Interview by Victor Thorn & Lisa
Guliani
http://educate-yourself.org/cn/gedwardgriffininterview02apr04.shtml
April 2, 2004
WING Spotlight Interview: G. Edward Griffin (The Creature
from Jekyll Island)
by Victor Thorn & Lisa Guliani
Victor Thorn: There's an old saying that I'm sure we've all
heard. It goes: "Follow the money." And that's
exactly what we're going to do with G. Edward Griffin, who
wrote quite possibly the best book ever about the Federal
Reserve System. It's called The Creature From Jekyll Island
- and that's what we're going to do - follow the money. To
truly understand the way the world works,the first thing we
have to do is understand money. That's at the core of
everything. The controllers, the elite that run the world,
use money as the stranglehold over all of us - via money and
the creation of money. In my book, The New World Order
Exposed, I devoted four or five chapters to the Federal
Reserve System, but after reading Mr. Griffin's book, I was
very humbled by everything he knows. Mr. Griffin starts off
this book by saying that the Federal Reserve System is not
federal, it has no reserve, and it's not even a bank. It's
really fascinating how intricate and involved it is and how
crucial the Federal Reserve and the creation of money is to
the people who run not only this country, but the world. Mr.
Griffith, why don't you tell us how you became involved with
researching the Federal Reserve?
G. Edward Griffin: Well, I'm just a guy that
got interested in recent history. I never was much
interested in history when I went through school, but when I
got into the real world, I began to see things around me
that went counter to what I had thought was reality. So I
began to do some research and got into all of these upstream
topics at a very early age. Basically, I'm a reader. I read
books and I interview people and I dig into library
archives. I love to go through microfilm and a lot of old
documents. It just seems to be the pond I was meant to swim
in. So, a long time ago, I got into this business of being
what they now call a researcher and a writer. But basically,
I'm just an investigator. I dig these things up and I write
books on them, and much to my amazement, people actually buy
the books and read them and tell me they like them - which
really is amazing to me, because some of these topics, like
the Federal Reserve System, sound as though they're pretty
dull and boring.
My job has always been to get people into
the topic a little bit so they can realize that it's not so
boring after all. The Creature From Jekyll Island is a
second look at the Federal Reserve System - that is really
like a "whodunit".It's a mystery story of what
they've done with our monetary system. I just began to write
books and produce television documentaries - very low budget
things because I funded everything. I never did anything for
the networks or the major stations. I always did everything
for my own edification where no one else could tell me what
to do or what to say or what slant I had to take. My job was
to tell it the way I saw it. So I've been doing that since
about 1960. And I formed a little company a few years after
that called "American Media" that is still very
much alive and well. We produce educational documentaries,
we publish books, and we produce audio recordings. We have a
name as far as our marketing arm is concerned. It's called
"The Reality Zone".
Of late, I've become very concerned with the
practical side of these things. For years, I have been
writing and speaking on all of the things I find that I
consider to be problems in our society - things which do not
look well for the future of America. So I had been one of
these people who went around saying, "Gee everybody,
don't you see what's going on? Don't you care about the
future? Let's do something about it." So I've been
pointing with alarm for a lot of years, and it finally
dawned on me that it really doesn't make any
difference what we know about these problems if we don't do
anything about it. And that led me to the question:
what is it that one can do about these things? And up until
that time, I had been pretty much following the line that,
well, if we are just informed, the truth will set us free.
And it finally dawned on me: that is a myth. The truth alone
is not going to set anybody free. Truth is often shackled in
chains by a tyrannical system. It's up to the people who
know the truth to get off their chairs and do something
about it.
Victor Thorn: We've spent a lot of time
speaking about that very point. We've said: We already know
what's going on. We know what's wrong, we know what needs to
be changed, but if we're all in front of our computer
screens or in front of our televisions and not doing
anything about it, then it's exactly like you said. Nothing
is going to change.
G. Edward Griffin: Reading another book or
attending another seminar or sending carbon copies of
letters or emails around to our friends - while that's all
very good and exhilarating, it still doesn't change
anything. So about two years ago, I began to change my
orientation. Out of that came an organization which we call Freedom
Force International. The purpose of this
organization is to actually show people how they CAN do
something to turn events around. How they can not just be
complainers, but actually become "doers".
Lisa Guliani: Mr. Griffin, in an earlier
writing, you discuss that the best chance we have to change
the system is through its weakest point - which is public
opinion. Can you address that?
G. Edward Griffin: That sounds like one of
my earlier writings, and I really question that today.
There's no doubt in my mind that we do need to change public
opinion, because as long as the public doesn't realize
there's a problem, as long as they support the programs, for
whatever reason they think these programs that are
devastating to our freedom - that they think are necessary -
for example, to protect us against terrorism, or necessary
to protect us against drug dealers, or necessary to protect
us against crime, or necessary to protect us against child
pornography - all these excuses that are thrown out to
convince people that these increasing rules and regulations
in our lives are "necessary" for our own good. As
long as people buy into that nonsense, it's going to
continue. So I'm really not saying that public opinion is
not important. But what I would like to add to that now is
what I was mentioning a moment ago - that once we've got
public opinion on our side, then what?
Just having the majority of people or a
large number of people coming from the same point of view
does not translate into political action unless those people
are smart enough and dedicated enough to get involved in
political action and translate their political opinion into
actual deeds. What I'm really talking about is that our
nation (or any nation) is really controlled by what
sociologists call the 'power centers of society.' The power
centers are those groups and organizations through which
people work and act, and in many cases they actually think
homo sapiens are a kind of herd animal. He has this
"herd" instinct. We have leaders and we seek
leaders and we follow leaders. And leaders pretty much tell
us what to do. In many cases, they tell us what to think. If
we are led to believe that consensus is important, and if
somebody does a poll and they say "Well, 60% of the
population is all for this measure," we have a tendency
because of our nature, to say, "Well, if 60% of the
population is for it, it must be okay. I should be for it,
too." That's the way people think. So, what I'm driving
at is that the collectivists who have really captured
control of most of the governments of the world today have
done so not by military means, and they don't even represent
a large percentage of the population.
They represent, in most cases, less than
three percent of the population - and in some cases, even
less than one percent of the population. Yet, they can
dominate the whole nation because they are in control of the
power centers of society. I'm talking about the political
parties, labor unions, church organizations, schools - all
the organizations that add up to the sum total of power in a
nation. And if you've noticed, in many cases these
organizations have leadership with a point of view or an
agenda which is totally removed from the point of view of
the rank and file members. And the members often wonder,
"How did this guy get to be the president?" Or,
"Where did these people on the board of directors come
from? They don't represent me and my way of thinking."
Well, this happened because there were people who had an
agenda for many decades now. They've known that in order to
put their political views into place and to dominate a
society, they had to control those power centers. They use
their energies, their time, and in many cases, huge amounts
of money in order to capture control of the power centers.
The reason I mentioned that is because I believe the best
way - the only way - to reverse this trend is to recapture
control of the power centers. Public opinion is important,
yes. But it is NOT the complete formula because unless we
can convert public opinion into actual control of the power
centers of society, we are not going to win. And that is the
whole purpose of Freedom Force International.
Victor Thorn: One of the first steps we need
to take is to abolish the Federal Reserve System, and you
concur with that in The Creature From Jekyll Island. Why
don't you tell us a little bit about the first page in your
book, where you said about the Federal Reserve - it's not
federal, there is no reserve, and it's not even a bank. What
does the Federal Reserve represent and how did it become so
powerful?
G. Edward Griffin: We could spend hours just
talking about that. Let me take it from a sort of
fundamental point of view here. First of all, it might be
beneficial to explain why I called the book The Creature
From Jekyll Island. A lot of people think that seems like a
contradiction of terms. I just had a smog check here and I
was talking to a mechanic. He asked me what I do for a
living and I said I write big, boring books. He said,
"Yeah? Well, what was the latest book you've
written?" I said it's called The Creature From Jekyll
Island and his eyes lit up and he thought it was a sequel to
Jurassic Park. Then I said that it was a second look at the
Federal Reserve. And he got this very puzzled look on his
face. He didn't understand how a book on the Federal Reserve
could be called The Creature From Jekyll Island, which is
one of the reasons I chose that title. I wanted to catch
people's attention and make them wonder. So let me explain
very quickly. Jekyll Island is a real island. It's off the
coast of Georgia, and it was on that island back in 1910
that the Federal Reserve System was created. When I got into
the research, I realized that this was strange.
You would expect that something like the
Federal Reserve, which we've all been taught to believe is a
government agency of some kind. You'd think that it would
have been created in Washington, D.C. in some kind of a
committee room. But no, it was on Jekyll Island back in
1910. Furthermore, I discovered that the island in those
days was privately owned by a small group of billionaires
from New York City. People like J. P. Morgan, William
Rockefeller, and their business associates. It was a private
social club called The Jekyll Island Club. This is where the
families of these very wealthy people went to spend the cold
winter months. They got out of New York and went to Jekyll
Island. They had some beautiful cottages there and they're
all there today, by the way - if anybody wants to go look at
them. They've been preserved. And I thought, well, isn't it
strange that the Federal Reserve was created at a meeting on
Jekyll Island? And then I discovered that the meeting was
conducted under conditions of extreme secrecy. I can assure
you that very few wars of history were plotted under greater
conditions of secrecy than this meeting. All of these things
were ringing bells in my mind. I thought, what on earth is
going on? You know, when something's done in secret, there's
usually something to hide. And I thought to myself, what on
earth were these people trying to hide? So that's what
really triggered my imagination and my curiosity, and so I
started to dig into it. You know what I found? I found out
what they were trying to hide. That's what my whole book is
about.
I discovered that all of the important
things that we need to know, in my opinion, about the
Federal Reserve System could be traced to that meeting on
Jekyll Island - and in terms of the things that they were
trying to hide from public view. Now, what were those
things? It's hard to summarize this. First of all, we have
to realize that the Federal Reserve was offered to the
voters back in 1913 when it was actually passed into law. It
was offered to the voters as a solution to a problem. The
American people were deeply concerned in those days about
the concentration of financial power into the hands of a
small group of powerful banking and investment firms on Wall
Street. In those days, they used to call that conglomeration
the "money trust". That was what you'd find when
you dug into the newspapers of the period and looked in the
editorial section.
You'd find a lot of editorials condemning
the "money trust". People knew that there was too
much power in the hands of a few people, so there was a
clamor for legislation which was supposed to break the grip
of the money trust. And the Federal Reserve Act was offered
as the solution to that problem. So, we start off with the
assumption that the Federal Reserve Act was to put control
of the monetary system and the banking system back into the
hands of the people and to break the grip of the money
trust. All right, the first thing they were trying to hide
at that meeting was the fact that the Federal Reserve System
was written BY the money trust. The people who attended that
meeting were the epitome of the money trust. These were
literally the wealthiest men in the world. When you added up
the wealth which was controlled by the seven men who went to
that meeting, in accordance with the estimates of the
writers at that time - this is not my estimate - they
estimated that these people either controlled directly or
indirectly through the banking firms that they represented,
approximately one-fourth of the wealth of the entire world.
Victor Thorn: Isn't that incredible?
G. Edward Griffin: Yes. We're talking about
the J. P. Morgan dynasty, the Rockefeller dynasty, Kuhn Loeb
& Company, the Rothschilds from Europe, and the Warburgs
from Germany and the Netherlands. These were the people who
were represented at that meeting, and they are the ones who
created the Federal Reserve System - supposedly - to break
the grip of the money trust. So, the first reason for the
secrecy was to hide the fact that this was like asking the
fox to build the hen-house and install the security system.
One of the persons who attended that meeting wrote an
article for The Saturday Evening Post some years later and
he explained, quite openly that had the public known at the
time precisely who was writing this bill, they would have
rejected it. So that, you see, was one of the reasons for
the secrecy. But we can learn other things about that
meeting, too. I mentioned a moment ago what firms and
enterprises were represented. This is extremely important.
Another interesting thing is that, prior to
this meeting, or at least to this period in history, these
firms were competitors. Prior to the turn of the century,
they were struggling for dominance in the financial markets
of the world. They were spilling blood all over the
battlefield in New York and Paris and London, vying to be
dominant in the financial markets. And here they are,
sitting around the table on Jekyll Island in the seclusion
of this very exclusive clubhouse, coming to an agreement.
And the reason that is significant is because it was
precisely at this time in history that a major change was
going on in the way America was doing business. Prior to
that time, free enterprise competition was reigning supreme,
and that's the reason - in my opinion, at least - America
surpassed the rest of the world in a very short period of
time. It went from a very crude, rugged frontier type of
nation and became a highly industrialized and affluent
nation because of free enterprise competition. At the turn
of the century, people like Rockefeller and Morgan and
Carnegie had decided that since they were at the top of the
heap, they didn't want any more competition. They wanted to
put an end to competition.
Victor Thorn: John Rockefeller said,
"Competition is a sin."
G. Edward Griffin: Absolutely! All of his
biographers quoted him on that. So they began to look for
ways to eliminate their competition, and of course, if they
couldn't beat them in the open marketplace, which was the
old way of eliminating competition, now they were looking
for new ways, and that was to form monopolies and cartels -
to go into joint ventures with competing firms so that they
could no longer compete on price or markets, patents and
processes. They would come together and form a cartel, and
then they wouldn't have to compete and they could share the
market. Well, that was what was happening at the turn of the
century; and lo and behold, when you look at these men
sitting around the table at a clubhouse on Jekyll Island,
all of a sudden you realize, "Oh my gosh, the Federal
Reserve System is a CARTEL." And that is exactly what
it is. It is not a government agency. It is a cartel no
different than the banana cartel, the oil cartel, or any
other. It just happens to be a banking cartel. That is the
second thing that emerges from the study of what happened on
Jekyll Island.
Victor Thorn: Tell us about Paul Warburg and
how he was a front man for the Rothschild family and how he
essentially masterminded this and patterned it
after the German Reichsbank.
G. Edward Griffin: Paul Warburg was born in
Germany, he was a naturalized American citizen, and he was
very knowledgeable in European banking. We must remember
that the Federal Reserve System was modeled very closely
after the Bank of England. It was what the textbooks call a
"central bank". That's just a code word. It
doesn't really mean anything. It's not a bank at all, but if
you want to look it up in a textbook or an encyclopedia -
you'll find it under the phrase "central bank".
What it basically is, is a cartel - it's a partnership
between the government and the private banks. I might add,
before I jump off of that topic of the cartel, in the case
of the Federal Reserve, the cartel went into partnership
with the federal government - and cartels like to do that
because only governments can enforce the cartel agreements.
See, without government involvement in a cartel, there's no
way for the cartel members to make sure that the other
members stick with the agreement. So what are they going to
do if one of the oil producing countries decides they want
to lower the cost of oil because they want a larger share of
the market?
There's nothing that the other countries can
do to force them into line unless, of course, you pass an
international law and call it a trade law and now you can
get the United Nations involved and enforce the cartel
agreement for oil or whatever - fish or who knows what. In
this case, the banking cartel was very eager to get the
United States government into the contract so that all of
the banks - once they were in the cartel - had to follow the
cartel agreements or else they would be violating the law
and then the police could be brought after them. That was a
way of enforcing the cartel agreements. I emphasize this
because most people don't realize that cartels always have
an affinity to government to enforce their cartel agreement.
I'm a little bit off the track. It was Paul Warburg who was
a master at all of this. I think he had more experience with
this central bank mechanism than all of the rest of them put
together. So he was the technician - but also, we mustn't
forget that all throughout his business career he maintained
a close relationship with his brother, Max Warburg, who was
head of the Warburg Banking Consortium in Germany and the
Netherlands. Not only that, he was a senior partner in
Kuhn-Loeb & Company, which was one of the giant
investment firms in New York, and as such they handled the
financial affairs of the Rothschilds. So, he was
well-connected at several different levels, as you can
imagine. Paul Warburg is really the role model for the
Little Orphan Annie caricature called "Daddy Warbucks".
Everybody at the time knew that Paul Warburg was "Daddy
Warbucks".
Victor Thorn: Let me ask you this. You
mentioned that the five primary forces at that time were the
Morgans, Rockefellers, Rothschilds, Warburgs and Kuhn-Loeb.
Today, if we had to name the dominant forces in the banking
industry, or those people who are really pulling the strings
of the rest of the world, how much different would it look
today - or would there be any difference - than it looked in
1913?
G. Edward Griffin: Well, it's really hard to
quantify that. I believe it would look pretty much the same
except for one shift. In 1913, the Morgans were the dominant
American banking influence. Before I say anything more, you
should know that J. P. Morgan was really - most biographers
say and have said of him - that he was probably an agent of
the Rothschilds. The Rothschilds had a very strong, very
effective tactic of doing business through other
organizations that were thought to be independent. They
developed this tactic over the decades in Europe when there
was a lot of anti-Semitism, and so the Rothschilds, of
course, being Jewish, found that if they wanted to gain
dominance in a market that was anti-Semitic, they certainly
couldn't do it directly themselves.
So they worked through agents who were
thought to be independent, and in some cases, agents who
were thought to be anti-Semitic - which was kind of clever.
J. P. Morgan was often thought of as being anti-Semitic, but
the record is now clear that he was an agent of the
Rothschilds himself. So, in any event, in 1913, it was
pretty clear that J. P. Morgan - The House of Morgan - was
the dominant banking influence. But today, that seems to
have shifted to the Rockefellers. There's no doubt in my
mind today that the Rockefellers are the dominant banking
force in the United States. The Rothschilds, I believe, are
still very powerful - although they continue to operate
behind the scenes so that nobody really focuses on them.
They like the public to think that they're just a bunch of
playboys and they dabble in the markets. But in reality, I
think from what I can see, the Rothschilds are still very,
very powerful in all of this.
Lisa Guliani: Mr. Griffin, could you please
discuss the 16th amendment to the Constitution and whether
or not you think it should be repealed?
G. Edward Griffin: Well, that's a topic
that's a little beyond my expertise. A lot of people are of
the opinion that the 16th amendment to the Constitution was
never properly ratified and I've seen the documentation to
prove that - and it's very convincing to me. However, I
think that trying to reverse that on the basis of the
technicality that it wasn't properly enacted in the first
place is a mistake. I think that if it were to go before the
States today and they were
given a chance to ratify it, they probably would. In other
words, we're back to the question that was brought up
earlier. We need to change public opinion. I think that the
16th amendment has been so well accepted over the years that
there's probably some legal argument somebody could make
that it's now grandfathered into place. I don't like the
16th amendment any more than anyone else, but I think the
way to get rid of it is not on a technicality, but on the
principle that it's wrong. Let's assume that it was properly
ratified. Now, what do we do about it? I think we still need
to get rid of it - not because of a technicality, but
because it's based on fallacious principles.
Lisa Guliani: I'd like to also ask you about
NESARA. Are you familiar with that?
G. Edward Griffin: Yes, I'm quite familiar with NESARA.
Lisa Guliani: There is quite a controversy
on the internet about NESARA. Is NESARA a trap or a
potential solution to our problems?
G. Edward Griffin: My opinion of NESARA is
that it is NOT the solution to the problem at all. I
wouldn't go so far as to say it's a trap, although it could
be. But that would imply motives to the promoters, which I
don't think would be justified. But I certainly do not see
it as a solution, primarily because, although it has a lot
of good-sounding phrases to it, and although it is very
critical of the Federal Reserve, and although it does have a
lot of good things going for it, the one thing it doesn't
have is a real solution. And by that I mean, what the
proposed solution of NESARA is, is to take away the power to
create money out of nothing - take that power away from
those big, bad bankers and turn it over exclusively to those
nice trustworthy politicians. In other words, NESARA does
not focus on the fact that the Federal Reserve System
creates money out of nothing, it focuses only on the fact of
WHO does it. It doesn't make any difference who does it - it
shouldn't be done at all by anybody. I don't think that
politicians can be trusted any more than bankers.
Victor Thorn: Mr. Griffin, if you were
sitting in Washington, D.C. right now in the Oval Office,
what would be the first two or three things you would do?
G. Edward Griffin: Well, the first thing I
would do is go on television and tell everybody what's on my
mind. I would want to try and explain to people what I'm
going to do. I wouldn't just do it. I'd explain WHY I'm
going to do it first, explain what my principles are and
what I believe the proper function of government is. And
then I'd say: if you folks like what I've just said, then
I'm going to go ahead and implement it. And if you don't
like what I've just said, then you better elect me out of
office.
Victor Thorn: what would be the first two or
three things you'd implement?
G. Edward Griffin: Boy, I'll have to think
about that one. The first two or three things - it would be
like a kid in a candy store. I don't know - that's a good
one. Can I think about that for a while? I'm tempted to say,
"Abolish the Federal Reserve." But as I said in my
book, we can't do that overnight. It needs to be stepped
out, because it would certainly destroy the economy to just
abruptly abolish the Federal Reserve. There are a lot of
things out there I'd like to see change, but in all honesty,
I don't think they can be done overnight.
Victor Thorn: Let me ask you this question:
I was talking to an economist the other day and I asked him
a fairly vague question: "How close or how realistic is
the possibility that the bottom could really drop out of our
economy?" He said it is, in fact, a real possibility.
What are your views on that?
G. Edward Griffin: My view on that is kind
of complicated. First of all, as I said in my book, I
believe that what is happening to our monetary system is
disastrous to the future of the country. It's a disaster to
the monetary system. I don't see how it could survive
without falling apart. It's a disaster to the freedom issue.
I don't see how people can continue to have this system and
maintain their personal freedoms. I'm really alarmed about
that. I believe that sooner or later, the bubble has to
burst. Now, let me qualify that by saying - and I think I
said this in the book - there is one condition under which
we would not have a collapse of the monetary system. That
would be a condition in which no one would dare say that we
had one. In other words: totalitarianism. If we had no
freedom of speech, no freedom in the marketplace, no freedom
to buy or sell as we wished, then all of the forces of
supply and demand would be paralyzed. Under those
conditions, there would be no collapse of the monetary
system.
There would just be slavery. And what
concerns me is we may be moving into that scenario. I
believe, for example, that the Federal Reserve is
manipulating the market. I'm convinced that there are
mechanisms they are using. They're using the hidden taxation
of inflation, and the creation of money out of nothing to
sustain the stock market to create the ILLUSION of continued
prosperity. That is a terrible thing, when you can intervene
in the free market like that and literally paralyze it. So
what I'm concerned about is that we are moving very close
into a condition where it might be comparable to the Soviet
Union twenty years ago. If we had lived in the Soviet Union
twenty years ago, no one would have said that they were
having economic problems because the official line from the
state was "everything is improving". They had
five-year plans, ten-year plans, everything's on target,
employment is up, prosperity is up; the value of the ruble
is up. All the official pronouncements were positive and
nobody DARED say that they were lies. I think we're coming
to the point - if we aren't there already - where we're
looking that kind of a thing smack in the face.
Lisa Guliani: You mentioned earlier an
ideology called "collectivism". The CFR is guided
by this ideology and they believe the best way to bring
about change is by engaging in war. Let's talk about the
three pillars of collectivism.
G. Edward Griffin: Well yes, I would like to
do that very much because that "ism" is what we
stress in my organization, Freedom Force International. I
believe that it's not enough to just know what we're
against. We have to know what we're FOR in a struggle like
we're in today, because history is so full of examples of
people who have risen up against some tyrant or some system
which they found unbearable - and at great cost in blood and
treasure, they've overthrown the heinous system and they're
all so happy until five years later - or maybe not even that
long - they find out that they merely replaced the system
with one which is just the same (or maybe even worse)! And
that happens over and over again in history because people
only focus on the things they don't like. They don't really
have any idea of what they want. They don't have any
positive goals or principles of their own. And so, at
Freedom Force, I believe that it's very important to have a
creed. What do we believe in? What are our goals and
principles?
In answering that question, I believe we
have to come face-to-face with the recognition that in the
western world today, the political conflict between
ideologies is not between liberals vs. conservatives,
left-wingers vs. right-wingers, or socialists vs.
capitalists. All of these words which really defy clear
definition - everybody uses those words with a little
different thought in their mind as to what they mean - they
cannot be defined where everybody agrees on it. I think when
you cut through all of that verbiage and all of the
emotional attachments we have to those words, you wind up
with just two ideologies in the western world today. And
that is, individualism vs. collectivism. And the western
world today is in the grips of collectivism. Collectivism
can take many forms. Socialism is a form of collectivism.
Nazism is a form of collectivism. Communism is a form of
collectivism. They're all variations of collectivism, and if
you know what collectivism is, you can spot them. Even if
they don't have a name, you can have your favorite candidate
standing up and saying, "Vote for me!" And he'll
come up with some political nostrum and if you recognize it,
you'll say "AHH! That's collectivism! He's a
collectivist!" And he may not even know it. So what is
this thing called collectivism? I've identified actually
five philosophical foundations for collectivism, three of
which are probably the most important. Three of them are
very easy to recognize.
The other two require a little more
analysis. By the way, when you take these pillars of
collectivism and you turn them upside down, they're the
pillars of individualism. So we find that on these five
points, the world is divided. You either have to be one way
or the other, if you've given any thought to it at all. The
most important thing that people will recognize is that
collectivists believe that the group is more important than
the individual --- that the individual must be sacrificed,
if necessary, for the greater good of the greater number.
Now that is at the core of all of the mischief of
collectivist systems such as Communism, Nazism, Socialism,
or Fascism. If you look at any of those, you'll find the
underlying belief that the numbers are important - that if
we can justify that this particular deed is good for a
greater number, then we can sacrifice the smaller number.
It's simply a question of a head count. And under such a
system, there really is no foundation for individual rights
because nobody has a right if the greater good of the
greater number is served by denying that right. I'll give
you an example. I think everyone is beginning to recognize
today that we didn't get into WWII as a result of a surprise
attack by Japan. For years, everybody denied that.
They thought that was a scandalous concept
for people to suggest that President Roosevelt and people
high in the military and in the State Department of the
American government would stand by and not only allow the
Japanese to attack, but to goad them into it, to encourage
them. What an awful thing to suggest! Well now, of course,
all the history has come out, the smoking gun has been
found, and there aren't many of us today that even question
that anymore - although a lot of people still haven't heard
it. But the defenders of the Roosevelt regime today don't
say that he didn't do this or that they didn't do that. What
they say today is, "Well, yes it's true, but he was
justified in doing so because it was for the greater good of
the greater number." It was worth sacrificing a mere
two or three thousand American lives at Pearl Harbor in
order to wake up the nation to the necessity of getting into
the war and fighting against Hitler at a time when it was
easier to do than later. In other words, it was okay to lead
three thousand people to their death in order to get us into
a war that was for the greater good of the greater number.
Victor Thorn: And the same rationale is
applicable today.
G. Edward Griffin: Oh, it's definitely
applicable today. Of course. You see, nobody could talk
about it during WWII because they were living through it.
Now, you know, because its history, we can talk about it.
Well, it's happening in the war on terrorism, too - but you
can't talk about it today because people are too emotionally
involved in it.
Victor Thorn: If you had a crystal ball
right now, what do you see happening to our country and our
world in the next six months to a year - up to say, the 2004
election? What do you see happening in the Middle East?
G. Edward Griffin: Well, my crystal ball
doesn't work too well. I think I've got a pretty good hold
on the long view, but I've always been very bad on the short
view because things are always happening that are
surprising. But I do know that if there is no change, things
are going to continue as they are now going. That's pretty
obvious. And the change I'm talking about is a change in
public awareness. Right now, it seems that the greater
majority of the American people are solidly following the
concepts of their leaders - even though it's pure
collectivism - from top to bottom. They don't understand
that and they're being fooled. They don't have the
information like we're talking about. Therefore, they are
unable to make intelligent decisions about what is right and
what is wrong. As long as that condition continues, then we
are going to continue to follow the policies of the people
who presently control the government. And that does not look
too good. I think that the goal of the present government is
to continue to expand their military presence throughout
the world. They have written about this. They want to
establish what they call "Pax Americana", similar
to "Pax Romana". In other words, they see
themselves as leaders of a new Roman Empire to dominate the
world. Beyond that, they see that as a stepping stone to
being the most influential voice in the creation of a world
government. That's the ultimate goal for them all. They want
to be the top dogs in that world government. That's where
we're headed, and unless we can turn it around, I'm afraid
we're going to find ourselves locked up in a world
government based on the model of collectivism. And I can
assure you, we're not going to like it.
Lisa Guliani: Do you think Americans have
the stomach for freedom that our ancestors once did?
G. Edward Griffin: I think they do, although
a lot of us have been taught in our schools, as I was, to be
very suspicious of freedom. I think a lot of people have no
faith in freedom. They're afraid of freedom because they
haven't thought it through. They think, I should have the
freedom to choose what color socks I want, but when it comes
to freedom in the banking industry or freedom in the market,
that's too complicated. We've got to have government
controlling that.
Lisa Guliani: They don't want the
responsibility.
G. Edward Griffin: Yes, I think people have
been trained to do that, educated to do that - but now we
talk about the stomach and the heart. I think when you come
down to push and shove, when the issues become clear, most
Americans will definitely take a stand for freedom.
© 2004, WING TV ® All rights reserved.
Website by pcStudios.
The history of the race, and each
individual's experience, are thick with evidence that a
truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is
immortal.
~ Mark Twain
Freedom had been hunted round the globe;
reason was considered as rebellion; and the slavery of fear
had made men afraid to think. But such is the irresistible
nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants, is the
liberty of appearing. ~ Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, 1791 ~
=========================================================
Forward courtesy of :
The Stanley Scoop
http://www.stanley2002.org
Reply to: rick@stanley2002.org
