Published On: Fri, Dec 18th, 2020

Prohibition And Covid-19; Part Four: An historical context; social engineering for grabbing power

In this series, we are discussing the comparisons to be made between the economic blockade using the pretext of “Covid-19”, and Prohibition of 1920s USA. Fabian Franklin, writing from the period, said that a defining feature of Prohibition was the loss of individual liberty as a price of the march of socialism and that the former will characteristically come about because of the latter. It is argued here that Prohibition would have been engineered especially for the purpose. Likewise, the economic blockade excused by a fake pandemic is for facilitating a further advancement of socialism.

Of course, implicit in Prohibition was the other factor that makes it like the “Covid-19” economic blockade, and that is the attack on commercial activity – for some people. Spoiling the opportunity for individuals to benefit from capital ownership, not to mention the primary goal of stripping them of the means to produce a saleable commodity, is also the outcome of the implementation of socialism. Or, to help create clarity for people who are deceived (as it is intended that they be), and even to pre-empt the liars who would cause the obfuscation, instead of socialism, let us use another term which is explained more in due course (not to mention also in other pages hereabouts): the restoration of Babylon.

It relates to a particular way that the masses must be contained and controlled to satisfy the lunatic ideas of a self-entitled elite who think that their identifying as an elite means that they should rule. It has been the purpose of these people, working at the head of freemasonic secret societies to restore Babylon to the English-speaking masses who, through force of their own effort, had stopped being slaves, and had become middle and working class capitalists. Wealth is power. Means to produce wealth is means to power. The definitions are true; which means that relativism does not apply. Wealth belonging to many individuals living up to an expectation in civil rights kills the ambition of Pharaohs. Those who blame the ills of socialism on capitalism, which is a thing always being done as a method for control of thought, and insist that socialism has never been implemented, are liars and agents, conscious of the fact or not, working out of the freemasonic tradition of deception.

In the USA, at the time of Prohibition, there were other developments that formed sweeping changes, all as a result of industrialisation (for which capitalism is blamed). But instead of being understood as an organic event that developed in an inevitable way that caused tremendous social upheaval, and problems that would be seen to be solvable by collectivisation, and increased powers of government, the catalyst for a new order should perhaps now be considered something that was engineered in the particular way most conducive for the objective of creating collectivised populations, or socialisation, or socialism.

In Britain, where  industrialisation first developed, and where there was no springing of it fully formed from the ground, the same change would seem to have taken place over too long a duration for it not to have been organic. However, all students of real history worth their salt know of Robison’s 1797, Proofs of a Conspiracy – or to give it its full title, Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free-Masons, Illuminati and Reading Societies, etc., collected from good authorities. The warning is clear in the full title. Drawing, as it did, on information that the French Revolution had been a freemasonic endeavour, there’s good reason to take Robison seriously:

Nothing can more convincingly demonstrate the early intentions of a party, and this a great party, in France to overturn the constitution completely, and plant a democracy or oligarchy on its ruins. The Illuminati had no other object. They accounted all Princes usurpers and tyrants, and all privileged orders as their abettors. They intended to establish a government of Morality, as they called it (Sittenregiment) where talents and character (to be estimated by their own scale, and by themselves) should alone lead to preferment. They meant to abolish the laws which protected property accumulated by long continued and successful industry, and to prevent for the future any such accumulation. They intended to establish universal Liberty and Equality, the imprescriptible Rights of Man (at least they pretended all this to those who were neither Magi nor Regentes.) And, as necessary preparations for all this, they intended to root out all religion and ordinary morality, and even to break the bonds of domestic life, by destroying the veneration for marriage-vows, and by taking the education of children out of the hands of the parents. This was all that the Illuminati could teach, and THIS WAS PRECISELY WHAT FRANCE HAS DONE.

(One should think of the Illuminati, which Robinson said infiltrated British lodges, as a province of ideas in and amongst the wider landscape of freemasonic ideology that evidently created effective methodology for achievement of freemasonic objectives).

The following is from the website of the Grand Lodge of British Columbia and Yukon; the denial is all too freemasonic:

While it is both simplistic and specious to lay the responsibility for the French Revolution at the door of Freemasonry, there is no question that freemasons, as individuals, were active in building, and rebuilding, a new society. Considering the large number of bodies claiming masonic authority, many men identified today as freemasons were probably unaware of each other’s masonic association and clearly cannot be seen as acting in concert. Yet they did share certain beliefs and ideals.

It should be of great interest for anyone to discover that “capitalist” is from a French word, used as a term of reproach in the French Revolution: a “man of money, one who has large property employed in business”. In the context of a thuggish socialist revolution, anyone with property employed in business would be a hated figure for the justification of the robbery that was intended to be done to him.  So, it was a term to agitate class warfare. Capitalism is still the derogatory term used for the perverse purpose  of having people hate that which would save them, and have them love that which enslaves them. Indeed, it is a triumph of freemasonic propaganda that capitalism is used to describe a natural phenomena of civil liberties; i.e. people having skill and material as an extension of themselves which they can use to their advantage to create prosperity. That capitalism is natural is perhaps why it didn’t need to have a name until men were asked to hate it. Those who vilify capitalism now do so in the same revolutionary, freemasonic tradition. Those who vilify capitalism and understand what they are doing also understand that the “Covid-19” episode brings their goal of an irrevocable socialist order another degree closer to being achieved.

While the reader considers the following, remember Robison’s words about the intention to deny “property accumulated by long continued and successful industry, and to prevent for the future any such accumulation”.

In the UK at this time, (with figures taken from a recent ONS webpage), 13.2% of people who work do so in “Human health and social work”; 4.3% work in “Public administration”; and 8.8% work in “Education”. Potentially, then, in 2020 more people work for Government than the 15% who are self-employed. The rest of the work force, of course, work for someone else. After we consider the 15.2% who work in “Wholesale and retail”, many of whom are going to be with big chains, this is anything between 40 and 50 percent who will potentially be in employment with a private company that is independent, although the reality is, of course, as in wholesale and retail, a good deal of the employment will ultimately be for corporations (one way or another), with a market divided between fewer of them rather than being divided between many independent companies.  Indeed,  in the subtext of the Great Reset envisioned by World Economic Forum, the aim is an elimination of competition (from small and medium independents), with some roles of government administered by non-competing corporations in a “stakeholder capitalism” model. This would not be capitalism, but it would be socialism. And when all the people work for government, one way or another, this would be something that the likes of the socialist HG Wells envisioned in his Rights of Man. (Incidentally, sustainable development, which is language out of Agenda 21, is a pillar of the Great Reset. Basically, it means keeping people from owning property, especially land).

In 1801, in Britain, 35% of the workforce had jobs on the land. In towns, at the same time and previously in the 18th century, there would have been a myriad of manufacturers and service providers, all independent one from the other (a non exhaustive list is made here). The economy would have been one of complete capital ownership and employment provided by a diversity of capitalists. What changed, and was already in the process of changing, to create a completely different order was, i) the forcing of people off the land to create a supply of labour in centralised manufacturing operations – owned by much fewer people – and, ii), the setting up of factories, not for reasons of efficiency, but to control a manufacturing workforce.

According to Boyd Hilton, in the book that he wrote that forms that part of the New Oxford History of England series that covers 1783 to 1846 (A Mad, Bad & Dangerous People?), there had been 4000 Enclosure Acts passed between 1750 and 1850. The revolutionary impact of Enclosure Acts in the Hanoverian period, where some 7 million acres were affected, was the creation of new terms of usage of land, and the confiscation into private hands land which had been for common usage.

Says Hilton:

Historians dispute whether enclosed land enjoyed significantly higher yields than the remaining open fields, but most agree about the malign social consequences. Enclosures led to the break-up of many existing leases, which led in turn to shorter leases and higher rents. They deprived labourers of common or shared-use rights, not just to grazing but to crops, brushwood, and fuel. Many cottagers and smaller yeomen were turned into landless labourers.

The bottom line is that Enclosure Acts directly denied capital ownership, or introduced interference whereby its benefit was negated, therefore pressure to surrender it.

Before factories, there was a system of “putting-out”, or cottage industry, where someone contracting manufacturing services would supply raw materials, and then collect finished product, with payment being in the form of piece-rates.  A complaint, it seems, that was used to justify the movement of production into a centralised location was that independent manufacturers would have days-off when they liked, and more seriously would embezzle the “master” supplying the resources by using it for other projects. In reality, there probably wasn’t a case in law for restitution if a supplier of material had given too much, and there wasn’t a contract concerning what to do with surplus. Indeed, as long as a buyer of the service got the number of items ordered, surplus material could rightly be offset in the final payment, if a contract had been properly negotiated – but apparently, it was more convenient, for the purposes of propaganda, to accuse cottage manufacturers of fraud than be more careful when doing business with them.  As for the problem of the holidays, these of course were part of the privilege of the cottage manufacturer being a capitalist. However, it seems that it served as an impediment to service buyers being in control of product being in a certain place, at a certain time – which is all stuff of contractual obligation to buyers – and so centralisation became a desirable state of affairs.

Of subsequent industrialisation, Hilton has this to say:

The impulse to mechanize was a consequence rather than  a cause of movement into factories. Initially the working methods adopted in centralised production units would have been much the same as in outworkers’ cottages.

And…

While the spread of factories and machines (like that of enclosures) was important politically and culturally, its contribution to economic growth is more uncertain.

What is being said here is that it is somewhat assumed that early centralisation and mechanisation of cottage industry improved production efficiency. What it certainly would have done is denied ownership of capital, because now the cottage manufacturer would be using another person’s facilities, with only his skill (which would become less of a saleable attribute as factory production became more robotic) and time – which was paid for by a flat wage – remaining to him. So, now it would be a situation where the (ex) cottage manufacturer would be a wage-taker, and the one-time service buyer would be a wage-giver, a relationship that doesn’t have to have anything to do with quantities produced. In this situation, any sense of injustice can occur all on the ex-cottage manufacturers side when wages are only gauged against what there is to buy, and they turn out not to be enough.  After this, there can be organisations that step in to manage collectivised ill feeling, and create leverage over how useful an asset of capital a workforce can, in itself, be to the factory owner. Power, then, is awarded those at the top of the workers’ union, and then owners and trade unionists can play a dance where they look as if they are opposed, but in fact seek a common purpose. A trade union, making the issue about more pay, or the endowment of working conditions, and making rules against flexibility so that there cannot be enterprise from individual workers, ensures that capital ownership remains in the hands of the factory owner – and that is all that matters.

Ultimately, what is rarely thought about is the possibility of any other model having come out of industrialisation, where improvements in mechanisation could have been brought to bear in a cottage industry environment either on a grand scale, because in some instances this is what did happen where the cottage manufacturer could do it (and some of these still survive [Hook Norton]) or where manufacturers retained larger degree of capital ownership in a centralised location (this is not the same as being a stakeholder or a shareholder: earnings would be turnover after profit and loss).

Arguably, what actually happened was deliberate social engineering to create a power base from which to apply leverage for the implementation of the next degree of socialism†. To dismiss this out of any mistaken idea that socialism is a new idea, and that 18th century mill owners, for instance, wouldn’t want it, would be to not understand that mill owners could have been freemasons, looking to do their bit towards the completion of the Great Work for promotion in their “modern-thinking” lodge, while destroying competition, in their own personal interests.

In America, as the book, The War on Alcohol, by Lisa McGirr, reminds, there was a wider governmental power grab in the second, third and fourth decades of the 20th century, beyond Prohibition itself, which represented  the advancement of socialism in the name of dealing with ills created by industrialisation. While it would be hard to argue that the dust bowl was a deliberate act of sabotage to force people from the land in the Mid West – one needs to ask where farmers got the idea to farm in the unintuitive way that caused a failure of soil to stay together on any piece of land – that there was immigration involving incredible numbers, as if whole countries had upped sticks and decamped to the States – would have been government’s doing.  “Between 1880 and 1920”, reports McGirr, “over twenty million men and women immigrated to the united states, drawn by the voracious appetite of manufacturers large and small for their labour”.

The immigration was to satisfy the needs of the few people who owned centralised, mechanised manufacturing facilities. Of course, social malaise and degeneration in standards of living would follow as an inevitable feature, and this included drinking, and to Middle Class America’s horror, at the same time plotting the inevitable socialism in the saloons – and arguably it is this that motivated lots of well meaning Prohibitionists. People saw drinking establishments as being the font of socialisation, and that drunken immigrants would not learn differently to what they were being exposed to there. Ironically, this was a fear that was exploited for the purpose of socialisation. Moreover, while some  scapegoat industrialists would be demonised as part of the exploitation, unseen right at the bottom underneath all the energy put into banning alcohol, the real cause of the problem was the known consequences of a particular industrial model whose owners were looking to consolidate:

The climate of fear evoked to root out the liquor “foe” led many prohibitionists  to grant intoxicating liquor… an almost magical power to do evil. In doing so, they deflected attention from the economic causes of poverty in a rapidly industrialising economy… Dethroning “King Alcohol” provided a means to discipline a particularly “corrupt” group of profiteering capitalists and the volatile collective leisure of potentially threatening poor populations, whether European immigrants in cities, native mine workers in the west, or African-Americans in the south. It was the quintessential reform of a white Protestant evangelical and largely Anglo-Saxon middle class who found their traditional mores and powers under assault in the rapidly paced world of unbridled American capitalism.

Right at the end of the above extract we touch on the confusion that always attends this subject, coming from the use of loaded terms, but we also start to see some clear definition. It reminds that actually there could have been antagonism between industrialists and their exploitative model of industry, and the middle class who thought that immigrants were being used in a way whereby they would never be good Americans. And so, in this light, Prohibition would have been a clever way of winning the middle class over. To be clear, the saloons would not have been vital for socialisation, so they were a decoy. On the other hand, industrialists campaigning to ban alcohol was a device to get potential opposition of their exploitative model on the same side, ironically, for the purpose of socialisation.

We should note, then, that America’s industrialists supported Prohibition, and with a lot of clout:

Additionally, the movement benefited from the strong support of prominent capitalists who provided significant financial resources. The industrial magnate John D Rockefeller strongly backed the Anti-Saloon League, donating millions of dollars to the Prohibition crusade. Manufacturing magnate Henry Ford also supported the war against alcohol, seeing it as one means of bolstering an effective workforce. Alcoholic drink, the common wisdom among employees held, contributed to “blue Mondays” with high absentee rates marking the beginning of the work week. Heavy drinking left less money for other consumer goods. Manufacturers such as Lewis Edwin Theiss argued, as a result, “Until booze is banished we can never have really efficient workmen. We are not much interested in the moral side of the matter as such. It is purely a question of dollars and cents”. The “managers of the big corporations” opposed drink among their employees, observed journalist Ames Brown.

And so it becomes clear that what is important for industrialists about Prohibition is the acquirement of absolute control over the workforce. It’s not about welfare, it’s about the complete ownership of opportunity. We are reminded of the real reasons that British industrialists sought to move manufacturing into centralised locations. Behind it is centralised power acting against the interest of individuals.

When capital ownership has been swapped out for socialisation, workers are a capital asset in themselves, who receive a wage for their self-applied maintenance – so that they can be a useful capital asset. As such, when the centralised, mechanized, workforce as capital model is instituted, it will inevitably involve the creation of the welfare state to deal with the inevitable ills – so it is in a power-grabbing government’s interest to want to see the trigger get pulled.  Furthermore, government has a new role to play keeping assets useful, to help them spend their wage efficiently; to manage them. As already discussed, wages don’t have to have anything to do with work done, because wages are in fact an issue of maintenance of the asset.

More management for government to do comes from the very fact of the contract between industrialist and socialised asset. Firstly, a wage must be paid, because without one the worker is cheated in his switch from capitalist to socialised asset – but following from that, the contract is such that the wage must be paid even if no work is done, because  the worker gave up capitalism in return for a wage. However, because this is an abomination, and people generally don’t want to be robbed, a system must be created to force the sharing of wages around, from those who work to those who don’t. And just because people don’t want to be robbed‡ of their earnings, the welfare state is an inevitable feature of socialism, featuring the all important function of taxation to reduce the effectiveness of common capital ownership. And when once instituted, the welfare state is a slippery slope to further socialisation, and more power, because government can give itself responsibility to tend for all sorts of the disadvantaged, or the ill, or those who it deems to be unequal, or the victims of a so-called planetary environmental disaster. In common as a consequence of all this solution-providing is legislation for the riding roughshod over individual liberty for the “good of the many”.

We find, unsurprisingly, that Prohibition wasn’t the end of what was going on in America in terms of socialisation (again, from McGirr):

The adoption of a federal strategy to banish the liquor trade was not only driven by fears of shifting demographics. Progressive reform focussed new attention on the federal government as the proper arena to resolve problems wrought by industrial capitalism. While many Progressives have focussed on reform at the municipal level, others had turned to their states, calling for factory inspection laws, workmen’s compensation laws, and minimum wages for women. Still others worked to establish a federal administrative apparatus to regulate industries – from finances to railroads – that knit together the growing national economy. In 1906 Congress established the Food and Drug Administration to control patent medicines, regulate pharmaceutacles, and protect consumers against impure foods. That same year, concerns over diseased and rotting meat led to the passage of the Meat Inspection Act. In 1913 the Federal Reserve Board reformed the banking system. The Clayton Act tightened anti-trust laws. The Federal Trade Commission in 1913 promised more regulation of the nation’s economy. In 1914 Congress expanded the authority of the Interstate-Commerce Commission with the Hepburn Act. Finally, also in 1914, the Harrison Narcotics Act established the first broad federal anti-drug legislation.

The Progressive Reform era also witnessed a wave of constitutional activism not seen since the Civil War and Reconstruction. After a nearly half-century hiatus, the nation adopted four amendments within the brief period of 1913-1919. The Eighteenth Amendment benefited from and formed part of that wave. It was introduced in the wake of state ratification of a federal income tax and the direct election of senators.

Don’t be fooled by the last sentence in the extract, because it was fear of the ballot box, or so the story goes, that motivated senators to vote for Prohibition, and so we must note that having a situation where a mob can vote to empower government to further violate the rights of an individual is a feature of the socialised country. In theory , an unelected chamber to defend a constitution in spite of the electorate is a necessary feature of a republic.

What is only hinted at in the extract, but does feature prominently in McGirr’s book, is the opportunity that Prohibition offered for governmental power grab through expansion of federal law enforcement capability – most notably the FBI. This is a subject for future articles in this series, but even with this brief mention, we can infer a control grid being fulfilled on the back of an engineered crisis – and recognise it as a text book methodology for rule that occurs over again, and is occurring as a result of the Covid-19 hoax.

 

† That there was an old order reaction to centralisation of manufacturing could be read from the following extract from Hilton:

With possible exception of Liverpool, the towns listed in… [the table (Bradford, Huddersfield, Manchester, Blackburn, Wolverhampton, Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield)] were all relatively new, possibly because industrialists found it easier to expand in places that were unencumbered by restrictive guild regulations and corporation red tape.

‡ On the contrary, as our not so distant history can demonstrate, a capitalist population creates infrastructure for support for those unable to work through voluntary subscription, and for those who are ill by welfare services being offered for free by providers where necessary, the ability to do so created by general fee-paying (i.e. those who can afford, pay). Of course, it is easier to do this when a National Health Service isn’t injuring people in droves with allopathic medicine, and when food produced by corporations isn’t made not just unhealthy, but actively harmful, for various reasons ultimately all tied up with an agenda for political control.

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