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First, there have
been some changes over the past week. Due to a falling out with my business
partner, I am no longer associated with the web site www.thegoldbug.net. I
have two new sites, www.thegoldspeculator.com and
www.thegoldspeculator.blogspot.com. The first is directed toward people who
are interested in subscribing to my economic letter, the One-handed
Economist. The second is directed toward those who wish to read my blog. The
new sites are up and running, and I will try to give all of you folks the
best that I have.
One of the great things about America is that it is made up of many different
kinds of people. These people approach life in different ways. They become
knowledgeable about different areas of reality, and they become successful in
different fields. Thus we can learn from them. I try to keep the attitude
that I can learn something from almost anyone, and I am not often
disappointed.
I am one of these different people. I was never brought up as a Christian. I
am a Jew from a family of Sadducees, and my great ancestors were high priests
at the time of King David. They were descended from Moses (via his brother
Aaron), and they understood what Moses was trying to teach the world. Of
course this kind of stuff is not passed on in the genes. But through a lot of
study (and some luck) I have managed to recover my family heritage. When I
did, I realized that I have something of great practical importance to teach
the people of our time.
The history of the Jewish people is full of powerful and world shaking
events. You certainly know that Christianity derives from Judaism. (The Roman
pagans of the 3rd century A.D. felt that there was hardly any difference
between the two monotheistic religions, and the reason that the (western)
world went Christian at that time was just that Christianity was a bit more
user-friendly, meaning that it was closer to Roman paganism and the Romans
felt more comfortable with it.) It is also the case that Islam derives from
Judaism. If you read the Koran, it is full of references to Moses. There was
also a religion very popular in the ancient mid-East based on the teachings
of the prophet Zoroaster which was quasi-monotheistic and probably came from
Judaism. And on top of this, Buddhism developed in India at the precise time
(6th century B.C.) when the Jewish people were relocated to Babylonia.
Babylonia is not that far from India, and there were undoubtedly trading
routes connecting the two cultures. It is therefore quite likely that all of
the world’s monotheistic religions derive from Judaism, and the great
majority of the world’s people today owe what they consider their most
valued possession to the Jewish people and to Moses. To these specific
religious changes, we can add two non-religious ones.
We all know that the Greek people, particularly in the city of Athens,
flowered in the 6th century B.C. They did great intellectual work. They did
great work in architecture and the arts. They rose to become a great power in
military terms, and when the Macedonians united them, they established a
great empire in that portion of the world. But modern intellectuals, although
they acknowledge the greatness of classical Greece, do not have any
explanation for why these great events suddenly appeared in one small part of
the world for a brief moment in time and then disappeared. Well, here is the
explanation.
In the eighth century B.C. the Greek poet Hesiod, obviously influenced by the
Five Books of Moses (or as much of the Old Testament as existed at that time)
started to preach the concept of justice to the people of Greece. The
Israelites of that day were neighbors to people of Greek descent (the
Philistines, or Sea People), and they had commercial and cultural ties to
Greece proper. Hesiod reinterprets the ancient Greek religion, remodels Zeus
so that he sounds like the God of the Old Testament and emphatically preaches
the concept of justice. His message is that Zeus is just. He rewards the good
and punishes the evil. This idea took about two centuries to penetrate Greek
culture, and the great age of classical Greece was the result.
A similar period of cultural success attended the ancient Hebrews when they
first learned the concepts of monotheism and justice from Moses directly.
They began as a group of slaves or serfs running away from their masters.
Soon they acquired their own country. And within the space of 3 centuries
(the time of Solomon), they had acquired a small empire in the mid-East and a
great deal of wealth.
Clearly there is something going on here. When the people of a culture
discover the concept of justice. they rise to greatness. There is a burst of
energy. They make both intellectual and practical achievements. They astonish
the world. If we examine the roots of our own culture and ask what has made
the United States great over the past few centuries, we have to trace things
back to the ideas of the Founding Fathers, which in turn are modeled on the
ideas of John Locke. But Locke was a Calvinist. What the Calvinists did was
to reinterpret the Christianity of that day in terms of the Old Testament and
the concept of justice.
The Christians of Calvin’s day were not very nice people. If you dared
to disagree with them, on even the most obscure point of theology, they would
burn you alive. Death by slow roasting and being buried alive were also
popular. If Calvin wanted a chance for his ideas to spread, he needed to
employ deception. So he pretended to be a true Christian, going back to
original Christianity. This was not so. Calvin’s doctrine that you can’t
get to heaven by your own efforts led his followers to disregard the New
Testament (and its doctrine of love). All of the thinking up to that time was
that the reason for following Christ’s teachings was that this was the
way to get into heaven. Once the Calvinists gave this up, they turned to the
Old Testament and the doctrine of justice. It is not an accident that William
Bradford, the governor of the Pilgrims (through most of their early days)
kept a Hebrew diary. Hebrew was at that time a dead language and had last
been spoken some 1800 years previously in a small portion of the world some
5,000 miles from where Bradford lived. Yet he had learned the language and
was comfortable with it. In general, the Calvinists studied the Jewish people
of their day and imitated them. The free economy was imitated from the Jews
of the Middle Ages. These people were scattered and were not in control of
any government; however, they sometimes managed to find heads of state who
let them govern themselves according to Jewish law, and in these cases they
set up free economies and became renown for their great (by medieval
standards) wealth. This, of course, continues today, and we have the
phenomenon of Jewish department stores and Jewish financial people (of whom I
am one).
If we ask the reverse question, why did these cultures fall, then we get the
reverse answer. Why did the people of Greece sink back into mediocrity? Why
did the Roman Empire fall? Indeed, the most recent example of a fall of a
great culture occurred only half a century ago. Britain elected the Labor
Party. They championed the welfare state. The British pound collapsed, and
the British economy sunk to the level of an ordinary European country. In
each case, the cause was the abandonment of the concept of justice. Plato
influenced the ancient Greeks away from justice, and neo-Platonists, such as
Augustine, influenced the 4th century Romans the same way. That was the cause
of the Dark Ages. The rise of socialism and fascism in the 20th century was
caused by a neo-Platonic group of intellectuals. called the Romantic School,
who flourished in German-speaking Europe in the late 19th century, in
particular, a special subset of this group who employed what I call the wolf
in sheep’s clothing technique.
It is not exactly a secret that modern intellectuals love Plato and hate
religion. When I was at Harvard, it was a standing comment that one could not
graduate without reading Plato, Marx and Freud. Marx and Freud are
neo-Platonists. Yet Plato was a polytheist. That is, he embodied the most
irrational form of religion, the form which believes that the gods come down
and interrelate to human beings (cure them of diseases, fight with them in
wars, have sexual relations with them, perform miracles). This form of
religion has been given up by even the least rational people in our modern
culture and exists today primarily in the universities.
It is very important to understand that this polytheistic-Platonist view has
a very deep body-soul dichotomy. In this view, the world is divided into two
elements – called the spiritual, or Dionysian, aspect and the
materialistic, or Titanic, aspect. In this view, the spiritual and the
materialistic are mutually exclusive. Everything in the universe must belong
to one of them, but nothing can belong to both.
What these people call the spiritual aspect are those things relating to
consciousness. Much of their spiritual world is fabricated (God, angels,
ghosts, etc.). But there are conscious entities in the universe, animals and
humans, and these are the closest that exists to a spiritual universe.
However, if you look at the human consciousness, it is easy to see that it
evolved in response to certain environmental demands. About 10 million years
ago, a group of chimpanzees in East Africa (along the Rift Valley) found that
they could get food by going into the water. When an animal changes its
environment (in this case from trees to water), there is a big increase in
intelligence (e.g., elephants and dolphins). By 5 million years ago, these
chimps had evolved into the earliest humans (lost body hair, gained greatly
in intelligence and adopted an erect posture). Then these primitive humans
made another big change in environment. They came back out of the water, not
into the trees but onto ordinary land. This caused another big increase in
intelligence. This double environmental pressure has led to a highly
intelligent animal and a great expansion of the human mind. This is what a
Platonist calls spiritual development. But of course this “spiritual”
development had a great many practical consequences. It led to the discovery
of tools (and later farming) and thus a great increase in the ability to get
food. It led to the discovery of new weapons and greater proficiency in war.
In our own age, it has led to major improvements in the standard of living.
That is, the “spiritual” development of a greater mind has led to
a number of “materialistic” developments, thus proving that the
two realms are not mutually exclusive.
I have pointed out that in politics this body-soul dichotomy leads to a
division between a (spiritual) party of love and a (materialistic) party of
practicality. And what history teaches again and again is that these two
parties, while opposite on the surface, are identical in their essence.
Generally, a party of love (the political left) appears and begins to spread
its doctrine. Then some of the members of the party of love convert to a
party of hate or practicality (the political right). This is happening in our
own day right in front of our eyes, and it has happened repeatedly in
history.
The most important example of this occurred in Germany starting in 1875. A
new political party was started to bring the country Christian Government. It
was called the Social Democratic Party, and it was based on the concept of
love. Government was to be like a big father who loved his subjects and gave
them something for nothing. The Social Democratic idea was adopted by the
German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, who called it his Christian program. Its
two principle features were socialized medicine and social security. This was
called the welfare state and proved very popular throughout Europe. “A
government based on love” thought all of the people. ‘What a
wonderful idea. Why hasn’t anyone thought of this idea before? And
government based on love swept nation after nation, but Germany led the way
and was highly esteemed in intellectual circles at the turn of the 20th
century. Germany was the most advanced, the most progressive, the most
idealistic country in the world. Then the country of love began to change.
Within the country of love, the Social Democrats were the party of love. The
first thing that happened was that a member of the party of love, named Adolf
Hitler, changed into a preacher of hate. He became the spokesman for a new
party of hate (the Nazis). And gradually, through the 1920s, the party of
hate grew stronger and the party of love grew weaker. Finally, the party of
hate took power, and Germany went on an orgy of hate and murder that lasted
12 years and killed 50 million human beings.
The modern left is desperate to deny the fact that the original Nazis came
from the extreme left. They went from one extreme to the other. The left
rewrites this history to pretend that the Nazis came from the German
conservative movement. In fact, the conservatives hated Hitler and tried to
kill him. The same thing has happened many times in history. A society begins
preaching the doctrine of love. Then the people of that society change from
love to hate, and the society goes on a rampage of hate and destruction.
That is where we are in regard to the modern day Democratic Party. It is
composed of people who have a conscious philosophy of love and who are full
of hate. Barack Obama fits this role to a T. He is not the Jimmy Carter-type
of leftist who is content to spout philosophy. He has a toughness in him
which he keeps under tight control.
What shocked me was his deliberate deception in sneaking over the National
Coordinator of Health Information Technology without allowing the Democrats
in Congress to read the bill for which they voted. Such legislation was
exactly the way that the Holocaust started in Germany. First, they killed
those people whom the socialized medicine system considered too expensive to treat.
Then they threw in the political enemies of Hitler. Then they threw in the
Jews and the Gypsies. All of the countries who imitated Germany and set up
socialized medicine also kill people. But they are more moderate about it.
They give the impression of being caught in a dilemma whereas the Germans
gave the impression that it was a lot of fun.
Of course, killing people is the line which distinguishes the party of love
from the party of hate. You can deceive yourself that you are still motivated
by love even after you have started killing. The Germans, for example, called
the killings of the 1930s “mercy killing,” which we can interpret
as “killing for love.” However, an objective historian has to
judge people by their actions. Barack Obama wants to kill people. He wants it
so much that he engaged in some pretty high pressure political tactics to ram
this legislation home (disguising it as part of the economic stimulus
package). He has crossed the line between love and hate.
In our historical age, the most recent acting out of this story of love and
hate was, as noted, in Germany; the party of love was the Social Democrats,
and the party of hate was the Nazis. Therefore, when a member of the party of
love in our society crosses the line and joins the party of hate, it is
perfectly appropriate to call him a Nazi.
Of interest here is Obama’s recent appointment as Science Czar, John
Holdren who, in a 1977 book Ecoscience (San Francisco,W.H. Freeman, 1977)
advocated forced abortion, taking babies from their mothers and bringing a
World Government police force into the U.S. Wilipedia wrote:
Holdren received worldwide[citation needed] coverage in the news after it has
been found that he co-authored a book in 1977 that advanced such
controversial birth control methods as mass sterilization through drugs in
the water supply and sterilization of criminals [13]. [Wikipedia,
article on John Holdren, July 12, 2009.]
Howard Katz
The Gold Speculator
Howard S. Katz is
the editor/publisher of the One-handed Economist, a financial letter which
combines fundamental and technical analysis. He was a bug on gold in the
1970s and became a bug on gold again in late 2002.
Subscribe to the Gold
Speculator (the One Handed Economist)
You can subscribe
to Howard Katz’s thoughts on commodities, stocks, bonds and real estate
are available in a letter entitled The One-handed Economist and published
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