The Real American Right: Part I
The Betrayal of the American Right, by Murray N. Rothbard
Edited and with an introduction by Thomas E. Woods, Ludwig von Mises Institute, 231 pages, $20
Reviewed by Justin Raimondo
Part I— Who We Were
Sometime in the late 1970s, I came into possession of an unpublished manuscript by Murray N. Rothbard, the late great libertarian theorist and economist: by the time I was done reading The Betrayal of the American Right, I had already determined to popularize and elaborate on Rothbard’s theme with a book of my own: Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement was published by the Center for Libertarian Studies in 1993. Fourteen years later, the original inspiration for my efforts is seeing print for the first time – and I have to say it is being brought into a world far more hospitable to its message than existed in 1971, the year it was written.
This book really opened my eyes, and gave me a sense – for the first time – of where I was, politically, and, more important, where I was going. I had grown up a conservative, weaned on National Review, the “fusionism” of Frank Meyer, and the bedrock constitutionalism of Barry Goldwater, and then the dogmatic certainty of Ayn Rand’s “Objectivism,” which provided entrée into the wider libertarian movement. At that point, however, I had no idea of the history of the movement I was joining, no sense that the legacy I was upholding extended farther back then, say, the founding of National Review in the mid-fifties. Oh sure, I knew about Albert Jay Nock, and had some idea that there was a proto-libertarian tendency beginning to raise its head in the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) and similar groups in the dim dark days of the New Deal era, but I had no clue that I was part of a movement that pre-existed the National Review crowd and Buckley’s circle: as far as I was concerned, the libertarian movement was founded at the 1969 convention of Young Americans for Freedom ,where a libertarian burned his draft card and a fistfight with the “trads” led to the founding of a separate libertarian youth group, and then the creation of the Libertarian Party itself in 1971.
Murray gave me a copy of the manuscript around 1990 or thereabouts. I couldn’t put it down. From the very first chapter – which starts out by asking how the conservative movement became apologists for the Establishment in a very Seventies scene with the “hardhats” (remember them?) – to the final section, which segues into an autobiographical account of life in the Old Right, the narrative had me utterly transfixed. So, this is what it’s all about! – I thought to myself. And so it was …
“How many Americans realize that, not so long ago, the American right wing was almost the exact opposite of what we know today?” Murray made this trenchant inquiry some forty years ago, and yet his question is more relevant today than it ever was, what with the American right being identified with perpetual war, drunken-sailor-spending, and the all-powerful central state – “principles” that, if you had identified them to National Review’s readership in, say, 1960, would have thought you were talking about some other movement entirely.
How did this incredible reversal take place? The Betrayal of the American Right was written to answer this question, and it does so by revealing the hidden history of American conservatism – the story of the Old Right that flourished in the United States long before the New Buckleyite Dispensation.
The essence of the so-called “New Right” was revealed by the Sage of Sharon in an early piece (1952) for Commonweal, wherein he praised Nock as his ideological lodestar, and yet sadly concluded that, because the "thus far invincible aggressiveness of the Soviet Union imminently threatens U.S. security,” the libertarian dream of returning to a system of constitutionally limited government had to be indefinitely delayed in favor of "the extensive and productive tax laws that are needed to support a vigorous anti-Communist foreign policy.” This meant that conservatives must support, for the duration, "large armies and air forces, atomic energy, central intelligence, war production boards and the attendant centralization of power in Washington–even with Truman at the reins of it all." And not only that, but “We have got to accept Big Government for the duration–for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged...except through the instrumentality of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores."
Nothing ever changes, does it?
Rothbard takes us on a historical journey, through the early individualism of the Jeffersonians, the Jacksonian [.pdf file] movement, and all the way back to Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, who fought for religious and individual liberty among the American colonists. He debunks the academic leftist prejudice that radical movements in America were co-opted by the Socialists and the left-Populists, pointing to the New England Brahmins such as Edward Atkinson and William Graham Sumner as the founders of the Anti-Imperialist League – laissez-faire proto-libertarians who mounted the main opposition to America’s first venture into the business of empire-building, opposing the war in the Philippines.
This is really the essential message of Betrayal, and that is that the Old Right movement was inextricably bound up with the history of the anti-imperialist impulse. In the late 1800s and early 20th century, the Anti-Imperialist League argued that the acquisition of colonies meant the beginning of an internal corruption that would end in the fate that awaits all empires, i.e. decline and fall. By 1940, the America First Committee was essentially making the same argument: that in taking sides in the European war, we would risk contamination by the same totalitarian-collectivist virus that had infected the Old World and would surely prove fatal to our republican institutions. In the winter of 2007, Ron Paul and his supporters are making a modern variant of the same point: that, in choosing between republic and empire we are really faced with a choice between renewal and decline.
In all these movements, the question of war and peace, and of America’s role in the world, has always been the core principle, the catalytic factor that set them in motion. War, the great radicalizer, is ever the mortal enemy of liberty, and property, not to mention morality: which is why, at least until recently, staunch opposition to it has, historically, been at the heart of the movement to conserve American institutions and the traditional folkways of the nation, including its libertarian, anti-imperialist tradition.
We are, after all, a republic born in a war against a colonizing power, Great Britain, whom some would model us after. The desire to preserve the Constitution against all attempts to revise or ignore it, the impulse to get back to the nation’s roots as a truly revolutionary exemplar of an anti-imperialist power, is the quintessence of American conservatism. That’s why you see so many people at these Ron Paul rallies wearing tricornered hats, and carrying “Don’t Tread on Me” Revolutionary War flags. It’s truly a crusade to restore our Old Republic, and that’s why the neocons hate it with such intensity – because it represents a challenge to their hegemony on the Right. From the size of Paul’s rallies, it looks like they have reason to be worried.
In any case, Betrayal is really essential reading for those tens of thousands of Ron Paul fans who probably don’t know they stand at the end of a long and proud tradition, starting with the “Tory anarchism,” as Rothbard calls it, of H. L. Mencken and Albert Jay Nock. What Rothbard trenchantly notes is that both these literary giants were considered radical liberals and even extreme “leftists” during the 1920s, when Mencken’s American Mercury and Nock’s The Freeman, were bastions of World War I revisionism and opposition to the militarism and internal repression brought about by the Great War. By the time the New Deal and the looming threat of another world war rolled around, both Mencken and Nock were considered extreme “right”-wingers, “reactionaries” who stood in the path of Progress and yet another “progressive” crusade to make the world safe for capital-‘D’ Democracy. And all without changing their views!
The New Deal saw this alliance of libertarian and liberal tendencies begin to diverge, with the latter taking up with Franklin Roosevelt’s Popular Front with Big Labor, Big Business, and Big Government and embracing the president’s war agenda. After the Hitler-Stalin Pact gave way, they were joined by the Communist Party in the drive to war, and conservatives mobilized a counter-movement in the America First Committee.
Rothbard’s account of the struggle between the two camps is wide-ranging, detailing how the individualist liberals of the 1920s became the anti-New Deal conservatives of the 1930s and 40s, including Mencken, Nock, John T. Flynn [.pdf file], and Garet Garrett, a prolific and talented author and an editorial writer for the staunchly anti-interventionist, anti-New Deal Saturday Evening Post, under editor-in-chief Wesley Stout. The very aspects of the Hoover regime the liberals of the 1920s had hated – subsidies to business, regulations favoring cartels, government crusades to coerce people “for their own good” (i.e. Prohibition) – they came to embrace during the New Deal era.
On the key question of war and peace, too, the liberal inversion was complete, and even more radical. The interventionists went after the antiwar opposition, and shut them completely out of the media. Mencken was forced out, as was Nock: John T. Flynn was kicked out of The New Republic, with editor Bruce Bliven publicly denouncing him for not going along with the program. Particularly fascinating is Rothbard’s account of how, when “Dr. New Deal” turned into “Dr. Win-the-War,” as the President put it, the Anglophiles of Wall Street and the East Coast Ivy Leaguers flocked to the cause, so that the mighty pro-war pro-New Deal Popular Front extended all the way from Communist Party headquarters in New York City’s Union Square to the Wall Street digs of the big investment bankers and corporate lawyers
Rothbard points out that the advent of the war reshuffled the left-right spectrum once again, and turned former liberals into conservatives, and vice-versa. Old style liberals such as John Flynn, Senator Burton K. Wheeler, and the writer John Dos Passos, under the pressure of the pro-war pro-Big Government New Deal, became trenchant critics of collectivism, and were considered thereafter to be on the “right” side of the ideological aisle. Forged in the heat of war and economic Depression, the Old Right was engaged in a battle for the heart and soul of the nation – and it was a fight with no holds barred. Rothbard gives us a blow by blow account of the smear campaign directed at the so-called “isolationists,” and the rise of the professional “isolationist”-baiters, such as the “Friends of Democracy,” led by the Reverend Leon M. Birkhead, and John Roy Carlson, the professional sneak and liar, who sought to depict the America First Committee – of which John Flynn was the New York City chairman – as the “Nazi transmission belt.” Much as the neocons, today, are eager to brand anyone who opposes the Iraq war, or their proposal to launch “World War III,” as a collaborator with “terrorism.”
The terrific smear campaign, and the militarized conformism that ushered in the war era, drove the Old Right underground: with the America First Committee dissolved, and opponents of the New Deal beleaguered on all sides, the libertarian-conservative “Remnant” survived, albeit barely. Rothbard treats us to illuminating portraits of John Flynn, the redoubtable Frank Chodorov, Garet Garrett, Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, and others, such as the founders of Human Events, including Felix Morley, the President of Haverford College, Henry Regnery, the conservative publisher, and the writer Frank Hanighen, painting a very different picture of the conservative movement from the one we know today. I would note that Hanighen was the author of a widely-read muckraking book, The Merchants of Death, published in the 1920s, which famously exposed the armaments industry as one of the chief agitators for war – hardly the sort of literary credentials one would expect, these days, from a man of the Right, and yet not at all out of the ordinary for the Old Right of the 1940s (Human Events was founded in 1944). Merchants of Death was an important impetus for the hearings of the Nye Committee, in 1924, which exposed the inner workings of what was later to become known as the “military-industrial complex.” Hanighen joined the right-wing interventionist stampede, however, and was instrumental in driving the conservative movement into the War Party’s back pocket.
Also waiting in the wings was the small but high-powered contingent of libertarian-conservative economists, whose critique of socialism and interventionist economics was virtually unknown, such as Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek. The latter, however, did not remain obscure: his The Road to Serfdom attracted much attention, both pro and con, and became a bestseller. The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand’s best-selling novel about an individualist architect who wouldn’t compromises his standards, also hit the bestseller list. The impact of these works was meteoric: they flared, for a moment, and then flickered out. As Rothbard put it: “But this impact, and indeed the quieter ripples made by the other libertarian works during the war, was visible only as a success of the day. There did no seem to be any lasting result, any sort of movement to emerge out of the black days on which the libertarian movement had fallen.”
Ah, but the postwar renaissance of the Old Right was boiling just beneath the surface, as Rothbard relates in Chapter 7, when the narrative takes a new and surprising turn as the author switches to the first person, and the story really begins to get interesting …..
Comments
Wonderful as always Justin, but especially many thanks for the link to Henry Regnery’s memoirs, priceless!!!
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Looks like an awfully selective history of the American Right. I wonder, were there ever any conservatives in the South? If so, did they ever say anything a teensy bit critical about capitalism and bourgeois Yankee commercialism and industrialism? I also wonder, did any antebellum conservatives ever defend slavery in *principle* against the “free-labor system”, a.k.a. capitalism?
If so, then why no mention of an anti-capitalist Old Right here? Maybe Rothbard was trying to grab legitimacy for his *own* tradition--what’s called here “the” Old Right—by erasing rival Old Right or conservative traditions from American history. It’s an old story.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
The greatest accomplishment of the Old Right was the Immigration Act of 1924.
We need another such bill today as we watch the Third World hordes invade and pillage the West.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Thanks—wonderful article.
I’d also suggest <i>It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand<> by Jerome Tuccille, a brief and very funny survey of the lib-trad split.
As an aside, my understanding of the “old right” meant the line that began with Lysander Spooner and ended with Nock.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Rothbard’s history is a fascinating narrative. I doubt, however, that paleo libs do themselves any favors by refighting the war between the Jeffersonians and the Hamiltonians, especially when the latter are portrayed (falsely) as the ancestors of FDR and GWB. It is also dubious whether the US would have survived the hegemony of the British Empire had the Jeffersonian vision of laissez-faire won out over the Hamiltonian vision of mercantilism. In short, libertarians are not the only conservatives in America.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
The “REAL” American Right?
I didn’t know there was one…
Anything “American”, by definition, is not “right”, that is, “conservative”. Although the USofA has been influenced by some Old-World types and philosophy, it is thoroughly an invention of Revolution AGAINST what can be called “conservative tradition”.
Not that only the USofA has this problem. It is EVERYWHERE! Even super-conservative Bavaria’s bedrock of tradition is being subsided and undermined by Revolution. Only in the most rural,isolated parts of this world, America and Bavaria included, do we find true “conservatism”, and by that I do not mean the so-called “true conservatism” of Sid Cundiff’s Tories. What I mean is clan/family/tribe based culture, society, and religion, which, wherever it has encountered it, is the Catholic Faith. Where a society has rejected the Faith, it has also rejected tradition, embraced Revolution, and can not be considered “conservative”.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
From the Greater Washington D.C. Board of Realtors to the Arms Manufacturers and Merchants to that last bastion of Soviet Socialism known as the American Agricultural industry to Detroit to all the G.O.’s and NGO’s of K Street along with the vaunted Corporate Media and their mommy and daddy in government in Washington......there has been a huge emotional-psychological and intellectual investment in the Federal Government within the lapsed Republic to the extent that any hint of doubt about the defacto criminal syndicate that it has become is viewed with alarm....and painted as either charmingly anachronistic, downright crazy or ‘radical”. There are no ‘gatekeepers” of traditional reason regarding government just as there is no separation of powers or two-party system. The so-called fourth estate of the media is simply part and parcel of the State, little better than Pravda if Pravda were wed to People Magazine and owned Playboy.
The great irony of this bit of widespread social mania is best demonstrated by all the triumphalist democratic rhetoric and paeans to liberty that emanate from institutions and Corporations that become more Crypto-Marxist with every year. Someone should perform a kind of comparative analysis (informed by what we know of the Stockholm Syndrome) between the Soviets and post 1860’s America.
George W. Bush is not the cause of the current trainwreck, he’s the crowning achievement of it......what Mencken said we should “get good and hard”.
So, thanks to Raimondo and this summary with its links. Some widespread if limited memory of the old liberally minded, discerned laissez faire “conservative” ethos will be needed when the maniacs and aparatchiks driving this misnomer of a bus called the “Free Market Express” crash it into an arroyo called “best laid plans”. Creative Destruction....Compassionate Conservative....Mission Accomplished.......Thousand Points of Light....Axis of Evil.....Evildoers......Bring it on....Homeland Security....Parsed Definitions of torture......Lantos condemning Google China for what our government does daily now.....Read My Lips....Freedom and Democracy in the Middle East......what a hoot. And to think a lot of these people received the “benefit of a private education” in a “prestigious institution”.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
My book “Beating the Powers that Be - Independent Political Parties of the Upper Midwest and their Relevance to Third Parties of Today” came about because Justin’s writings and lectures about former U.S. Senator Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota, Sen. Burton K. Wheeler of Montana and Congressman Charles Lindbergh Sr. of Minnesota and all the other statesmen of the Upper Midwest and northern Plains and Rocklies who were opposed to World War I. In this case, you see how ideas and knowledge travels and trickles down to different people and in turn leads to more discovery and transmission of such ideas and a re-discovery of history so to speak. That’s is the essence of what Ron Paul is doing. Bringing that history back to a wider audience and making it relevant again.
Thanks Justin!
Click to flag this comment as abusive
The America First Committee was not created by conservatives only but was a coaltion of anti-interventionists of all stripes.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
I read this a book a few months ago. A very good read. Being a huge H.L. Mencken fan, I particularly enjoyed the chapter on him and Nock.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
This is an excellent primer on the history (the past century, at least) of “genuine” conservativism. Now, quickly, where do we go from here?
A year ago, The American Conservative took up that very subject and ran, among several articles, a piece co-authored by Paul Weyrich that advocated a “retro” approach to reassembling the conservative model – “a conscious, deliberate recovery of the past.” How dispiriting. Like it or not, we live in a world of TiVo and (thankfully) the Internet. We can’t sit around a Norman Rockwell cracker barrel altercatin’ how that foundling ended up on Skeezix’ doorstep. The only way to pull this country out of its despotic decline is to engage the experience of age AND the energy of youth. These days, the kids have little enthusiasm for a back-to-sticks movement.
I intend to vote for Ron Paul – even if I must write-in his name on the ballot. In my heart, I know I probably will have to. But whether or not he becomes president, he has begun a debate in this country that is as refreshing a gust of breeze to come along in decades. This is the perfect time to coalesce all this… vitality… into an active movement. Something that will remain when the spontaneity and spirit have subsided. (Something with a better name than “paleo-conservative” – please!) And something that will finally put the stake in the rancid neoconservatives.
We’re are at a point in human history when faith in pseudo-religious, utopian political pipe dreams is at an all-time low. Traditional American conservativism is nothing if not realistic. Yes: People want change. Now is the time.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
I looked for this book on Barnes & Noble’s website and according to them it does not exist. Is it going through normal trade distribution channels?
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Step back a moment and understand that the “anti-interventionist” right is a tiny droplet in a huge ocean. Even today, when the libertarians are standing tall with their anti-war position, they are in fact unable (as the left wing is) to positively influence foreign affairs.
When you ‘capture’ the flag, and take power in America, you support empire or you get kicked out, like Jimmy Carter. In other words, a state of permanent opposition is the only course left to you if you want to remain anywheres close to your ideals. Or, join the parade.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
As George Nash will attest,1969 was a vintage year even in Cambridge. It saw the instauration of an undergraduate seminar on the Coevolution of British and American Conservatism at Harvard’s Institute Of Politics, addressed in the 1970-71 academic year by Kirk , Buckley, Evans, and other NR worthies.
It was ignored by those who went on to become Big Neocons On Campus, as were then too busy being Young Democrats and/or attempting to tar and feather the Secretary Of Defense.
Although Daniel Moynahan, always a great fan of Burke, served as the seminar’s Faculty Adviser, an actual Republican being unobtainable , and the organizers got to commune with Oakeshot, Braine, Amis, and Le Jeune, in London, the event somehow failed to draw in from Wellesley a formerly ardent Goldwaterite name of Hillary Rodham.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Libertarianism was very important to me during my high school and college days… thought and still think Karl Hess was a cool guy. As I grew older I began to see that the real world was a lot more complex and nuanced than what many of its authors were telling me. I read and still read voraciously across the political spectrum. Eventually my worldview evolved into one that abhors laissez faire as much as knee jerk socialism. I’m anti-war, anti-globalist, and trying to balance my personal life with the best of the traditional and modern. I learned a lot from my libertarian sojourn but would never think of going back.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
One thing I’m most proud of is that I figured what that bitch Ayn Rand was all about at a very early age…
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Justin is so brilliant in some ways and so naive in others.
Rothbard was attempting to invent a libertarian “tradition out of a hodge podge of widely divergent political ideologies that as little in common as Pat Buchanan and Noam Chompsky.
To claim there was an “anti-imperialist” tradition in American politics is true, but the fantasy part is that it was a “Libertarian” tradition. Anti-Imperialism had just as much a legacy of the POPULISM of Senator La Follett, and the People’s Party as it did among the advocates of “Laissez Faire Capitalism.}
The root of what’s wrong here is the idea that Capitalism and Imperialism are not inter-related. They are. You might recall that the Iraq War is ostensibly a war for “Democracy”…ie, Wall Street Finance Capitalism.
Those who argue that the American dollar is not based on something of “real value” are just being silly…the American Dollar is based on Mideast Oil. Thus, the war to save this system. Nobody in the mainstream of the “libertarian” movement believes in the Gold Standard, ever since Milton Friedman won the Noble Prize for allegedly “proving” that you can end the business cycle by manipulating the money supply.
Modern “free market” capitalist economics is BASED on the idea of an “activist” government monetary policy…dragging up the “Gold Standard” is as much a effort in fantasy as Justin Raimondo’s vain attempt to resurrect the old nonsense of Murray Rothbard about at “libertarian” anti-imperialist, anti-interventionist, anti-internationalist “tradition”.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Long Walks in Paris sed:
“As I grew older I began to see that the real world was a lot more complex and nuanced than what many of its authors were telling me. I read and still read voraciously across the political spectrum. Eventually my worldview evolved into one that abhors laissez faire as much as knee jerk socialism.”
I agree. Libertarianism is the ideology of the adolescent male. I traveled this path myself…”libertarianism” is the mirror image of communism, which is why I oppose it.
Both are dangerous because they are naïve, are utopian in conception, and advocate absolute economic “solutions’ that would create economic disaster for a majority of Americans.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
1. Fine article with a flaw, one that I’ve mentioned before: The same old metaphor that endarkens: that political ideology can be grafted on a straight line running from left to right or right to left. There’s nothing “Right” or “Left” about the “Old Right”: they were, from the 20s to the 50s a cross between libertarians and Jeffersonians who lived on Main Street, shined their shoes, wore blue (or black) suits, were married only once, went to churches where snakes weren’t handled and Marxist weren’t pastors, and for whom the strongest drink they ever drank was Dr. Pepper.
Nor is there anything “Left” or “Right” about Jeffersonianism, Libertarianism, Hamiltonianism, and the enviromentalists. The Evangelicals are proving that they’re not really “Right” or “Left” either. Nor are any of the above in the “middle”. Each of these positions, along with Social Democrats, Classic Socialists, Cultural Marxists, Fascists, Racialists, Nationalists, etc. have their own unique “deep structure”. So do we Tory Conservatives, and so do Christian Democrats—both rare birds in the USA.
2. We had a Jeffersonian party in the USA until Wilson turned it into a Socialist party. The Jeffersonians have been looking for a party ever sense. There was a time when Gringos knew how to form political parties. Now they’ve forgotten.
3. As I commented the other day: If Tory Conservatives wish to build a bridge to Libertarians, it’s at least an improvement to trying to team up with the Stormfronters.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
I also wonder, did any antebellum conservatives ever defend slavery in *principle* against the “free-labor system”, a.k.a. capitalism? —Ploni Almoni
Slavery really wasn’t defended by anyone with much argument at all. No one in the USA argued, as Aristotle argued, that certain human beings, by nature merited being slaves. Instead, slavery then, as killing children now (aka “abortion"), was defended on the grounds of naked self-interest: “it’s mine, it belongs to me, and I can do with it as I wish!”
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Adding this book to my must-get list. WAY behind in my reading now.
Reading through the comments here, it’s no wonder the “right” is a fractured as it is. Although I think I’m starting to get what Taki is after with this website (and I hope it works!).
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Knowing what happened is useful but until you know why something happened you are powerless to resist it. Libertarians will endlessly discuss ‘what’ but are clueless about ‘why’.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Sid Cundiff: Slavery really wasn’t defended by anyone with much argument at all.
See The Southern Tradition: The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism by Eugene Genovese for a discussion of Southern conservatives’ principled arguments defending slavery as a system that’s superior to capitalism (the “free-labor system"). Or just see the Wikipedia entry on John C. Calhoun. Antebellum conservatives were certainly not appealing to naked self-interest.
Of course the Southern Agrarians continued this conservative critique of capitalism. Raimondo, following Rothbard, is just trying to erase those conservative traditions he doesn’t like from history. Conservatives shouldn’t let him get away with it.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
itis thew british orchestrated chos on world stage stupid! nothing to do with americans in isolation..
read this please
http://www.larouchepac.com/news/2008/01/08/british-trigger-global-mayhem-financial-crash-accelerates.html
http://www.larouchepac.com/news/2008/01/08/british-trigger-global-mayhem-financial-crash-accelerates.html
quote--"British Trigger Global Mayhem As Financial Crash Accelerates
Increase Decrease
January 8, 2008 (LPAC)--This article is reprinted from EIR’s January 11, 2008 issue.
British Trigger Global Mayhem As Financial Crash Accelerates
by Jeffrey Steinberg
Sir Alan Greenspan, the octogenarian one-time paramour of hedonist philosopher-author Ayn Rand, and the former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank, delivered a frantic confession on Dec. 27, 2007, in an interview with National Public Radio. Sir Alan candidly admitted that the world financial and monetary system, which he helped to shape during his 20-year tenure at the Fed, is finished. “What I have to forecast,” he told NPR, “is that something will happen which is unexpected, which will knock us down.... The odds of that happening, I think, are rising, because we are getting into vulnerable areas.” Elsewhere in the brief interview, Greenspan reiterated, “We’re in a turning phase, and the extraordinary improvements that have occurred in the world economy in the last 15 years are transitory, and they’re about to change.... So, I think this whole process will begin to reverse.”
Greenspan’s words hardly capture the magnitude of the financial crash that has been onrushing for the past six months, and that has now entered a new, even more volatile phase, as of Jan. 1, 2008. As Lyndon LaRouche announced in a July 25, 2007 international webcast from Washington, the system is doomed, there are no “monetary” solutions to the crisis; and higher-ups in the City of London financial oligarchy are fully aware of the accelerating, irreversible crash of the whole global financial system.
Greenspan is but one among a number of City of London parrots who have been squawking doom and gloom in recent weeks and months. The London Daily Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, a British intelligence asset, who led London’s campaign to destroy the Bill Clinton Presidency, and who now resides in Brussels as the “Torygraph’s” financial correspondent, has been pouring out a steady stream of remarkably accurate accounts of the financial crash process for months. The “Torygraph” is leading a campaign to bring down the weak-kneed Fabian Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and replace him with a “tough-guy” Conservative, who can better steer Britain into austerity dictatorship at home, and imperial provocations abroad.
And in his weekly column in the French financial weekly L’Express, on Jan. 3, London Warburg asset Jacques Attali was far more shrill than Sir Alan or Ambrose: “It is the whole world which seems to be going over the precipice,” he wrote, “As if a collision of trains going at full speed was being prepared. As if, in a vortex emptying the bottom of a bathtub.... [T]here is no stability in sight for the global economy.”
Attali also spilled the beans on the vital link between the financial collapse process and the eruption of chaos around the planet, writing, “That the murder of an opposition leader of a country of the South [Pakistan—ed.] would so gravely shake the Asian financial markets, and with them those of the entire world, reveals the extreme fragility of the planet.”
Returning again to the details of the escalating financial disintegration, Attali warned, “Beyond the subprimes, many other debts are circulating and no one knows how the banks will be able to honor them: those of hedge funds, of monoline insurers, of LBO funds, and of holders of credit cards, which form a pyramid amounting to much more than the bank’s own funds, which would have been closed a long time ago, had the central banks not agreed to refinance them all without restraint.” Attali concluded by returning to the situation in Euroland, predicting that the very future of the single European currency is in jeopardy, “with an Italy going financially adrift, to such an extent that the very existence of the euro could be put into question by speculators attacking the Rome Treasury.”
Indeed, in the past months, an estimated $1.5 trillion in bank assets have been wiped off the books, and an equal amount of equity has evaporated on world stock markets. The idea that central banks could “solve” this crisis by a hyperinflationary flow of new money, is clinically insane. Crises set to blow during the first quarter of 2008, including a blowout of the insurance sector and a looming derivatives explosion, make the disasters of 2007, like the wipeout of the U.S. mortgage bubble, seem small in comparison.
What Does It Mean?
It is in this context, and only this context, that the global pattern of assassinations, ethnic, religious and tribal eruptions, and all-around chaos, can be understood. None of these are local or regional events. They are all part of a single British strategy—aimed at one, single global objective: The destruction of nation-states, the launching of worldwide asymmetric warfare—to last for generations, and the consolidation of a vise-grip control over the strategic raw materials wealth of the planet, in Anglo-Dutch private cartel hands.
Students of history will recognize the pattern. It is the model of global oligarchical warfare, devised in modern times by Venice, utilizing private mercenary armies, like the Norman conquerers and crusaders, to eliminate any and all pockets of humanist resistance.
By now, some readers of this report are no doubt squirming over the idea that London is any longer a center of imperial power, capable of unleashing global chaos. Indeed, the British, themselves, have championed the idea that the Sun long ago set on the British Empire, and that the United States, not Great Britain, is now the reigning world imperial power. At best, a new “Anglo-American” consort, led by Washington, with London as its junior partner, is the epicenter of global power. But a more careful look reveals a very different picture. There is no “Anglo-American” consort. There is London, the British System of Empire, and a collection of wanna-be British assets and agents, who reside in Washington, on Wall Street, and around the globe. ======-------”
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Joe Pop.....
Little Milty “proving” that the monetary system can “end the business cycle” that plagues such things as a Gold Standard economy........well, perhaps he’s right because the printing presses are screaming and the current business cycle is fixing to end with all the charms of a gut shot.
What Milty failed to discover is that it is not hard currency that is the problem so much as it is the sordid reputation for gluttony and opportunistic aggrandizement that is Homo Sapiens Sapiens variety Growth Economensis himself. Detach this booster from anything tangible and he goes dizzy with possibility. Put him in charge of setting value and he’ll make damned sure any value is wrung out toot sweet. Man is the cannibalistic ape that has turned from mere territorial gustatory cannibalism to the far more convoluted game of intellectual AND gustatory cannibalism against everything and everyone.
This alone, poking several holes in Libertarian conceits but one must have some kind of romantic dreams and to put this kind of hope in the hands of a government is like turning on the television with expectations of enrichment....or, voting for “change” with the well meaning cranks scurrying about the various primary states of the U.S.
If Mr. Singh’s quotes of Greenspan’s statements are true, I wish to suggest a round of applause for his first baby steps into English as a First Language . His use of the English Language from his term at the Fed being something like a convention of boobobby hoodugger willy willy wingdangers of the chair-dancing tent dwelling set. In obfuscation we trust.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
This board has some of the most well-thought and respectful comments of most forums I’ve visited. It also harbors, unfortunately, a post containing the misguided notion that the US intervention in Iraq was exclusively for oil (see Joe Populist above).
If oil were the only reason for invading a country, then the US should invade both Mexico and Canada. As you can see from the data at the US Department of Energy’s website, the three top importers of oil to the US include our two closest neighbors, and Saudi Arabia (Source: http://www.eia.doe.gov).
We have not invaded any of these countries, near as I can tell, as of 11:35 PST, January 9, 2008. So can we please dispense with the histrionics and keep to the issue of empire building? This is the real reason for our invasion of Iraq.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
If some Southerners defended slavery as superior to captialism, they were pretty dumb to do so. See DiLorenzo on this.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
This is the real reason for our invasion of Iraq. -Swett
Its about controlling the oil.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2003/03/ma_273_01.html
The thirty year itch [seizing ME Oil]
While I find all the forays into conservatism interesting, people should be aware of what the master planners have in store.
The clue to the character of the “End Game” is the Strategic and Prosperity Partnership Agreement signed by Presidents Bush, Fox of Mexico and Martin of Canada in Waco, Texas in March, 2006.
This Agreement was signed without the approval of Congress, or the knowledge of most of the American people.
It is clear from the End Game Plan reflected in this Agreement why the Bush Administration has been so resistant to defending U.S. borders.
It is also clear that a key component of the End Game Plan is the dissolution of the United States Dollar and other currencies into a new currency, the “Amero.” Indeed, two bits of anecdotal evidence that this plan is being taken seriously are:
1) That the “Swiss Portfolio” Investment Advisory Company is already touting the “Amero Alternative” on its website; and
2) The London investment firm Jeffries International Ltd.’s Vice President, Steven Pervis, said that the coming “Amero” will have “a big impact on everybody’s life.”
http://www.financialsense.com/fsu/editorials/deepcaster/2008/0104.html
Click to flag this comment as abusive
<<...the coming “Amero” will have “a big impact on everybody’s life.”>>
In America, that means the “Amero” will somehow cancel next season’s “American Idol”.
I doubt it.
Americans will roll over and accept pretty much anything, as long as it is of The Revolution.
Besides, what difference does it make if the American dollar is pegged to the Mexican peso and Canadian dollar? If anything, the Canadians should be worried; but, then again, Canada is being over-run by Mohammedans, so they’re probably all hoping to get down to Mexico, where it’s warmer and Mohammedans are very rare.
As long as incomes rise, and prices drop, as has been the trend, people will remain happy. The problems will start when the rest of the world rises up in Revolution against their governments for purchasing valueless dollars. As long as the Chinese and Arabs can still buy gold and opium with these new “Ameros”, the American public is set with cheap consumables, and is very happy.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
As usual Joe Populist makes broad generalizations about a libertarian movement he knows nothing about. Libertarianism has a long tradition that dates back to enlightenment-era ideals. Yet somehow this individual continues to equate it wrongly with adolescent populism and/or “the mirror-image of communism”. It is neither. One might get the former impression from the Ron Paul rallies or the latter impression from reading ostensibly “libertarian” articles/texts from the Cato Institute (who, as evidenced by Herr Brink Lindsay, get more neo-con everyday). That libertarianism has a long and distinguished tradition is not the slightest bit in doubt.
It is also funny how you never provide any credible evidence to support your not-so-rational tirades against libertarianism. It is hard to imagine why you are so vehemently cynical about a movement that opposes so many of the evils we see perpetuated today. I have to wonder...what’s your agenda, sir?
Click to flag this comment as abusive
JR says: Particularly fascinating is Rothbard’s account of how, when “Dr. New Deal” turned into “Dr. Win-the-War,” as the President put it, the Anglophiles of Wall Street and the East Coast Ivy Leaguers flocked to the cause, so that the mighty pro-war pro-New Deal Popular Front extended all the way from Communist Party headquarters in New York City’s Union Square to the Wall Street digs of the big investment bankers and corporate lawyers.
Once again, I will recommend Anthony C. Sutton’s books on Wall Street’s financing of its supposed enemies.
Follow the money.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Simply allowing Iraq to enter the open market would have significantly reduced the price of oil.
Invading Iraq had nothing to do with oil. Only liars and idiots make that claim.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Post a Comment
By submitting this form, you give Taki's Magazine permission to publish this comment. Comments will be published at our discretion, and may be edited for clarity and length. Personal attacks, ethnic slurs, the riding of hobby horses and the beating of dead ones will be deleted as soon as they are detected by our small but alert staff. Repeat abusers of this policy will be barred from leaving comments. All comments reflect only the views of those posting them and not necessarily those of this website, its editors, or authors. For best formatting, please limit your response to one paragraph and don't hit "enter" to force line breaks.
Commenting is not available in this section entry.