Hello Mr. Griffin.
I’m sure you have heard of the popular movie
on the internet, Zeitgeist.
It had three separate parts about
Christianity being fake, the Federal Reserve being a conspiracy
and bad, and that the government was involved in 9/11.
Well the sequel just came out,
Zeitgeist Addendum, and it seems very
dangerous. This movie screams controlled opposition/false solution
propaganda more than anything I have ever seen.
The movie starts off with
why the Federal Reserve is bad.
It seems to latch onto valid concerns that
the freedom movement/Ron Paul supporters have been worried about.
But its solution is really, really bad and is already sending a lot of
people in the wrong direction. It goes on to say that money is evil and
has caused every problem in the world. If only we abolished all money
and private property everything would be great.
All resources should collectively belong
to all humans of the world. Intelligent management of resources and
technology could allow everyone to be free. The world would turn into
some utopia. All crime would go away and greed and corruption would go
away. We should be a one world community. It even specifically says that
voting for liberty candidates like Ron Paul is the wrong thing to do. I
guess we should give up all hope and let bad politicians do whatever
they want to us.
It is full of doublespeak, wild assumptions, and crazy
socialist propaganda.
It also put in more about
how religion is bad. I am convinced this thing was
specifically made to stop the liberty movement from achieving anything.
It puts in just enough truths that we believe in to trick people into
following the wrong path.
I think statements about what is wrong with this film from liberty
organizations like
Freedom Force International would do a
lot of good and would prevent some people from going in the wrong
direction. Some people might think the best idea is to just ignore
it and it will go away. But it appears to be incredibly popular online
and gaining support. Even the most popular
Ron Paul website posted the video.
And the most popular Ron Paul message board
has three threads with hundreds of posts talking about it.
Jonathan
2008 Oct 6
REPLY FROM E.G.:
Jonathan,
I don’t like to criticize anything that is
helping to spread the truth about the Federal Reserve and 9/11
but I must agree with the substance of what you have said about this
video. I watched it two nights ago and was deeply disturbed by its
message.
At first, I thought it would be best to just
let it play itself out in expectation that most viewers would cross it
off as whacky.
However, the production value is high, the
effects and sound score are compelling, and there is enough truth
embedded in the beginning to capture the attention and possibly the
trust of many within the freedom movement.
So here are my comments on a few items of
concern:
-
The information about
the Federal Reserve is, for the
most part, right on target. However, I practically fell out of my
chair when the program repeated that old, silly argument about the
Fed not creating enough money to cover the cost of interest on debt;
and, therefore, the world must forever be in debt. I knew right
there that the writer did not read
The Creature from Jekyll Island or,
if he did, he forgot my analysis of this common myth.
For those who are interested in that
topic, it is fund on pages 191-192 of The Creature.
-
The next jolt came when the program
praised Civil War Greenbacks, calling them debt-free.
Actually, Greenbacks were contrary to the U.S. Constitution and,
although they were not fiat money issued by the banks, they were
fiat money issued by the government. That was better than paying
interest on nothing to bankers, but they still wiped out the
purchasing power of American money through massive inflation.
They can not correctly be called
debt-free, either, because they represented debt on the shoulders of
the government, which means, of course, on the shoulders of the
taxpayers. It never ceases to amaze me how people think that the
solution to money created out of nothing by those big, bad bankers
is to have money created out of nothing by those nice, trustworthy
politicians.
Yet, that is what this program supports.
-
There is a lengthy segment in which the
author of
I Was an Economic Hit Man, John
Perkins, tells the story of how propagandists in the U.S.
manipulated public opinion to support military action against
several Latin American countries. Then Perkins says that these
propagandists scared Americans by telling them that the leaders of
these countries were Marxists who were aligned with the Soviets.
This, of course, is a half truth that is just as dangerous as a
total lie.
It is true about the propagandists and
their strategy to scare the public into supporting military
intervention in those countries, but it is false to portray those
dictators as great humanitarians who cared only for the well being
of their people. That is total bunk. They WERE aligned with the
Soviet Union and they WERE part of a Marxist/Leninist strategy to
dominate Latin America; a strategy that continues to this day.
There was plenty not to like on both sides of that struggle, but
objective historians would never depict the Rhodesians (the
CFR crowd in the U.S.) as bad guys but depict the Soviet
puppets as good guys. In his book, Perkins reveals this same slant.
He exposes the foul tactics of international corporations, the
IMF, and
World Bank, but he never mentions a
Leftist dictator, such as Fidel Castro or Hugo Chavez without
praising them.
Perkins is a collectivist aligned with
the Left, and that strongly influences his telling of this story.
Yet the producers of the video make no mention of this bias and give
him an inordinate amount of time to present his slanted view without
challenge.
-
Perhaps the biggest insult to our
intelligence is the main theme of the program. It is that profits
are the root of all our problems today. That being the case, we must
change mankind to reject profit and we must work together on some
other basis. It is never quite clear what that basis is, but,
whatever it is, it will be administered and directed by an elite
group, at least in the beginning. I was stunned by the fact that
this is pure Marxism.
Marx theorized that people had to be
re-educated (in labor camps, if necessary) to cleanse their minds of
the profit motive. He and his disciples, such as Lenin and Stalin
and Khruschev, said that, eventually, the character of man would be
purged of greed, and then the state would wither away because it no
longer would be needed. Sure! We saw that in the Soviet Union and
China, right? Yet this Marxist nonsense is exactly what is offered
in this video program. It is Communism without using the name.
The profit motive is neither good nor bad.
It can be applied either way depending on social and political factors.
The desire for profit is merely the desire to be compensated for our
labor, our creativity, our knowledge, or even for our risk. Without
profit, very little would be accomplished in the world - not even if
everyone spent a few years in labor camps to be re-educated.
It is a basic part of man’s nature and is
the mainspring of human progress, as Henry Grady Weaver described it in
his book by that same title. Throughout history, whenever man lived in a
system that allows him to be rewarded for his work, there has been great
productivity and abundance.
By contrast, where social engineers gained
control of the state and restricted people from receiving the fruits of
their labor, productivity fell, and scarcity was the norm.
The profit motive functions differently in
different political systems. In a free system where government does not
intervene in the market place, the profit motive always will manifest
itself as competition, each person or each company trying to deliver
better quality products and services at lower prices. That was how it
used to be in the early days of America, and that is what led to the
greatest outpouring of productivity and abundance the world has ever
seen.
However, in a collectivist system where
government controls every conceivable aspect of economic and commercial
activity (the system that now exists in America), the profit motive
always manifests itself as a quest for political influence and laws to
favor one group over another.
The net effect is to eliminate competition
in the market place.
Under collectivism, success is achieved, not
by creating better products and services for less cost, but by
controlling legislators and government agencies. It is a system of
legalized plunder, as Frederic Bastiat called it in his famous
treatise,
The Law. Unfortunately, it is the
system that dominates most of the world today.
Zeitgeist Addendum ignores this reality.
At one point the narrator even says that the
greatest evil in the world today is "the free enterprise system." That’s
an incredible statement, especially inasmuch as the free enterprise
system has been dead for several decades. It lives in name only. The
whole world now is in the grips of non-competitive monopolies and
cartels that have forged partnerships with governments.
All of the evils to which this program
alludes are the result, not of the free enterprise system, but of the
abandonment of free enterprise and the adoption of
collectivism. This program creates a mythological boogeyman and then
advocates more of the very thing that has brought us to the mess we are
in today.
The enemy of mankind is not profit. It is a political system of big
government. Yet, this program is supportive of some of the most notable
big-government collectivist on the planet. Marxist/Leninists may be
enemies of collectivists in Washington, DC, but they are collectivists
in their own right.
The Communist model is no better than the
Nazi model.
There is much more that could be said about other program topics such as
technology supposedly being our salvation, about the a future world in
which no one has to work, and about common ownership of land, oceans,
natural resources, etc. but, for the most part, these merely are sub
issues to the ones already described, so I will spare my readers the
pain of further discourse.
In summary, this program does NOT offer a cure.
It offers a mega dose of the disease itself.
Ed Griffin
2008 Oct 9
