TWO DISSERTATIONS ON WISDOM
ANCIENT AND MODERN
(i)Wisdom From The Bible
Beware The Number Of The Beast!
“Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.” (1)
The above words are widely quoted, both by Biblical scholars and by our modern mystics. This, and similar passages, have been and continue to be interpreted as revealed truths about the coming of the Anti-Christ and the final conflict between the forces of light and darkness. One such modern mystic is David Icke, the former soccer player and Green Party spokesman whose much publicised conversion to New Age “enlightenment” has made him the but of jokes far and wide and has seen him denounced as a fascist and anti-Semite, the latter for giving spurious credence to the equally spurious Protocols Of Zion. Icke though is no more a fascist or anti-Semite than he is a prophet. His main fault is that he is extremely gullible, taking at face value the most outrageous lies, scandal and gossip peddled about the rich, famous and powerful, figuring incorrectly that there is never any smoke without fire. (2)
Another but of ridicule was a woman with somewhat darker motives than Icke; Mrs Lyrl Clark Van Hyning was a wilful peddlar of anti-Semitic propaganda. When a Jewish doctor invented a polio vaccine she ran a headline in her newspaper proclaiming Jews Mass Poison American Children. (3) According to one fringe watcher, Mrs Van Hyning was also “the principle source of the charge that postal zip codes are part of an international Jewish plot to code the nation for final takeover.” (4)
It has become almost de rigueur to laugh at such people and dismiss them as three sandwiches short of a picnic. Leaving aside the absurd anti-Semitism of Mrs Van Hyning though, the truth is very different; whatever interpretations may be put on it by David Icke and his ilk, the book of Revelation was manifestly not written by cranks.
The men who wrote the Bible and other holy scriptures were not prophets in the religious sense, and they were not predicting the end of the world, rather they were commenting on the social and political problems of the day, and the people who caused them. To do so overtly would have been dangerous, so they used veiled language, parables, and fanciful imagery. It was far safer to talk about a Great Beast who put his mark on all men than to rail against Caesar who sought to do the same thing, if only to collect the taxes all his subjects were duty bound to render unto him.
The parables of Jesus are clearly recognisable not as religious mush but as socio-political commentaries. One of his most famous parables, that of the Good Samaritan, could have come straight out of a latter day diatribe against racism, although thankfully free of the horrendous Marxist dogma that dilutes the essential message, namely that all men are brothers and that the world would be a better place if they acted so.
Times change, technology advances by leaps and bounds, but human nature remains eternal. The men who wrote the Bible and other holy scriptures could not have predicted closed circuit television, telephone tapping, DNA fingerprinting, or any of the other tracking devices of the modern age, but they knew that men, both in and out of government, have sought to control the movements and behaviour of other men and of the population at large since time immemorial. After all, wasn’t Judas recruited as a spy to report on the movements of Jesus, a reactionary who challenged the established order, evicting money-changers from the temple and telling the good people of Palestine that they had no right to stone harlots because deep down they were no better than harlots themselves?
Book of Revelation or no book of Revelation, the Mark of the Beast is now truly upon all of us. Mrs Van Hyning may have shot wide of the mark when she pointed the finger at the all-pervasive international Jewish conspiracy, but postcodes are indeed used to track us in the age of the all-seeing computer eye.
Visit the University of Wolverhampton website for UK Sensitive Maps, key in a postcode, and presto, a map of the area comes up. National Insurance Numbers are hardly a new invention; they have been used to track our movements for decades. Banks and other financial institutions collect data on us constantly; this and other information – which may or may not be accurate – is traded invisibly and instantaneously between corporations, local, national and international government agencies, without our knowledge, much less our consent.
In recent years we have been blessed with itemised phone bills. It is not widely known, but as well as private phones, every telephone call made from every British Telecom public telephone is logged on a computer and archived forever: time, duration and destination of call. In October or November 2000 I bought a new phone card, the first one I’d bought for some time, and was more than a little surprised to find that this card was personalised with its own unique serial number. All this will also be logged on computer and archived forever. The authorities may not know the identity of the buyer, but they know the details of every call made from that card.
CCTV has legitimate uses; it has brought many dangerous criminals to book including the schoolboy killers of two year old James Bulger, serial killer Colin Ireland, and London nail-bomber David Copeland, but the denizens of major cities throughout the world are now recorded on literally hundreds of cameras – public and private – every day, including in telephone boxes and public toilets.
Is David Icke really such a nutter when he rails against the cashless society in the following fashion?
“Today if you go into a shop to buy food and your credit card is refused by the computer, you can pay with cash. What happens when there is no cash? You are at the mercy of the computer. If it refuses your card or microchip, you have no means to purchase anything.” (5)
It is true that there were no microchips in Nazi Germany, but a yellow star was not a bad substitute. In South Africa under Apartheid, internal passports went even further, and even in supposedly free, democratic Britain, ration books and identity cards were the norm throughout the Second World War, so much so that the overwhelming majority of ordinary people favoured retaining them after the War. (6) It is a very small step from written permission to purchase goods (ration books) to a worldwide network of computers that is capable of tracking every single purchase made by every single individual, and isolating anyone of whom the servants of Big Brother disapprove.
There were no microchips in Biblical times anymore than there were in Nazi Germany, but the desire to control and oppress other men certainly was, as it exists in all of us.
Similarly, the men who wrote the Bible could not have predicted AIDS, but they understood enough about human biology to realise that homosexual filth was not gay, and that if men practised such perversions they would eventually pay a terrible price, if not by contracting insidious, incurable diseases then by becoming possessed by demons.
There are many well known fallacies, argumentum ad antiquitum is one, but the notions that all change equates to progress, and that we in the 21st Century are somehow wiser or more intelligent than our “primitive” ancestors are not only more plausible but often far more dangerous. Jesus and his fellow prophets were laughed at in Biblical times; today we laugh at David Icke, but as history clearly demonstrates, we do so at our peril.
(ii) Wisdom From The Boob Tube
How Dirty Money Taints Us All
More years ago than I care to remember, I watched an episode of a British TV police drama, maybe Z Cars. Unlike the typically escapist cops and hookers celluloid trash of American TV, British crime series have always leaned heavily towards realism; the characters are plausible, the scripts realistic, and the scenarios could actually happen in real life. This particular episode was in the early seventies or even the late sixties – which gives away my age! This was long before I had even heard of usury in any meaningful sense, but the punch-line of the story made such a profound impact on me that I have never forgotten it, and it altered forever the way in which I think.
The story line was simple: a con-man, in his fifties if I recall, was making the rounds of old people’s houses emptying their meters under false pretences. This was at a time when many households were fitted with gas and/or electricity meters – the exception rather than the rule these days.
The con-man was caught bang to rights, and all that remained to deprive him of his liberty for a long time was to parade him in front of his elderly victims so that he could be identified as a serial fraudster. The only problem the police had was that none of the victims would identify him. It wasn’t that they were uncertain, or even that they feared retribution, but that they refused point blank to mark his card. A perspicacious police officer soon sussed the reason. When the con-man emptied an old person’s meter, he would say to the victim: “You’ve paid too much”, or words to that effect, and give the householder a small refund.
That way he had, in the victim’s mind, made him (or more often her) an accomplice to his criminal act. If he were brought to trial he would point the finger at the person he had robbed.
This is hardly a new idea, and it is not one which is related simply to money. In the dark, distant past, and even to this day in some cultures, women who have been raped keep silent lest the crime of their assailant somehow taint them. After all, how could any woman submit against her will? Surely she must have desired to have sex with her rapist, albeit subconsciously? Wouldn’t a virtuous woman prefer death to dishonour?
Nowadays we – in the West at least – see through the speciousness of such shallow arguments easily; only a sicko would use such perverted logic. Or a rapist. But the taint of dirty money is in some ways a far greater taboo than the taint of rape.
The money system does work, and in some ways it works well. Some people do profit from it handsomely, and most of us profit, or appear to profit from it, in some small way. But this is an illusion. Does the householder who receives a small refund from a con-man really benefit? It may be that he personally doesn’t have to repay the money that was filched from his meter, but he, and all honest consumers, pay the price in full the same way all honest shoppers pay the price for shoplifting. The gas or electricity company may write off the money purloined from a particular meter or meters, but this price will be recouped from their investment capital, which means lower dividends for shareholders and higher prices for consumers. In the case of a state run corporation the taxpayer rather than the shareholder pays. Even if the meter money is insured, we all pay by virtue of higher insurance premiums.
Then there are all the other, hidden costs. The crime will be investigated by the police, and if the culprit is brought to book, there are the costs of the prosecution. If he is convicted, he will be locked up at the expense of the taxpayer; even if he is acquitted, the lawyers, judge and jury have to be paid. This is all money that could have been spent in more productive ways, and human resources that could have been employed more gainfully.
Nowadays many more people know the facts about usury than in the past. Major Douglas proved mathematically that money is created ex nihilo. (7) Even economics text books and more general works now discuss the truth about money creation in broad general terms. Yet there is still massive resistance to the reform of the financial system; reformers are either derided as cranks or more often ignored. The major reason for this is the unspoken conspiracy of vested interest identified by anthropologist Gerald Mars in his ground-breaking monograph Cheats
At Work. (8)
Making money, and the corollary making work (jobs at all cost), has become an obsession in our society. There are people in the City of London and in financial institutions nationwide and worldwide who literally make money in their daily work. They do this by moving money from A to B, from B to C, and from C back to A again. These people are often referred to as capitalists, but they have little if anything in common with productive capitalists: entrepreneurs, merchants or traders. They do not create machinery, consumer goods or food. They do not provide a service in any meaningful sense like a doctor, a dentist, a librarian or a typist. They simply shift money around and skim off a commission with each move. The jobs these people work at, for want of a better word, have been created by usury, but in a sense these people are more parasitic than usurers, because at least usurers produce new money, money which helps oil the wheels of industry and commerce; the same cannot be said of the majority of stockbrokers and futures traders.
There is of course a role for speculators and money brokers in any economy; more people own shares now than at any time in history, and people will occasionally need or want to sell shares, but not on the scale on which they are currently traded. Quantifying the useless transactions would be difficult if not impossible, but it would be fair to say that the vast majority of shares traded day in and day out are traded to no useful purpose, but simply to make profits at somebody else’s expense. That somebody else is society as a whole.
It is not simply parasitic capitalists who play this game. A vast army of bureaucrats is employed by all manner of statutory bodies, spying on us, regulating any aspect of our behaviour that somebody somewhere considers to be undesirable or offensive. This sort of nonsense goes way beyond mere policing. Most such bureaucrats are interested first and foremost in preserving their own jobs, and secondly in extending their power over our lives. Directly or indirectly they, like the parasitic capitalists, are products of the debt-based money system, and all are equally tainted.
It has often been said, and written, that money, or the love of money, is the root of all evil.
This is far too simplistic an analysis for all the evils of the world, but it is not that great an overstatement. There are very few evils which are not exacerbated in some way by money: either by the desire for it, or the lack of it. We must each and every one of us realise that we manifestly do not have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo of the debt-based money system; if we benefit personally in some small measure, then someone else is paying. And when we profit in any measure at somebody else’s expense, dirty money taints us as much as it taints the most parasitic of capitalists who batten off the misery the usurers have foisted on the vast majority of Mankind.
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