Introduction
This article was published in The Canadian Intelligence Service in October of 1968. It has been reproduced at this time because it may well be that desperate people now need its message more than at any previous time.
The author, Mr Eric Butler, is the well-known Australian lecturer and writer on international affairs, politics, economics and history. He has spent much of his life directing the attention of 'conservatives' to a weakness in their movement - a failure to understand the realities of finance, and how their ignorance in this field is continuously, and effectively, used to ham- string them.
Mr Butler claims that no conservative movement can halt the growth of the Welfare State, Socialism or Communism, until it promotes a change in the basis of credit creation and its control. He warns that centralised credit control is a powerful instrument being used to create a programme of economic and political centralism, leading ultimately to the World State, or to the collapse of civilisation.
The result of failing to observe such warnings has been that the true conservative has largely been drawn into the dialectical left/right debates designed to obscure the root cause of the present political and economic discontent. Verbal champions of freedom have often persuaded him to offer his allegiance to alleged 'conservative' or 'Right-wing' political parties, who, while continuing to further the causes of revolution, publicly maintained the pretence of "anti-Socialism." This has produced, as intended by those in charge, the required degeneration in the social morale and credit, issuing in "the sort of irrational and furious discontent which can be channelled into revolutionary violence." But the famous British historian, Sir Arthur Bryant, in his preface to his excellent "Spirit of Conservatism," maintains that "With the 'malice which the rage of party stirs up in little minds,' the true Conservatism has no part."
In his preface to Sir Arthur's book, Colonel John Buchan describes the true Conservatism: "It is not an abstract dogma, for it is always close to facts. It is based upon certain fundamental principles, but inside these principles it cultivates a wise opportunism. Above all things, it is a spirit, and the fruits of that spirit are continuity and unity."
There is still in New Zealand, a tough core of common sense and mutual faith which may yet save the nation from the worst extremes of Socialist tyranny. But like a rudderless ship, the true conservative movement is power- less to make a constructive contribution towards reversing current trends toward the Socialist State without grasping the realities of finance. This book- let makes that challenge to New Zealanders.
- - David Thompson, Director, New Zealand League of Rights.