Chapter 9

Potsherds And Other Fragments

“To return to the smaller world of ancient days,” Astle begins with a biblical quote reminding us that there is nothing new in human affairs. Just before we turn the page, he reminds us of the purpose of “the monetization of the state,” being “the transfer of that independent labour” into “a condition of dependence on a wage money, directed towards being able to keep on living as with the notion of being a free man.”

This is simple enough. Yet, without the art of Bernays, minus propaganda, the human in the age of information would note that he was forced under threat to pay protection money and was not permitted to leave his “freedom” home without having his travel documents checked by an armed officer of the state.

Astle presents some of Solon’s words, which I will mine directly in another section of this work. The Origins of Tyranny, Ure, 1922 is a major source for this chapter. Astle demonstrates a naive belief that the existence of standing surpluses would not wreck an egalitarian society. He accurately describes how “aliens” to the locality arrive, backed by distant and unseen banks, and then defraud small land owners via alliance with petty bosses with the goal and towards the effect of impoverishing the free farmer so as to generate a slave class. This class may then be exploited to undermine other farmers, and home craftsmen in the city through work houses, and spread the social disease of economy.

The rise of tyrants as temporary kings in the power of the bankers begins to unfold under Astle’s inquiry. The evil nature of money is that it is a unit of exchange based on treasure, that then becomes divorced from treasure, which is hoarded away, as the currency itself is devalued, with the precious metals being migrated out of established economic regions and into central treasuries and to regions where money is not yet introduced or to where a trade imbalance may be thus addressed.

The evil is facilitated by permitting private individuals, usually people of another, or even no, nation, control over a people’s unit of exchange. These people are by definition not socially responsible to the people, and owe service only to their superior conspirators. The tyrant, or temporary king, the oligarchy, the democracy, these are all tools of the money monger to extract the wealth and liberty of a people and bind them in the darkness of the counting house.

The abstract loss of a people’s self is misunderstood until it is too late. Astle places the king and the priesthood as the saviors of the people, yet these were corrupted also. Only the rarest kings and priests were not slaves of evil. However, Astle is correct in his gaze through history, that the only examples of leaders who did not openly slave for the bankers were certain kings, and those temporary kings [such as Jackson and Lincoln] who defied international banks and were then slain or denied reinstatement.

The politician, who is not hereditary or in power by conquest, owes his legitimacy to the bankers who financed his mercenaries or his political campaign. Astle describes a system that seeks the “alienation and subversion of the free dependents with the purpose of ultimately leading them into day labour or into slavery final and absolute,” that must not, may not, can not stop. A hunger possesses all financial institutions and soon infects and possesses all of those fated to come under those established rules of exchange. He draws a parallel with the British enclosure acts, which birthed America. In addition he sights Theognis, whose complete work will be covered in its own section of this work.

The banker was the giver and taker of all. Astle cites Alexander’s officers of regional treasuries as having no clue as to finance, which was a reflection of their redneck master’s naive misunderstanding of international power. Astle holds Alexander as aware as the Asiatic emperors, which is not accurate. This book will finish with Alexander’s war on international banking, as he was one of those few conquerors who sought to extinguish that evil. Ironically, such men become the examples of evil in money memory, which is to say modern memory. Even Astle falls for that portion of the Lie Perpetual he is battling in his investigation.

Slavery of nations depended on mining operations and then the establishment and hollowing out of related systems of value. The democratic agents of leadership are described as “… no more than blind creatures lifted up from the mob in service to the money power.”

Sacred treasures deposited at religious centers are noted by Aristotle as having come in large proportion from tyrants, whose outward piety amounted to a sacred deposit that would later be stolen by paid priests smuggling the relics out. Xenophon did relate [unknown to Astle] how he arranged for dedication of sacred treasures from his booty to cover promises to a god, in such a way as to lead the reader to suspect that Xenophon knew there to be treasure thieves in operation. So too did his dedication of a temple near Elis suggest that temples were being corrupted, with his endowment specifying a means to prevent theft from the god Artimus by priests.

Astle describes the movement of trade imbalances ever eastward reflected in silver to gold ratios from Europe at 13:1, Greece 10: 1, to 6:1 to 1:1 in China and India. Comparisons of banking following conquest across the Channel to England and resulting in the Magna Carta and other money lending pacts favoring international aliens, are beginning to draw together on Astle’s ponderous loom. He takes this conquest banking nexus back to 2470 B.C. to King Manishtusu of Akkad invading southern Persia to gain access to silver mines. The “slave king”s of early Rome are cited as part of the international banking conspiracy to enslave farmers circa 700, when tyranny was beginning in Greece. Note that Homer, in his Odyssey, circa 725 B.C., cites Italy as a place where slaves were snatched by Semitic merchants to be sold in Asia. Likewise the legend of Euthymus, circa 450 B.C., cites this same eastward slave flow out of Italy.

Astle leads us into the vault of tyranny with some acute reminders of the shadow nature of money power wielded by, “… the class or persons hidden within the Aramaic speaking middle classes that permeated the whole Levant and Near East… Thus were the simple and industrious and brave Greeks now raised up to be the new vehicle through which the final and destructive purposes of those controlling international bullion and slave trades would be achieved, as the shepherd the peoples of the world further down the road of no hope…”