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* Zeitgeist Addendum: A Critical Review *
DriftingByTheStorm
Posts: 8,684
I found this article to be most articulate in getting across some points i tried to make about the new Zeitgeist movie.
G. Edward Griffin knows his shit, and anyone who has gotten hooked on alternative political view points through the Zeitgeist series owes it to themselves to consider the POV presented here.
The idea of a money-less world controlled by central planners (or machines created by central planners) is a very dangerous idea, and fails to address the very concerns the first half of the movie points out. Not only does it fail to address those concerns, it actually exacerbates them.
READ:
G. Edward Griffin
Freedom Force International
October 16, 2008
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. Here is the video link.
Jonathan, 2008 Oct 6
REPLY FROM EDWARD GRIFFIN:
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:
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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
G. Edward Griffin knows his shit, and anyone who has gotten hooked on alternative political view points through the Zeitgeist series owes it to themselves to consider the POV presented here.
The idea of a money-less world controlled by central planners (or machines created by central planners) is a very dangerous idea, and fails to address the very concerns the first half of the movie points out. Not only does it fail to address those concerns, it actually exacerbates them.
READ:
G. Edward Griffin
Freedom Force International
October 16, 2008
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. Here is the video link.
Jonathan, 2008 Oct 6
REPLY FROM EDWARD GRIFFIN:
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:
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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
If I was to smile and I held out my hand
If I opened it now would you not understand?
If I opened it now would you not understand?
Post edited by Unknown User on
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Comments
I think it is important to note here that the argument should not really be about whether any religion (like christianity) is portraying "truth". This article, and the ideas it conveys, are not an attempt at a defense of christianity.
It is simply an explanation of why SOME would eminently prefer that the predominance of the christian ideology (whether you believe it to be myth or truth) disappear for good.
There is definitely a close-knit cloister of super-elite would-be world-rulers that take as their "religion" the esoteric teachings of a whole basket of ancient mystery religious concepts ... and they would like to use this as part of their attempt to thrust upon the world a "great" (evil) new order.
For those who remain completely in denial of this fact, it would behoove you to watch The Order of Death ... if you really think "Bohemian Grove" is a joke or a hoax, check out the part around 33 minutes where Alex accosts David Gergen and gets him up in arms furious about his invasion of their privacy at The Grove. Gergen is no joke, and neither are the secretive meetings at The Grove.
These people are real, their intentions are real, and their goal is to subvert the free will of mankind by breaking his collective will, by bringing the existing order down in flames, and to then propose, support, and implement false solutions and thus bring about a New World Order.
This isn't paranoia.
In fact, if you look around, you might even see it happening now.
Now, even as the current financial order lies flailing and dying, those very same masters who created the current mess are proposing a new "global financial order" ... not my words, theirs ... REPEATEDLY in the last few months.
What are they on about?
It would behoove you to find out.
If I opened it now would you not understand?
As for the AJ video on Bohemian Grove:
I like Alex, and what he stands for, and I believe a good chunk of what he says. I think he's got to keep himself honest in making his reports, else no one would take him seriously, and he'd look like even more of a whacko. BUT, I think some of the editing in that video is a little questionable-- I think he should make his sources more available also. Whereas I might believe what he says, I think a lot of other people wouldn't, just from how some of his videos are put together.
Do I think that there's a great evil in this world that exists? Absolutely. And where else would it try and go besides straight to the top? Nowhere. The elite, do exist, and I think they answer to one certain master.
The Creature From Jekyll Island is a MUST read, for sure.
It may be 500+ pages, but you wouldn't know it. It goes by quick, and then you go back to reread it!
As far as your concerns with the legitimacy and sourcing of AJ's Reprise: Order of Death, i'm honestly not sure what you mean.
The footage of the actual Cremation of Care ceremony was shot by Alex himself.
I don't see any reason to think ANY of it fake.
There are articles and even pictures that go back to the early half of the 19th century (another) about Bohemian Grove. You can hear Richard Nixon talk about it on his tapes, and watch David Gergen get confronted by AJ about it.
What specifically do you question in the Order of Death video?
In any event,
i think the thing i find most fascinating about ALL of this stuff, from The Illuminati and Scottish Rite Freemasonry on down to the Bohemian Grove and The New World Order, is that they ALL seem to have stemmed from very genuine and pure motives, and they were ALL perverted by the warped visions of a greedy and near-insane few.
I mean, Thomas Jefferson wrote VERY favorably about The Illuminati and of Adam Weishaupt in early 1800. (and YES, it is real, you can find it here as well as in the library of UVA itself).
There were certainly disagreements as to the nature of the order, and of its purposes (George Washington was concerned, as was John Quincy Adams specifically about Jefferson's involvement with The Illuminati) ... but their aims, at least in the beginning, seemed to be simply to deliver man from the troubles of a monarchical and divided religious world, but also to navigate him safely through the perils of the secular age (that is basicaly what Weishaupt himself was on about). Their ambition WAS a "new world order", a new order of the ages (check your dollar bills, folks) ... a new enlightened era in which nations and states faded away, along with the necessity for personal (private) property and religion.
I tend to strongly disagree with the prudence of those last ambitions, but i am firmly of the opinion that Weishaupt, Jefferson, and all the other late enlightenment thinkers who took to his notions, believed in the just and beneficent intentions behind these aims.
It is all too clear from the history of the last 20th century however, that any purity of spirit involved with the original formulation of such plans has all but been utterly erraticated by more self-serving and dispicable motives.
At least, i am certainly of that opinion.
:(
If I opened it now would you not understand?
and reveling in it's loyalty. It's made by forming coalitions
over specific principles, goals, and policies.
http://i36.tinypic.com/66j31x.jpg
(\__/)
( o.O)
(")_(")
Nah man, I believe Alex. I'm just saying, there's something about the way his stuff is put together that I think a lot of people would find unconvincing-- I can't exactly put my finger on it.
The fact that this is even discussed should have people concerned, as there's at least a little bit of truth in most rumors.
Did Robert Johnson sell his soul to make the blues? Did these people sell their soul for power?
Who knows? It's definitely a possibility.
If not, these leaders of the "free world" have some really STRANGE hobbies.