You’re Human!
Do You Know What That Means?

by Robert Ingraham

[Print version of this article]

PART FIVE OF A SERIES

V.—Oligarchy

July 18—What is it that holds us back? What saps our moral commitment to build a better future? What force inserts the voice of pessimism into our minds that tells us that the only possible approach to our life is to “live for today” and make the best of a bad situation?

In the previous installment of this report, we looked at the great contributions made to human advancement, over several millennia, from China. The breakthroughs were astounding. Yet, in Europe, for almost 2,000 years—until the dazzling intervention by Dante Alighieri and then the great leadership provided by Filippo Brunelleschi and Nicholas of Cusa—the advancement of European culture was retarded. Our potential for development was poisoned.

In this chapter, we shall look at the subject of Oligarchy and Empire. We shall discuss history, but this is not a classroom exercise. The evil which afflicted Europe in the centuries prior to the Florentine Renaissance is with us, still, today. We see it in the financial policies of the City of London and Wall Street. We see it in the hostility to scientific advancement. And most of all, we see it in our culture; we see it within ourselves.

How many drug addicts are there, today, in America? How many alcoholics? How many victims of a perverse “pleasure and escapist” entertainment culture? Many good people try to close their eyes to the human devastation which surrounds them, much as Saint Augustine once covered his eyes while witnessing the barbarities in the Roman Coliseum—but blinders do not work; the carnage of this culture enters the lives of each of us. The day-to-day reality of living within a society that is destroying itself produces a numbing despair, and this eats away at the hope and courage within everyone.

Oligarchical power still exists, and oligarchic culture predominates. This is our enemy. It is mankind’s ancient and present enemy, and if you do not recognize the nature of your enemy, you can never hope to win.

Recognizing the Enemy

We do not simply have a bad and corrupt culture in today’s trans-Atlantic world. We live within an oligarchic culture, an imperial culture. It is a culture which tells you every day that you are not human, that you are impotent, that you have no power to affect the future. The policies of London and Wall Street—from geopolitics to monetary speculation to the economic looting of the population—ensure that there is no basis for hope, or for a better future, within our society. We are rats in a maze, simply trying to make do.

This is not a natural state of affairs; it is not a human state of affairs! Rather, the true human condition is seen in what was earlier reported on the scientific advances in China, and the true human identity may be seen in the personality of Beethoven, or Louis Pasteur, or Alexander Hamilton. Ours is a creative species, but this is what oligarchy has attempted to eradicate from our culture.

If one wants to give a name to the “species character” of the oligarchical outlook, perhaps an apt choice would be Malthusian. Parson Thomas Malthus was both a pitiful figure and a plagiarist, but in his much-trumpeted work, An Essay on the Principle of Population, he puts forward an argument which defines the oligarchy’s agenda, down to the present day. Malthus defines the human species as existing within an entropic biosphere, one governed by fixed laws and limited resources. He insists that humanity is subservient to these “laws of nature,” and helpless to take command of its own future. He insists that any attempt by society to grow, to expand, will result in crisis and collapse. He justifies human suffering. This is an outlook which engenders deep pessimism within any person who accepts it.

In his demand that the human species be reduced in number, Malthus denies everything that is truthful about humanity. This is no accident, since Malthus was an agent of the British Empire, an empire then murdering millions all over the world. In the 20th century, an “updated” version of Malthus’ argument was presented by H.G. Wells in his Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought (London, 1901), and Wells, together with that other “Typhoid Mary” of the British Empire, Bertrand Russell, devoted their lives to eradicating the creative essence of the human identity from English-speaking culture.[fn_1]

Beginning in the 1960s, through the launching of the British-created environmentalist movement, accompanied by the publication of such drivel as The Population Bomb (1968) and the Limits to Growth (1972), total war was declared on human culture. Mankind’s creative nature—that which had inspired human progress since the discovery of the use of fire—was declared the enemy. Wells and Russell, together, denied the noëtic power of the human mind and demanded that human culture be reduced to the sensual appetites of a baboon or hyena. The current hegemonic acceptance of “environmentalism” within American and European societies is evidence of the success of their efforts.

You might think that all of this has nothing to do with you. But answer the following questions: Isn’t there a limit on human population growth? Don’t we need to conserve limited resources? Aren’t we going to run out of fresh water? Isn’t space exploration a waste of money? If you answered yes to any of them, you are infected with the oligarchical outlook, with a pessimism you don’t even recognize. And it is that pessimism which leads to the drug epidemic we see today. It is precisely this pessimism which the oligarchy deliberately sows and fertilizes, because it is the best method for keeping the rest of us in self-imposed chains.

Roots

Oligarchism is a plague which is not new. It has infected our species since the time of the Bronze Age and the regimes of Sumer and Babylon. It is the system of imperial-oligarchical rule. In this installment of our report, we shall examine the murderous influence of oligarchical culture in modern European history. A comprehensive investigation is not possible within the constraints of this composition. Instead, we shall limit ourselves to certain characteristics of two case studies: the Roman and British empires.

We shall be discussing history, but the purpose of this is to make clear certain things about our current situation. Today, the most powerful elements of the trans-Atlantic financial empire are lashing out, attempting to destroy U.S. President Donald Trump, provoke confrontation with Russia and China, and sabotage the economic development policies of the Belt and Road Initiative. This financial oligarchy is the successor, the descendant, of the ancient empires discussed in this report, and the oligarchs of today are motivated by the same oligarchical outlook as their ancient predecessors.

Lyndon LaRouche has defined the enemy of humanity as the “Oligarchical Principle.” It is of utmost importance that each of us thinks through the actual nature of this deadly oligarchic disease. An oligarchic system is an anti-human system. It denies human creativity. It is an entropic system—in direct opposition to the creative, self-developing nature of the universe. Oligarchic culture demands that you accept as fact that you are less than human. It denies—completely—the inherent creativity which has made possible all human progress. It drums this into our consciousness every minute of every day.

If you do not grasp the essence of what characterizes the oligarchic outlook, you will never learn how to defeat it, or how to be truly human.

Rome

If one traces the worst period of oligarchical rule in Rome—from the Third Punic War in 149 BC to the death of the last emperor in 476 AD—by that latter date, the total population of the Empire was lower than it had been 600 years earlier. To put it bluntly, that is all you really need to know to conclusively condemn the anti-human nature of Roman culture.[fn_2]

Contrary to what almost everyone is taught in high school and university, the European “dark ages” did not take place in the centuries following the collapse of the Roman Empire. It was the Roman Empire, itself, which was the Dark Age. What followed its demise was merely the lawful devolutionary product of the devastation to human culture wrought by the 700-year rule of that imperial monstrosity.

Rome was an entropic society of zero-technological growth, built entirely on slave labor and economic looting. For six centuries there were no improvements in the methods of agriculture—from tillage, to fertilizer, to tools; no improvements in mining or metallurgy; no improvements in shipping and navigation. Even previously known technologies such as water wheels and water pumps were hardly used, considered “more expensive” than the use of slave labor. Human productivity went backward, and true scientific investigation ceased to exist. Contrast this to what has been reported in earlier chapters of this report as to the pre-Roman breakthroughs in science, astronomy, engineering and navigation.

The initial expansion of the Roman Empire was carried out through genocide and enslavement. Julius Caesar, in fewer than ten years in Gaul, exterminated over 800 villages and sold over 1 million captives into slavery. After 117 AD, Rome stopped expanding geographically, and “internal” looting replaced foreign conquest, first among the far-flung Roman provinces and then against the people of Italy. This growing impoverishment and de facto enslavement of the Roman citizenry intensified over time, particularly during what historians like to call the “good” Antonine period.

This is precisely the “internal dynamic” of all imperial systems, down to the present day trans-Atlantic monetary empire. Human beings are mere commodities, and their labor is to be looted, through a variety of methods, to serve the interests of the oligarchical Leviathan.

As for monetary and financial policy, the historian Abbott Payson Usher has demonstrated[fn_3] that what is usually considered to be the “modern” form of imperial global finance did not have its origins in London, Amsterdam, or even Venice, but that all of the later 13th, through 18th century “financial innovations” in those locations had their legal and political roots in the “concept of debt,” as it was understood in the axioms of Roman and Byzantine Law.

Under Roman rule, progress stopped, science stopped, and the population was driven downward into a bestialized culture of “bread and circuses.”

The Reckoning

From no later than 165 AD, continuing for three centuries, the Roman Empire was devastated by an ongoing series of epidemics and plagues, which never let up. During this entire period, the economic looting of the population together with ongoing military warfare (now almost entirely defensive) continued—and intensified—unabated.

Two of these epidemics, the Antonine Plague and the Plague of Cyprian, are often referred to as “great plagues,”[fn_4] but, in addition to these, wave after wave of disease struck the empire for more than two centuries. It is suspected that the two “great plagues” were both smallpox, but it is also known that the continual series of epidemics included malaria, gonorrhea, leprosy, and measles.

The Antonine Plague struck in 165 AD, and the first wave of the epidemic killed 4 to 7 million people throughout Europe. During a second wave nine years later, reportedly 2,000 people a day were dying in the city of Rome. By 180 AD, it is estimated that somewhere between 25 to 50 percent of the entire population of the empire had perished.

The Plague of Cyprian raged from 250 to 270 AD. Sources from the period report that at the peak of the epidemic, 5,000 people a day were dying in Rome. During an outbreak in Carthage, a local deacon named Pontius wrote of the disease:

There broke out a dreadful plague, and excessive destruction of a hateful disease invaded every house in succession of the trembling populace, carrying off day by day with abrupt attack numberless people . . . All were shuddering, fleeing, shunning the contagion, impiously exposing their own friends, as if with the exclusion of the person who was sure to die of the plague, one could exclude death itself also. There lay about the meanwhile, over the whole city, no longer bodies, but the carcasses of many . . .

Rome’s Oligarchical Twin

This same dynamic which devastated the Roman Empire in the west, also dominated the existence of its eastern sibling. What can one say about the Byzantine Empire? The zombie that refused to die? Byzantium was a parody of the Rome of Claudius, utilizing the same Roman methods of military conquest and economic looting. The tax farming and related monetary policies of Rome were brought in lock, stock and barrel. Under Byzantine rule, agricultural mills were abandoned, roads fell into disrepair, and local industries disappeared. In many areas water became scarce, as infrastructure collapsed. Whole sections of previously urbanized territory became ruralized or simply returned to wilderness. It was an empire based—in its entirety—on monetary wealth.

In 533 AD, the Emperor Justinian decided that he was going to reconquer the western Mediterranean and recreate the Roman Empire. Eight years into the war, one of the worst epidemics in human history struck Constantinople. The first wave of the epidemic lasted from 541 to 549 AD, spreading throughout Europe after the second year. In the capital, the peak of the epidemic lasted some four months and the death toll rose to a staggering 10,000 a day; more than 200,000 people were said to have died in Constantinople in the first year alone. By the time Justinian’s plague had run its course, it had killed at least half the population of Europe, brought trade to a halt, and destroyed the empire. As one commentator said, “It then seemed to spread all over the [known] world; this catastrophe was so overwhelming that the human race appeared close to annihilation.”

Mass Death

At this point, the effects of imperial/oligarchic rule are best stated by simply citing some statistics. The figures are obviously inexact, but the author has attempted to cross-check them with several sources. As already stated, the population of the Roman Empire was lower in 476 AD than it had been in 169 BC. As that Empire collapsed into chaos, the population of Western and Central Europe declined further:

Year Population

350 AD 23 million

600 AD 13 million

780 AD 7 million

For the eastern Byzantine Empire, it looks like this:

Year Population

350 AD 18 to 26 million

600 AD 10 to 16 million

780 AD 7 million

Then there are the effects of the Venetian-Mongol alliance of the 13th and 14th Centuries (a story which will not be told in depth here):⁵

Population of Europe (under Venetian monetary domination):

Year Population

1200 AD 59 million[fn_5]

1300 AD 78 million

1400 AD 39 million

1430 AD 22 to 24 million

Population of China (under Mongol Rule):

Year Population

1200 AD 123 million

1400 AD 60 million

These figures are only shocking if one fails to grasp the necessity of continued human breakthroughs in science and technology for the survival and advancement of the human species. Human discovery, human creativity, and an anti-entropic increase in human productivity are all necessary features of human culture, without which the destruction of our species is fore-ordained. The toleration of imperial financial systems and oligarchical culture ensures a dynamic of collapse and extinction of human society. There is no possibility of a bucolic zero-growth human society. Mankind either increases its productive power within the universe, through the social application of continual individual human discovery, or we die as a species.

The Self-Imposed Entropy of Empire

The genocidal consequences of imperial policies of tax-farming, slavery, usury, and what Marxists would call “primitive accumulation” are self-evident. Their effects destroyed the Roman Empire, as well as the later Venetian trans-Alpine system of usurious banking in the 14th Century. These are the same policies which have characterized the entire history of the British Empire. At the same time, imperial rule has left humanity vulnerable to precisely the type of “galactic threats” which resulted in the extinction of many other species. We have touched upon some of this is Part Two of this series. Here, let us look deeper into the question of epidemic disease.

The historical record is clear that the looting policies of monetary empire exposes a weakened population to the ravages of disease. In the relevant case studies cited above, as well as in others, we see empires seemingly at the height of their “glory”—e.g., Athens under Pericles or the Rome of Marcus Aurelius—felled by epidemic disease. What characterizes all of these imperial systems is the ostentatious display of monetary wealth, while the population is driven downwards, and the truly creative arts of science and technology are diminished. All of these imperial systems exhibit a reduction in per-capita energy consumption and a decline in potential relative population density.

During the heyday of the Venetian monetary empire, starvation, warfare, and disease killed off 50 to 60 percent of the human beings in Europe. Some areas lost 80 percent or more. Including the death toll from Venice’s partner, the Mongol Empire, and folding in the rest of the Mediterranean region, the final number of human corpses had to have been in excess of 100 million. Some sources claim that in the period from 1276 to 1350, life expectancy in Western Europe dropped from 35 years to 17 years. Parts of Asia and Europe, today, still have lower population densities than in 1250 AD. Most of France and Italy did not return to those earlier population levels until the 19th Century, and for much of southwest Asia and northern Africa this did not happen until the 20th Century.

The Cosmos and Disease

Several of the worst disease pandemics in human history (in the 3rd, 6th, and 14th Centuries) were preceded by violent shifts in weather patterns and climate, patterns largely determined by an array of galactic influences.

Take the case of the 14th Century Black Death. The “Medieval Warm Period” ended abruptly in 1314 with the onset of brutally cold and incessantly wet weather. This was the preliminary phase of the “Little Ice Age,” which would continue for centuries, bringing even much colder weather by the 17th Century. By 1315, there were universal crop failures. People died of starvation on a massive scale. There was no corn, no bread, no anything, and hunger was universal. Diseases such as pneumonia, bronchitis, typhoid fever, dysentery, diphtheria, and tuberculosis finished off many of the weakened population who did not starve outright.

All across Europe most of the livestock died, either from starvation, or from the accompanying spread of epidemic diseases such as rinderpest. By the time it was all over in 1322, somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of the population of Europe north of the Alps, were dead and the region was a wasteland. Then, in 1347 the Black Death struck the already devastated population.

Throughout this entire period, the Venetian monetary empire, and its Lombard and Angevin allies, intensified their tax-farming, debt usury, and other forms of financial looting—all reminiscent of the earlier practices of Rome. The population of Europe was driven downward, industry and agriculture collapsed, and the ability to defend against disease and climate change evaporated. This is how species go extinct.

The British Empire

The modern oligarchical spawn of these ancient imperial systems is the British Empire, which is with us still today. Through its banking and monetary power, as well as the multifaceted control it maintains over global narcotics trafficking, news media, entertainment, food cartels, armies and political institutions in the trans-Atlantic world, it is the paramount enemy of mankind.

This is precisely the empire which is presently mobilized to destroy the efforts by Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping to implement a grand strategy of peace through economic development.

The public record of British genocide, far worse than Adolph Hitler, is readily available. Those who deny such evidence suffer from a mental affliction. The British Empire was the leading slave trader, narcotics trader and author of mass murder for centuries. And there is nothing to indicate that they have changed; they simply no longer possess the unchallengeable global hegemony to rule unchecked.

The question arises: “Are the British oligarchs actually human?” In perhaps the only truthful utterance which ever passed from her lips, Queen Victoria once referred to her progeny as “frog-like,” and were it not for the recent practice by European royalty to procreate with “commoners,” it could be argued that the modern Olympian aristocracy has been self-degenerating—reverting biologically—to a lower animal species. Certainly, a history of mental afflictions, not to mention hideous physical features and other congenital defects, have plagued generations of that inbreeding class.

The semi-incestuous family members of the oligarchy exhibit all of the characteristics of a lower-ordered species, or of a renegade branch of the Homo genus, who upon seeing the first human-lit fire fled back to the jungle. Thus, the World Wildlife Fund is aptly named, for it captures the essence of their species-identity.

Isn’t this what they are? Adam Smith and his “pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain”? Humanity would have suffered extinction long ago if it had followed that dictum. All of modern British “science” and philosophy has promoted a non-human concept of the human identity, and one which flies in the face of two million years of human acts of discovery. From Hume to Locke to Bertrand Russell, spokesmen of the empire have proclaimed, “We are not human,” and maybe they aren’t. But we are.

The history of the human species demonstrates that only the power of creation which exists within the human mind—a power coherent with the developing nature of the universe—will allow for human society to develop into the future. The oligarchical principle is anti-cognitive. It suffocates and murders precisely that creative identity which allows human culture to progress. This is why all empires disappear. They possess no means to thrive. The only question is how many of us they will kill before they go, or whether we kill oligarchy first.

Oligarchy does not simply impose its power on the population, like a bunch of storm-troopers or slave mongers. It gets us to enslave ourselves. This is the issue of culture. If we accept the idea that our primary base instinct is the “pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain,” if we allow the pessimism of the oligarchical outlook to enter our hearts, we are already defeated.

An insight into the Satanic degeneracy of the British oligarchs who financed the rise of Adolph Hitler may be obtained through the viewing of the 1936 film Ewiger Wald (Eternal Forest). It is all there: the brutish worship of mother earth, the glorification of nature and “primaeval man,”—and Nazism as the pinnacle of that outlook.

To be continued.

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