kill over twenty million people; it was as sudden and nearly as devastating as the 14th-century Bubonic Plague. In Russia, these events were keenly felt. A famine, coupled with the influenza, killed about twenty million Russians between 1914 and 1924. The famine was caused largely by the communist revolution and the consequent economic upheavals.

For the beleaguered Russian people, these events were just the beginning of a growing nightmare.

Under the Five Year Plan begun in 1928 by Stalin, all privately-owned land was to be “collectivized,” i.e., it was to be put under government ownership. Many peasants and landowners understandably resisted. Stalin’s government responded by launching a program of mass murder similar to the French Reign of Terror. Peasants and landowners were targeted for physical extermination in order to seize their land and remove them as obstacles to communist Utopia. This extermination campaign lasted from 1929 until 1934.

Millions of people were murdered for no other crime than that they happened to own land. In response, a rebellion broke out between 1932 and 1934 in which defiant peasants destroyed half of Russia’s livestock. This rebellious act, coupled with the communist regime’s attempt to bring in outside money by over exporting wheat (3.5 million tons within two years) resulted in another famine that claimed an additional five million Russian lives.
 

The total death count between 1917 and 1950 as a direct and indirect result of the establishment of communism in Russia is estimated at roughly 35 to 40 million people. This is one of the largest mortality rates from any single episode in history. To this figure we should add the deaths associated with the establishment of communism in other countries, such as the two million land owners murdered in China during Mao Tse-Tung’s crash industrial program of the 1950’s, and the millions butchered in Cambodia in the early 1970’s under the Khmer Republic. In terms of the sheer number of lives lost, communism was one of the single most catastrophic events in human history.

My purpose in this discussion is not to beat a drum for rabid anti-Communism. It is simply to indicate that the historical patterns we studied have continued to recur in the 20th century. Communism is little more than a rehash of a worn-out theme which has been repeated over and over again with the same tragic consequences. “Communism” is but another in a long line of destructive artificialities arising out of the mystical Brotherhood network that has helped keep people fighting, suffering, and dying for absolutely no purpose whatsoever. “Communism” was not an alternative to the enemies it claimed to fight, namely monopolistic “capitalism” and End-of-the-World religions. Modern communism was their natural outgrowth.

The dismantling of Soviet and European communism has been a cause for genuine elation throughout the world. Brotherhood factions have been coming and going throughout history, and the passing of each often brings about a period of resurgence. Unfortunately, East European reformers currently plan to preserve the inflatable paper money system and erect a graduated income tax scheme to help pay for it. Severe ethnic and nationalistic strife in several former communist nations reveals that other warring factions have been regenerated or created to mar the peace that should have come from the end of the Cold War.

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