(c) Copyright 1999: Graham L. Strachan
When modern man first appeared on the earth about 45,000 years ago, he was tribal, wandering round after his food, and surviving by hunting and gathering. Tribal man was socialist: everybody had the same goal: tribal susvival. Everybody worked for the tribe, and the proceeds of hunting and gathering were pooled and shared. Then around 8000 BC certain tribes started cultivating crops and domesticating animals, which enabled them to form permanent settlements. Settled agriculture led to food surpluses, which in turn led to better nutrition and population increases. The socialist tribe was no longer a suitable social organisation, and the individualist social order based on the nuclear family replaced it. That transition from tribal to individualist society is referred to as the ‘Neolithic (new stone age) Revolution’.
The greater productivity of settled agriculture led to another development: it enabled a segment of the community that once had to hunt and gather, to live parasitically off the rest, and to concentrate on pursuits such as organisation and religious speculation [see Funk and Wagnalls Encyclopaedia, ‘Man: Modern’].1
Over time that parasitic segment developed into a full-time ruling class, in which four identifiable factions emerged, each with its own specialised area of control. The factions didn’t always agree among themselves, but on one point they were unanimous: they had to keep the productive masses under the thumb, or their comfortable parasitic existence would come to an end.
So in combination they exploited the productive population: (1) the political elite centred around the king extracted taxes from them at the point of a sword, (2) the economic elite gained ownership and control of the means of production (initially agricultural land, livestock and slaves) and turned free farmers into tenant farmers, (3) the money power invented and controlled money, and kept the people hard at work paying the interest on debt, and (4) the priestly/intellectual elite invented reasons why the productive population should put up with being exploited.
Throughout history those four factions have ruled over the productive masses -- the working, farming and small business classes -- and exploited them. This is not simply ideology. Economic historians agree. Professor H.S. Ferns in his book ‘The ‘Disease of Government’ says that the rise of this parasitic class marked the beginning of, “...the seemingly inevitable tendency in civilised societies towards the exploitation of the creators of wealth by castes of non-producers....Armed with the means of violence, administrative capacity and priestly magic, mixed in varying proportions, the castes of non-producers have, over most of the world and most of history, seized power and used it for their own purposes.”2 The economic historian Herbert Heaton says this on page 12 of his ‘Economic History of Europe’: “Throughout the rest of this book the influence of those who used spiritual, political, or physical force to appropriate without directly producing must be kept constantly in mind.”3 It doesn’t come any clearer than that.
Throughout history, having extracted wealth from the producer by these means, the ruling elites proceeded to squander it on wars, monuments in their own honour, and leisure. Much of encyclopaedic history is the story of the squabbles and power struggles of these parasitic ruling classes, who came to despise the people they lived off, and still do. The Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle described as ‘banausic’, anybody who actually worked for a living, ‘banausic’ meaning low class or cringing [Karl Popper, ‘The Open Society and its Enemies’, Vol. 2, esp p.225].4
The secret of ongoing domination was to deny the masses education and essential information, and to control how they viewed the world and their own place in it. The priestly/intellectual elite invented the idea that the king was a god, and that the gods decreed that some people were born to rule while the rest were born to serve them. Knowing no better, and having no means of knowing any better, the masses accepted it, throughout all the ancient civilisations right up to the fall of the Roman Empire around AD 400, and indeed throughout the Middle Ages that followed.
There is much made of democracy -- the idea of people ruling themselves -- in ancient Athens, but it was strictly confined to the ruling classes. Slaves -- more than half the population -- had no say, women had no say, and nor did the foreigners (mainly Syrians and Jews), who ran most of the business [Austin and Vidal-Nanquet, ‘An Economic and Social History of Ancient Greece’ (1977)].5 The same was the case under the Roman Empire.
After the fall of Rome around AD 400, of all of the four factions, the priestly power actually gained the upper hand. The Roman Empire was replaced by the Holy Roman Empire, under which popes crowned and controlled, through superstition, the kings of the Western world. The intellectual class became the ‘handmaiden of theology’, inventing theories to justify the power of the almighty Church in Rome, such as the theory of papal infallibility. They even forged documents such as the Epistola Clementis to justify the exercise of political as well as spiritual power by the Church. The money power financed the Church, and withheld support from those kings who threatened the dominance of the popes in Rome.
But the real power over the people again lay in the strict control of information. The Church refused to let anyone translate the Bible out of Latin, which meant the masses couldn’t read it for themselves. Other books were forbidden and if found, burned. If people wanted to communicate with God, they had to go through various intermediaries, both earthly and heavenly, interposed between man and God by the Church. The Church controlled education. The only schools were those associated with seminaries. The only people who were educated were either people going into the Church, or working for the Church, and perhaps the sons of the nobility and land-owning classes.
Saint Augustine in ‘The City of God’ preached that poverty and serfdom were God’s punishment for sin, and the exploited masses should accept their earthly lot and look for their rewards in the life hereafter. The masses accepted it. What else could they do? The penalty for challenging Church dogma was eternal damnation. Scientific experimentation was regarded as alchemy or witchcraft and forbidden. The Church formed the Inquisition, which sought out alchemists, witches, and heretics and burned them at the stake by the tens of thousands.
It was only around AD 1500 when John Tyndale translated the Bible into English and copies were printed on the printing press invented by Gutenburg, that those who could read could see at last what the Bible really said. It said that God had created people as indivduals in His own image, not as tribe members, and that all men were created equal. It followed that some men were not born to rule over others as the priestly/intellectual class had been saying for over 2000 years.
Now it doesn’t matter whether you believe in religion or not. The fact is people back then did, and that piece of information -- that each and every one of them was an individual human being, as valuable in the eyes of God as the members of the ruling classes -- was mightily subversive. The result was the Protestant breakaway from the dominance of Rome known as the Reformation. That in turn opened the way for scientific experimentation to take place legally, and for the dissemination of non-religious books, which in turn led to the great revival of non-religious thought and knowledge known as the Renaissance. The power of the monarch was challenged too, and replaced by parliaments, and the foundations of modern democracy were laid. The Church’s monopoly on education was broken and independent private schools were established. The modern world was born when the minds of the ordinary people were released momentarily from the control of the ruling elites, and allowed to express themselves.
Then around the mid-1700s tradesmen types in England started experimenting with machinery -- a steam engine, then spinning and other machines -- using their own money, or money raised in partnership with other entrepreneurs, not through borrowing from the money power [Sima Liberman (Editor), ‘Europe and the Industrial Revolution’(1972), p. 425-7].6 It all happened at a time when there were tens of thousands of former serfs wandering the countryside begging, looking for work -- kicked off the land by the landowning aristocracy who had enclosed their estates for grazing -- so there was a readily available source of labour, and there were markets for the goods on the continent of Europe. This was the Industrial Revolution, and it was started not by the landowning aristocracy, or the priestly/intellectual class, or the king (now the parliament), nor was it financed by the money power. It was started by ordinary productive people on their own initiative and using their own money and ingenuity.
Former serfs flocked to the towns for jobs and the labourer was paid a wage for the first time in history. Savings banks and friendly societies were formed, not for the savings of the wealthy, but of the now working classes. The ruling elites (now back in control of information) are fond of stressing the horrors of the Industrial Revolution -- the ‘shocking’ working conditions in the factories and squalid living conditions in the towns, children up chimneys and down mineshafts. In fact there were children up chimneys and down mineshafts well before the Industrial Revolution. The revolution brought them out into the sunlight and put them into full-time schooling. It also enabled working class women, for the first time in history, to consider full-time motherhood as an option, something they’ve since allowed themselves to be persuaded they didn’t want.
The historic fact is that before the factories were established, most people in England and Wales could not live off their meagre earnings, and the high disease and mortality rates prove it. Now they were paid better, and fed better, and the literal explosion in the population of England and Wales immediately following the Industrial Revolution attests to that fact [Peter Mathias, ‘The First Industrial Nation’ (1969), p.193].7
>From the perspective of the historical ruling classes, however, it looked as though the masses were about to break out from under their iron fist for the first time in human history. A meeting was convened in Germany by the money lenders, and representatives of the priestly/intellectual class and the landowning aristocracy were invited to attend. The nobility seem to have been largely left out -- power was to be shared only three ways from now on. A plan was drawn up to restore power into its ‘rightful’ hands, a plan for world government by the ruling elites. It is known that such a meeting took place and that a plan was drawn up, because the plan came into the possession of the German government, which published it in a bid to warn the monarchies of Europe. That plan has been in operation ever since, and is coming to fruition now. If it succeeds, never again will the productive masses have the opportunity to throw off the shackles of slavery.
An integral part of the plan was to regain control of information, and that has been done. The globalists acquired control of the major media outlets and wire services feeding information to the people. They also gained control of the education curriculum through so-called ‘progressive education’ theories. The Western world is now back to a situation analogous to the Middle Ages, where information and education are within the control of those wishing to control the populace, and to place in the minds of the masses ideas conducive to rule by the elites. This time, global rule.
But another problem has arisen, strangely reminiscent of the invention of the printing press and the translation of the Bible, an independent source of information -- the Internet. Through that medium people are now finding out for themselves just what has been going on for the past 5000 years. Could it be that the world is on the verge of another revolution -- an Individualist Revolution -- that completes the work of the Reformation, Renaissance, and Industrial Revolution and liberates the individual mind? Or will the political stooges of the parasitic elites use the excuses of pornography on the Internet, the threat of ‘terrorism’ and panic in the streets over the Y2K bug, to shut down the new medium and deny once more the ‘ordinary’ people of the world the opportunity to break out from under the yoke of exploitation, and to start thinking for themselves? The answer to that question is largely up to you, the reader.
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