Part 4 of 7
by Dr. Edwin Vieira, Jr., Ph.D., J.D.
(Editor’s Note: While I disagree with the author’s interpretations about the US Constitution, the rest of his scholarship should be read by all.)
PART THREE of this Commentary explained why a domestic crisis would probably not provide an occasion for reform of America’s monetary and banking systems. Continuing that analysis…
2. For constitutional change to occur, irresistible pressure for reintroduction of silver and gold coin (or their electronic surrogates) as media of exchange in American markets would have to build up before the Establishment could do much to reduce it. This could arise from a foreign crisis the Establishment could not control. Such an event might force the Establishment to return to the practical operations of constitutional money and banking in order to retain any hope of remaining in power at all. Or a foreign crisis might encourage and enable other centers of political and economic power in the federal system–such as the States–to introduce gold and silver as media of exchange in their own economies, in order to protect themselves and their citizens.
3. The eruption of a foreign monetary and banking crisis in the not-too-distant future is possible–even probable–in the Islamic world. Ironically enough, too, precisely because of what the Establishment is doing there.
a. Dar al-Islam (as Muslims denote the territory in which Islam predominates) already sees itself as targeted, besieged, invaded, and increasingly occupied by the West. For generations, the Islamic world has been the victim of a cold war: aggression that tip-toes in on the little cat’s feet of economic exploitation, pseudo-intellectual ridicule and bullying, political assaults, and cultural subversion aimed at control of Muslims’ primary resource (oil), and transmogrification of Islamic society along both:
* socio-economic and cultural lines–the insinuation of modernism in all its pernicious forms, including population control, radical feminism, the sexual revolution, hedonistic consumerism, and rampant materialism; and, ultimately,
* political lines–the imposition of what cheerleaders for Western intervention call “democracy,” so as to turn Dar al-Islam into a thoroughly demoralized, degenerate, manipulated, and subservient satellite of the West.
b. Most importantly, the economic, political, social, and cultural attacks all coalesce in a religious conflict: the Western Establishment’s assault on so-called “Islamic fundamentalism.” Here, one must speak plainly: To the Establishment, the pejorative buzz-word “fundamentalism” means any religion that teaches belief in a personal God, in transcendent justice (that is, eternal rewards and punishments for man’s conduct in this world), in absolute morality, in natural law, and ultimately and especially in objective truth. For–in the fields of money and banking, no less than in others–the Establishment cannot deal with objective truth, and therefore must deny that it exists.
Absent objective truth, the Establishment does not have to explain and defend what it is doing, because objective explanations and defenses are not possible, and therefore cannot be demanded. And if objective explanations and defenses are not necessary, the Establishment can never be held accountable for what it does. This is why the Establishment embraces the Supreme Court’s idiotic dictum that “[a]t the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”[1] That is, “I have a right to my truth, which is not necessarily your truth”–or, there exists no real “truth” at all, only supple excuses for some people’s vicious appetites, and slick rationalizations for their aggression against others.
If both the Establishment and its opponents have an equal right to define their own economic conceptions of “sound” money and “honest” banking, and their own legal conceptions of “constitutional” money and banking–and if they can define ALL “existence, * * * meaning, [and] * * * the universe,” they certainly can define these lesser-included matters–then the issue reduces to the stark question of naked power: Whose “truth” is to prevail? In other words, to Humpty Dumpty’s observation to Alice in Wonderland, that who is to be master is the pith of the problem. On this score, even were the Supreme Court correct that “[a]t the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life”, nonetheless the Constitution foresees that individuals may be deprived of their liberty–and property and even lives, too–with “due process of law.”[2] So, inasmuch as the Establishment controls the apparatus that claims the prerogative to tell Americans what constitutes “due process of law” (in particular, the courts and the law schools), its “right to define * * * existence, * * * meaning, * * * the universe, and * * * the mystery of human life” becomes paramount. Not a very comforting thought for any individual whose “liberty” and “property,” let alone “human life,” may be subject to the Establishment’s self-interested “defin[itions].”[3] When secular humanism degenerates–as it inevitably must–into secular elitism, the hoi polloi had better fear for their lives.
c. Beyond this Kulturkampf, though, the Islamic world is also assaulted by hot war: the forces of occupation that march in wearing combat boots, their deployment rationalized by a bastard progeny of the Brezhnev Doctrine, that politicians and bureaucrats puporting to speak for “the United States” may invade Dar al-Islam any time, any place, to strike at “terrorists;” occupying the land, overturning governments, killing or maiming those who resist (and many others who do not, but simply wander into the line of fire), and setting up new “democratic” puppet regimes. Not surprisingly, the whole Muslim world is desperate to fight back. (After all, how would you feel if United Nations “blue helmets” marched into America on the same theory?) But how can Muslims possibly defend themselves against the greatest military power in world history?
4. One alternative for an Islamic counterattack stands out among the rest.
a. Plainly, it would be futile for Muslims (or apparently Americans themselves, for that matter) to expostulate on the illegality of the Establishment’s military adventurism. For example, that in none of these incursions to date has Congress actually “declare[d] War”, or has anyone actually proven that “the common defence” and “the general Welfare” of the United States (as opposed to neo-imperialistic expansion aimed at promoting the goals of various selfish special-interest groups) are at stake, as the Constitution requires. Or that, inasmuch as the sole constitutional authority of the United States in the premises is to “guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government,”[4] not a “democracy”, the General Government can claim no power to impose “democracy” on foreign nations. Or that, because the freedom Americans enjoy consists of “the Blessings of Liberty” their Constitution secures in the Preamble, the General Government cannot bring “freedom” to anyone by violating the Constitution. Or that, because Congress’s only relevant power is “[t]o define and punish * * * Offenses against the Law of Nations”,[5] it cannot authorize, enable, or even tolerate the President and the Armed Forces to violate “the Law of Nations” by preemptively marching into other countries to effect “regime change” on the basis of falsified evidence of an impending attack. Or that, because the Constitution is superior to any treaty, none of the foregoing can be undertaken under color of some directive or purported authorization from the United Nations or other multi-national or supra-national entity. Bootless, indeed, would be such remonstrances. For an Establishment that refuses to obey its own Constitution will not shrink from defying “the Law of Nations” or even “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” to which the Declaration of Independence appealed and on which all governmental authority in America rests and to which it must conform.
b. Then, too, Muslims cannot resist these incursions in the short run by massing conventional armies, navies, and air forces. Their scientific, technological, and industrial bases are too limited for that. And they cannot win in the long run by employing the low-intensity, irregular warfare the Establishment self-righteously condemns as “terrorism”, either. For the Establishment will cite such “terrorism” as an excuse for perpetuating and intensifying its offensives against Dar al-Islam, at least as long as sufficient American blood and treasure remain to be expended in campaigns of “pacification.”
c. But the Islamic world could strike a sudden, debilitating, and potentially fatal blow at the Establishment’s Achilles’ Heel–its Ponzified monetary and banking systems–through adoption by some significant portion of the world’s over 1.1 billion Muslims of gold and silver coin as their common media of exchange: specifically, the Islamic gold dinar and silver dirham. This is not idle speculation, but an imminent fact. Already the Internet is burgeoning with information that anyone who searches for web sites dealing with “the gold dinar” can discover for himself. So, what appears here is by no means news to Muslim monetary and economic theorists and activists–only to most Americans. No Muslim firebrand needs these Commentaries to understand the potential for exploiting the Islamic gold dinar and silver dirham as levers to overturn the Western Establishment’s monetary and banking systems. They already know it, and are encouraging their fellow Muslims to act upon that knowledge. But every American needs to become aware of this situation, in order to take appropriate countermeasures against what almost surely is coming.
d. Perhaps most interesting is that Muslim proponents of reintroducing specie as media of exchange focus, not simply on gold (which is the almost exclusive preoccupation of the few Western advocates of sound money), but also on silver. In this, they display great insight. In the West, even the most ardent advocates of gold often deny that silver is any longer a monetary metal. These friends of sound money forget, however, that silver’s monetary character, no less than gold’s, is contingent on the economic and legal context in which they are used as media of exchange.
Recall that silver lost its place as a monetary metal co-equal with gold not as the result of silver’s economic inferiority, but as the consequence of an international political conspiracy to “demonetize” it.[6] Which conspiracy then turned the same tactics on gold, in favor of fiat central-bank paper currency.[7] And succeeded in both instances.
Today, the partisans of legal-tender fiat currency contend that gold, as well as silver, is no longer a monetary metal. This argument is not without empirical evidence, inasmuch as neither silver nor gold circulates as a medium of exchange to any significant degree in any country’s markets, let alone throughout the world, as both gold and silver once did. On the other side, though, one can ask whether contemporary fiat paper currency, being merely an evidence and instrumentality of perpetual debt, is properly “money” at all, even though it does circulate to the practical exclusion of gold and silver. These disputes prove that what markets use as media of exchange can be controlled by law, by economics driven by law, by public ignorance and apathy, by the criminal politics of conspiracies among officeholders and special-interest groups, and especially by all of these operating in tandem. So, the answer to the assertion that silver is not a monetary metal is that it has been made so, just as gold has, and that, when once again offered to knowledgeable people as a medium of exchange in a usable form and under favorable legal and economic circumstances, silver will be accepted as such, just as gold will be.
Footnotes:
1, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 851 (1992), reaffirmed in Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558, 574 (2003).
2, See Amendments V and XIV, Section 1.
3, See, e.g., Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), and Victor Sperandeo & Alvaro Almedia, Crashmaker: A Federal Affaire (2000), ch. 117.
4, Article IV, Section 4.
5, Article I, Section 8, Clause 10.
6, See, e.g., M.W. Walbert, The Coming Battle: A Complete History of the National Banking Money Power in the United States (1899).
7, See J. Livingston, Origins of the Federal Reserve System: Money, Class, and Corporate Capitalism, 1890-1913 (1986).
