Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, celebrating the one who had a dream of racial equality. Yeah, sure. What if the racial problem was mostly a smokescreen? A distraction?
Indeed, where did this racial inequality come from? Partly, as I have explained, it arose from the original Martin Luther, and his reference bible, the Bible. Let’s not forget that, because King David refused to massacre an innocent tribe, the Jewish God then tortured David’s son to death over a week or so. To punish his dad. How come Auschwitz is a big surprise to those who revere this sort of monstrosities? It’s just more of the same stuff, on a grander scale.
In the 1620s, English agents of the West Country Men-financed companies like the Virginia Company found that slavery was a profit enhancer. Endured servitude for whites was not enough: to make an entire race of self-reproducing robots was best.
Tobacco was the obvious thing to grow. This was all very expensive, but with lots of capital, it could be done very profitably, thanks to slavery. Some American states were mostly inhabited with black slaves in the 1700s. By then the top people in the future USA were living much better than anybody but the top aristocrats in Europe.
So what brought slavery? Plutocracy. Slavery arose from greed unchained, and blossoming plutocracy. The Bible comforted the righteous, as it celebrated tribal hatred as religion.
Thus race was just a convenient marker. The real genesis of slavery was not racial hatred, but greed.
In November 1938, on Martin Luther’s birthday, the Nazi leadership ordered an attack on all businesses in Germany held by Jews. Some buildings were completely destroyed (such as the great Synagogue in Berlin). There was glass all over the street, and it came to be known as “Kristallnacht”.
A poll conducted afterwards showed that two-thirds of the Nazi rank and file disapproved of the violence. Somewhat similarly, when Germans learned that Nazis were exterminating mental retards, public protests terminated the program (not before a relative of Hitler got eliminated, logically enough).
Hence, when the Nazi leadership engaged in massive extermination, that was kept secret. This secrecy was facilitated by the German goose stepping mentality. However a question surfaces: if so many people disapproved of Nazism in its heartland, how come Nazism got so empowered?
My main thesis (imparted to me early on my an uncle who was not just an astronomer, but also the son-in law of Molkte) is that the “plutocrats”, who Hitler and company officially vilipended, were actually the Dei In Machina (gods animating the machine) of Nazism.
The connection with plutocracy central, the USA, was, naturally, most important. Why is the USA plutocracy central? The USA became a superpower sometimes in the Nineteenth Century, but, because of the size of that nation-continent, American plutocrats, and the organizations they led, were made of bigger stuff than their homologues anywhere else.
USA plutocrats were indeed huge. JP Morgan, a banker, all by himself, stopped the Wall Street crash of 1907. What does that have to do with our story? Morgan became friend and mentor to Herr Doktor Schacht, later to invent German hyperinflation in 1923, and, being the most important banker in Germany, a crucial promoter of Hitler. Don’t be surprised that banks from the USA were massive supporters of Hitler, too.
Most people do not know any of these facts: the cognitive landscape they see is reduced to a small room. And not by accident: Albert Ballin was a Jew, friend of the Kaiser, managing director of the Hamburg American Line, the world’s largest shipping company, and involved in the complicated negotiations about a possible joint ownership of the world by Britain, Germany and the USA (something Colonel House, right arm of USA president Wilson pursued in person on June 1, 1914).
After Germany was defeated in 1918, the USA confiscated a lot of German property. Much of it, including the Hamburg-Amerika Linie, the world’s largest shipping company, at some point found itself in private American plutocratic hands. How one went from public seizure to private-plutocratic will never be documented: the building where the documentation of these transactions were stored, fortunately burned in 1923.
This quick recycling from public seizure to Anglo-Saxon plutocratic control made the German economy a strange hybrid pretty much controlled by American plutocracy in the 1920s and 1930s.
In general, all these horrors were made possible by never talking about them. A Deus In Machina can only operate well when it is not seen as part of the machine.
Instead of whining about slavery, and pretend that it is all about shades of skin, it may be more reverential to ponder how it arose. And whether it’s not rising again, for the same reason: inequality of wealth and power.
Patrice Ayme
Tags: Martin Luther, Martin Luther King, plutocracy, slavery
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 
January 21, 2014 at 2:58 pm |
As usual, I have really nothing to say about your central argument and its all too lively illustrations, except for silently clapping my hands. So I’ll resort to nitpicking, as usual too. Blame my contrarian streak and my pleasure in contributing to this blog, even if what I offer is mere trivia.
You call the US plutocracy the “deus ex machina” of Nazism’s rise to power, meaning the hidden power which engineered and manipulated that rise. No objection to the facts, but that’s not what a “deus ex machina” is – it would be a “deus IN machina”.
The expression “deus ex machina” was widely used to deride the way mediocre playwrights or opera libretto writers would wrap up an atrociously complicated storyline: flame or smoke would erupt from a corner of the stage, and some hitherto unseen deity (or philosopher, or angel) would appear and deliver the stunned actors and audience a clarifying speech (or aria) solving all the unsolved (and unsolvable) mysteries in the script; the shepherdess would be revealed as the king’s daughter, the vile traitor would be unmasked, and so on, allowing the curtain to drop at long last.
Thus the “machina” was not a “machination” being operated in secret by a powerful deity; it simply was the stage “machinery” (mobile scaffolding and smoke pots) which accompanied the convenient deity as it made its entrance (“comme un cheveu sur la soupe” as we say in French).
Wiki’s explanation is excellent.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/deus_ex_machina
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January 21, 2014 at 3:30 pm |
Dear Dominique: Thanks a lot! That’s an excellent point, and in appreciate it. I am going to change ex into in. I was vaguely thinking of it, even though I was unaware of all the much appreciated context you provide.
Deus in machina it will be.
The funny thing is that Hitler often had to attend social functions with old name “plutocrats”, even in Italy, and he intensely disliked making small talk with those “plutocrats”. He preferred the efficient American kind.
PA
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January 29, 2014 at 6:48 am |
Patrice Ayme. The rise of plutocracy is all extremely complex. I have written dozens of long essays on the subject. The economy at this point depends upon the fractional reserve system. FDR knew this, and made sure that the banks would create good money (= good credit, on good project). That was the Banking Act of 1933 (G-S). That was dismantled under Clinton. And it stays dismantled. Mostly. So banks create money for their friends. In San Francisco, the average home is one million dollars, about 15 times the average income. Because the government has not stepped in with “cheap” housing. And because the banks make money conspiring with the hyper rich, not by financing “losers”. Under Obama, the change has been, ever more plutocracy.
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