John Dunn

First posted on Sunday, 21 July 2013 at 19:23





Emile Keller



'Today,we have financial liberty, an absolutism of capital freed from all laws- human and divine - and dealing mortal wounds to the social liberty itclaims to have founded.'



Edmund Burke’s contrasting of the so-called Glorious Revolution with the French Revolution was but a superficial window-dressing of history. He and the Whig historians who followed him, simply rendered events acceptable to the Whig collaborators who, on their newly updated and porticoed country estates, were welcoming the money-lenders into their social circles and families. To say the Glorious Revolution was a peaceful handover of power neglected the extended and bloody struggle that led up to it - namely the English Civil War and Dutch Wars. The outcome of the revolutions in Britain and France was certainly the same:financial freedom for the beneficiaries of uncontrolled usury and the fractional reserve lending of central banking.

In contrast to the lickspittle Whig histories, the French counter-revolutionists described the aftermath of financial freedom as anything but glorious. Emile Keller’s account, written in 1865, remains just as relevant to this day.‘The poor and the state itself’, wrote Keller, ‘found themselves at the mercy of capital, which had complete license to sell, to buy, to speculate, to charge fees, to retain funds, or to lend at high rates’.

Keller elaborated the implications of financial freedom, which later became the credo of liberalism, the dominant ideology of Usura.

The newly emancipated wealth was quick to refuse those free services that hitherto had been regarded as an honour to render to the country. In confiscating the goods of the clergy, great care was taken to leave to the state’s expense, and thus to the nation’s the provision of education, charity, and worship that the church had originally provided.

With the one hand they had pushed away the work of pure devotion, with the other they had grabbed the best ranks, offices, and functions that the nation dispensed.

The country now has the obligation to pay a triple army of soldiers, employees, and creditors, an army that grows each day and whose general staff is drawn from a small circle of favoured families. Thus, in place of a great reservoir of natural riches on which each could draw, we have a public debt of ten billions... Thanks to this predominance of material interests, the aristocracy of devotion, virtue, talent, military honour,judicial integrity, and municipal patriotism is everywhere eclipsed by the aristocracy - or better, by the feudal barons - of finance, the basest and most self-serving of all.

Today, we have financial liberty, an absolutism of capital freed from all laws - human and divine - and dealing mortal wounds to the social liberty it claims to have founded.

For the man with nothing, equality under the law, social liberty, political liberty, and religious liberty are mere decoys.

Thence comes - and think deeply on it - the inevitable menace of war and social revolution, the mere spectre of which froze the bourgeoisie in terror in 1848. At the end of these violent struggles came the no less lamentable necessity of a new centralisation, a new absolutism of the state on the economic terrain.

The country will resemble a giant railroad company, incapable of managing its own fortune, hardly knowing those who are chosen to represent her, and whose hearts, minds, arms, and fortunes will be at the mercy of several braided helmets, at once all-powerful and irresponsible.*

I even believe that a people exclusively devoted to the study of material things - which improve no other faculty than the student’s memory - will eventually become inferior to other peoples with respect to the mind, reason, and other social qualities... Their mercantile commerce will be able to flourish, but their social commerce will be little agreeable.**

Discrimination by the senses is dangerous to avarice. It is dangerous because any perception or any high development of the perceptive facilities may lead to knowledge. The money-changer only thrives on ignorance.

He thrives on all sorts of insensitivity and non-perception. An instant sense of proportion imperils financiers.

You can, by contrast, always get financial backing for debauchery. Any form of “entertainment” that debases perception, anything that profanes the mysteries or tends to obscure discrimination, goes hand in hand with drives towards money profit.***