FREEDOM AS DEBT SLAVERY

Chapter two in a Brief History of Liberal Democracy

This is the second chapter of my book “A Brief History of Liberal Democracy”. If you are looking for part one, it is here.

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Shortly before the United States entered the European War, another revolution had taken place. It would lead to a change in America and the West as lasting and profound as the revolutionary effects of the violence of World War One.

This revolution was also about the bottom line: money.

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Though the British Empire reached its zenith in 1920, it was broken by the First World War.

LIBERALISM 2.0

The liberalism we have now is not the liberalism we had then. It has been argued, especially by Robert Tombs, that the British Empire was inspired by a liberal and Christian belief in improving the world where it could. Free trade was seen as a moral duty, and was undertaken even when it would have been more profitable not to do so. The Liberal idea - of spreading democratic and civilising values worldwide - was inspired by Bible-reading imperialists.

British world hegemony lasted around a century, roughly from 1815 to the outbreak of World War One.

It was replaced by US hegemony. The industrial basis of British power was replaced by a deindustrialised financialisation of the economy, following the bankrupting of Britain in its two World Wars.

The British defaulted on their first war debt in 1935, leading to the punitive conditions of their second round of debt slavery to the Americans in 1941.

Britain nominally paid off its World War Two debts in 2006, sixty years after it had lost its gold, financial securities and its empire in a settlement quixotically described as a “victory”. If Fort Knox is opened and the gold is still there, much of it will bear the insignia of the Bank of England.

The one time master of the world had become a debt slave, along with almost everyone else in it. This was due to the financial revolution undertaken by the first Wilson administration - the replacement of wealth with fractional reserve banking, with the institution of the Federal Reserve in 1913.

Since then, our world has been underwritten by the principle of something for nothing, and the enslavement of the free in name only by the democratisation of debt. As David Hunt pointed out in his recent book, these are the two distinguishing factors of usury, and they are the reason it is condemned by the Church as a grave moral evil.

When we speak of a pivot from the Christian inspiration of our civilisation into a moral abyss, remember how the wages of sin are paid. And what they are.

The liberal-consumer model was celebrated as the verdict of history by Francis Fukuyama. It has replaced our industries with services, our crafts and trades with consumption, and has turned our high streets into the desolate ruins of an international nowhereland.

Our debt based addiction economies do not care where the consumers come from to power its endless growth model, which is killing everything else in order to thrive.

The triumph of this model was called the end of history. It gave the West three decades of stagnation politics, replacing the free world with an inversion of the Soviet Union it claimed to have defeated. The empire we inhabited, and which was thought to be eternal is now dying of a lack of belief - bankrupt of money and meaning.

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If you have no money and would like to read my book please email me at frankwrighter@pm.me saying “SKINT”. I will let you in.