Showing posts with label Financial Oligarchy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Financial Oligarchy. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 5, 2024

The Destruction of the United States as we know it | Martin Armstrong

I have studied many forms of government. I have found that Republics have always crumbled to dust because they are the most corrupt form of government one can create. Even a Dictatorship or Monarchy is never so corrupt, for they are not suspectable to bribery as Republics. The criticism of Democracy has come from the Greek philosophers who saw the people as too stupid to make decisions. Our representatives look down upon us the same way. 
 
 » If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, 
you will succumb in every battle. «
Sun Tzu, The Art of War.

Many wanted to believe that the Roman Republic was a democracy. Yet, this democracy was a total facade, for it was always under aristocratic rule – not the common people. We too live in a facade where they tell us who is the enemy and we are expected to fight and die who their pleasure. We have no right to vote should we go to war against Russia or China. Rome was the same way. The people had no real rights in this regard.

Assuming they do not take up Alexander Soros’ bold implicate to assassinate Trump so he can flood the United States with his Open Society that disregards culture, religion, and ethics, the computer is forecasting a tumultuous post-2024 election in 2025. History repeats for human nature never changes. What we will see post-2024 is the destruction of the United States as we know it.

 
See also:

Tuesday, February 13, 2024

Inside European Finance’s Most Secretive Society │ Owen Walker

In late October 2023 more than 40 of Europe’s most powerful bankers convened at the palatial Dolder Grand hotel overlooking Zurich for three days of discussions about the state of their industry. Attendees were given the chance to quiz Switzerland’s finance minister Karin Keller-Sutter and central bank governor Thomas Jordan, just over six months after the pair played key roles in the rescue of Credit Suisse by its rival UBS. The talks, which were not publicly disclosed, were arranged by a highly influential organisation whose existence is barely known outside its rarefied membership.
 
Italian President Francesco Cossiga at the 77th session of the IIEB on October 20, 1989.
 » This is not like Davos, where anyone can buy their way in. This really is exclusive. «
 
[...] The Institut International d’Etudes Bancaires (IIEB, International Banking Study Institute) is the most exclusive and secretive networking club in European finance, where bank bosses rub shoulders with guests from presidents and prime ministers to royalty and central bankers. This is not like Davos, where anyone can buy their way in, one longtime member told the Financial Times. This really is exclusive. For 73 years the IIEB has brought together the heads of Europe’s biggest banks twice a year at luxury hotels and royal palaces across the continent to discuss sensitive subjects such as M&A deals and global policymaking. The group has no website and its membership, meeting agendas and minutes are not made public. Members are discouraged from sharing details of the discussions. 
 
[...] The IIEB was founded in Paris in 1950 by the heads of four lenders from across the continent — Crédit Industriel et Commercial, Union Bank of Switzerland, Société Générale de Belgique and Amsterdamsche Bank — with the aim of holding regular top-level discussions on developments in the banking sector, as well as the economy and monetary system. It was part of a raft of cross-border institutions set up during that period to encourage closer ties between organisations from countries that had recently been at war with one another. [...] High-profile guests are a staple of IIEB gatherings. In 2000 and again in 2009, the group was hosted by Prince Andrew, first at St James’s Palace and then Buckingham Palace. At the IIEB’s first meeting in Russia, in St Petersburg in 2013, it received a speech from former president Dmitry Medvedev, while the club welcomed Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, now Turkey’s president, at a gathering in Istanbul when he was still the country’s prime minister.
 
[...] In one of the few publicly disclosed speeches given to the IIEB, European Central Bank vice-president Lucas Papademos began addressing the October 2006 IIEB meeting in Athens by quoting Adam Smith’s warning against collusion from 'The Wealth of Nations': People of the same trade seldom meet together even for merriment and diversion, but on those occasions when they meet the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public or some contrivance to raise prices. If Adam Smith could have seen this gathering of top bankers from across Europe, would he have expressed such an opinion, which would also be a cause of alarm for a central banker because of the potential ‘contrivance to raise prices’? I very much doubt it.

 

Wednesday, November 22, 2023

Switzerland About To Start Collecting Data To Calculate Sanctions Impact

The Swiss government is to start collecting data from companies trading in commodities as the Ukraine conflict underscores the importance of the sector for both domestic and foreign policy, the Federal Council said in a statement released Wednesday. Switzerland currently has no official data on the contribution of the commodities trade to the country's GDP or goods traded by locally-based companies.

Over the next three years, the state statistics office will request information from about 400 companies, the statement said.

The move comes as Switzerland is juggling the implementation of Western sanctions against Russian resources with its status as a major hub for trading the country’s energy, grains and metals and a history of neutrality in international conflicts. Switzerland accounts for more than a third of global crude oil trade, more than two-thirds of metals trade and more than 35% of global agricultural trade, according to research, the report said.

Wait ... They did not calculate the impact before imposing sanctions. Now they want to know. In three years.
 
 Switzerland imported more than 14 tons of gold from Russia during October 2023 for processing, taking advantage of the fact that it was shipped through third countries, and thus did not violate Western sanctions, the latest data from the Swiss Federal Council has revealed. In October, the Alpine country’s gold imports totaled CHF776 million ($879 million), of which $875.7 million worth of the gold originated from Russia and was delivered through the UK and Moldova, data showed.
 

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán (Nov 22, 2023) - » Europe has lost its capacity for self-determination. « Speech and talk on being a soccer player and a politician; on Ukraine and the West a.k.a. NATOstan loosing the war; on sovereignty and national interests of Hungary as a member of the European Union;  on how Hungary stopped illegal migration;  on the decline and demise of the European Union - in Zurich, Switzerland.

Tuesday, November 21, 2023

Ukraine Lost 90% Of It's Army And 480,000+ Soldiers Are Dead

Ukraine's army, hailed by NATO media the 'strongest and most powerful military force in Europe', is collapsing on all fronts. Some 480,000 plus Ukrainian soldiers are now dead, an unknown number wounded, maimed, handicapped, mentally affected. Hundreds of thousands lost fathers, sons, husbands, brothers, friends. The evaporation of Ukraine's economy and finances is about to complete. The moment money from the West stops, the regime in Kiev, the army and the administration will disintegrate. And the regime in Washington remains committed to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian and does not allow the Zelensky regime to surrender nor to end the daily carnage and sacrifice amongst brothers now enemies.  
 
Why?
 
The US insists that the Zelensky regime has not yet run out of men and women old and young for slaughter
ten years to the day since the US-Zionist Euromaidan Putsch was triggered in Kyiv on November 21, 2013.
Project Ukraine. War-And-Pillage. Who benefits. Who commands the US.
 
Approximately half of the country's total population of around 40 million in February 2022 had fled their homes or became Russian Federation citizens. Once the war is over, settlements and infrastructure destroyed by artillery shells, battlefields, trenches, font-lines etc. will remain toxic wastelands, unsuitable for settlement, agriculture or any other human activities. 90% of the six million Ukrainian refugees in the West are women and children and may have no reason, no one and nowhere to return to.
 
Genocide?
Ethnic cleansing? 
Why.
 
Scott Ritter (Nov 21, 2023) - "480,000+ GONE! Ukraine has LOST more than 90% of it's ARMY! WE WASTED BILLIONS!

Thursday, October 26, 2023

The US War On China | Edward N. Luttwak

Xi’s incessant calls for “combat readiness” may mean that he actually doubts that Chinese military forces are ready for real combat. Its navy, after all, is brand new and inexperienced, while the air force is greatly inferior in its technology, mostly relying on Soviet jet engines, radar-evading “stealth” that is not really stealthy, and inferior missiles. But more importantly, Xi’s intense bellicosity and intense calls for “the rejuvenation of the Chinese people” suggests motives that we cannot even imagine. No, not Taiwan, which China could have had for the asking by merely treating Hong Kong’s freedoms with demonstrative respect, making “one country, two systems” very attractive to the Taiwanese.
 
» There is no China. There is only Xi. He is a dictator. He is isolated. He is obsessed. Kill the bastard ! 
Wang Yi is but a lackey. China is corrupt and weak. Dump Ukraine and destroy China ! «
 
» Know your enemy. He will win who knows why to fight how to fight when to fight and when not to fight. «
  Sun Tzu, The Art of War.
 
Much more likely is his personal sense of shame that China’s history is a long sequence of defeats at the hands of badly outnumbered invaders — the Turkic, Mongol and Manchurian Jurchen tribes-people, and then the Japanese who might still be there if they had not attacked the US. As with Mussolini, then, Xi’s real aim may well be to turn his unwarlike people into warriors.


The Plot Of US Banks To Seize Russia | Martin A. Armstrong

New York investment bankers staged a financial coup against Russia in the late 1990s. The main goal was to make Russia dependent on US money in the long term. Russian billionaire and oligarch Boris Berezovsky played a key role in this process. The head of the Republic National Bank of New York and the US fund Hermitage Capital, Edmond Safra, was the one who funded the whole wire. Whether the US government was involved, I'm not entirely sure. But the bankers definitely were. And what they were after is basically they got Yeltsin to steal effectively 7 billion dollars from IMF loans. 

Edmond J. Safra (1932–1999)

Once the transfer was completed, Safra reported to the US government and the FBI about Yeltsin's alleged money laundering activities via the Bank of New York. Then the prosecutors immediately went to the Bank of New York and then they threatened Yeltsin and said: look, you resign and put this guy Berezovsky and everything will be fine. And Yeltsin at that stage realized that this all was a set up. That's when he turned to the young Vladimir Putin, who confiscated all assets of Hermitage Capital in Russia. New York bankers urged me to participate in the financial coup against Russia. They tried to get me to invest in Hermitage Capital and I declined. I said: look, this is gonna collapse, it's not gonna work. They wanted me to put in ten billion dollar, and I said no 'I'm not up with my clients' money into it'. I refused. When they started this nonsense about me, I told them ‘look, Republic stole the money.' And the government said ‘we believe Republic'. I said Ok, fine, and I did an interview with the Japan press. During this interview I told the truth, and right afterwards I became the target of US intelligence. US intelligence agencies have repeatedly tried to lure out my secret formula that helped me to predict the 1998 financial crisis in Russia, but I refused. When Russia collapsed, that's when the CIA basically came in and said: 'look, we want this model '. We offered to provide forecasting for them, and they basically said no they had to own it. And that's why I said ‘no'. The US authorities detained me because of my refusal to collaborate. I served a prison sentence from 1999 to 2011.


Perhaps the number one question I always get about the ordeal I went through and the sheer chaos that surrounded everything, was just who really was behind the plot to blackmail the former head of Russia Boris Yeltsin to stop him from running for reelection in 2000 and hand-pick Boris Abramovich Berezovsky? It is true I even had a meeting with the US Attorney Office on the subject when they realized that Republic National Bank and Edmond Safra had set up even Bank of New York as the center piece in the plot. As the players that surrounded me have mysteriously died, hanged themselves, been imprisoned, released, just saying they were denied a fair trial without explanation as with the nurse that supposedly killed Safra, this wild plot is still the classic who-done-it that may not be solved until someone gets the secret files tucked away on this one. Bereszovsky, who fled to Britain obtaining political asylum, suddenly hangs himself. Then there is the lawyer/accountant Sergei Magnitsky, who represented Safra’s Hermitage Capital Management mysteriously dies in prison awaiting trial and then is given a posthumous trial and found guilty. While he was portrayed in the West as a whistle-blower, don’t forget so was Safra against Bank of New York. This then led Congress to strangely pass the Magnitsky Act to a bill to impose sanctions on persons responsible for the detention, abuse, or death of Sergei Magnitsky, for the conspiracy to defraud the Russian Federation of taxes on corporate profits through fraudulent transactions and lawsuits against Hermitage. This is curiously strange for a foreign act to prompt Congress to pass a law in the USA. We cannot leave out Edmond Safra’s own mysterious murder in Monaco that took the fire company hours to reach being just 10 minutes away while his more than 20 bodyguards were all given the night off and reported bullets in his body with his nurse saying Russians dressed as ninjas showed up.

In August 1999 Boris Yeltsin appointed Vladimir Putin prime minister.

What I do know is there appears to have been a plot to take over Russia and that came from sources directly in Russia at the time. My case began September 13th, 1999 and Safra was killed December 3rd. Within a week the government moved to put me in contempt and stop my request for a speedy trial. It came out in court that bullets were left in my mailbox to warn me to shut up. But I was in the public spot light so they created a contempt and through me in to suspend everything. Safra was linked with Boris Abramovich Berezovsky and allegedly Vladimir Aleksandrovich Gusinsky, the media tycoon. As the plot was laid out by Russian sources, Yeltsin was convinced to take $7 billion from the IMF funds to refurbish the Kremlin – a staggering amount of money. The funds were wired to a largely unknown company in Switzerland. The wire was steered through Bank of New York and as soon as it was made, Safra had his bank run to the Feds and report that Bank of New York had just conducted a money laundering event. The Feds ran in wide-eyed and of course announced their action to the world before thoroughly investigating the allegations of Safra. I had a personal meeting with Dov Schlien president of Republic National Bank in March 1999 where he asked me to invest $10 billion offering a letter of credit guarantee. I sent an email to Tokyo explaining the offer to our office there. It was at this time that THE CONSPIRATORS threatened Yeltsin with exposure of his theft of $7 billion on the world stage. The demand was to appoint Berezovsky as the new President of Russia and for Yeltsin to step down and not run in 2000. Yeltsin, realizing he was set up, turned to Putin who nobody had heard of. As the story goes, Putin promised to take care of everything if Yeltsin appointed him instead, Yeltsin resigned on December 31, 1999, after Safra was killed on December 3rd in Monaco. The Presidential elections were held in Russia on the 26th of March 2000 formally electing Putin.

Berezovsky and Gusinsky fled Russia with their assets confiscated with the former gaining political asylum in Britain and the latter taking off to Israel. I even had a meeting with the Assistant US Attorney in NY in April 2000 about this mess because they ran into huge problems with the whole Bank of New York alleged $7 billion Money Laundering. They could not get any cooperation from the Russian government. It was Edmond Safra’s Republic National Bank then ran to the US Government in August 1999 and informed them that the Bank of New York had just wired $7 billion to Switzerland in a money laundering scam. The US authorities ran in immediately. The wire was sent to Mabetex, which was the Swiss based company ran by Kosovo/Swiss entrepreneur Behgjet Pacolli who claimed to have the contract to refurbish the Kremlin. He became President of Kosovo in 2011. The Bank of New York broker Lucy Edwards pleaded guilty but did no jail time because she 'cooperated' with the government. At her sentencing, the Judge simply asked who was the $7 billion money laundering for? She replied it was a 'ransom' for a Russian businessman. The Judge did not bother to even ask any names. The classic cover-up as if anyone would ever pay $7 billion ransom.


See also:

BRICS+ Destroys The US And EU Currency Monopoly | Michael Hudson

There is no way that today’s international debt overhand can be repaid. That is as true for the United States as it is for Global South debtors. The US Treasury owes much more to foreign governments in the form of their holdings of US securities than it can foreseeably repay. It has post-industrialized its own economy, and has committed to spending enormous sums abroad, while its dependency on foreign imports is rising and its prospects for collecting its existing debt claims on deficit countries is looking shaky. The past half-century’s foreign investment has taken the form of privatization of the public domain of debtor countries. This investment has not helped them develop but has merely transferred ownership of their oil and mineral rights, public utilities and other assets. A viable international financial system requires productive investment such as China’s Belt and Road Initiative that can help countries prosper, not asset stripping. Dollar dominance will continue over Europe and other US satellites. Other countries that still need dollar reserves for their trade and investment with the United States can continue as it has. But what will be changed is a new basis for the international economy itself. There will not be a new BRICS currency in the sense of a dollar or euro that could become a medium for trade, investment or international speculation. There will only be a mutual "currency of settlement" of payments imbalances among central banks joining the new system. And that system itself will be based on principles opposite from the financialized neoliberal model being promoted by the Dollar/NATO bloc. That is the real context for the current discussion of BRICS+ economic reform.


President Putin was very clear when he recently talked in Valdai about a single settlement currency: "This definitely deserves our attention. It's a complex issue, and we have to solve it in one way or another." The Western press talks about how much wealth and reserves do the BRICS countries have. Naturally, you count their gold as a large part of their reserves. But where is the gold of the BRICS countries? Much of their gold is not in their own countries. It's in the New York Federal Reserve Bank, it's in the Bank of England and the gold of African countries is in the Bank of France. Right now, this gold is being held hostage. But countries can ask the US, the UK and France to give them back their gold. Germany tried to do that a few years ago and said, "Can't you begin to give us our gold back that was moved to your banks during the last seventy-five years of  US occupation? " And the US said, "Oh I'm sorry, we can't. We've already done something else with your gold. There are legal problems and we are not giving it back to you!" Now, let's say the BRICS countries would ask for their gold and if the United States and England and France will not return it, those countries could take compensation, including all of the foreign investments in their countries. They could do another thing: If, especially the African countries, say, "You've stolen our gold. You cannot expect us to pay our foreign dollar debts if you have come and seized our gold. Give us back our gold. You owe to us. And by the way, we're going to join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization so you can't send your troops in and do what you did in Libya and simply grab it." This is an element of the financial future that nobody in the West has talked about.

Quoted from:

Monday, October 23, 2023

The BIS — The Apex Of The System | Carroll Quigley

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 feudalistic 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 the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations.
 
  The three principal bimonthly meetings are the Global Economy Meeting, 
the Economic Consultative Committee and the All Governors' Meeting.

[...] It must not be felt that these heads of the world’s chief central banks were themselves substantive powers in world finance. They were not. Rather, they were the technicians and agents of the dominant investment bankers of their own countries, who had raised them up and were perfectly capable of throwing them down. The substantive financial powers of the world were in the hands of these investment bankers (also called ‘international’ or ‘merchant’ bankers) who remained largely behind the scenes in their own unincorporated private banks. These formed a system of international cooperation and national dominance which was more private, more powerful, and more secret than that of their agents in the central banks.  
 
This dominance of investment bankers was based on their control over the flows of credit and investment funds in their own countries and throughout the world. They could dominate the financial and industrial systems of their own countries by their influence over the flow of current funds though bank loans, the discount rate, and the re-discounting of commercial debts; they could dominate governments by their own control over current government loans and the play of the international exchanges. Almost all of this power was exercised by the personal influence and prestige of men who had demonstrated their ability in the past to bring off successful financial coupes, to keep their word, to remain cool in a crisis, and to share their winning opportunities with their associates.

Wednesday, February 22, 2023

Modern Fractional Reserve Banking - A Ponzi Scheme | Murray N. Rothbard

The banker issues fake warehouse receipts and lends them out as if they were real warehouse receipts represented by cash. At the same time, the original depositor thinks that his warehouse receipts are represented by money available at any time he wishes to cash them in. Here we have the system of fractional reserve banking, in which more than one warehouse receipt is backed by the same amount of gold or other cash in the bank’s vaults.
 

It should be clear that modern fractional reserve banking is a shell game, a Ponzi scheme, a fraud in which fake warehouse receipts are issued and circulate as equivalent to the cash supposedly represented by the receipts.

 
See also:

Monday, October 3, 2022

Schwab’s Idea Will Fail | Martin A. Armstrong

Martin A. Armstrong (Oct 03, 2022) - Now insofar as the sovereign debt default, we are looking at governments collapsing which will take down banks that must retain reserves in government bonds. Klaus Schwab is an academic. He has ZERO real-world experience. His ideas will collapse just like Marx for the one element both ignore is human nature. It cost over 200 million lives for Marx to get his theory in place. Communism collapsed because without curiosity and freedom to explore, talk, and think, all advancement of society comes to an end.

Klaus Schwab

Schwab’s idea will fail because the setup is different this time. Marxism succeeded because in Russia serfdom ended only during the 1860s. Therefore, the common people DID NOT own anything and it made sense to raid the rich. This time, people own houses and cars, and they save with pensions and to help their children. This time the common people would have to surrender all their assets so Schwab’s Marxist theories can be implemented. It is a whole different board game this time around.

Monday, September 26, 2022

The Bankster's Paradise Conspiracy Theory | Antony C. Sutton

There is an extensive literature in English, French, and German reflecting the argument that the Bolshevik Revolution was the result of a "Jewish conspiracy"; more specifically, a conspiracy by Jewish world bankers. Generally, world control is seen as the ultimate objective; the Bolshevik Revolution was but one phase of a wider program that supposedly reflects an age old religious struggle between Christianity and the "forces of darkness."
 

The argument and its variants can be found in the most surprising places and from quite surprising persons. In February 1920 Winston Churchill wrote an article — rarely cited today — for the London Illustrated Sunday Herald entitled "Zionism Versus Bolshevism." In this article Churchill concluded that it was "particularly important ... that the National Jews in every country who are loyal to the land of their adoption should come forward on every occasion ... and take a prominent part in every measure for combatting the Bolshevik conspiracy." Churchill draws a line between "national Jews" and what he calls "international Jews." He argues that the "international and for the most atheistical Jews" certainly had a "very great" role in the creation of Bolshevism and bringing about the Russian Revolution. He asserts (contrary to fact) that with the exception of Lenin, "the majority" of the leading figures in the revolution were Jewish, and adds (also contrary to fact) that in many cases Jewish interests and Jewish places of worship were excepted by the Bolsheviks from their policies of seizure. Churchill calls the international Jews a "sinister confederacy" emergent from the persecuted populations of countries where Jews have been persecuted on account of their race. Winston Churchill traces this movement back to Spartacus-Weishaupt, throws his literary net around Trotsky, Bela Kun, Rosa Luxemburg, and Emma Goldman, and charges: "This world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing."
 

[...] The persistence with which the Jewish-conspiracy myth has been pushed suggests that it may well be a deliberate device to divert attention from the real issues and the real causes. The evidence provided in this book suggests that the New York bankers who were also Jewish had relatively minor roles in supporting the Bolsheviks, while the New York bankers who were also Gentiles (Morgan, Rockefeller, Thompson) had major roles.

What better way to divert attention from the real operators than by the medieval bogeyman of anti-Semitism?

 

Wall Street's Revolutionary Socialism for Mexico | Anthony C. Sutton

Anthony C. Sutton (1974) - Another case of revolution supported by New York financial institutions concerned that of Mexico in 1915-16. Von Rintelen, a German espionage agent in the United States, was accused during his May 1917 trial in New York City of attempting to "embroil" the U.S. with Mexico and Japan in order to divert ammunition then flowing to the Allies in Europe. 
 
Iconic image of revolutionary Pancho Villa in Ojinaga, a publicity still taken
by Mutual Film Corporation photographer John Davidson Wheelan, January 1914
 
Payment for the ammunition that was shipped from the United States to the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, was made through Guaranty Trust Company. Von Rintelen's adviser, Sommerfeld, paid $380,000 via Guaranty Trust and Mississippi Valley Trust Company to the Western Cartridge Company of Alton, Illinois, for ammunition shipped to El Paso, for forwarding to Villa. This was in mid-1915. On January 10, 1916, Villa murdered seventeen American miners at Santa Isabel and on March 9, 1916, Villa raided Columbus, New Mexico, and killed eighteen more Americans. 
 
Columbus, New Mexico, after being raided by Pancho Villa
 
Wall Street involvement in these Mexican border raids was the subject of a letter (October 6, 1916) from Lincoln Steffens, an American Communist, to Colonel House [Edward Mandell House], an aide' to Woodrow Wilson: My dear Colonel House: Just before I left New York last Monday, I was told convincingly that "Wall Street" had completed arrangements for one more raid of Mexican bandits into the United States: to be so timed and so atrocious that it would settle the election [...]
 
Venustiano Carranza, 44th President of Mexico,
First Chief of the Constitutionalist Army, 1920
 
Once in power in Mexico, the Carranza government purchased additional arms in the United States. The American Gun Company contracted to ship 5,000 Mausers and a shipment license was issued by the War Trade Board for 15,000 guns and 15,000,000 rounds of ammunition. The American ambassador to Mexico, Fletcher, "flatly refused to recommend or sanction the shipment of any munitions, rifles, etc., to Carranza." However, intervention by Secretary of State Robert Lansing reduced the barrier to one of a temporary delay, and "in a short while [the American Gun Company] would be permitted to make the shipment and deliver."

The raids upon the U.S. by the Villa and the Carranza forces were reported in the New York Times as the "Texas Revolution" (a kind of dry run for the Bolshevik Revolution) and were undertaken jointly by Germans and Bolsheviks. The testimony of John A. Walls, district attorney of Brownsville, Texas, before the 1919 Fall Committee yielded documentary evidence of the link between Bolshevik interests in the United States, German activity, and the Carranza forces in Mexico.

Consequently, the Carranza government, the first in the world with a Soviet-type constitution (which was written by Trotskyites), was a government with support on Wall Street. The Carranza revolution probably could not have succeeded without American munitions and Carranza would not have remained in power as long as he did without American help.
 
[...] We also identified documentary evidence concerning a Wall Street syndicate's financing of the 1912 Sun Yat-sen revolution in China, a revolution that is today hailed by the Chinese Communists as the precursor of Mao's revolution in China. Charles B. Hill, New York attorney negotiating with Sun Yat-sen in behalf of this syndicate, was a director of three Westinghouse subsidiaries, and we have found that Charles R. Crane of Westinghouse in Russia was involved in the Russian Revolution.

Sunday, September 25, 2022

Lenin. Money. Revolution. | Serhii Hrabovsky

Serhii Hrabovsky (2010) - The themes linked to Lenin, money, and revolution, present an inexhaustible source for historians, psychologists, and satirists. Just imagine: we have a man who urged to make, after the complete victory of communism, toilet bowls in public restrooms of solid gold; who never had to earn a living through hard work; who was quite comfortably off even in prison and exile, and barely knew what money is, yet at the same time made a considerable contribution to the theory of commodity-money relations.

How exactly did he manage to do that? Not via brochures and articles, of course, but through his revolutionary activities. It was Lenin who introduced, in 1919-21, non-monetary “natural” barter between towns and in the countryside. This resulted in the total collapse of the economy, a complete standstill in agriculture, mass famines, and, consequently, mass uprisings against the regime of the Russian Communist Party. Only then, soon before his death, did Lenin perceive the true meaning of money and introduced the NEP, the New Economic Policy, a kind of “manageable capitalism” under the supervision of the communist party.
 
 
 
However, our purpose here is something other than the exploration of these fascinating subjects. Instead, we will take a look at where Vladimir Lenin got the fantastic sums necessary to fund party activity before the revolution. Over recent decades some very interesting materials have been published, but still, much remains obscure. For example, at the beginning of the 20th century, the underground newspaper Iskra was sponsored by a mysterious benefactor (individual or collective), disguised in the party documents as the “Californian gold mines.” Some researchers believe that this was an instance of radical Russian revolutionaries being sponsored by American Jewish bankers, mostly Russian expatriates and their descendants, who hated Tsarism for its official anti-semitic policies.

During the revolution of 1905-07, Bolsheviks were sponsored by American oil corporations with the view to pushing their rivals out of the world markets (namely, Nobel’s oil cartel in Baku). At that very time, the American banker Jacob Schiff also provided Bolsheviks with money, as he himself confessed. The list of donors also included Yermasov, a manufacturer from Syzran, and Morozov, a merchant and industrialist based near Moscow. Later, the Bolshevik party acquired another financial donor in the person of Schmidt, owner of a furniture factory in Moscow. It is curious that Savva Morozov and Nikolai Schmidt both eventually committed a suicide, as a result of which the Bolsheviks got a considerable proportion of their fortunes. And of course, big money came from the so-called ex’es [the truncated form of “expropriation”] or, in simpler terms, banal robberies of banks, post offices, and railway ticket-offices. These actions were masterminded by two characters with criminal monickers Kamo and Koba, i.e., Ter-Petrosian and Dzhugashvili.

Nevertheless, hundreds of thousands and even millions of roubles invested in revolutionary activities might at best only shake the Russian empire. Despite all its shortcomings, its institutions were pretty solid – but only in peacetime. With the outbreak of the First World War, new financial and political opportunities opened up before the Bolsheviks, and they didn’t fail to take advantage of them. On Jan. 15, 1915 the German ambassador in Istanbul sent a report to Berlin, relating about his meeting with a Russian subject Aleksander Gelfand (aka Parvus), an active participant of the revolution of 1905-07 and owner of a large trade company. Parvus acquainted the German ambassador with the plan of the Russian revolution. He was immediately invited to Berlin, where he met with some influential cabinet members and advisors to Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg. Parvus suggested that the Germans give him a large sum of money to help promote, firstly, the national movements in Finland and Ukraine and secondly, to support the Bolsheviks, who propagated the idea of the defeat of the Russian empire in the unjust war for the sake of overthrowing the “regime of landlords and capitalists.” Parvus’ suggestions were accepted; on Kaiser Wilhelm’s personal order, he was given two million German marks as the first contribution to “the cause of the Russian revolution.” Later, other installments followed, some of them for greater sums. Thus, according to a receipt made by Parvus, on Jan. 29, 1915 he received 15 million in Russian bills for the development of the revolutionary movement in Russia. The money was allotted with the typical German efficiency.

In Finland and Ukraine Parvus’ (and the German general staff’s) agents turned out to be of second or third-rate importance. Therefore, their influence on the process of gaining independence in these countries was insignificant in comparison with the objective processes of nation-building in the Russian empire. Yet in regards to Lenin, Parvus-Gelfand hit the bull’s-eye. Parvus claimed that he told Lenin that, at that moment, revolution was only possible in Russia, and only as a result of Germany winning the war. In response, Lenin sent his proxy Fuerstenberg (aka Ganetsky) for close cooperation with Parvus, which lasted till 1918. Another installment from Germany, although not as large, came to the Bolsheviks via the Swiss parliamentary Karl Moor – but it only amounted to 35,000 dollars. More investments came from the Nia Bank in Stockholm. On the order of the German Imperial Bank at No. 2754, Nia, personal accounts for Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and other Bolshevik leaders, were opened. Order No. 7433 of March 2, 1917, provided payments for the “services” of Lenin, Zinoviev, Kollontai, and others, in the sphere of public peace propaganda in Russia, where the Tsarist regime had just been overthrown.

The colossal sums were wisely administered. The Bolsheviks published their own newspapers which were distributed free of charge in every town and village. The entire territory of Russia was covered with a network of their professional propagandists. “Red guard” units were formed quite openly. Of course, it was done not just with the German gold. Although the “poor” political emigrant Trotsky had 10 thousand dollars confiscated by Canadian customs in Halifax in 1917, whilst being on his way from America to Russia, it is absolutely clear that he still managed to smuggle huge sums from the banker Schiff to his supporters.
 
Yet even greater funds were raised in the course of “the expropriation of the expropriators” (in more common terms, the robbing of wealthy individuals and organizations), initiated in the spring of 1917. Has it ever occurred to anyone to question the Bolsheviks occupation of the palace of the ballerina Kshesinskaya and the Smolny Institute?

Generally speaking, the Russian democratic revolution broke out in the early spring of the 1917 quite unexpectedly for all its political subjects both inside the empire and outside its boundaries. It was a spontaneous, truly grass-roots movement both in Petrograd and on the outskirts of the empire. Suffice it to say that a month before the start of the revolution Lenin, who then was in emigration in Switzerland, publicly voiced his doubts about the chances for the politicians of his generation (i.e., 40 and 50-year-olds) to live to see a revolution in Russia. However, it was the radical Russian politicians who were the fastest to change their ways and ready to ride the revolution (as we have already said, with the use of the German assistance).

All in all, the Russian revolution was not accidental. It is even strange that it should not have broken out, say, one year earlier: all the social, political, and national problems in the Romanov empire had reached their limits, while from the formal, economic perspective, the industry was developing dynamically, and the stock of weapons and ammunition had considerably increased. Yet the utter inefficiency of the central power and the corruption of the elite, unavoidable under any autocracy, took their toll. Following that, the deliberate corruption of the army, the undermining of the rear, the sabotage of any attempts at constructive solutions of the urgent problems, together with the incurable chauvinistic centralism typical of virtually all Great Russian political forces, aggravated the crisis. During the campaign of 1917, the Entente troops were supposed to start a simultaneous general offensive on all European fronts, but the Russian army proved to be unprepared. Consequently, in April the attacks of the Anglo-French forces at Rheims failed, the casualties exceeding 100,000 in dead and wounded. In July, the Russian troops attempted an offensive in the direction of Lviv, but eventually had to retreat from Galicia and Bukovyna, and yield Riga in the north, almost without resistance. Finally, the battle at Caporetto in October resulted in a disastrous defeat of the Italian army. 130,000 Italian men were dead, another 300,000 were taken captive. Only the English and French divisions, urgently shipped from France, were able to stabilize the front and prevent Italy from withdrawing from the war. And finally, after the November uprising in Petrograd, when the Bolsheviks and left social revolutionaries came to power, an armistice was declared on the East front – first de facto and then de jure, and not only with Russia and Ukraine, but Romania as well.

Such changes on the Eastern front were to a large degree possible due to the funds which were allotted by Germany for the demoralization of the Russian army from the rear. The military operations on the Eastern front, prepared on a large scale and executed with great success, were considerably facilitated by the undermining activities from within Russia, conducted by the Ministry of foreign affairs. “Our chief goal in this activity was to further strengthen the nationalist and separatist sentiments, and support the revolutionary elements. We are continuing this activity even at present, and completing an agreement with the political division of the General Staff in Berlin” (Captain von Huelsen).

Our joint efforts have yielded considerable results. Without our constant support, the Bolshevist movement could have never reached the scale and influence it now has. Everything testifies to the further growth of this movement.” These were the words of German secretary of state, Richard von Kuehlmann, written on Sept. 29, 1917. It was a month and a half before the Bolshevik revolt in Petrograd. Von Kuehlmann knew what he was writing about. He was an active participant in all those events; a little later he was to conduct peace negotiations with Bolshevik Russia and the Ukrainian People’s Republic in Brest in the early 1918. He controlled the huge financial current, going into the tens of thousands of German marks, and also had contacts with a number of key characters in this historic drama. “I have the honor of asking Your Excellence to allot a sum of 15 million marks at the disposal of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for political propaganda in Russia, referring this sum to paragraph 6, section II of the extraordinary budget. Depending on the development of events, I would like to stipulate in advance a possibility of addressing Your Excellence again in the nearest future with the view to allotting additional monies,” wrote von Kuehlmann on Nov. 9, 1917.

As we can see, no sooner had news of the Petrograd revolt (to be labeled the Great October Revolution) arrived than Kaiser Germany allotted new funds for propaganda in Russia. This money went first and foremost to support the Bolsheviks, who first demoralized the army, and then withdrew the Russian Republic from the war, thus freeing millions of German soldiers for operations in the West.

Yet managed to preserve the image of unselfish revolutionaries, romantic Marxists, until this very day. Even now, not only “official” adepts of the Marxist-Leninist creeds, but also a certain proportion of the non-party left intellectuals, are convinced that Lenin and his adherents were sincere internationalists and noble champions of the popular cause.

On the whole, we can observe a curious situation. In 1958, Oxford University published the secret documents of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Kaiser Germany (this is where von Kuehlmann’s telegrams come from, and where one can find scores of no less significant texts dating back to the First World War), which proved the massive financial and organizational assistance rendered by the German authorities to the Bolsheviks.

Germany’s goals were obvious. The radical revolutionaries were to undermine the military potential of one of the principal rivals of the central powers, to which Germany also belonged, i.e., the Russian empire. Thousands of books on the subject have been published, providing other convincing evidence. Yet even today not only communist historians, but also a great number of liberally-minded researchers, will deny self-evident historical facts. Here is some more evidence provided by the German secretary of state von Kuehlmann: “Only when the Bolsheviks began to receive constant investments from us via various channels and under various labels, were they able to firmly establish their major printed organ, Pravda, to develop active propaganda, and to considerably enlarge their party base, which was rather narrow at the beginning” (Berlin, Dec. 3, 1917). Indeed, party membership grew 100 times only within a year after overthrowing Tsarism! As far as Lenin’s personal stand goes, this is how Colonel Walter Nicolai, head of German military intelligence service in the times of the First World war, described him in his memoirs: “Like anyone else, at that time I knew nothing about Bolshevism; as for Lenin, I only knew that he was living in Switzerland as a political emigrant, under the cryptonym ‘Ulianov’ he provided my service with valuable information on the situation in Tsarist Russia against which he was fighting.

In other words, without constant assistance from the Germans, the Bolsheviks would hardly have become one of the leading Russian parties in 1917. This would mean a completely different development of events, probably much more anarchical, which would have hardly resulted in the establishment of a dictatorship, let alone a totalitarian regime. The most likely scenario is a different version of the disintegration of the Russian empire, as WWI was primarily about the ruin of empires. Thus, the independence of Finland and Poland was de facto a fait accompli some time around 1916.

The Russian empire, or even the Russian republic, would hardly have become an exception from this process of collapse triggered by the First World War. Suffice it to remember that Britain was forced to grant independence to Ireland, India rushed for its independence just after WWI, and so on, and so forth. And this revolution itself was to a point marked by the national-liberation struggle, as it was the Life Guards Volhynia Regiment that was the first to rebel against autocracy in the early 1917. As to the Bolsheviks, at that time they were a minute party, hardly known to anyone else (four thousand members, mostly in exile and emigration). They had no say in overthrowing Tsarism.

Assistance did not stop after Lenin’s government came to power. “You are free to operate large sums, as we are extremely interested in the stability of the Bolsheviks. You have Riesler’s funds at your disposal. If necessary, wire us how much more you need.” (Berlin, May 18, 1918). As usual, von Kuehlmann calls a spade a spade as he addressed the German embassy in Moscow. The Bolsheviks stood fast, and in the fall of 1918 they threw huge sums from the Russian imperial treasury, which they had seized, into revolutionary propaganda in Germany, with the hope to inciting the world revolution.

The situation in Germany was a mirror image of the one in Russia. In early November, 1918, the revolution did break out there. Money, weapons, and qualified professional revolutionaries shipped in from Moscow and played their role. Yet the local communists failed to lead this revolution. Subjective and (more importantly) objective factors worked against them. A totalitarian regime was established in Germany only 15 years later, but this is a different topic. Meanwhile, in 1921, in the democratic Weimar Republic the renowned social democrat Eduard Bernstein published in his party’s central organ Vorwaerts an article headed “A Shady Story.” In it, he related that as far back as December 1917, he received an affirmative answer from "a certain comp
etent person” to the question of whether Germany had given money to Lenin. According to his data, the Bolsheviks alone were paid more than 50 million German marks in gold. Later, this sum was officially mentioned during the session of the Reichstags committee on foreign policy. Responding to the accusations of libel from the communist press, Bernstein suggested that they sue him, after which the campaign instantly stopped. As Germany was in a bad need of friendly relations with Soviet Russia, the discussion of this topic in the press ended abruptly.

Aleksander Kerensky, one of the Bolshevik’s chief political opponents, deduced from his own investigation of the case, that the sums received by the Bolsheviks before and after coming to power totaled 80 million German marks in gold. As a matter of fact, Ulianov-Lenin never even tried to conceal this from his party colleagues. Thus, in November, 1918, at the meeting of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (a Bolshevist quasi-parliament), the Bolshevik leader said: “I am often accused of having carried out our revolution with German money; I do not deny it, but instead, with the Russian money, I’m going to carry out the same revolution in Germany.” And he tried to do so, throwing away tens of millions of roubles. However, he failed: the German social democrats, unlike their Russian counterparts, saw which way the wind was blowing and managed to arrange for a timely assassination of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. This was followed by the disarmament of the “red guards” and physical extermination of their leaders.

They had no other way out of the situation. Maybe, if Kerensky had mustered his courage and ordered to shoot Smolny together with all of its “red” inhabitants, even the Kaiser’s millions wouldn’t have helped them. We might as well round off here, should it be not for a piece of information in The New York Times of April, 1921, stating that in 1920 alone, 75 million Swiss franks were sent to Lenin’s account in one of the Swiss banks. According to the newspaper, Trotsky had 11 million dollars and 90 million franks on his accounts, Zinoviev – 80 million franks; the “knight of the revolution,” Dzerzhynsky, had 80 million, while Ganetsky-Fuerstenberg had 60 million franks and 10 million dollars. Lenin, in his secret note to the Cheka leaders Unschlicht and Bokiy of April 24, 1921, demanded that they find the source of the information leak. However, it was never established.

Was this money also meant for the world revolution? Or is it a kind of kickback from the politicians and financiers of those countries where Lenin and Trotsky’s “red horses” were not ordered to go? One can only hypothesize. Even now a considerable proportion of Lenin’s papers is kept top secret [...].

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