CHAPTER 18

WARNING. Before I turn to the GEDANKEN PLAN OF WAR, let me WARN the reader, emphatically, that I do not support any Course of Action that is rooted in violence or in chaos. The Dangers from such a course should be clear to everyone. What I do promote is for the Electorate to assume responsibility for its Future: to decide, democratically, how much Net Advantages it is prepared to give away to the Money Trust and to Governments -- at its expense. The distribution of advantage is the distribution of power.

My position should therefore be very clear: WISDOM dictates that the most advantageous Course of Action is the course of PEACE WITHOUT WAR. For this, and here I follow the advice of Machiavelli, one must understand, as dispassionately¹ as possible, what the nature of the War might be. It is in this dispassionate spirit that I present the following.

Now, let me turn to the GEDANKEN PLAN OF WAR:

(A) The Assumptions
(B) The Primary Aim of the War
(C) The Clausewitzian Principles of War
(D) The Means of Offense, the Means of Defense, and the Strategy
(E) The Peace Negotiations.

Clausewitzian Terminology. The terminology, the expressions, and much of the phraseology that I use to describe the Plan are from Clausewitz's On War.² In the following, unless noted otherwise: Clausewitzian expressions and quotes are between quotation marks; and Clausewitzian concepts and key words are in italics. The Plan is an application (or interpretation) of Clausewitzian doctrine.

(A) The Assumptions. The Plan has two Assumptions:

1. The Attacker is the Money Trust. The object of the Attacker is to take possession³ of a considerable amount of the People's wealth -- to take control of every important aspect of human economic life. The object is therefore to subjugate the People economically and politically. Of course, no member of the Money Trust can be expected to agree with this assumption. But then, many believed that the earth was flat -- when every object in the heavens tended to indicate otherwise. In any case, the Money Trust can take some solace. It is better to anticipate than ignore the Plan -- as "Nothing becomes a General more than to anticipate the Enemy's Plans."⁴
2. The Defender is the People. The object of the People is to compel the Money Trust to fulfill the Will of the Majority -- to recover and preserve the People's economic and political interests.⁵ The Plan deals with the essential character of the War; but it contains no prescriptions for the destruction or devastation of the Money Trust, as this is in nobody's interest. The focus is on free and legal potential action -- with emphasis on the defense of the interests of the People.  

(B) The Primary Aim of the War. Under Clausewitzian doctrine, the People would have to choose between two kinds of war:⁶ 

1. The complete "overthrow of the enemy." The political purpose of the War would be the complete overthrow of the unmerited net advantages of Big Business and Big Government over the Citizen. The operational objective (the scale of means and effort) of the war would be calculated to achieve this political purpose.  
2. A war to exact strategic concessions for use as bargaining chips at the peace negotiations. The intended aim of the peace treaty would be the complete restructuring of Legislation.

Clausewitzian doctrine asserts that War is "the continuation of policy with other means."⁷ In other words, War would not be waged as an independent activity, but as an integral part of the economic and political intercourse between the People and the Money Trust. Ideally, the general interests of the People would be unified into a single coherent intelligence -- which could be called the People's Policy.

(C) The Clausewitzian Principles of War. Clausewitz argued that the primary aim of war is the overthrow of the enemy. But how can the Defender overthrow his enemy? What principles of War can be used? For Clausewitz, it is in the nature of war that one must look for answers. Clausewitzian principles of war⁸ would dictate as follows:

1. The blow (the free and legal withdrawal of unmerited cooperation, loyalty, and trust) against the "enemy" must be convergent,⁹ cohesive,¹⁰ massively concentrated,¹¹ and must come as a total surprise.¹² This is only possible if the People can act as a whole -- and spontaneously.¹³
2. The blow (the free and legal withdrawal by depositors of their own money) must be directed against the enemy's "center of gravity."¹⁴ The People must seek "great success" instead of "minor conquest" -- "by constantly seeking out the center of his [the enemy's] power, by daring all to win all."¹⁵ In the case of the Money Trust, the center of power is MONEY. Money is the "key to the country."¹⁶ Much money (real and fictional) resides in "fortresses"¹⁷ -- here, financial institutions. Therefore, the center of gravity of the Money Trust is the center of gravity of financial institutions.
3. The force (the free and legal withdrawal of unmerited cooperation, loyalty, and trust) used in the defense of the People must be no greater than necessary.¹⁸
4. For the People, the progress of the War must be from Defense to Attack (the lawful elimination, by the Legislature, of Darwinistic net advantages). The transition to counterattack must occur as soon as the "culminating point"¹⁹ of the war is reached. The attack must be "concentric."²⁰ The People's offensive action must be secret, sudden, and devastating.

For Clausewitz, the advantages of the defense are greater than those of the attack. This is because the initial object of defense is self-preservation.²¹ The defense is the "stronger form of waging war."²² Therefore, for the Clausewitzian, the advantages of defense accrue to the People, the Defenders -- and not to the Money Trust, the Aggressor. This is extremely important.

(D) The Means of Offense, the Means of Defence, and the Strategy. What are the Money Trust's means of Offense? What are the People's means of Defense? What could the People's Strategy be? These questions are discussed under four headings:

1. The People
2. The People's Allies
3. The Disposition of Contracts
4. The Government.

1. The People. Individually, the consumer, the employee, the mortgagor, the small business owner, etc., is weak. The forces of creditors against the individual citizen operate generally in synch, at a distance, and convergently -- while the citizen awaits the blows.²³ In tough times, lenders can destabilize borrowers with ease. They can simply call, reduce, or freeze credit lines. The simultaneous and convergent attack by all the creditors and their agents on any individual borrower can therefore be devastating. To complicate matters, the cost of legal defense against a Big Bank, for example, can be substantial, especially after the borrower has been destabilized.

The main advantage of the Money Trust is that it can attack any individual borrower -- the consumer, the small business owner, even a government --, first by suddenly calling, reducing, or freezing his operating loans, then, if the borrower is destabilized, by moving, when possible, into a position of ownership or control over all or some of his assets. Any Big Bank can potentially overwhelm the individual small borrower during tough times. The duel is uneven. The Money Trust has access to vast resources -- including, ironically, the People's deposits -- to defeat its opponents.

However, it is much easier for the People, as a unit, to "spring surprises by the strength and direction"²⁴ of its own attacks against the Money Trust. One must not underestimate the fact that the "moral forces"²⁵ of the people are substantially greater than those of the Money Trust. And the people have a decisive numeric advantage over the Money Trust.²⁶

The advantage of the convergent attack is to the creditors. But this advantage is tactical in nature, not strategic. The strategic advantage favors the "divergent operations of the defense."²⁷ Let me explain. Collectively, the people, as the will of the theater of operations, constitute a formidable source of power. Much of the power of the Money Trust derives from the People's deposits. The people could use this power to their advantage. They could, as discussed by the economist David Ricardo, suddenly converge on all financial institutions and withdraw their matured deposits. While withdrawals of deposits (matured or payable on demand) are not illegal, the convergent action would force governments to interfere, as no government would want to risk the collapse of its financial system.

The concentric run on banks would intensify the power of the People: MONEY, instead of flowing into the fortresses of the Money Trust, would flow out legally into the pockets of families. In other words, MONEY would diverge out of the Money Trust. To quote Clausewitz, "[t]he convergent form pays dazzling dividends, but the yield of the divergent form is more dependable."²⁸ 

Cash Resources at Canada's Top Five Banks. Consider, for example, the case of Canada, a G7 country. In 1993, banking in Canada was dominated by five or six banks -- it still is. Let's focus on the top five for a moment. Together, as at October 31, 1993, they held:²⁹

1. $474,650 million in deposits.
2. $41,260 million in cash resources (including cash and deposits with the Bank of Canada)
3. $143,744 million in cash resources and securities

On a per-capita basis, their cash resources amounted to about $1,426.

Now, consider the following theoretical question: how much money would each family have had to withdraw, on October 31, 1993, to have depleted the cash resources at the top five banks on that day? If all families banked with the top five exclusively (which was clearly not the case), then the roughly approximate answer is: on the average, about $4,503. A similar calculation gives a rough distribution of the average income-weighted withdrawal within quintiles for family units: (1) lowest quintile (poorest families), $1,728; (2) second quintile, $2,980; (3) third quintile, $4,074; (4) fourth quintile, $5,367; and (5) highest quintile (richest families), $8,367.³⁰

The withdrawals scenario is clearly hypothetical, speculative and incomplete:

1. It assumes that people could and would have converged on banks.
2. It does not take into account possible interference by the Bank of Canada, governments, and other interested parties.
3. It ignores the serious effects and consequences of potential panics and bank failures, etc.

Runs on Banks. Money wars, panics, runs on banks, and bank failures are nothing new. In Money, John Kenneth Galbraith provided some startling historical statistics, from the U.S. Bureau of the census: 246 banks failed during 1907-1908; and "more than 9000 banks and bankers bit the dust"³¹ during 1930-1933 -- 659 banks failed in 1929, 1352 failed in 1930, and 2294 failed in 1931.³²

The reader must be warned: runs on banks are a VERY SERIOUS matter. According to Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwarz, the DANGERS from runs on banks include LOSSES OF CAPITAL, LOSSES OF DEPOSITS, and LOSSES OF PURCHASING POWER.³³ 

2. The People's Allies. The influence of the People, as Defenders in one theater of operations, could spread well beyond the original theater of operations. People, around the world would have a substantial interest in the outcome of the War, especially one pitting the People against the Money Trust. A decisive victory by the Money Trust against the People, in any theater of operations, could have extreme repercussions all over the planet. A substantial increase in the power of the Money Trust, in one theater of operations, would probably be viewed with considerable suspicion in all other potential theaters of operations.³⁴ Support for the People, as Defenders in one country, could emerge spontaneously in many other countries. This could trigger the international members of the Money Trust to rally and fight for its common global interests.

THE COLLECTIVE ECONOMIC SECURITY OF PEOPLE EVERYWHERE, AND THE GLOBAL INTEGRITY OF THE MONEY TRUST, COULD THUS COME INTO FIERCE COLLISION. THIS POTENTIALLY GIGANTIC COLLISION OF INTERESTS IS WHAT I CALL WORLD WAR III AGAINST THE MONEY TRUST.

3. The Disposition of Contracts. From his investigation of how War originates, Clausewitz concluded that the "idea of war originates with the defense."³⁵ This is because the attacker (here assumed to be the Money Trust) fights in order to gain possession (of money, assets, the economy, the country, etc.), while the defender repulses the attack with a fight. Since the idea of war originates with the defense, it is the defender who establishes the "laws of war" and the "ground rules for his conduct."³⁶ For Clausewitz, it is the People's "readiness for action" that constitutes the "act that really fits the concept of war."³⁷ So what could the People's readiness for action entail? It could entail the disposition of contracts with the Money Trust.

Principles of Justice. John Rawls gave a systematic account of the foundations and principles of justice. He sketched a theory of civil disobedience and of conscientious refusal.³⁸ Most interestingly, he discussed the specific conditions under which the electorate has a "right to resist."³⁹

Based on an interpretation (correct or not) of the principles of justice and fairness, the People could nullify or abrogate (rightly or wrongly) unfair or unjust contracts -- contracts that do not respect the principles of fairness and reciprocity, contracts that do not recognize the citizen as a free and equal person, contracts that enslave, contracts that can destabilize one party to the benefit of the Money Trust, contracts that pervert the legal order, etc. In any case, all promises and guarantees obtained through deceitful withholding of critical information would be "void ab initio."⁴⁰ 

The People could compel the Money Trust to fight on their terms. They could refuse to comply with unjust or unfair arrangements. They could "prolong and postpone"⁴¹ unjust or unfair payments, en masse, leaving the initiative for legal attack to the Money Trust, in the Courts (conceptually, this strategy would not be unlike the one used by the Russians against Napoleon). These actions would increase the defenders' cash position -- and weaken that of the Money Trust. The cost of continued legal attack by the Money Trust would far exceed benefits. Why? The same net advantages of the Money Trust (e.g., the high cost of legal defense against a possible commercial abuse by a bank) would then be reflected back against the interests of the Money Trust. The People's strategy would, in all probability, be limited to wearing down the Money Trust, without destroying it. A nasty Clausewitzian plan could go much further -- it could be "calculated primarily to destroy the enemy by making him exhaust himself."⁴² 

Hume on the "Violent Death" of "Public Credit." The notion of violent death of public credit is not new. In his Essays, first published in 1741, the Scottish philosopher David Hume, speculated as follows: " . . . either the nation must destroy public credit, or public debt will destroy the nation."⁴³ He went on to argue that "[t]he public is a debtor, whom no man can oblige to pay. The only check which the creditors have upon her, is the interest of preserving credit; an interest which may easily be over-balanced by a great debt, and by a difficult and extraordinary emergence, even supposing that credit irrevocable"⁴⁴ [my italics]. 

4. The Government. Central Banks have been described as banks of last resort. A concentrated run on banks would automatically involve them. However, a concentrated series of blows at the centers of gravity of the Money Trust -- the massive transfer of deposits from the Money Trust to the depositors, and, more importantly, the generalized free and legal withdrawal of unearned or unmerited cooperation, loyalty, and trust -- would force a wise government to preserve the integrity of the society and opt for an orderly Peace. This would be the Clausewitzian "culminating point of victory"⁴⁵ -- the end of Defense, and the beginning of the People's Attack on all the unjust net advantages of Big Business and Big Government.⁴⁶ This would be the point in time when a wise government would dissolve. Power would then devolve by right to the People, and the People would immediately proceed to erect a new Legislative.

John Locke on Transgression by the Legislative. Should governments be allowed to force people into the power and dominion of financial para-governments? If yes, would a resulting rebellion be justified? For answers, legislators better consult John Locke.

In Second Treatise of Government, first published in 1690, Locke argued that "whenever the legislators endeavour to take away, and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people . . ."⁴⁷ [italics in the original]. He then added: "Whensoever . . . the legislative shall transgress this fundamental rule of society; and either by ambition, fear, folly or corruption, endeavour to grasp themselves, or put into the hands of any other, an absolute power over the lives, liberties, and estates of the people; by this breach of trust they forfeit the power the people had put into their hands . . . , and it devolves to the people, who have a right to resume their original liberty, and, by the establishment of a new legislative, . . . provide for their own safety and security, which is the end for which they are in society"⁴⁸ [italics in the original].

Locke's logic is absolutely clear: Transgression by the legislative is a breach of the people's trust; it forfeits the power entrusted by the People. Once systematic trains of abuses against the people unconceal the hidden designs and artifices of the legislation, then the People have no choice but to take care of their own interests, in which case, the power devolves by right to the People.⁴⁹ 

(E) The Peace Negotiations. The primary object of the War -- and, therefore, of the Peace -- would be the complete abolition of all unfair and unjust net advantages in the Legal System. The successful Peace would produce a new Legal System, which, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, is the "most wholesome and necessary for the public good." The necessary time would have to be allocated to the creation of the new System. Caution would require that the transition, from the old system to the new system, be planned with utmost care. 

WOULD THE PEOPLE BARGAIN AWAY THEIR RIGHT TO CHANGE THE WHOLE EXISTING SYSTEM OF LAWS? THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION FAILED TO DECLARE THE BULK OF ENGLISH COMMON LAW NULL AND VOID. IN THIS RESPECT, IT PERPETUATED INEQUALITY. IT FAILED TO REPLACE THE SOLOMONIC CREED [Proverbs 22:7] WITH A DEMOCRATIC CREED. THE LAW THUS REMAINED THE SLAVE OF MONEY.

Thomas Jefferson. Willard Sterne Randall gave an intriguing account of how and why laws were revised or modified by Jefferson. The following is derived from this account. In 1776, the House of Delegates in the United States fully authorized a committee, headed by Thomas Jefferson, to revise, amend, or repeal the laws of Virginia, and, to draft new laws, if necessary. Except for revisions and modifications of laws dealing with primogeniture and entail (laws of inheritance and conveyance of lands to descendants), and freedom of religion and education, Jefferson and his committee left the bulk of English Common Law intact.⁵⁰ Quoting from Jefferson's Autobiography, Randall wrote that "Jefferson wanted to 'annul this privilege' and the 'harm and danger' of this 'aristocracy of wealth.'"⁵¹

Since Jefferson kept the bulk of English Common Law intact, he perpetuated -- wittingly or unwittingly -- the inequalities that had been bound up with the Solomonic creed [Proverbs 22:7]. The world would need another Jefferson to complete Jefferson's work -- to annul, in Jefferson's words, the "harm and danger" of the "aristocracy of wealth." 

John Locke on Resistance to Change. In Second Treatise on Government, first published in 1689 (87 years before 1776!), Locke warned about the people's natural resistance to dissolving a corrupt legislature: "if there be any original defects, or adventitious ones introduced by time, or corruption; it is not an easy thing to get them changed, even when all the world sees there is an opportunity for it"⁵² [my emphasis].

It is not an easy thing for people (even for a Jefferson), to resist change. This is precisely why, Locke argued, we are constantly brought back again "to our old legislative of king, lords and commons . . ."⁵³  

LOCKE'S IMPECCABLE INSIGHT EXPLAINS WHY JEFFERSON'S BLOODLESS REVOLUTION, INGENIOUS AS IT WAS, WOULD REMAIN UNFINISHED.

THE GEDANKEN PLAN OF WAR
THE MEANS OF OFFENSE AND THE MEANS OF DEFENCE

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