I have a suspicion that the history of money is the thread that, when pulled upon, will unravel a lot of other mysteries.
Michael Hudson is a mainstream economic historian who has written a series of books about money in the ancient world. The conspiracy researcher Joseph P. Farrell writes about money. I also learned a lot from reading the extensive commentary of an anonymous monetary historian who goes by the name Mefobills at Unz.com. His comment history is well worth reading in its entirety.
The Unz Review He describes how barley was the first money and that credit and debt precede what we think of as "money". Ancient city-states each issued their own sovereign currency in the following way. Citizens deposited grain at the temple. In return credit was extended to them using various stand-ins for the value of the grain, bronze disks or wooden tally sticks for example. These stand-ins for value were then exchanged among the population as currency. It was a closed system and the temple was able to both introduce credit exceeding the quantity of grain when necessary as well as forgive debt when it threatened the proper functioning of society.
Metal coins came much later and disrupted everything. My understanding is the following. Metal coins had no "home" the way sovereign currencies did. They were freely circulating and could not be "redeemed" anywhere. Both Mefobills and Joseph Farrell underline the way that stateless merchants (Jews for Mefobills, Venetians for Farrell) cleverly used freely-circulating metal currency, falsely seen as possessing value "in itself", to speculatively pit one city-state's sovereign currency against another's. Gold and silver were alternately made artificially scarce (by hoarding) and artificially abundant in order to raise and lower the exchange rate on the real sovereign currencies issued by city-states and convertible into real wealth, allowing coin owners to subvert and capture previously self-contained economies. The crucial "problem" with metal coinage was that debts enumerated in precious metal
could not be released by an act of the Temple or king since such money was intrinsically extraterritorial. This is the origin of the situation in which we find ourselves today, in which the black magick of compound interest has created an absurd predicament in which the total amount of debt on the books is far greater than the total amount of "money" on Earth, yet there is no mechanism by which the impossible, unpayable debts can be forgiven. In ancient Mesopotamia, kings would simply jubilee such debt and start over. The bankers know this of course and they know it is a problem. I suspect this is one of the reasons they are so desperate to set up a world government RIGHT NOW. Only a world government would have the power to jubilee debt in any significant way. Now, to be clear, I do not think these people have good intentions just because debt forgiveness is one of their platforms. I think that their fantasy is to put all the old debt in a pile, light it on fire, and start fresh with a new sovereign currency based on the old city-state model. Only this time, since the sovereign currency they introduce (a CBDC) will be global and "outsideless", there will be no threat of a freely circulating stateless currency undermining it. I believe they intend for this currency to be the Final Form of Money and once it is rolled out, credit for regular people will become a historical artifact. The world will be locked once and for all in a fixed caste system. It is tempting to see sovereign currency as "good" and freely-circulating currency as "bad", since the current economic pickle we are in has been caused by the unchecked proliferation of the latter, but I think we need to be careful here. There are at least two kinds of totalitarianisms out there. There is the old-fashioned tyranny of the Annunaki who ruled the city-states and issued sovereign currency, and the more "sophisticated" and less visible tyranny of the hidden money manipulators. The former ("Enlil") will always be interested in controlling and micromanaging the lives of their citizens. They may imagine themselves to be "benevolent tyrants", but freedom is impossible under such a system. The latter ("Enki") will on the contrary encourage freedom and license, knowing that social atomization only accelerates the invisible mechanism that will sooner or later transfer all of the real resources into their pockets, at which point they can move on to the next country. The former is Gentile Totalitarianism, also known as Fascism, and the latter is Jewish Totalitarianism, which always has a new name. A lot of people who are aware of the destructive power of the second form of totalitarianism, today in the ascendant, are nostalgic for the first system. I think this is a terrible error. Yes, Hitler broke the usury mechanism, but his goal was not to liberate Germans, it was to recreate the old sovereign money system in which the Party functioned as the God-King who decided what the common good was. The so-called MEFO bills issued by the National Socialist government were a return to sovereign money. The new money worked. However...you couldn't quit your job in Nazi Germany. Trade unions were abolished. The state told you what job they wanted you to do and you had to obey. The role of the citizen was to work for the common good. This sounds maybe nice in theory, but in practice it always means that someone else gets to decide what is good for the collective. In the case of Nazi Germany, for example, it meant that the state might come by in a Gaswagen and kill your handicapped kids while you're at work. It meant that the freak Albert Speer got to decide what Berlin would look like. Had the Nazis won the war, the entire city would have been razed and rebuilt to look like this:
Le Corbusier, also a Fascist obsessed with (delusional) fantasies of the "common good", wanted to raze the Right Bank of Paris and replace it with this:
I have lived in Germany. When I first arrived I was enthusiastic about the sense of collective responsibility that is still present there, especially concerning money. With time, however, I came to loathe it. The collective moral conscience has a shadow side. People police each other. If you break the rules, people feel justified in letting you know. This becomes dangerous when the rules themselves become immoral. The problem is that the "healthy" desire to be moral and responsible is weaker than the perverse desire to masochistically submit to rules and sadistically enforce them on others. The latter will always win. In France, the corona rules were enforced by sick, sadistic cops and bureaucrats and followed by citizens out of fear and base conformity, mostly. In Germany, there was no need for cops. The citizens were overjoyed at this exciting new opportunity to shame each other and masochistically prove their subservience to the Common Good. If the French were simple bourgeois cowards, the Germans were enthusiastic snitches who self-brainwashed into Believing that they were saving the world. I do not trust individuals or organizations who claim to work for the common good, because perverts will always target and subvert such institutions.
These are the dangers of Gentile Totalitarianism, or to be more precise, Territorial Totalitarianism (as opposed to Deterritorialized Totalitarianism). There is a funny throwaway line in Orwell's "Down and Out in London in Paris" in which a colorful White Russian emigre working in a restaurant tells Orwell to "Trust a snake before a Jew, and a Jew before a Greek, but never trust an Armenian". At the time, Jews, Greeks, and Armenians all functioned as more or less stateless merchant mafias. Today Jews appear to have run the table and largely cornered the niche, but the niche is not "Jewish" in essence. It is an immanent consequence of the existence of multiple territorial states. In a world in which there are multiple states, it is a simple logical inevitability, from a purely game theory point of view, that a non-territorial financial entity will sooner or later arise and "rediscover" the same old tricks for undermining and subverting territorial power. Some group functioning as "Jews" will always arise because the existence of competing territorial states demands the existence of a kind of "financial aether" or rather a financial pseudo-ether that articulates the isolated territories via some form of nomadic money.
We see it happening still today. Russia and China are Territorial Totalitarianisms. They fancy themselves as eternal. In these countries no criticism of power is permitted. The State is pompous. The leaders are always in danger of floating off into the narcissistic delusion that their fantasy of what is good for the people is what is actually good for the people. Some of the time, of course, they really do help the people. They favor religions and social structures that are stable and conservative. The role of the citizen in these nations is to serve as a pseudopod of the state and make children who will also be pseudopods of the state.
The United States, NATO, etc., on the other hand, are Deterritorialized Totalitarianisms. Under such a system the individual has much more freedom but the end result always seems to be a breakdown of civilization and a descent into perversion and chaos. Highly intelligent people often chafe under the rigid social structures that average citizens need. They desire freedom, independence, forbidden knowledge, and sexual liberty and they imagine themselves capable of dealing with the dangerous consequences in a way that average people are not. Hence the spontaneous "Judeophilia" of intellectuals throughout history. Joseph Farrell remarks that it is only
after freely circulating coins began to "invade" the previously self-contained city-states of Greece in the "6th century BC" that what we call philosophy emerged. The metal money that had no home and could be exchanged for anything was the first avatar for a primordial substance supporting visible reality. It must have been an exciting time. Descartes is the modern philosopher who is credited with inventing the "transcendental subject" which might be described as a free-floating universal subjectivity independent of any territorial markers. I think it is no coincidence that he lived in Amsterdam, the city in which Jews invented modern capitalism (they took it to England after that, more below) with its promise of limitless pleasure and the escape from rigid social and class structures that so many brilliant people desire. Here is what Descartes wrote to his friend Balzac (not the writer) in 1631:
You must excuse my enthusiasm if I invite you to choose Amsterdam for your retreat, and to prefer it not only to the monasteries of the Franciscans and the Carthusians that many good folk retire to, but also to the finest houses in France and Italy, and even to the famous Hermitage where you spent the past year. No matter how polished a country house may be, it always lacks countless conveniences that are found only in towns, and even the solitude one hopes to find there turns out never to be quite perfect. There, I agree, you’ll find a stream that would make the greatest talkers start day-dreaming, and a valley so secluded that it could make them ecstatic; but it can easily happen that you also have neighbours who will bother you at times, and their visits will be even more of a nuisance than the ones you receive in Paris. In this large town where I live [Amsterdam], by contrast, everyone but myself is engaged in trade, and thus is so focused on his own profit that I could live here all my life without ever being noticed by anyone. I take a walk each day amid the bustle of the crowd, with as much freedom and repose as you could get in your avenues, and I don’t attend to the people I see, any more than I would to the trees in your woods or the animals grazing there.
Descartes can perhaps be forgiven for not understanding that the prosperity he saw around him was the result of a speculative bubble, and that all bubbles pop sooner or later. My guess is that the smarter people in the deterritorialized camp see that the current debt scam, which is the first global debt scam, must therefore also be the
last debt scam, since there is no longer anywhere else to flee. There is no more "elsewhere" and a deterritorialized state needs a constant supply of untapped elsewheres to parasitize if it wishes to continue functioning. I believe this is the key to understanding the Covid and Ukraine charades. The stateless mafia wants to go territorial. They want to go "legit". They see that their only hope for survival is jumping horses. They are running the United States, or more precisely the dollar, into the ground one final time, in one final debt binge, to impoverish everyone on Earth once and for all, at which point all debt will be jubileed and the global control grid will be rolled out. It will be an old-school territorial control grid. Consumerism will disappear. Russia and China are scripted to "win" this staged conflict. The BIS is fully on-board with the transition. I guess that the problem is that there are just too many people with too much money and power out there who want the deterritorial debt system to continue just a while longer.
The commenter Mefobills regularly brings up the Tally Stick accounting system that was used in England from the moment the "Jewes" with their "metal money" were expelled in 1290 until the Bank of England was chartered in 1694. He describes this as the Big Bang event of modern finance. What is a tally stick?
What tally sticks tell us about how money works
Tallies were a way of recording debts with a system that was sublimely simple and effective. The stick would contain a record of the debt, for example: "£9 4s 4d from Fulk Basset for the farm of Wycombe". Fulk Basset was a Bishop of London in the 13th Century. He owed his debt to King Henry III. Now comes the elegant part. The stick would be split in half, down its length from one end to the other. The debtor would retain half, called the "foil". The creditor would retain the other half, called the "stock" - even today, British bankers use the word "stocks" to refer to debts of the British government. Because willow has a natural and distinctive grain, the two halves would match only each other. Of course, the Treasury could simply have kept a record of these transactions in a ledger somewhere. But the tally stick system enabled something radical to occur. If you had a tally stock showing that Bishop Basset owed you £5, then unless you worried that he wasn't good for the money, the tally stock itself was worth close to £5 in its own right.
If you wanted to buy something, you might well find that the seller would be pleased to accept the tally stock as a safe and convenient form of payment. So the tally sticks themselves became a kind of money, a particular sort of debt that could be traded freely, circulating from person to person until it utterly separated from Bishop Basset and a farm in Wycombe.
The second part of the article, however, is where it gets interesting for us here. Look what happened in 1834:
Those tally sticks, by the way, met an unfortunate end. The system was finally abolished and replaced by paper ledgers in 1834 after decades of attempts to modernise. To celebrate, it was decided to burn the sticks - six centuries of irreplaceable monetary records - in a coal-fired stove in the House of Lords, rather than letting parliamentary staff take them home for firewood. Burning a cartload or two of tally sticks in a coal-fired stove is a wonderful way to start a raging chimney fire. So it was that the House of Lords, then the House of Commons, and almost the entire Palace of Westminster - a building as old as the tally stick system itself - was burned to the ground.
So we have another one of these mysterious fires. This one conveniently wipes out six hundred years of "irreplaceable monetary records", making sure that no one knows how money worked in the past.
If you go to the Wikipedia article for the fire, it gets even better. We have an architectural competition:
In 1836 a competition for designs for a new palace was won by Charles Barry. Barry's plans, developed in collaboration with Augustus Pugin, incorporated the surviving buildings into the new complex.
And we also have a lunatic asylum:
In 1852 the Commons was finished, and both Houses sat in their new chambers for the first time; Queen Victoria first used the newly completed royal entrance. In the same year, while Barry was appointed a Knight Bachelor, Pugin suffered a mental breakdown and, following incarceration at Bethlehem Pauper Hospital for the Insane, died at the age of 40.
We have predictive programming:
In the late eighteenth century a committee of MPs predicted that there would be a disaster if the palace caught fire. This was followed by a 1789 report from fourteen architects warning against the possibility of fire in the palace; signatories included Soane and Robert Adam. Soane again warned of the dangers in 1828, when he wrote that "the want of security from fire, the narrow, gloomy and unhealthy passages, and the insufficiency of the accommodations in this building are important objections which call loudly for revision and speedy amendment." His report was again ignored.
On Soane's Wikipedia page we read this:
On 16 October 1788 he succeeded Sir Robert Taylor as architect and surveyor to the Bank of England. He would work at the bank for the next 45 years, resigning in 1833.
So he was working for the Bank of England.
We also read this:
Soane, who was a UGLE Freemason, was employed to extend Freemasons' Hall, London in 1821 by building a new gallery.
We have lost documents:
The British standard measurements, the yard and pound, were both lost in the blaze; the measurements had been created in 1496. Also lost were most of the procedural records for the House of Commons, which dated back as far as the late 15th century. The original Acts of Parliament from 1497 survived, as did the Lords' Journals, all of which were stored in the Jewel Tower at the time of the fire.
I suppose the "surviving" documents were forged after the fact.
We have celebrities selling the narrative:
The novelist Charles Dickens, in a speech to the Administrative Reform Association, described the retention of the tallies for so long as an "obstinate adherence to an obsolete custom"; he also mocked the bureaucratic steps needed to implement change from wood to paper.
Why on Earth was Charles Dickens railing in public against a few cartloads of old sticks being stored in the basement?