War is the father of all good things

Blazing Saddles, directed by the incomparable Mel Brooks, is a spaghetti western farce of epic proportions. The story is about a black railroad worker who is about to be hanged is made sheriff of a small town in the hope that the locals will be so appalled that they will move out of the town, which is blocking the desired route for the railroad. The irony is that Bart, the guy who becomes sheriff, is jailed for clobbering his racist boss with a shovel in the opening scene. In the movie, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche is quoted as having said 'out of chaos comes order', though as far as I know he never wrote that phrase. One might say this misquotation is a metaphor for the entire movie, in that just as Nietzsche did write things along the same lines as this but not this exactly, the story of the movie is initially one of order coming out of chaos, though it lapses back pretty quickly and ends in the most ludicrous fight sequence you will ever see. The full movie can be downloaded from rapidshare. So what did Nietzsche actually say? In The Gay Science he states that:

"War is the father of all good things." - TGS, passage 92

This is a variation on one of the fragments left of the work of the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who said

"War is father and king of all." - fragment 53

Now, neither philosopher is referring to war in the conventional sense of a geopolitical battle of some kind. What they mean is that strife, flux, change, difference, opposition, conflict and struggle are necessary for historical change and progress to occur. Without the emerging needs of the first industrial revolution, for example, we would never have had the second. This is an idea that also carries great currency in the dialectics of Marx and Hegel, though the three Germans differ quite significantly in how they conceive of the struggle that brings about change. Anthony Sutton identifies the philosophy of The Order (of Skull and Bones) as positively Hegelian, with the aim of generating conflict in order to maintain the power and authority of the state:

"America's Secret Establishment has had little publicity, few reviews ignored by mainline distributors yet, has sold steadily for the past 16 years at a rate of several hundred copies a month.

This activity, in turn, has generated other articles and books by other authors. But my real intent, to generate an exploration of Hegelian influence in modern America, has not been fulfilled. In great part, this can be attributed to an educational system based on a statist-Hegelian philosophy, and which has already achieved the "dumbing down" of America.

This disastrous, destructive philosophy, the source of both Naziism and Marxism, has infected and corrupted our constitutional republic. Much of the blame for this corruption is with an elitist group of Yalie "Bonesmen." Their symbol of Skull and Bones, and their Hegelian philosophy, says it all, although with typical duplicity, they would have you believe otherwise.

Hegelianism glorifies the State, the vehicle for the dissemination of statist and materialist ideas and policies in education, science, politics and economics.
Wonder why we have a "dumbed-down" society? Look no further than the Bonesman troika who imported the Prussian education system into the U.S. in the 19th Century. A political philosophy in direct opposition to the classical liberalism nurtured in 19th Century British and American history. In classical liberalism, the State is always subordinate to the individual. In Hegelian Statism, as we see in Naziism and Marxism, the State is supreme, and the individual exists only to serve the State...

...Not only did Skull and Bones become a major force in drug smuggling (the Bush and Prescott families in the 1860s), but in true Hegelian fashion, generated the antithesis, the so-called "war on drugs." This hypocritical policy maintains the price of drugs, controls supply, and puts millions in jail while the gainers, in great part, are none other than the same "Bonesmen" who pass the laws to prohibit (Bonesman Taft, 1904)." - Sutton, Introduction to The Order

It is this idea that conflict, challenge and struggle is necessary for history to change and progress that particularly interests me. As discussed in my previous post on this blog, Francis Fukuyama's confidence trick failed and the world leaders needed new problems to look like they were solving so they could maintain their authority, so they fell back into old Hegelian habits. It is no coincidence that we lurch from global terrorism to global warming to global economic crisis, with crime, teenage pregnancy and the health service filling in the lead lines and front pages whenever the former aren't in the news.

It the latter of these, the economic recession, that is in the news at the moment, though the story is the same as it's been for well over a year. Going back to July 2007, before the exposure of mainstream banks to massive amounts of poorly secured debt became apparent, the BBC was already talking of a 'crisis'. At that time, Ben Bernanke, head of the Federal Reserve, was talking of losses of $50-100 billion. Since then, estimates of the scale of the issue have varied wildly, with it being reported recently that five European countries have committed to 1.3 trillion Euros in bailout packages and the Bank of England estimating at the end of October that losses had already reached £1.8 trillion. And this was before sterling dropped to parity with the Euro.

This early reporting set the tone for everything that followed. It was initially called a 'credit crunch' but then became a 'credit crisis', with the staple 'global economic crisis' always in the mix. It is curious that the consonance of the first two phrases is so similar to that other popular expression, 'terrorist threat', right down to the repetition of the menacing 'r' sounds. 'Credit chaos' is also quite common, this having the key element of making it seem like this is all part of an organic process.

There has to be hero though. No story of crisis can end without the hero riding off into the sunset in a limousine, wrongs righted, truths told, loved and accepted by all who are watching. And the hero of this piece is central banks. Going back to August 2007, just after Bernanke estimated the losses at $50-100 billion, Rothschild-controlled French bank BNP Paribas announced that it couldn't value three investment funds estimated to be worth 2 billion Euros, due to the uncertainty in the US sub-prime market. Almost immediately, the European Central Bank made 95 billion Euros available to stave off concerns. Since then it has become everyday news, with central banks either loaning to governments so they can partially nationalise ailing banks, or direct to the commercial banks themselves.

Even the World Bank got in on the act, first in May 2008 where they launched a $1.2 billion 'rapid financing facility' to help poor countries deal with the 'food crisis'. Then in December they created a $2 billion 'fast track facility' to enable poor countries to borrow money to help them through the recession. The President of the World Bank is Robert Zoellick, a member of the Trilateral Commission, PNAC and the CFR, a former Enron board member and whose nomination for the job came just a week after he attended the 2007 Bilderberg conference. When announcing the 'fast track facility' he said:

“We cannot afford business as usual. We need a human rescue package, not just a financial rescue package – and we need a new rapid response capability to make sure the money gets quickly to where it is most needed. Already 100 million people have been driven into poverty as a result of high food and fuel prices, and we estimate that a 1 percent decline in developing country growth rates will trap 20 million more people in poverty." - Zoellick, December 2008

Anyone who knows the history of the World Bank will realise this is no 'rescue package'. They even state on their website that this facility:

"will allow the Bank Group to provide rapid funding for social safety nets, infrastructure, education, and health." - worldbank.org

In other words, when these desperately poor countries inevitably default on the new loans, effective ownership of that socialised national infrastructure will pass to the privately owned World Bank. One only has to look at how they treat the Amazon rainforest to see their knowing ability to deceive and exploit in one fell swoop. Despite being allowed to play the hero, to the extent that the 'Evanomics' correspondent on the BBC likens you to the Three Musketeers, the central banks have persisted with apocalyptic views of our financial future. Then again, can you blame them when it works so well. On June 19th 2008, Governor of the Bank of England Mervyn King gave a speech in which he said:

"Lord Mayor, we face the most difficult economic challenge for two decades." - Mervyn King speech in full, BBC

The following day, the chancellor announced new powers for the Bank of England to take over ailing commercial banks. The Times reported this as a 'blow' to the government-controlled Financial Services Authority , who were hoping the new powers would be granted to them. But no, there is only one hero to this story. Indeed, just before the World Bank announced their 'fast track facility' they offered a very bleak vision of 2009 for developing and emerging countries. And tonight the BBC are broadcasting an interview with Sir John Gieve, outgoing deputy Governor of the Bank of England, where he says that the central bank needs greater powers to stop this from happening again. You can watch Blazing Saddles in ten parts via the following videos: